Brother John

There’s a war raging, and John Eckhardt
won’t relent. Fighting in the trenches for decades now, the firebrand
fivefold minister has charted his own unique crusade against a known
enemy, drawing enlistees from American inner cities and suburbs and as
far away as Africa, Asia and parts of Europe. But don’t go looking for
shields, guns or grenades at his south Chicago church­—befittingly named
Crusaders Church. You won’t find them. 

This battle is not against flesh and
blood. The enemy, Satan, won’t go down with mere ammunition but with
authoritative, Word-filled prayers that change lost lives and rattle the
religious.

That’s where Eckhardt—the pastor of
Crusaders and a former elder in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC)—has
set himself apart. Called to the ministry of an apostle in 1989, he now
makes it his business to train church leaders here and abroad with the
spiritual tools necessary to keep evil out of their lives and
assemblies, and prayer is an integral part of the formula.

He oversees his home church and two
others in the Chicago area. There’s also Crusaders Church Ethiopia,
Crusaders Church Curacao and Eckhardt’s own apostolic missions network
that brings thousands of apostles together to confer and strategize
about winning more souls for the kingdom. He and others like him believe
the latter-day church needs a radical makeover and must be
intentionally fervent about outreach and ministry that extends beyond
cushy pews and cushier sermons.

That’s what drew Toris Anderson to
Crusaders more than 20 years ago. “Coming from the street as a
24-year-old young cat, I was looking for realness, not play church,”
says the now 47-year-old police officer. He and his wife are elders and
prophets in the church. Anderson passed up a job opportunity in another
state a few years ago so he could stay with Crusaders. 

“I couldn’t see myself without this
family. It’s such a part of me,” he says. “I just couldn’t leave. I
respect him as a man of God.”

Crusaders headquarters is located in the
AFC World Outreach Center at 79th Street and Ashland Avenue on Chicago’s
South Side. The auditorium, with its towering pillars and ornate
cornices, appears to have been a theater at another time. During a
recent Sunday service, a teen stepped on to the raised stage and blew
the shofar, commencing the beginning of praise and worship. Dancers
twirled in the aisles, youth popped up like popcorn with hands raised in
praise, others marched with banners, and prophets intermittently
stepped up to the mic and offered bold words of encouragement. When
Eckhardt got to the podium, his message was clear and consistent:
There’s a strong need for deliverance, casting out demons and moving in
the prophetic ministry.

This is not your average
Pentecostal service. But Eckhardt says it’s time out for average. He’s a
proponent for churches to return to places of power, led by those who
believe in walking in it. 

“All we need are some preachers who will
preach the gospel and will say, ‘In the name of Jesus, come out,’” he
says. “If you want abundant life, you need to be delivered from the
demons in your life. When you get involved in deliverance, your life
will change. And the good news is you don’t have to remain bound.”

But many ministers shy away from the
casting-out-demons part and say “that’s too deep for me.” Eckhardt’s
response: “If it took all that in the Bible days, why wouldn’t it now?”
Instead of finding a ministry that believes in deliverance, some people,
he says, have resigned themselves to living “with their demons.”

He tells of visiting a church and being welcomed by the somber dirge: “Trouble in my way / I have to cry sometimes.”

“We just accept life is like this. We all have challenges, but trouble,”—he shouts as if it’s sitting in the pew—“you’ve got to go! 

“I’m not climbing up the rough side of the mountain,” he adds. “[Jesus]said speak to that mountain.”

This is from a man who grew up Roman
Catholic in south Chicago and had never heard of the Pentecostal
experience until he got saved during a street meeting as a student at
Northwestern University. The church hosting the meeting was Crusaders
Church of God in Christ, the church he would eventually join, become a
minister with and, after the death of its former pastor, lead.
(Crusaders Church is no longer COGIC-affiliated.)

Eckhardt met his wife, Wanda, at the church in 1978. They were married a year later and are now parents to five children:  Shalonda, 30; Johnathan, 25; David, 22; Timothy, 19; and Joel, 15.

It was shortly before Eckhardt took the
helm at Crusaders that he began to understand the importance deliverance
needed to play in the modern-day church. “I got on the radio teaching
deliverance, and the city went crazy. I started traveling. We got a lot
of opposition, but I never took it personally. God gave me boldness, and
anything I thought was God, I preached it and the more the
church grew,” says Eckhardt of the congregation that expanded from 100
to about 1,000 in that one year alone. Today, Crusaders churches have
more than 4,000 members in the Chicago area.

First, he took care of home. “We trained
our members how to prophesy and how to cast out devils. In fact, any of
them could stand up and do what I do,” he says, proudly. After making
sure that spiritual gifts were fully operational in his own church,
Eckhardt visited multiple nations to help others work in the apostolic
realm and establish new churches with active fivefold ministries. His
interest lies in increasing the number of prophets and apostles
worldwide, two of the under-represented positions in today’s church
world, he believes.

Eckhardt helped to establish churches and
ministries in more than 80 nations as head of the International
Ministries of Prophetic and Apostolic Churches Together (IMPACT), which
he founded in 1995. The main purpose of this group is training in
intercessory prayer and spiritual warfare, deliverance and healing,
prophecy, and church planting here and in other nations. 

He helped to establish more than 300
churches in Ethiopia alone. And this spring he already has planned trips
to South Africa, Uganda and Korea, not to mention his nationwide
schedule.

As serious as matters of the kingdom are,
Eckhardt also knows how to relate to his audience. One Sunday he tells
the congregation about having to hire two different plumbers to fix two
different problems at his home per his wife’s request. Apparently, he
didn’t want to do it. He then chimed: “But when a man loves a
woman”—referencing singer Percy Sledge’s hit song, to which the audience
exploded in laughter.

Eckhardt is also on the faculty of Peter
Wagner’s Leadership Institute and is a member of the International
Coalition of Apostles. But if it is a bit strange for some that this
relatively unknown pastor in Chicago could rally so many to the cause of
apostleship and deliverance, his simple, yet defining solution of
achieving that goal is even more incredible.

In the 1990s, Eckhardt began to write
books about the modern apostolic move of the church. “A lot of what we
were teaching in the church wasn’t taught much,” he explains. “So every
time I’d teach something new, I’d write on it.”

To date, he has authored more than 40
titles, including a popular series of books on prayer. “The prayers we
are dealing with are deliverance prayers,” he says, explaining,
“I just started writing them down. It started with 50 confessions that
we were doing for our church.”

Soon after, book publisher Charisma House
got wind of the prayers and asked Eckhardt to consider publishing them.
Some 600,000 book sales later, he’s become the forceful voice behind
the words of deliverance prayers for many. Prayers for everything
ranging from finances and relationships to spiritual warfare and
depression are within the pages of these books that allow the reader to
pick and choose the prayer that ministers to their needs. Most of the
one- or two-line prayers have scriptural references by them.  

His hope is to offer readers a greater
prayer vocabulary. “There are a lot of prayers in the Bible but I don’t
think the Bible has written down everything,” he says. “Even everything
that Jesus did wasn’t in the Bible.” 

Yet, he is not without critics. Eckhardt
often shows up on Internet-based Christian watchdog sites, where his
theology and methodologies are questioned. Even some who have partnered
with him in the past have severed ties and distanced themselves from him
and his teachings.

But he says it’s to be expected. “A lot
of what I preach is controversial,” he says matter-of-factly. “But as
people read more, they’re moving more and more toward it.”

While he’s had his detractors, he’s also
had a few high-profile followers. At one point, Marie Muhammad-Vaughn,
the great-granddaughter of the Nation of Islam’s Elijah Muhammad was
part of the ministry, as was R&B singer R. Kelly and the late Eugene
Record of the famed Chi-Lites, who served on the church’s praise team
until his death in 2005.

In the future, Eckhardt, an ardent
soldier of the faith, says he looks to the day when “people are released
in the gifts and limitations are broken off of churches.”

Lisa Jones Townsel is a freelance writer and an editor based in the Chicago area.

Prayer by the Book

 Christians in the U.S. and other parts
of the world have been touched by Eckhardt’s emboldened prayers. On
popular book websites, many readers express great relief and
satisfaction about his scripturally sound, unrelenting prayers. 

The first in the series, Prayers That Rout Demons,
was printed in 2008, with several printings since, Auguste says.
Combined, Eckhardt’s prayer titles have sold almost 600,000 copies in
English and Spanish. Auguste calls the growth “phenomenal” among
intercessors and says people on prayer lines are “praying from it.” 

Books like Eckhardt’s help redefine
prayer and form the basis of community, Auguste says: “People are
praying all over the world with these books, [praying] together on a
global scale.”