Who Gets to Cast Out Demons? Part 2: The Question Nobody Answers Clearly

Last week, Part 1 raised the basic question of whether Christians should still take demonic affliction seriously; this week turns to the harder follow-up: if evil is real, who is actually authorized to confront it? You do not have to read the first essay before this one, but it is worth going back to after you finish.
 
Most Protestant traditions, Lutheranism included, do not have a formal answer the way Rome does; this essay is written for serious lay readers and pastors who need a safer, more accountable way to think about deliverance ministry. The real dividing line running through everything here is not which tradition you belong to, but whether authority comes from an office, appointed and accountable from above, or from individual initiative, taken up by someone convinced of their own readiness to act. That distinction matters because spiritual confidence without pastoral accountability can quickly become spiritual recklessness.

Rome answers with the first. They developed a canonical exorcist role over centuries precisely because untrained intervention is clearly dangerous — spiritually, psychologically, and sometimes even physically. Authority to carry on this work is not left to whoever feels called. It requires a bishop's appointment, ongoing supervision, and increasingly formal medical or clinical consultation, because the differential diagnosis between psychiatric illness and spiritual affliction is real, and error in either direction can harm someone. I have spent time training alongside men preparing for that ministry, under the sponsorship of a priest with direct experience in the field. What struck me was not the drama and special effects that Hollywood assumes is at the center of it all. At the core, it was the discipline. The insistence on ruling out the medical — and the merely spiritual-sounding — before treating a case as demonic. The refusal to let one person act alone. Years of formation before anyone is handed authority to act. There is considerable wisdom in this approach.

In recent times (within the last 100 years), there have been serious efforts inside Lutheranism to build a comparable formation without creating a parallel magisterial structure. Kurt Koch (1913-1987), a German pastor and theologian, gives the movement its documentary backbone by publishing case files where mental or physical illness appeared to have a demonstrable spiritual root. Robert Bennett gives the discussion a more explicitly confessional Lutheran footing after fieldwork in Madagascar, where Lutheran pastors casting out demons were not importing a Catholic or Pentecostal practice but exercising ordinary pastoral ministry in that context. Harold Ristau carries the retrieval into the present: an LCMS pastor and former military chaplain whose My First Exorcism treats deliverance ministry as a serious pastoral discipline, with a foreword from John W. Kleinig, whose liturgical scholarship carries real weight in confessional Lutheran circles.
 
This is not a fringe curiosity being smuggled in from elsewhere. It is Lutheran pastors and scholars publishing through recognized presses and endorsed by seminary faculty, doing the slow work of historical and liturgical retrieval. That said, the case should be made with precision: the problem is not that Lutheranism has no resources, but that many Lutheran institutions have not yet worked those resources intentionally into pastoral formation, supervision, and lay ministry training.

The Other Model

Formal ecclesial authority is not the only serious way to handle this. I have also spent time with healing ministry in charismatic-renewal streams — under Mike Flynn, an Episcopal priest and Vineyard pastor (mentored by John Wimber) whose own mentorship shaped how I think about this. Additionally, pastors such as Francis MacNutt, Dennis Bennett, Sam Storms, Charles Kraft, and Neil T. Anderson approach the issue from a different angle: spiritual gifts of discernment before intervention, a team rather than a solo operator, and a theology built around authority in Christ rather than technique against an enemy. 

There are fewer rules, permissions, and protocols in this way of operating, and that distinction matters. At its best, the charismatic-renewal model moves quickly, prays boldly, and relies on discernment in community; at its worst, it tempts the inexperienced to find a demon behind every symptom and to confront situations that may be medical, psychological, relational, or simply ordinary. You cannot “cast out” something that is not there.

The people most likely to need a real answer to the question are often the ones least likely to receive it from their own pastor, because most clergy formation does not address the question directly. That leaves people improvising — reaching for whatever they can find and MacGyvering together something at their own kitchen table that no seminary, synod, or bishop ever authorized, simply because no one taught them there was a slower, safer, more accountable way to ask for help.

The Insight From the Margins

There is a population inside the church that knows this territory better than most seminary faculties: people who have lived through addiction, incarceration, and homelessness rarely need convincing that both psychiatric and spiritual affliction are real. Many have experienced something that closed in, took hold, and had to be broken, not merely managed. This is the bridge between high ecclesiology and real-world pastoral life — the place where the abstract question of authority meets concrete suffering.

A congregation shaped by that community can hold a serious conversation about these matters. It is often the more comfortable, more credentialed wings of mainline Protestantism that have lost the category altogether — not because the affliction is absent, but because the people with formal training have stopped expecting to meet it.

Where That Leaves You

As a layperson, you do have real authority, but only within your own sphere: your household, minor children, property, and business. That is the authority Scripture gives you under the Fourth Commandment. Inside that sphere, you are not powerless and you are not required to wait for permission to pray, bless, or renounce evil over your own home and family. But when something feels larger than your actual standing to address, the decision path should be simple: pray faithfully within your sphere, involve your pastor early, and resist the impulse to search the internet for a rite you were never given authority to use.
 
A responsible pastor should investigate the claim, pray with you, and help distinguish spiritual affliction from medical, psychological, or household factors that require other forms of care. If an initial visit settles the matter, good — that is the system working as designed. If it does not, the next step is not private escalation but accountable pastoral escalation: a second visit, a stronger rite if warranted, the Eucharist if appropriate, consultation with experienced clergy, and clinical discernment where necessary.
 
What you should not do is keep trolling the internet for advice and tools to “try out.” Improvising past the point where you have actual standing to act is dangerous because sincerity does not create authority, and spiritual authority should never be performed in isolation, panic, or curiosity. If this essay has one practical conclusion, it is this: pray where you have been given responsibility, involve the church where the burden exceeds that responsibility, and do not mistake access to online rituals for a call to use them.


Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area

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