Available from booksellers on April 7, 2015.

R. Loren Sandford, Yes, There’s More: A Return To Childlike Faith And A Deeper Experience of God (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2015), 240 pages. ISBN-10:1621369803 ISBN-13:978-1621369806

R. Loren Sandford is the senior pastor of New Song Church and Ministries located in Denver, Colorado. He has written other books, a few of which deal with the prophetic, these include: Purifying the Prophetic, Understanding Prophetic People, and, The Prophetic Church. In this current book he addresses a different subject: the disappointment that many Christians feel about their experience of God. Sandford writes about things that will not help lead us into a deeper experience of God and things that will.

The book has twelve chapters. In these chapters, Sandford covers a number of important topics. He writes about spiritual hunger, the reasons why people feel disappointment with their spiritual experience, the place of feelings in our faith, the importance of our spiritual identity in Christ, and worship. A major emphasis of the book is our relationship with one member of the Trinity who is often overlooked: God the Father. The author gives considerable space to writing about intimacy with the Father and having the Father’s heart, nature, and character (page 56).

Charismatic readers may be surprised at the teachings and practices that the author takes issue with. The following quote is informative in this regard. “I call them ‘spiritual technologies’ because they have been presented as methods and procedures to produce a desired result—if we could just say the right words or pray the right things or confess certain truths or address the right demons in the right ways, we could eliminate suffering and produce the happiness that we desire” (page 8). Later in the book he writes “Satisfaction for the hunger we feel cannot be found in methods, confessions, ritual prayers, impartations, or any other form of purely human effort” (page 116).

Michael L. Brown, Authentic Fire: A Response to John MacArthur’s Strange Fire (Excel Publishers, Dec 12, 2013), 418 pages.

In my review of John MacArthur’s Strange Fire, I pointed out what I considered to be inexcusable intellectual dishonesty regarding the Charismatic Movement and its contributions to worldwide Christianity. Blanket statements were made with little documentation or knowledge of those within the movement who have made strong intellectual, scholarly and corrective statements. MacArthur singled out rare abuses and presented them as if they characterized the entire movement.

I therefore find Michael Brown’s Authentic Fire to be, not only an appropriate response, but a devastating rebuttal so thoroughly documented and footnoted as to be almost overwhelming. He treats John MacArthur with due respect, while confronting massive errors and refraining from any hint of the mocking tone so prevalent in Strange Fire. In doing so, he doesn’t hesitate to point out areas of concern that thinking charismatics share with MacArthur. What I called inexcusable and dishonest in Strange Fire, Brown characterizes as an enormous blind spot, granting MacArthur some benefit of the doubt. Nevertheless, he truthfully poses an indictment: “You see, it is one thing to address serious errors and abuses, as I and others have done. It is another thing to fail to recognize and, worse still, mock the contemporary work of the Spirit, to vilify godly leaders, and to damn to hell countless millions of brothers and sisters in Jesus.”

Brown has done his homework. With numerous quotes from works of the likes of Derek Prince, David Wilkerson, John Wimber, Leonard Ravenhill, Oswald Chambers, A. W. Tozer and a host of others, he makes an ironclad case for the existence of sound theology and biblical practices within mainstream charismatic circles. He does this without denying the occasional abuses that have obviously occurred, but puts them in their proper perspective.

As an insider to the Charismatic Renewal, Brown points out, not only abuses that need correction, but failures in discernment as happened, for instance, in the Lakeland Revival. Far from denying that abuses and failures exist, he includes confessions like this one addressing the “coronation” of Todd Bentley: “Although I never attended any of the meetings and watched only two services online, one of them absolutely horrified me, as some of the most respected charismatic leaders in the nation gathered to lay hands on the main leader, Todd Bentley, in what seemed to be kind of a coronation service. Some of these men were friends of mine, and I was so grieved over what was taking place that I had to turn the meeting off, unable to watch what seemed to be almost an act of self-mockery.”

As a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary, 1976, I have no trouble reading scholarly works. That being said, I find Authentic Fire almost daunting in its documentation, bordering on the tedious in its thoroughness. I mean this as a shining compliment. This is no short paperback meant for devotional or inspirational reading by the average person. In Authentic Fire, by means of an avalanche of actual fact and exposure of faulty reasoning, errors in scholarship, presentation of misinformation, use of faulty biblical exegesis and ignorance of actual revival history in MacArthur’s work are effectively refuted.

Prophesying in the Father’s Heart
An excerpt from a teaching given at the Hearing Heaven conference at Fusion Church, Auckland, New Zealand in August, 2010.

This is a pre-publication review of John MacArthur, Strange Fire: The Danger of Offending the Holy Spirit with Counterfeit Worship (Thomas Nelson, Nov 12, 2013) 9781400205172.

Strange Fire by John MacArthur is basically an attack on anything and everything related to the Charismatic Movement and the various movements descended from it, as if the whole of it were composed of one monolithic set of doctrines and practices that all of us espouse. It invalidates anything that smacks of the supernatural or of emotion freely expressed in God’s presence. MacArthur pours his vitriol – and I mean vitriol – through the filter of his own prejudices and theological presuppositions in a way that blinds him to the differences between the various movements within the charismatic stream and causes him to deny the existence of the majority of us who do not agree with or practice the abuses he objects to. In doing so he ignores or reinterprets, through very poor exegesis, the clear teaching of much of the Scripture as well.

Ironically, as he formulates his attack, he builds upon concerns that many of us in the movement share. I share his concern over abuses in prophetic ministry, aberrant doctrines, fallen leaders, manipulative fundraising, acting out in fleshly ways that are not of the Spirit and fakery on the part of some associated with the movement. As an insider, I confront these things as well, seeking what is genuine and calling for biblical grounding. MacArthur commits grievous error, however, in claiming that these abuses characterize the movement as a whole. They do not.

For example, I am a charismatic and have been from my childhood in the 1950s. I am also a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary, 1976. Consequently, I have been steeped in exegetical principle and the doctrines of the historic faith from a time when Fuller described itself as “reformed” in its theology. Consequently, I do not embrace aberrant theologies. Reading MacArthur, you’d think that all charismatics espouse prosperity teaching. We do not. You’d think that we are all Word of Faith adherents when, in fact, they constitute a small minority and promote a doctrine many of us oppose. I actually wrote a rebuttal of those two doctrines in my own book, Purifying the Prophetic.

Pneuma Review: What was it like growing up in a household where your parents had such a distinctive ministry? Please tell our readers about your own journey and how you came into prophetic ministry.

R. Loren Sandford: There were strong positives and strong negatives. It wasn’t just that the ministry was distinctive, but that it was also pioneering in three areas (the charismatic movement in general, inner healing and the prophetic) not well understood or received in the early days. This drew persecution both from the local congregations my father pastored and from the wider body of Christ. As children (I’m the eldest of their six) we felt it and were deeply wounded by it. It drew a lot of energy from our folks which often left them with a deficient awareness of how it affected us. Those were lonely years for me at a time when I was really too young to understand or process what was coming at us.

The turning point came in 1988 when John Paul Jackson prophesied over me in a pastors’ meeting that my own prophetic calling was not my father’s calling and that the fear of my father’s calling had kept me out of my own prophetic destiny. I began to pay attention to things I simply “knew” in ways I cannot describe. Even so, twenty-five more years would pass in a dark night of the soul designed to crush and break me to conform more to His image before I came into what has now unfolded. I began to realize that I had so often been right when others had been wrong. While much of that error was born in dreams, visions and mystical experiences, I just knew things in my spirit. It wasn’t until about five years ago, however, that the Lord told me clearly to put myself on the line and go public with the things I was hearing from Him in that simple rational knowing.

Pneuma Review: What kind of experiences does the Lord use to train and mature the truly prophetic person?

Sandford: Character formation and wholeness are everything. These can only be accessed through what Paul described as, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me” (Galatians 2:2). In Romans 12:14-15 he called us to, “Pursue peace with all men, and the sanctification without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one comes short of the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springing up causes trouble, and by it many be defiled.” There must be a dying before there can be a resurrection. This is more than positional. It’s a real experience that more often than not involves some pain.

Loren Sandford, senior pastor of New Song Fellowship, is a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary and a widely recognized leader within the charismatic renewal. He has authored several books, and written, produced, and recorded several music CDs. This monograph, The Prophetic Church, comes at the heels of a transition in the prophetic streams of the renewal movements. As the prophetic outpouring revivals of the nineties waned, new prophetic ministries have come to the fore. As his title begs the question, Sandford’s thesis argues that intimacy with God is the power and primary mark of the prophetic church to be a light in this generation (18). He argues that “a season of the emergence of lighthouse churches and ministries is now upon us” (16). Sandford’s symbolic writing style, combined with numerous biblical examples provides the reader with vivid images to conceptualize the major thrusts of his proposal. The author’s themes build together to communicate his thesis.

Sandford opens by making bold proclamations regarding an ensuing revival in the church of the Western world. However, he conveys with sadness that the revival will stop short of creating a cultural change or lasting impact on secular society. He supports this premise based upon a hermeneutic in which he utilizes biblical narrative to support end time events and then applies these interpretations to the current state of affairs. He records a few of the historical outpouring events of the nineties by giving account of the Toronto Blessing, Brownsville, Smithton, and Pasadena revivals. Sandford argues that the subsequent rejection of these outpourings by the church, degradation of morality as it relates to God in society and liberal views regarding doctrine and authority of Scripture within the church, have caused an irreversible judgment or course within society that will prevent revival from pervading the current culture (13─16).

Sandford highlights the destiny of the prophetic church in part three. He describes this destiny through a Daniel-Joseph anointing motif and the characteristics of the life of Moses as “force multipliers” (101). He defines this concept of force multipliers as factors which seek to “dramatically increase the effectiveness” of something which already exists (187). The writer’s use of exhortation is befitting to build up the ideas of a bold and faithful community, ready to serve, and shining as the light in the darkness as a result of the their participation with these force multipliers. Part four transitions the reader into a counter-cultural theme of the meanings and biblical importance of honor. He links this culture of honor with the release of God’s power and provides several biblical narratives to demonstrate the correlation. After a short excerpt on the importance of faith, Sandford writes to the issues of prophetic prayer and praise. In this chapter, a prophetic church is described as one who knows its identity, position, and prays and praises with declarative statements which builds an atmosphere of faith. The latter theological concepts are familiar to the various streams within the Word of Faith Movement. However, they may seem somewhat foreign for the evangelical reader.

R. Loren Sandford is pastor of New Song Fellowship in Denver, Colorado; he is also the son of John Loren Sandford, co-founder of the Elijah House. Pastor Sandford is himself prophetic and grew up in a prophetic home. His experience of, and exposure to, prophetic ministry qualifies him to write about this subject.

Understanding Prophetic People is divided into three sections. Section one is called “Foundations.” Topics covered in this section are: the profile of the prophetic person, an overview of prophetic ministry, a discussion of what prophetic ministry is not, a description of the prophetic task, the prophet as intercessor, and the office of a prophet.

Of particular interest in this section is Sandford’s profile of the prophetic person. Sandford begins the first chapter by saying: “Prophetic people are generally weird.” In the remainder of the chapter he goes on to describe some of the characteristics of the prophetic person including rarely being happy, being burden bearers, having the gift of weakness, having eccentric personalities, being self-protective, people who are lonely and suffer from rejection, being over serious about life and having unusual experiences. An awareness of these things can help churches, and especially pastors, relate to, and help incorporate prophetic people into the church.

The remaining chapters in section one are devoted to various aspects of prophetic ministry. Significant points that Sandford makes in this section are that prophetic words need to be tested (he is very strong on this), that modern day prophets do not have the right to command and that prophetic words should not be general, but be specific and have substance.

Section two is titled “Hearing God.” In this section Sandford discusses meditation, visions and dreams and the voice of God.

Sandford says that meditation (on the Lord and on His Word) is a must for a prophetic person. Before one can speak the Word of the Lord to people they must first hear it. Sandford says if a prophetic person does not meditate they increase their risk of hearing from sources other than God.

Also in this section Sandford addresses the subject of dreams. He warns us that all dreams are not God communicating with us, some are natural dreams. He also says that dream interpretation is not a science or learned skill, but rather a prophetic gift (which can be developed).

Section three is “Training and Placement.” In this last section Sandford addresses the issues of the need for wilderness experiences and the dark night of the soul and the placement of the prophetic gift within the church.

I thought that this last section of the book was the most powerful. In it Sandford describes some of the experiences that a prophetic person can expect to go through. These experiences purify and prepare them to be the person that God wants them to be. While he specifically applies the experiences of the wilderness and the dark night of the soul to the prophetic, I think that what he writes has relevance for other areas of ministry as well. The wilderness experience and the dark night of the soul are painful times but Sandford provides some insight into their purposes in developing the prophetic person. Sandford is brutally honest and transparent about his own experiences as he has gone through these places of testing.

R. Loren Sandford, Purifying the Prophetic: Breaking Free from the Spirit of Self-Fulfillment (Grand Rapids: Chosen, 2005), 203 pages.

Loren Sandford writes with a twofold purpose: He seeks to confront the culture of self-centered Christianity and to refocus the Charismatic Church on the work and the imitation of Christ. He speaks with a prophetic tone throughout the book—pointing the bony finger of the prophet at sin—while at the same time he nurtures with a pastoral heart, bringing healing to the wounded. Calling attention to the public prophetic errors, such as the fear-filled predictions of Y2K disasters, he asks why there has been no public reprisal against them, or any discrediting of their ministry. In all of this, Sandford names the self-centeredness as parallel to the worship of Baal. To combat this mindset, Sandford sets before the reader a proposal for correction.

Sandford opens with the scriptural illustration of Agabus and the prophetic warning of danger and persecution that he brought to Paul and of the warning of impending famine. In like manner, he calls the contemporary prophets to task with Columbine, Y2K, and 9/11 events as descriptors of failure to prophesy accurately. Leaders of the church, he warns, must be cautious with “the seemingly innocent words” that are spoken. He asks, where is accountability? Pressing further, he confronts prophetic errors with his term “prophetic psychic reading”. Likewise, he disparages the frequent misnomer, “God told me…” In our self-centered culture, we are quick to hear what we want to hear and to ignore the rest. Sandford calls for a course correction.

Sandford uses the scriptural analogies of the Jezebel spirit and Baal worship to describe the same errors in western culture. The corrective, according to Sandford, is to reestablish the foundational things that God has desired for His people: To be a people of faith and to know what it is to love one another—even as Jesus summed up the whole of the Law—to love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. Self must be subjected to the service of others.

Primary to the thesis of Sandford’s book is the fresh emphasis on the Cross of Christ. Without mincing words, he confronts the excesses of the “word of faith” movement and its “prosperity doctrines.” Nowhere in these does Sandford find the work of the cross in the life of the believer. Further, he pointedly exposes many of the movement’s distortions of scripture. Sandford emphasizes the teachings of Jesus and draws the reader to recall the repeated admonitions to take up ones own cross. Here he also pleads for the teachers of the church to place a fresh emphasis on the precious blood of Jesus Christ. It is the suffering of the cross and the purchase of the blood that will bring the needed corrective to the self-centeredness of the twin errors of the above teaching. Further, these correctives will bring maturity to the infantile and rebellious.

Julia C. Loren, “Healers of the Wounded Soul” Charisma (Sept. 2005), pages 55-62.

Julia Loren presents to the reader of Charisma an insightful and charming article about one of the most important couples of the Pentecostal/charismatic persuasion, John and Paula Sandford. Their works on healing, deliverance, inner healing and the prophetic office are destined to be classics until the Lord returns. Mrs. Loren wisely chooses to highlight two aspects of the Sanford’s many faceted ministry, their development of inner healing prayer, and John’s understanding of the work of the prophet.

Inner healing was originally discovered by Mrs. Agnes Sanford through her ministry to heal and disciple Jewish refugees who had experienced the trauma of Nazi persecution. This ministry became popular with the publication of Ruth Carter Stapleton’s best selling book, The Gift of Inner Healing (1976). Unfortunately, this work reduced inner healing prayer to merely “directed visualization.” John Sandford, who had spent several years as Mrs. Sanford’s assistant at Christian teaching missions, immediately saw that this book was dangerous to the inner healing movement. He set about writing a work that would explain this type of prayer in biblical terms and bring it further to become a ministry of transformation. Two books came out of this correction of the Stapleton book, The Transformation of Inner Man (1982) and Healing the Wounded Spirit (1985).

Unfortunately, these books did not head off a great evangelical assault on the inner healing ministry led by Dave Hunt’s infamous work The Seduction of Christianity (1985). Hunts arguments, based on cessationist theology, dealt a severe blow to the inner healing movement, and it mostly stopped as healing prayer within evangelical and charismatic churches.

Julia Loren in 2007.

Loren’s article points out that it was largely the work of the Sandfords to reintroduce inner healing as an orthodox ministry— extending the ministry of forgiveness of sins to enable true transformation in the life of the believer. That battle took two decades, and it is now mostly won, with the ministry of inner healing regaining wide acceptance. This was gained not only through the consistently good teaching courses, books and videos that the Sandfords have produced, but by the undeniably good fruit evident in hundreds of thousands of people ministered to and healed through inner healing.

The other part of the Sandfords’ ministry outlined in Mrs. Loren’s article is John’s expansion of our understanding of the office and function of the prophet in the contemporary church. Prophetic ministry is now considered a staple of many charismatic churches, yet this was not so at the start of the charismatic renewal. John Sandford’s book The Elijah Task (1977) first gave the Church a clear biblical theology on the present and continued need for prophetic ministry. Loren points out that many of today’s more established prophets such as James Goll and John Paul Jackson were deeply influenced and motivated by the Sandford’s work.

Loren mentions throughout her article how the Sandfords suffered various waves of persecution for their pioneering work. Unfortunately she is overly polite and omits specific names and controversies. This is common to many Christian writers, and it is, I believe, a misunderstanding of the biblical pattern of historical writing modeled in both testaments, where we see frank descriptions of sin (as in David’s adultery) and controversies such as Paul’s dispute with Peter in Antioch (Galatians 2:11-14). Loren’s article gives the reader no information as to precisely who opposed the Sandfords, and very little on the specific issues that stirred controversies against them. No mention is made, for instance, of The Seduction of Christianity.