When you reinvent the wheel, you break a lot of wagons...
I always picture a wagon wheel when someone says “Let’s not re-invent the wheel!”
I picture a rickety ancient wooden cart. But what if we DID want to re-invent a wheel? I imagine this scene in the middle ages…a bunch of farmers standing around various carts…taking them apart…probably completely destroying most of them as they try to make something that worked perfectly fine work even better…
Thats kind of what IHOP did. They re-invented the wheel.
What would make up the wheel of your average church with your average twenty-something christian? What values, goals, and priorities would represent its spokes? (What a great group discussion question- seriously please send me your answer..)
here’s mine:
I’m sure there’s more but that’s what made up most of my church life prior to IHOP. Here’s what made up IHOP’s wheel…as I experienced daily life there…
You might notice the spokes of outreach, discipleship and community have been removed. The quickest way to my point would be ….ihop added what felt like 100 other spokes: “Here this will help you..eat nothing 2 days a week. Here try this! Pray in tongues for up to an hour a day if you can- the longer the better. We’re all about a “fasted lifestyle” here (which included living simply and often just…poor) The 50hr/week schedule most staff and students kept included all of the above plus more.
Yeah that wheel broke. It broke the lives of many people, causing their carts to tumble and crash into 1000 pieces.
How can we appropriately acknowledge when our experiments…don’t work? When they cause damage and harm in people’s lives…
Maybe a rickety old crashing cart brings to mind a much more helpful metaphor…and a biblical one…
“My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Many would talk about how the “Ihop manate”- this ‘calling’ and load you heap upon young people…doesn’t feel light…(it feels f*cking heavy…crushing would be more accurate..)
How many people need to come forward and tell you this..before you really listen?
I was told repeatedly a life in the prayer room (as an “intercessory missionary”) doesn’t lead to burnout. That hours upon hours spent in meditative prayer would help me grow in my love for God and enliven me to keep going.
Leadership responses to criticism were always at the ready:
Well this just isn’t for you..
well this is what the Lord has called us to….
Not everyone has this calling…
Prayer Room ministry isn’t for everyone…
That would be fine to say…if you didn’t also say every day: “this is a high calling”. If the second class in your core* set of teachings wasn’t named “The eternal glory of an intercessor?”
Who doesn’t want eternal glory?
When things at IHOP get hard and stop making sense, a young person isn’t going to shurg, say “ok” and go enroll in tech school. They’re gonna go harder, try harder…prove this is their calling too.
Thats how human beings work. Especially young ones. We have an undeniable need to prove ourselves. When leaders can’t acknowledge they have crashed someone’s cart, er…caused a lot of pain in the lives of young people trying to live up to impossible expectations…we’re in serious danger indeed.
Jesus had words for people like that in Matthew 18:6
“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
Strange, the first picture that came up in my google search of that phrase “don’t reinvent the wheel” was a cylinder rock with a hole in it…looks an awful lot like a milestone…
I can hear the objections now…(I can always hear their objections in my head..) oh but these aren’t “little ones!” These are young adults!
(Did I mention IHOP has a massive children’s ministry? With well-advertised summer camps called “signs & wonders” camp????)
IHOP leadership is very ignorant of a concept now coming to light in popular culture called power dynamics. Expecting an 18yo to recognize when a ministry is overly demanding, unhealthy and set appropriate boundaries is completely unrealistic.
I used to think I was ok with IHOP’s line of thinking and recruiting as long as it was targeted at 40+ somethings….real adults who can make more informed decisions….then I started my deep dive into spiritual abuse….
IHOP is attractive because it has re-invented the wheel…a person over 40 may be just as attracted to the vision and values as I was at 22, when I had already participated in a lot of ministry and I was really wanting and needing something different.
Unfortunately, after 22 years of Night & Day worship and prayer…we just might have the evidence ihop’s shiny new wheel breaks more carts than it doesn’t.
Do we really have to find and prove some majority are wounded? Aren’t hundreds of busted broken carts PEOPLE enough to show a serious problem?
Time will tell…
**E12: the name of a study group held regularly, led by just about anyone..that was primarily for studying Mike Bickle’s teachings around Revelation and the end times. I think the E stood for end times and the groups met at least 12 times? I never joined one so I’m not sure..
**Core: what is now referred to as “ihop foundations” used to be called core: a series of 3 week-long classes (length of time varied by internship) taught by ihop leadership including Excellencies of Christ with Allen Hood, Eternal Glory of an intercessor with Corey Russel, Omega and other classes about Revelation and end times theology.