There is nothing rooty tooty or fresh and fruity about this IHOP. Though apparently you will find plenty of nuts.

"Prophet" Mike Bickle

I have been hearing references to this International House of Prayer (IHOP) for some time now, but I have not really spent any time reading about it because I figured these Evangelical types are pretty much throwing themselves against the rubber walls of the same metaphorical looney bin.

I may have to rethink that.

Talking Points Memo recently did a piece on the church that is, in a word, "chilling."

Here is just an excerpt: 

Through IHOP and its associated church, Forerunner Christian Fellowship, Bickle claims to be cultivating an elite class of “forerunners,” or people who “represent God and his interests,” and who “prepare the people to respond rightly to Jesus by making known God's plans so the people can make sense of what will happen before it actually happens.” His vision of the end-times, which is central to his teaching, maintains that these “redeemed” people will be raptured just as Jesus begins his “royal procession” into Jerusalem. Bickle believes they will return to earth as “resurrected saints” who will “possess supernatural abilities.” When Jesus rules as “King over all dominions and spheres of society,” these resurrected saints will rule with him, “as kings and priests.”

Essentially Bickle sells a certain spiritual snake oil that suggests that Jesus needs his followers to prepare the planet for His return, and that by doing that they will in turn be granted super powers.

You know, because there is nothing crazy about that.

Rolling Stone also wrote about the church earlier this year while covering the death of a young woman at the hands of one of the church's "apostles:"

This is IHOP's most alluring tenet: God needs IHOPers to effect the Tribulation and bring Christ back to Earth. "The church causes the Great Tribulation," Bickle has preached. Before founding IHOP, he argued that "God intends us to be like gods. God has conceived in his heart of a plan to make a race of men that would live like gods on Earth." Bickle sometimes affects to know God as he would a peer. "I heard what I call the internal audible voice of the Lord," he has said. He claims that he visited heaven one night at 2:16 a.m., and the Lord charged him with preparing for an End Times ministry and seated him in a golden chariot that lifted off into the empyrean. At IHOP, where prophetic experiences are endemic, the mortal and divine commingle liberally. 

The vanguard of God's End Times army, according to Bickle, will be made up of young people, or "forerunners," seers specially attuned to the will of the Lord, "the best of all the generations that have ever been seen on the face of the Earth." For seven years of Tribulation, they will battle the Antichrist. When Christ returns, he will slaughter by sword in a single day the unsaved, and his warriors will rule heaven and Earth forevermore. 

Let's get this straight. Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, is coming back to hack all of the non-believers into pieces?

Boy that sure doesn't sound good for my people now does it? Or Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Episcopalians, Catholics, Methodists, or pretty much anybody not attending this church.

Damn, that is a lot of slaying for one day. I wonder if his arm would get tired?

Speaking of getting tired check out how attending the church seems to have affected this young intern.

Apparently this young woman is undergoing some supernaturally induced Braxton Hick contractions, or else multiple orgasms, I can't tell which. And clearly this is not considered in any way odd, or troubling to the congregants in attendance.

There are a lot of Evangelical and Charismatic churches out there, but it seems to me that this one is promoting a special kind of crazy.

It always amazes me that this kind of thing is still happening in the most powerful nation on earth in 2014.  Actually I am both amazed, and deeply deeply troubled.