Sid: I know that I know that I know that I know… There is coming such a great awesome outpouring of God’s Spirit on planet earth. He’s going to have mercy because once more he’s going to shake this earth and those that are not on a firm foundation will fall. Now they’ll have good news for the church system in the world, and the good news is your churches are going to be packed, but the bad news is the harvest will be so great you won’t be able to contain it. And that’s why I am so excited about a new wineskin for a new outpouring of God’s Spirit and it’s… I have a manual in my hands something I have wanted desperately because of all the calls I get from people throughout the world that want to start One New Man Congregations. This is not the One New Man Congregation, but it is a vessel that will be able to contain the glory of God that is about ready to be poured out so that you can read my book “The Race to Save the World” and “Mega Shift” which tells you how to set up an open congregation; how to set up a home church. I mean this fellow Jim Rutz has spent 40 years not just researching on how it’s affected throughout the world, but he’s had hands on experience. And I have two people that started, the Holy Spirit started with them just like Jim. They’d never heard of Jim today they’re spokesman for Jim’s Organization Mega-Shift Ministries, Tim and Katie Mather. Tim you told me you have quite a heritage goes all the way back to a man I’ve heard about that was in the Salem witch trials Cotton Mather. Now just to clarify the record what side of the fence was he on in the Salem witch trials?
Tim: He was on the good side. He was one of the ones that put a stop to it in the end.
Sid: So how many generations of pastors in your family?
Tim: In amongst the 16 generations there were many many of the generations were pastors as it comes down to me.
Sid: Tell us a bit about your background so you became a pastor because your dad was a pastor and what is it like to be a pastor of a church, what is it really like. I mean under the current system that’s going on that’s all your family knew that’s all you knew. What was it like for you?
Tim: It’s very simply impossibility because there’s so many demands there are so many pulls on your life; so many things that you have to do if you’re in a smaller church you’re the janitor, and you’re the CEO, and your everything in between. It’s an impossible job.
Sid: So Katie as the pastors wife of this impossible job what did you see going on in your husband’s life while he was trying to multitask on too many tasks?
Katie: Well I saw him being pulled from many directions trying to be all things to all people, but not even really fulfilling what he felt was his true purpose, his true calling in ministry that was in his heart.
Sid: Why did you stay in the pastorate Tim?
Tim: Because I felt I had a call from God to preach the good news.
Sid: Were there times when you wanted to just walk away from it?
Tim: I had a colleague during a pretty long stretch of my ministry who said he had a resignation letter in his desk with no date on it and he would bring it out every Monday morning.
Sid: (Laughing)
Tim: Dust it off and ask the Lord can I resign this week? It wasn’t quite that bad I don’t want to paint that kind of picture, but it was an impossibility. I knew the whole time that there was something wrong, that there as something missing from what God had called us to do.
Sid: What would you say was the highlight of your week as a pastor?
Tim: The highlight of the week is the time when we get to preach, that’s what I live for, I used to say that I lived 23 hours or six days 23 hours a week to get to do that 1 hour a week that I loved to do and that was to preach the Word of God.
Sid: So Tim when did you realize that the system was not as affective it was the best we had but it wasn’t as affective as it should have been?
Tim: Well, it’s kind of been an underlying thought looking back in my entire life I knew something was wrong. And talking with other pastors when there are no lay people around we would talk a lot about that over the years about it’s something missing, something’s out of place we’re missing it somewhere. And the question, the standard question is “Well, is this all there is, is this the real thing?” So it came to the forefront in 1992 and I was fasting and praying and I felt the Lord say to me “Preaching in its present form is not what I want, it’s not what I designed it to be.” Well, that was my entire life!
Sid: Well, you shocked by that Word?
Tim: I was shocked well I knew that….
Sid: Did you rebuke that word and think that it wasn’t the Lord?
Tim: I knew it wasn’t me so in discerning whether it’s the Lord speaking I knew it wasn’t me and I couldn’t figure out why the enemy would say to such a thing to me. And so when I began to just listen to what He had to say it began to open my eyes to we have to go into another direction to do the will of God on this planet, to pull off what He said in the Bible that’s going to happen.
Sid: So you didn’t have anything more than this word from God and this intuitive hunch that there’s got to be something more. So what do you do with this? Well your dad’s an old time preacher, did you go to him with this idea?
Tim: We went to him he was at that time preaching a six month series of messages called “Servants of Righteousness” which many people would call every member of ministry that were all called to do the work of the ministry. And I said “Do you really believe what you’re preaching?” And he said “Yes.” And so we said “Well, let’s see what the Lord has, let’s just go off on this adventure and see what He has for us not knowing where we were going. We left the country and we went in a sense to another country to find out this new thing.
Sid: Well, tell me about it.
Tim: Well the process was I was the coach I was the trainer in this church and so we began to train the people to do ministry, to pray for one another, to share, to evangelize, to go to the hospitals and minister to the sick. Every kind of gifting just finding out what it was and pulling it out.
Sid: Your job was to mobilize the body.
Tim: Right it’s to put them, get them in gear and so it was about an 18 month process. At the end of it what we were going to do was train house church leaders and ultimately we broke-up a church of about 180 people we broke it up into home groups.
Sid: And how did this work?
Tim: Well, it worked great in the beginning because we didn’t have a manual we didn’t have any other way to figure out what was going on we were listening to the Holy Spirit and trying to interpret what He was saying in this new place. And it was very difficult and so in the middle of our training process in the last six months of that time we found Jim Rutz’s first book somebody brought it to me and said “Hey this is a book that talks about what you’re doing it’s called “The Open Church” printed in 1992. So we got that and finally we were really thrilled because we weren’t the only ones out here in this place.
Sid: It’s sort of like as I propagate people understanding the one new man and I find out all over the world the Holy Spirit is speaking this thought to people I’m not a lone voice in the wilderness, so I understand what you’re saying, go ahead.
Tim: That’s why He develops….that’s why it’s so important to develop those kind of relationships to keep you in balance and God says the same thing over the entire planet and everybody’s hearing that. So we then used that book and trained our people and went to work and the presence of God was powerful and we called them life groups at the time. We trained them we sent them out; people were getting born again there were healings, there were people finding emotional and relational healing. People developing relationship in a new way and it was just a huge adventure.
Sid: The question that I have is what is the difference between what you’re doing today and what you used to do under the former system?
Katie: Well I think the big difference that we really saw in the people is that for so many years they had been the lay people in the church and there was a limitation to what they could do within the structured church as far as Sunday School Teachers, Music Ministry of different sorts, church positions. But what they began experiencing was actually ministering truth and life into people’s lives on a regular basis in a very real way and for themselves experiencing feeding people and bringing life transformation. And that was a very exciting part and we were able to equip them to minister in a very real and practical way so that it actually increased the ministry of the church.
Sid: You know every pastor heart is “How can I mobilize my people, how can I take this from spectators sport to everyone a worker?” But Tim what’s the difference between a good church that has home groups or cell groups they’re mobilizing people they’re doing these good things in a home church?
Tim: The answer to the question is one word and that’s control.
Sid: Tell you what, we’re out of time….
Tags: its supernatural, Sid Roth