Living As A Prophetic Person: An Introduction

An Invitation To Being Prophetic AND Being Well.

Prophetic people are a strange bunch, and why wouldn’t they be? Their sensitivity to spiritual life lends them to odd language, strange gestures and a seemingly confrontational nature about things that really matter to them. When I was young, people were forever calling me sensitive. Almost every sleepover I had with friends until my teen years ended around 3am when I woke up sensing strange things in the room. My parents called it night terrors or being scared of the dark and I assumed they were right. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I realised I was bumping into stuff in a realm that my friends, nor my parents at the time could perceive or understand.

It turned out these strange beings standing over me while I slept weren’t a figment of my imagination, but an unwelcome reality from another dimension.

As I grew up there was also that strange knack for knowing who people really were before I even knew anything about them. Sometimes I felt terrible about it, like I was judgemental or always assuming the worst in good people or the best in the “worst”. I felt things when I walked into different homes, events and churches. I often felt grieved by the lack of affection for God amidst worship and preaching in communities that centered more around theology and works, then felt angered at the lack of action by communities that were all talk about affection and no action! I saw angels when I prayed alone, demons when I prayed for others, hardly slept more than a few hours at a time and had dreams of things happening that even made the days feel haunted.

Once my hunger for ministry grew I discovered the real rub of being prophetically wired - not fitting in. No matter how hard I tried to be a good worship pastor, assistant staff member, pastor, evangelist or missionary, I just couldn’t seem to fit the respective moulds. I was too christian for the workplace and too “secular” for the church. This was only made worse when I started writing the music I did. The church wanted me to be a worship leader and the mainstream wanted me to drop all the God stuff. I just seemed to see it all so differently, and that really seemed to get on others nerves. Trust me, I didn’t want to. All I’ve ever wanted to do is to fit in and be accepted somewhere by someone or people.

I needed to find a language for my experience. I needed to make sense of my own gift before I could learn how to engage with others, the world and the church in a healthy way.

In all of that here’s what I discovered - if you’re prophetic, you’re prophetic. There’s no changing that. You can deny it or run from it because if you can see things, intuit people, have a passion for justice, the arts or a church in love with Christ it’s because you’re made that way, and it’s a magnificent gift.

But it’s entirely possible for all of those things to make you angry, cynical, burnt out, anti-church, untrusting and ultimately lonely. Because all the feelings I’ve described are hyper accentuated in a church community of broken people claiming to know, love and follow Christ.

And if you ask me, it kinda feels like a whole generation, a whole prophetic generation, has been dancing on the precipice of being just that.

Being a prophetic person is meaningless without love, peace, patience, kindness and a life beautifully integrated with God’s people. In our time, I really believe God is bringing a renewal of the prophetic voice in the church. But it’s going to take some hard work on the part of prophetic people to bring their fruits into line with their gifts, and it’s going to take real humility from church leadership who have often hurt, marginalised, done away with and kept out prophetic people from their staff, leadership and communities because of the personal challenges that come with this gift.

We need prophetic voices, and we need to celebrate and encourage them if we’re to weather a century that will only become more and more tumultuous with time.

We need to know what we mean when we say prophetic, have a new vision for healthy prophetic people, and get real about creating a prophetic accountability structure within our local churches that integrate prophetic people into the movements of God’s organisations.

So, with all of that in mind, I’m going to share some thoughts from my own journey about how to live a healthy prophetic life here in this Journal. I’m going to be writing and publishing a series of thoughts and encouragements from my Living As A Prophetic Person Online School as a way of trying to contribute something concrete to the conversation.

If you’re prophetic and struggling to make sense of all you’re experiencing, then these journals will hopefully give you some hope and excitement. If you’re a pastor, leader, spouse, parent or friend of a prophetic person, then I hope this series will give you some context to learn to celebrate and give oxygen to this unique and magnificent gift in those around you.

I’d love to hear from you with each post, what’s inspired you, how have you experienced being prophetic or working with prophetic people in the church, or even what some of the challenges you feel we’re facing are in the comments below.

Here’s to a renewal of the eyes and ears of Christ in a time when it’s so desperately needed.

Talk soon,

Strahan.