In this episode Gina has a conversation with Pete and Patty Shambrook who after pastoring for over 20 years, found themselves unsettled with the stark contrast between “church” they were experiencing and the Church represented in the Bible. This launched them on a journey to encountering God’s presence, the power of prayer and what it means to walk in the Spirit.
Books mentioned:The Grace Outpouring & The Way of Blessing by Roy Godwin
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Listen below to follow along starting at 25:56.
Asking Questions That Lead to faith
Patty:
I think it was in just the very beginning when I was just questioning, “There’s gotta be more, more than this to my faith.” We even started having conversations, like daring to ask the question as pastors, like, “I’m not seeing some of the prayers that we’ve been praying for a long time answered.
I don’t know if I even know the richness of prayer. Does prayer work?” Like we, we allowed ourself to ask the questions that you’re not supposed to ask. That was really freeing too, realizing the limitedness of our faith, not questioning God, there was never a question that we’re going to walk away or that the Bible’s not real.
Pete:
Which I think is an important piece, because being blunt honest about stuff, and about what’s going on inside of us, it allowed us to go back to scratch again. But we still trusted God to bring us through and to begin again and to show us. We trusted him in asking questions.
Gina:
That’s a huge piece, is trusting His goodness and His character, and that He can take all of it. He can take it, He’s not threatened by my questions. I mean, look at the Psalms, you know? The disorientation, and the reorientation.
I was talking about going through difficult things, and we’ve been wrestling through some stuff with people in our family that are struggling with some hard dark things. There was one particular morning I woke up and I was just wrestling with hopelessness, and I had this conversation with God, “I know you spoke this Lord, but I don’t see it. Are you really there?”
And I happened to be in the middle of reading Job at the time. Not because of that. I actually interviewed a friend, RihannaDowney, and she mentioned Job. I had felt that I should read Job. Most of us will not go through anything even remotely similar to what Job went through, but it was interesting in that moment for me, as I was wrestling and questioning or got to the chapter where God finally answers Job and says, “So Job, where were you? where were you when I created everything?”
The thing that was powerful about it for me at that moment was that it was a loving rebuke and there was comfort in it because it wasn’t this belittling “Who do you think you are to ask me a question?” There’s actually love behind it.
Then God turns to Job’s friends and rebukes them and then says, “I’m going to have my servant job pray for you guys, and when he prays for you, I’m going to hear him and forgive you.” And then He restores everything.
There’s just this loving safety that even in all of this toil and turmoil and all of my questions and all of my, “I don’t get it. I don’t understand. You’re not moving. I’m not seeing who You say You are, but I know that you are.”
Patty:
It comes from such a different place. It wasn’t bitterness, It wasn’t disbelief, It was more like, “I know I’m missing it. Would you teach me?” I know I’m missing it, I trust that this is real, but I wanted my life to reflect it.
So we just started stepping out of the box and going to conferences that I would never have gone to. I remember the first one I went to with a girlfriend who was also in that place knowing there’s gotta be more. We went up to LA and I had my notepad out and i said, “If they’re not preaching the word I’m going home.”
I’m like taking notes and there’s some weirdness there and I’m like, “I’m just so desperate for you. I just want to focus on you.” It was such an amazing few days. We just started hanging out with different people outside of our church and going to conferences and reading books on prayer and testimonies and borrowing their testimonies and going, “Okay, what you’ve done in their life, I want you to do that in our life and in our church.”
Pete:
Freshman fresh fire.
Patty:
That was the first book we read.
Pete:
We read that to each other in bed at night. We got the borrowing testimonies part from Jim symbols testimony, and we made it our own as well. And talk a little bit about what you saw.
Just Do Something
Patty:
Well, I first just read about somebody who had been using this white barn for ministry. Pete was away teaching somewhere, and it was one of the first months we were in our little back house. I was by myself and feeling sorry for myself and lonely, and then something just lit up inside me. After that, I just felt like the Lord just started giving me pictures.
Then I ran into someone who I hadn’t seen in a while, and she’s like, “I had a dream about you.” and she described the dream and she’s like, “Does that resonate?” And I said, “You know, I’m not really sure. But I do have this dream of doing ministry in a white barn.” She goes, “That’s so weird! There was a barn in it!” so there’s just these little nuggets of things that the Lord started giving us.
But we just have this picture of a place, I think just as we started experiencing the freedom in Christ, and just the joy of walking with Him, that it’s not hard. The things that we were reading in the Bible, we were finally experiencing. We got to pray with the people who lived in the home that we were renting their back house. We experienced a radical miracle with him that, as we were just really learning to pray and pray with authority, we got to be with them through that.
We were in Uganda a couple years later. I saw a vision of people just running in and there being worship and teaching, but different teaching, like equipping people for this life of freedom, prayer, and intimacy with God. So we were like, what is that? What are we supposed to do with this? And then summer of 2017, we ended up going to a prayer house in Wales called Ffald y Brenin.
Pete:
We read two books while we were there for a week. One’s called “the grace outpouring,” and the other is “the way of blessing,” written by Roy Godwin.
Patty:
Anyway he took over as director, Roy Godwin and his wife Daphne, they just believe in the power of blessing. So there will be nonbelievers driving up asking, “What is this place?” And they take them on a little tour of it. It’s just stunning at the end. They say, “Can we bless you?” And they be like, “Well, okay.”
Gina:
Who’s going to say no?
Patty:
Exactly! But the stories are amazing. Even as they go into this old, beautiful stone prayer room of people just falling on their face, going, “God, I didn’t know you were real.” And them going, “That’s the Holy Spirit, It’s not us.” It just got us excited about what they called “A thin place” in Wales.
Pete:
And Roy and Daphne affirmed and confirmed some stuff in us. We ended up walking out of there in tears in the best way. Like just happy tears. They’ve actually said, “Yes, this is what you’re called to.” We’re like, “Okay, what now?”
Gina:
Because it stirs up all this expectation, and then we want to do something, and what do you do with it?
Pete:
Well Daphne gave her some incredible advice. She just said, “Do something good. You don’t need to accomplish everything right now.”
Gina:
Such good advice, because how much of us get paralyzed in the vision because we don’t know where to start. It’s so simple, but it’s so true. You do something. Just move. Take one step, because God will meet you at each of those steps.
Patty:
Because He’s the one who’s going to open the door. Actually, I was at lunch with a woman from our church and I said, “I wish we could do a prayer room and start doing some 24 hour prayers.” We want a place where people encounter God, because there’s so many people that go, “I don’t know how to pray or I’m not the prayer warrior.”
They might not come to a prayer house, but they’ll come to a space that’s set up for them to encounter God. So we had this idea of this encounter room, and just started talking to Ruth about it and she’s like, “Oh, we just finished this little apartment above our garage, we want to use it for a prayer room.”
Gina:
Of course you do!
Patty:
Exactly. It was so random. We ended up with her and a few other people going in to decorate. We found this big, long, cool wood table and it’s in the middle of the room, and have art supplies and have map of the world. We created stations all over the room. Creating that space was the “do something”.
Pete:
So talk a little bit about that, because there’s the now and the not yet. Now we’re doing something, the prayer house and encounter room, but there was also a bigger vision that comes later on.
Patty:
Well, when we started it, it was open for people to go in and experience God. We did different events, 72 hours of prayer, 40 hours, 24 hours, which has been really neat through the night because it’s safe and on someone’s property.
It was incredible to hear the stories through that, we just had people starting to call and ask, “Can you meet us there and pray for us?” We had been doing different trainings and inner healing and Sozo and that’s how that part started. We do a lot of prayer appointments for inner healing.
Pete:
And the beautiful thing too, that you brought this up earlier, Gina is that we’re a neutral space. We’re not a church. We’re not connected to any particular church. So we’ve had quite a few pastors and staff from churches come through, and we just get to love on them and care for them. We pray for them, and work with them in prayer as well. It’s been really good.
Gina:
It’s so interesting because the organizational church is important and it has a role, and there’s something powerful and significant about spiritual communities gathering for corporate worship. But especially now we’re in the middle of the pandemic, but even this has forced this deconstruction of our dependence on the organization.
Part of what I would want to encourage people who are listening with stories like yours and stories that they’ve heard in other episodes is what we are the church and we’re supposed to be the church, not just go to church. You happen to have been pastors on staff, but really you’re a son and a daughter who were hungry for more.
You started sensing and feeling this prompting, this burden, this desire, to see something shift and change and meet these people. And they say, “Just do something.” So you are doing something, you birthed this ministry and it’s not within the four walls of an organized church, but it’s the church.
You are ministering to people both in and outside of the four walls of the church, and if people could understand the power of risk, the power of taking a step, the power of giving yourself permission to dream with God, going back to you saying, when everything gets stripped away and you give yourself permission to dream with Him of what is possible.
I think we squash those things because we assume it needs to fit into the mold we see organized church in the United States or whatever it needs to fit into. if there’s no role or ministry that my church is doing that my gifts fit into, then there’s just not a place for me. But what could happen if the body of Christ, if sons and daughters would step out.
Pete:
Think outside the box? Start dreaming and thinking outside the box. It’s such a freeing thing.
Restoring Hope and Freedom
Patty:
We love the church too. And it is good having those ministries that come beside and support the church. Because it is a lonely place for leaders and pastors and pastors wives. So I think that’s been one of our favorite parts.
Very early on as we opened that little prayer house, one of the first people that called Pete was a leader at another church. We asked him,”How do you even know we were doing this?” And he said, “I need prayer.”
Being a therapist too, being able to pour hope into some of the leaders that are tired and that haven’t experienced what they need from the Holy Spirit and give them an imagination for what God could do in their lives. because that’s what we started. Really, I think that was part of it going, “How do we engage our imagination for what God wants to do?”
Because we use our imagination for fear all the time. At first it feels like, are you really supposed to do it? But we started imagining what God was doing in our family. We started imagining who they were designed to be instead of looking at things that were going on and being filled with fear, and it just totally changed our faith.
Pete:
So Cedar house really began for us as not just a place, but a way to encounter God’s presence. Our tagline is “Restoring hope and freedom.” Because once you’ve encountered the presence of God there’s only hope and freedom ahead of you. That’s what He’s desiring to bring to us to.
Because there’s this stuff that we’re attached to that’s habituated in us, that even after we give our lives to Christ, we’ve got the Holy Spirit in us now, but we’re still left asking the question, “Why can’t I overcome these things here? I’m still dealing with the same stuff.”
You know? But the fact of it is that’s part of the process, but the more we are able to be in God’s presence, the more the Holy Spirit begins to deal with that stuff in us, if we’re able to be open about it, because we can stop Him from getting into those places as well.
Gina:
Well he can start revealing it and then we can just go, “Nope.”
Pete:
There can be some scary stuff that comes up, like if you’ve dealt with abuse and childhood trauma as well. It doesn’t even necessarily need to be that significant. But childhood trauma is stuff that we get stuck with. That’s one way that Satan gets to dig his toe into our lives, is through traumas, and then we start agreeing with him about those traumas.
Gina:
Yeah, absolutely.
Pete:
And those are lies. When we agree with what he’s saying about us then we are believing lies.
Gina:
Once you come into agreement with those lies then you’re giving them permission to set up camp.That stronghold is now being constructed. Until we can uncover what those are and renounce those things and turn from that to the truth, then we do have the power to tear down every stronghold and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God.
Art as Ministry
Patty:
One of the things we are really excited about with Cedar house is we’ve been so moved by the arts, that is something I think that I think that’s missing in the church today. So we have some artists that we’re really excited about that are dancers and choreographers and do pottery and painting and there’s another way of experiencing God.
Gina:
Absolutely. I was at a worship mentor gathering probably eight or nine years ago and Ian Kron was speaking and he said something along the lines of “Art allows for truth to come in sideways.” I can sit here and listen to words all day long, but art is going to bring truth in a way and a direction that’s going to seep in and permeate in a way that words just can’t.
And it’s not just seeing art, but also creating it. I love that you were saying that even in the prayer room you have the table with art supplies. I think there’s so many of us who will say, “I’m not artistic. I’m not creative.”
But when we’re kids, we’ll sit down with a box of crayons and we’ll just go to town because we’re not in that place of judging or comparing. There’s something powerful about not just experience and seeing and receiving beautiful art by artists, which is a powerful, and prophetic declaration of God’s goodness.
But then also unlocking in us whether we’re creative or not, to be able to express ourselves creatively and artistically, whether that’s with color or something we have planted or you are an engineer. There’s something innately creative about who we are because we’re made in the image of our creator.
There’s so many things that have been limited and shut down and not allowed to be in the church. What would happen in the global Church if his kids start to say yes to the invitation to bring those things.
Patty:
Completely. I remember reading the difference between artists and creatives, and we might not all be artists, but we’re all creative. It is like you said, it’s bringing that out, and for some maybe that’s been shoved down where someone said, “You’re not an artist. You’re not good.” So you stop creating.
Gina:
Or every piece of art that you that’s appropriate for the church has to have a cross in it. In the same way that God can take our questions, He can take all of that processing and our art as well. So how long has Cedar house been going now?
Pete:
Since October.
Patty:
Not very long. So right now we just have our little prayer room that we’ve actually not been in during COVID. We’ve been doing zoom prayers.
Pete:
It’s amazing. How the Holy Spirit transcends even zoom. We have some incredible sessions with people, and seeing God moving them, it’s just been amazing. We have a virtual prayer room on our website as well.
Patty:
So there’s several things we are doing, and we are in fund raising mode. I don’t know if I’ve ever been someone who thought you have to have a building when you have a church, but we really do want a space because it will be a place where we can have dance. like you said, there’s something to experiencing it as well.
Tara with her dance, and Andrea even with pottery, and some of the things that they’re dreaming about, how do we incorporate prayer and helping people understand who they are and their identity.
We have some really gifted people in the prophetic and they’re just so pastoral and so loving and giving them a space to teach and train. We would love to be able to have a space where we can bring in some leaders and pastors.
Faith Builds Faith
Pete:
We’ve been meeting with multiple church pastors and just helping them create an imagination for the scope and power of prayer. We get to come in and figure out where they’re at and look at next steps for them. Because every church is going to be different, you know?
I think having that sensitivity to begin where they need to begin, instead of going, “This is where you need to be right now.” and say, “Can we just start where you’re at? Let’s go there.” It’s important to discern what’s going on. .
Gina:
That’s so important. I feel like a lot of young leaders will go away to a conference and then they try to emulate what they see. They try to just replicate that in their space, but it’s not about that. It’s about being equipped and inspired to then come be exactly who you were designed to be in the community you were planted in.
What is that? What’s the iteration? What’s the version? What does it look like when the creativity unleashed here? That shouldn’t look like it does at Bethel, Hillsong, or Mosaic, it needs to be different.
Pete:
Well, it’s human to try and formulate something. We got to smack our hand every time we reach for the formula. Now you’re sitting in front of a person right now, or you’re sitting in front of some people right now. Get to know their story, where they’re at before you enter in on helping and instructing them on where to go now.
Gina:
That speaks also to encountering God’s presence and healing. I think it’s so strategic that Jesus never healed the same twice. Because we want a formula, but it’s not about that.
Pete:
And notice He tell us how to do it in Luke. That’s the beauty of the gospel. You see it in front of you, see the kingdom of God, like laid out in front of you. What did Jesus do? He preached the gospel. He healed the sick, he cast out demons.
Then He tells us to do all the things that he taught us to do. Now go figure it out with the Holy Spirit. That is the point, if there’s going to be a dependence on the Holy Spirit, then we can’t formulate it.
Gina:
Exactly.
Pete:
We have to be dependent on Him to show us how to go about what it means to cast out demons, or to heal the lame or the sick, or to preach the gospel.
Gina:
I’m excited to see what God does.
Patty:
One step at a time. God opens doors that you couldn’t imagine. It takes you in a direction that you might not have planned. You get moving and he turns you left.
Gina:
He Zigs when you thought he was going to zag.
Patty:
Exactly!
Pete:
I’m thinking about the person who might be listening to the podcast who could be thinking, “Well, they’ve got their act together, and you know, they’ve stepped out.” But it wasn’t easy, It was difficult. As Patty said, it was born out of darkness actually. We just weren’t willing to stay in the darkness, and God showed us the way to direct ourselves. Just do something.
When you get up in the morning, and God’s put something on you heart, just do something. We’ve seen the “somethings” add up. You get to look back at the “somethings” and you go, it really has become “A big something” that’s really good. But it started with small somethings.
Gina:
I love that. I met with a girl yesterday and she was asking me, “What does your quiet time look like? That started a whole conversation. The church has gone through all these things of like, you have to have your chair and a basket with books and highlighters, and don’t be distracted, you know, take those thoughts captive. I was encouraging her with something I heard from a message a long time ago.
The pastor said, “I used to get so caught up on distraction until I started realizing it might be the Holy Spirit trying to tell me something.” If He was reminding me of a bill that I need to pay, I’d say, “Thank you Jesus for reminding me to pay that bill.” If somebody’s name popped in my head, I would just stop right there and pray for them, or I would send them a text.
I was telling the girl I met with, “Start to practice listening, the first step may be as simple as that.” You might be sitting there asking, “Why does that person’s name keep coming to me?” Well, maybe next time that happens, consider it’s Jesus, and maybe just send a text, and that may be your one thing to do.
And that person goes, “My gosh, I can’t believe you texted me because I was just going through something.” Or when you send that encouraging word, or you just say, “Hey, I’m praying for you right now,” you will start seeing God meet you in that risk, and that’s going to embolden you.
That’s going to create a hunger for more. Sometimes that’s how He’s speaking because it’s a partnership, and that joy and excitement makes you want to be invited into more, and makes you want to say yes more. Then you go from sending that text, then maybe the next thing is to speak something to that barista at Starbucks or to invite someone over. Faith builds faith.
Pete:
Faith breeds faith.
Gina:
Faith breeds faith. If you’re listening right now, you don’t need to have this vision for a prayer house tomorrow. It could be as simple as “I just want to love people more, and I just want to be Jesus more, and I want to be more bold in that. I want to love hospitality. I want to invite people into my home.” Whatever that is, take a step.
Check out the rest of this conversation: There Has To Be More
For more about Cedar House: Visit Cedarhouseoc.com to schedule an appointment or make a donation.
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