Michael Root trained with The Elijah Challenge online
Spring 2013
“I have been wanting to contact you for a while now to thank you for the teaching that you have made available online. I have watched both the basic training and the advanced training twice now over the past few years and I have also read the book of your testimony and adventures in Indonesia.
I was born in California and my family moved to Australia in 1963 and I have lived here ever since except for my 4 years in college back in Los Angeles during the early seventies. I have been active in ministry for many years and have been involved in discipleship training for over 20 years. I have been involved in prayer ministry for the past 10 years and I have been also travelling to India since 2002. I have a good friend in India that I have been working with since that time conducting Pastors training conferences with him since 2006.
He is a Pastor by training and was involved with the Church of South India for many years. He was touched by God to work with some leprosy villages and the poor in some rural areas. He was told to stop helping them by his church bosses and he could not, so he left the security of that vocation. A few years later he had a man come to his home in the slums of Chennai, where he was ministering to the poor, at 11pm at night. This man said that although he was a Hindu and he had a brain tumour that was inoperable, God told him to come to my friend and my friend would pray for him and he would be healed.
My friend had only recently been baptised in the Holy Spirit but he prayed and the man said he felt heat in his head and he was totally healed. My friend was surprised but thanked God and sent him on his way. Later the man had x rays that proved that his tumour was gone.
God has since used my friend Pastor Martin to heal many people – he definitely has a gift of healing. I don’t think I do, but I use authority & power. Anyway we have had a lot of adventures together travelling over most of South India during the past 7 years. We have been in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andra Pradesh and also Sri Lanka training village Pastors and helping to support 6 leprosy villages and also doing some community development projects with the poor.
Recently I watched your video training again and felt that God wants me to train these village Pastors in the use of authority and power to heal the sick and cast out demons in the work of evangelising the lost. So that is what we are going to do starting 14th March I will be travelling to India. We will be training Pastors in 3 places – two in Karnataka state and 1 day in GOA state. I am sure that we will not be able to cover everything but we will do as much as we can in the time available.
I have been ministering to people myself using authority and power for several years and have seen God do some amazing things both in healing people and also delivering them from demons. I am a part time teacher and associate prayer minister with a ministry called Ellel Ministries – http://www.ellelministries.
I want to encourage you that what you are giving with these training resources is very valuable. Many thanks to you for your faithful obedience.
India Report
I travelled to India in March for two weeks. My purpose is always to meet three objectives.
1) Visit the 6 Leprosy Villages that are partially supported by the church I fellowship with in Dubbo. Over the past 10 years we have supported them by supplying rice, ointments & bandages, water supply, goats, roof repairs and other help.
2) Work with various poor people to help them help themselves by providing vocational training and equipment to do the training. (Sewing training currently). Also we are looking at self help micro loans to help alleviate poverty.
3) Training for village Pastors and leaders who have very few resources and training opportunities.
This year I felt very strongly that I was to give an abridged version of the Elijah Challenge Training (I did not call it by that name), because I only had two days in each of two towns and only one day in Goa. I did give everyone the website as a reference and gave Elijah Challenge credit for what I used. I left a printed copy of the training with my Indian Pastor friend Martin Glansy. (Martin has an incredible gift of healing—so interestingly at times he found it hard to understand what I was teaching!)
My purpose was not to teach the whole course but to provide enough of it to challenge the leaders to go back to their churches and to train their people to heal the sick & cast out the demons and to preach the message of the Kingdom of God. I think that message about any believer can do this got through to quite a few of them.
I went to Hubli in Karnataka state first. Hubli is the second largest city in the state and my contact there is a brother who has been a Pastor for a number of years and he worked with YWAM for over 8 years. The Lord asked him to start a new church in an area of the city where there was no current church. That was 12 months ago and now he has about 50 people in the church.
Ex-Brahman Hindu believer powerfully healed
We arrived on a Sunday at about 1:30pm on the trai n. After we were taken to our Hotel room the Pastor said that he had scheduled me to preach at his church that night. I said okay, but had nothing planned. After a shower and a brief rest I prayed and asked God to please give me a message for the church.
He gave a couple of scriptures and i then had a brief outline of what he wanted me to share but also indicated that I was to finish with the promise that Jesus and given every believer a measure of power and authority that we were commanded to use to serve him by healing the sick and casting out demons as we shared the Gospel message.
I also felt like he showed me that there would be someone who had pain in the shoulder and upper arm that he wanted to heal.
Well, I went to the church and gave the message but did not feel that I was supposed to call out for the healing at that point. I was asked to minister to various people and I did. Towards the end of doing that a young mother asked to pray for her arm and shoulder that she had pain. The Pastor was standing next to me because he was translating for me.
When she said this I thought, “okay now is the time to teach the Elijah Challenge” by demonstration. I asked the Pastor to call a woman who was a strong believer to come. He called a lady who had testified earlier in the service that she had been a devout Hindu of the Brahman caste until last year when God had saved her. Since she had been saved she has visited over 300 homes to share the Gospel.
I asked her if she was willing to heal this woman in Jesus’ name. She said yes she was. I then said okay say exactly what I say. This was going from me to the Pastor and then to this woman who spoke it out with passion.
I asked her to put her hand on the shoulder and she did. I then asked her to put her other hand on the arm just above the elbow and she did. We then commanded the shoulder to be healed in Jesus’ name and the pain to go, for the arm to be healed and all pain gone and not to return—complete restoration in Jesus’ name.
I asked the woman what happened to the pain and she raised her arm up high and said it is gone – all gone. Thank you, Jesus!
The ex-Brahman lady was so excited. I then found out that she was the mother-in-law of the woman who was healed and that her son had been giving both women a hard time because he was not a believer. Maybe this healing was to help him believe.
Infirmities healed while training Pastors
There were about 35 Pastors at the training and I shared about the Kingdom of God in the first session and then taught that healing and deliverance are signs that God gives to validate the Gospel when it is preached. Then I taught about how God has given every believer a measure of power and authority for the rest of the training.
On the second day I called for anyone who had pain to come forward and we would heal them in Jesus’ name. A very experienced Pastor came forward with a severe pain in his upper arm/shoulder area. I had two younger men come forward and I coached them in commanding healing in Jesus name. I asked him before we started how severe the pain was on a scale on 1 -10 as you teach and he said about a 7. After we commanded healing three times he said it was down to about a 3. We stopped then because I wanted to take questions before everyone left the conference.
He then asked me a question. He said I have prayed for many people to be healed and have seen many miracles when I and others in my church have prayed for them. Why was I not healed when we prayed for my pain? I could not really give him a good answer but I said perhaps God wanted you to see and feel this way of healing?
We did another training at a town called Billary and had about 30 leaders there and a woman who had bad knees was healed. She was a senior Pastor’s wife and two of her nephews commanded the healing.
Ministering to professional clergy more challenging?
In Goa I only had one day for training on a Saturday because all the Pastors had to be back at their churches the next day. I got a shock because when I arrived at the YMCA rooms they told me there would not be a translator because everyone, all 60 people spoke good English. Well, I was able to do my two days of material in one day because I was teaching in English.
At the demonstration I asked for anyone who had pain, and an older lady came forward who had pain in her forearm. I asked her how long she had the pain and she said several months because she had broken her arm. I asked her to rate the pain and she said about a 6.
Michael leads sisters to minister healing to the woman with painful forearm
I asked for two women to come forward to heal her and I specifically asked for them to not be Pastors. They came forward and I led them in what to command, but they were very hesitant and lacked passion and conviction. We asked what the pain was doing and the lady said it was a 5, so I said let’s do it again. We did and then it was about the same. So I said okay, I am going to join in with you. With the ladies permission I put my hands on top of the other women’s hands and then with much conviction I commanded healing in Jesus’ name.
I asked her how it was now and she said about a 2-3. It was much better and she said she would believe that God would complete the healing soon.
Well, I did not have the spectacular healings that I would have liked but God was at work and sometimes the professionals (clergy) can be a tough lot to train. They have a lot of things that they have been taught that may not be helpful.
My wife and I are involved in the Healing Rooms here in Dubbo and in a ministry called Ellel Ministries that believes, teaches and practices discipleship, healing & deliverance and so we have many opportunities to command healing and deliverance, but mostly with believers.
I have spoken to a friend about the possibility of him going with me downtown on a Friday or Saturday night and seeing if God will lead us to unbelievers to minister to with the Elijah Challenge ‘A Bomb’ as brother Carl Henderson calls it. I am up for whatever adventure God wants to throw our way because I know He will be doing it through us.
Thanks again for making all your material available on the internet. I have been blessed by reading and watching it.
Pastor set free from infirmity sent by sorcerer
Two years ago I was in India and on the third day of a Pastors training conference a Pastor hobbled in. He had not been able to come the other two days because he could not get on his motorbike to ride to the church. That day he had had a bath in the hottest water he could stand and even then he was barely able to get there. He could not sit in a chair and he could not stand without pain in his thigh. So all day he lay on the floor leaning up against a pole.
Then we called him forward and the Pastors cried out to God in prayer for him. After about 10 minutes my Indian Pastor friend who organises the meetings told me to minister to him. He had told me earlier that there was a spirit sent by a Hindu sorcerer which was the cause of the pain. I had a picture of a spear or an arrow in his leg.
So putting all these together I declared that the spear was removed and the power coming from the sorcerer was cut off in Jesus’ name with hand motions. I then laid my hand on his leg and said “be healed in Jesus’ name. Pain be gone now. Leg restored in Jesus name.”
And praise God it was, and he was totally healed and was able to walk and sit with no pain. He stayed around for about another hour and a half talking with us and he stood and sat during that time with no pain.
God is good. I believe that our problem mainly lies within our heads in that we don’t believe what the word teaches us. We have been brain washed by the doctrines of a church that has lost its power and authority and has tried to compensate by making excuses why we can’t heal and cast out demons.
Praise God he is correcting us as we listen to what the Spirit is saying to the church.”