Q and A with Ken Fish
Ken Fish, Princeton ’82, is the founder of Kingdom Fire Ministries. He is the featured speaker at Christian Union’s Gospel of the Kingdom Conferences, which are hosted biannually in New York City. The conferences are known for focusing on physical and emotional healing, deliverance, and prophesy, and other supernatural aspects of ministry.
Ken Fish teaching at a Christian Union salon in 2018.
As a student at Princeton, Fish was a solid-state physics major before shifting his undergraduate studies to religion and philosophy. Following graduation, he worked on Wall Street before taking a job in the financial sector in Southern California and pursuing a master of divinity at Fuller Theological Seminary. An internship led to a full-time position and over a decade working for the late John Wimber at the Vineyard Church. Under Wimber’s leadership, Vineyard was known for empowerment by the Holy Spirit, significant renewal in the gifts, conversion growth, and a movement that grew to a network of over 2,400+ churches worldwide.
Fish, who also earned an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management, founded Kingdom Fire Ministries ten years ago.
CHRISTIAN UNION: How were you first introduced to the ministry of healing, deliverance, and prophecy, etc.?
KEN FISH: At Princeton, I was involved in a campus ministry. It was a good ministry. We had a belief in the things of the Spirit, but, honestly, we couldn’t report on a single healing…and I don’t remember ever seeing a demon cast out of anybody. We were well-intentioned, but we didn’t know what we were doing and had no one to train us. Around my junior or senior year, I started praying and said, “God, I see all these things in the Bible and I don’t live any of it.” There was a disconnect between my lived out Christianity and the Christianity that I saw in the Word of God.
Not long after that, I was at church and a woman walked up to me with a bag in her hand [and gave me] John Wimber cassette tapes that dealt with matters of healing and spiritual gifts. I just got so animated, and I remember praying and saying, “God, if this is real, I have to have this. I don’t care what it costs me.”
CU: How do your academic and theological backgrounds help you in your work with Kingdom Fire Ministries?
KF: My academic background probably helps me think about what’s happening with a more clinical eye than your typical charismatic Christian. By the way, I’m not a big fan of the term charismatic Christian. I use it because people use it, but I really think a better term is pneumatic Christian—we’re people of the Spirit and the gifts.
Having a seminary degree puts a discipline around the way I think about Scripture, church history, theological tradition, etc. I went to seminary because God—I mean this is going to sound weird, but it’s the truth—God told me to go to seminary. In my sophomore year at Princeton, I had an open vision, which means that I saw this vision whether my eyes were open or closed and it was as real as if you hold your hand in front of your face and see your hand. The vision lasted three days. When I would lie down at night to go to sleep, I’d close my eyes, and still see it. When I would wake up in the morning, it was still there. If the professor was lecturing, I’d look down and see it as superimposed over my notes. There was no escaping it. Then, after three days, it left. The vision clearly instructed me to go to seminary; there was no question that that was what God wanted me to do. I probably needed that vision because I didn’t enjoy the seminary environment. I found it filled with a lot of unbelief, a lot of very propositional theology, and almost, a hostility to what you read in the Bible at face value. I found a lot of hostility to that kind of vibrant Christian faith.”
CU: Why do a lot of people, including Christians, not embrace supernatural ministry?
KF: Jesus said, “When the Son of Man returns will we find faith on the earth?” There is an immense amount of unbelief in the body of Christ. We live in a society where the things of the supernatural are either openly mocked or questioned, whether it is in academia, the media, in government—no one really takes any of this very seriously. And religion is kind of relegated to, “You believe what you want, but don’t take it too seriously, don’t go too far with it; we don’t want to have a lot of fanaticism here and things that are dangerous.” That’s the underlying tone you see pretty much universally throughout most of Western Christianity, at least Protestant Western Christianity. Additionally, a lot of seminaries are infected with that [kind of thinking]—seminaries where we train our future theological leaders, pastors, etc.
CU: As a Christian Union board member, how important is it for students to receive training in the gifts of the Spirit? What kind of leaders can that kind of teaching develop?
KF: Those are exactly the kind of leaders we need. If you look at the early leaders of the church, they were all steeped in Scripture and took it very seriously. It’s almost not fair to look at Paul. He could certainly be an example. You could also look at less educated men like Peter or James. They quoted the Old Testament Scriptures in their writings. They knew it well and understood it in light of the revelation of Jesus…they experienced Him and understood who He was. As John says in his first letter (1 John 1:1), “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life…” John was not going to get pushed off of his belief, and that’s why he ended up on Patmos. That kind of experience, coupled with your knowledge of Scripture, is what makes leaders who are not easily swayed. Yes, there are some that fall away and don’t stay the course, but, in general, if you’re on the switch rails of Holy Spirit power and in Scripture, and you have both in your life—those kind of people don’t easily fall away, and they are not easily bound to the prevailing orthodoxy of the greater culture around them.
CU: You returned recently from a ministry trip to Athens, Greece, with author and national radio host Eric Metaxas, and reported that there were many miraculous healings. You also said that about fifty people came to know the Lord. What is the correlation between supernatural ministry and evangelism?
KF: I think the main reason God does things like this is because He loves people and He’s compassionate. Of course that always brings up the question of “Why isn’t everybody healed?” That is a complex topic and there are a lot of answers. Even if I gave every answer, it would not fully explain everything. But many people are healed and, increasingly, many more are being healed. I certainly see an ongoing uptick in the level of grace, the number of healings, the complexity of healing, the nature of healings that we see week to week, month to month, year to year…”
CU: How essential is prayer for a ministry like yours that operates in healing, deliverance, and prophecy?
KF: Prayer is essential to everything we do. I’ve got a team of intercessors that hear from me regularly and I have a wider prayer letter that I send out every month. Prayer is a critical component. I don’t think you can do this kind of ministry without prayer.
CU: What Bible verse is foundational for your ministry?
KF: 1 Corinthians 2:4-5, “My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.”
