Recently, Allison was interviewed by fellow IHOP-KC missionary Nathan Wood for the IHOP-KC blog. Check it out below or go to www.ihop.org and look at the blog for pictures and other cool stuff.
April 21st, 2010 by nathanwood
Nate: How did you come to the Lord? What is your testimony?
Allison: I was raised in a godly home with godly parents who testified to the truth and reality of Jesus throughout my life. However, when I was eighteen, I left home and went on a Grateful Dead tour. For the next few years I was caught up in a nomadic lifestyle, traveling all over the country.
Nate: What do you mean when you say nomadic?
Allison: I lived out of vans, in makeshift camps, and in woods all around the world. I lived in parks in the middle of cities.
Nate: So, you were a hippie?
Allison: Yes, I was a hippie. I became heavily involved in drugs, drinking, sexual promiscuity, and all the things that go with that. I was trying to find a community. I was very lost, very deceived, and it was all so empty. When I finally returned to the Lord, I was 26 years old.
Nate: At what point did you just realize that it was an empty lifestyle and not what you thought it was?
Allison: I think because of my upbringing, I always knew it was wrong. I always believed in God, but was furiously running from Him. I think that very early on in that lifestyle I knew I was chasing something that could never satisfy me.
Nate: So you had a little nugget of truth, in the back of your mind, always bothering you?
Allison: Yeah, that truth was always in the back of my mind, and my parents were intercessors, constantly praying for me. I was caught in the crossfire of God’s love. I constantly felt guilty, but I would try to medicate that guilt with other things.
Nate: At what point did you realize you couldn’t run anymore; what was the turning point in your heart or in your mind that pushed you to return to God?
Allison: It started in April 1996. I was a heroin addict, and I woke up one morning on the floor in an abandoned trailer in the middle of the Oregon woods. I had a moment of clarity. I looked around me, and there was no one near. I was sober, and I realized that I was dirty (I hadn’t had a bath in weeks), that I was broke, and that I was lonely. There was no one around me that had true affection for me. Anyone that I was with would have thrown me out of a window to get a fix. I felt the Lord speak to me. He began to say, “I have more than this for you.“ I was twenty-six years old. I was a smart girl, yet my life was a constant downward spiral. So I did what any normal person would do. I hitchhiked to a pay phone, called my mom, and said, “Help me!” It took me about two months to get back to Alabama, but I had a radical, supernatural deliverance from my heroin addiction in one day. I was completely delivered, without any side effects. That should not have been possible. So, even before my salvation, the Lord touched me and healed me. I actually didn’t end up getting saved for another two years. I was fighting the truth because of my desire to live life on my own terms. The Lord was drawing me, mostly through the testimony of my parents’ love and through His kindness in bringing me back. One night, I was waiting tables at a bar and somebody gave me a Bible. Later, I picked up a six-pack of beer, read Romans, and turned to the Lord.
Nate: Did you meet your husband Samuel while you were in Alabama?
Allison: Yes, I met Samuel in late October 1998, and I met the Lord about three months later in January 1999. Samuel had a huge part in bringing me to the Lord. He was obsessed with the man Jesus, and he constantly talked about Him. He stirred up all these things from my childhood—memories of the love of God and the unveiling of the Savior. We would dialogue about Jesus for hours. So when I got saved, Samuel was ready to go there with me.
Nate: How did you hear about the house of prayer? When did you come to the International House of Prayer?
Allison: We got married in 1999 and moved to North Florida, where our love for the Lord grew strong. We were involved in ministry, and we met some people who had been tracking with Mike Bickle’s teachings. As we learned about the forerunner ministry, it confirmed some words of knowledge that had been spoken over Samuel. He was at the Passion for Jesus conference in 1997, when Mike laid out the initial plans for IHOP–KC. He was hitchhiking through town when a woman told him, “If you come to this conference, I’ll pay for your dinner and I’ll get you and your friend a hotel room.” He wasn’t even there to go to the conference—he was a hippie looking for a free ride and some food. Later on, we established a house of prayer in Florida. Within that time period, we went to IHOP–KC’s onething conference in Atlanta in 2003. We moved to Kansas City in 2006 after the Lord made it very clear to us.
Nate: Tell us about what do you do here. What does the Lord have you doing in ministry?
Allison: Besides serving in the prayer room as an intercessor, my primary service is working with the Children’s Equipping Center, specifically, with a prayer room intensive for 8–12-year-olds in the Samuel Company. We minister to about 150 kids.
Nate: There are 150 kids?
Allison: Technically there are 130, but we have a lot of visitors each week. Our goal at the Samuel Company is to teach kids how to do what we as forerunners do: to build a house of prayer and to commit to a lifestyle of prayer and fasting. Of course, with children, fasting is never about food. But we do talk about making choices. With our kids, fasting means that they might choose to fast computer games or candy, but they don’t fast meals. We encourage them to love God with all their strength. We also teach them practical tools for the prayer room. Kids sometimes come in and don’t know how to pray. They don’t know how to pray from the Word, so we help them with it. We bring all 150 kids into the prayer room at one time, and the very atmosphere changes when they walk in. There’s electricity with these kids. People are seeing them worship with their hands raised and praying with their whole hearts to the Lord. It’s a very powerful experience.
Nate: I love that. There is nothing better than training the next generation in the things of God. So what’s it like to have your whole family here? What are the challenges and rewards of having your whole family involved?
Allison: Originally, Samuel and I had decided that we would do give our lives to God in the prayer room and through the forerunner ministry. After a couple of months, we realized that it wasn’t just about us, but that we were supposed to take our kids with us. In the prayer room, our kids were laying hands on people, and one of our sons was prophesying and just really getting involved. We homeschool our boys, so they get a regular education, but we really love watching them grow in the things of God when they go to the prayer room. We are a family of intercessory missionaries. It’s very rewarding as a mother to watch my kids grab onto the truth of the love and affection that God has for them. They are walking in the strength of that truth.
We have won if they understand the truth of God’s love. Knowing that they are running the race with comrades their own age is good too. They are challenging and provoking their friends and each other to learn Scripture and to pray. My kids were on a forty-day video game fast, and I could hear them encouraging their friends: “We haven’t played a video game in twenty-one days!”
The challenges are in living regular life. The prayer room is a place that my kids like to go, but there are days that they don’t want to pray. Then it’s time to encourage them. Sometimes I just want to check out of the prayer room, go outside, and pick flowers, but the Lord has called us to this lifestyle. It can be challenging to make sure that our kids don’t burn out, but at the end of the day they are strengthened in the things of God.



