Pentecostal
Deliverance ministry
The only body here with no service book. Its founding conviction is that what the gospels show requires no office and no permission — so there is nothing to license and no text to follow.
In its own terms
What this body is doing
Deliverance is a practice rather than a rite, and the distinction is not a slight. Its founding conviction is that what the gospels show Jesus doing is available to any believer on the authority of the commission in Mark 16, without office, appointment or episcopal licence. That is a coherent position with a scriptural warrant, and it explains almost everything else about the movement — including how fast it spread, since it needed no institution to spread through.
What it has in place of a service book is a literature. From 1973 onward, manuals describe categories of spirit, the routes by which they are held to gain access, and the shape of a session. The corpus carries six of these, and they argue with each other in print: about checklists, about whether a believer can be indwelt, about territorial claims. That internal argument is why this body's claims can be graded at all — the objections come from inside it.
Where it stands in the tree
Descent
Separated from
Pentecostal and charismatic · 1973Not a separation but a specialisation: a practice that grew inside Pentecostal and charismatic churches and spread through paperbacks rather than through synods, which is why it has manuals and no service book.
The same questions asked of every body
What it holds
Are the gifts still given?
Described from a text the corpus holdsContinuing, and available to any believer.
The premise of the whole literature: the gifts did not cease, so the commission to cast out spirits still stands and needs no office to exercise it.
They Shall Expel Demons · 1998
Who may act?
Described from a text the corpus holdsAny believer, without office or permission.
Grounded in the commission of Mark 16 rather than in an appointment — which is why it needed no institution to spread through.
They Shall Expel Demons · 1998
What counts as evidence?
Described from a text the corpus holdsBehavioural checklists, contested from inside the movement.
The 1973 manual is the source of the form; its critics within the movement object to the checklist itself more than to any entry on it.
Where is the spirit?
Described from a text the corpus holdsIn the person, the family line, the object, and the territory.
Generational curses, legal ground and territorial spirits are all twentieth-century extensions; the territorial version dates to the late 1980s.
Territorial Spirits & Strategic-Level Spiritual Warfare · 1989-1996
Whom do the words address?
Described from a text the corpus holdsThe spirit, directly, and often at length.
The session form is a dialogue with what is addressed; binding and loosing language is applied to the spirit rather than to conduct.
What restraint is written in?
Described from a text the corpus holdsWritten by individual authors rather than by an institution, and unevenly.
Several writers caution against assuming a spiritual cause for illness; the corpus records that caution where a text makes it and its absence where it does not.
The Three Battlegrounds · 1989
What closes the matter?
Described from a text the corpus holdsOften nothing formal. The literature describes maintenance rather than dismissal.
Legal ground has to be kept closed, which makes the matter continuing rather than concluded.
Operating in the Courts of Heaven · 2014; revised 2016 · in copyright, described never quoted
What happened afterwards
Reception
Widely mistaken, by supporters and critics alike, for an ancient practice recovered. Its vocabulary is scriptural and its framework is twentieth-century; the corpus dates each element rather than accepting or dismissing the whole.
This page records what a body holds and where that is written down. It takes no position on whether any of it is true, and nothing here is instruction — the rites are described by what they contain, never as something to follow.