Derek Prince

From Philosophy to Scripture

Long before Derek Prince became known for opening a Bible and teaching from it for hours, he was a young Cambridge scholar who did not believe the Bible was the word of God. He had the education, the languages, the philosophy, the kind of mind that could take an argument apart and examine it carefully, but by his own account none of that had brought him to peace. Then war interrupted the life he expected to live, and somewhere inside a British Army barrack room the book he had taken up mainly as something else to study became the means through which he met Christ.

Bangalore and Cambridge

Prince was born in Bangalore, India, in 1915 into a British military family and was sent to England for his education. He won a scholarship to Eton, studied Greek and Latin, then went on to King’s College, Cambridge where he studied philosophy and eventually held a fellowship. Christianity belonged to his upbringing but it did not hold his heart, and during his Cambridge years he moved away from it. When the Second World War came he entered the Royal Army Medical Corps as a noncombatant, and because he had decided that a philosopher ought to understand the Bible before dismissing it, he began reading it.

For months he read and struggled with it. He later admitted that much of it seemed difficult and baffling to him, but he kept going because he did not want a book to defeat him. Then on the night of July 31, 1941, while stationed at Scarborough, something happened that all his years of philosophy had not given him language for. He encountered Jesus Christ. Prince would tell that story many times over the years without trying to make it respectable for an academic audience, he spoke of being overwhelmed, of weeping and then laughing, and of waking another soldier in the room because of the noise. About a week later he said he experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Whatever people later thought about every part of Derek Prince’s teaching, he never treated that night as a passing religious experience. Years afterward he could still say, “I’ve never doubted that Jesus is alive, and I’ve never doubted that the Bible is the Word of God.”

War, North Africa and Jerusalem

The scholar did not stop thinking after conversion, but something had changed underneath his thinking. Scripture was no longer an object he stood over and examined. He began to live under its authority. Soon afterward he was sent with his unit to North Africa where he served as a hospital attendant through difficult years of war, spending long stretches in the desert and giving much of his spare time to the Bible. He also suffered badly from a skin condition and spent many months in military hospitals. Those years became a kind of hidden Bible school for him, with very little of the life he would later become known for, just Scripture, prayer, war, sickness and a young believer trying to learn the ways of God.

Prayer became very real to him there. During the long British retreat across North Africa he began praying about the course of the war and later believed he had seen God answer in events surrounding El Alamein. Experiences like this stayed with him and would eventually become part of his lifelong burden for prayer and fasting. He came to believe deeply that believers should pray beyond their private needs, that nations and governments belonged in the place of intercession too. Years later he gathered much of that burden into Shaping History Through Prayer and Fasting.

The war eventually carried him into the Middle East and after his military service ended, Jerusalem became part of his life in a way that never really left him. There he met Lydia Christensen, a Danish missionary who had spent years caring for girls in Jerusalem. They married in 1946, and Derek became a father almost overnight to the eight girls already in Lydia’s care, six Jewish, one Arab and one English. He had gone into the army as an unmarried Cambridge philosopher and came out of it a Christian worker with a wife, eight daughters and a life that looked almost nothing like the one his education had prepared him for.

A Teacher Across Nations

The family remained in Jerusalem through the tension surrounding the birth of the State of Israel, then the fighting of 1948 forced them to leave. They eventually settled in Britain where Prince preached at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park and invited people back to the family home for further teaching. A congregation grew from those gatherings. Later the family moved to Kenya where Derek served for several years as principal of a teacher training college and continued preaching and teaching. Another African girl joined their family there.

Through all these movements one thing was becoming clearer, Prince was a teacher. He could take a subject, work carefully through the Scriptures and keep going until ordinary believers could follow what he was seeing. He was not known mainly because he could stir a crowd. There was something almost classroom-like about him even when he preached, Bible open, thoughts ordered, verse after verse allowed to carry the argument. His earlier training had not been thrown away. It had come under another Master.

During the 1960s his ministry moved increasingly into the United States and into the growing charismatic renewal. He taught strongly on the Holy Spirit, faith, prayer, fasting, spiritual gifts, deliverance, covenant and the authority of Scripture. Some of the subjects for which he later became most widely known, especially deliverance from demonic oppression and teaching about blessings and curses, have continued to be discussed and disagreed over among Christians, but he did not approach these things as entertainment. He believed the unseen world was real and that Scripture had to govern how believers dealt with it.

The Shepherding Controversy

There was also a serious mistake in those years that belongs in his record. Prince became one of the principal teachers associated with what became known as the Shepherding or Discipleship movement, alongside Bob Mumford, Charles Simpson, Don Basham and Ern Baxter. They were trying to answer real problems they saw in the charismatic movement, especially believers with little accountability or rootedness, but teachings about submission and spiritual authority grew into practices that brought unhealthy control into the lives of some Christians.

Prince eventually withdrew from the movement. He did not spend the rest of his life defending what had gone wrong. In one later sermon he spoke about it plainly and said, “God started something, but we messed it up.” He traced part of the failure to personal ambition. That admission belongs beside the better known parts of his ministry because a life of usefulness does not mean a life without error, and there is something important in a teacher being willing to say that he had helped take something in the wrong direction.

The work continued. His books travelled widely and eventually his voice did too. Derek Prince Publications began in 1971 and later became Derek Prince Ministries. Radio opened another door, especially after his marriage to Ruth Baker in 1978 following Lydia’s death three years earlier. Today with Derek Prince began on only a small number of stations and eventually carried his Bible teaching into nations he could never have reached personally. Over the years his material was translated into many languages and distributed far beyond the English speaking church.

Marriage, Later Work and Death

Ruth shared those years of travel and ministry with him, and together they returned to live in Jerusalem in the early 1980s. Israel remained a deep burden in Prince’s life. He prayed for Jerusalem, taught about God’s purposes for the Jewish people and urged Christians to take those purposes seriously. At the same time his ministry continued across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Americas and other parts of the world.

Prince was already an old man by then and her death struck him deeply. He later spoke openly about the bitterness he felt beginning to rise in him and the decision he made at her funeral to thank God for Ruth’s life and keep trusting Him. It was not the language of someone untouched by grief. He understood that if he allowed his heart to settle into resentment toward God, something inside him would close.

He continued teaching during the years that remained, though his health was declining. The voice became older, the body weaker, but the Bible was still open. He had written scores of books by then and left thousands of hours of recorded teaching behind, yet near the end of his life when a journalist asked what the church most needed, his answer was remarkably simple, “Bible teachers, serious Bible teachers.”

He had spent much of his youth learning how to think, then nearly all the rest of his life learning to bring thought under Scripture. The subjects changed, the countries changed, the people beside him changed, Lydia was gone, Ruth was gone, generations of listeners came and went, but he kept returning to the Book that had first confronted him as a soldier.