The Anchorage Daily News quotes Kelly Tshibaka as saying she’s a victim of those who ridicule what she believes is a spiritual gift she has—the ability to speak in tongues.

“It’s only vogue to attack Christians who are conservative or charismatic. You would never think it’s OK to replay that with some of the Jewish practices or some of the Muslim practices, and I don’t think it’s OK either. I don’t think faith discriminations is OK,” Tshibaka said after a July campaign event in her headquarters. “We don’t always understand other people’s religious practices, but we aren’t expected to. That’s something that’s deeply personal.”

Voters don’t have to understand or accept her religious practices, but they should at least know what Tshibaka preaches.

Tshibaka and her husband, Niki Tshibaka, founded a church near Washington, D.C. in 2006, part of the Foursquare Church, a Pentecostal denomination founded by Aimee Semple McPherson in 1923. As the co-pastors, the Tshibakas delivered regular sermons, many of which remain online.

The Rev. Kelly Tshibaka spoke at various times on spiritual gifts, including those that she believes she has been given to her by God—including the gift of healing and the gift of speaking in tongues.

In a March 3, 2013 sermon she said it took her five years from the time she started praying to be able to speak in tongues until she received the gift.

Tshibaka, speaking on April 7, 2013, said she can tell that her “spirit language” is a real language—one of 7,000 or more languages she said God created—though she does not know what her spirit language is or what she is saying. She said God knows all 7,000 languages, which he made when he scattered the people of Babylon.

She said her spirit language is probably one of the languages that no one cares about any more. She said when she sings her spirit language people think she is happy, while if she just speaks it in a grocery store, they think she is crazy.

Here is her explanation of speaking in tongues, which she said is praying of speaking in a language that your mind does not know. “So what happens is the spirit will bypass your mind to speak the unfiltered, uncorrupted word of God.”

She said she does not go into a trance when she speaks. She said that when she prays in tongues she sends her brain on assignment to do something else.

“If we think that faith is OK. And healings are OK. And everyone loves wisdom, then you can’t have those and not have tongues and interpretation of tongues,” she said.

“Our God is a God who speaks,” she said. “We don’t get to pick whether our God gives us the gift of tongues and the gift of prophecy.”

Tshibaka said when one of her children was 18 months old, she could understand what the child was saying in her “spirit language.”

Tshibaka told stories of a Foursquare pastor who preached in his “prayer languages” and was shocked to learn it was the language of the country he was visiting. She mentioned another pastor who was in Russia and the pastor’s “spirit language” was English, though the pastor didn’t know English. She mentioned a woman from Boston who went to Hong Kong and could speak fluent Chinese as soon as she landed. She could speak it no longer after she got back on the plane to leave, Tshibaka said.

This is a link to her sermon about speaking in tongues: https://archive.org/details/podcast_mvff-weekly-sermons_spiritual-gifts-2-march-3-201_1000159160263

Gift of healing

Tshibaka said she prayed for the gift of healing and received it, saying she has a good record of success in praying for God to cure people of cancer, resolve infertility issues and stop miscarriages.

She also said she has a poor record of helping people kick smoking, adding that God sometimes gives specialties to people with the gift of healing, similar to the way doctors have specialties. The power to cure people is not hers, she said, but God sometimes “works through me and people get radically healed.”

“One of the ones I’ve prayed for and had a lot of success is cancer. Scary. Because it seems so hopeless. But it seems like just about everyone I’ve prayed for with cancer has been healed. And the same thing about fertility issues,” she said in a sermon on March 24, 2013.

She said, “lots of people who couldn’t have kids now do.”

“When I pray for healing for someone, I believe they’re healed, whether or not it happens in that moment. Why would God not answer that prayer?”