By Oyewole Sarumi
The most dangerous error is never the one that arrives with a denial. It is the one that arrives with a testimony. It speaks the vocabulary of the sanctuary, kingdom, authority, ordinance, spirit, midnight, and it delivers results. People testify. Crowds gather. The algorithm rewards it. And because something happened, the leader and the congregation conclude that God was in it. This is the precise terrain upon which the contemporary church must now exercise its most disciplined discernment.
The teaching under consideration, popularly associated with Pastor Jerry Eze and the New Season Prophetic Prayers and Declarations (NSPPD) movement, instructs believers to “summon” the spirits of living human beings, often children or people causing trouble, and to read “ordinances of the kingdom” over those spirits, commanding them to align.
The reasoning offered is that a person’s spirit wanders during dreams and can be accessed by a believer with sufficient authority. The instruction is urgent: stop talking to the body; talk to the spirit. Go back to where the person was formed. Summon the spirit where it matters. The results, it is claimed, are real. The bodies align. The children obey.
This is not a marginal curiosity on the periphery of global Christianity. The NSPPD platform reaches over one million viewers daily, has surpassed 102 million watch hours, and fills stadiums from Twickenham to Old Trafford. The teaching is not hidden in a house fellowship. It is broadcast to the nations. And it is precisely because of this reach that leaders cannot afford the luxury of polite silence.
The question before the church is not whether Pastor Jerry Eze is sincere, nor whether some people have experienced relief. The question is whether the practice of summoning human spirits is authorized by the Word of God. If it is not, then no amount of testimony can baptize it. The apostolic boundary stands: whoever does not continue in the teaching of Christ does not have God (2 John 9). The shepherd’s task is not to count the results. It is to guard the flock from a voice that sounds like the Shepherd’s but leads to another pasture.
The Anatomy of the Teaching: What Is Actually Being Said
To critique a teaching rightly, one must state it fairly. The instruction is not a careless slip of the tongue. It is a coherent, repeatable method. The believer is told that the human spirit can be summoned, that it can be addressed apart from the body, that it can be placed under the authority of the one who summons it, and that ordinances can be read over it to enforce compliance. The theological warrant offered is Jeremiah 1:5: “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee.” The argument is that because God knew the person before the body was formed, the believer can go back to that pre-embodied point of divine knowledge and “take back the battle” from there.
This is not exegesis. It is a metaphysical system imposed upon a text. Jeremiah 1:5 is a statement about divine foreknowledge and prophetic calling, not a manual for accessing a disembodied spirit. The text says nothing about the spirit leaving the body during sleep, nothing about summoning it, and nothing about reading ordinances over it.
The teaching takes a true doctrine, God’s knowledge of the person before birth, and uses it as a launchpad for a practice that the same God has explicitly forbidden. This is the oldest strategy of the serpent: take a true word from God and add a “did God really say?” twist that creates a new jurisdiction.
The African Plume critique of this teaching is blunt but accurate: Jerry Eze claims he can summon the spirit of anyone, dead or alive, and that they will obey his voice. The practice is presented as a lost art of the kingdom, something “they” used to do regularly. But the kingdom of God is not a school of arcane technique. It is the reign of the crucified and risen Christ, mediated by the Word and the Spirit.
When the language of “ordinances” and “summoning” and “commanding spirits” becomes the operative grammar, the center of gravity has shifted from trust in the Father to control over the unseen. And control over the unseen is the definition of sorcery, not the definition of faith.
The First Boundary: Scripture Never Authorizes the Summoning of Human Spirits
The Old Testament is not ambiguous on this point. Deuteronomy 18:10–12 forbids divination, sorcery, witchcraft, casting spells, consulting the dead, and communicating with spirits.
The context is the worship of Yahweh versus the abominable practices of the nations. The command is not a prohibition against superstition for primitive people; it is a prohibition against attempting to access spiritual power outside of God’s authorized means. The person who does these things is an abomination to the Lord.
The defense often offered is that the teaching concerns living spirits, not dead ones. But this distinction does not rescue the practice. The question is not the status of the spirit being summoned. The question is whether God has authorized human beings to summon human spirits at all. He has not.
The Christian’s access is to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit (Ephesians 2:18). It is not access to the spirits of other people through midnight commands. Hebrews 4:16 invites the believer to approach the throne of grace with confidence. It does not invite the believer to summon the spirit of a wayward child or a troublesome neighbor and read ordinances over it. Spiritual authority in Christ gives access to God; it does not give control over the human spirits of others.
This is where the teaching reveals its deepest error. It confuses the presence of God with the possession of power. The believer who has been given the Spirit of adoption cries, “Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15). He does not cry, “Spirit of my enemy, appear.” The language of sonship is the language of trust and surrender. The language of summoning is the language of manipulation. These are not two dialects of the same spirituality. They are two different religions.
The Second Boundary: Demons Are Not Human Spirits, and the Distinction Matters
The New Testament is clear that believers have authority over demons. Jesus cast out demons. The apostles cast out demons. The seventy returned rejoicing that even the demons were subject to them in Christ’s name (Luke 10:17). But no apostle ever summoned a human spirit, read an ordinance over it, and threatened it into alignment. The New Testament never treats the human spirit as an object to be commanded.
The reason is theological, not merely practical. A demon is an evil spirit, a fallen angelic being that may be resisted, rebuked, and cast out in the name of Jesus. A human spirit belongs to a person made in the image and likeness of God. That spirit is accountable to God, not to another human being. To treat a human spirit as though it were a demon, something to be summoned, commanded, and threatened, is to assault the dignity of the person. It is to reduce a image-bearer to a spiritual object.
This confusion produces pastoral chaos. If someone is demonized, the church addresses the demon in Jesus’ name. If someone is sinning, the church addresses the person through truth, correction, prayer, and love. If someone is attacking the church, the church prays, forgives, sets boundaries, and leaves the offender to God’s justice (Romans 12:19). But the church does not summon the person’s spirit. The pastoral vocation is to care for souls, not to seize them.
The Third Boundary: The New Testament Model of Spiritual Warfare Is Prayer, Resistance, Truth, and Love
When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he said, “Our Father in heaven” (Matthew 6:9). He did not say, “Summon the spirits of those who trouble you.” When he taught them to deal with enemies, he said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). When Paul taught spiritual warfare, he said, “Put on the whole armor of God” and “pray in the Spirit” (Ephesians 6:11, 18). He did not teach believers to summon human spirits. When James taught resistance, he said, “Submit yourselves to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). He did not say, “Summon the spirits of your enemies at midnight.”
The pattern is consistent and inescapable. Christian warfare is God-centered and Scripture-governed. It is waged on the knees, with the Word in the heart and the name of Jesus on the lips. It is not waged by imitating the techniques of the occult and painting them with church vocabulary. If witches summon spirits, the church does not answer by saying, “We summon spirits too.” The church answers by saying, “We belong to Christ. We pray to the Father. We resist the devil. We cast out demons in Jesus’ name. We walk in love. We obey the Word.” The church’s power is not in the technique of the command. It is in the character of the God who hears.
The claim that a person’s spirit leaves the body during dreaming and becomes available for summoning is not a Christian doctrine. It is speculation, and it is speculation that carries immense pastoral risk. Scripture does not teach it. The church should not build a practice upon it. The leader who teaches this is not opening a door to deeper revelation. He is opening a door to a spiritual imagination that has no anchor in the text. And a spiritual imagination without a textual anchor is the seedbed of every form of error.
The Fourth Boundary: Results Are Not a Hermeneutic
The most common defense of the practice is empirical: It works. People are seeing results. Children are obeying. Bodies are aligning. Breakthroughs are happening. Therefore, God must be in it. This is the argument from pragmatism, and it is as old as the garden. The serpent did not deny that the fruit was desirable. He denied that the command was binding. The question is not whether a practice produces an effect. The question is whether it is authorized by the Word of God.
The video’s own warning is worth repeating: the fact that something produced a result is not a guarantee that God is part of it. People operate power outside of divine jurisdiction, and the power still produces results, but God is not in it. This is the teaching of Scripture. Moses warned Israel that a prophet might arise who performs signs and wonders, and the sign might come to pass, and yet the prophet leads people after other gods. The Lord allows this to test whether his people love him with all their heart (Deuteronomy 13:1–3). The test is not the result. The test is the word.
John Owen understood this. The great Puritan theologian insisted that the truth of the gospel is not established by the success of those who propagate it, but by its conformity to the apostolic deposit. Owen warned that men infected with error have been the great corrupters of divine truth in all ages, and that the church’s safety lies not in the abundance of signs but in the fidelity of its doctrine. The shepherd who judges a teaching by its fruitfulness rather than by its faithfulness has already abandoned the sheep to the wolves.
The Fifth Boundary: The Dignity of the Human Person and the Danger of Spiritual Manipulation
There is a pastoral dimension to this error that must not be overlooked. To summon the spirit of another human being, especially a child, and to command it into alignment is to engage in a form of spiritual manipulation. The parent who does this is not exercising faith. The parent is attempting to control the inner life of another person through a technique that God has not given. This is not parenting. It is a violation of the boundary between creature and creature.
The New Testament calls parents to bring up children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4). It calls them to instruct, to correct, to model, to pray. It does not call them to summon the child’s spirit and read ordinances over it. The pastoral counsel of Scripture is ordinary, patient, and humble. It is the counsel of sowing and watering, of trusting God with the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6–7). The technique of summoning is the counsel of impatience. It promises immediate control, and it delivers a counterfeit authority that damages the very souls it claims to help.
The same principle applies to conflict. If someone is troubling you, the Bible gives clear and sufficient responses: pray for them, forgive them, confront them biblically, correct them gently, set wise boundaries, seek counsel, report wrongdoing when necessary, and trust God’s justice. Resist any demonic influence behind the situation. But do not summon the person’s spirit. The church must not confuse prayer with summoning, discernment with divination, authority with control, or spiritual warfare with occult imitation.
Endor Revisited: The Occult Architecture of the Summons
There is one Old Testament narrative that settles the question of form more decisively than any other, and it is the story of Saul and the medium at Endor. Saul had himself “cut off the mediums and the spiritists from the land” (1 Samuel 28:3, 9). He knew the law of Deuteronomy 18. He had enforced it. And then God went silent, no dream, no Urim, no prophet, and Saul, rather than repenting, went shopping for another channel. He disguised himself, sought out the woman at Endor, and asked her to “bring up” Samuel.
The vocabulary is unmistakable: bring up, consult, disturb. This is the language of summoning. A living person sought access to a human spirit, addressed it as a separable entity, and expected it to appear and speak at his request. That is precisely the operation being marketed to the contemporary church under the vocabulary of kingdom authority, and it differs only in its dress and its audience size.
The verdict of Scripture on that episode is equally unmistakable. First Chronicles 10:13–14 does not attribute Saul’s death to his military failures or even primarily to his earlier disobedience at Gilgal. It says he died “because he was unfaithful to the Lord; he did not keep the word of the Lord, and also consulted a medium, seeking guidance, and did not seek guidance from the Lord.”
The man who would not wait on the silence of God went looking for a spirit, and that act was the final straw. The text functions as a warning, never as a manual. There is a long interpretive debate over whether Samuel genuinely appeared or whether the woman produced a demonic counterfeit, the text itself is ambiguous, and the medium’s own shock suggests something occurred beyond her technique.
But on either reading the practice stands condemned. If Samuel appeared, it was by God’s extraordinary sovereign intrusion, not by the medium’s art, for she was as startled as anyone. If it was a demon impersonating Samuel, then Saul received a false word through an occult channel and died in deception. There is no reading of 1 Samuel 28 in which summoning a human spirit becomes a legitimate and transferable Christian technique.
This is why the practice must be named for what it is: not merely unwise, not merely excessive, but a category error with occult architecture. It treats the human spirit as an object available for control, which is the working definition of sorcery, and it offers the believer a technique in place of the throne of grace.
The presence of the name of Jesus, the language of kingdom, and the testimony of results does not sanctify a procedure God has not authorized. Satan masquerades as an angel of light, and his servants as servants of righteousness (2 Corinthians 11:14–15). The serpent quoted Scripture too.
Yet a fence must be placed around the accusation, because leaders have too often wounded the body of Christ by turning a valid theological critique into a personal spiritual verdict. There is a real and necessary difference between saying “this teaching is witchcraft in form and origin” and saying “this man is a witch.” The first is a theological judgment about a practice, and it is defensible from Scripture.
The second is a judgment about a person’s heart, regeneration, and standing before God, and it is not ours to render. Teachers will be judged with greater strictness (James 3:1), so the weight here is genuine. But the prophetic task is to name the error publicly and clearly, not to pronounce damnation over a man whose conscience belongs to God. Paul himself describes having acted in ignorance and unbelief, and yet obtained mercy (1 Timothy 1:13). The line between a deceived teacher and a wolf is sometimes visible only to the Chief Shepherd.
Honest complexity must also be acknowledged. A ministry is rarely exhausted by a single clip, and the NSPPD platform has gathered hundreds of thousands in daily prayer and Scripture reading, with many testifying to genuine encounter with God. That does not excuse the teaching, but it does mean leaders need a category for a ministry that does real good in one area while teaching something indefensible in another.
To write off every person with a flawed practice as a reprobate produces cynicism, and cynicism is not discernment. To shrug at the flawed practice because the good is real produces gullibility, and gullibility is not grace. The mature leader holds both: gratitude for what God may genuinely do, and refusal to endorse what God has not commanded. One may honour the praying while refusing the summoning. It is also worth conceding that preachers sometimes speak in rhetorical hyperbole at the heat of an altar call.
But this video clip does not read that way. It offers a considered rationale from Jeremiah 1:5, distinguishes spirit from body, and instructs hearers to “keep on until you address some people’s spirits.” That is not a slip of the tongue. That is a teaching, and a teaching is answerable at the bar of Scripture.
The charge, then, must be framed with precision: call the teaching what it is, and leave the man to God. Say plainly that this is witchcraft in form, that the church must not baptize it with kingdom vocabulary, and that the flock must be warned. Then keep both courage and charity intact, and teach the leaders who follow to do the same.
Formation for Discernment: The Leader’s Charge
The question for leaders is not whether this particular teaching will fade. It may, and another will take its place. The question is how to form congregations and students who can recognize the difference between the voice of the Shepherd and the voice of a stranger, even when the stranger quotes the Shepherd’s words.
The first mark of such formation is a deep, reverent, and comprehensive knowledge of Scripture. The false teacher thrives on biblical fragments. He quotes a verse, isolates it from its context, and builds a system upon it. The cure is not merely more preaching but better reading, reading that traces the covenants, follows the redemptive storyline, and asks of every text, “What is God doing here, and what has he commanded?” The Bereans were noble because they examined the Scriptures daily to see if what Paul said was true (Acts 17:11). The church needs that same nobility.
The second mark is a theological grammar thick enough to detect counterfeits. The doctrine of Christ is the center, but it is surrounded by the whole counsel of God: the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, justification by faith, the authority of Scripture, the reality of judgment and resurrection, the nature of the church, and the dignity of the human person. When a teaching subtly redefines one of these truths, it often does so by redefining another. The leader must be able to hear the false note even when the melody is familiar.
The third mark is pastoral courage. John’s instruction not to receive the false teacher into the house is not a license for rudeness. It is a call for boundaries. The leader who refuses to endorse a teacher who denies or distorts the apostolic faith is not being unloving. He is being faithful. The unloving thing is to assist and accommodate error. To welcome the false teacher, to promote his materials, to send students to his conferences, is to share in his evil deeds (2 John 11). This is a sobering reality, and it requires a courage that is rooted in love for the flock rather than fear of the crowd.
The fourth mark is a spiritual rhythm that keeps the leader’s own heart soft. It is possible to become a defender of orthodoxy while losing the orthodoxy of the heart. The false teacher is not merely wrong; he is proud, knowing nothing, obsessed with controversy, and destitute of the truth (1 Timothy 6:4–5). The antidote is not merely more information but deeper transformation, the cultivation of humility, contentment, and a love for Christ that makes the promises of the religious marketplace look pale. “Godliness with contentment is great gain” (1 Timothy 6:6). The leader who has learned to be content in Christ is far less vulnerable to the seductions of spiritual technique.
The Boundary That Leads to Peace
Let me say this as I conclude that the boundaries of apostolic doctrine are not prison walls. They are the walls of a home. Within those walls there is room for prayer, for fasting, for weeping, for rejoicing, for the exercise of every spiritual gift, and for the patient, ordinary work of discipleship. Outside those walls there is the endless wandering of those who have gone on ahead and left the Shepherd behind.
The teaching that instructs believers to summon human spirits is not a deeper revelation. It is a departure. It replaces trust with technique, access with control, and the dignity of the image-bearer with the manipulation of the spirit. It may produce results. It may fill stadiums. It may be accompanied by testimonies. But the shepherd’s question is not, “Did it work?” The shepherd’s question is, “Is it of God?”
The answer of Scripture is clear. God has not authorized his people to summon human spirits. He has authorized them to approach his throne, to resist the devil, to cast out demons, to speak the truth in love, and to trust his justice. The church that remains in that word has both the Father and the Son. The leader who guards that word will give an account, and he will give it with joy. The flock is not his to control. It is his to feed, to protect, and to present, sound in faith, in love, and in patience, to the Chief Shepherd, who alone has the authority to summon whom he will.
Prof. Sarumi, a disciple of Jesus and teacher of the Word of God writes from Lagos
