Pastors Bill and Cara Nordeen of High Tower Ministries, hightowerministry.org, an affiliate of Rock Ministerial Fellowship in Virginia Beach, Virginia, know the reality of the Holy Spirit’s power. He moved them from running a Christian day school to a vibrant campground ministry and on to their e-church ministry of today. Through this latest ministry venture, they share their dynamic encounters with the Lord across multiple channels, including Facebook, Instagram and YouTube as well as the High Tower Ministries podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network. Contact them for prayer at [email protected].
“Not too long ago, a woman came up for prayer with her mother-in-law for her husband,” Cara says. “And her husband had been away from the Lord, and he wouldn’t come to services … the mother-in-law stood in proxy to intercede and pray for him.”
As the four agreed in prayer, “The power of God just came upon all three of us in such a mighty way,” Cara says. “And the Lord spoke to my husband to pray that wherever he is right now, that the Lord—would come into the room, and that he would fall to his knees and weep in repentance, but also in holy surrender to God, and that he would feel the tangible presence and the love of the Father. That was at 8:15 at night.”
Later that evening, the two women that they had prayed with called the Nordeens to report a miracle. When they got home, the man they had prayed for approached his wife, tears in his eyes.
“I don’t know what happened tonight, but it was like I was in church service with you,” he said. “At 8:15 tonight, I fell down to my knees and started worshipping God, calling out to the Lord.”
“There’s no distance in the Spirit,” Cara says. “And there’s nothing impossible for God. We’ve got to pray in these people and our loved ones—we pray them into the kingdom. God is so willing to go right where they are and touch them. … They have to have their own encounter with God.”
From Childhood Church to Full-Time Ministry
Both Bill and Cara were reared in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Today Virginia Beach remains the site of their family home—which they share with their teenaged daughter and son—and the home base for their growing ministry.
“What’s really funny about my husband and me is that we both were baptized at Rock Church as children,” Cara says. “And we ran around the halls of the church as kids, but we didn’t know each other. I met him when I was 15. … It’s just like God was smiling down on as kids, knowing that was always a plan, for us to be together and do ministry together.
Bill’s family enjoyed a close relationship with Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, where both his stepfather and mother were employed throughout his childhood. Cara’s amazing faith journey appears on the High Tower Ministries’ website: “Her spiritual eyes were first opened at age five. The gift of prophecy and word of knowledge have been present in her life as she has moved in the gifts of the Spirit from a young age …. the gifts of healing have flowed freely through her and her family by way of the Holy Spirit.”
As a young adult, Cara began a career with fashion house Christian Dior. She spent more than nine years there, managing retail accounts and working through an equipping season through which God increased her skills and experience for His greater glory.
Within a year of leaving the industry, Bill and Cara opened Kids Kingdom, a Christian day school they operated out of their home for nearly a decade. Through the relationships they had with their students’ families, they ministered the love of Christ every day. Cara describes this as a great season shut away with the Lord, similar to Moses’ wilderness experience in which he was set apart with God rather than remaining in the splendor of Pharoah’s house. During that powerful time with God, He birthed a new vision for the Nordeens’ life together.
“God always will come through for you; He’s always on time; He’s never late,” Cara says. And the Holy Spirit spoke to her about a new ministry direction. She prayed for months about the possibility of closing down their in-home school, believing God would reveal their next season to her husband.
One evening, Bill called Cara to tell her, “We need to talk tonight after I get home.”
His tone sounded serious, and Cara thought, Hmmm. I wonder what this is about.
“What’s on your mind, honey?” she asked as the two sat at their kitchen table later.
“I think we need to consider that it is time to close down the day school.”
“When he said that, I jumped up and said, ‘That’s God! That’s God! I know that’s God!'” Cara says. She now had the prayed-for confirmation. “From there, we understood God was going to cause everything to work out OK,” she says of their shift to full-time ministry in 2014. “There is no distancing us from the Holy Spirit—there is nothing impossible for God, and that’s why we need to pray our family and friends into the kingdom.”
The Nordeens say that as the transition continued, they felt the temptation to slip into fear. But they pressed in and thanked God for the new season dawning before them, including the refining and testing of their faith as they trusted Him with their finances.
From Day School to Campgrounds
God birthed the Nordeens’ next ministry step in intercession. As newlyweds, they discovered Bill’s love for camping and Cara’s love for travel, similar interests that would sow the seeds for future ministry. “It was really a beautiful process to be able to get out beyond the church walls and touch the people where they were,” Cara says.
In its earliest days, the campground ministry took the form of Sunday school-like prayer meetings at local campgrounds with the children of visitors staying at the holiday sites around the Virginia Beach area. The Nordeens held sessions in the center pavilion or recreation halls at the campgrounds. As time passed, they were traveling up and down the East Coast holding Kids-4-Christ events and Sunday worship services.
With that, the Lord poured out a constant stream of opportunities for intercessory prayer at the campgrounds, soon expanding beyond the campers themselves. In short order, healings from disease, injury and generational curses; deliverance from substance addictions including drugs and alcohol as well as past hurts; and multiple baptisms took place.
“We’ve had people we ran into who were homeless, living in tents on campgrounds, and God dramatically brought them forth and delivered them, healed them, and they came up out of the water speaking in tongues,” Cara says. “We’ve seen people lose their taste for alcohol—God totally turned their lives around, and set them up in a home and gave them a good job, when they were homeless before with no hope.
“We saw God move in such a mighty way out there,” Cara says. “But it was a season. And God brought us off the campgrounds.”
While she was writing Unlocking Glory (Xulon, 2019), God spoke through the prophets they knew through their ministry, Cara says. “The Lord said He was changing our ministry and that it was going to feel like we were starting a ministry all over again—but this time, we were starting out with wisdom,” she says.
From Campgrounds to E-Church
Following a back injury Bill suffered, the couple sought ways to hold the last few campground events still on their schedule. God had them sell the golf cart and trailer they used to transport tools and supplies, and they made plans to rent a golf cart to use during the final two events. The couple still owned a large recreational vehicle, the home base of their ministry.
But then the unexpected happened. “The Lord started telling us to sell the RV,” Cara says.
“Lord, you can’t have a campground ministry without an RV,” they told Him.
“Exactly,” God said.
The couple quickly alerted their intercessory prayer team to press in to God. Was it time to sell their motor home? With the upcoming book launch, they needed funds for both printing and promotional work.
“We were holding all of this before the Lord,” Cara says. “Do You really want us to sell the motor home—are You ready for us to transition now? We need You to speak to us.'”
The Nordeens and their intercessors had just finished praying when the doorbell rang.
“This may sound a little crazy, but I was led to your house by the Holy Ghost,” said the man who stood there.
He lived across town, but he and his wife were asking God to show them a motor home they could purchase to take their children and grandchildren on family vacations.
“He kept leading us to this part of your street,” the man said, telling them they had also looked at an identical RV that belonged to their neighbors across the street—but received no direction to buy it.
The Nordeens’ RV sat next to their house with no sign or other indication of a potential sale. But God knew.
“When I stood in front of your house, the Holy Spirit said, ‘This is the one you’re supposed to buy,'” their unexpected visitor told them. “By any chance, are you interested in selling your motor home?”
Cara says her husband’s jaw nearly hit the floor as he told the man that their ministry prayer team had just finished praying about that exact subject. God moved so fast that the man and his family bought the RV as soon as the Nordeens could prepare it for sale.
“I want you to use that money, take it from one vehicle, to put it in Unlocking Glory, which is the next vehicle for your ministry,” Cara says the Lord told them. “And I want you to go ahead and start writing that study guide [for the book] and really start working on your e-church community.”
When the Nordeens moved into ministry in 2014, “God told us to put on our website that we were an e-church community,” Cara says, adding that at the time, they didn’t even know what an e-church was, but they obeyed.
“We realize that God has always been setting us up from the very beginning for the time and the season that we’re in right now,” she says. “God has got us in a transition … we’ve launched our internet show Greater Glory. Greater Glory goes out on Sunday morning at 9, Sunday night at 7 and Wednesday night at 7, Eastern time. And we also launched a live show on Tuesday nights called Testimony Tuesdays, where we share testimonies of God’s miracle-working power … testimonies of how God speaks through dreams and visions and how God really is involved in our lives and every aspect that He wants to be.
“And we pray for people prophetically after each show, words of the Lord come forward—prophetic insight, gifts of healing—God is starting to grow our online audience,” Cara says, adding that God is bringing them about 200 new followers a day.
“You can never get to the end of what God wants you to do,” she adds. “You can search Him out, but you can never exhaust God. He is ready to reveal mystery after mystery to you. … He likes us to seek Him out, and when we find the next new thing in God, it’s like having a gold nugget appear. It’s amazing, that revelation that He brings forth.”
High Tower Ministries International is available for Unlocking Glory conferences and also guest ministry. Bookings: [email protected], and visit www.HighTowerMinistry.org.
Robert Caggiano is a content development editor for Charisma Media
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