Derek Prince
Founder, Derek Prince Ministries | Bible Teacher, Author, and Theologian
Biographical Overview
Peter Derek Vaughan Prince (14 August 1915 – 24 September 2003) was a British-born Bible teacher, author, and theologian recognized internationally for his systematic, expository teaching on Scripture. Educated as a classical scholar at Eton and Cambridge, he abandoned an academic career in philosophy after a wartime conversion to Christianity, going on to found Derek Prince Ministries and author more than 100 books and hundreds of recorded teachings distributed in over 100 languages worldwide.
Education & Formation
Prince won a scholarship to Eton College at age fourteen, where he studied Greek and Latin, and went on to King’s College, Cambridge, where he received a Fellowship in Ancient and Modern Philosophy. At Cambridge he also studied Hebrew and Aramaic, languages he later refined at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Though raised in the Anglican Church, he had adopted an atheistic worldview by the time he completed his studies. His theological formation instead came through his own intensive, self-directed study of Scripture — begun in 1940 while serving as a medic in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War II — following a 1941 conversion experience he attributed directly to hearing the voice of Jesus through the biblical text.
Ministry & Professional History
After his discharge from military service in Jerusalem at the close of World War II, Prince married Danish missionary Lydia Christensen in 1946 and became father to her eight adopted daughters. The family ministered in Jerusalem, England, and Kenya before Prince’s teaching ministry took him to pastorates in Minneapolis, Seattle, Chicago, and finally Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where in May 1971 he opened an office to publish and distribute his teaching — an operation renamed Derek Prince Ministries in December 1990. After Lydia’s death in 1975, Prince married Ruth Baker in 1978, and the couple launched the daily radio broadcast Today with Derek Prince, which grew from eight stations to international distribution. Prince was also one of the founding teachers, alongside Bob Mumford, Don Basham, Charles Simpson, and Ern Baxter, of the Shepherding Movement, an effort within the Charismatic movement to emphasize discipleship and pastoral accountability; he later stepped back from that movement to focus on his own international ministry. Following Ruth’s death in 1998, Prince continued teaching and writing until his own death in Jerusalem in 2003. Derek Prince Ministries today operates in more than forty-five countries.
Fields of Study & Expertise
Prince’s teaching centered on the systematic exposition of foundational Christian doctrine, biblical prayer and fasting, spiritual warfare and deliverance ministry, marriage and family, and the biblical basis for the modern State of Israel. He was an outspoken opponent of replacement theology, teaching that God’s covenant with the nation of Israel remains in force, and became a widely cited voice within the deliverance ministry movement for his teaching on the reality and treatment of demonic affliction in believers’ lives.
Publications & Media
Prince authored more than 100 books, including The Foundations Series, Spiritual Warfare, Blessing or Curse: You Can Choose, The Destiny of Israel and the Church, They Shall Expel Demons, and Promised Land: God’s Word and the Nation of Israel, along with God Is a Matchmaker, co-written with his wife Ruth. His recorded teaching library includes more than 600 audio and 100 video programs, translated into more than 100 languages. His daily broadcast, now distributed as Derek Prince Legacy Radio, continues to air internationally.
Recognition & Reach
Derek Prince Ministries maintains offices in more than forty-five countries, and Prince’s recorded teaching continues to be translated and distributed posthumously across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. A year before his death, asked by a Jerusalem Post journalist what the Church’s greatest need was, Prince answered, “Bible teachers — serious Bible teachers,” a description widely applied to his own five-decade ministry.
Personal
Prince married Lydia Christensen in 1946; she died in 1975. He married Ruth Baker in 1978; she died in 1998. Between his two marriages, Prince was father to eleven adopted children. He and Ruth made their home in Jerusalem from 1981 onward. Derek Prince died in his sleep at his home in Jerusalem on September 24, 2003, at age eighty-eight, and is buried at the Alliance Church International Cemetery in Jerusalem.