pat loughery

I’m at the Coming Days conference in Spokane this week, celebrating the 30th anniversary of Elijah House, a prophetic and healing prayer ministry. My mom is a prayer counselor with Elijah House, and I’m also here to celebrate the work that my mom has done with this ministry. The focus of the conference is on the future of prophetic ministry.

Today’s been a fun day so far. Walking in, I ran into Dale & Denise Stark, dear friends who are healing prayer ministers and overseers in Mountain Vineyard, our sending church. (We continue to schedule time with the Starks after leaving to plant, and it’s been incredibly fruitful).

After I ran into Dale & Denise, I met Carol O’Connor who – with her husband Bill – have been pastoring what is now the North Tahoe Vineyard for quite a while now. I hear that Bill lurks out on this blog also, so – hi Bill!

Worship is led by Broken Walls, a native American/First Nations group with indigenous songwriting and instruments (drums, then acoustic guitar plus drum-based songs). It’s really good stuff.

Last night, Jim Goll spoke about the Elijah – Elisha transition, and specifically about multi-generational training, mentoring – not losing what has been given to the elders. He told the story of his daughter, a 14-year-old, who followed God’s leading to visit a specific store in the mall in her area, and she stood outside the door and prophesied over everybody who came in to the store for 30 minutes – people were healed of physical needs and heard God’s love.

The same group – three people from the youth group – went to the local new age fair, set up a booth and prayed for people. It broke outside the box of what’s allowable and what’s not (in Jim’s mind).

A theme we’re hearing so far is that the work of the prophetic ministry MUST happen outside the walls of the church gathering – that this must simply be practice for the real work of ministering in the culture.

The language of mission and contextualization isn’t being used, but certainly the themes are. It’s great to hear that also from the pentecostal/charismatic flow of the church as well. I’m enjoying being immersed in the charismatic worship and language structure again.

More quick notes here and there – Spokane is a very progressive city; the entire downtown grid is (free) wi-fi enabled, as is the convention center that we’re meeting in. Downtown Spokane has been undergoing renovation lately as well and it’s good to see the downtown beautification process working so well.