A couple of weeks ago I attended the Prophetic & Arts conference hosted by Bethel Church in Redding, CA. The main speakers were Kris Vallotton who is one of the senior pastors at Bethel, Deborah Crone who is a senior leader at The Mission in Vacaville, CA), Theresa Dedmon who heads up the arts ministry at Bethel, Akiane (pronounced Ah-kee-ah-na) who is internationally recognized as one of the greatest child prodigies alive today and is a distinguished painter as well as a poet (she’s only 13 years old currently!), and John Paul Jackson who is a well-known teacher in prophetic ministry circles. There were also many excellent workshop lecturers too numerous to mention here.

The conference was fantastic, and I say that as objectively as possible considering Bethel Church could host an afternoon potluck and I’d probably think it was incredible. Not only was it pretty well-orgnized considering how jam-packed the facilities were, but the speakers and the subject matter being covered were all exciting, challenging, and no doubt life-changing for some.

I can’t go into all the details of what went on, so I’ll summarize the main areas in which I was impacted as follows:

• There’s no question that we live in an age of unprecedented creativity and innovation all over the world, and there are plenty of fine and talented artists to go around. However, when you take the raw innate abilities given to you by God at birth and combine that with an ongoing revelation of His glory and His creativity via the supernatural prophetic gift, it kicks up your output to a whole new level. In listening to Akiane’s story, I found it astounding that she grew in her artistic abilities simply by painting or writing down what she saw, heard, felt, smelled, tasted, and touched during her adventures with God in other dimensions. It was almost as if the revelations that God was giving her were so profound and so meaningful that they couldn’t help but come out in some creative fashion.

• An amazing example of a surprise artistic passion was the story of Deborah Crone. She spent most of her adult life completely oblivious to the fact that God had given her the ability to be a world-class painter. She basically stumbled onto her gift without trying, and in fact it took several years before she even had a conscious awareness that she was an “artist” in the professional sense of the word. I wish I could share with you her testimony, but suffice it to say, in only a few years she has gone from just being the “pastor’s wife” to being a much sought-after painter in the secular world whose original works sell for thousands. Talk about getting a reboot in life! Bottom line: God can download new creative visions right into you or awaken gifts you didn’t even know you had!

• Prophetic art can be a carrier, or portal, into the heavenly places though a supernatural transfer of God’s presence. How? Why? I honestly don’t know, but Theresa Dedmon gave some amazing testimonies of people being physically healed, set free from oppression, spiritually renewed, and all that good stuff simply by experiencing prophetic art. It seems to be the case that in whatever spiritual “atmosphere” you create your artwork, you are also saving an “imprint” of that atmosphere so that it can be later distributed to others. Pretty astounding, if you ask me.

• John Paul Jackson was a fount of wisdom at this conference, and it was wonderful to hear him speak as I hadn’t had the opportunity to do so previously. He gave a great talk about the source of our creativity and how all true creative power, beauty, and artistic passion comes only from the Holy Spirit. The world tries to imitate it and the demonic realm tries to replicate it, but you can’t grow good fruit from a bad tree. Only a good tree yields good fruit, so the closer we get to the Holy Spirit and more pure our lives become, the more our creativity turns from the ordinary to the extraordinary; the natural to the supernatural.

• The final word John Paul Jackson had for the conference was a very interesting insight. He said that movement in worship is the next big wave for the Church. There have been some sporadic attempts at incorporating dance and drama into the worship times in various circles, but John Paul is convinced that the next great move of God will be birthed out of entire congregations rising up to express their radical love and devotion to God through physical movement such as dance, dramas, rituals, and so forth. I tend to think John Paul is onto something, since the freedom of my movement has had pretty much a 1:1 correlation to the freedom of my spirit. I can still remember when it was a huge deal for me just to lift my hands up a little bit while singing. Now I occasionally jump around like a crazy person when the worship gets going, and if you knew just how little talent I’ve had for anything remotely resembling dancing, that’s a miracle in and of itself!

I wasn’t the only person from Grace attending this conference — Jennifer Sprague also came and had a delightful time. I’ll include her thoughts in a subsequent blog post, so check back soon for the stunning conclusion.

Now go grab a paintbrush or a whistle or a camera or a pair of scissors, tell God He rocks, and make some totally rad art!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 10:20 am and is filed under Happenings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.