Prophetic Ministry Guidelines by Denomination (Compared)

A safeguarding lead opens five denominational websites in five tabs before Monday's leadership meeting, looking for one plain answer: does anyone official actually say how a prophetic word should be recorded, weighed, and followed up.

Four bodies publish something concrete enough to check directly. The Assemblies of God's 2025 position paper Modern-Day Prophecy gives a four-question weighing test and a warning about social media. New Wine Cymru's 2024 Prophetic Forum guidelines require every session to be recorded and the recording sent to the church's own leaders. Vineyard Churches UK & Ireland splits the practice between a general safeguarding statement and a teaching resource on weighing a word. A widely used protocol compiled by John Paul Jackson and Marc Dupont sets Scripture as the standard and requires an apology when a word turns out wrong. Elim's public guidance covers safeguarding broadly but names no separate prophecy policy. Across every document that says anything concrete, four convictions repeat: Scripture judges the word, weighing happens in community, personal words get extra care, and a wrong word is owned honestly rather than dropped.

Which denominations publish prophetic ministry guidelines?

A pastor writing a prophecy policy is not starting from nothing. Several church movements have already put their thinking about prophetic ministry in writing, and a leader can read it directly rather than guess. Five documents are named below, each read directly rather than taken on trust; anything not confirmed by reading the source is left out. None is ranked against another; each comes from a church family with its own history and its own way of putting the same convictions into words.

What does the Assemblies of God position paper require?

The Assemblies of God's General Presbytery adopted its position paper Modern-Day Prophecy on August 4 to 5, 2025. It affirms prophecy as an ongoing gift, then spends most of its length on how a church should judge it. It gives four questions for weighing a word: does it edify the church (the why), does it avoid unnecessary confusion (the how), is it biblical (the what), and is the person trustworthy (the who)? On personal words it is direct: prophecy belongs to the local congregation, where the speaker is known and accountable, and no word should be given in a way that is shielded from the discernment or judgment of the believing community around it. It names social media as a specific risk, because a public post strips a word of the context, correction, and community a face-to-face setting provides. On accountability, correction of someone who prophesies wrongly should be gentle rather than punitive, and pastors carry responsibility for teaching a whole congregation how to weigh what it hears.

What does New Wine Cymru's Prophetic Forum guidance require?

New Wine Cymru, the Welsh regional expression of the New Wine movement, publishes a short guidelines document for the prophetic ministry it offers to church leadership teams (May 2024). Two of its rules stand out for their concreteness: every prophetic session is recorded, and every recording is sent to the church's own leaders afterward, so a word never lives only in one person's memory. Personal words are given individually, in an unhurried two-hour session; the guidelines recommend no more than six leaders in a group at a time and ask participants to keep their cameras on so the team can see who they are ministering to. On accountability, the document asks the receiving church to build its own relational accountability around the prophetic ministry it hosts: the church's own leadership team carries the ongoing evaluating.

What does Vineyard Churches UK teach about weighing a word?

Vineyard Churches UK & Ireland does not publish a single named prophecy policy the way New Wine Cymru does. Instead it separates two things a church needs. Its safeguarding statement (updated May 2023) sets the general reporting route: a national safeguarding team, a stated commitment to preventing abuse, and named contacts for concerns, though it does not address prophetic ministry specifically. Its teaching resource Stewarding the Prophetic (Katia Adams, 2020) covers the practice itself: a word has to be weighed and actively engaged with before it comes to anything, and leaders carry responsibility for pastoring people through the process of receiving and engaging a word.

What does Elim publish on prophetic ministry?

Elim's safeguarding pages (its national policy is dated for the 2025 to 2026 church year) commit the movement to building healthy churches and safe spaces for everyone in its community, name a National Safeguarding Lead, and route concerns through an online portal or the national team by phone or email. What is notable by its absence: neither Elim's general safeguarding page nor its article on healthy church culture names prophecy or prophetic ministry specifically. Elim folds prophetic ministry into the same safeguarding culture as every other form of pastoral contact; its public guidance has no separate prophecy document.

What does the widely used Jackson/Dupont protocol require?

One more document is worth naming because so many prophetic teams already work from it without a formal denominational tie: Biblical Principles Concerning Ethics and Protocols Relating to New Testament Prophetic Ministry, compiled by John Paul Jackson and Marc Dupont with an editing team of several other well-known prophetic teachers. It is written as a first-person commitment a minister can sign. It sets the Bible as the absolute standard for weighing and assessing any revelation, requires full repentance and a specific apology when a word turns out wrong, calls for an ongoing accountability group for the minister's own life and marriage, and flatly refuses to let anyone charge a fee for a prophetic word.

Two bodies came up often in the sources behind this post but could not be confirmed here: Australian Christian Churches has a public Safer Churches child-protection page, but nothing on it names prophecy specifically, so it is left out of the comparison above rather than guessed at.

What do the guidelines agree on?

Read across these documents and the same convictions surface every time, in different words.

• The Bible judges the prophetic word. The Assemblies of God and the Jackson/Dupont protocol both name Scripture as the standard a word is measured against; Paul's own instruction sits behind both: "Two or three prophets should speak, and the others should weigh carefully what is said" (1 Corinthians 14:29).
• A word is weighed in community. The Assemblies of God paper warns specifically against a word given where there is no community to weigh it. New Wine Cymru builds this into the room itself: cameras on, a named church team receiving the recording afterward.
• Personal words get extra care. Both New Wine Cymru's small-group format and Vineyard's emphasis on pastoring someone through a word treat the individual on the receiving end as someone who needs support through what they have heard.
• Getting it wrong is planned for. The Assemblies of God calls for gentle correction; the Jackson/Dupont protocol spells out an apology, restitution, and continued accountability, on the assumption that a prophetic ministry will sometimes miss.
• Recording matters. Where a document gets specific at all, it tends to land on the same point: write it down, or record it, so the word can be weighed against what was actually said rather than what someone remembers being said.

Where do they differ?

The differences are mostly a matter of form. Some publish a standalone prophecy document (New Wine Cymru, the Assemblies of God); others fold prophetic ministry into general safeguarding and teaching resources without a dedicated policy (Elim, and to a lesser extent Vineyard). Some name a mechanism, such as a recording sent to leaders or a four-question test; others state a principle and leave the mechanism to the local church. The differences are a matter of form: how much practical detail belongs in a public document versus a leadership team's own habits.

How does a church adopt or adapt one?

A church does not need to write a prophecy policy from a blank page, and it does not need to adopt one denomination's document wholesale either. A workable approach: take the four-question weighing test from the Assemblies of God paper, New Wine Cymru's habit of recording and returning every word to the church's own leaders, and Vineyard's instinct to pastor the recipient rather than simply deliver a word and move on. Write those three practices into a short policy your leadership team actually reads and uses. There is a free prophecy policy template built along these lines, ready to adapt for your own church.

A policy is only as good as the place the practice actually happens. A shared record that the discernment team can see, weigh against Scripture, and confirm together keeps the recording step every document above names as good practice from living only in one person's memory or a phone note that gets lost.

FAQ

Which denominations publish official prophetic ministry guidelines?

The Assemblies of God adopted a position paper on modern-day prophecy in August 2025. New Wine Cymru publishes a short guidelines document for the prophetic ministry it offers church leadership teams. Vineyard Churches UK & Ireland and Elim address prophetic ministry through general teaching and safeguarding resources rather than a single standalone policy. A widely used protocol outside any denomination, compiled by John Paul Jackson and Marc Dupont, is also in circulation among prophetic teams.

Do these guidelines agree with each other?

Yes, on the substance. Every document that addresses the practice in any detail holds to the same core: Scripture is the standard a word is weighed against, weighing happens in community rather than alone, personal words deserve extra pastoral care, and a minister who gets a word wrong owns it honestly rather than quietly dropping it.

Why does Elim's public guidance not mention prophecy specifically?

Elim's national safeguarding pages address the whole of church life, including prophetic ministry, under one safeguarding culture rather than a separate prophecy clause. That is a real choice some movements make: fold every form of pastoral contact into one safeguarding framework instead of writing a document for each.

What should a church do if it cannot find its own denomination's prophecy guidelines?

Borrow the practices themselves, whichever movement they came from. The four-question weighing test, the habit of recording every word, and pastoring the person who receives it are not proprietary to any one movement; they show up across every document reviewed here. A short, adapted policy built from them will serve a congregation better than waiting for a denominational document that may not exist.

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Keep Reading

• Prophetic Ministry Guidelines for Churches: A Protocol
• Weighing Prophecy: How Churches Test Words Together
• How to Start a Prophetic Ministry Team at Your Church

Doxa helps churches record prophetic words, weigh them together against Scripture, and hold the good ones until they come to pass. It is free to start; see how it works for churches.