Thursday

Prophetic Feelers

Some people experience God in pictures or visions (seers); others in dreams (dreamers). Some experience God by hearing things (hearers, I guess). Those are all relatively easy to describe to others. More socially acceptable, these men and women are often great communicators.

Some folks experience God and the Spiritual realm through their feelings (feelers). My experience has been that these folks experience more of the heart of God, perceive more deeply and often more accurately, but have more difficulty translating the revelatory experience into language, and therefore, their revelations are less often received and understood by the body as a whole.

Our language has difficulty handling feelings well, partly because our culture doesn't respect taking responsibility for our feelings.

Folks that experience God in ways that are easy to describe (visions, words, etc) have a much easier time talking about the revelation they receive. Because they “fit in” better, they also do better in schools and seminaries.

So they become the pastors and teachers, the leaders of the churches. And because as a culture, we’ve delegated responsibility for the state of our soul to the leaders of the church, they have also become the standard for how God’s children receive revelation from their father. We can describe them either in spiritual terms (seers and hearers) or in educational terms (left brained academics).

As a result, we have a church that is led by academics and left-brain leaders. I have no complaint against that fact, except this: the churches they lead are not made up only of academic, left-brained people, even though their sermons and classes are primarily academic, left-brained lessons.

In fact, our seminaries and Bible schools, even our public schools, hardly legitimize such emotive people, and so the leaders and peers which they turn out don’t understand, and often don’t acknowledge the presence and the legitimacy of the feelers among us, of our creative and imaginative brothers and sisters.

Our church leaders are generally left unable to train feelers, people who interact with both the spiritual realm and the natural realm by way of their feelings. And so we are unable to pastor or lead the feelers among us, seeing them, through the eyes of academia, as people who need us to fix them.

Most of the resources for the left-brain, logical prophetic folks don't fit real well for the right-brained creative, for the prophetic feeler folk. Much of our basic discipleship training is in academic vocabulary, leaving the feelers among us less capably discipled than we believed, and therefore more vulnerable to the ravages of the war that we are engaged in.

I grieve for my brothers & sisters that we’ve disrespected and wounded. I’m thankful that God is addressing these disparities and bringing them back into alignment.

We have a ways to go, but we’re on the way. I look forward to our continued growth together.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am going through a season in which I receive both visions and dreams but I also am right-brained too ;) Not meaning to contradict, but interested

Carol Brown said...

Thank you for this post! We don't hear much about these sensitive ones. My husband was a pastor and in our travels we constantly found people whose lives were damaged because they thought something was wrong with them. So I wrote two books about it. www.fromgodsheart.com Again, thank you for speaking up.

Grateful said...

Thank you thank you thank you thank you. This post had been a huge huge piece of the puzzle for me. Many a time the feelers are considered 'soulish'. And although we have to guard against that and walk in the Spirit at all times, the feeler realm will be rooted in the Truth of His word and the heart of the Father. Thank you!!

Unknown said...

what & how can a feelers do?
To be able to release the prophetic word.

Since they are a feeler & how to know it is accurate?

Unknown said...

Same with any other gift of the spirit. We have more than one sense. Eyes, ears, smell, touch etc.

Unknown said...

Thank you this has brought much to prospective. Although I've had dreams and a vision and heard His voice. I do believe as I was told to be a feeler.