The prophetic community has received a great deal of criticism in the past year—from both inside and outside the church. Dr. Joseph Mattera says although some of that is unwarranted, he also believes the church has a responsibility to monitor the prophetic.
“With the prophetic as anything else, it’s so powerful it could either be a great blessing or a curse,” he tells Dr. Steve Greene on a recent episode of the Greenelines podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network. “And if you went to the Indianapolis 500 race, you would not want to sit close to the cars that are going up to 120 miles an hour unless there were sufficient guardrails. And that’s what we need with the prophetic.”
Earlier this year, Mattera and Dr. Michael Brown put together a Prophetic Standards Statement, available at propheticstandards.com, which has now been signed by almost 900 faith leaders, including denominational leaders, theologians, pastors, prophets, apostles and others. Mattera describes the statement as “basically protocols—guidelines and guardrails so the prophetic community can flourish, so the gift of prophecy can flourish. It by no means tries to quench the Spirit.”
Although the statement did not specifically address politics, Mattera says he does so in his new book, The Purpose, Power and Process of Prophetic Ministry. “The prophets didn’t have 20/20 vision, of course, in the year 2020,” he says. “So there are several reasons; I don’t claim to be the expert on all of them. But one is, the Bible says, ‘We prophesy in part; we know in part,’ meaning, ‘We prophesied according to what we know, or our paradigm’—and some of it might have been motivated more by the political as their desires for a certain person to be president, and other emotions could override and make them think God was speaking.
“It could also be groupthink,” Mattera says. “They hear one prominent prophet say it, then they copy it.”
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