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Interview with Dick Mills

The ministry of Dick Mills is characterized by the unique gifts with which God blessed him. One of the foremost authorities on Bible scholarship, Dick ministered words of wisdom, edification, and encouragement from the Holy Spirit both to individuals and congregations. With his wife, Betty, Dick ministered around the world in thousands of churches of varied backgrounds. He was also a gifted writer and served as an adjunct professor at six Schools of the Bible and Seminaries. In 2002, we were honored with the opportunity of interviewing Dick for OSPN. Ten years later, on May 25, 2012, Dick Mills went home to be with the Lord. To learn more about the ministry and legacy of Dick Mills, visit his website.

What’s the most important thing that you would like for other spiritual leaders to know about prophetic ministry?

The thing I use as a role model is Jesus in Luke 2:52 where the Bible says He increased in wisdom and in stature, and He was in favor with God and with man. When it says He increased in wisdom, this is intellectual development. Then, when He increased in stature, it has to do with physical growth. You’ve got to make sure you exercise, and keep your physical health up. Then, He was in favor with God, which is spiritual development, and in favor with people, and that’s emotional development. Jesus had the emotional ability to relate to people. He related to His Father as a spiritual relationship. He increased in intellectual development and physical development.

I look at life in those four components: I have a spiritual walk, a physical walk, an emotional walk, an intellectual walk. The big secret in life is to make sure that none of this gets out of balance. I’m not a person who’s always balanced, and that’s where a good wife comes in. If I get a little too concentrated in one area, Betty can reel me in. I’ll be upstairs with six boxes of books, writing, and she wants me to come down and have supper with her. I’m splitting infinities and God wants to remind me I’ve got a family! Betty reminds me to stay balanced.

How else does your wife bless and assist you?

Betty and I travel together and we work together when I minister to people at the personal level. She has a writing pad, and when I give prophetic promises to people, she writes these promises down. We’re in sync. Sometimes, because of the excitement and spontaneity of the moment, I’ll get emotional and misquote a scripture. My mind’s racing but if I quote a scripture wrong, Betty can correct it. That’s a great blessing.

Funny things have happened like where a man gave a lady in the congregation who was very insecure a word, and the person writing it down on a piece of paper wrote it down one chapter off. The lady took the promise, went home and looked it up, and it said "So I prophesied and that night my wife died." She went into a state of shock! You have to be accurate or you can really mess it up bad. Betty’s accuracy in these areas saves me a lot of embarrassment.

How do you and your wife make time for your marriage when you’re both so busy with ministry?

We consider ourselves on a forty-five year honeymoon. Years ago, somebody said, If you want to stay happily married, treat your mate after you get married the same way you treated them before you got married. So we prioritize our time. It’s interesting that some years we’ll have 300 services, sometimes in 100 different towns. That means a lot of packing and traveling, and yet we always manage to arrange prime time together that we just go off and have fun. When we were first starting out, we’d finish a meeting in one town on a Sunday night and open up in another town on Tuesday, so Monday was a travel day and Monday night was family fun night.

We just decided that God invented the family before He invented the church, and we want to keep everything in proportion.

I’m not married to my ministry; I’m married to Betty.

In some cultural mentalities, the man has a wife and a mistress. There are men that let the ministry do this to them–the ministry becomes their mistress. His wife’s the Madonna–she raises the children. But he’ll do things for the ministry that he’s not doing for his family. Typical pastor–if the roof’s leaking in the parsonage and the roof’s leaking in the church, he’ll patch the roof in the church. Typical situation is if the hot water heater’s rusted out in the parsonage; he’ll buy a new hot water heater for the water baptismal unit. Maybe their car is falling apart, but he gets a new wagon for the church. If his wife says, "Our water heater’s out; you only baptize people two or three times a month," he’ll say, "Well, I’m doing it for the Lord."

That means the ministry is his mistress. You’ve got to make sure that doesn’t happen. Men become married to their ministry because the ministry is a reflection of themselves. If the ministry succeeds, they succeed, and it’s easy for the person to get absorbed in all the peripheral things that go with the ministry.

Betty and I have been in it for forty-five years, and it’s getting better all the time! We stepped on an airplane recently and I said to the flight attendant, "We want the ‘butter-up’ treatment. We’re on our honeymoon." The stewardess said, "Isn’t that wonderful." She put us in the best seats and brought us coffee. "When did you get married?" she asked. "Oh, forty-five years ago," I said. "We’re still on our honeymoon!"

A person can be in the ministry and have a happy marriage, but they can’t take the marriage for granted You have to work at it. Vacations are BIG with us. We’re outdoor people, we go camping. That’s a big event in our lives. Our Thanksgiving and Christmases are big events for our family. We’ve got seven grandchildren and there’s something about those times that are awesome, so I try not to have services on Christmas. Most churches don’t want visiting speakers on Thanksgiving or Christmas anyway. So it’s worked out real good for us.

What is one of the biggest hindrances for leaders?

I feel like there’s a danger of taking yourself too seriously. I think maintaining a good sense of humor [is vital].

One thing I found out years ago is that fanatics can’t laugh. Mussolini couldn’t laugh. Hitler couldn’t laugh. Stalin couldn’t laugh. Tito couldn’t laugh. Because they were absorbed with their own importance.

I really feel people should maintain a healthy ability to enjoy life and not get so absorbed that our emotions become stilted. Laughter is an index of normalcy. People that are religious fanatics can’t laugh either. People who have the religious spirit are legalistic, hypercritical and joyless, plus they resent anybody else that has joy. So I have a personal aversion to people that have the religious spirit because there’s a falsity to the whole thing.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. The Scripture is so practical. It says "Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep." We’re not laughing all the way to heaven. It’s not just a comedy routine from here to glory, but it isn’t crawling on your hands and knees crying every inch of the way either. We do what the situation calls for. People need to be able to relate to people who are hurting. And then be able to enjoy people who are succeeding.

It takes time. Every weekend in church, people are going to gather, and you’re going to have a lot of good news–somebody got a job, somebody got married, somebody had a baby, somebody’s got a new house–those are happy things. But then you’re going to hear about people who’ve had deaths in the family, accidents, job losses, and so you’ve got to be able to relate to people right where they are.

I think Jesus was the most normal person. The thing that impressed me about Jesus is how He was able to function at any age level with people and relate to them. He wasn’t just scholastic; when the disciples were arguing as to who was going to be the greatest, He turned around and took Peter’s son, who was three years old, and put him on His lap. Jesus is bouncing him on His knees while everyone is arguing as to who’s going to be the greatest. Finally when they got through, Jesus said — "This is what the kingdom’s like, and except you become like this child, you’re not gonna make it."

That was quite a lesson for them too.

What keeps a leader grounded?

There are four faces to every pastor: There’s the face that he sees when he looks in the mirror. First Corinthians says nobody knows what’s inside that man except that man himself. There’s no way anybody else can know.

Then, there’s the man that his family sees because they live with him. They see him at his best, they see him at his worst, they see him elated, they see him depressed, they see him with high highs, they see him with low lows.

Then, there’s the face that the congregation sees.

There’s a fourth Person who is seeing him, and that’s how he looks to the Lord. It’s not always easy to balance this all out, but there is such a thing as living in a way that maintains integrity with your family, integrity with people, integrity with the Lord, and then your own self-respect and sense of self-worth. Everybody should realize they have four faces.

I know my ambitions, aggressions, desires, and pursuits, and I see myself, but the big thing is, how does the Lord see me? That weighs heavy on my heart, because it says in Habakkuk 1:13 God’s eyes are purer than to behold iniquity. David says, If I regard inquiry in my heart, the Lord’s not even going to notice me. It’s imperative to have a good relationship to the Lord.

There was a Pentecostal group that lost a large number of ministers over a twenty-year period to adulterous relationships. They hired someone to go around and interview these men who’d lost their ministries, their families and their self-respect because the organization wanted to know how to prevent it from happening again.

Invariably, they found a similar pattern to every one of these situations. When the ministers first started out, they were totally dependent on the Lord’s giftings, help and blessing. They were conscientious and sincere in the disciplines of their personal walk with God–prayer time, Bible study. As time went on, things began to grow, numbers increased, money increased, prestige and status increased. And they began to let up on the thing that had got them to where they were.

One man told the interviewer, "I had so many people in the church, the only time I ever said a prayer was when I was in the hospital calling on sick members and they asked if I would say a prayer for them." Another said, "We just had so many things going for us that the only time I ever read my Bible was at ten o’clock Saturday night, trying to get something to say for Sunday."

They had let down on their Bible study, and they let down on their prayer life–their intimacy with the Lord was replaced with busyness. They got so busy that it caught up with them. This may not have been what caused all the ministers to fall, because greed moves in also and causes people to do things that are questionable, but for the most part, the main thing was they were too busy.

If I could say anything to ministers, it would be: Don’t ever lose your time with the Lord.