So, the day after I was fired, we had our weekly night watch community meeting. At the end of the meeting, Stuart gave an exhortation to the night watch staff. He called us to a season of thankfulness, hilarious giving, and speaking well of one another.
The exhortation could not have had better timing.
Well, that was a new experience…
For the first time in my life, I have officially been fired. Yes… I shall explain.
We’ve gone public with the new blog site! This actually happened at the end of December. I just keep forgetting to mention it here. Most of my better blogging seems to end up on that site… so check it out.
The new site is www.onethingblog.com. My posts are the ones written by “Christine” that have my picture plastered all over them. (Blasted site layout!) It’s pretty easy to figure out. 
As I mentioned previously, there are some serious implications to the coming changes with God TV.
Around the time IHOP started up 7 years ago, the ministry and its leaders were hit with a lot of accusations. You can easily find numerous websites warning of Mike Bickle as a dangerous heretic with his little IHOP cult. With increased publicity (as TV is sure to bring), there will also come increased criticism. And our community is going to be evaluated (integrity, living the sermon on the mount, identification with the stereotypical western church, etc.) by Christians across the globe. There’s just a lot that is really sobering about being in the public eye.
There are also a lot of financial consequences. God TV is convinced that they can bring our monthly subscriptions to the 24/7 live webstream up to 1 million. At $10/month, 1 million subscriptions means $10 million coming into the IHOP missions base. Mike is excited about what this means in enabling thousands of intercessory missionaries to do this full-time. But there are so many things that come along with that.
There’s also the factor of the thousands of people this could feasibly draw to IHOP. I love the idea of lives being impacted and more people finding their place in the prayer movement. But this is also going to attract a lot of weird people. And even money is going to be a drawing factor for some. As Mike pointed out, we know that the people who are here now came and gave their lives to do this knowing that they would get nothing in return (thus having to raise our own financial support).
I have a hard time staying focused and being faithful when we have a crowded prayer room for Friday Night Burn. What’s going to happen when IHOP goes to 5000 full-time staff and there is no such thing as having my own row in the prayer room anymore? Eeek! That’s part of why I want to continue enjoying the empty morning times in the prayer room while I can. It won’t always be there. And talk about losing that place of hiddenness that we so enjoy in the prayer room at times. When we are being broadcast all over the world, we aren’t exactly so hidden anymore. (Bob Sorge has just given a bunch of copies of his book, Dealing with the Rejection and Praise of Man, to the IHOP worship teams. And it has been recommended that we read his Envy as well.)
I am so thankful that we are entering into this 90 days of consecration as a night watch community before all of this is fully set into motion. It is so important that we address our weaknesses now and establish a culture in the night watch that allows us to fully give ourselves to what we have all moved here to do. Before the added publicity comes and the people start flooding in.
Essentially, these changes put a big target on us, both spiritually and in the natural. I’m not even going to get into this one… but it does.
In our last meeting about this, we spent long periods of time just sitting there and crying together. It is sobering… the stewardship that God has given to a weak group of people like us… and the changes that are likely to quickly come upon us.
In the coming months, things will be set into motion that will drastically change life at IHOP. Things that make the prophesies of 500 to 5000 overnight and the salvation of 1 billion people much more tangible. And the shifts that are likely to follow make me more grateful than ever for the time of consecration that we are entering into as a Night Watch community.
God has begun to knit us together with Rory and Wendy Alec, founders of God TV. In fulfillment of what they believe to be their God-given mandate to support and spread the prayer movement across the globe, they have approached us with a very aggressive proposal. They are pouring their resources into getting IHOP’s message and mandate of night and day prayer to the nations.
Among many other things, they intend to broadcast the live prayer room between the hours of 2 and 6am in each of the 200 nations and territories where they have an audience. Because of the differences in time zones, this means that we will have camera operators in the prayer room around the clock (and SOMEWHERE in the world, the prayer room will be broadcast live at every hour of the day). God TV is set to move their cameras in on April 1st.
Another part of their vision involves times of global crisis. When things are happening in the world, they want people to turn to God TV instead of CNN. When crisis hits the nations, their plan is to “pull the lever” on all programming and go to live feed from the prayer room on each of their stations, 24/7. From our little prayer room, we would literally be leading the nations in corporate intercession.
The presence of their cameras will also lead to some drastic improvements in our $10/month internet broadcast of the live prayer room. And that is just a small portion of the many things they intend to do. They plan to create a program using recordings from our Encountering God Services and conferences. They also have plans involving our Forerunner School of Ministry (which will most likely lead to its full accreditation in the near future).
The implications of these changes are huge.
So much change is headed our way that I am not going to give my reaction/response to these events or discuss the implications in this blog. So… we’ll leave it at that for now.
