I had been a Christian for many years, having accepted Jesus as my Savior at the age of fourteen, but no one told me that Jesus had to be Lord (e.g., boss) of my life. As a result, my early Christian experience was not very successful or powerful, and I never developed a deep and intimate relationship with God. That is why I ended up backsliding in my late twenties for four or five years.
Shortly after I was married, though, I started feeling hungry for God. I began to fast, and my devotions and prayer time came alive. I enrolled at Fuller Theological Seminary so I could go into full-time ministry. I began to have prophetic knowledge of people’s needs, but I had never heard of the prophetic gift and did not know what was happening.
In April 1994 I got an email about some amazing meetings in San Francisco where God was showing up in unusual ways. I went, received prayer and had an incredibly powerful encounter with God. My body began to shake, which lasted three hours. During that time, God kept telling me to trust Him. I continued to attend the meetings, and God met me powerfully each time. He began doing inner healing in me, and I began to feel loved and also able to love others with the love of Christ.
After this I began flying to Toronto, where Randy prayed for me several times at the revival. Every time he prayed for me, a passion for missions would burn in my soul. Randy came to minister in my home church in August 1994, and during these meetings I again experienced the tangible presence of God.
In 1995 and 1997 I went with Randy and a team to Moscow. On both of these trips, I saw God do amazing miracles when I prayed for people. I saw deaf ears open, semicrippled people walk and one instance when God grew back missing body parts. There was a lady who had been in a fire, and her kneecaps were burned off. When I prayed for her, God gave her new kneecaps! The thing that I took back from the second trip was that God really will heal the sick through me!
In June 2001, I started a healing school where people learned to pray for the sick and see people get healed. I am convinced that God wants everyone in the Body of Christ to be able to pray for and heal the sick.
In 2002 I was laid off from my job, five days before leaving on a trip to Brazil with Randy. Significant things happened to me on that trip. It was an incredible time where I saw the power and anointing of God in healing as never before. I felt that it was a foretaste of what to expect from God in terms of healing ministry. When I got home from Belém, I knew that God was taking me out of secular employment to live by faith and work full-time for Him.
I cannot help but think of Randy as a spiritual father since God used him to impart into me and to launch me into ministry. Randy also helped me gain enough boldness and confidence in the Lord to be able to conduct healing meetings in many different countries around the world.
[Note: After returning from the Russia trips, Teresa saw her ministry begin to grow from very humble beginnings into an interactive Internet training school for intercession and prophecy called GodSpeak International. Thousands of students have participated in the school, which is still active today. Many have been launched into their own powerful ministries through it.]