The Life and Times of Bear Creek Ranch

The Name

            “So, where is the creek?” The question has been asked hundreds of times. The answer is always the same, “There is no creek.” Then . . . “OK, you got some ‘splaining to do, Lucy.”

            In November 2001, my son Lucas and son-in-law Kevin went deer hunting on our property in Montour Falls, NY. About an hour after daybreak, they saw a black bear limping through the woods. Since a bear permit is included with the big game permit in that part of the state, they decided to put her out of her evident misery.

            As the shot rang out, she fell into a small, unnamed runoff stream.

            They rudely woke me up, demanding, “Hey, come see what we got.” And there she was, a three hundred pound bear, dressed out, and awaiting my reaction.

            After closer inspection, a thought occurred to me, “Is it bear season?” We looked it up in the DEC handbook and discovered that, though Lucas had a bear permit, the season wouldn’t open until forty-eight hours hence.

            “What do we do now?”

            I said, “Well, you have a couple of options. You can go out in the woods and bury her; nobody will be the wiser. You can hang her in the barn and tag her when the season opens. Or you can confess to the DEC and see what happens. It depends on what your integrity will allow you to do.”

            Lucas called the Game Warden and told him everything.

            When the officer came to my house to collect the bear, he couldn’t stop praising Lucas for his integrity. “I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, and I’ve never had anyone tell me the truth like this.” He was genuinely astonished.

            He quipped, “Listen, Lucas will live this down pretty quickly. But there is a guy just over the next hill who has been hunting for thirty years. On the first day of deer season he spotted two deer from his tree stand. He shot the first one and the second one just stood there. So, he killed that one, too. He excitedly ran to the place they had fallen and discovered that he had shot his neighbor’s two donkeys.”

            He continued over our laughter, “He will never live that down. So, tell Lucas he has nothing to worry about.”

            The Game Warden promised to tell the judge the whole story and ask for the smallest fine possible, since it could range from $500 to $4,000.

            It turned out to be a $500 bear – we didn’t even get to make it a rug – and the stream into which she fell was dubbed Bear Creek.

Fast and Be Floored

            In 1993, I was fasting and praying to hear some direction from the Lord for my personal walk and for our church. What I heard changed my life forever. The Holy Spirit spoke to my heart, “Preaching, in its present form, nauseates me.” I wrote it down, horrified. For years I had said, “I exist six days, twenty-three hours every week just to do the one thing I love: preaching.”

            He floored me with His statement.

            I went through the process of testing the prophetic word. I knew it wasn’t me; I loved preaching. Why would it be the Enemy? Of course preaching nauseates him: it reaches the lost for Jesus. He wouldn’t say something so obvious.

            I knew it was Father. (Read the rest of this story in Escaping Church.)

She Split My Lip

            One day, my wife and I were having one of those discussions, you know, much too loud and way too emotional. Suddenly, she leaped at me with both fists flailing. One blow split my lower lip. As she punched, she shouted, "I will never tell you anything again! All you ever do is use it against me!" Somehow, I kept my composure and didn't strike back or even move to protect myself. Seeing I was just standing there, she came at me again, but I was ready to block her little fists. As suddenly as she had attacked, she backed off, and stood there with her arms folded staring angrily at me. I took a breath and became aware that the presence of God had filled the room. I pointed my finger at the bed and commanded, "Sit down!" Miraculously, she sat down and folded her hands in her lap like a little girl. She had never obeyed me so swiftly, so I knew something was happening that was beyond both of us.

            I asked her, "What other secrets have you kept from me?" Suddenly, out poured her life, most of which I had never heard: a life filled with sexual abuse and destruction beginning at age three by a non-family member and continuing into her early teenage years. She had never shared this with anyone, not even with me, her husband of eighteen years. As it came gushing out, the compassion of Jesus flowed over me in that moment. We began what would be a five-year long process of healing. (Read the rest of this story in Out of Bondage.)

            When we shared this experience and her subsequent deliverance with our church, I made a specific plea to the congregation. I invited only those directly affected by sexual abuse in their own lives to respond. When 75% of the adults came forward for prayer, our lives and ministry were transformed forever. We were thrown headlong into inner healing ministry.

House Church What?

            We were planting a new church for the Assemblies of God in Elmira, NY when the two events above occurred. A third was lurking just around the next turn. We had been teaching and training our congregation as “Servants of Righteousness,” meaning, everyone in the Kingdom is a minister, not just the pastors.

            What resulted was breaking up the assembly into a couple dozen house groups.

            I was tasked with training the house group leaders. I had no idea what I was doing. I was a pastor with no concept of house church/cell groups/simple church/open church or any variation thereof. I prayed desperately every week that Father would tell me what to tell them.

            He did, week after week, until a colleague of mine handed me a book and said, “Hey, here’s a guy who is doing the same thing. I guess you’re not the only heretic out there.”            I was thrilled! We took the book, Open Church, and used it as a guide to doing house church.

            After four months of equipping the laity to lead their own house groups, we released them into the adventure. No more Sunday morning service, just house groups meeting day by day from house to house. Sounds kinda biblical, right? (See Acts 2) (Read the rest of this story in Escaping Church.)

Foreshadow

In 1994, we began to hear the Holy Spirit say, “Deliverance and Wholeness Center.” We thought we knew what it meant and He flooded our spirits with the vision of a center where seekers would come and undergo deliverance and receive counsel on living out their newfound liberty.

            However, as is the case when serving in the Upside-Down Kingdom, the path led out onto the road instead of in to a Center.

            With our life-altering revelations in hand, we embarked upon our new adventure. Katie and I formed Set Free Ministries and traveled full-time doing deliverance and wholeness seminars training deliverance teams in local churches.

            We continued to oversee the house groups, solving problems and sharing delights. Soon, we began to be called into other groups escaping the institutional church system around the country. We gladly accepted the task of midwifing them into their new world.
            Year after year passed and still there was no Center.

            For Christmas 2000, I bought Katie a saddle. When she saw it, she wept; it was a symbol of our vision. Within a few months, we moved into a new property, we knew it was the place: 240 acres of pristine land and a ramshackle house in Montour Falls, NY. Plans were laid for a lodge and cabins, and we negotiated with a national motel chain to build the hub of the new Wholeness Center.

            Bear Creek Ranch was crowning; the vision was birthing!

            Enter 9/11. The business people backing the project were no longer viable. We were extended beyond our ability to recover. Our ministry finances collapsed, and we were forced into personal bankruptcy.

            The vision was in shambles.

Two Ministers Walk Into A Bar . . .

            In our travels, we met Lynn and Linda Reddick. We spoke at some conferences together and we taught some classes at their training school in Portal, GA. Our hearts were knit together.

            During a conference at a hotel in Ohio, the four of us sat down in the hotel bar/restaurant to eat dinner. The prophetic began to stir and we conspired to develop the training school into a college.

            Back home at the Ranch, I wrestled my riding lawnmower over the expansive lawn and the Holy Spirit spoke so loudly I thought it was audible. “I didn’t tell you to buy this house,” He said.

            “What? What does that mean?”

            We intended to purchase the Ranch from the ministry and move forward with our plans for the Center. I shut the mower off and queried Him, “What do you mean by that?”

            Silence. (I often wonder at the cryptic nature of prophetic word, don’t you?)

Strangers In A Foreign Land

            One month later, we found ourselves living in Portal in time for the 2004 Fall semester at Covenant Bible Institute. How it happened is a blur; that it happened remains a marvel.

            “Ya’ll ain’t from here, er ya?” became the question of the year from the South Georgia natives among whom we now lived – our Yankee speech impediment was obvious. That was often followed by, “How do ya’ll get from New York to Portal?”

            We were in a foreign land where strangers actually make eye contact and everyone drives white pickup trucks. So, we bought a pickup, but are still working on looking in the face of the people when they ask, “Howzyermomernem?” (Which being translated means, “How is your mother and them.” And yes, it’s all one word here.)

            We put the vision of a deliverance and inner healing center to death and threw ourselves into our new life. As Academic Dean of the new Bible College, I invented the programs and courses for the growing student population. But after three years, we came to a watershed moment where we had to take the next leap toward government accreditation or to go in a different direction. It would cost several millions of dollars for the accreditation, several more for new accredited faculty, and several more millions in the college corpus. Since we only had several tens of dollars to our name, Father made His plan clear to everyone involved.

Born Again All Over Again

            On March 1st of 2007, Lynn and Linda introduced us to a man who came to share a vision he had to create a boot camp. He wanted to do it through and with Covenant Bible Institute. As he shared what he had seen, Katie’s right leg shook and all sorts of bodily fluids leaked from her head. We stared at him in horror: He was precisely describing our Bear Creek vision, you know, the one that never happened, that led us into bankruptcy, that we had put to death and mourned, and had finally put behind us.

            The audacity! I was furious.

            He didn’t want to do it; he just wanted to help fund it – he was a grant writer – and then move on to something else. He told us that he was in final negotiations to receive a $14,000,000 grant to make it happen.

            I still didn’t want to pick it back up. It had cost us too much the last time. My emotions were raw. Katie, typically, was ready to get back to work fulfilling the old vision.

            Two weeks later, we were in Hawaii at a conference – you know, suffering for the work of the ministry. In the first session, the first main point the speaker tossed up on the screen said, “Anything and everything will only succeed in the right environment.” He was talking to business entrepreneurs and ministry people. The first sub-point followed, “Anything and everything will only succeed in the right geographical environment.” Then, he said it: “Right vision; wrong location.”

            Ever been hit in the forehead with a baseball bat? Imagine the spinning vision, the nausea. Father spoke; I blanched; Bear Creek Ranch rose from the grave.

Reruns

            The grant dissipated. It doesn’t matter why or how; it just plain disappeared. Here we were with empty hands and a vision in reruns. Once again, we pledged to be faithful in the small things and move ahead.

            Magnanimous, eh?

            In coming to Georgia, our traveling ministry had dwindled to nothing. But, for some strange reason, more and more people came to us for deliverance. Katie coached them through our wholeness and inner healing follow-up, and by January 2008, they were waiting in line.

            Katie decided – despite my objections – that we should bring them all together for a retreat instead of taking them through one by one as we had been doing for more than twenty-five years.

            More people inquired; more retreats were scheduled. Our Deliverance Retreat was born. So, we accidentally backed into our Deliverance and Wholeness Center.

Fresh Meat

            During this time, a whole new team of people began to appear. We trained deliverance teams, and team leaders, and put them to work.

            Each time we scheduled a retreat, it filled up. We haven’t marketed it outside those on our existing database, yet new seekers appear, seemingly out of nowhere.
            Apparently, Father is behind this thing.

            Portal is a town of less than six hundred people that barely appears on the map. But, people are being drawn here. Father loves the Bethlehems of this world. It’s the foolish things He uses to confound those of us who think we are wise.

            Portal is that to me.

Hoss

            There is no creek here either. In fact, Bear Creek Ranch is not even a place yet, just a vision of a ranch providing freedom and liberty to those who find their way to us.

            We were able to purchase a property here in Portal, ten acres with a double-wide. (Now, Katie is the queen of my double-wide, an obscure reference to a recent country song). The Lord has compelled a few of our friends and ministry colleagues to share their blessings with us. So, we are supported like missionaries in a foreign land.

            We have never had a pet; not a fish or a dog, though, to be perfectly candid, I did have a pet rock back in the 70’s. One day while driving down the dirt road on which we live, I heard a strange sound. I looked in the rearview mirror and there in the ditch were three puppies someone had abandoned. After living for a couple of weeks with the ADHD triplets, we gave two of them away.

            We chose Hoss.

            Once the pet-dam was broken, chickens soon appeared, followed closely by a couple of horses on loan from Elshaddai Farms in Apopka, Florida. Father has been prepping us for the ranch. Imagine if you will, this city-boy doing daily chores, and actually touching animals without the protection of rubber gloves.

            Weird.

Riding Off Into the Sunset

            We believe the next step is to build a retreat house – dare we say it? – to build Bear Creek Ranch Retreat Center. We have begun to cast the vision to those on our mailing lists through our newsletter, The Dispatch. We expect that soon – more than fifteen years after receiving the vision – we are going to see the actual Deliverance and Wholeness Center appear.

 

Tim and Katie Mather
Bear Creek Ranch Foremen