In 1983 he began a bid for the presidency in order to be "a healer to the nation", but was forced by health fears to abandon his ambitions. Recently he had written in Glimpses of the Devil (2005) about his experiences of conducting exorcisms and had embarked on a new career as a songwriter. The voice of God asked him to be objective about the merits of a song he had written on the subject of faithfulness. "I went into a sort of guided meditation and I imagined there were a million people around the globe, Japan, Ethiopia, Brazil, America, what not, all with headphones on listening to this thing and that their consensus would somehow be objective… I played it for the 62nd time and I said: 'Holy s***! It's not good. It's great.' "

His next book, People of the Lie (1983), explored human evil. He was tiring, too, of his own patients, whom he thought "slow" and insufficiently attentive to him. He wound down his practice and set out on the lecture circuit, charging $15,000 a talk. He collaborated on Christian song sheets and, in 1987, published The Different Drum, which pointed out where communities were going wrong.