Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by Bill Dew.
Bill Dew was a successful commercial real estate agent in California who dated the beginning of his life with Christ to March 31, 1992, when, at forty-seven, he had an encounter with Jesus and was baptized in the Holy Spirit. He later traveled in healing ministry with Randy Clark and devoted himself to teaching ordinary Christians to pray for the sick. In July 2006 he came to the Florida Family CFO at Lake Yale in Eustis to teach on healing and the kingdom of God.
Bill was forty-seven years old and had been going to church for thirteen years when his life changed. He was working in commercial real estate and doing well. “I was very successful. I was a driven kind of guy.”
On March 31, 1992, at 8:15 in the evening, Bill was baptized in the Holy Spirit. He had never been part of a Pentecostal or charismatic church. “I had a vision of Jesus. He came and told me he loved me and he forgave me and he said, and son, you can do this too.”
The first person he prayed for was his wife, Carol, who had fallen and been hurt that day. She was healed that night. Bill had never been to Bible school or seminary. What he did have was a conviction about what God wanted him to do. “I really felt like God put a mandate on me. And basically it was heal the sick, teach others to heal the sick, and impart to them what God has done with you.”
In January 1996 Bill went to Toronto for a week of the renewal meetings and ended up staying three weeks. Later he became Randy Clark’s driver during a week of meetings in Northern California. Clark then invited him to travel with him.
Bill and Carol eventually spent sixteen months traveling full-time with Randy Clark in healing ministry. Following that call meant leaving much of Bill’s former life behind. Money became tight enough that he sold his red 1993 Lexus to keep going. He called the car “the last vestige of my old life.”
Two weeks later, in Colombia, Bill was praying for Clark before an outdoor meeting of about 2,500 people when he began feeling pain in his own body. Clark recognized what was happening: Bill was receiving words of knowledge in the same way Clark sometimes did. “The anointing is more often caught than taught.” That idea became important to Bill. He did not want Christians simply to listen to stories about what God had done through somebody else. He wanted them to discover that God could work through them too.
In July 2006 Bill came to the Florida Family CFO at Lake Yale and taught from the book of Acts. “I want to be a normal Christian,” he told the campers. His definition of normal Christianity included the supernatural life described in Scripture. “The church is supposed to be a place where you can get saved, healed, delivered.”
He told story after story, but the point was not that Bill Dew could do unusual things. It was that ordinary believers could pray for people wherever they happened to be. One of them was a young man named Chad, who prayed for a woman wearing hearing aids in a grocery store at ten o’clock at night. When she was healed, Chad borrowed the store’s intercom to announce it.
That led to more prayer. A woman in a motorized cart who was facing hip surgery got up and walked out of the store, and a concert pianist suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome was prayed for and found relief in his hands. Bill liked stories like that because they happened in a grocery store rather than a church service.
Bill saw his ministry primarily as equipping other Christians. “You do know you can’t heal anybody. You do know that. It’s him.” He pictured a three-year-old helping his father hammer a fence. The child has his hand on the hammer, but the father’s hand is over his, supplying the strength and directing the blow. That, Bill said, was what ministry was like.
At his church, the Potter’s House School of the Supernatural had thirty-nine students that year. Bill and other church leaders took them to Fiji, where students who had never prayed for anyone before ministered to a woman who had come out of the hospital paralyzed. “She came out of the wheelchair weeping, speaking in tongues.” The important part of the story for Bill was who had prayed for her: beginners. A pastor in Oregon once gave him a compliment he treasured. “You’re just so ordinary. But you make us believe we can do this too.”
Bill also told the campers about praying for a woman in a mortgage office who was afraid she was losing her baby. She had miscarried the previous November and was pregnant again. Bill prayed for her and declared that the baby would live. The next day, he said, the doctor found a healthy heartbeat. The baby was born healthy that November.
Bill had heard of a similar answer to prayer in Redding, California. He connected the stories with something he had learned about testimony: “the root word of testimony means to do again.” For him, telling what God had done was a way of building faith for what God might do again.
At one of Bill’s early meetings in San Diego, he prayed with a church secretary who had never prayed for anyone else to be healed. That evening her husband became ill and ended up in an emergency room. She prayed for him there, and his fever disappeared within three minutes. Then she started praying for other people in the emergency room.
By morning, Bill said, she had prayed for twenty people, led five to the Lord, and seen five significantly healed. It was another example of what he wanted his ministry to accomplish. The goal was not to gather people around someone with a healing ministry. It was to send Christians out believing they could pray for the person in front of them.
Carol shared much of Bill’s journey into healing ministry. She was the first person he prayed for after his experience in 1992, and she later traveled with him as he left his former career behind and entered full-time ministry. After Carol went home to be with the Lord, Bill later married Kathleen “Kat” Dew. Bill and Kat have continued in ministry together through Dewnamis Ministries, traveling and teaching Christians to pray for the sick and minister in the power of the Holy Spirit.
The emphasis remains much the same as it was when Bill stood before the Florida CFO in 2006. He ended one of his teachings there by reading a declaration his church had adopted: “We’ve decided that living saved but not supernatural is living below our privilege and short of what Christ died for.”
*Note:
Many speakers lived before the days of the internet and many had very limited biographical information available. The information in these biographies came mostly from transcripts of their messages, and relies heavily on their own spoken words. Please contact us if you have any corrections.