Jack Deere: My Desire for Power Enabled Paul Cain's Manipulation

Secret Recordings, Attempted Extortion and Fabricated Prophecies —The True Legacy of #IHOPKC's Most Influential "Prophet"

Editor's Note: My father recently shared his insights on the scandal at IHOPKC involving Mike Bickle here. In his account, he referenced an email that he characterized as manipulative from Bickle. The email suggested removing a chapter about Paul Cain from the latest edition of his book, now retitled “Why I’m Still Surprised By the Voice of God.” Despite Bickle’s objections, the chapter remained in the book, albeit with revisions. The revisions were not solely based on Bickle’s objections, but also on others’ input. Due to readers requests’, my dad granted me permission to publish the 2022 original draft that prompted Bickle to raise concerns about his chapter devoted to Paul Cain. The draft chapter was penned at least two years before the latest disclosures about Bickle’s clergy sexual abuse scandal. Given recent events, my dad’s perspective on what transpired more than 20 years ago with Paul is still evolving. From what I understand, Bickle introduced my father to Paul Cain, a connection that led to profound harm to our family. Nevertheless, this draft chapter also acknowledges a prayer my dad learned from Bickle that he believes helped liberate him from Paul's influence. — Stephen Deere

True Prophets, Carnal Prophets, and False Prophets, originally written for: “Why I’m Still Surprised by the Voice of God”

An Unpublished Draft Chapter

There are spiritual prophets who use their prophetic gift wisely to bless the church and to lead unbelievers to the Lord.¹ There are carnal prophets, true believers with a true gift of prophecy, who use their gift to exalt themselves and who cause division in the body of Christ.² And there are false prophets. There are two kinds of false prophets: unbelievers who use the devil’s power and unbelievers who have learned how to traffic in the Lord’s power.

By the end of the first century, John wrote that “many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). Jesus had warned the apostles that false prophets, false teachers, and false Christs would deceive many people, especially in the in the last days, by performing great signs and miracles (Matthew 24:11, 24). Satan supplies the power for them to do all kinds of counterfeit miracles, signs and wonders (2 Thessalonians 2:9). False prophets and false teachers deny that Jesus is the Christ (2 Peter 2:1). The defining purpose of their mission is to lead people away from Jesus Christ by leading people to themselves.

At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus described the second class of false prophets, those who have learned how to utilize or traffic in the power of the Lord, but do not know him.

Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’ Matthew 7:21-23

These prophets are not using Satan’s power for their miracles. Satan will never supply power to cast out demons (Matthew 12:25-26). Although these prophets do not trust in Jesus, they have learned how to use his power to do miracles and to prophesy. They are like the evangelists who lead people to Lord without ever having for themselves a saving relationship with the Lord. Jesus said that there are many such miracle workers who are so skilled as masquerading as believers that many of them won’t be revealed as unbelievers until the end of the age. Although their miracles will be a blessing to individuals on whom the miracles are performed, the Lord calls them “evildoers” because the overall effect of their ministries will be to draw people away from the Lord and to usurp the Lord’s place in the lives of their followers. When the Lord says, “I never knew you,” he means that he does not recognize them as being in his family, as having a spiritual relationship with him.”³

To summarize: miraculous power enters the world through three avenues.

1. From God through born again prophets and miracle workers who may be mature Christians or carnal Christians.

2. From God through unbelievers who have learned how to traffic in God’s power.

3. From Satan who gives his power to false prophets and false teachers who are unbelievers.

Jesus warned the church not to be deceived by unbelieving miracle workers. After I came to believe in the gifts of the Spirit, I gave the same warning to my hearers. I frequently warned them that the power of a person’s spiritual gift was not an indication of their spirituality. And then I ignored that warning for myself. I had such confidence in my discernment and in my knowledge of Scripture and theology that I did not think I could be deceived.

In 1987, one of my new friends, someone I much admired, told me about a prophet who moved in great power. I lived in Ft. Worth, and at that time this prophet lived in Dallas. His name was Paul Cain, and I first met him in September 1987. I was thirty-nine years old and he was fifty-eight, but he could have passed for seventy. He was frail, had heart problems, and was generally unimpressive. He did not show much knowledge of Scripture or theology. He had been involved in the Pentecostal healing revival of the 1940’s and had some great stories to tell. When I met him, I thought he was at the end of his race. I couldn’t imagine him moving in power like John Wimber and thought his main value was as a historical repository of a decade of miracles back in the 1940’s Pentecostal healing revival.

Then we had our first meeting where we ministered together. After I spoke and gave a teaching, Paul got up and called out people telling them their diseases and the secrets of their hearts and pronouncing some healed. It was amazing. I introduced Paul to my new friends in Ft. Worth who had international ministries and had recently been introduced to the gifts of the Spirit. At one meeting, Paul called out a lady and named five diseases that were afflicting her. It was all true. Then he pronounced her healed. I interviewed her soon after the meeting. She was completely healed. None of us had ever seen a prophet or healer like Paul. But all this power came in the frailest of packages. He was frequently sick and sometimes addled on stage and off stage. He had a full-time assistant who prepared all his meals and gave him his medicines and did a thousand other things for him.

Paul asked me to introduce him to John Wimber. I told John about him and tried to schedule a meeting for them, but it wasn’t working out. Then, in the summer of 1988, we moved to Anaheim with our three children to be on John’s staff. In September that year, I asked Paul when he was coming to Anaheim to meet John. He said, “I don’t know yet. But the Lord shows that there will be an earthquake in Southern California on the day I arrive.”

“An earthquake! The big one?” I asked.

“No. It won’t be the big one. But on the day I leave Southern California, there will be a big one somewhere on the earth. The Lord hasn’t shown me where,” he said.

I told John about Paul’s earthquake prophecy. He smiled, sort of a “been there, done that, heard all this before” smile.

Paul got on a flight to come to Anaheim on December 3, 1988. At 3:38 am on December 3, 1988, my English Pointer, Skipper, hurled himself against the glass patio doors trying to get into the house, and then a 5.0 earthquake, centered under Pasadena, rumbled down the coast to Orange County and shook our house. That morning John and I rode together to pick up Paul, and I reminded John of the earthquake prophecy Paul had shared with me. “What kind of guy is this?” John said. “An earthquake is his calling card!”

Paul’s visit to the Vineyard was so supernatural that he quickly came into John’s inner circle and was invited to minister at all the major conferences. Paul returned to Dallas four days later, on December 7, and the big earthquake that he prophesied came to pass. On that day two earthquakes struck Armenia just minutes apart. The first was 6.9 and the second was 5.8. They killed at least 60,000 people and destroyed almost half a million buildings. I had never heard of God authenticating a prophet like this. I thought to myself, he must be special, the godliest prophet on the earth. And it made sense to me: it would be just like God to put great power in the frailest of packages.

It turned out, however, that the earthquakes were signs of the damage Paul would do to the ministries and to the people who gave themselves to him.

I saw no warning signs of an impure ministry at the beginning, just a sweet old guy with old fashioned religious cliches and corny humor bumbling around on stage and then breaking out into the most supernatural ministry I had ever seen. So when the warning signs emerged, those of us in his inner circle ignored them.

Paul was not just a bad teacher. He was horrible. Sometimes he was impossible to understand. He never rose above those outdated cliches. He crumpled at the slightest criticism. But if we wouldn’t let him teach, he wouldn’t do prophetic and healing ministry at the end of the meeting. So we gave into his manipulation and endured his rambling, pointless talks so we could see the prophetic ministry that was beyond anything we could do.

I would never let a pastor remain on the church staff if he or she did not financially support the ministry. But Paul never gave money to the church or to any ministry. When I asked him about this, he said that he was saving up his money so he could rent stadiums for the “last day ministry.” He believed that we would help usher in the return of the Lord.

I also ignored the evidence of mental illness and megalomania. When his mother died, Paul showed me her Bible. He claimed that she had left it open to Malachi 4 and had underlined verses 5-6, which prophesy the return of Elijah to prepare the people for the return of the Messiah. He implied that he was Elijah.

He spoke ill of all the other prophets. He said they were not godly. He would not tolerate rivals. If a leader outside of the Vineyard criticized Paul’s speaking ability and asked John why he let Paul speak in the conferences instead of only doing prophetic ministry, Paul claimed that he could “see” that his critic was in sexual sin.

Paul frequently used heart pains to justify breaking his word and to make himself the center of attention. Sometimes the Vineyard conferences turned into prayer meetings for his health as though the success of the conferences depended on his health. This was the beginning of John’s break with him. At the time, I thought John was wrong, maybe even jealous of all the attention Paul received. I continued to put up with all Paul’s manipulations, and I chose Paul over my spiritual father John Wimber because of a secret prophecy Paul had given to me.

Just before I moved to Anaheim, Paul told me, “What you are going to do after the Vineyard is so great that it will make the Vineyard seem like nothing. If I told you now, it would take away all your enthusiasm to serve at the Vineyard.” I thought Paul was the most powerful prophet in America, maybe in the world. With that prophecy, he took away my gratitude to John and my enthusiasm to serve at the Vineyard.

Paul could see my desire for power. It was implicit in Paul’s promise of power to me that I would have to leave John and go with Paul to enter the fulness of that power.

In my previous professor life, I thirsted for knowledge. It was the most highly valued commodity in my academic world. I excelled in lexicography and exegesis. I was exalted for being smart. I loved the exaltation. I needed the exaltation. It meant that I was special. Then I came to believe in power. I saw blind eyes open and the deaf healed. Thirst for power replaced my thirst for knowledge.

I was thirty-nine years old when Paul promised me great power. I had just begun to pray that God would grant me a work of the Holy Spirit, to love the Son of God like his Father in heaven loved him. I had learned this prayer from my new friend Mike Bickle. This was years before I knew how to feel the affection of Jesus or that Jesus wanted to be friends with me. So I was only a beginner in knowing and experiencing the love of God. I continued to count on power to do for me what only the love of God could do. The pure and godly part of me pursued power because I wanted to see God exalted and people helped. The impure part of me pursued power to validate myself and show people I was special. And I believed that Paul would lead me into greater power than John Wimber had.

John had loved me. He taught me to hear God’s voice and how to pray for the sick. He paid for me and Leesa to go to conferences all over the country so I could learn the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Airline tickets, car rentals, hotels, food—anything we needed John took care of because he loved us. John gave me a place on his stage. He introduced me to leaders, movements, and churches around the world.

John gave.

Paul took.

I chose Paul.

Later, I would learn that Paul’s promise of great power was typical modus operandi for him. After you were convinced he was the greatest prophet, he would tell you that you had this unbelievably great future ministry. But this great future was always conditioned on being with him. He sought to take the place of God in the lives of his followers. And this became true for me, as I frequently asked Paul’s opinion before I asked God to speak to me.

My deliverance from the worship of power and the control of Paul Cain came through learning how to feel the affection of Jesus. There is no greater motivation for us to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength than to feel that we are loved by God. I tell the story of how I came to experience this love in Chapter Five of this book. My memoir, “Even in Our Darkness,” is the longer version of how God pursued me and led me into a deepening friendship with Jesus.

Eventually, God exposed Paul’s deceptions and sins in late 2003, but by that time he had already set me free from Paul’s control. An ambulance had taken Paul to the emergency room to be revived. When he came home from the ER, he told me that his heart had given out on him. The next day, his assistant called me and told me that Paul had drunk three bottles of wine and passed out. The assistant had thought Paul might be dying and called the ambulance. He also told me that Paul’s drinking had been out of control for years. I learned that Paul had struggled with alcoholism all his adult life. Those morning meetings he had missed because his heart was acting up were actually due to hangovers. The assistant who revealed all these things is the real hero of this story.

There were three of us, all pastors, who were considered Paul’s spiritual sons. In February 2004, we agreed to have an intervention with Paul. We met with his assistant first, who told us a story of consistent abuse, dishonesty, and drunkenness. We learned that Paul taped every phone conversation he had so he could later use the tapes for blackmail if anyone ever tried to accuse him of sin. And we learned that Paul had a secret history of sexual immorality. All of this and more came out over several weeks of confrontation.

One of us called Paul’s cardiologist to ask about Paul’s heart condition. The cardiologist told us, “Paul doesn’t have heart problems. His heart is strong.”

Although Paul could move in genuine prophetic power, he also faked revelations. We learned that he had a genealogical program on his computer. One of the things he was famous for was getting the address of a person and the names of their relatives. He mixed this information in with genuine supernatural revelation about healing, and he admitted this deceit to us.

He threatened the three of us with the ruin of our marriages and ministries if we did not cease our attempts at confronting his sin. Our goal was to restore him, not to expose him. But Paul didn’t want to be restored. He wanted to be left alone. He left our restoration process. We published a statement on the internet, but it was far too mild. Some interpreted it to mean that Paul only had a single sexual failure in a moment of weakness. He told people that we had lied about him because we wanted his money. But the truth was that we were his primary fundraisers. He even accused us of committing adultery and incest.

It became clear to me that Paul was mentally ill. He actually believed his power was so great that he could convince the church that his three spiritual sons were the evil ones, even when multiple witnesses were emerging from the past to accuse him of various abuses and sexual sins. He had perviously told me that the ministers in the healing revival of the 1940’s were sexually impure, and only in ministry for the money and fame. He told me he had left the revival stage because he couldn’t stand the corruption of the leaders, going into seclusion and waiting for God to show him the pure leaders of the “last day” ministry. But it turned out that the revival leaders he spoke of had made him leave the stage because of his own sexual impurity. No church would allow him to speak. All this came out after we made his sin public. I also listened to multiple allegations of sexual assault.

This was the Paul I eventually came to know. He stood on a stage that I helped to build because I elevated prophetic power over character. Most people who knew Paul knew only a sweet old guy bumbling around a stage and then miraculously breaking into power.

I never spoke to Paul after 2004. He had done something so vile to me and my family that I would never risk giving him another shot at knowing us. The Lord commands us to forgive from the heart, but he doesn’t command us to enter back into a relationship with an abuser, especially when the abuser does not repent of their abuse. I never saw any sign of repentance in Paul’s life. I continued to hear reports of him threatening former friends if they did not exonerate him and stop telling stories of his abusive behavior toward them.

The evidence against him became overwhelming. He made full confession to Charisma Magazine in 2005 when he was seventy-five years old. Then, two years later, he denied the confession. He had found someone he could control “to restore” him. He claimed restoration, but he never returned to prominence in the body of Christ. He told his new support group that his spiritual sons had deserted him and lied about him. At the end of his life, Paul told an audience at a conference that he had been a lifelong celibate and that the angel of the Lord was always with him. But it was clear to those of us who knew him that the power of God was no longer with Paul. He died at age 89, on February 12, 2019.

So what was Paul?

Some days I think that he was a carnal prophet. On all days, I hope he was a carnal prophet. I want to see him in heaven. On other days, I think he was an unbeliever who learned how to traffic in the Lord’s power. The Lord said that there would be many of these people.

There is significant evidence against him knowing Jesus. In his long term relationships, he drew people to himself and not to God. I never heard him freely confess a sin, and he always blamed someone else for his sin. It took us days of confrontation to get him to admit the obvious, but he always had an excuse for every failure or shortcoming. He told the grossest lies about anyone who refused to proclaim his innocence. He threatened all of his former ministerial friends—not just the three of us—with ruin when they would not excuse his sin. He battered one person without mercy until the person was on the brink of a breakdown. I confronted him several times about this, and he always said the same thing, “What else could I do? I was like a caged animal. All I could do was scratch and claw.” I never saw him show any sorrow over sin. I never saw him repent of any sin.

The most damning charge against him is that he could never state the gospel, though he always insisted on giving the evangelistic message at the conferences. I even wrote out the gospel for him to read at the conclusion of his “evangelistic” messages: “Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died on the cross for your sins. If you will trust him to forgive you and give you a new life, he will come into your heart and never leave.”

Somehow Paul would manage to misread and garble this simple statement. When theologians from another country heard Paul attempt to preach the gospel, they said to me, “The gospel is simply not native to the soil of his heart.” I could not disagree with them.

For these reasons I am agnostic about where Paul is spending eternity.

But I am sure about two things.

He had the greatest prophetic gift I’ve ever seen.

He was the most abusive person I’ve ever known.

1. Some cessationists argue that since all contemporary prophets admit to making mistakes—if the prophets are sane—there can’t be any true contemporary prophets. They use Deuteronomy 18:14-22 to prove that true prophets can’t make a mistake. But this is a baseless interpretation, one that no Hebrew scholar would ever support. See Appendix Three for an explanation of Deuteronomy 18:14-22 based on exegesis, not based theological convictions which have no exegetical support.

2. Paul was the spiritual father of the Corinthian church. When he wrote his first letter to them, he summed up their spiritual state by saying, “Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly—mere infants in Christ” (1 Corinthians 3:1). The word translated “worldly” is the Greek word sarkinos, which means “fleshly,” that is, “weak, sinful, and transitory (BAGD, 743). The KJV translated sarkinos “carnal,” the English word in 1611 for “fleshly.” And “carnal” is still at home in the theological world of English speakers. All newborn Christians are carnal, just as all newborn babies are selfish. Given the right nourishment and good spiritual environment, baby Christians grow into spiritual Christians who produce the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). The Corinthians should have become spiritual Christians by the time Paul wrote them, but they were characterized by jealousy, quarreling and sexual immorality. The author of Hebrews had the same complaint about those who received his letter (Hebrews 5:11-14).

Being born again does not guarantee spiritual growth. Our spiritual gifts don’t guarantee our spiritual growth. It is possible to have a genuine spiritual gift of prophecy and remain a carnal prophet for one’s entire life. Spiritual gifts are given, not earned. It is possible to have an impressive spiritual gift and remain a carnal believer all one’s life. Samson had great power, but he never developed the character to use that power with wisdom.

3. This is one of the meanings of Greek word “to know.” See ginosko, BAGD, 361:7.