![]() “Thanks,” he says, sheepishly, and kneels again in front of her, fingers gently encircling her wrist. “You can do me too,” she says, and the kid lights up. I’m racking my brain for an excuse not to when the girl next to me, a Bethel student who is coincidentally wearing a brace on her wrist, offers her arm up to him. He begins to softly intone a prayer: Lord, please bring healing to her knee. Still smiling, he kneels in front of me and lays his hands on my knee, fingers on the gap in my brace where my kneecap is visible. “Sure,” I say, because there’s not really another answer in this kind of situation. He’s looking, pointedly, at my right knee, which is at the moment bound in a thick and very noticeable black brace. “Would you mind if I prayed for healing?” “Excuse me,” he says, and tells me his name. ![]() I’m sitting on the edge of the room, notebook in my lap, when a thin, sandy-haired young man comes up to me with a wide smile. ![]() They have already begun, tentatively, to learn Bethel’s other trade: faith healing. So far, Bethel’s first-years have been learning the stories of their predecessors, ancient Old Testament prophets like Daniel and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, in preparation for today - the day they begin to become prophets themselves. To Bethel students, learning, seeing, and performing these “signs and wonders” - be it prophesying about things to come or healing the incurable - aren’t just quirks or side projects of Christianity. In the modern day, prophets and healers don’t just walk among us, they are us. The basic theological premise of the School of Supernatural Ministry is this: that the miracles of biblical times - the parted seas and burning bushes and water into wine - did not end in biblical times, and the miracle workers did not die out with Jesus’s earliest disciples. (“Name the five things that distinguish a false prophet from a true prophet.” “What is the difference between a vision and a trance?”) The students are waiting for today’s lecturer, Kris Vallotton, one of the school’s founders and a prophet so prolific he literally wrote the book on it - Basic Training for the Prophetic Ministry, a combined textbook and workbook used by Bethel students to learn how to hear, and speak, God’s words. It’s a strange medley for a place like Redding, an economically depressed rural outpost about 200 miles north of San Francisco, in the heart of Northern California’s Trump country. There are so many languages spoken here it’s hard to keep track: English of all flavors, spoken with Australian and British and South African accents Chinese Korean Portuguese. The roomful of some 1,200 students hums with expectant energy: People talk in clusters, clutching their books to their chests and stealing eager glances at the stage. The auditorium of the civic center in Redding, California, where first-year students have class, is so full of eager, neatly dressed young people that it’s initially impossible to find a seat.
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