The driving force behind Dr. Paula Price and Paula Price Ministries (drpaulaaprice.com) is “Think Differently. Live Powerfully.” An international voice on the subject of apostolic and prophetic ministry, Dr. Price is recognized as a modern-day apostle with a strong prophetic anointing. She is perhaps most well known for her significant contribution to the body of Christ with The Prophet’s Dictionary, now in its 15th year of publication and ever increasing in its reach, and for The Prophet’s Handbook.
As a former sales and marketing executive who has a D.Min. and a Ph.D. in Religious Education from Word of Truth Seminary in Alabama, Dr. Price blends ministerial and entrepreneurial applications in her ministry. Known as “The Soulologist,” she has established three churches, a university, a publishing company, a consulting firm and a global collaborative network linking apostles and prophets.
Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Paula Price Ministries comprises three major areas of ministry, Price University, The Paula Price Success Center and her church, Congregation of the Mighty Ecclesial Embassy.
Equipping the Body of Christ
Dr. Price has created curricula, which is employed at Price University, which she founded in 2007 with an emphasis on the apostolic and prophetic. The school’s website explains its purpose: “Apostles and prophets need to establish a solid reputation befitting the claims of first-level office holders in the Lord’s church, something that can only happen through quality education.”
“We like to say first apostle, second prophets, but when you research it, you can’t really degree those two,” she says. “And if you can’t degree them, we cannot take our rightful place in society, at the tables of the world, in the academic halls and all of that. So I developed a curricula that will be to that end. We’re emphasizing the diplomatic and ambassadorial sides of apostleship as well as our ecclesial responsibilities, and then always dealing with the prophet is God’s divine communications institution.”
With those purposes in mind, she recently re-released a textbook from 1993 titled Constructing the Contemporary Prophet.
“It’s really taking the gift and bumping it up to what it really was in the Bible, which is an office, so I introduced the concept of gift versus office,” she says.
Price University offers specialized programs that include professional ministry, general ministry, and business and ministry, as well as graduate-level programs. Through the university, where she serves as president, Dr. Price aims to equip students to “Learn today. Lead tomorrow.”
After writing many courses, she realized they had “no point of cohesion,” so she set out to remedy that. “To bring about cohesion, I wrote The Prophet’s Dictionary, and The Prophet’s Dictionary has 1,600 terms. Every one of them is extremely Scripture laden, not just Scripture laced, because the whole idea of a prophet is that you speak for the deity that is sending you to take care of its affairs. So it says God is God. He’s our God, Jesus Christ. The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. Jesus is in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. So I developed the 1,600 terms, and at the center, the area on the prophetic, I literally institutionalized the prophetic so that we understand that it’s more than a talking gift, if you will.”
Because this principal text is a dictionary, it continues to find new life, particularly in the classroom
“It is a required text for most prophetic education,” she says. “There’s a companion to it, called The Prophet Handbook. And likewise, the handbook is a textbook. It’s a textbook on making a prophet.”
Along with her books—which also include The ABC’s of Apostleship, Eternity’s Generals and When God Goes Silent: Living Life Without God’s Voice—other excellent tools she provides are the standardized ministry assessments.
“Over a 12-year period of time, I developed a group of assessments for the fivefold, for prophets and apostles,” she says. “They’re web based, so anybody can go online and do them. They tell you where you are in ministry, whether you’re called, so it’s more than an inventory list, which most of them are. They can get up to 60 pages of information on themselves through these assessments.”
Any believer can take the Minister’s Assessment Questionnaire or The Prophetic Aptitude Questionnaire.
“We’ve had fire chiefs, we’ve had attorneys, we’ve had doctors and judges,” she says. “It is amazing. It’s not as christianese as you would imagine, but it may come up with a little bit of Bible language.”
An individual can take an assessment or a church can take them as a group.
In fact, Dr. Price says, “It settles arguments, and I always say we are the independent third party that confirms what pastors and leaders know instinctively.”
Dr. Price also says she is a “firm believer” in credentialing.
“Many of us don’t realize that credentialing establishes credibility,” she says, providing a context for why she believes this is important in the body of Christ. “When we go back to the mid to late ’80s and early ’90s, we were just pushing forward in ‘let’s get away from denominationalism. They’re suffocating people’s gifts,’ and that was essential. We needed it then. The problem is the second and third generation does not know that’s why we did it. All they know now is we just give everybody a chance with their gift.”
Dr. Price believes this lack of understanding has made way to disrespect for order and authority in the church. Some say, “‘You can’t tell me who I am. God told me. I heard Him in my closet.'”
This kind of belligerent behavior is having a negative impact on the local body.
“The church is now being really crushed with that kind of independence and nonsubmissiveness, so our agendas are getting clogged,” she says. “We’re getting bottlenecked with independent people, or we have people who are splitting, saying, ‘I’m going off to do what I want.’ It’s in my latest book, Assessing Your Prophetic Self, and the greatest contention is, ‘You can’t tell me who I am. I heard God for myself.’ All of us out here in the field, our churches are ripped, our visions are snatched, our good people are dragged out, only to find out that they should have stayed.”
So credibility is really important for the believer who would be a leader. When a church is looking for a pastor, the members must take care to really know the individual they are hiring.
“How many times have you heard somebody say, ‘That is a highly skilled minister’? You don’t hear people say that. We say, ‘He’s anointed. He’s really gifted. He is really loving. My spirit burns.’ But how do you measure that? So how does someone who’s about to dump a $50,000-$100,000-a-year salary on somebody say, ‘This is the best choice.’ We can’t do that, and we take people’s bios as gospel. We take their resumes as if they didn’t get some professional to write it.
“So first of all, in all of our training, we are able from the assessment to say, ‘You know what? You’re not called to the prophetic. I know you want to do it, but you’re not called to be a prophet.’ For example, my PAQ, the Prophetic Aptitude Questionnaire, will take them out of the office as well as put them in, and then it will tell you, you’re an intercessor. That’s where you peak. But then we hone your skills, we hone the attributes, we hone the you God made, not the ‘you’ you want to be.”
Besides credentialing tools, Dr. Price also developed commissioning criteria and practices, along with ceremony proceedings for apostles and prophets. She is bringing Scripture-based order to the body of Christ.
Hitting Her Stride in Life
Along with her professional and ministerial accomplishments, Dr. Price is also a wife, mother of three daughters and grandmother of two. While her family brings great joy to her life, she also leaves room for the family of God. She has planted three churches, one in New Jersey, one in Massachusetts and now her embassy congregation in Oklahoma.
“I started on the model that was prevalent at the time, but what we have today in Tulsa, The Congregation of the Mighty Ecclesial Embassy, is based on my apostleship,” she says, realizing that “apostles are supposed to have embassies because we are the heavenly equivalent of an ambassador for Jesus Christ. Now I know, we say we make everybody an ambassador, but there’s a difference between being the ambassador of a sovereign and the ambassador of a product.”
It was a battle, though, to launch the Embassy. Dr. Price sees it as a “rebirth” that came into being three years ago.
“You have to go through trials due to apostleship not being widely accepted,” she says. “That’s why this whole day in my life is thrilling me after almost 40 years. But you have to stay in the fight until you defeat what doesn’t want you to win, and so we finally did. My church restarted. Ironically, I had quit ministry. ‘I’m done,’ I told Jesus. ‘Your people don’t like me. I don’t pass through the way you want. I’m out. I’m done.’ And so He’s talking to me. We’re almost sitting face to face, and He’s saying, ‘You’re a pastor. You’re going to pastor. You’re a good pastor,’ He said. ‘And you’re going to have a church if I have to ship them in.'”
She objected because she didn’t know what God was going to do or how.
“When you go through it, you have to fight for your seat,” she says. “At every level, you’ve got to fight again. So I did.”
She says Jesus asked for her to trust Him one more time, and she agreed—with one caveat.
“I said, ‘But if this doesn’t work, I’m off the hook forever.’ And so we started in this rank little room. It was terrible. It was horrible.”
She asked Jesus for “better quarters” because the room was so disgusting.
“I couldn’t stand it,” she says. “I almost cried every Sunday. We ended up going from a rinky dink church room to a rinky dink mall that was about to close and then from there to the library. And then He finally put us in a warehouse district with a tiny strip mall at the entrance.”
Dr. Price still was not enthused, so she had a question: “Lord, why are you doing this to me?”
But when she followed His direction and went inside the strip mall location, she found a wonderful place for her church. The Lord proved Himself reliable, and the church grew in unexpected ways.
“True to His word, He shipped people in,” she says. “My church is comprised of people from all over the country. They listen to my broadcast. I’ve been on The Paula Price Show, The Jesus & Paula Price Show, the Taking It On With Paula Price talk show, and these people have been listening to me for three to five years. When God put me in that building, they started coming, they closed their ministries, they sold their businesses. They said, ‘This is where God is next, and it takes something to do that.”
Dr. Price points out that none of the people in her church even knew each other.
“They’re coming at the Abrahamic call, if you will,” she says. “They’re coming because they know they’re part of the next thing God’s doing. The thing I’ve been learning [to ask] is, ‘Are you ready for God’s future?’ We’ve given people prophecies about their future, but are we ready for God’s future? They’re coming because they want to be a part of God’s future as He’s doing it, and with COVID, hey, that is something.”
The Embassy went through quite a spiritual battle in June 2020 when, she says, the enemy came against her.
“You have to defeat the spiritual and natural princes that are resisting the next thing God wants to do or the new thing or the progression,” she says, and, thankfully, they did defeat the enemy. “They all say, ‘No, I gave up too much for this. I’m not settling for that.’ So I now have contenders, warriors, intercessors, fighters—I call them my fighter pilots—so I finally know, at this late stage of my life, I’m finally hitting my stride in why I’m on the planet.”
Clearly, Dr. Paula Price is someone who takes her own advice. She knows the “Learn today, lead tomorrow” statement is not only for the students of Price University. She has learned and continues to learn. She had led and continues to lead through all of the gifts and offices with which God had entrusted to her care.
Christine D. Johnson is managing editor, print, at Charisma Media
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