The Philosopher in the Barrack Room

Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures? LUKE 24:32

A child of the Empire. He was born Peter Derek Vaughan Prince on the fourteenth of August, 1915, in Bangalore, in British India, into a British military family. It was a world of order, service and reserve, and something of all three stayed with him for life. His gifts showed early. He won a scholarship to Eton College at around fourteen and read Greek and Latin there, and from Eton he went up to King’s College, Cambridge. He did brilliantly. He was elected to a fellowship in philosophy, and he gave his mind above all to Plato. He also studied Hebrew and Greek, a competence that would later give his Bible teaching its careful, text-first grain.

A mind that doubted. None of this made him a believer. He had been raised in the conventional Anglicanism of his class, and he had left it behind as something a thinking man outgrows. He was, by his own later account, a sceptic — not hostile so much as unpersuaded, a man for whom the Bible was one ancient document among many, to be weighed and filed. He was also, by the same account, restless. Philosophy had given him tools of great precision and no conclusions worth living for. He could dismantle an argument. He could not find one that would hold his weight.

War. When war came he enlisted, in 1940, and served as a non-combatant in the Royal Army Medical Corps — a hospital orderly, a medic. It was a strange place for a Cambridge don. He took a Bible with him, and he began, as a philosophical exercise, to read it through, intending to understand it the way he understood Plato. By his own testimony the reading went on for some nine months. He found it baffling, and he found he could not put it down.

The barrack room. Then, in the summer of 1941, in a barrack room in Yorkshire — the ministry he later founded places it at Scarborough — the analysis broke open into an encounter. He did not describe it as the winning of an argument. He described it as meeting a Person. He came out of that night convinced of two things, and he would say them for the next sixty years: that Jesus Christ is alive, and that the Bible is true, relevant and up to date. Soon afterwards he had an experience he understood as the baptism in the Holy Spirit, and the Pentecostal convictions it gave him never left. The sceptic had become a believer, and the philosopher had found the book he would spend the rest of his life expounding.

The desert. He was posted to North Africa and served for roughly three years through the desert campaign, still as a medic. He read the Bible constantly, prayed, and began to learn in hard conditions what it meant to trust God for health, for safety and for guidance. When his service ended he was discharged, not in England, but in Jerusalem. It was the decisive accident of his life. He arrived in the land in the last years of the British Mandate, and a burden settled on him there that never lifted: a sense of responsibility towards the Jewish people and the purposes of God for them.

Lydia and the girls. In Jerusalem he met Lydia Christensen, a Danish woman who had given up a career as a teacher to follow a call to the Holy Land, and who ran a home for children there. She had taken in girl after girl whom no one else would take — Jewish, Arab and others — and was raising them as her own daughters. Lydia was considerably older than Derek. They married in the mid-1940s, and the young Cambridge philosopher became, at a stroke, the father of a houseful of adopted daughters. Lydia’s own story of her call, and of the family in Jerusalem, was later told in the book Appointment in Jerusalem. The family lived through the violence that surrounded the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Prince was to regard those events for the rest of his life as a fulfilment of Scripture happening before his eyes.

London and Kenya. The family moved to London, where for some years he pastored a congregation and preached in the open air. In the late 1950s they went to Kenya, where he worked as an educator and administrator, training teachers in the years before independence. It was there, by his own account, that he saw both revival and the reality of spiritual conflict at close quarters, and there that his convictions about the power of prayer to shape a nation’s course took firmer form.

America. In the early 1960s the Princes moved to the United States. He pastored and taught in Seattle, in Minneapolis and in Chicago, and in time settled in Fort Lauderdale, in Florida. These were the years of the charismatic renewal, when the experience of the Spirit that Pentecostals had long known began to spread into the older churches, and Prince — a Cambridge man with a Pentecostal testimony and a gift for plain exposition — found himself much in demand. His teaching on the foundations of the faith, first given as a series of booklets and later gathered into one volume, became a standard text of the renewal. A publishing work grew up around his teaching, and in time it became Derek Prince Ministries.

The Shepherding years. In the early 1970s he joined with four other Bible teachers — Bob Mumford, Charles Simpson, Don Basham and Ern Baxter — in what outsiders came to call the Fort Lauderdale Five. Out of their association grew the Shepherding, or Discipleship, Movement. Its intentions were serious: to bring accountability and maturity to a renewal movement that was often chaotic. Its teaching was that every believer should be personally submitted to a shepherd over his life. In practice it spread quickly and went badly wrong. Followers were widely reported to need a shepherd’s approval for the major decisions of their lives, and critics charged the movement with authoritarian control. Much pain was done in its name.

Prince was the first of the five to leave, and the first publicly to repudiate the teaching, in 1983. He did so not with excuses but in the language of repentance, confessing that what had begun in the Spirit had turned into something of the flesh, as the Galatians had been warned. He continued for years afterwards to warn against manipulative spiritual authority. No honest account of him can omit this chapter. None should omit the way he ended it.

Loss and a second marriage. Lydia died in 1975. In 1978 he married Ruth Baker, an American, and the two of them carried the work on together for twenty years. His radio teaching was carried daily around the world and translated into many languages, and he wrote dozens of books — on faith, on prayer and fasting, on the cross, on deliverance, on rejection, on marriage and fatherhood, on Israel and the last days. In 1981 he moved his home back to Jerusalem, and from there he travelled and taught almost to the end. Ruth died in Jerusalem in 1998.

The end in Jerusalem. Derek Prince died at his home in Jerusalem on the twenty-fourth of September, 2003, in his sleep, aged eighty-eight. He was buried in the city he had carried in prayer for more than half a century.

The shape of a life. He leaves an unusual example. Most of the teachers in this series came to Scripture in simplicity and never left it. Prince came to it as a critic, was overcome by it, and spent sixty years persuading others that the book he had once doubted was strong enough to rest a life upon. He was reserved rather than warm, precise rather than eloquent, and he disliked hype. He got some important things wrong, and in the most public case he said so. But the two convictions he carried out of that barrack room he never let go of: that Jesus Christ is alive, and that the Bible is a true book, for now.

Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. MATTHEW 24:35

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Prince came to faith by reading the Bible through for months. Set yourself to read one whole book of Scripture this month, straight through, asking only what it says.

2. Think of the circumstance you least expected to shape your life — a posting, a move, a loss. Ask what God may have been doing through it.

3. Lydia took in children no one else would take. Is there a person or a need near you that everyone else is passing by?

4. Prince repudiated publicly what he had helped to build. Is there a position you have held, or taught, that you now believe was wrong? Consider what honesty would require.

5. Write down the two or three convictions you would still be saying at eighty-eight. Pray over whether they are the right ones.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You met a doubting scholar in a barrack room and opened the Scriptures to him. Open them to me.

Where I have read Your Word as a critic, or as a spectator, or not at all, forgive me. Let my heart burn again as You speak.

Guide my steps as You guided his, through places I did not choose. And where I have been wrong, give me the humility to say so, plainly and soon.

Let me finish, as he did, still believing that You are alive and that Your Word is true. Amen.