‘Voice from the sky’ Jennie Allen’s Prison Ministry event

By Elizabeth Prata

Jennie Allen has a new target audience for her brand of Gospel: incarcerated women.

Jennie Allen is the founder of the global conference for women called IF:Gathering. She founded it in 2013 based on a “voice from the sky” to use Allen’s words, telling her to equip and disciple this generation. IF:Gathering was born, “Inspired by the question “If God is real… then what?”

No. Romans 1 tells us that every single soul knows God is real, they just suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

I admire people who are committed to prison ministry. It’s important to heed the Lord’s commission to try and reach every tribe, tongue, and nation no matter where they are, in the 10/40 window of the hard and closed countries or behind bars where they cannot come to us in church so we must go to them.

But like everywhere, we need to be careful who we allow ‘in’ to our mind and soul. Women in prison are a captive audience, so it’s even more important to properly vet the speakers coming to teach. It is sad that the organization God Behind Bars chose Allen to minister to women.

Why?

Allen as mentioned above, she believes that disembodied voices from the sky are God. So, she believes in extra-biblical revelation. She also finds no worries in preaching to men, employs spiritual formation practices such as Enneagram, seeks unity at the expense of truth, and partners with terrible false teachers.

Below is a clip of Allen’s appearance at a max security women’s prison near Las Vegas. Allen wrote on her Instagram, “160 women attended in a maximum security prison in Las Vegas. 130 stood up to pray to receive Christ and we baptized 110.”

Mass conversion events like these always make me skeptical. These type of events are often musically manipulated, emotional events. Mass conversions are rare. Even Jonathan Edwards after the success of his piercing sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God which sparked the Great Awakening, was skeptical of the genuineness of the people rushing to claim they were converted. As John MacArthur has said,

So you must enter, you must enter this gate, you must enter alone, you must enter with a certain amount of violence (difficulty), and you must enter naked, in a sense—with nothing in your hands. You can’t go through the narrow gate with your baggage; it’s a turnstile.

On the other hand, you could choose the wide gate, easily found, easily marked with all kinds of false teachers pointing you in that direction. Lots of crowds, no difficulty, no self-denial. Bring your baggage, bring your sin, bring your self-will. No repentance, no surrender, no submission to Christ. It’s the gate of self-indulgence. It’s for those who want a little religion, but religion that doesn’t ask them to give up everything.

To be fair, it’s just a clip, so I don’t know if she preached a good sermon or not.

But to be realistic, she has never taught rightly so…likely when Allen says “Colleges to prisons! What do they have in common? They are all DESPERATE for God” I must ask myself, ‘Yes, Jennie, but WHICH God are they hungry for? Because your God is not the God of the Bible.”

When she speaks in interviews about submission to elders in one’s church, for example, it’s only if they are not controlling. And only if it doesn’t impinge on her ambition to preach.

I do mourn the false theology Allen probably gave in that prison. I HOPE it was a message solidly exegeted from the Bible to women’s souls in holiness and rightly dividing the word. I HOPE so. But I fear it was not.

I wonder how many of those women’s repentance was real or not, how many will continue to walk toward holiness as the emotionalism of the event wears off. It’s a grief to know that these false teachers spread their brand of faux-Christianity to unsuspecting women.

Satan is active everywhere, roaming the earth to see whom he may devour. We need to be just as active. I know it seems that the numbers are skewed in the direction of satan, i.e. that there are many more of them than there are of us. But God in His power will save whom He wants to save and He has no difficulty doing it. Yes, it is disheartening to see satan’s activity but it is more than heartening when one genuine believer is converted, adding to the trophies of grace in Jesus’ kingdom for His glory.

While I genuinely doubt all 130 women in the event were truly saved, I know that the Lord would probably have saved one or two, or a few. And they will be a light and a witness to His grace in that prison while they live, and then forevermore.