Malachi O’Brien is the pastor of the Church at Pleasant Ridge in Harrisonville, Missouri. We wrote about him years ago after Ronnie Floyd appointed O’Brien to be the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s influential Committee on Committees. Later that year, he became the SBC’s 2nd Vice President.
Our concern was that O’Brien has a long history of partnership and promotion of Mike Bickle (of the disgraced and discredited Kansas City Prophets) and The International House of Prayer that Bickle runs, which is a charismatic, dangerous cult where mind-numbing, hallucinogenic, trance-inducing repetitive ‘worship’ mantras, creepy prayer labyrinths and fire tunnels are church mainstays.
(If you aren’t aware of why Kansas City IHOP is a cult read this expose in Rolling Stone Magazine, the Love and Death in the International House of Prayer. Virtually any anti-cult expert or professional de-brainwashing psychologist would explain that the environment and culture at IHOP fits the definition of cult in every conceivable way. Every aspect of their “worship” – from the way the lights are dimmed to the repetitious music to the endless chanting – is designed to program the brain for mindlessness.
Add to their cultic behavior their pro-Romanist ecumenism, embrace of any and almost every religion as compatible with Christianity, and endless droning on about “prophecies” and “miracles” that are literally never provable, and IHOP ranks among the most dangerous churches in America, perhaps behind Bethel Church in Redding and slightly ahead of Hillsong.)
At the height of the fervor of the so-called Asbury ‘Revival,’ Obrien was ecstatic over what he felt to be a move of God and fulfillment of prophecy, writing:
In the last few months he’s tied Asbury to the SBC, believing that God will move in the denomination the same as on that college campus if Southern Baptists simply seek the Lord more. Now, Malachi is up to his elbows in more prophecy, giving a ‘prophetic declaration’ that in the next 20-30 years, women preachers and pastors will be embraced within the SBC because that is what the Holy Spirit and the next generation of southern baptists will want.
When pressed about his prophecy, O’Brien makes the case that prohibitions against women pastors in the early church were only descriptive, not prescriptive.
And later, he offers a direct correlation between indwelling and action, saying that the more people pursue and are filled with the Holy Spirit, the less they will care about prohibiting women pastors. Instead, in response to the Holy Spirit, they’ll be embraced.
While O’Brien might be correct that the SBC may one day embrace women pastors, it won’t be on account of a move from God, but rather an act of rebellion, and it certainly won’t make his prophetic declaration true.
