When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, Luhrmann 2012; ch2 excerpts:

'ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS a person must master at a church like the Vineyard is to recognize when God is present and when he responds. This can seem odd to someone raised in a mainstream church, where God is usually not imagined as a person with whom you have back-and-forth conversation throughout the day. At the Vineyard, people speak about recognizing God's "voice." They talk about things God has "said" to them about very specific topics-where they should go to school and whether they should volunteer in a day care-and newcomers are often confused by what they mean. Newcomers soon learn that God is understood to speak to congregants inside their own minds. They learn that someone who worships God at the Vineyard must develop the ability to recognize thoughts in their own mind that are not in fact their thoughts, but God's. They learn that this is a skill they should master. At the beginning, they usually find both the skill and the very idea of the skill perplexing.

We hit the golf ball and then lean in the direction we want the ball to travel. We say a quiet, earnest "please" when we click on an e-mail that matters. But it is one thing to hope fleetingly that a thought in your mind is heard by and responded to by something external; it is another thing to experience that moment as an actual conversation.
In effect, these Christians are asked to develop a new theory of mind. It is not radically different from the basic theory that toddlers acquire in every culture that we know: that humans act on the basis of what they hold in their minds, and those minds are in some deep sense separate from the world. (On this level, even chimpanzees exhibit classic theory of mind.) This new Christian theory of mind-we could call it a "participatory" theory of mind-asks congregants to experience the mind-world barrier as porous, in a specific, limited way. Humans are usually keenly aware of the difference between mental events generated within the mind (we call them thoughts) and those generated from an external source (which are usually called perceptions). In general, we know that when we hear the phone ring, the sound originated from outside of us, and we know this simply, straightforwardly, automatically. We know that when we think we would like a peanut butter sandwich, that thought comes from our minds, and again, this knowing feels simple and straightforward. To be sure, we sometimes get confused: Did I see it on television, or maybe it was a dream? But the confusions are relatively infrequent. We are constantly distinguishing between sounds and sights in the world and thoughts and images in our mind, and we do this so effortlessly that it rarely seems like a puzzle worth fretting about, this miracle that we are able to identify the source of the events in our minds.
When you attend a church like the Vineyard, you are presented with a theory of mind in which that distinction is all of a sudden no longer straightforward. You are asked to experience some of your thoughts as being more like perceptions. In a church like the Vineyard, God participates in your mind, and you "hear" what he says as if it were external speech. The general model is clear enough, although no one actually presented it to me as a bullet-point list. God wants to be your friend; you develop that relationship through prayer; prayer is hard work and requires effort and training; and when you develop that relationship, God will answer back, through thoughts and mental images he places in your mind, and through sensations he causes in your body. You still experience those thoughts and images and sensations, for the most part, as if they were your own, generated from within your own mind and body. You have to learn to experience those you have identified as God's as different.

The process is not straightforward. In the middle of C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, a text written to invite skeptics and newcomers to the faith but read-as Lewis knew it would be-by those who have been Christians for many years, he says:
    I want to start by saying something I would like everyone to notice carefully. It is this. If this chapter means nothing to you, if it seems to be answering questions you never asked, drop it at once. Do not bother about it at all. There are certain things in Christianity that can be understood from the outside, before you have become a Christian. But there are a great many things that cannot be understood until after you have gone a certain distance along the Christian road … Whenever you find any statement in Christian writings which you can make nothing of, do not worry. Leave it alone. There will come a day, perhaps years later, when you suddenly see what it meant.1
Lewis presumes that much of what he says about faith is opaque to those who are not Christian. A skeptic might interpret this as a preemptive defense against skepticism. A better way to make sense of it is to consider that believing in this God involves complex learning in which learners override basic intuitions as they learn. This kind of learning suggests that what people are doing is not only learning but unlearning. They are like students in a physics class who begin with their intuitions and then turn them upside down.2
In fact, the learning does begin with an insistence on unlearning. Most serious life changes are preceded by an inchoate yearning, but evangelical conversion stories emphasize the unease and build it into a kind of achievement, as if telling people to abandon their preconceptions makes it possible for the real learning to proceed, clearing the cognitive underbrush to build a road through a tricky bit of forest. At the very time that new Christians (or newly committing Christians) are attending church, reading the Bible, and hearing endless accounts of God's nature, they are also told that God is not who they thought he was. "God's appointment book doesn't read anything like: M/W/F 10:07-10:22 a.m., talking to Sarah from Pasadena."3 As the author of The Beginner's Guide to Hearing God writes: "It's like God uses a radio when He speaks to us. God has not quit speaking to you. He has just turned the knob over to a different channel that you are not used to hearing Him on."4 You are told, in short, that you should expect to feel confused.

The church requires those who would be part of the official prayer team that stands in front of the church on Sunday morning to take an actual class. These two-to-three-hour classes explain the way prayer works and how to do it. The classes teach that when you pray, you have mental events (not that those teaching use that phrase) that are the presence of God in your mind. Your job is to pay attention to these events and follow where God "leads." This means that when you are praying, you should speak out loud in describing the images, thoughts, or impressions (often scriptural verses) that come spontaneously to mind, elaborating them as you understand them, paying careful attention to what is appearing in your mind and at the same time carefully paying attention to the emotions of the person being prayed over. The implicit theory is that God will speak to the person praying in ways that lead the person being prayed for to be emotionally moved. "Pray, listen and watch," advised the handout we got in the prayer ministry training class. "Listen for the leading of the Holy Spirit. Look for indications of the presence of the Holy Spirit (crying, peace, warmth, tingling, muscle spasms)." The idea is that you make yourself "available" for the Holy Spirit to work through, and the Holy Spirit will enter the other person through your prayer and (often) make them cry. People sometimes talk about this as being a "conduit." "I feel almost like a tube," Sarah once said to me, "that the Holy Spirit is feeding through me and into another person."

Even to Christians this sometimes sounds like psychotherapy, and indeed most sophisticated pray-ers speak, when they are praying, like empathic psychotherapists. Yet the language of the church attributes the empathy to the Holy Spirit so emphatically that sometimes the teachers make the process sound like the kind of mind-reading games children play on sleepover parties. Once a minister from another Vineyard, eagerly teaching us to hear God's voice, held up her key chain and announced that she was going to tell the Holy Spirit which key she was thinking about and that we were to ask the Holy Spirit to tell us which key she'd chosen. I went to a conference where we did another exercise: we put a member of our group in the center of our circle and prayed for her silently. The instructor told us to write down the images we felt we had received in that prayer so that other people's remarks would not "contaminate" what we said, and then we went around the circle in turn to share what had "happened." Many of us mentioned yellow or orange items: yellow foxgloves, a yellow canoe, an orange Chevy Convertible. The subject beamed and said that it was so cool to know that God knew her favorite color.
When I told these stories to members of the Vineyard, many cringed. And yet people often talked as if uncanny coincidence had enabled them to recognize a thought as a perception of God for the first time. They usually told some story about realizing that what they experienced as a random thought-or image, or a particular scriptural reference, maybe with a sudden rush of warmth-was in fact unusually relevant to the person they were praying over, and they felt that only an external God who had access to both minds could have planted a thought so relevant to the person who needed the prayer in the mind of the person who was doing the praying. Aisha was an intense, eager Christian who found her way to the Vineyard because she loved the idea of an intimate relationship with God, but she remembered being terrified the first time she prayed for a stranger as a member of the church's prayer team. "I didn't know what to say. I was really scared. And then, I remember, I saw something. It wasn't a vivid picture. It was more like my words described the picture than I saw clearly what the picture was. When I described it to the person I was praying for, he just started to cry. Then he explained why he was crying, and with that information, I was able to pray for him more. It was the most powerful thing."

In prayer training, she had been told never to give concrete advice in prayer and never to prophesy about birth, death, or marriage. A skeptic might see this rule as a hedge-don't predict anything that can be falsified-but the church sees it as a caution because the humans who interpret God's voice are so fallible. Soon afterward, she found herself praying as a member of the prayer team for a woman, a stranger to her, and as she prayed, she began to get images of a child. "Do you have children?" she asked the woman, and the woman said no. Nor had she nieces or nephews. Our teacher continued to pray, she said, but her images of children were so powerful and persistent that finally she blurted out (as she told the story) that "a child will come into your life." She felt awful afterward, she said, not only because she'd broken one of the cardinal rules but because she felt like a fool, making a prediction she was sure would come wrong. But a month later the woman came back to church and came up to her and thanked her, because she'd been pregnant when she had prayed for her and she hadn't known it. That was when our teacher knew that the image had come directly from God.
The church nudges people to interpret these uncannily coincidental thoughts as the presence of God by insisting that when God speaks to them in this way even when they are not praying, he wants them to pray for the people whom the thoughts or images represent. People spoke as if, in effect, one agreed to take on this responsibility when one became this kind of Christian. It was common for someone to report that the face of someone else had "popped" into their mind, and conclude, from this, that God wanted them to pray about that person. They often used the verb pop to describe this kind of experience, because pop implies that the image was spontaneous, and because it wasn't something they were already thinking about, so it was reasonable to suspect that God had deliberately placed it in their minds and for a reason.

"One day," Alice explained, "I read this book about Christian dating. For some reason, the name of a friend from high school popped into my head, every time I picked up the book. So I just randomly e-mailed her. I wrote, 'Well, I don't know what's going on, but I think God wants you to read this book.' She e-mailed back, 'Oh my goodness, this is amazing.' It turns out that she and her boyfriend were having problems. She was like, wow." "You have to be careful," Alice added quickly. "You have to think, is this coming from me or from God, and how will they react?" Then she added, "But if a person's name pops into my head and I don't e-mail them, and then something happens, I'm like, God, you really told me to e-mail that person. You told me to e-mail, and I'm sorry."

 She began to pray in earnest.
Then came the moment when "it broke through"-a Vineyard phrase for the way people experience the supernatural in everyday life.11 What "broke through" was the first real experience of having thoughts and images arise in her mind, while she was praying for someone else, and feeling sure that these thoughts and images came directly from God. This is the story that Sarah told:

    It was the first year that I was with the church and the first year I was really praying for the church. The Vineyard Association was having their national meeting in California, and they asked for intercessors to be praying regularly for that. I took it very seriously, and I prayed every morning. And one morning I was just sitting in my prayer chair, I had just finished and I was thinking about a picture. I thought my mind was wandering. I kept on seeing these boats. And I was thinking about that, and the phone rang, and it was the pastor. He was at the meeting, and he was calling about something completely different-and it was really silly for him to be calling. And after we went through with that, I just waited, and then I felt moved to say, "Why did you call me?" And he said, "I don't know. I just felt like I was supposed to call you." And it clicked then, that the picture I had seen wasn't a distraction from my prayers but was connected to my prayers. I told him about this picture that I'd gotten. And he told me when he came back that several people had gotten the same picture, and that it was about Jesus with his hands on the wheel of a ship! It sounds like lunacy, you know. And yet that's how it works.
People told me that when you are learning to hear God, it really helps to write down your prayers. This is particularly striking to an anthropologist because some anthropologists and historians have argued that it was literacy and eventually print culture that enabled science to emerge by creating a source of truth and memory outside the fallible human mind. Writing a claim down makes it easier to check the claim for accuracy and so writing makes science possible.12 But evangelical Christians encourage the use of writing because writing can make the supernatural more real. If you want someone to learn to experience the burbling stream of their thoughts as containing an external presence, writing things down is a useful tool because it actually externalizes the words of that presence. Vineyard congregants wrote out their prayers, and they did so, I thought, as a means to make their inner prayer process more tangible and not of the self. Most people whom I met at the Vineyard seemed to have a "prayer journal."

Dialogue with God explains that the "four keys" to experiencing dialogue are: learning how to recognize God's voice in your everyday thought; learning to go to a quiet place and be still; attending to dreams and visions; and writing down the dialogue so that you remember it and it becomes real for you.

Congregants would say, for example, that God spoke to them through circumstances. By this they meant that when events took place that skeptical observers might see as coincidences, they could recognize that the event was something God was using to speak to them about their lives. "Patterns and coincidences are not random," explained Stacy, a social worker, when I asked her how she heard God's voice. "A huge part of hearing God, for me, is just being able to recognize patterns."

Of course, if Madeline had not been pregnant, the moment would have lost its meaning. That is why, as Madeline told the story, her husband began to fidget. He didn't want me to think that faith depended on so flimsy a thing as circumstance. "There's a significant danger with experience being the basis for anyone's faith," he explained. "If our Christian walk is just simply us asking and him replying, then he becomes like Santa Claus. Like, what's the point of that?" And yet he too told me, when we first met, about an uncanny coincidence and how much it had meant to him, how it had confirmed his sense of God's active presence in his life.

Jane explained: "I was reading in Judges and I don't even know why I was reading it. There's a part where God talks about raising up elders in the church to pray for the church. And I remember, it just stuck in my head and I knew that the verse was really important and that it was applicable to me. I didn't know why. It was one of those, let me put it in my pocket and figure it out later." How, I asked, did she know that it was important? "Because I just felt it. I just felt like it really spoke to me. I don't really know why. And a couple of days later a friend asked me to be on the prayer team, and it was like, wow, that's what it was."
"God is always talking to you," Sam told me. "You just have to learn to listen. He always talks to you through the Bible. When you read his word, something will grab your heart."...God is understood to be communicating when, as one congregant put it, "a verse just jumps out at me," or when you have a powerful bodily feeling-you feel peace, or intense joy, or suddenly you feel very tired, as if a burden has been lifted and now you can sleep

Hannah commented, "Earlier during the summer I had a dream about a couple of people I know, and I woke up that morning and I was like that was a weird dream. Then I heard later in the day about the bombings in London and those two people are in London during the summer. And so it was like, whoa, I should have been praying for them."

In the medieval era, when few (if any) doubted the reality of spirits and the supernatural pressed in upon the everyday like a damp, low cloud, 'discernment of spirits' meant the ability to distinguish godly spirits from demonic ones. Individuals suffered the presence of beings who haunted their dreams and invaded their bodies. The salient question was not whether the vision was supernaturally inspired but what kind of supernatural activity had inspired it-and thus whether it was trustworthy, reliable, sound. Joan of Arc, for instance, was burned not because people doubted that she had had contact with supernatural forces but because people doubted that these supernatural forces were divine. This ability to discern the difference between divine and demonic spirits seems to be the sense in which Paul uses the term in his first letter to the Corinthians (the only time the term 'discernment' is found in the Bible), when he speaks of the different "gifts" that humans have and lists among them the 'discernment of spirits'.17

The first test was whether what you had heard or imagined was the kind of thing you would say or imagine anyway: if it was, the thought was probably yours. If not, it could be God. Spontaneous or unexpected thoughts were more likely to be attributed to God.18 Elaine, who led my house group, explained to me how she heard God speak to her in her mind. "It is kind of like someone was talking to me. That's how real it is. I get responses." How do you know? I asked. "God speaks to me," she replied. What do you mean by that? I asked. You can hear him with your ears, outside your head? No, she responded. "For some people God speaks with a distinct voice, so you'd turn around because you think the person's right there. For me it hasn't happened like that. Well, I mean kinda, there has been kind of that sense, but not like you'd turn your head because someone was there." Can you say more about those God experiences? I prompted. She explained that she did not hear the voice like it really was another voice, but it was more than a passing thought. It was clearly, she felt, not her thought. She went on to give an example. "When people were praying over me and I'm just receiving it [meaning the prayer], all of a sudden I hear, 'Go to Kansas.' Because I was debating whether to go to Kansas, but I hadn't been thinking about it within a twenty-four hour period." That's what made it distinctive to her: she wasn't thinking about it, it wasn't something she would have thought about right then. "It makes you want to say," she continued, " 'Where did that come from?' "
The second test was whether it was the kind of thing that God would say or imply. This was often articulated as making sure that what you thought God had said did not contradict God's word in the Bible. This caution was explicitly expressed in all the written material and nearly every casual conversation on the topic. Dialogue with God, for instance, states clearly (and repeatedly) that "if the revelation violates either the letter of the Word or the spirit of the Word, it is to be rejected immediately."19 God is a loving God; a revelation that tells you to hurt yourself or someone else, people said, came from something other than God. "You need discernment," the pastor said. "There's a letter written from Paul when he says, 'Don't put out the fires of the spirit but test everything, and hold on to what is good.' We don't expect that God would want someone to cut themselves, or tell them to jump off a bridge. That is not God." Notice that this would not apply to Abraham and Isaac or the other points in the Hebrew Bible when God acts, as the biblical scholar Jack Miles puts it when writing about the Book of Job, like a fiend. When people talked about making sure that what you heard did not contradict the Bible, they really meant that it should be in keeping with the understanding of God's character as taught within this church: unconditionally loving, eternally forgiving. The God at the Vineyard was not a fiend.20
The third test was whether the revelation could be confirmed through circumstances or through other people's prayers. People would check with each other to see whether they had "gotten" similar images in prayer. They asked people to pray for them, and sometimes followed up to see what those prayers had revealed. In the summer of 2004 Elaine's roommate moved out of their studio apartment. Elaine had never lived alone and wasn't really sure if she wanted to, and the total rent of the place was about what she earned each month. She began to pray to God to see if he wanted her to move out or to take a roommate. She thought that he wanted her to stay. That made her uneasy. So she began to ask other people to pray for her as well, and to tell her what sort of messages and images they saw. "It's a lot more money than I was paying before. So my human intellect was saying, 'Live with someone.' There's scripture about being in community, having a roommate. But there's a sense"-a sense that arose from her experience in prayer-"that I should really be living by myself. A friend of mine was praying, and she saw me in a studio by myself. I'm like, okay. I respect how she sees. She's been sensing God and the Holy Spirit for longer than I have. So I need to take that into account. It doesn't mean that I'm deliberately going to stay there because of that but I need to test that. You test prophecy. You ask God for more confirmation. That [the confirmation] could be God really saying it to me clearly. It could be someone else having a word or something." Then one of her friends had an image, in prayer, that Elaine thought was a sign. "One person had an image for me about being on the second floor, and studying, and being by the window with light shining in. That was kind of-okay, I remember that. I'm just kind of waiting [for something to happen]. A lot of it is waiting."
The final test was the feeling of peace. Prayer and God's voice are thought to give you peace and comfort. If what you heard (or saw) did not, it did not come from God.

When I first met Elaine, she was wondering whether she should invite a homeless woman to move in with her. She had asked God, she told me, and he had said no. "What does that mean?" I asked her, puzzled. She looked at me as if I were a little slow and said, "God puts the word into your mind. He just says no." It was as if the word just appeared in her mind, and she knew-she just knew-that it wasn't her own but came from God. She was very clear that one had to learn to recognize his voice, and that she had done so. People talked about learning to recognize God's voice the way they recognized a person's voice on the phone: "It's a different sort of voice. I mean, I know my own voice. If I thought of your voice I would think of how your voice sounds, and if I think of my voice I think of how it sounds, even if I'm not hearing anything. It's a different tone of voice." Or: "It's like recognizing someone-it's like, how do you recognize your mom?" They were insistent that you could learn to identify God: "It gets to a point you just know it's God's voice. It's very snappy and comes with constant prayer just nonstop."'