I first came across Cliff in the mid 1980s when I attended a Lydia prayer conference at which Cliff was speaking. I was enthused by the message he brought and also about the ministry which he was exercising. The magazine Prophecy Today was in its infancy and I began to subscribe to it on a regular basis.
It wasn’t very long after that first encounter that we moved from living in Yorkshire to London suburbia and that gave me the opportunity to offer help in the Prophetic Word Ministries office near London Bridge. I think I went in 2 days a week, most of which was spent stuffing envelopes and sticking on stamps, and it was during that time that I witnessed the laborious cut and paste process of putting together a magazine.
The wonders of Desk Top Publishing had taken the printing world by storm and it seemed fairly obvious to me that if Prophecy Today could be produced that way it would greatly reduce the time and hassle of its production So one day I ventured into Cliff’s office and suggested the idea to him. It had evidently been a tiring morning and he was looking harassed; ‘But how could we afford it and who would be able to use the equipment if we had it?’ was his response. Fortunately I’d done some homework on the matter and it seemed that £5000 would be required for the necessary Apple Computer and Quark Express software plus printer. In the 1980s that sounded like a huge amount of money for a small ministry but, rather weakly he said ‘Well we’d better pray about it’. As for the question of who would use this equipment – I certainly liked the idea and offered to take the necessary training if and when we were able to go ahead.
Not too long after that Clifford called me into his office. He had received a cheque for £5,000! It came from someone whose wife he had prayed for at a meeting at which Cliff had spoken some while earlier in Harrogate (I think), and this lady had been healed. The cheque was a thanksgiving offering from the husband for that healing.
And so I was given the go ahead and headed out to shop for the necessary items and to enrol in the relevant course – quite an alarming experience as at that stage all I could do with computers was use them like an electric typewriter! It was a 3-day course after which I returned to the office and was expected to be able to produce the next magazine – along with Gary, the assistant editor at the time. That was a pretty fraught experience and it took several months to get to the stage of being able to produce Prophecy Today without too much pain. Inevitably the main challenge was that now that additions and changes could be made to text with a bit of manoeuvering on the keyboard, articles could be changed or added to right up to the last minute before being sent to the printers. Then I understood why the printing world is so pressurised – changes and deadlines, changes and deadlines! Somehow, we always got through it and I certainly enjoyed those days of working in the PWM office, not just for the work but for the interaction of colleagues and especially for the regular prayer times that we had together.