We made the move to Campbellsville, KY from Asheville, NC in late August of this year for the purpose of establishing a new kind of healing community. The more familiar we become with the community itself and get more understanding about what we believe God wants to do here, the more we come to appreciate that this is going to be significantly different than we ever imagined. It is certainly not complete, but the vision is gaining clarity day by day.
Perhaps the most interesting element of this move is that it was from Asheville, a city of 72,789 in a county (Buncombe) with a population of 238,318, to a rural city of 11,266, located in a county (Taylor) of only 24, 512. The bottom line? There are more cattle living around Campbellsville than there are people living in it. One of the most bizarre things about Campbellsville is in the last half century I have lived in over 75 towns and this is the first one without a BBQ joint of any kind.
On the other hand, we do have two Asian and two Mexican food restaurants. The point being that you can’t be a food snob here and have any place to eat out. This is no up-scale anything.
To make matters more interesting there is a Baptist University (about 3,500 students) here and the county and surrounding counties are dry, so there are no beer joints to hang out in, no clubs to visit, no local music venues for those under 30 of any kind to frequent. There are no festivals here either. There is absolutely nothing to do here. When we opened a banks account here and the young lady who helped us asked, “Why did you come to Campbellsville? I’ve been trying to get out of here all my life.”
To make matters worse there are no significant employment opportunities here. The last major employer Fruit of the Loom bit the dust over five years ago letting go about 4,500 workers. There are jobs here, but for the most part they are only $8.50 to $10 per hour without growth potential. Many of the local residents actually work in others cities 30 miles (Lebanon and Columbia) and 46 miles (Elizabethtown) away. Consequently, graduates of Campbellsville University have had to leave the area in order to find employment.
On the positive side, I can sit on my back patio and hear every high school band concert free of charge, along with moms and dads cheering their kids at the various pee wee football and soccer games in the evenings. And if the wind is just right I can hear the college band practice, and I can hear the roar of the engines at the Saturday night tractor pulls contests. I can be at the bank, the grocery store, church, Lowes and Wal Mart in five (5) minutes or less. Which is wonderful … but that’s about all there is to go to.
The point of all this is two-fold.
If you are going to prosper in Campbellsville you have to make some significant life choices. One of the biggest is that you have to choose to live in community; which means that you have to choose to live your life in the context of small groups of people; small groups for church; small groups for socialization; small groups for entertainment; small groups for sports and recreation; small groups for everything. And you have to choose to do it in small groups multiple times each week.
Small town USA living has some interesting ramifications. One of them is the time it takes to do anything. In a larger city the time it takes to accomplish anything has a significant compliment of travel in it. When we lived in the Atlanta you had to add thirty minutes to any task just to make sure you got there, and another 20 or 30 to get back. Here the issue is conversations with people you meet in the grocery store, the gas station or the laundry. You have to add at least 20 minutes to every trip just to catch up on who’s who and what’s what. That’s small town living at its best. And worst because everyone here knows (or think they know) everybody else’s business. If they don’t know it, they are pumping you for it.
Everyone longs for community and the joys of it. But there is a price to be paid for it. In most cities you have to choose to pass on all the other distractions and activities available to you in order to have it. Here in Campbellsville that choice on one level is already made for you. But the lack of opportunity to participate in voluntary distractions doesn’t negate the fact that you still have to choose to be a part of community. And you still have to choose to share your life, as others also must choose to share their lives with you. Part of sharing life together is inventing things to do together; social imagineering.
We live in a world that prizes independence and self-reliance; all characteristics of your local neighborhood narcissist. A great recipe for isolation. These are great characteristics if coupled with personal responsibility and intentionally genuine care for others.
The other significant element that cannot be ignored here, as alluded to in the opening paragraphs, is the fact that because there is nothing to do and no place to work here the church has to take its rightful place in the community and take on the economic poverty that has gripped this community for years. I want to approach this from two perspectives; first, from the corporate point of view, and secondly, from an individual entrepreneur perspective.
If you will recall, David stood in the prophetic place for all believers of prophet, priest and king. At various times David operated in each of these individually and on occasion, in two simultaneously. However you recognize it, David was simply conveying to us a practical pre-Christ representation of our rightful spiritual position in our fleshly world. We in charismatic circles are certainly familiar with the prophetic in a number of different ministry applications. We are also certainly familiar and have readily embraced the position of priest in the Body of Christ. In fact, we’ve done this pretty well for the last couple of centuries. The prophetic place we haven’t yet seen emerge is the kingly position.
We have several pictures of the kingly anointing in the Bible, but none more clearly represented than the New Testament description of the Holy Spirit encounter with Peter and Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5:1-5). Peter stood in the kingly place of determining what was acceptable and what was not, declared it and as a result, both died. In the Old Testament, when Deborah (Judges 4:4-5) took her place as gatekeeper, she determined what entered the city and what left the city; effectively determining what commerce was allowed to be conducted in the city. Evil left and righteous remained.
There is a day coming in which the Lord will declare who is against the Lord and His ways, and who has hardened his/her heart against the Lord permanently. When that day comes the righteous will confront the evil and declare they are being given 24 hours to repent. If they do not, they will die. At first blush that doesn’t sound Christian to us. Certainly there is no turning the other cheek in that scenario. But there is a Biblical precedent that cannot be denied. I am here to prophesy that it is coming to a town near you … if, and only if, the gatekeepers and spiritual authorities will take their place.
There is in this community a major issue with drugs; abuse primarily of prescription drugs, plus a few other recreational drugs. The reason we do not have a BBQ restaurant is that what we did have was closed last month because they were growing marijuana in the back of the store, among offering other nefarious products and services.
I spoke with a neighbor a few days ago who lamented that the loss of the local Chief of Police was retiring soon. Her experience has been that there is some discernable corruption with local law enforcement, which also appears periodically in the local court system … after I mentioned our work with survivors of sexual slavery. She followed up that statement by mentioning another major problem in the county; incest and the county’s propensity to turn a blind eye to it.
I am not saying that it is time for every believer to confront those you believe to be outside the law. Most don’t have that level of spiritual maturity or discernment to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. (Suspicion does not qualify as discernment.) There are those who have set their hearts and minds, even given their lives to, the destruction of anything that speaks to, or promotes Godliness. What I am saying is that we are in a spiritual battle for the individual cities of our nation and it is time for those with the maturity and the discernment to begin to act on what they see.
It is time for the church to rise. It is time for the spiritual gatekeepers to take their place and declare what is lawful and acceptable in the county (Campbellsville is the County seat) and what is not. It is time that the church determines what righteous commerce is and what is not, and that the unrighteous has to be revealed and removed from the county. It is time that the gatekeepers and other spiritual authorities take their place such that righteousness (which exalts a nation) can firmly be established. When that happens, an atmosphere will be established in the city and the county that will foster the blessing of commerce. Businesses will spring up (Psalms 112:3, Proverbs 13:22, Eccl 5:19, Is 60:11) and full employment will return. The community as a whole will be blessed because we will become the blessing that God intended for us to be.
Let the redeemed of the Lord ‘say so.’ (Psalms 107:2) In other words, let the church say what is proper in the city and the county (not the world) and what must leave immediately. The wicked have to go. That is our birthright. Let us no longer give it to the enemy to exercise. (2 Samuel 22:35)
The second thing I would like to address is the revival of the entrepreneurial spirit here in this little corner of the globe, which is another basic function of the triumphant church. (Deut 8:18) As our pastor, Adam Russell, sated to me a couple of weeks ago, “You can’t work for The Man in Campbellsville. You have to be The Man.” That statement is so pregnant with truth for the Body of Christ it’s ridiculous. Look at the following;
Deuteronomy 8:18 “But you shall remember the LORD your God: for it is He that gives you power to get wealth, that He may establish his covenant which he swore unto your fathers, just as it is today.”
Proverbs 8:10-12 “Receive my instruction, and not silver; and knowledge rather than choice gold. 11 For wisdom is better than rubies; and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared to it. 12 I wisdom dwell with prudence, and find out knowledge of witty inventions.”

It is the Lord who not only grants us the power to get wealth, but it is the Lord who even authors the ideas that generate it. Collectively we in the church have focused far too long on our sin, our weaknesses and all the reasons why we can’t make things work. It is high time for us to realize that the Lord not only knows all that, but He doesn’t care about it. This is about Him doing through us and in us what He wants to. When you and I are focused on what we have to improve on for that to happen, it becomes about us. We need to become less sin focused … and more God conscious.
For centuries the church has had the viewpoint that we need to separate from the world – meaning run and hide from it so that we are not contaminated by it. Consequently, we have slowly conceded full control of every earthly Kingdom to the enemy and it’s been used against us. If we live in an area where the economic and spiritual conditions are depressed, the future of those we love will continually be in jeopardy. This is the fault of the corporate Body of Christ in the city or region and the plan of the enemy to relegate the church to the place of irrelevance in society as a whole.
The Lord put into each of us a specific combination of dreams, desires, talents, aptitudes, spiritual gifts, skills and abilities, intellect, personality and temperament for a reason. He wants to be Himself through an authentic you!
When God told Abraham that he was blessed to be a blessing, He was setting a Kingdom principle in place that remains today. You are blessed to be a blessing, unless you are stuck in the place of recounting how unqualified and inappropriate you are for that challenge. We are blessed to bring blessing back to our beleaguered employment-challenged communities. We are the ones who are blessed to foster creative ideas for new products and services, create new companies which employ thousands and change the face of America – even if the rest of the country doesn’t have a clue. I believe the entrepreneurial spirit is actually the Holy Spirit in disguise. If we refuse to embrace it, we will forfeit the very reason we were created.
So to cap this off; Why are we really here?
We have on some level come to realize that all the inner healing work we have learned to do, and consistently engage in teaching so many others to do, is actually part of a bigger strategy that the Lord has in mind here. We are here to help create an environment where the younger generation can find out who they are (re-establish personal identity); enable them to engage God to heal the wounds that bind them from being who they were created to be; help them to discover and embrace their strengths; recover their dreams; equip them with skills to solve personal problems and resolve conflict with others; and help build the foundation of a platform of success under them that allows them to be blessed and become a blessing where ever they go and whatever they do.
From there, we are to teach and encourage others to do the same. America can be a great blessing again if, and only if, the church resumes its proper role in society.
To accomplish this we are planning to start a school beginning in January 2012 where enrollees can interactively collide with the above noted subjects and be changed to realize their full potential. This is not a ministry school. Yes, some aspects and tools of ministry will be taught, but it is more a classroom environment geared to mastering life. The most primary element of it being the discovery and encounter of personal identity, which will help unveil their primary purpose for life here on planet earth. The courses will be very practically oriented and will even include some secular tools for assisting in determining aptitudes and career choices, basic financial management, problem resolution, business planning, etc.
Planning is already underway and you can expect an official announcement within the next few weeks. Thus far there are seven (7) individuals who will be teaching. We are anticipating that the initial year will not involve a fee, but will only require re-imbursement for classroom materials provided. If you would like to sow into this fertile field and the lives of a couple dozen future world changers, you may do so at www.houseofhealingministries.org.

The move from Asheville, NC to Campbellsville, KY is complete. It took more time, required more energy and stamina, and was much more troublesome and expensive than we ever imagined. In the moving biz, bags don’t fly free. But we are here and have gotten “mostly” situated. Many thanks to the 10 able bodies who met us when we arrived and unloaded it.
Although the move didn’t make much sense from a ministry perspective, alas it was for the ministry that we made the move. The Lord said, “You can’t go to the next level without it.” The shift has already begun. We will be starting to help create another healing community here, but it will look markedly different than what we were able to put together in Asheville. This will look much more like an entire church who’s mission is all aspects of healing; physical, emotional and spiritual.
This past week we began planning for two major efforts; a school/training program and a safe house for sex trafficked girls. The training facility will have two functions. The first will be initiated in January 2012 and will provide young people with a series of courses and exercises that provide a method to establish personal identity, which will in turn help them to establish a course for the remainder of their lives. It is not a ministry school per se, although there will be elements of it included. The second function will be to equip individuals with the tools to be the most effective prayer ministers they can be and enable them be effective in all ministry situations, from the simplest to the most complex of healing and deliverance opportunities.
The third activity that is beginning to take shape through discussions with other ministers is the establishment of a Safe House for women who have rescued from sex trafficking. The need is great and we have already been asked for an opening date. God seems to be drawing additional ministers here with like hearts for the broken, so we feel that in time there are going to be ample number of ministers to meet the size of the task. We simply have to get God’s mind on what and how to accomplish it.
Pat and I will continue to teach Sozo and other inner healing topics, do personal ministry and put on the very popular Inner Healing RoundTables around the country. If you, or someone you know, would like training in any of these areas please guide them to our web site.
The Trauma Prayer that was prayed over a group in Moultrie, GA is now available as a free download from this website, Itunes, Vimeo and Facebook. The testimonies of healing, deliverance and the re-establishment of uninterrupted sleep continue to flood in. Please send the link to all your friends on Facebook, email and whatever other social media you subscribe to. If they need help, this is it. We even had one gal report that she had lost 17 pounds listening to it every night. The calmness that she now had has broken the “need to feed.” Jesus has given His Body an amazing tool. Let Him have His glory!
If you would like ministry in Asheville, NC we remain connected with a cadre of well trained and highly experienced prayer ministers that we can refer you to. So don’t despair – help is available.
Jim Banks

For all of you who patiently awaited the download of the Abilene, TX Inner Healing Round Table Audio, it is now available at the Resources Page at House of Healing Ministries website.  Download individual speakers for $4.00 each or the entire 5-person teaching set for $20.00.

Please read the entire press release here.  As part of this roll-out of the new book, you can download a PDF copy of the file by visiting the download section of this website (please note that the PDF file cannot be printed) and is available now.  The book will start shipping March 1st.