I’m preparing a few talks at the moment on deliverance ministry, after some kind invitations to share on the subject at home and overseas. So in the next few posts I am going to review (with a bit of help from ChtGPT) some books touching on deliverance ministry and freedom ministries – where the freedom includes being free from enemy activity. 

My interest in this dates back to reading ‘Devil on the Run‘ by Nicky Cruz and other missionary stories like ‘Chasing the Dragon‘ by Jackie Pullinger when I was a teenager. Both are compelling narratives of the power of Christ conquering the power of the occult and addictions. 

When I got to Church of England vicar college I have memories of some training on this. As far as I remember there were two key take homes: a) the bumps in the night are probably the radiators that need bleeding, and b) better call in an expert (with a radiator key) to fix it. This may be an unfair recollection, and it’s possible to find fuller diocesan training online e.g this from Chelmsford. But as a young priest I found that people on the ground sensed a real need for help that couldn’t be explained simply by bad indoor heating appliances. One of the first bits of ministry I was asked for was to break a curse put on an Asian man from a Sikh background, who believed he had been cursed after visiting a witchdoctor in East Africa. Such strange requests turned out to be relatively common over the years. When out of my depth I would inevitably draw upon either my spiritual director who trained the diocesan deliverance team or one of the many local charismatic ministers who had more experience than me. 

My worldview had been shaped by i) missionary stories including Chasing the Dragon and Devil on the Run and , ii) Neil T Anderson’s writings on Victory over Darkness (that became the Freedom in Christ course), iii) my time in New Frontiers International (newfrontiers) as a student and refined through iv) an intensive Pastoral Prayer Ministry course through Word for Life Trust led by an accredited by the Association of Christian Counsellors and v) some Christian fiction as well – ranging from allegories like Bunyan’s Pigrim’s Progress and Joyner’s The Final Quest to pure fiction like Perretti’s This Present Darkness. I was aware that even the Alpha course offered a session on how to be free from evil, that some Bishops had written on the subject (eg David Pytches and Graham Dow) and that I had personally benefited from prayer ministry where my spiritual director had rebuked and helped me renounce enemy activity over my life. Indeed I had experienced immediate and fundamental relief accompanying the sort of glorious, liberating repentance that is hard to describe until you’ve experienced it. The sort that leaves you realising that the Christian practice of confession is not just good for the soul, but amazing for the soul. That repentance is a complete gift from our Father in heaven who loves us to run home to him, and that it disentangles us from sin, the world and the devil. 

As a pioneer minister I was asked to help train a diocesan deliverance team who had possibly strayed into hyper-spirituality. As I became more aware of the Anglican system in place I found solace in working with teams like the one I had been asked to train. When asked to visit a ‘haunted house’ as a vicar  I went with a diocesan deliverance officer. I watched my friend (a trained deliverance officer) not just sort out the presenting issue but also lead the couple in the house to faith, equipping and enabling them to pray for and bless their own house through a well developed liturgy she got them to join in with. We got to see them baptised and confirmed a few months later.

When I started at SOMA (Sharing of Ministries Abroad) UK, in 2022, the training intensified. I had been reminded of John Woolmer’s book ‘The Devil Goes Missing‘ lamenting a loss of understanding of the devil in current Anglican missiology and soteriology. He illustrates his book with tales from East Africa where he encountered enemy action in a variety of tangible ways. So I was expecting to discover and grow more in this ministry while there.

In fact the SOMA training ground was as much the UK as it was Africa, India and the Middle-East. As I developed more experience I found that opportunities to grow just kept coming. There was an English church that asked me to join in prayers for a woman who had come to a wonderful saving faith but still had night terrors from an early childhood trauma. A church that was gripped by masonic and other spirits that made it almost impossible to minister in before a SOMA team working with the incumbent and bishop cleared the building out spiritually. An international team bringing deliverance training in Rwanda where three of the westerners on the team were individually delivered of forces that had been binding them that they were each previously unaware of. I was so struck that these very, very, very good team members all needed some deliverance even when they were ready and able to go on mission – travelling across continents from Western nations to Africa.

I watched more experienced SOMA team members, like my National Director friends from Ireland and New Zealand bring their honed ministry to the task. In particular I got to spend a lot of time with my Irish colleague Henry Blair and saw how the Lord had gifted him in discernment of spirits and exorcism. I also got to see the benefits of submitting this ministry to an appropriately aware and spiritually discerning and authoritative bishop. Two English and one Irish bishop have been particularly significant for me in this, and through them I’ve learnt how buildings, believers and even bishops can get spiritually infected by the enemy if they make a ‘topos’ [room] for him in our lives or structures.

In the midst of this learning I was kindly proposed by my Area Bishop and commissioned by my Diocesan Bishop to be a Deliverance Officer and had the benefit of experiencing the national Church of England training first hand. It emphasises that ‘Deliverance ministry is a specialist ministry within the Church of England and constitutes one aspect of the Church of England’s commitment to bringing wholeness, peace and healing to all who experience distress, whether in body, mind or spirit. As such, deliverance ministry is pastoral, missiological and embedded in wider healing ministry.’ 

As might be expected the deliverance ministry of the established church attracts the ire of campaign groups like the National Secular Society and so there is a big incentive to keep it under the radar. The NSS see deliverance ministry as legitimising abuse, and in a world where safeguarding failures need to be openly acknowledged and repented of, it is tempting to hide the deliverance light under the proverbial bushel. However, most of what we are learning about safeguarding is that more transparency, not less, is good; and much of what we are learning about culture is that there is much to be gained in Christians preaching the ‘weird stuff’.

The training is delivered by an academic psychologist and church official, and begins very soberly with a horror story of gross malpractice. It was the sort of horror story that can explain why an entire denomination has been so cautious about doing any deliverance ministry for 40 years despite it being one of Jesus’ most reported activities. Hence the insurance policies, institutional needs, communications officers fears and reasonable safeguarding concerns played a key part in this training. A strength was the impressive theological and psychological reflection on where mental health issues crossover with what might seem to be a need for deliverance ministry, but isn’t.

As you might expect it was training grounded in realism and rationalism, with a nod to the inexplicable. Yet elsewhere in the Church there is a significant steer that as we leave modernism and christendom in the far distance of our rearview mirror, we are entering into an era that is neo-pagan rather than simply post-Christian. So argues Bishop Graham Tomlin, and if he is right it would come as no surprise if, in a neo-pagan era, the spiritual forces of paganism become more obvious. Almost all the old stories of the conversion of the British Isles describe great power encounters, often with Bishops and Abbots leading the way in driving out evil spirits and snakes from the land. At the same time that there are signs reported by the Bible Society of a hunger in a rising generation for spirituality generally ‘the quiet revival’, Alpha Leadership Conference speaker Rachel Gardner also pointed to significant increases in interest in witchcraft and the occult. Will we need to (re)learn the deliverance practices that great saints like Augustine, Cuthbert, Patrick or Abbess Aebbe are reported to have utilised the last time paganism was so dominant in these isles?

Of course there has been a hundred years or more of Pentecostal deliverance ministry in the UK on top of practices rooted in longer established denominations. A student at London School of Theology recently wrote an excellent comparison of deliverance ministry practice in the Pentecostal church culture she grew up in and the Roman Catholic Church. As an Anglican I read it thinking what she is reaching for is an Anglican middle way – one that is comfortable with equipping God’s people to minister in the power of the Holy Spirit, move in spiritual gifts and understand their own authority in Christ, but also one that knows the benefits of delegated authority, sacramental and liturgical rites (including confession, holy water, baptism and the eucharist).

But rather than providing that effective middle way ‘via media,’ at the moment as Anglicans we are in danger of either fear based withholding of ministry (by bishops/safeguarding officers) or a free for all, where churches and ministers are unaware of, or operate outside of the radar of, formal authority. 

Hence it is encouraging that there is a new national bishop for deliverance in place who has substantial personal experience in the ministry both in the UK and abroad and in leading a local church. The stories he and his team can tell are extraordinary. So it will be interesting to see if under his leadership the Church of England can find a confident while still rightly cautious ‘via media’ in deliverance ministry where that equipping and delegation combine to set all God’s people free in a nation that sorely needs it.