Customer Reviews

Claiming All Things for God: Prayer, Discernment, and Ritual for Social Change

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My apologies if my memories of Rev. George McClain's book are a little rusty. I read it over ten years ago, while taking a course with his wife, Rev. Tilda Norberg, which included a practical application of McClain's prayer of corporate deliverance approach.

Deliverance prayer is normally used for individuals. Perhaps because the author is a Methodist minister, and more attuned to social issues, he had the idea of using deliverance prayer for groups and institutions which were absolutely unresponsive to any attempts at communication to resolve sinful situations.

McClain's approach is humble, thoughtful, intelligent, and spiritually perceptive. For example, when we did a group discernment for a profoundly stuck church (the pastor had come to Rev. Norberg for help), we had to first repent of similar sins in our own lives, and pray to be delivered ourselves.

Only then did we pray for deliverance for the church (among other things, their Board wouldn't give their pastor the key to the basement, and was so in love with their church architecture that they were throwing out a seniors' group because they might (after years of having met there) mess it up).

Within a few weeks, the pastor reported to us that the Board had straightened out all the problems they had, and returned to a manageably human level of difficulty.

As Christians struggle with institutional sin on a massive scale in our society, deliverance prayer for abortion mills, anti-Christian governmental bodies both national and international, media, corporations, etc. can be a whole additional level of spiritual warfare.

The author is a bit more liberal than most Christians who normally do deliverance prayer are apt to be, but it doesn't affect the points he makes. This may be why this powerful book has received so little attention: his mostly liberal church isn't interested in deliverance prayer; and deliverance prayer churches mostly don't read books by liberal Methodists.

If you or your church are concerned about the direction our country and our world are taking today, and want a powerful and effective way to respond, McClain's book can be a treasure.