Years ago, at 2am on a Saturday in October 2020, I was delivered from a demonic infestation which had plagued my life for years… gone in a nanosecond. One moment I was terrified in the dark of my room, cowering in my bed with tears leaking from my eyes, the next moment the dark, oppressive presence that had just attacked me in my dreams was gone and instead my room was filled with the overwhelming peace and power of the Holy Spirit. I had been a witch for years up until that moment, and none of my spells or rituals could ward off the evil closing in on me, only God himself had the authority.

What did I learn about deliverance and demonisation from my personal experience? Well, in the years since then I have learned a lot, not just about the demonic, but especially about how Christianity defeats the powers of darkness, and I have to say; I’m not a fan of deliverance ministries. You might find that strange, given my background, but I hope I’m able to explain how spiritual warfare really works for the average Christian, and what you can actually do in the power of Christ.

First, a bit of background about me: I work as a mental health therapist in Tasmania, currently studying postgraduate psychology (honours), and I would probably describe my Christian denomination as charismatic Anglican. I first attended church as a 7-year-old when my mother converted from the New Age to Christianity, but her version of Christianity was very fear-based.

My Testimony

My mother taught me that an open bible would ward off demons (who she firmly believed were constantly attacking her), and that a crucifix was some sort of talisman which would leave the wearer vulnerable to attack if they took it off. Perhaps some of the demonic paranoia was warranted, considering her mother had practiced the old ways of the islands, passed down from our Fijian ancestors, or perhaps from exposure to the dark magic practiced in the regions of Africa she grew up in, around Kenya and Tanzania. My mother’s family thought that spirit walking and channelling the dead were normal parts of everyday life, so I think she had good reasons to be worried. However, she never really seemed to find freedom in the Lord. As a child, I was taken to multiple faith-healers for deliverance and my mother would spend hours at night trying to cast demons out of me. Why? Because I could see and hear things which others couldn’t. Maybe she should have taken me to a psychiatrist instead, but that never seemed to be an option for her, possibly because spiritual activity was so normal in her family, or maybe because she feared being analysed herself. In later years she was diagnosed with a personality disorder, but as far as I know she’s never sought psychological treatment, possibly because the paranoia is too strong. The last time I had contact with her, before she brought killing me into the conversation, her home was festooned with crosses, including a cross made out of masking tape on her front door. According to her, it prevented demons and demonically possessed people from coming into her house.

As you can imagine, my mother’s version of Christianity dissuaded me from following the faith, so as soon as I had left home for university, I stopped going to church. I still believed there was a God of some description, but I didn’t think that Christianity offered much in the way of truth or spiritual protection. In my experience, the more exposure I had to church, the more I would see disturbing and frightening things. My solution was to stop practicing any form of spirituality and hope it would all go away.

Unfortunately, that was not a permanent solution, although it did alleviate things for the most part. Over the course of a decade as an agnostic, I still had a number of what I described as ghost experiences. Most notably, one occurred the same day that the feature image of this article was taken; September 2016 at Port Arthur in Tasmania. I explored the partially ruined historic site during the day, fascinated by the history of the penal settlement and the natural beauty of the surrounding wilderness landscapes. It wasn’t until I entered the parsonage late in the afternoon that a sudden sense of foreboding hit me. It was like someone else was in the room, invisible, and their seething hatred for me was palpable. I left that building as quickly as possible, breathing a sigh of relief in the brisk spring air. However, I had also booked in for the ghost tour later that night and one of the places the guide took us was the parsonage. I gritted my teeth and followed inside, telling myself there was nothing to be afraid of, it was all in my head. No sooner had we all gathered as a group in the front room, than the shadowy figure of a hulkingly tall man, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and a long coat with a cape over the shoulders, appeared behind the man standing next to me. I looked away, trying not to freak out, telling myself; “it’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real…” except that the tour guide proceeded to tell us about the very tall vicar who died in that house and was too large to be carried down the narrow staircase.

That was the final straw for me. Since 2013 I had been living in a house in Queensland which seemed to be haunted, and seeing a full apparition on my first real holiday in years sent me into a tailspin, trying to figure out how to get rid of these experiences, or at least make sense of them. The only frame of reference I had was my mother’s belief that seeing the ugly side of the spiritual world made me evil somehow, that I was the one doing something wrong by being assaulted with unwanted visitations. At that point, I was not familiar with the biblical concept of a seer, or how parents are supposed to spiritually cover their children, but I’ll get to that later.

Whatever was in my house didn’t seem like a typical “ghost”. My first encounter was in broad daylight, around lunchtime on a Thursday before I worked an evening shift at the library and all my housemates were at work. I was sitting at my computer in the office when I heard someone sigh directly into my left ear. It startled the living daylights out of me, and I shot up out of my chair, spinning around to find the intruder. I raced around the house, shouting for whoever had breathed to show themselves, even running outside to try and catch someone lurking on my property. There was nobody.

For weeks I kept that experience to myself, starting to wonder if I was losing my mind or hallucinating, but it had been so visceral that I still felt the hairs on my left arm responding to that sound. One night, around 3am, the TV in the living room came on at full volume with a static channel, waking up the household. We all came out of our rooms, and someone grabbed the remote to turn it off, having to take the remote from the couch to the TV’s sensor to shut it off because that TV was notorious for not responding unless the remote was only a foot away from its sensor. We all stood around looking at each other in silence, then went back to bed. The next day we discussed what happened while making dinner, agreeing that it was strange the TV would respond, even if the cat stepped on the remote, and how did it get so loud so quickly and change stations? That was when my housemate, Tanya, said that she had heard someone sign in her ear when she was alone in the office.

After that it seemed to quiet down, until Tanya and her husband moved out of the house. Once they were gone, I was mostly on my own because the only other living person in the house was a workaholic who spent up to 18 hours a day at their job. During the evenings I started to see a big black hooded figure of a man standing in the doorway between the living room and the office, watching me while I watched TV, but only ever in the peripheral of my eye. Every time I turned my head to catch it, there was nothing there. It wasn’t just black in the sense that fabric can be black, this entity seemed to be an absence of light, like a black hole in the shape of a tall man with no face. I felt like I was losing my mind again, wondering if it was wise to even tell anyone what I was experiencing.

Then it escalated. A few times, weeks apart, I came home from work and found the porch light switched off, even though I was in the habit of turning on both the porch light and the living room light before I left the house in winter. I knew it would be dark once I got home, and I would be alone, so I tried to make the house look inhabited, but also have a light for me to open the front door. When that happened for the second time, I started to wonder: had a forgotten to turn the light on, or was someone turning it off? It wasn’t the only other person who had a key, because I asked, and they were too busy. I decided to start an experiment, paying close attention when I left the house that the lights were actually on, and for a while it all seemed normal, until one day I came home, and the porch light was switched off at the wall. I tried not to freak out, but a week later when it happened again, I stood outside my house crying, too afraid to go inside.

Later, as summer arrived, I was lying in bed trying to ignore my alarm, when someone shouted my name. I shot up out of bed, ran around my house and outside the house, able to see quite clearly in the morning daylight that I was completely alone. The creepiest part? Whatever had shouted my name in my empty house had used my mother’s voice, despite her still being alive and well. This was definitely NOT a ghost.

Not wanting to be a helpless victim, I did what any rational person who worked in a library would do; I read every book I could find on the subject. However, as you can imagine, a secular public library does not have a great selection of Christian books, so mostly what I found was sensationalism like the Warrens and spiritual fluff like Joyce Meyer. There was nothing practical or helpful in the Christian section, so I moved on to the mediumship books. Those at least gave the appearance of knowing what they were doing and didn’t seem to exploit fears. When a friend suggested I contact a group of mediums she knew, I was primed to believe it would be helpful and safe.

The advice I found in one library book said I needed to reclaim my space and transform the mood to sort of muscle out the intruder. I opened up all the blinds, let lots of fresh air flow through the house, spent extra time cleaning and “reclaiming” my property, all the while playing peaceful music. What I didn’t really think about was the fact that most of the “peaceful” music in my collection was actually Christian worship songs. Did I evict the spiritual squatter with my positive mood, or did it find the praise of the Lord too uncomfortable? Either way, something worked, and at the time I put it down to advice from mediums.

The medium group used to meet for public channelling sessions on a Sunday night at the local church hall, which they apparently hired. To my biblically illiterate mind it didn’t seem incongruous, and ostensibly it wasn’t a problem for the Christians hiring out their space, which begs the question; how many churches actually know anything about spiritual matters?

I was invited to the Monday night sessions, which were closed gatherings designed to train people in their abilities to interact with the spirit world. We did psychic exercises, which yielded a pretty high rate of accuracy you wouldn’t expect from chance, and performed necromancy for each other to get messages from beyond the grave. What started to worry me was the trance channelling sessions. We had been told by our instructor that we all had one or more “spirit guides” who connected us with the supernatural realm, and that we could share our bodies temporarily with one of those guides to receive a purer message without missing anything. After a year of seemingly safely interacting with the supernatural, I had no reason to doubt what the teacher was saying, so I gave it a go… and the spirit guide was very eager to take over my body. During the Monday sessions, I would often feel a physical presence of whatever spirit I was talking to, which took the form of a static field in the shape of a person: invisible, but palpable like an electric charge that would touch my arm and make the hairs buzz. Trance channelling was much the same, except that the field of static enveloped me completely and buzzed inside my head, speaking through my mouth whenever I opened it. It actually took some effort on my part to sustain the connection, eventually snapping apart when I grew tired, but even though I had some semblance of control, it was the incessant pawing at me that occurred before the channelling that freaked me out. The spirit was already trying to take control before I had even agreed to do it.

Shortly after that I left the medium group and started researching paganism and druidry. To my thinking at that time, it seemed like a charming and innocent activity to commune with nature and explore ancient philosophy. It didn’t involve too many spiritual exercises, although eventually it introduced the “spirit guide” connection activity, very similar to the medium group. However, the other stuff, like gathering with others in a forest to sit by a fire and share stories was much more enjoyable than channelling a tearful message from someone’s dead grandma.

After a few months going to druid meetings, one of the leaders invited to apply to her witchcraft coven, a wicca-based group of women who met every month on the full moon. I was accepted into the coven and began attending the monthly rituals, where we had to wear specially made red robes, unless we wanted to attend “sky-clad” which is a wiccan euphemism for nudity. Thankfully, I never had to deal with nude rituals, because I am way too much of a prude for that, but I did call on various pagan deities for favours and blessings, especially Hecate, the Greek goddess of magic and necromancy. Over the years as a practicing witch, I learned a number of rituals purported to ward off negative entities, which I practiced on a regular basis, believing they kept me safe.

I also learned how to read tarot and after I moved to Tasmania, I began selling psychic readings at crystal shops and online, often experiencing the same static charged presences I had felt during mediumship. This was how I had my second experience of attempted possession. I had been commissioned to do a reading for a girl who said she thought that the entity of Hades wanted to work with her. As soon as I started the card shuffling the static presence was there, trying to envelope me from the top of my head, pressing down on my shoulders so that I hunched over in my chair, physically struggling against its oppressive force. It told me what it wanted her to know; that she should let it in. I didn’t dare deliver a different message. Whenever I think back on what I have done, that particular choice still fills me with horror, and I hope and pray that the girl has been delivered from that entity, because I certainly let her down in that moment.

It wasn’t long after that reading that I began to question a lot of the things I had been taught. The world was losing its collective mind during 2020, and to me the cracks were starting to show. A lot of the online content I consumed during lockdowns happened to be from Christian creators, because they seemed to be the only people commenting on social issues who made any sense to me.

After a month or so of starting to consider the possibility that Christianity was true, something strange happened. When I watched the news and shook my head at the wild behaviour, a phrase would pop into my mind, and I would google it because it seemed like a quote. Sure enough, I would get the results back that it was a direct quote from the bible. Over and over this happened almost every second day for a month, always word-for-word perfect quotes of one or two sentences. The thing was, I hadn’t read a bible in about 15 years. I didn’t own a bible, and I actually don’t remember ever reading those parts of the bible that randomly popped into my mind in the first place. This was not my own memory at work. I had no natural recollection of bible quotes.

Eventually, I decided to buy a bible, and that was when all hell broke loose.

Apparently, demons don’t take kindly to people defecting to the Lord. Just buying a bible became a difficult mission which required three attempts. The first attempt, I was directed to a shop that had moved location, but my phone wouldn’t tell me what the new address was. The next attempt, a different store was closed by the time I got there, and the next attempt I had some trouble starting my car and then began feeling sick and dizzy while driving, almost turning around to go home. I pushed through the overwhelming feelings and burst into the Christian book shop, asking where they kept their bibles. Once I was home again, I did what my mother had taught me to do; leave the bible open like a warding spell and put on a cross like a talisman. It was essentially exactly like the witchcraft I had been practicing, but with a Christian veneer, and unsurprisingly it didn’t work.

For two weeks after I brought the bible home I was tormented day and night. During the night I would have terrifying dreams of being attacked by people with black eyes, waking up in the early hours of the morning and feeling a malevolent presence in the corner of my room. During the day my house was also oppressive, deterring friends from visiting who said they were uncomfortable in my home. Nothing I did worked to get rid of the evil that had unmasked itself.

Eventually, on that fateful night in October 2020, I was woken in the early hours by a night terror. I don’t remember praying, or asking for help, but God had mercy on me and delivered me all the same. I hadn’t set foot in a church at that point. I didn’t know any Christians. It was just the Lord who showed up and banished evil from my life permanently. In that moment I was hit with both the peace and the disappointment of the Holy Spirit, his palpable grief shattering my heart into a thousand pieces. Surely it is only the goodness of God that can lead us to repentance, because I certainly did not deserve His mercy.

The Holy Spirit had a stern word for me before He let me go back to sleep; “I have closed that door. Do not open it again.”

Deliverance Ministries

Do I think that my experience is typical of deliverance? No, not really, but it’s not abnormal either. We have biblical examples of God reaching out to people himself, like Paul on the road to Damascus, and there are plenty of recent accounts of people in Muslim countries dreaming about Jesus and being converted that way. God has invited the church to participate in the great commission, but He is by no means reliant on us or hampered by us.

That being said, there is a place for deliverance as part of ministry, specifically for people from outside of the church and those who are new to Christianity and may not have been delivered yet. My husband wasn’t delivered until his water baptism, even though he was a genuine believer for months beforehand. Baptism isn’t always necessary for deliverance (I didn’t need it) but it can be part of spiritual warfare, like the Israelites’ enemies drowning in the Red Sea while the Israelites were delivered from oppression.

Where I disagree with a growing number of deliverance ministries is when they claim that Spirit-filled, blood-bought Christians can be demonically possessed, not just tempted or attacked in some way. In the five years since my deliverance, I haven’t once had a recurrence of any demonic attachment, and you won’t find any biblical examples of that either. Some will claim that Jewish believers with unclean spirits are examples of Spirit-filled Christians being possessed, which is ridiculous because all those examples pre-date Pentecost and the outpouring of the Spirit.

Another claim deliverance ministries will make is they know all these solid, long-term believers who suddenly manifest demons during a service and need to be delivered. This seems to be the entire basis for their theology moving forward, and yet they have failed the first principle of any scientific or logical enquiry; are there alternative explanations?

Alternative Explanations

As I mentioned earlier, I’m studying psychology honours at the moment, so my life is all about research right now and the rigors of scientific enquiry. If I attempted to submit a research paper with the level of evidence being offered by deliverance ministers, I would be laughed out of academia. It’s not sufficient. They have not explored the contradictory evidence, such as testimonies like my own, nor have they cited sufficient biblical evidence for this doctrine, nor do they seem willing to entertain alternative hypotheses, so that’s what we’re going to do now.

The first possible factor which the Catholic church usually explores first as part of their duty of care, is mental illness. Sometimes something as simple as stress can affect someone’s perception of reality, especially in an environment which encourages someone to leap to the conclusion of demons. There are all sorts of medical events which can also temporarily affect someone’s mind, such as post-surgery psychosis, which is when anaesthetic causes delusions, paranoia and mania for a period of days or months. Reassuring someone that it might be medical rather than spiritual and ruling that out first is ethically responsible, even if it’s not popular.

A second potential factor is the person hasn’t actually been born again, even if they have been a churchgoer their whole life. I attended church until I was 20 years old, but that didn’t stop me from being vulnerable to other spirits. In the situation of children, they are not the ones who need to be dealt with, it’s their parents. The parents have brought something into the family home, and because children haven’t got their own defences yet, they are vulnerable prey. No amount of praying over the kids will save them, the church needs to confront the parents about their spiritual life. If the person afflicted is an adult, maybe they need to re-learn theology because it is entirely possible they don’t actually have the true gospel, similar to Acts 19 when Paul encountered disciples of John the Baptist who hadn’t yet received the Holy Spirit. Some people fall through the cracks because churches don’t take discipleship seriously. It’s not an indictment on the individual; it’s a failing of the church.

A third possible explanation is the placebo effect. People are primed to expect something to work, and their mind makes it happen, especially in circumstances where results are incredibly subjective. How do you know it worked? Well, I didn’t feel good and now I feel good, therefore the ritual worked. That’s the same logic I used to employ as a practicing witch, but it never made it true.

Another possibility is the person has a driving desire for attention, similar to factitious disorder (formerly Munchausen disease). Granted, this could fall under the psychology category, but it doesn’t need to be pathological to be causing some effects. People just really want to belong and feel accepted in a group, so an environment which places the expectation of deliverance on participants may subconsciously evoke the desired behaviour. Or they might actually have factitious disorder, allegedly like Mike Guglielmucci who faked cancer for 2 years, receiving donations from people for his non-existent medical treatment, and produced a song with Hillsong which he performed with a breathing tube that he didn’t need. Mike was a pastor at the time and theoretically a born-again believer, but he blamed his deception on a long-term porn addiction and only likes to talk about God’s forgiveness rather than how messed up his actions were. Similar psychopathology could easily lead someone to “manifest” demons at church on a regular basis.

A fifth potential explanation is that it’s easier to blame external factors rather than taking responsibility. Sometimes it’s hard to admit when the problem is ourselves and we need to do something about it, especially when there are deliverance ministers who earn their bread and butter from enabling such people. Vlad Savchuk put out a video which was recently panned by the YouTube channel Lion of Fire, and rightly so. In the “deliverance” video, Vlad commanded a series of “demons” to leave people and named them all things like gluttony, drunkenness, sexual immorality, chocolate addiction, porn addiction etc… which is basically a list of sins of the flesh, not demons.

This sort of message constantly being put forth by deliverance ministries does not help Christians to overcome their flesh. Instead, it gives them a victim mentality which disempowers them from living godly lives and makes them feel helpless without the assistance of deliverance, which is how scammers cultivate repeat customers, something I saw frequently in New Age “healing” businesses. If Christians actually read their bibles instead of heaping up teachers to tickle their ears, they would know the onus is on us to “flee immorality” (1st Corinthians 6:18) and that the works of the flesh are evident in that whole list of things Vlad was “casting out” (Galatians 5:13-21).

Basically, if it’s listed in Proverbs, it’s probably of the flesh, not a demon. The bible clearly tells Christians to stop living in the flesh and start living by the Spirit instead:

You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ. But if Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you. Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation – but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live. – Romans 8:9-13 (NIV)

Are we tempted to sin? Yes, of course we are. However, the bible is pretty clear that temptation is not sin itself, nor is it an excuse to sin either:

So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall! No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it. – 1st Corinthians 10:12-13 (NIV)

Spiritual Warfare

How are we, as Christians, supposed to conduct spiritual warfare? We can at least be sure that spiritual warfare is real and needs to be taken seriously, but the biblical advice on this matter is not to find a deliverance minister or start “binding and loosing” or commanding demons to get out in Jesus’ name. What the bible actually says about spiritual warfare for Christians (who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit and not by demons) is to focus on faith and protecting their minds from deception, lies, and doubt:

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armour of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armour of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled round your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people. – Ephesians 6:10-18 (NIV)

Ephesians lists things like knowing the scriptures as a form of spiritual defence, having faith, knowing the truth, having a right relationship with God (close to your heart), and always being ready to share the gospel and spread peace to others. Praying for one another is also part of standing firm in the Lord. Notably, writhing on the floor while someone casts a binding spell on you is absent from this passage of scripture. Again, as I mentioned in the previous section, our spiritual walk also involves overcoming fleshly impulses, which is why a fruit of the Spirit is self-control, not being rescued from our flesh by a charlatan deliverance minister:

You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you think Scripture says without reason that he jealously longs for the spirit he has caused to dwell in us? But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says: ‘God opposes the proud but shows favour to the humble.’ Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. – James 4:4-10 (NIV)

This passage from James is a rebuke to covetous and quarrelsome churchgoers who are not following Jesus in His ways and the advice isn’t to cast out demonic attachments, it’s to humble themselves. We are called to humble ourselves and submit ourselves to God. That’s spiritual warfare. James clearly says if we draw close to God by humbling and submitting ourselves to God in repentance and faith, the devil will flee. No need to “cast out” Satan, because it’s God who casts out Satan, not us.

How else can we battle dark forces, other than growing our faith and relationship with God? We have another example from the apostle Paul:

Even if I should choose to boast, I would not be a fool, because I would be speaking the truth. But I refrain, so no-one will think more of me than is warranted by what I do or say, or because of these surpassingly great revelations. Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. – 2nd Corinthians 12:6-10 (NIV)

In this biblical example, we can see that Paul is physically afflicted, but not mentally afflicted, by Satan. However, Satan is only allowed to afflict Paul because God has permitted it for Paul’s benefit. In many other circumstances, Paul has been untouchable to Satan, like when he was bitten by the snake. In this situation do we see Paul commanding the affliction to leave him? Do we see Paul rebuking Satan directly? No. Actually, we see Paul petitioning God directly and asking for deliverance, but when God says no, Paul accepts the answer. There is no harm in asking God for assistance, but sometimes the answer is that our circumstances are for our benefit; to prune us so we bear fruit and refine us like gold. This is an example of how Christians need to trust God and submit to Him instead of constantly railing against every perceived adversary.

If you have the Spirit of God, you do not need the deliverance minister.