With some years of experience in training members of the Fivefold Ministry, including those wishing to function in the Fivefold Ministry, I have come to some conclusions concerning marriage and ministry. My conclusions are not only a result of my experience in training married folks but also the Lord has given me clear instructions for the future on how to work with married people.
I know from personal experience, the problems that can take place in a marriage when ministry enters the picture. I was married originally to someone who loved the Lord, but had little interest in ministry and showed no signs of any kind of calling.
When the call of God came to me it set a fire in me that drove me to study, and prepare myself for the work He had called me to. And although my wife was ready to follow along in this, she never shared my passion for the work.
Going into full-time ministry always brings pressure to bear on spouses, because when you pastor a church, the members expect your wife to be the assistant pastor. And when she fails to show any ministry interest, it affects your ministry.
Such a wife eventually rebels against the whole idea of ministry, especially if she is incapable of doing any ministry, and inevitably what takes place is what happened to me. She chose to find someone else who shared her passions and left me to stand on my own.
When we set up training schools for the Fivefold Ministry, one of the first things we noticed was that husbands and wives seldom shared the same desire for a specific fivefold ministry. Those who came to be trained as prophets and were married seldom included their spouses in their ministry.
In fact, our experience with prophets showed that most of them had already been through a divorce or separation and had been loners in ministry for years. One of the first signs was their answer to a question we asked in their student application: “Will your spouse be studying with you?”
The answer was almost without exception, “No.”
Even those who wanted to move into a higher level of ministry such as the Apostolic ministry usually were loners in their ministry thrust and did not involve their wives much in their ministry.
This was not confined to the higher level ministries, because many pastors also saw their wives as simply helpers who were not actively involved in their ministry.
Having been deserted by my first wife because of the call of God on my life, I was determined to not enter a new marriage with someone who did not share my passion for the work of the Lord. And when I first met Daphne I discovered that one of her main desires was to marry a pastor and go into ministry.
As we entered into a marriage ordained by God, sharing the same call and desire to work for the Lord, the Lord gave Daphne and me a clear prophetic word as we commenced our married life.
He told us that He was going to bring us married couples and that we were to do with them as Samson did with the foxes. We were to bring them together and put some fire into them, and then release them to go out and destroy the work of Satan.
This soon began to manifest in our ministry although we needed to go through a phase of identifying the problems with the existing church system. A short period of pastoring a church that someone handed over to us, and some experience in helping someone set up a Bible School in their church laid the groundwork for us to follow in the future.
I attempted to re-enter the denomination in which I was ordained, getting involved in a local church in the hope they would put me back into full time ministry. But this just did not work, and eventually the Lord told me to move out of the church system and go where He would lead me.
After that, Daphne and I ministered from home, and often people came to us for ministry. Some of these were married couples and others single. We had several single people living with us and receiving personal ministry in the home and we were flowing well together.
After the Lord led us to move to Mexico, and eventually set up training schools internationally, my relationship with Daphne changed somewhat in ministry. I had moved to a higher level of ministry than her and was involved in intense teaching and training of leaders. Whereas she preferred to minister to ordinary believers and had a real pastor’s heart.
And although she went through all the training that I was offering and eventually was placed, first into the Prophetic Office and then later into Apostolic Office, she never had the drive to be a trainer as I did.
So instead of she and I working together as a team, we began to walk on different roads. And because first my daughter, and later my spiritual daughter shared my passion for training the Fivefold Ministry, I spent more time working together in ministry with someone else than with my wife.
Although we were training folks in the new Fivefold Schools, we seldom had anyone come in where both husband and wife shared a passion for the call. So we were always working with either strong women, whose husbands had no interest in their ministry, or men who did not involve their wives in what they did.
The true power in ministry, as the Lord had shown me, was when two people work together as a team in ministry. There is a far greater power, and there is also protection. Because when one is down the other will usually still be up.
So when the Lord told me to give up my training mandate it was quite devastating and I did not know what to do. It felt like He was calling me to retire and hand it all over again to someone else.
But in reality, the Lord was expanding my vision, and He was bringing Daphne and me once again into a true team ministry that could flow together as one. And now, as we return to a fuller ministry than before, we are working in it together into the future.
We started by launching a new ministry of our own which we called LesDaph ministries, which was a lower level ministry offering practical teaching to all believers. And then from there the Lord began to expand things and bring us together into a far bigger ministry than before.
And now, because our main emphasis was no longer on simply training the Fivefold Ministry, we could return to training ministers as part of the larger mandate He had given us.
This school is part of the result of this direction from the Lord and our emphasis in training ministers will never again ignore the importance of marriage in ministry.
We will not accept students for training who are not willing to involve their spouse in the ministry. And where we receive single folks, we will endeavor to help them find the right marriage partner who will support them fully in their ministry and calling.