While you can trace the birth of the School of Prophecy back to my original discovery of the gift of prophecy, its true source is undoubtedly in my journey with Graham Cooke and the many years I worked with him during his time in Community Church, Southampton. I was fortunate enough to grow up, develop and mature in a network-based, community orientated and lively charismatic church. My church provided me with considerable exposure to the operation of prophecy in both public and personal settings, as well as plenty of opportunities to learn and practise the gift of prophecy myself. It laid a solid foundation for Graham to build on.
In 2006, Julie and I felt God calling me to leave my career employment as a Group Financial Director, and I became an itinerant prophetic minister, i.e. self-employed church consultant. Leaving full-time employment gave me the time and space to start turning my dreams of a formal training programme for the prophetic into a deliverable action plan. I had by then been writing and rewriting my material for some time and had consequently developed a considerable library from our schools and my church teaching. In 2008 I started working intentionally on developing a teaching curricula based on my experience and practise. The level one curriculum was already fairly clear in my mind, and the level two curriculum started to take shape.
Many of the core subjects of level one, particularly those associated with the historical confusion about the gift, were all easy to elaborate, explore and extend in level two. Next, my experience in prophetic mentoring had reinforced my understanding and appreciation of the potential character ceiling for those in ministry. The discovery of the StrengthsFinder personality profiling model, and my considerable familiarity with it, laid the foundations for the level two’s approach to dealing with this important issue. Finally, an extremely intense and challenging two-year period gave me considerable experience of religious and controlling spirits, and uncomfortable contact with some false prophets.
Publishing the Growing in Prophetic Ministry level two course manual in 2021 obviously raised the question of whether there was a level three. I felt there was, but I hit another emotional healing barrier similar to when I started writing the level one teaching manual. It would inevitably be something like ‘How to be a Prophet’, but as I did not consider myself one at the time, I was not willing to write it. The Holy Spirit broke the stalemate one day when He asked me if I would be willing to write Engaging Your Prophetic Calling. This new title brought me tremendous peace, so I set about developing and running the course for a couple of years to fine-tune the material, ready for me to write the teaching manual.
I was initially unsure about the first topic in the level three course, as these had turned out to be very significant in the first two courses. Fortunately, I was led to the critical area of identity, which quickly highlighted God’s discipline and godly assertiveness as subjects. The icing on the cake was deciding to include Emotional Intelligence in the topic as this led me to a book similar to Strengthsfinders in level two, which even included an online assessment. My consultancy role in church drew heavily on my understanding of prophetic culture, so the environment, mentoring, and contributing subjects followed quickly. The rest of the level three curriculum seemed to develop naturally from there, and I soon had all twelve subjects.
In Spring 2025 the level three course manual was published, which completed the training resources for all three school courses.