Mantles, Anointings, and Impartations: What’s the Difference?

Understanding this subject of mantles can be a challenge when working with believers within different circles of the Church.

Especially in Pentecostal and Charismatic circles, mantle is a term that we often use without understanding it as well as we need to. Our Christian verbiage sometimes interchange anointings, impartations, giftings, and mantles as if they referred to the same spiritual realities, yet all four refer to something different.

Too often in certain circles of the Body of Christ, people choose “buzz words” that make people feel happy; yet they’re not always correct in the way they use those terms. When that is the case, those individuals will have to wake up somewhere down the road and realize that their view of what they may have received needs to be adjusted — that it doesn’t actually match the status or grandeur of the term they have been using.

The word mantle is simply used too loosely in the Body of Christ.

I often have someone come up to me and say something like, “I had a prophetic word spoken over me that I have the mantle of Kathryn Kuhlman.” When I hear a comment like that, I don’t buck it or argue with the person. I realize it is most likely simply a misunderstanding of terms.

The truth is, there are entire camps in the Body today that have mixed up their Christian verbiage so much that a person can’t trust a lot of what they are saying. People will call different spiritual experiences this or that, using different terms like mantles, anointings, impartations, visions, dreams, and encounters — and they will think they are right in how they use all those terms. But there is a danger in this trend, because these terms can become buzz words without biblical moorings — and in the process, lose the power of their actual scriptural intent.

For instance, to inherit a mantle is to receive an assignment from Heaven that lasts a lifetime. So if someone who is still running his own spiritual race says he is passing on his mantle to you, you can know that is not what is happening. That person may be blessing you with an impartation, but it is not a mantle.

You can receive an impartation of a spiritual gift or an anointing from a man or woman of God, and that spiritual substance will be present and working in your life. If you’ll cultivate what has been given to you, it will become part of you as you pursue God’s plan and purposes, and it will flow through you to bless others. However, this doesn’t mean you received the mantle of that person.

Some people have a legitimate encounter with a minister in which a spiritual gift was imparted to them or an anointing came upon them by the Spirit. After the encounter, it’s possible that others are able to then spot at times certain aspects of that minister’s particular anointing in these people’s lives.

But then too often wrong assumptions are made. “That person must have So-and-so’s mantle.” I get a little nervous with that kind of comment because, as I said, believers don’t keep the Christian vocabulary very policed. Too often people mix anointings, mantles, and impartations together; yet each word is distinct from the other terms.

So let’s try to “untangle the threads” and clear up the confusion between these terms that tends to muddle the issue when talking about mantles. What is the difference between an anointing, an impartation, and a mantle? Getting this answer straight will help set you up to think right and be correctly positioned to receive all that God desires to bless you with as you pursue His plan for your life.

Anointings

Given this confusion of terms that prevails in the Church world today, I want to give you descriptions and examples of two of the primary terms in our discussion: anointing and impartation. Later in Chapters 13-16, we will discuss an example of a multi-generational mantle.

Let’s begin with anointing. The Hebrew word for anointing comes from the Greek word chrio and carries the meaning of smearing, or the free application of oil. When used symbolically of the Holy Spirit, the word chrio means in part to consecrate or to appoint. It also refers to the burden-removing, yoke- destroying power of God given to an individual to accomplish a sacred task.

Author and Bible teacher Rick Renner, an authority in New Testament Greek, explains this concept of applying the oil of anointing in his first volume of Sparkling Gems From the Greek:

The word “anoint” that is used primarily in the Old Testament Septuagint and the Greek New Testament comes from the Greek word chrio. This word originally denoted the smearing or rubbing of oil or perfume upon an individual…. Technically speaking, the word “anoint” has to do with the rubbing or smearing of oil on someone else…. I refer to the anointing as a “hands-on” situation. It took someone’s hands to apply the oil.

Let’s consider this concept in the context of God anointing our lives. God Himself — the Great Anointer — filled His hands with the essence of the Spirit and then laid His mighty hands upon our lives, pressing the Spirit’s power and anointing ever deeper into us. So when we speak of a person who is anointed, we are actually acknowledging that the hand of God is on that person. The strong presence of the anointing that we see or feel is a signal to let us know that God’s hand is personally resting on that individual’s life.

In the Old Testament, the oil was used to signify the transfer of the anointing of God to consecrate and make holy for His work and His purposes. We see this in the account of Moses anointing Aaron for the priesthood.

And he [Moses] poured some of the anointing oil on Aaron’s head and anointed him, to consecrate him (Leviticus 8:12 NKJV).

The anointing oil is used as a symbol of the anointing of the Holy Spirit, which is activated by a person’s faith and transferred in the unseen realm under both the Old and the New Covenants. Spiritually, this word anointing refers to the ability and presence of the Holy Spirit working through a human vessel to equip and empower that person to accomplish God’s purposes.

Rev. Colin Dye, my long-time friend and colleague who pastored Kensington Temple in London for 31 years, offered me this clarifying definition of the “thread” called “anointing”:

**To be anointed means to be equipped with the divine capacity and ability to perform a sacred task. It implies both authority (the right to act in a certain way or to perform Heaven’s tasks) and power (the ability to carry out those tasks). The Holy Spirit’s power (ability) must be put into action. Then His operative power is released and becomes effective, producing results that are felt, seen, heard, or experienced.

One of the most common means of transferring an anointing is through the recipient closely following another’s ministry. A person who faithfully follows a particular minister or ministry often receives a measure of the anointing that God has placed upon that minister.

Rick Renner’s definition of anointing helps clarify what’s taking place in this ongoing spiritual process that I sometimes call “picking up an anointing.” We could say that the more a person follows and receives from a particular minister, the more opportunity “the Great Anointer” has to lay His hands upon that person’s life and “press in” a measure of the Holy Spirit’s anointing that rests upon that minister.

I can share an example from my own life in which I received an anointing from a minister — in this case, Rev. Kenneth E. Hagin. I heard Brother Hagin preach more than any other preacher in my life, and his ministry has blessed our family and my ministry more than I can express. I am forever indebted to Kenneth E. Hagin for the price he paid to teach the message of faith to his generation.

When I was a young boy, I lived three miles from Brother Hagin’s Bible school in Broken Arrow, a suburb of Tulsa, Okla- homa, and my family would regularly attend his meetings. Grandma discovered Brother Hagin in the late 1960s when he was just starting out in the Tulsa phase of his ministry. She had heard about this minister but didn’t know much about him.

But Grandma was like Dr. Lester Sumrall in that she would ride every wave of the Holy Ghost as it rolled in, no matter what she had to go through to get there. And from the time she attended her first Kenneth E. Hagin meeting, Grandma was hooked. Our whole family started attending all of Brother Hagin’s meetings that we could through the years.

So if you watch me or listen to me preach, you can see at times the anointing I picked up from Brother Hagin. It will sometimes manifest when I’m preaching.

I have an anointing from Brother Hagin, but I don’t have his mantle. By being around him and receiving from his teaching and his ministry for all those years, that anointing came upon me, and I have kept it and cultivated it. I so appreciate that anointing. I have picked it up by sitting under and receiving from his ministry for so many years. It’s a part of my DNA; it’s part of who I am.

The Nature of Impartations

I’ve found that there are many people who think they have the mantle of some great person of faith, but in actuality they do not. They may have an impartation from the supply of a person’s spirit that is real and legitimate, but that isn’t a mantle.

As I mentioned earlier, in the world of a mantle, there are anointings, giftings (which include fivefold ministry offices and the nine gifts of the Spirit), and impartations. All of these are encompassed in a mantle, but the reverse cannot be said. A mantle is not simply an element of the giftings or the anointing upon a person’s life.

So let me give you my definition of an impartation. The word impartation is a functional term denoting an authoritative transaction in the Spirit — through laying on of hands, through words spoken by the Spirit, etc. — in which a person receives spiritual giftings and equipment needed to fulfill God’s purposes.

The substance deposited in your spirit from an impartation stays and resides in you so you can operate out of what was received as you learn to yield to the Holy Spirit’s promptings. We can see an example of this kind of spiritual transaction in the Apostle Paul’s words to his spiritual son Timothy:

Therefore I remind you to stir up the gift of God which is in you through the laying on of my hands (2 Timothy 1:6 NKJV)

We also see an example of this kind of authoritative transaction in Numbers 27, where the Lord conferred upon Joshua a measure of the honor and authority that was upon Moses as leader over Israel before it was time for Moses to depart.

The Lord said to Moses, Take Joshua son of Nun, a man in whom is the Spirit, and lay your hand upon him; and set him before Eleazar the priest and all the congregation and give him a charge in their sight. And put some of your honor and authority upon him, that all the congregation of the Israelites may obey him….

And Moses did as the Lord commanded him. He took Joshua and set him before Eleazar the priest and all the congregation, and he laid his hands upon him and commissioned him, as the Lord commanded through Moses (Numbers 27:18-20,22 AMPC).

Also, we see an example of an impartation of a spiritual gift operating in Peter and John’s ministry. The two apostles traveled to Samaria to minister to those who had been born again but were not yet filled with the Spirit. When they laid their hands on the people, an immediate outward sign of that impartation — the infilling of the Spirit — occurred.

We know from other scriptures that the people began speaking in other tongues as they were filled with the Holy Spirit (see Acts 2:4, 10:46, 19:6). The power demonstrated in that spiritual transfer of anointing even caused the resident sorcerer who observed what had happened to ask the apostles to give him whatever the Samarians had just received (see Acts 8:18-19)!

An impartation denotes a more specific and authoritative spiritual transfer than what I just described as picking up an anointing from a minister that you might closely follow over a substantial period of time. In addition, the spiritual giftings and equipment you receive through impartation will continue to work in you, not just flow through you.

For some, when the Holy Spirit comes upon them, they act like the one from whom they received an impartation. For others, they do a measure of the work of that person, with the impartation manifesting more in certain displays of God’s power rather than on a regular basis.