Reflections on the Prophetic Visions Shared at Bethlehem 1 Year Ago

Last year on this date (3/26) there was an amazing Bethlehem downtown family meeting.  It was definitely my highlight of the year at church.  I'm writing about it now to share the visions with those who weren't there and to reflect on them.

A caveat:  I don't have a recording of this meeting (if anyone does, let me know!), so this record is based on my notes at the time, plus a brain-dump I did last summer.  I'm sure I forgot a lot, and there are probably things I'm misremembering.  I chose to write in 1st person (e.g. Pastor Jason's voice) to try to convey how it felt to be in the room, but these words are my best memory, not verbatim quotes from Pastor Jason.

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Pastor Jason started the meeting by reading a question from a congregant (the elders had received 20 pages worth of questions and were trying to work through them):

"BCS and BBC tend to have a view of Christianity that feels like a mountain peak, where the peak of it is Mount Nuance Perfection. It is about 5 feet wide. Anybody who is standing not there, is on a slippery slope. This is a problem for working with, communing with, learning from the rest of the Christian world. How can we start to make BBC-DT more of the reality that Christianity is more like a plateau that is 5 miles wide. There are still things that fall off the path, but it allows us to grow in our culture of understanding, love, care, winsome speech. It creates a place for us to partner with other churches that maybe have some different views but we can be winsome with each other. Or is this something that is not desired at BBC-DT or disagreed with at BBC-DT? I am not saying we go all in here and drop convictions on key primary issues. I know one question that is going to change for all is, what are the primary issues?"

Pastor Jason responded by talking about how there are 1st, 2nd, and 3rd tier issues.  For example, on divorce, the elders hold a variety of views.  He then shared the following:

I [Pastor Jason] had a really hard day.  I had meetings from 8 am to 9 pm at night.  I woke up the next day feeling awful, one of those days where you start writing your resignation letter in your head.  That morning I got an email from [a woman at Bethlehem] saying, "I think I have a vision for you, but I want to test it first.  I had a picture of you on your knees praying, but you felt so overwhelmed and discouraged that you couldn't even pray.  Does that sound right?"  Yes, it does.  "OK, good.  I can tell you the vision."

So Cara and I met with her at our house, and she said, "I saw you sitting in the corner of a big Costco warehouse.  The room was empty, and you had your back to me.  You were trying to pry off these rotten floorboards, but you were struggling.  The baseboards were bolted down with lug-nuts.  You had this tiny screwdriver and weren't making progress.  The lug-nuts represent demonic strongholds.  I walked over and handed you a socket wrench.  You were surprised and said, 'How did you instantly know what tool I needed?'  It's because I'm an intercessor.  These strongholds can come out only by prayer."

It wasn't totally out of the blue for her to email me, because she'd had another vision prior.  She had shared this vision with the elders, and they had tested and approved it.  In that vision, she shared this: "I had a vision of Bethlehem as a large ship.  We were trying to pull away from the harbor but not making any progress.  The pastors were on deck, urging the congregation to row harder.  But the ship didn't move.  Then I looked up and saw there was a second deck above, which was empty.  And I realized, that's where the intercessors were supposed to be.  If we'd had intercessors up there, we could have seen that there were these thick ropes tying us to the dock."  So this vision felt like a call for intercessory prayer.

I don't know much about intercessory prayer; I'm more of a prayer list kind of guy.  But [this woman] gave me a book to read, and we [some group of elders?] have been meeting to pray.  We met on Saturday to pray against toxic strongholds at Bethlehem.

In that meeting, someone had a vision.  They said, "it seems like you're the man in the parable of the Good Samaritan.  You're calling for compassion for the wounded man on the ground.  You're calling people to come help the vulnerable (e.g. minorities, women, abuse victims).  But instead of helping you, they start beating you up as well.  So now you're a second body on the ground.  Does that sound right?"  Yes, that captures my feelings exactly.

When Jesus speaks, he brings conviction AND healing.  When Satan speaks, it's harsh.  Jesus brings both (conviction and healing), just like how he talks to the 7 churches:  "This you do well, but this I have against you."

I received this word from the Lord,  "There's mercy for all my failures."  And I thought, yes, that's true.  If that's true, then let the light shine.  I want to get all my failures into the light, because there's grace for them.  

It feels like we've been in a fog.  We started work on several things but got stuck.  We started work on ethnic harmony, we started work on gender issues, and we started work on spiritual gifts.  It's like a 3-legged stool.  We dropped the spiritual gifts leg of the stool, because we weren't ready.  Maybe if we hadn't bogged down on spiritual gifts, that could have given us some of the tools to finish the other items.  It's like a 3-legged stool, and we were missing a leg of the stool.

In one of these prayer meetings, someone called us to renounce strongholds.  There are toxic strongholds that need to die.  

Here are some of the strongholds we saw:

-knowledge.  Thinking that educational credentials equal spiritual authority.  Thinking that unless you're super educated, you don't have something to offer.  This one was humbling for me; I didn't see it.  An emphasis on theological precision and being able to footnote things with scripture references.  And often people who can't do that feel like they can't speak up.  They feel intimidated.  A pastor said to me, "I'm a music guy.  I don't have a theological degree.  But often God can give me a spiritual sense of something, and it will be accurate, but because I don't have the degree I won't say anything."  It's like we're a bobble head - a stiff neck with a big bobble head on the end.  Knowledge puffs up, but love edifies.  

-Bethlehem's reputation and spiritual pride in it.  Bethlehem is known for its pastor, not its people.

-prayerlessness

-lack of follow-through.  A spirit of starting things and not finishing things.  Starting work on the women's survey, ethnic harmony, and spiritual gifts, but not following through on these things.

So we saw these strongholds.  We must expose and renounce them; this is built by practice.  And I prayed, "Show me everything that's wrong with us, and let the light shine."  The person asked us, "what are the things that need to be exposed?"

So I invite you to renounce these strongholds.  We're going to have an open mic time for prayer, and I invite you to come to the mic and repent of things.  Let's renounce these strongholds together.

And for about an hour people came to the mic and confessed things like prayerlessness, cynicism, bitterness, self-sufficiency, feeling in control, buying into these strongholds, impatience, being easily offended, abuse of leaders, careless words, etc.  It was really powerful.

End of meeting summary.

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There are two things about this meeting that I see now but totally missed at the time.  The first is that during the meeting I had no clue of the turmoil happening behind the scenes (the reaction to the 1/31 church meeting, the dismissing of grievances that had been filed against an elder, etc.).  I had no clue.  I was sitting there weeping over one specific friendship that had been strained by Covid divisions.  But I could tell that there was a lot of emotion in the room.  I remember sitting there thinking, "I know what I'm feeling divided over (namely Covid), but I wonder what everyone else in the room is so upset and divided about."  I had no idea.

The second thing is how oblivious I was to the first stronghold Pastor Jason described.  Namely, the emphasis on knowledge and theological precision.  I had no idea that this was a problem.  I remember coming home and asking Mickey, "Do people at Bethlehem feel intimidated by this?  I've never picked up on that.  Maybe we should ask our small group if any of them feel this way."  I didn't realize it landed on people that way.  Mickey is a BCS grad, and I'd been at Bethlehem for 20 years and had just absorbed the atmosphere without thinking.  I would sometimes joke about how Bethlehem is heavy on position papers, but that was as far as it went.  That's the thing about culture; when you're immersed in it, often you don't see it.  So it's helpful to have someone point it out.

Here are some reflections on the meeting:

1. It feels like such a gracious gift that the Lord gave Bethlehem these visions.  He loves his church, and I think he wants to expose the rotten floorboards and the ropes holding the ship back.  Having these strongholds exposed is a gift and an opportunity.
2. It felt so hopeful, like God was at work bringing things into the light.
3. It was so unlike a typical Bethlehem meeting!  Prophetic visions, renouncing strongholds, open mic for prayer - these things reminded me of my year with YWAM, but it felt very strange for Bethlehem.  I came home and said, "Mickey, it was such an unusual meeting!"  
4. I thought it was so cool that the person who had the visions was a woman.  That too felt unusual for Bethlehem.  The Lord could have given these visions to a male pastor, but he chose to give them to a female congregant.  I'm thankful the elders received it.
5. It's a good reminder to pray.  I feel pretty cynical about praying for Bethlehem these days, so recalling these visions is a good impetus to try to keep praying for change.
6. Those rotten floorboards are still there.  I don't think they magically disappeared in the last 12 months.  They still need rooting out.  Ignoring them is not going to fix the problem.  
7. Likewise, with the vision of the ship, those ropes are still there.  Trying to row harder is not going to work if the ship is tied down.

In the sea of painful things that happened at Bethlehem last year, this meeting felt like a bright spot.  God loves his church, and he wants to expose these strongholds so they can be uprooted, for the good of the church.  The question is:  what will Bethlehem do with these visions?  Will the church consider them, weigh them, and act on them?  Or will the visions get forgotten in the rush to move on from this hard season?