Ministry Update: Launching NIGHT WATCH!

Hey, friends! It has been too long since I’ve written… tbh, I was swamped for a while with our summer programs and I didn’t fight like I should have to make Fragrance Arise a priority. But in all our discussions and prayers about building the house of prayer and strengthening the prayer movement, I’ve been freshly aware of the potential of this blog, and I’ve been convicted that I can’t afford to let it sit on the back burner.

So I am coming back after my unnofficial hiatus with the best news ever: Today, September 1, The Prayer Room Missions Base is extending our hours into the night! For 6 years, we’ve been 18/7 with live prayer and worship 5am-11pm every single day. We’re expanding that that to 1am every night, making us officially 20/7 and one step closer to our goal of being 24/7! We call this addition the “Night Watch”, and eventually, the whole overnight portion of our schedule will be the Night Watch.

This is incredible. We are so thrilled and grateful to the Lord that He has given us the strength to be able to give Him this offering. Tonight at 11pm, instead of praying a closing prayer and turning off the lights, a fresh worship leader (me!) will come on stage and we’ll keep going another two hours until 1am. And then we’ll do it again the next night, and the next, until we’re able to go longer and never turn off the lights at all.

Since our early days of starting as a one hour 5am daily prayer meeting in our director’s living room in 2005, we’ve known that The Prayer Room was called to a 24/7 house of prayer for our region. Over the years, we’ve added slowly, very careful that if we added a set to our schedule, it would be on every day of the week, and we would be able to sustain it. We don’t experiment with adding hours for a season; if something gets added to our schedule, it’s there till Jesus comes back.

We’ve been faithful to that model since day 1, but that means that every step is very slow and strategic. We’ve been 18/7 for 6 years, knowing that whenever we took our next step forward into the night, it would be a big deal.

The plan has always been to add one set at a time into the night: first 11pm-1am, then 1-3am, and finally 3-5am to make us 24/7. Our strategy to shore up these new sets would be to launch an internship at the same time, and fill that prayer room with young adults with passion for worship in the night. After the internship, some would stay on the night watch, and we could start another internship and go get more.

This is what we’re doing this semester. Today, in conjuction with launching our new Night Watch hours, we’re also launching our first-ever Fire in the Night internship! This is a part-time 14 week program for young adults centered around those night hours. Here’s the schedule:

  • Class 8-9pm Tues/Wed/Thurs
  • Class 3-7pm Sat (including an hour for dinner, food provided)
  • Encounter service 7-9pm Sat
  • Prayer room 9pm-1am Thurs/Fri/Sat (we chose weekend hours because these are mostly people with jobs!)

While they’re in the prayer room, they’ll be serving on three sets each, which will be a mix of worship leading, ushering, and prayer leading. For more info, including class content, see our website at tprdfw.com.

As of today, we’re launching with 5 interns! (I’m a little leery of putting that number out there, because it ALWAYS fluctuates the first few weeks–ask me at the end of the semester how many we ended with!) I’m so excited to see these hungry ones encounter Jesus in the night.

To get this internship off on the right foot, I put together a short playlist of songs from that specifically talk about the night watch. They’re all from the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, where they’ve been doing 24/7 live prayer and worship since 1999 – so they know a thing or two about worship in the night! The songs from the “Simple Devotion” album were actually all written and recorded by the night watch worship teams.

If you don’t see it below, here’s the direct Spotify link.

There is one other song that is deeply precious to the night watch in Kansas City (written by Chris Tofilon) but it was never released on an album so it’s not on Spotify. I pulled a live recording from youtube and edited it down to six minutes from an hour-long set. This one is called “Psalm 134 (Bless the Lord)” and the Psalm it’s based on is literally ALL about the night watch – the priests who stand and bless the Lord in the house of prayer through the night.

“Come, bless the LORD, all you servants of the LORD,
who stand by night in the house of the LORD!
Lift up your hands to the holy place
and bless the LORD!
May the LORD bless you from Zion,
he who made heaven and earth!”
(Psalm 134:1-3)

Attached below is the live recording of Psalm 134 (6 min) and also the longer worship time it came from (23 minutes). If you have time, listen to the longer one. It goes into a powerful spontaneous time of what I call throne room worship, centered on the holiness of God. You can also right click to download.

Ministry Update: Growing in Musical Strength

Once a month, I send newsletters to my ministry partners (learn how to partner with me here!) about my life as a full-time intercessory missionary at The Prayer Room Missions Base, and I’ll be posting a few highlights from these letters on Fragrance Arise.

A few weeks ago, I shared a huge need/prayer request in my post “What I’m Praying: Crazy Supernatural Provision for a Dorm and Finances“. We’re still praying for God to break in and supply monthly partners as well as a dorm building where we can house some of the single young adult members of our community. I encourage you to check out that post and join us in prayer!

In other news, our part-time Forerunner Music Academy is at its halfway mark! I’m so proud of these 21 students as they are falling more in love with Jesus, being stretched in boldness, and gaining music skills both vocally and on instruments.

The past few weeks, our IHOPU externs/teachers Daniel and Tyler have become very intentional about bringing FMA students to join their worship sets, and a few of the students have even started leading their own sets. The explosion of new singers and musicians on stage makes me SO happy! These students are falling in love with the prayer room and learning to encounter God in a deeper way through their new skills. I love watching God woo their hearts into His story and His zeal for His house.

Here’s a short clip of Daniel leading four of our FMA students in a set! It’s unusual to have one instrument and five voices on stage, but these guys just went for it and it was wonderful. The whole room was getting blessed!

Here’s another FMA clip– students practicing developing spontaneous choruses for intercession in harp and bowl class!

I’ve been inspired by the musical swirl that’s happening around the base to learn more as well! I’m now playing keys on the Wednesday 5-7pm set led by Daniel. It’s my first time learning to follow someone else’s leadership as a musician, but Daniel is very patient and encouraging and I’m really excited to grow in this area. I’ve also started trying to learn guitar again with teaching from Chris, one of my fellow missionaries—mostly because I want to be able to keep the fire on the altar if the power ever goes out. It’s happened before, and I’ll be ready!

I’m learning guitar– follow my Instagram to see the journey!

Ministry Update: Forerunner Music Academy and TPR 2.0

Once a month, I send newsletters to my ministry partners (learn how to partner with me here!) about my life as a full-time intercessory missionary at The Prayer Room Missions Base, and I’ll be posting a few highlights from these letters on Fragrance Arise.

February feels like the month 2019 really got into full swing. We launched our part-time Forerunner Music Academy (FMA) and at the same time launched a massive ministry reset dubbed TPR 2.0!

Forerunner Music Academy at TPR

The Prayer Room has the distinction of being the first IHOPU FMA partner school in the United States! We are using IHOPU curriculum and have been trained in the teaching methods of IHOPU. To spearhead this school, we currently have two IHOPU externs, Tyler and Daniel! Tyler is a current senior in IHOPU’s full-time FMA in Kansas City, and Daniel is an IHOPU FMA 2018 graduate. Both of them are incredible and have stepped so beautifully into serving and doing life with this community. They have been leading, administrating, and teaching like pros and we are so grateful for them.

The school runs on Saturdays for 14 weeks and includes training in piano, guitar, voice, harp and bowl, and theology, as well as Encounter service and 6 hours in the prayer room. We have 22 students, and all of them are so hungry and excited to encounter God and strengthen their skills. Most of them have little to no previous music experience, but they’re going to be able to play worship songs by the end of this semester!

Two of our students in particular came to us in the craziest ways. Brie was in Orlando when she met Brad at a conference. He mentioned our FMA, God gripped her heart, and within a WEEK, she uprooted her entire life and moved here. Sebastian is a freshman at Texas A&M in College Station — about 3 hours south of Dallas. He drives up every weekend to attend our church and take this school. I’m so excited for how both of them, as well as our other students, are saying yes to the call of God on their hearts!

TPR 2.0

The Prayer Room is also launching a fresh re-emphasis on our core mandates with several new components to our weekly activities. We’re calling it “TPR 2.0.” Interestingly, this coincided with similar shifts throughout the prayer movement. IHOPKC’s “Reset” for many of the same reasons is the most well-known, but as we’ve heard from house of prayer leaders throughout the nation we’ve found that God is doing the same thing everywhere. He’s refocussing us on keeping the “first things first” and stirring up a deeper sense of family. In most places, this shift started independently, without talking to other ministries.

At The Prayer Room, we have launched:

  • PRAYER FOR REVIVAL – We believe that God wants to do more in our region than He is currently doing, and in part that’s because He’s waiting for the intercessors to cry out to Him for revival. Accordingly, we’ve added a cycle of intercession for revival to around 30 devotional (worship only) prayer meetings from 9am-5pm every day. That’s a LOT more intercession happening on a weekly basis!* I blogged on Wednesday about praying for leaders to be aligned with God for revival during this intercession time.
  • REVELATION TEACHING – When The Prayer Room began, God gave us a clear word about focussing on Jesus’ return, and we want our community to get firmly grounded in the study of the end times all over again. We’re taking 2 years to go through the book of Revelation in our weekly services, with discussion groups immediately after each teaching, and we’re being very intentional about engaging and following up with visitors in the groups. You can follow along with us on our Facebook page or on our recent messages page.
  • CONNECT NIGHTS – To break up the intensity of the Revelation study and to help our community thrive, we’re going to have a community “connect night” every two months in place of our Saturday night service. Next week, we’re watching The LEGO Movie with “extreme popcorn”!

To hear our director Brad Stroup cast vision for TPR 2.0, check out the Facebook video of Encounter service that night.

I am so excited about all three of these components. I love the added energy of the revival intercession times, and I love the format of the Revelation teaching. It’s so much fun to see eschatological newbies become encouraged that Revelation isn’t meant to be scary and they really can study it and discover the beauty of Jesus in the climax of history. Breakthroughs of fresh clarity are already occurring; this is going to strengthen our community so much these next two years!

*I bet some of you harp and bowl junkies are really curious as to how we’re doing cycles of revival prayer during devotionals in a simple and sustainable way! Here’s what it looks like in our prayer room:

  • At the midpoint of the set, the usher chooses a prayer topic related to revival. We have about 20 options preset on slides that the usher can choose from. They announce the topic on the mic and invite anyone who wants to sit in the open mic seats to pray for this topic. (Staff are required to pray.)
  • The usher prays for the topic. They can pray a short rapid fire prayer, a longer apostolic prayer, or anything in between. The worship leader sings a chorus based on their prayer.
  • Anyone else may pray on the mic next. Again, they may pray long or short, with or without a verse. This sets the bar low and makes it easy for anyone to engage.
  • After ALL the people have prayed, the worship leader sings a chorus, usually the same chorus again.
  • That’s it! Usually it takes 5-10 minutes. It requires very little training, and it can be done even if there are only a worship leader and an usher in the room. This is how we are following the Spirit’s nudge to be more intentional about daily praying for revival in our region.

What I’m Praying: Night Watch

Today I’m continuing my every-other-Wednesday series What I’m Praying. (On the in between Wednesdays, expect to see posts on What I’m Reading.) The vision for this series is to share a peek into either the “prayer vibe” around our house of prayer, or what’s on my heart personally to pray.

Ever since a bunch of us got back from the Onething conference in Kansas City a few weeks ago, many of us have carried a stronger burden than usual for what we call the “night watch”. On the first evening of the conference, the session ended up being all about honouring those who serve the Lord as worshippers and intercessors in the night, literally flipping their schedule upside down for months or years at a time to keep the “fire on the altar” (Leviticus 6:13) in 24/7 prayer rooms while the rest of the world sleeps.

God began stirring up a holy jealousy in us that we would have a night watch in our city, and we carried that passion home and have made it a central prayer topic in many of our prayer meetings.

The foundation of night watch is found in the heavenly throne room scene in Revelation 4:

“And the four living creatures… day and night they never cease to say, ‘Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!'”
(Revelation 4:8)

This is the picture that the tabernacle of David was patterned after, with priests on duty around the clock worshipping God. In fact, the second shortest chapter of the Bible, with only three verses, was written out of the place of David’s night watch:

“Come, bless the LORD, all you servants of the LORD, who stand by night in the house of the LORD!
Lift up your hands to the holy place and bless the LORD!
May the LORD bless you from Zion, he who made heaven and earth!”
(Psam 134:1-3)

(Check out the video above at 30:50 for a prophetic song based on this passage!)

The reality is that Jesus is actually worthy of unceasing worship. For all of who He is and all that He’s done, as the Creator of the cosmos, the Lamb who was slain, the most beautiful Man to ever live, the infinitely good and kind Bridegroom, King, and Judge– He deeply, intrinsically deserves the fullest praise we can give Him.

Allen Hood likes to say that we give Him 24/7 because we can’t give Him 25/8.

Let’s be a people who continuously push the boundary, saying “How can I give you more of what You deserve? How can I love, serve, and worship you more?” Of course, this is never out of legalism, as though His love and favour depends on us trying as hard as we can– but once we catch a glimpse of His matchless beauty and feel the weight of his love and delight, our hearts overflow with love in return that expresses itself in increasingly radical ways. Like flipping our schedule upside down to praise Him all night long.

Here at The Prayer Room, we are all eager to launch our night watch, but we will only do it when we can do it sustainably. This has been our ministry model since day one: when we add a set to our schedule at a certain time, we add it on every day of the week, and we do not come off of it no matter what. Whenever we begin inching our way through the night toward 24/7 (first 11pm-1am, then 1-3am, then 3-5am), we will count the cost very soberly and make sure that our days are solid enough to survive some of us transitioning to the nights.

God, burn this passion on the hearts of Your people, to see Jesus be worshipped in our city literally day and night. Let us not rest until we give You what You deserve. Bring people to fill our prayer room during the daytime hours so that we can responsibly reassign people to carry the nights. Have Your glory here!

Holy Stubbornness: Don’t Quit on Your Calling


Building a house of prayer is NOT easy. I’ve heard multiple leaders say it’s the hardest thing they’ve ever done–way harder than planting a church, doing overseas missions, etc. Really, the only reason this place is still standing is that years ago, God graciously gave us a holy stubbornness to NOT QUIT NO MATTER WHAT.

There are so, so many reasons to quit. When the money falls apart, the people wander off, the building gets taken away, other important causes demand attention… there is every good and natural reason in the world to quit.

In the “world”.

But we are not of this world. We don’t think like this world. We are not slaves to things like practicality and pragmatism. We don’t make decisions based only on numbers and logic.

We make decisions on faith.

13 years ago, God called a guy named Brad to start a daily prayer meeting that was eventually supposed to become a 24/7 house of prayer (this is TPR’s origin story). And then one by one, over the years, God called each of us to be part of it. Occasionally, He calls someone out of it just as clearly as He called them in. But MOST of the time… He expects us to plant our feet and not walk away from the thing He called us to. No matter what.

Of course we look at the numbers and listen to reason. Sometimes God leads through reason. But there are times, especially about the big things, when we need to set our face like flint and refuse to back down.

“For the Lord GOD will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed.”
(Isaiah 50:7)

For us at The Prayer Room, that means first and foremost day and night prayer, 5:00 am to 11:00 pm with live worship, every single day of the week. We don’t take a day off and we don’t cut corners. We don’t cut the schedule when we’re running low on people–by golly, we’d invent human cloning before we’d cancel a prayer meeting.

For me personally, holy stubbornness means I know I am called to be part of the house of prayer movement. I make decisions based on that calling. I have discouraged guys from pursuing me because of that calling. I arrange my finances and my schedule around that calling. For me, God has been clear that means full-time missionary staff at The Prayer Room. I do not have the right to decide to do something else with my life, no matter how convenient, attractive, logical, or even necessary other options may seem.

The pastor I grew up with, Pastor Danny at Water of Life, calls this “staying on your number”. Years ago, he used a sermon illustration of gym class at school where the coach would tell all the kids to stand on their assigned number on the gym floor. No matter how much you wanted to move or felt entitled to a more favourable number, you had to stay on your number. The phrase has become Water of Life shorthand for staying grounded where God has planted you.

Really what this comes down to is obedience and faith.

“And Samuel said, ‘Has the LORD as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the LORD? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams.'”
(1 Samuel 15:22)

In the story of 1 Samuel 15, God told King Saul to completely destroy his enemies and all of their possessions and livestock. When the prophet Samuel showed up, he found that King Saul had done his idea of the right thing, which was to spare the best of the livestock for the purpose of sacrificing it to God. That sounds pretty holy, right? But God’s message to Saul was, “I told you what to do, and you didn’t do it. The excuse ‘I’m doing this for You!’ doesn’t cut it, because I TOLD YOU what to do, and this was not it. To obey is better than sacrifice.”

Obeying what God actually said is better than doing other good things for good reasons that are NOT actually what God said to do. God delights in obedience. It gives Him great pleasure when we trust Him enough to follow what He said to do no matter what, even if there are “good reasons” to do something different.

For us, that means we’re stubbornly going to keep building the house of prayer.
For you, it might be the house of prayer, or it might be something different. Maybe God has called you to overseas missions, or to a church ministry, or to a specific marketplace career. Maybe it’s your marriage, or homeschooling, or fostering/adoption.

DON’T QUIT.

God called you into this for a reason. You said yes for a reason. Remember what that reason was, and hold onto it. Unless He releases you as clearly as He called you… don’t walk away.

Get stubborn. Get iron in your soul. Get a flinty face like Isaiah. Get radically surrendered like Jesus in Gethsemane.

Walk by faith, not by sight.

When it gets hard, He will give you grace to walk through it. His grace is sufficient. He will not let you fall. He might let you come close, but His promise is that those who wait on Him will not be ashamed. I think that means that even if there are moments or seasons of pressure and even embarrassment, in the long run you will not regret choosing to trust Him. You will look back a thousand years from now and be so grateful you kept saying yes. Wisdom will be justified.

It’s worth it. Holy stubbornness that says YES to Jesus no matter what is worth it.

Don’t give up on Him.

Testimony: My Sister Got HEALED of Scoliosis!

This past week, my sister Elise came to visit me at The Prayer Room for a few days. We had a great time in the prayer room together, going to small group and Encounter service, treasure hunting through Texas Thrift, making the world’s best and simplest marinated chicken, and even visiting the Fort Worth Water Gardens and Sundance Square.

Best of all, Elise got a few very special testimonies! On Wednesday night at a small group, she received a prophetic word that was partly related to her ministry being tied to kids, that they would be drawn to her like to the Pied Piper. The next day, two little girls in a store bathroom struck up a conversation with her through the stall door and created an open door for Elise to minister to their mom. It was such a fun confirmation!

The next day Elise asked Jeremy, the TPR leader who had given her the word the night before, to pray for her back. Her spine had been curved slightly to the left for years, was very sensitive to touch, and had been informally diagnosed with mild scoliosis. Related to that, when she sat with her knees pulled up in front of her, her right knee was noticeably higher. Jeremy and I prayed for healing, and Jeremy actually felt the muscles rippling and moving under his hand even as Elise swore she wasn’t budging. She asked me to press on her back to test it out because previously even the slightest touch would cause pain. I then gave her her first painless back massage in close to ten years! When she sat down to test the alignment of her knees, they were completely level and even! We’re all so amazed at what Jesus has done for her!

Check out the video below or click HERE to watch it on Youtube (click CC to view captions).

Meet My “Chickens” – Interns and Externs!

It’s been too long since I posted an update here. A lot of things happened all at once, but I’ve finally caught my breath and can share some pics and news!

In my role as head of the Forerunner Equipping Center at The Prayer Room, I serve as “mother hen” over our Immerse Internship, School of Supernatural Ministry, and any other student programs we may be running at the time. Right now, I have a total of nine “chickens” in my programs!

On May 27, we launched another summer Immerse internship! (Check it out on our website HERE.) This one is special because we completely revamped the curriculum to make it even more dynamic and strengthening. We have seven interns, most of whom are very new to our community and the message of the house of prayer. They are already encountering God and getting their minds blown by what He’s doing in the earth! Immerse includes 8 hours a week in the prayer room, weekly Encounter service, monthly three-day Global Bridegroom Fast, and five hours of classroom time a week. Classroom sessions include theology on intimacy with Christ, the biblical foundation of the house of prayer, LOTS of end times, practical how-tos for developing and sustaining a life of prayer, Bible discussion night, and community night.

We do Immerse both to help anchor young adults in the message of intimacy with Jesus and the importance of night and day prayer, and also as an onramp for those who may feel called to join missionary staff with us. Two of these girls (the two immediately to my left) are already on volunteer staff with us after doing previous programs. We’re praying that God would capture the hearts of one or two more to radically uproot the lives they had planned and choose to give themselves full-time to the vision of night and day prayer unto Jesus’ return and a great end-time revival!

Over the years The Prayer Room has hosted a number of IHOPU students who come as externs to experience a few months of missionary life at a smaller house of prayer, and several of the externs have decided to join us long-term. We did not expect to have any externs this summer, but at the last minute a different externship location fell through, and we ended up receiving not one but TWO amazing young women who are serving with us for eight weeks this summer! In the wake of one of our leadership team recently transitioning off, I’ve inherited leadership of our externship program and it’s great! Their first day was officially June 4.

Jarah and Christi are incredible and have already been such a strength to our team. Both have a passion to devote themselves to lifestyles of prayer to serve what God is doing in our generation and to see Jesus have His inheritance in the adoration of the nations. They are helping sustain prayer and worship in the prayer room and are also serving as assistants to division heads in two of our busiest divisions.

Other recent happenings:

  • The Prayer Room hosted an IHOPU ministry trip of 20-some students for a week in April! I hosted three girls in my house, and they all served in the prayer room and around the city, leading worship, praying, prophesying, and ministering in the love of God. We love IHOPU!
  • Immediately after the IHOPU trip, I travelled home to California for a week to watch my sister graduate college and get engaged!! It was a very special and exciting week to spend with family and my spiritual community back home.
  • I joined a summer dance program at a local Christian dance studio! Every Monday evening (my ONLY day off), I’ve been dancing for four and a half hours in a rotating variety of styles with super kind and gifted teachers and students. Tap, ballet, lyrical, and jazz have been my favourites so far. I haven’t had a real dance class since high school, and it’s been such a gift to my heart to push my body to create in this way again.

Current resource recommendation:

A few weeks ago, Brad preached on “Awakening Our Hearts for Revival” and it was POWERFUL. We talked about some of the high points of revival history and cast a vision again for what it is exactly we’re praying for. It stirred something up in our community that we’re still figuring out how to ride the wave of… it really seems like God is calling us deeper in this area! Stream or download the session HERE.

Prophetic Testimonies from TPR

It’s been a fun month for prophetic testimonies!! I’ve personally had four or five separate occasions the past few weeks of people giving me prophetic words out of the blue when I was least expecting it, and that’s not normal for me. (Yes, they were very encouraging and several of them were about the same thing!)

We’ve reached the point in our School of Supernatural Ministry semester that our students are ministering not only to each other but to staff and visitors as well. Two weeks ago, four students served 15 visitors through prophetic ministry. Some of these visitors had never even been to The Prayer Room before. They were deeply blessed to encounter the heart of God through the words of our students.

A couple came in with their son, who had a developmental disability. One student felt led to ask him, “What’s your favourite fish?” and said he saw Jesus grilling up some fish for him. It turns out, he was on a special diet and could only eat fish! The family was touched to be so known by God.

Another couple came in with a specific question on their hearts regarding a property decision. A student gave them a word about a property that was exactly what they needed to hear and brought so much peace and clarity about the situation!

Two students who were partnered together for the ministry time experienced a great flow of team ministry. Over and over, God gave one girl a picture and the other girl the interpretation. So many people were blessed by God using them both together!

My favourite recent SSM testimony was the student who came up to me outside of class and told me that she had encountered a woman who needed help with her car. She was nervous, but she obeyed the nudge of the Holy Spirit and asked the woman if she could help her, and then if she could pray for her! This is what it’s all about. We want students to encounter God in a way that it breaks the hold of fear and affects the way they live as powerful witnesses of Christ everywhere they go!

Prophetic Equipping Workshop – 65 attended!

On March 31, we did a Prophetic Equipping Workshop in place of our normal Encounter service. We had around 20 visitors on top of our usual crowd, and some of them were completely new to TPR. Andy and Jeremy taught on how to hear the voice of God and share it with others, and then everyone in the room gathered into groups of three or four and practiced prophesying over each other. My favorite stories were the people who came in skeptical, and were blown away that God would actually speak clearly to and through them!

One of our staff members brought her parents. She had been telling them for months about things that God was doing and how she was hearing His voice, but they didn’t really know how to take it seriously. When they came to our training night and started seeing accurate prophetic ministry in action, they were amazed. An SSM student gave the mom a prophetic word about yellow roses, and come to find out, she had actually been planting yellow roses just that morning!

Another young man who was not a believer came with a friend, and he actually heard the voice of God for himself for the first time! I don’t know what his history with God is, but he now knows experientially that God is real and wants a relationship with him.

The teaching from that night is available to stream or download on TPR’s Recent Messages page.

SSM Testimonies – Healed Achilles Tendon!

SSM students!

We’ve completed the first half of our School of Supernatural Ministry! Our six students (yes, we lost another since my last update) have been really pressing in to hear the voice of God and to minister to each other. We’ve done several activations which involve asking God for His thoughts for each other. I’ve been so proud of their tenderness and boldness!

Earlier this month, John, one of my students who is also a fellow staff member, shared a testimony at Encounter service: “Every time I’ve walked away from the teachings I get convicted; there’s a new holy ache and burden that my voice matters, this is important… And after that, we have a ministry time, and it’s been very fruitful for me and worth it—getting to hear the Lord’s heart over me, strengthening my spirit, giving me confidence. I look forward to every class to get re-amped… it’s empowering me and I feel it throughout the week.”

The first six weeks, our Thursday night sessions were focussed on ministry training. From here on out, we will be doing “real” ministry on Thursday nights! Last week, we started slowly by prophesying over each other. Everyone received several accurate words which built on each other, and everyone was encouraged!

On Saturday, we prayed for a student’s ankle. Her Achilles tendon was in a lot of pain due to a recurring injury that had been going on for almost a year and she had been really struggling in believing that God would heal it. She hadn’t been able to walk that morning. The pain dropped as we prayed, and by the next day, her ankle had no more pain at all! Praise the Lord!

Kansas City IHOPU Recruiting Trip

Every year, IHOPU in Kansas City, where I was a student for four years, hosts an externship expo and ministry fair for their students who will be required to serve on a senior externship. Various ministries and houses of prayer come to recruit students to come spend a season serving. This was how I first got connected with The Prayer Room in 2014 and 2015.

The past several years as we’ve recruited from IHOPU, we have had 14 externs, 5 of whom stayed on staff. The same three of TPR’s senior staff (Brad, Lisa, and Caslin) go together every year, and due to a scheduling conflict, I was invited to go for Lisa this year.

It was such a special experience for me to travel with Brad and Caslin to represent The Prayer Room at IHOPU. I remember well what it felt like to be a student hearing from so many different ministries and praying about where I should go. The TPR team was amazing at reaching out and getting to know me then, and the opportunity to do the same for the next generation of students was an incredible honour.

We drove 9 hours to KC on February 8, and arrived at the home of our dear friends and TPR-to-IHOPKC transplants Andrew and Lauren Meek. The next day was the expo and ministry fair. Brad was given five minutes to give a short presentation about The Prayer Room at the expo. He shared his testimony of how in 2005 he had been a missionary in Africa getting kidnapped by crime lords and seeing Muslims get saved, and then God abruptly called him back to Texas and soon after gave him the most clear and dramatic word of his life: “Start a daily prayer meeting tomorrow morning at 5am and don’t stop until I come back. And thus TPR was born as a daily 5am living room prayer meeting that over the years has grown into our own building with live prayer and worship 18 hours a day, 7 days a week.

We were one of the last presentations, so the students’ attention was starting to drift, but the story had them gripped. We got to talk to dozens of them afterward at the ministry fair, and we tried to set up coffee meetings with them all. The next day we had close to 20 coffee meetings with students every 30 minutes.

We made several great connections and look forward to keeping in touch with these students as they consider their futures. Please pray with us that God would lead some of them to extern and/or serve long-term at The Prayer Room!

Our table at the ministry fair
Clockwise from top left: Caslin, Whitney (TPR’s first extern, now a missionary in Hong Kong), Brad, and me