This is to introduce to you the ministry that has evolved in many different ways over a period of 46 years. I was born in 1952 into a Pentecostal family. My mom and dad received the Holy Ghost in 1948 and I have been raised in church around great miracles and power ministered through God’s Word and Spirit. After running from God for about three of my teenage years, I finally surrendered in the summer of 1972. I was 19 years old when I fully surrendered my life to Christ and allowed him to become both Lord and Saviour. I was working in Nashville, TN, and was living in the basement of my grandmother’s home. I was walking and hitchhiking to work, which was about two miles away. When I came in one evening, I picked up my grandmother’s Bible and started reading it. There, in her basement, I repented of my sins and immediately I received a great hunger from the Lord to study his Word. My life evolved over the next few years into a lifestyle of continual prayer, much fasting, and reading and studying the Word of God several hours a day.
It wasn’t long before I felt the call of evangelism burning in my soul. When doors wouldn’t open in churches, I started preaching on the streets, in jails, and prisons. In 1978 I put up my first tent in Rome, GA, and preached my first two week revival. God moved in a great way and the full-time evangelistic tent ministry was born from that meeting. I stayed in the evangelistic ministry for 22 years preaching mostly under tents and in rented auditoriums and civic buildings and also in home prayer meetings. The Lord began giving me a greater faith for miracles and healings. With that working of faith in my life, many more doors started opening and the crowds started growing: especially under the tents and in the missionary crusades.
In the year 2000, I fell off of a roof and during that time of recovery, which took several months, the Lord took me from the office of an Evangelist into the office of a Pastor. We founded a church in Alabama in August of 2000 named Word of Faith Deliverance Tabernacle, which is still going strong today. During those years the Lord gave me several dreams and visions that came to pass. Some people started saying I was a Prophet, I never acknowledged anything during those years but being a Pastor. After pastoring for 10 years the Lord started opening my understanding to things in the Word that I call mysteries. The majority of them came from Paul’s teachings and the Lord was speaking to me about many things that I had never seen or heard of before. The things I had heard taught in the past seemed to open up in a new depth and greater understanding. I was amazed at the direction that God was taking me, because it seemed to collide head-on with many things that were being taught in the church today. I would say from around 2010 until 2015 my mind stayed caught up in a working and a revealing of God’s Word and Spirit that just plain astounded me. No matter how much what I was preaching was colliding with the doctrines that were being taught, I knew what God was showing me was right. Somewhere in 2010, the Lord spoke to my mother-in-law and told her, “Tell John it’s time for him to take up his Apostleship, she was too afraid to tell me at the time! A few years later I had a dream that I was talking with a lady minister, and I was standing on a small embankment and she seemed to only reach to the height of my chest and she asked me, “What do we call you,” I told her, “Call me Apostle John.” She seemed a little dazed by that, so she said, “Step down here.” So I stepped down in front of her and she still only stood as tall as my chest. The Lord was showing me at that time my stature in the Spirit and where I would stand in ministry. During this time I encountered someone that I hadn’t seen in many years and the first thing this person said to me was, “Bro. John the Lord has been talking to you about your calling, you are called to be an Apostle.” When she spoke those words, I felt the Spirit of the Lord run through my body as a witness. In the fall of 2014 I was re-baptized in water and the brother who baptized me said, “I baptize you in the name of Jesus,” As I went down into the water and when I came up he laid his hand on me and he spoke these words to me, “An Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ.” I take the call of God very seriously and I’m not being prideful or looking for a title, and I’m not trying to make people look up to me. As I pondered all these events the Lord allowed a physical trial to come my way and from December 2014 until April 2015 I was physically unable to minister. While in prayer at the Word of Faith Deliverance Tabernacle on April 11, 2015, a man that I have known for over 20 years and have complete confidence in his walk and relationship with God, walked up on the platform where I was praying and spoke these words to me:
“I don’t speak this by the flesh, but I speak this by the Spirit. You need to know what God is doing in your life. God has raised you up to be an Apostle. You are going to go, Paul did not stay in the church, if he had stayed everybody would have looked to Paul, they couldn’t have gotten their eyes on Jesus, they would have looked to the man Paul. God has taken you off the scene because what he’s doing now no flesh can get the glory. But he has raised you up, you are going to plant churches, he’s taking you to another level. There are many instructors in Christ, but he is making you a Father, He’s making you a Father. You’ve been an Evangelist, you’ve been a Prophet, you’ve been a Pastor, he’s elevated you. He’s made you an Apostle in this hour. Be very careful the words that you plant because it will reproduce many. Know that when you speak my Words, know that when you endeavor to reveal the mysteries that I have put within you, saith God, know that it is the utterance of the Holy Ghost and not thy carnal mind mixed with my Spirit , saith God. The Word that I have put in thee is my Word, even as I put it in the Apostles, yea, I say unto you my Son, I have called thee to be an Apostle and I shall use thee to plant many churches and establish many, saith God, in my Word. In many this Word shall usher in a new order and many shall possess the Kingdom because of the Word that I have put in thee, my Son.
Guard thy heart. Walk in humility before me and man, saith God, for I shall use you to do exploits in these days. Eye hath not seen and ear hath not heard the things that I have prepared, but walk humbly before me. Turn the eyes of the people to me saith God. Be careful that you don’t cause the eyes of men to look to you and I shall use thee to bring glory and many Sons will come into glory, saith God.”
As he spoke I felt the fire of God run across the platform. He stood about 10 feet from me and never laid his hands on me. This word sank deep into my heart and spirit and wrought a work in me that from that time forward has changed my life. It was still several months before I would take the boldness and step forth and start declaring God’s mysteries and truths that he has placed in me; but the time has come for that to change.
I will now declare these truths and reveal these mysteries and declare and walk in the calling of an Apostle
Whereunto I am appointed a preacher, and an Apostle, and a teacher of the Gentiles. 2 Tim. 1:11.
