Prophet

The Greeks have three terms for our concept of word. That is, they break our concept down into three sub ideas, to express finer shades of meaning, which we are content to leave in rougher form.

  1. logos - general words, like the words in a book.
  2. rhema - the words which "jump off the page" to a person and are full of special meaning and significance.
  3. phimi - when we get excited by the "rhema words" we sometimes go out and tell our friends and neighbors about our insight. These are the "spoken" words.

The term prophet comes from this third sense of the term "word"

"Prophet" - someone who runs out and shares the word which God has enlivened to him, in order to give insight and direction to the community.

Such people have always been around the community, but are not always appreciated. As my dad used to say, "prophets aren't paid they are stoned".

Some very creative work done in the area of support and training for "prophets" has been done by John and Paula Sanford through their Elijah House Ministry, in Cour de Laine, Idaho, over the past few decades. Their work has a "counseling flavor" as they are from the tradition that a change in the inside of a person results in larger social change.

From a different tradition, there were some developments of the prophetic concept within the mainline Churches in the 1930's through the Social Gospel movement, from which arose the Canadian CCF and NDP political parties. Echoes of this movement are still around today though its main impetus has diminished greatly in the past quarter century.

The notion of people being given to the Church by God for its guidance, rebuke, and correction of direction has a long history, and often centers in the lineage of the Old Testament Prophets. Their concern is for:

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