01   Why Free

I Refuse to Lock This Behind a Paywall

Why free? Because, frankly, far too many people lack the spiritual wisdom to truly value the anointing. Yet seeing you set free and walking in your destiny is simply too vital for me to lock this behind a paywall. So we take the financial hit.

Scripture says that children shouldn’t have to lay up for the parents, but the parents for the children.

God will take care of me. He will honor me for the labor and the effort, one way or the other. Do I wish you could receive the profound blessing and breakthrough that comes with sowing into what feeds you? Absolutely, I do. But I refuse to take offense if you only value what costs you nothing.

Honest enough for you?

Please, don’t get offended. It doesn’t offend me, because I make a deliberate choice every single day to love God and love people. I know good and well that I cannot inherit what God has prepared for my life if I choose to stumble around in the trap of offense.

02   The Climate

Things Have Already Changed

One thing you need to know about me: if I open up and let the unvarnished flow of discernment and truth out of my spirit, it can be downright off-putting to modern church culture. I grew up behind the closed curtains of pastoral culture—a realm most believers will NEVER see. It was scandalous, exhausting, heartbreaking, and endearing all at the same time.

What about today? I can’t stop thinking about this issue of spiritual fatherhood. In case you haven’t realized it, our current spiritual-cultural climate is not going to stay the same. Things are shifting fast. Truth be told, they’ve already changed—most people just haven’t had the spiritual eyes to notice.

If you look back, coming out of the turbulent counter-culture of the ’60s and ’70s, the church exploded in the ’80s with massive megachurches, unprecedented evangelistic breakthroughs, and an apostolic momentum that still influences us right now. Another season like that is upon us. In fact, it is already standing at the door.

It is high time for you to quit the endless navel-gazing, step out of the victim mentality and cultural self-love, stand up on your feet, dust yourself off, and charge the gates of hell with a water pistol if that’s all you’ve got in your hand! You think stepping into that kind of calling is going to be risky and gut-wrenching? You better believe it is. And not everyone currently walking with you is going to make the journey. Settle that in your spirit right now. There is simply no other way.

03   Thanksgiving

The Call the Day Before Thanksgiving

Now, what about spiritual fatherhood? Over the decades, I’ve been regarded as a spiritual father to a few people. Honestly, when that title gets casually tossed in my direction nowadays, I can hardly keep from rolling my eyes. I’ve walked through the fire on this, and if sharing the scar tissue can help you avoid the ditch, I’m going to do it.

Several years ago, the day before Thanksgiving, I got an urgent call from the East Coast. It was a young guy who had relocated to the United States to plant a church, and instead, he had totally face-planted in failure. (He was a planter, all right—not of a church, but of his own face right into the dirt! Ouch. Though thank God, things did improve for him over time.)

This brother possessed a VERY strong, aggressive personality. He had missed a scheduled appointment with me a day or two prior, but he called out of the blue anyway and demanded to speak with me—even though my office initially declined. Once he got me on the phone, he immediately launched into a massive laundry list of his problems, frustrations, and grievances. He had poured tens of thousands of dollars into trying to establish a gospel presence in this southern city, and he had met with absolute, deafening crickets.

Finally, having heard enough, I cut in:

Stop. I don’t need to hear another word of that.

Then I proceeded to prophesy his socks clean off.

I tend to do that when I’m irritated, feeling put-upon, dealing with an inconvenient hour, and running into someone who lacks the basic grace to exercise patience. My attitude was: Okay, buddy, you deliberately interrupted my holiday weekend with my family—so now you’re getting the FULL LOAD. (Who says we can’t have a little fun in ministry, right?)

04   Boundaries

Don’t Get Any Crazy Ideas

Now, don’t get any crazy ideas reading this! Over the years, I’ve had way too many folks do internet research on my home address and show up on my front doorstep unannounced. Then we get the bizarre calls coming into the ministry office:

Tell Prophet Russ that God told me I’m his next wife, and I’m currently driving across state lines right now so we can get married!

Lord, have mercy. Cancel all my appointments; I’m leaving town!

Or how about the attractive woman at a conference, just a few months after my late spouse’s untimely passing, this person was married to an elderly gentleman on an oxygen tank who looked like he was five minutes into a major cardiac event, actively stalking me down the hallways and out into the parking lot just to force a “sisterly hug” on me so close that it I could have given her a clinical exam? Lord, deliver us. Her husband was on his way out of this life, she had set her sights dead on me, and she definitely knew how to present herself. The most insidious, demonic part of it? Physically, she was the spitting image of my late wife. The enemy never plays fair.

What did I do? By God’s grace, I have always kept a circle of deeply trusted people around me who fiercely guard my integrity and watch my blind spots. They don’t get every single thing right, but they know exactly what to do when a woman corners me at an altar call trying to pull me into a “holy hug” so suffocatingly tight I could perform an unsolicited clinical exam.

Ladies! Come on now. Think! Use your influence for righteousness, and show some honor and respect for the men of God in your life—even when they are struggling to maintain boundaries for themselves. You think I’m exaggerating? Go ask my staff.

05   The Exit Ramp

A Thousand Takers, Almost No Follow-Through

To make a long story short with this young minister: after that prophetic encounter, he instantly declared that I was his “spiritual father.” (Yeah, right. My immediate internal reaction was, Oh God, here we go again. A thousand eager takers, but practically nobody willing to actually follow through.)

Honestly, my heart sank into my boots.

Experience has taught me that whenever someone flippantly makes that declaration, they almost invariably get their feathers ruffled within a matter of weeks, take offense at something minor, and bolt straight for the exit ramp.

Look: don’t tell me I’m your spiritual father and then throw a tantrum the moment I act like one!

This young man carried an anointing that was genuinely off the charts. By every metric of gifting, he should have been pastoring an arena-sized congregation, yet there he was, grinding gears and struggling to maintain a handful of frustrated people. Why? There were numerous operational reasons, but the core issue was fatal: he talked endlessly about honor, he preached loud sermons about respecting the anointing, but the very second his personal ego was brushed against, he kicked us straight to the curb without blinking.

I wasn’t shocked—I’ve seen the movie before. But Kitty was deeply hurt. She had taken that young man, his wife, and his children into her heart as our very own family. She loved them fiercely. And that final, arrogant, venomous phone call—where he essentially decided he was going to “put the prophet in his place”—completely devastated her.

I’ll be honest with you: I’ve had a tough time shaking off the memory of that. I grew up in the trenches of ministry; I’ve lived this life from day one. I can take the hits, the slander, and the scars. If you imagine you’re going to manipulate, intimidate, or spiritually assault me, you had better eat a double bowl of Wheaties—because I’ve gone toe-to-toe with the fiercest personalities in the church world and walked out the other side intact.

The tragedy isn’t what he did to me or Kitty. The tragedy is what he did to himself. For all his personality flaws and stubbornness, all that young brother truly needs is someone who loves him enough to tell him the absolute truth, see Christ’s identity buried beneath the mess, and challenge him to lay down his defensive pride and religious contamination. If he could handle that and live up to the maturity and anointing he espouses and assigns to himself in his rhetoric, he would explode into his prophetic destiny. Instead, he remains an apostle in a sandbox—a tempest in a teacup, generating tons of noise and kicking up dirt, but falling miles short of what God put inside him.

06   Walter Waller

What a Real Spiritual Father Looks Like

As for my own journey? My primary mentor and true father in the faith was Walter Waller. Walter was actually a few years younger than me in age, but he carried an extraordinary, heavyweight mantle of wisdom drawn from an inexhaustible well of the Father’s heart.

Walking with us cost Walter. It cost him dearly. Back in those days, we were considered total outcasts in many circles (truth be told, some folks still view us as pariahs—we’ve just learned to wear rhino skin over our tender hearts). Walter defended us when the arrows were flying. He stood resolutely in the line of fire. He withstood relentless pressure from denominational leaders and colleagues demanding that he throw us out and cut us off, and he refused to budge an inch. That, my friends, is what a real spiritual father looks like.

07   The Course

Why I’m Laying This Out

Why am I baring my soul and laying all of this out before you?

Because I took these hard-won battle scars, combined them with sound biblical exegesis, and built the free course: “Finding Your Spiritual Father.”

This course tracks the dynamic of spiritual fatherhood from Genesis through the Epistles, and evaluates the real-world history of the “Fathering Movement” as it evolved out of the Charismatic renewal of the 1960s straight into our modern era.

• I don’t want you getting shredded by spiritual abusers.
• I don’t want you wandering into ditch after ditch because you followed a counterfeit.
• I don’t want your character to stay locked in arrested development—because genuine spiritual fathers exist to provide the very iron-sharpening-iron discipleship that cures that deficit.

And above all else: I refuse to sit by and watch your God-given destiny end in a spiritual abortion.

Walter Waller didn’t invent my destiny, but back in August of 2008, he aimed a Holy Ghost howitzer directly at my spirit and pulled the trigger. Since that pivotal alignment, I have walked in realms of favor, revelation, and supernatural reality that most believers only ever daydream about. I am nothing special in myself—not at all. But God honors the biblical protocol of generational alignment.

Enroll in the course. What do you have to lose? It doesn’t cost anything. That usually gets past most people’s religious “bone.” A couple of hours of your time? I have made this material completely accessible for zero cost because my heart breaks for the men and women I see every week who carry world-changing potential, but will end their lives empty because they refuse to shift their thinking and submit their gift to a process.

Of course, in our microwave generation, everybody wants an automated landing page, a snappy five-minute video hack, and instant apostolic elevation.

It does NOT work that way.

08   Eighteen Hours

Eighteen Hours, One Way

Years ago, Kitty and I used to pack our car once every single year and drive 18 hours ONE WAY just to sit in Florida with another heavyweight mentor of ours, Bill Lackie of Christian International. Once a year, Bill would grant us an hour—maybe two—to sit quietly in his office and talk through life, alignment, and warfare. Think about it. Eighteen hours, one way. And we didn’t go empty-handed. Hmm. Did I say that out loud? We went with a sacrificial offering that took courage and bravery to lay at Bill’s feet. God saw it. We experienced the breakthrough because we made it clear we wanted all God had for us, and it didn’t have to come out of a spiritual gumball machine with a secret decoder ring!

Curiously enough, across all those hundreds of miles and hours of counsel, he never once dropped his voice into a kingly tone and said, “Thus saith the Lord God of Hosts…”

By the third year of making that grueling 36-hour round trip, I looked at him and asked, “Bill, are you ever going to actually prophesy over us?”

He looked right back at me and snapped:

Russ, what on earth do you think I’ve been doing with you for the past three years?!

I didn’t argue. I didn’t get offended. I packed my bags, went home, and ACTED—I mean aggressively implemented and acted upon—every drop of counsel he poured into us.

That is where most people fail. The vast majority of believers collect prophetic words like baseball cards, never act on the wisdom given to them, and then have the audacity to blame the prophet or call the ministry false when their circumstances remain completely unchanged.

When we obeyed, our fruit went off the charts. I rarely talk publicly about the scope of our breakthroughs because people inevitably fall into one of two categories:

• Either they don’t believe you and accuse you of lying (which honestly makes me want to demonstrate the laying on of hands in a very un-sanctified way—LOL!),
• or they believe every word you say, yet remain far too lazy, stubborn, and unteachable to do the dirty work required to reproduce the fruit.

Years ago, I poured my time, heart, and spiritual resources into a certain leader. Honestly, he had skills and talent beyond anything I possess, and there was a call on his life. I granted him intimate, unrestricted access to our lives. That man could articulate and teach my revelation backwards and forwards; he could preach it better than I could. But he NEVER put it into active practice because of paralyzing fear. He was terrified that his wife wouldn’t support the leap into his ministerial assignment, so he opted to play it safe. He refused to step out of the boat, and today, a massive mantle sits bottled up, dormant, and entirely unavailable to the wider Body of Christ.

✦ Do the Work

Stop playing church in the sandbox. Stop letting pride, past church hurt, or religious fear sabotage what God wants to build in your life.

The course is waiting for you. Take it, absorb it, do the work, and let God break you out of the stuck place once and for all!

Enroll free in Finding Your Spiritual Father →