As I led the guys in worship,I could sense that God was going to do something special, and boy did He come through! I shared with the guys a dream I had a few nights ago.

Here’s some of what I shared…

“Let me explain the nature of prophecy very briefly – many people have the idea that a prophet is someone who foretells the future, or has an understanding of future events, and this is true, but there is another aspect of prophecy – to tell forth the Heart of God on a matter – in other words to bring out what God wants to reveal or to do in a given situation. God releases prophecy not just to foretell, but to tell forth His heart.

I would like to share with you a prophetic dream that I had a couple of nights ago, and it was I believe given to me for a purpose – for someone here today that God wants to bring healing and freedom to. In fact there may be a number of people that this will be for.

I said it was a prophetic dream, but in reality it was for the most part a nightmare. It seemed to go for hours and hours, and when I woke up the next morning I was exhausted.

It started off innocently enough, I had the sense that I was much younger than I am today, and it seemed to be set in the late 70’s or early 80’s. I had been in a pub somewhere and I had met up with a group of people there and become friends with them.

When we were leaving the pub, they invited me along with them – “Hey John, why don’t you come and hang out with us for a while?” And they had one of those old VW Kombi vans.

So there were 5 or 6 of us piled into this Kombi van, all heading off for a party somewhere, and all of a sudden this guy in the seat in front of me turned around, and his face had become one of absolute malice and evil, and he grabbed me by the arms and would not let me go.

Immediately I was aware that I had made a huge mistake, and it became clearer and clearer to me that I was in big trouble.

The funny thing was the reaction of the other people in the van – they seemed fully aware of what was happening, but powerless to stop it, and they had an air of resignation about them. This person (who was really a demon) who had grabbed hold of me was on some level a friend of theirs. He had accompanied them for years, they knew him well, but they had no control over him.

They had come to accept that he would always be with them, and in many ways he had control over them.

So we set off in this van, and I am struggling to get away from the grip of this tormentor, but he would not let go, and I could not do anything without him there, hanging on to me and trying to drag me in this direction or that direction.

The dream began to move through different scenes, stretching out over a number of years, and in each scene I had an increasing sense of desperation, because I was moving through this life bound to this evil being who I could not control.

One scene in particular in this dream stood out above all others.

I was travelling with my friends along a road that ran along the top of a hill, and when I looked down it was into a valley of extraordinary beauty, breathtaking beauty. The sun shone down into this valley in such a way that it seemed to be a place of perfection, almost a Garden of Eden.

But I could not enjoy it, because every time I looked at the scene this demon would grab hold of me, leering at me and dragging my attention away.

Throughout the dream, on many occasions, my friends tried to help me get away from this demon, but they had no idea of how to go about it, and any time I thought I was getting away it would come after me and grab hold of me again.

That’s how the dream ended, with me trying to get away, and failing every time.

I woke up exhausted, disoriented, completely worn out from my struggle, and over the last couple of days I have prayed and thought about the meaning of this dream. You see I know what it’s like to be in that struggle with something you cannot control, to have the circumstances in your life constantly poisoned.

In my case it was the demon of addiction, years of my life lost to heroin and cocaine.

But I knew that this dream I had was not about me, because it ended with me still struggling to get away, and I want to tell you that my struggle with the demon has ended -  in freedom.

Like the dream, I was powerless over my addiction, like the dream my friends wanted to help but couldn’t, but in real life it has ended very differently, and the reason for that can be summed up in one word – Jesus.

Let me explain why.

I would like you to imagine your life for a moment as  taking place in a kingdom. There is an absolute ruler in this kingdom.

He has absolute power and authority over everything and everyone in it, but He only exercises that authority when He is invited to.

He is the most powerful being in the universe and any universe beyond the one we live in, but He gives us the choice as to whether we allow him to lead and guide our lives.

He looks down on us here today, and He sees your struggles, your pain, your addictions, the brokenness that you hide from those around you, and He has such compassion for you and what you have gone through that He takes off His kingly crown, He sets aside his position as absolute king, and He allows Himself to be brutally humiliated, tortured and put to death.

Why does he do this? Because He knows that in His perfection the grave cannot hold Him, that the evil of this world has no authority over perfect love, and that by laying down His life He can purchase your freedom.

This is the story of Jesus, who physically rose from the grave 2000 years ago, and in the power of that resurrection lies the power for your restoration.

All you have to do is surrender to Him.”

At this time I gave an altar call, clearly explaining what it means to give your life to Jesus, surrendering every part of your life to Him. I asked the guys to raise their hands if they were prepared to commit their lives to him, and fully half of the men present raised their hands, and followed me in the Sinner’s Prayer.

What an awesome God!!!!

We have a strong vision for Church in the Park, and as our ministry has grown and developed I have felt the need to share how it was birthed, the vision that God gave me for it, and the direction that God is moving us in as a ministry.

Beginnings

I started Church in the Park in 2002, at a time when I was a member of Calvary Chapel here in Sydney. For some time I had been ministering in prisons in New South Wales, staging outreach concerts and preaching / leading worship in various prisons around New South Wales.
For some time I had a sense that God wanted to use me as an evangelist in the wider community, and I had a strong desire to reach more people.
Out of this desire was birthed the Church in the Park ministry.

We started off at Paul Keating Park in Sydney’s Bankstown area in 2002, with the fairly straight-forward approach of taking a worship band and some bar-b-q equipment to the park once a month.
My vision for Church in the Park was simply this – that we would hold outreach events in a park, we would worship, I would preach, and that people would be brought into God’s Kingdom.
There was nothing wrong with my vision, except for the word my.
After all, God is not interested in MY vision for Church in the Park – God is interested in my becoming conformed to HIS vision for Church in the Park.

We saw many people give their lives to Jesus in the early life of Church in the Park, but in my spirit I knew something was missing, that there was an aspect of our ministry that remained unfulfilled, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it.

God Releases His Vision

So, at the beginning of 2003, I sought God through an extended period of prayer and fasting for my ministry, and I began to become aware that there was more to what God wanted for us at Church in the Park than just a traditional church outreach.

So that’s the background, and now I’d like to tell you about the vision God has given me for Church in the Park.

God speaks to us in many different ways – sometimes it can be an impression that forms in your mind, it can be through a prophetic word given by another believer, sometimes it can be God’s voice speaking clearly to your heart, and at other times God can speak to us through dreams and visions. At all times, if I feel like I have heard from God about something, I endeavour to wait on Him for confirmation, and of course whatever I feel God is saying to me has to line up with the Word of God – the final authority.

Now, “vision” is a word that can be bandied about pretty loosely, but it’s in the way God confirmed the vision that I knew without a shadow of a doubt what God has called us to. That confirmation has enabled me to persevere with Church in the Park over a long period of time, often in the face of great difficulties.

The vision that the Holy Spirit gave me can be summarised as this –
Church in the Park is an evangelistic ministry, but beyond that God has called us to a ministry of reconciliation – people who have lost contact with their faith being reconciled to Him, and brought back into fellowship with other believers – restored into their faith.

It came to me as a series of very strong impressions as I prayed and fasted, and as this began to form in my mind, I really began to question it. After all, how does a simple evangelistic outreach become a ministry of reconciliation? Was this really God speaking to me? I felt completely out of my depth.
And so I sought the Lord further, asking Him for confirmation of what He was showing me.

A Reminder from the Past

As I continued to seek the Lord, he reminded me of something that happened in my life of a very personal nature, and then He showed me by a miraculous confirmation that this vision was real, and not something of my own making or imagination.

To give you some background, I was brought up in a Christian family, and from the age of 8 until 14 or 15 I sang in the choir of a church in one of the major denominations. There was a close friend of mine who also sang in the choir who I will call “Simon”.
There was also a man involved in this environment, in a position of authority within the church, who was a paedophile, and when I was about 12, this man molested me.

The damage done to me went on to manifest itself in many ways, including my rebellion against God, and eventually in heroin and cocaine addiction.

On the scale of abuse, the extent of that molestation was fairly minor, but others in my circle of friends were not so fortunate.

My friend “Simon” suffered greatly because of this man, and was so traumatised by what was done to him, that at the age of 15 he attempted suicide by trying to hang himself in the garage of his family’s home.
His parents took him out of school, and that was the last anyone I knew heard from him.

By this point, you’re probably wondering what this ugly story has got to do with Church in the Park.
I myself was very troubled when the Lord took me back through this sequence of events. These are things that I dealt with over a long period of time after I came back to the Lord, and I praise God that the extent of my healing is such that it does not trouble me to share this with you.

As these memories began to unfold in my mind, I asked the Lord what He was trying to show me, and so the Lord began to show me His vision for Church in the Park, that He wanted Church in the Park to not only reach the lost, but to draw people back into relationship with Jesus, back into fellowship with other believers, being reconciled to God, and restored into the place God designed for them in the body of Christ.

That people who had left the Church, because of offenses, because of being wronged, because of physical, sexual or mental abuse, would be brought back to the Lord through Church in the Park.

This whole concept was completely foreign to any idea I might have had for our ministry.

So finally, I decided that if this was indeed from the Lord, then I needed a confirmation from Him, and I put out a fleece before Him.
I said to the Lord “Lord, if this is you, then I need you to confirm this to me in a way that can only be considered miraculous. That every time I question what we’re doing and why, that I will be able to remember the miraculous confirmation you created for me.”

God Confirms His Vision

The very next day, between church services on a Sunday, I got a phone call.
It was my friend “Simon” from the choir. Remember, I had not spoken to this man since I was 15 years old.
Just think of this – 28 years since I had heard from this man, and the very next day after I asked God for confirmation of a vision He gave me that included this man, and the sort of abuse that God has called or ministry to bring healing to, and the man himself calls me.

He told me that the day before, he was talking to his fiancée, and they were talking about his upbringing and somehow my name came up as being a friend of his from school, and he got to wondering about what might have happened to me, so he searched through the phone directories until he found my name, and decided to call me.

We talked for a while, and it turns out that since leaving the church where we had been part of the choir, he’d never been a member of any church. His faith was completely dead. He asked me about what I was doing, whether I was still involved in music, and I shared some of my testimony, and told him about Church in the Park, and then I invited him to the next Church in the Park event.

He came along, and he turned up right as I was sharing about what God had done for me in healing me of all the shame of the things that had happened in my past.

The funny thing is he talked to my sister, he talked to our church’s senior pastor, it seems he talked to a number of people, all except me.
He left before the end of the event, and despite my attempts since to contact him, I have not been able to talk to him since. He didn’t return my calls, and I lost touch with him.

At first this was a great disappointment to me, but then I realized what must have happened – He wasn’t ready to confront the things in his past that had caused such trauma – my testimony of healing brought the past back into focus for him, and I believe that God has begun the process that will draw “Simon” back to Him.
What a confirmation!

Even when we temporarily had to stop Church in the Park and then re-establish it in a different location, waiting for government permissions for the use of the parks where we hold Church in the Park, raising funds for equipment, waiting for people to help, I have held tightly to the extraordinary vision God has given us, and the extraordinary way He confirmed it.

I believe that Church in the Park is a ministry commissioned by God to reach the lost, to bring healing to those who have lost their way and left their relationship with God, and to restore their relationship with Christ and with other believers – God’s Church.

Click here to visit our web site

John Hemans
Unchained Ministries

At the same time, I have added new musicians to our Church in the Park worship team – (we finally have a full band!), been writing and recording new songs for a worship CD, and today we began building our recording studio with a large “live” room for rehearsing in – praise God!

On top of all this, we were asked if we would stage Church in the Park in a second location, this time at Hilwa Park in Villawood, Sydney, and so are holding our first Church in the Park there this coming Saturday 21st November, from 12PM to 2PM.

See here for more details -

http://www.unchained-ministries.com/outreach/church_in_the_park.htm

Today was definitely one of those days – we minister in one of Sydney’s women’s correctional centres on a regular basis, and today we were taking a chapel service.

We hadn’t even started the service – in fact the girls were still coming in to the chapel, when a young lady (one of the inmates), came up to us and said “I’ve been thinking about this for a while – I want to give my life to Jesus”.

I could tell that she was completely serious and had really thought through her decision, and right there and then, before even starting the service, we led her through the sinner’s prayer, and later in the service she testified in tears about the wonder of finding forgiveness from the Lord.

The chapel was full, with many women there who had not come to chapel before at all, or had not been for a long time and as we worshipped and testified many tears were shed, as God’s power was released.

Kerry and I were sharing about two aspects of God’s righteousness – that God will always stand up for his people, and how we are the righteousness of God in Him (2 Corinthians 5:21).

I shared my testimony, and how it still amazes me that God reached down and saved me from the life I was leading, and how He always sees me through the blood of Jesus – saved, forgiven, with my sins placed further from me than the east is from the west – righteous!

I found out after the service had ended that an astounding thing had happened. There was another young inmate there whose only language is Spanish. She had previously requested to be part of a Kairos course, but the language barrier was such that they had to bring in an interpreter for her as she cannot understand more than a few rudimentary words of English.

Just after I started to share my testimony, she spoke to the chaplain and said “that man is speaking Spanish – I can understand what he is saying”(!)

Even as I type this I am amazed – I don’t speak more than maybe 15 words of Spanish, but this woman with such a thirst for the Lord was able to hear and understand what I said in English in her own language – praise God!

We left the prison with such a sense of God’s power and grace, and above all his love for people that need Him so much!

I had the sense that we were under attack as a church, and a couple of songs into the worship I really felt prompted by the Holy Spirit to go into a more intense approach to the worship, declaring by faith the faithfulness of God.

As I did, I felt the Lord show me streams of healing being released to the church – so I called people forward who needed healing.

Straight away people began being touched by God’s presence, and the following testimonies attest to God’s healing power -

• My brother Mark was able to preach with no ill-effects from the dizziness.
• Robyn (another church member) had been in a car accident the previous Wednesday and had come to church with a lot of back pain. As she came down the front in reponse to the altar call she felt a “crack” in her back and was immediately healed from all pain.
• When I got home, my wife (who had been unable to get out of bed that morning), was bouncing around the kitchen making lunch – all her soreness had been healed, and her joints were no longer swollen. She told me that at about 10:30 am (the time I made the altar call for healing at church), she felt a sudden presence of the Lord and was immediately healed – praise God!

Some photos from the event…

Last Sunday, 24th May my wife Kerry and I ministered at one of the women’s prisons in western Sydney. In the leadup Kerry had a powerful impression that she should share her testimony with the girls, and in particular how God had healed her from rheumathoid arthritis and brought restoration to her relationship with our daughter Kim.

We minister together, so I also needed to prepare, but a hectic work schedule found me on Saturday morning wondering at the last minute what to share on, and what God wanted to do – I was in the driveway of our house cleaning up my bike, thinking about the following day’s upcoming ministry, and it started to rain. I was preparing to carry the bike back into the garage, when I felt the Lord say to me “Turn around”.

I turned around and saw a beautiful rainbow right across the sky, and heard the Lord say to me “I will never leave you nor forsake you”. When I shared this later with Kerry she was amazed as that scripture was an integral part of what God had put on her heart to share in the prison the following day!

We went to the prison on Sunday morning and ministered in back-to-back chapel services, ministering in worship, and in our testimonies.

We both used that scripture to share from, and God moved in a powerful way, ministering in healing hearts broken from the isolation and strain on family relationships suffered by the women as a result of their incarceration.

One young woman gave her life to Jesus for the first time, and generally it was a fantastic day.

Raised from a coma through prayer!

Our church has been involved in the last 2 weeks in something truly miraculous!

My ex-wife who lives in Western Australia had become very ill with flu over a matter of some weeks. While attending hospital to have a minor treatment she collapsed and was subsequently diagnosed with a very serious case of pneumonia.

The doctors responsible for her care put her into a drug-induced coma, and began to contact her family because they did not expect her to live. As her immediate family began to gather from all over the state where she lives, my daughter Lisa called me to let me know the situation, and I promised her I would gather our church to pray. This was on Saturday 9th May.

The situation was so serious that the doctors did not expect her to survive.

On Sunday 10th May (Mother’s day) I was rostered to preach at our church, and I began by explaining the situation to our church, and we then all entered into intercession, that God would intervene.

My wife Kerry had a vision as she was praying of Jesus kneeling over a prone figure and raising her up, and this sparked faith in us that God was going to answer in a wonderful way.

After church I called Lisa, and she reported that at the time we were praying, her mother’s highly elevated temperature came down to normal, but she could still not breathe un-assisted and was still in a coma.

A week went by with no change, and then the following Sunday I again called the church to pray during the Sunday morning service.

I felt a powerful presence of the Lord as we prayed, and something in my heart was telling me that God was going to respond in a marvellous way.

I got out of church and called Lisa – she had also been at church that morning and her church was praying too – within half an hour of church finishing she got a call from the hospital that her mother had started breathing un-assisted, and the doctors subsequently brought her out of the coma, removed her IV tubes and breathing assistance, and she was in recovery!!!

Praise God! Hebrews 13:8 – Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever!

He still heals, saves, delivers and restores – HALLELUJAH!

As I looked out, I suddenly recognised that there was a man standing outside, completely motionless, facing towards the house. My immediate reaction was one of terror, but then in my spirit, I recognised him as an angel. Though he looked like an ordinary man, there was an atmosphere of incredible power emanating from him – (this was what had initially produced a reaction of terror from me), and I recognised that he was assigned to protect us.

Some of the rest of the dream I don’t remember clearly, but I remember being very aware that there were some extremely dangerous and destructive entities or influences that wanted access to our home, and that this angel was assigned to keep them out.

When I got up this morning (as if by coincidence!) I received an email update from Rick Joyner’s ministry on Todd Bentley’s restoration process, and there was a series of discussions about angelic beings, the ministering spirits sent by God.

I have no intention of getting into the arguments about Todd Bentley, angels, Emma or his restoration to ministry, but I was aware that the Lord was reminding me that we are in a daily battle, and that He has assigned angels to look after us and to minister on our behalf – praise God!