About Madras

For the next few posts I’ll be talking about our activities in Madras, Oregon while we were pastoring New Life Fellowship there. I’m sharing this because they have bearing on the current battle for Butte. Madras was our training ground for what we are doing here. On several occasions (before we knew we would be moving to Butte) I stated that the strongholds of Madras and the strongholds of Butte were the same – only Butte’s were bigger. So, knowing what went on in Madras will give you an idea of what is likely to be coming here. Besides, it’s a good story! :>)

It all started when the Lord sparked a desire in me to reach out to our community in some way. The greatest obstacle to that outreach was the tiny size of New Life Fellowship's congregation -- we simply didn't have enough manpower to take anything on. Still, we needed to do something -- not just for the sake of reaching the lost, but also for the sake of the church and the spiritual growth of our body. Our people needed to catch a vision for reaching out. As I mulled it over, it occurred to me that we should map out a neighborhood near the church building small enough for us to focus on. Like my dad used to say, “If you can’t chew a big bite, take a small one.”

The first step when you take on any kind of outreach is always to lay a foundation of prayer, and we gathered an intercessory prayer group for that purpose. The people who joined this group were all prophetically gifted and those gifts flowed freely in our meetings.  We found our giftings growing and expanding. For the first few meetings we stayed in the church building praying, seeking God for the next step. Eventually, we felt released to do some prayer walking to map out the neighborhood God wanted us to focus on. All through this time the Spirit was manifesting in our midst in great ways. "Exhilarating" is a great term to describe what was happening.  All of us in the intercessory prayer group were "into" spiritual warfare, but we felt constrained by the Holy Spirit to hold back from directly attacking the spiritual powers in the Madras area. He was showing us a lot about the spiritual geography of the area, but restraining us at the same time. In fact, much of our prayer was focused on keeping us incognito and out of the line of sight of the enemy.

To digress for a moment, Spiritual Mapping is an essential part of spiritual warfare. As we stay submitted to him and continue to be obedient, God will reveal to us what the enemy is doing, where his strongholds are, and what sins he is fomenting in the community.  This knowledge helps us focus our prayers, making our warfare more effective. To illustrate one way God did this, let me share about a young woman K. K was the grown daughter of one of the couples in our group. Her mother was extremely prophetic and K had the same gifting, with perhaps an even greater anointing. K did not live in Madras, but was still informed as to what we were doing and was joining us in intercession. One evening -- I don't know if she was dreaming, having a vision while in prayer or what -- K took a "spiritual foray" around Madras. Her description was like a travelogue description of someone going from place to place. The upshot of this was that she filled us in on where many spiritual strongholds were located and what kind of activities they engaged in. Some of it was confirmation of what we already knew (or suspected) and some was new revelation. When added to what had already been revealed, it gave us a very good picture of the spiritual geography of Madras

So, to come back on topic, we did our prayer walking through the residential areas near the church. The Holy Spirit mapped out a neighborhood for us and right smack-dab in the middle of our neighborhood was the Madras Hospital.  Remember what I said about how God was showing us the spiritual geography of the area? Well, Madras Hospital was the center where one of the dark powers of Madras resided.

Obviously battle lines were being drawn.