Charismatic Revival Fury, Ep 1: January 6th and the New Apostolic Reformation
This is the first episode in our new series - Charismatic Revival Fury: The New Apostolic Reformation, written and created by Dr. Matthew Taylor.
In this episode, Matthew traces the beginning of the NAR to C. Peter Wagner, a former missionary and seminary professor who spent the last part of his life cultivating what he believed to be a new apostolic age in the life of the church. Wagner wanted to go beyond denominations to a new Reformation - one in which modern day apostles and prophets used their spiritual gifts to guide their congregations. Wagner developed a network of charismatic young leaders who he believed would lead the church into its next era. And twenty years later, these apostles and prophets did just that - by forming the background of Christian Trumpism and leading the charge on J6.
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We worship Jesus, lifting up our voices to the Lord.
Our gifts are very, each has a bar.
Together we will prosper, we will shine the light.
And this nation's heart has been strong.
Cover the capital with a blood of kings.
There's a blood of kings.
A strong one.
Hey, this is Pastor Ren, and I'm out here filming at the Capitol.
We're seeing the Capitol building here, and everything that I said was going to happen has just happened today.
And so I want to show you what happened.
They stormed the building today, and this man right here was eight feet behind the girl that got shot.
What happened?
What's your name?
My name is Philip Graham.
Philip, man, thank you for being a patriot and being in there.
Can I pray for you?
Is that okay?
I'm a pastor.
Can I pray for you?
God, Lord, protect the soldier for you, this man that was brave.
Father, Lord, I just declare right now this lionheart of angels of God be protecting over him.
Father, Lord, any trauma, any trauma from this event, Father, I just declare and decree right now, it's all broken, that this man is secure and safe and held in your hollow of your hand, Lord.
Thank you for his...
Let's go!
Let's go!
It's our building!
I don't want to get in trouble!
Yeah, okay, let's go!
The flag of Jesus!
Jesus! The blood of Jesus! The blood of Jesus!
This violence and the spirit of violence and the spirit of wrath does not produce righteousness.
Take authority over it now.
We declare peace over the Capitol grounds.
In Jesus' name.
Amen.
Amen.
We're a holy nation.
Delivers in Jesus.
He sounds.
People speaking in tongues, singing praise songs, and lifting up prayers at a noisy, crowded event.
Recall an ecstatic church service or tent revival.
They are, to put it simply, religious sounds from a religious context, but none of them came from a church service or a revival meeting.
These are all recordings from the Capitol insurrection on January 6th, 2021.
So what did we just hear?
We heard people offering prayers in what's called prayer ministry, speaking about the blood of Jesus.
We heard enthusiastic preaching.
We heard what Christians call speaking in tongues, or if you want the more technical term, glossolalia.
We heard praise and worship music.
Is this American Christianity?
Yes, definitely.
This is a manifestation of what is commonly referred to today as Christian nationalism.
A mixing of a person's Christian identity with their national identity, their American identity, into a story that sees America as God's chosen nation, and American Christians as people who are called to save the country from its evil and godless ways.
There's more to Christian nationalism, of course, It sees the country as built for and by Christians, most often white Christians.
Christian nationalists believe there is some deep and essential connection between the idea of America, the nation, and Christianity, the religion.
So yes, there are many manifestations of Christianity on display at the Capitol Riot, and they definitely qualify as Christian nationalism.
But the more important question is, What sort of Christian nationalism is it?
What's the spiritual genre of the Capitol Riot?
Some observers of the Capitol Riot, even scholars who study this stuff, have called it just chaos.
A huge amalgam of different Christian expressions.
And there's some truth in that.
What does a Latter-day Saint dressed up as Captain Moroni have to do with a Catholic priest who said he exorcised a demon from within the Senate chamber?
Yeah, there was a lot of chaos that day.
But if we pay attention, there are also patterns we can find within that chaos.
You see, the Capitol Riot wasn't exactly a one-off event.
There were a lot of other events that led up to the Capitol riot, particularly a set of rallies called Jericho Marches.
These were organized, sometimes daily, in the various swing state capitals in the period between the 2020 election and January 6th.
The main event Jericho March happened on December 12th, 2020, in Washington, D.C.
In fact, January 6th, at least for some people who were there, was seen as another Jericho March.
Maybe even the ultimate Jericho march.
The Jericho marches had very much the same vibe as the Capitol riot.
Praise and worship music, fervent prayers for the election to be overturned, words of prophecy, language of spiritual warfare, people blowing shofars, and crowds of Christians marching around government buildings.
Perhaps the best way to characterize the overall genre of the Capitol riot and of the various Jericho marches that preceded it is charismatic revival fury.
Welcome to charismatic revival fury, the new apostolic reformation, a special series by straight white American Jesus.
Thanks for being here.
written by Dr. Matthew Taylor and produced by me, Bradley Onishi.
Our sound engineer is Scott Okamoto.
If you enjoy the series, please think about giving us a review on Apple Podcast, hitting subscribe in your podcast player, and checking out all that we do at Straight White American Jesus on our website and on our Patreon.
Thanks for being here.
Here's the show.
But I want to remind you that the new Apostolic Reformation is the most radical change in the way of doing church since the Protestant Reformation.
That's what we're springing off into the 21st century.
And Jay who's gonna rise up and we're gonna rule and reign through President Trump and under the worship of Jesus Christ.
Riots and revival actually erupt together.
Why shouldn't we be the ones leading the way in all spheres of society?
There's a deluge of revival coming.
There's a rushing mighty wind on steroids!
I said many years ago that we would even come to a place of civil war if this continues.
You just described the Capitol Riot as a kind of charismatic revival fury.
And obviously, we're linking all of that to the New Apostolic Reformation.
And that's obviously the title of our series.
And so, as we get going here, I'm wondering, Matthew, can you define those words for us?
What does it mean to be charismatic?
Why is revival at the center of all of this?
And what is driving all of this fury?
Sure.
Let's take it one term at a time.
First, it's charismatic.
This term charismatic, it comes from the Greek charismata in the New Testament, which refers to the gifts or the graces of God.
So, charismatic Christians are those who are focused on the supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit.
Sometimes charismatic folks call themselves spirit-filled or continuationist, as in the supernatural dimensions of Christianity continued after the era of the early church.
This is less thinking about raising hands in worship, which is what some people think about when they hear the term charismatic.
That's like dime store charismatic.
This is the full bore charismatic.
Prophecy.
Intense spiritual warfare.
The direct manifestation of the divine presence kind of charismatic.
Second, it's revivalist.
You might find this surprising given how most media sources depict January 6th, but the Christian expressions surrounding the Capitol that day were actually very hopeful, optimistic, looking for the inbreaking of God's miraculous power.
Many of the riot supporters in the crowd actually believed certain prophecies and expected a third Great Awakening to break out after God intervened on Trump's behalf.
And then third, paradoxically, it's also furious.
People are angry over the state of America, wanting to see America transformed and made more Christian, hoping to have the country taken back for God and Trump.
So I think the next question is, what have you found in your research about the Christian leaders, the pastors, the celebrities?
Who inspired this environment?
I mean, where did all this revival fury come from?
So I've spent the last two years researching and digging into the wild and nebulous world of non-denominational or independent charismatic Christianity in the US.
As we said before, it's part of the broader segment of Christianity that's usually labeled Pentecostal charismatic.
It's non-denominational, so sometimes the folks we're talking about get called Pentecostal, but they're not precisely Pentecostal, usually.
In the U.S., Pentecostal usually means denominationally aligned.
These folks are definitely evangelical, though a particular flavor of evangelical.
There are all kinds of American evangelicals with a lot of different streams of theology and practice that go under that broader evangelical heading.
Evangelical in the US is a coalitional term that incorporates a whole range of different theological and spiritual expressions.
Here, we're talking about a charismatic, highly supernaturalist, devoted to prophecy, healing, power evangelism stream of evangelical.
That's a very different flavor of evangelicalism from the kind of stuffy, intellectual, theological, reformed, also known as Calvinist stream.
Or the reactionary old fundamentalist stream.
Or the more staid denominational streams of evangelicalism.
This is the world of Charisma Magazine and televangelists, not so much Christianity Today or Billy or Franklin Graham.
It's fast-growing.
You have some studies that say this is the only segment of American Christianity that's growing right now.
And outside the U.S., this form of spirituality is growing gangbusters around the world.
You have, in the U.S., thousands of churches, many of them megachurches with multiple thousands of people in them.
And there are millions of devotees.
And this world is really young.
It got started in the 1970s or 1980s.
Most importantly, it's a world that is loosely affiliated, meaning there's not a ton of organizing structures, but highly networked.
All the leaders in this world know each other and work together.
The more I've traced back the spirituality of the Capitol Riot, and really the core leadership of Christian Trumpism, the more I come back to this independent charismatic world and to one man.
See Peter Wagner.
Jesus' body, the body of Christ, right, being the head and not the tail of the society in which we live.
Jesus taught about this, new wineskins and old wineskins.
So, anyway, where we are now is that I believe our old wineskin, for most of us, is denomination.
And our new wineskin is the New Apostolic Reformation.
I know some people say, you know, you shouldn't talk that much about Satan.
Well, those are people who never want to go to war.
Alright, so who is C. Peter Wagner, and why is he so important to this story?
Well, if you exist outside of the world of Pentecostal Charismatic Christianity, then C. Peter Wagner might be the most important American Christian of the 20th or 21st century you've never heard of.
He didn't grow up evangelical, but he converted in college.
In fact, the woman who led him to faith in Jesus was actually his future wife, Doris.
Now, Doris felt called to become a missionary, so Peter, everyone called him Peter, who was still a fairly new Christian, went with her, and they spent 15 years as missionaries in Bolivia.
Wagner comes back to the US, and he attends Fuller Theological Seminary in California.
If you don't know Fuller, it's about as mainstream of an evangelical educational institution as you can find.
And then, Peter got his PhD in social ethics from the University of Southern California, and then comes back to Fuller to teach.
And he's a professor at Fuller Seminary there in Pasadena for about 30 years.
And his area of expertise is what is called church growth, which is this pragmatic theology.
He's not trained as a theologian, per se, but he's a leading thinker in this church growth field.
The idea of church growth is you're mixing social sciences, right?
That's more where his PhD is, with theology.
How do you empirically make churches grow?
And this is a really exciting field for many evangelicals in the 1970s and 1980s.
Wagner becomes a sort of minor evangelical celebrity in some circles.
He rubs shoulders with a lot of famous evangelicals in the 1980s and 1990s.
And he's constantly asking, not just, how do you evangelize and missionize new groups around the world, but how do you build megachurches and mission movements at home?
Why do some churches balloon in growth and others shrivel and die?
Wagner was really instrumental in building a concept called the 1040 window.
It was this prayer and missions movement.
The idea was there was a space between 10 degrees north and 40 degrees north latitude across most of Central Asia that was the most unchristianized part of the globe.
And if you were around certain evangelical churches in the 1990s, this idea of praying for the 1040 window, this was just ubiquitous.
I attended Fuller Seminary, but I started there in 2004, which is well after Wagner left in 1999.
But I still caught the edges of his influence.
This idea of growth and expansion, this mentality built around church growth, and some of the ideas he had around spiritual warfare.
Those things really had a long tail in that institution.
Okay, so it's one thing to be a popular professor at a seminary.
But it's another thing to be a world-renowned apostle, somebody who literally starts what he thinks of as a new reformation.
How did that happen?
Wagner became famous at Fuller, maybe even a little bit infamous, for his partnership with John Wimber in the 1980s.
Wimber was the dynamic, charismatic, in every sense of that word, leader of the vineyard church movement.
So before we go any further, can you just describe for some folks at home the Vineyard?
John Wimber is the figurehead of that, but what is it?
Yeah, the Vineyard is a group or a family of charismatic churches that comes out of Southern California in the 1970s.
It's a very exciting movement at the time, kind of eccentric.
You know, Bob Dylan goes through that short-lived phase where he was an evangelical Christian for a little while.
He went to a vineyard church.
Today, there are a couple thousand vineyard churches worldwide, maybe about 500 vineyard churches in the US, according to their count.
My family went to a vineyard church for a while when I was growing up in Southern California in the 1980s.
John Wimber was the paradigmatic leader of the vineyard.
Everyone in the vineyard just revered Wimber.
And just to give you some sense of who Wimber was, he was a member of the band that became the Righteous Brothers.
He left before they took on that name.
But then he converted to Christianity and became one of the foremost charismatic Christian leaders of the 1980s and 1990s.
So he goes from being a literal rock star to a charismatic pastor rock star.
And Wimber's famous phrase was, doing the stuff, as in, we're just doing the stuff that Jesus did.
As I read the New Testament, I fell in love with Jesus.
Didn't you?
I liked him.
I liked what he was like!
I liked the things he did!
I liked the things he said!
Didn't you like those things?
I thought that stuff was hot!
I liked it when he multiplied the bread.
Did you like that one?
Huh?
How about it?
Did you like that one?
And the fishes?
You know, the sardines?
I always picture sardines.
I like that stuff!
I spent several weeks reading the New Testament and talking with these people, and I thought, this is great!
You know, I'm going to join up!
I want to do this stuff!
And so I remember the frustration of attending church the first few times.
And when they didn't do it, I was disappointed.
And I remember one day asking a guy about it.
I said, when do we go out and do it?
He said, what?
I said, when do we go out and do it?
He says, oh, you don't have to do it.
You just have to believe it was done once.
Now that's pathetic.
Isn't it?
I found out over the next year or two that we cried about it, we sang about it, we preached about it, we prayed over it, we gave to it, but we never did it.
We never got to go do the things that Jesus did.
And I grew disillusioned in the process.
Now you know, when I worked for the devil, he let me do his stuff.
Did he let you do his stuff?
He let me do his stuff.
But when I came to work for Jesus, they didn't want to let me do his stuff.
And to tell you the truth, I joined up to do the stuff.
Did you?
You see, it's doing the stuff that's going to change the world.
In the 1980s, Wagner and Wimber are friends, and Wagner is teaching Fuller classes, and he invites Wimber in to actually teach some of his classes, and then also experiment in healing and deliverance, like exorcism type stuff.
What is referred to in the Bible as words of knowledge, that's prophetic insights directly revealed by God to individuals.
And Wagner was really willing to take a back seat in these classes and basically hand things over to Wimber.
So in class there'd be a lecture by Wimber and then students would be instructed by Wimber in how to pray for healing or how to hear God's voice.
This gets really popular and you have hundreds of seminary students trying to audit these classes just to see the signs and wonders and get around John Wimber.
And the Wimber-Wagner courses, they get written up in several national Christian magazines.
Now, eventually, the rest of the Fuller faculty decide to intervene, because they don't like the effects these courses are having on Fuller's reputation.
Fuller wants to be a mainstream evangelical institution, and here you have this avant-garde pastor conducting trainings and miracles in a four-credit Fuller seminary course.
But even though the classes get shut down, riding Wimber's coattails for a while gives Wagner entrée into this whole independent charismatic world.
Wimber and the vineyard were just one important part of that rambunctious world.
This independent, non-denominational, charismatic segment of Christianity in the 1980s and 1990s was like first-gen Silicon Valley.
You had tons of energy, eccentric personalities, lots of new ideas floating around, and everyone wants to revolutionize the church.
Okay, so Wagner has this huge following on campus, he's gaining a big reputation in charismatic circles, and he's committed to charismatic power.
What's next for him?
Well, Wagner gets energized about this charismatic power stuff through his friendship with Wimber.
And he starts branching out.
And I mean really branching out.
He pivots his whole career to try to pursue what he believes is the growth edge of the church.
Fervently believes that this independent charismatic strand, as he's looking at the numbers both in the US and around the globe, he believes that the future growth of the church will be led by these independent charismatic types.
Wagner starts hanging out with some wild figures from this independent charismatic world.
People who make John Wember seem kind of tame.
He starts playing with some of the ideas that are floating around that independent charismatic world.
Prophets, modern day apostles, coordinated spiritual warfare campaigns, training people in performing miracles.
Eventually, John Wimber gets disenchanted with Wagner's shtick.
He stops teaching with him, and he actually thinks Wagner goes round to the bend on some issues, especially Wagner's view of spiritual warfare, which is really important, and we're going to devote a whole episode to it.
John Wimber dies young, in 1997 at the age of 63.
Now, Wagner is not a terribly original thinker.
He writes more than 75 books in his lifetime, but he's often just reformulating his own ideas, repurposing other people's ideas, repackaging them, bundling them together in new ways.
He's a professor, but his books are seemingly never peer-reviewed, and they have a certain flow-of-consciousness quality to them.
But Wagner is a genius at networking and organization building.
Remember, he has a PhD in social ethics, and he spent his entire career at this point empirically studying what works, what helps churches or movements to grow, and what doesn't.
As he's roaming and exploring this non-denominational charismatic world in the 1990s, Wagner starts meeting all these young, entrepreneurial, smart, up-and-coming leaders.
Some of them are Fuller students.
Some of them are charismatic pastors.
Some of them are even more out there, calling themselves prophets and healers and apostles.
So many of the burgeoning, talented young leaders, pastors, and prophets in this world somehow end up in Wagner's orbit.
People who are the guiding lights now in the charismatic world.
Cindy Jacobs, Che On, Chuck Pierce, Dutch Sheets, Becca Greenwood, Harry Jackson, Steve Schultz, Lou Engel, Stephen Strang, Lance Wallnau, And if those names don't mean anything to you now, don't worry.
Bickle, Bill Hammond, Michael Brown, Robert Henderson.
They're all networked with and hanging out with Wagner.
And if those names don't mean anything to you now, don't worry, we'll get to a lot of them in this series.
But this whole segment of American Christianity is again like Silicon Valley.
Lots of new ideas floating around, lots of talent migrating into independent charismaticism, lots of startup churches and startup careers.
So, in the mid-1990s, Wagner bundles together a set of these ideas and coins a phrase that becomes incredibly influential in this charismatic world and, really, in global Christianity.
He calls this set of ideas the New Apostolic Reformation.
The New Apostolic Reformation is the most radical change in the way of doing church since the Protestant Reformation.
That's what we're, that's what we're dealing with.
That's what we're springing off into the 21st century.
So I asked you this last week, but I want to ask it again.
I think a lot of people have heard of the New Apostolic Reformation, but it's really difficult to get a handle on its history and its contours.
So I'll ask you what's a really simple question with probably a complex answer.
What is the New Apostolic Reformation?
Now, if you go and Google and type New Apostolic Reformation, you're going to find some crazy stuff.
You'll find websites with literally thousands of names indexed to different Christian leaders who are supposedly part of the NAR.
That's how some people pronounce it.
You'll find some of those same Christian leaders who are supposedly NAR saying they have no idea what the NAR is, or even saying that no such thing ever existed.
You'll find writing about the New Apostolic Reformation that sounds like stuff out of a bad conspiracy novel where NAR leaders are spookily manipulating political leaders like some sort of charismatic Illuminati.
You'll also find people, reputable people, journalists, scholars, people who've done their research pushing back and saying, yes, there is such a thing as the NAR, and they can marshal a lot of evidence, much of it coming from Peter Wagner's writing and associations.
I think a lot of this confusion emerges from the particularity of Peter Wagner's ideas, and also how he went about building institutions for the New Apostolic Reformation.
But first, let me unpack this idea, and we will have a few more episodes working on this New Apostolic Reformation business, so if it's all a little confusing at the start, don't worry.
I think we have to back up a little and start with the question, what is an apostle?
Anyone who is even remotely familiar with Christianity will have heard this term, Apostle.
The Apostles were the disciples of Jesus.
The Greek word, Apostle, Apostolos, means someone who's sent, roughly a messenger.
There's a moment in the Gospels where Jesus sends out his disciples to do ministry in various areas without him directly supervising them.
And after that, they start getting called Apostles, the sent ones.
Now, the Apostles become a key locus of authority within the Christian tradition.
According to most Christian dogma, the Apostles write the New Testament.
It's more complicated than that, but that's a topic for another day.
And the Apostles lay the foundation for the Christian Church.
They're the first Christian missionaries and its first church builders.
So, one of the key questions for any church tradition is, what happens to the authority of the apostles after the original apostles die?
There are two major answers to this question according to various Christian traditions.
The Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and the Episcopalian, Anglican answer is that the authority of the apostles to lead the church gets transferred to another group of people in future generations, the bishops.
That's the Greek episkopos, where we get the term Episcopalian.
So, bishops are, again speaking very broadly, the formal spiritual governors of the Church.
And this is important.
To become a bishop, you need to be able to trace your lineage back to the Apostles.
So, the Bishop of Rome, the Pope in Roman Catholicism, traces his authority and lineage back to the Apostle Peter.
Okay, so that's answer number one.
Bishops take over for Apostles.
But when the Protestant Reformation comes along in the 16th century, some of the Protestant reformers are less comfortable with this idea of bishops succeeding apostles.
They don't really like what the Catholic Church has done with that model.
So, while some Protestants keep the concept or the office of the bishop, the Protestants largely come up with a different answer to that question about apostolic authority.
They say the apostles' authority wasn't simply in who they handed authority off to, but their authority was in the apostles' teachings, i.e.
the New Testament.
This is one of the core rationalizations of the Protestant idea of sola scriptura.
The scriptures are the teachings of the apostles, and no other theological authority, not bishops or church tradition, can supersede the authority of the apostles' voices in the Bible.
So, within the Christian tradition speaking broadly, you have those two options.
The bishops take over where the apostles left off, or the New Testament contains the definitive teachings of the apostles.
What is so provocative about Wagner's concept of the New Apostolic Reformation is that he's basically offering a third option.
A third answer to the question of what happened after the Apostles died.
Wagner's answer is, what if the role of the Apostles never died off at all?
What if there are still apostles?
The Apostle and Charismatic Movement began helping us to understand the Holy Spirit.
So this new wineskin that we have, which is the New Apostolic Reformation, is a direct descendant of the Pentecostal Movement and the Charismatic Movement.
But the current form, the current wineskin that God has raised up is the New Apostolic Reformation.
In my reading of history, the second apostolic age began in the year 2001.
The first apostolic age was the time of the original apostles in the New Testament times, and maybe a hundred years after that.
And then we went about 1800 years without really recognizing properly the biblical government of the church with apostles and prophets.
Now, we've already talked about how diverse the independent charismatic world is.
What makes the New Apostolic Reformation distinct among even these charismatic churches or denominations?
So you have different kinds of charismatic churches.
Pentecostal churches are charismatic, but by and large they're housed within these denominations.
Vineyard churches are charismatic, but again vineyard functions as a sort of quasi-denomination.
The world that Wagner is operating in, after breaking away from Wimber, is this more amorphous, independent, charismatic world.
Not a lot of clear boundaries, a bunch of independent churches and ministries.
Now, Peter Wagner did not personally come up with this idea of modern-day apostles.
As he's cruising around these independent charismatic circles in the 1980s and 1990s, he starts hearing rumors about this idea that God is reconstituting or resurrecting the work of the Apostles.
This idea itself has a complicated background, but it really congealed in the late 1940s with a truly and frustratingly understudied Pentecostal revival called the Latter Rain Movement.
That started in Saskatchewan, Canada.
It would be great if we could have more resources today on this movement because it's very important.
The Latter Rain folks come out of Pentecostalism, but then they're basically kicked out of the Pentecostal denominations because they're seen as too radical or too fringe.
And one of the things the Latter Rain folks really fixate on is a passage in Ephesians chapter 4.
In verses 11 and 12 of Ephesians chapter 4, the author Most people would say that Paul is the author of Ephesians, but critical Bible scholars say he's probably not.
Again, a topic for another day.
But the author of Ephesians lists five leadership gifts that Jesus gives to the church.
Apostles, prophets, teachers, evangelists, and pastors.
The last one, and Jesus says he himself, that's Jesus when he went to heaven.
After the resurrection, he was here 40 days, then he went to heaven.
And at that time, he gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints, for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.
Now that's interesting because almost all our friends and you, I bet a lot of you have come from traditional denominations, isn't that right?
How many of you have?
Okay.
But those of us from denominations, remember that For some reason, the leaders of our churches would all say that they believe the Bible.
You ask them, how much of the Bible do you believe?
And they all would say, 100%, right?
But when they come to this verse, how come they only believe 60%?
Because, see, they all believe in evangelists, they all believe in pastors, they all believe in teachers, But they stumble at apostles and prophets.
It's in the same verse.
They didn't make this up.
And it says, God gave some for all of these things for the equipping of the saints.
Anyway, I don't want to go into that.
The latter rain folks in the 1940s and 1950s, and eventually Peter Wagner in the 1990s, really zero in on this verse, which most Christians just read over without any hiccup.
And they ask a provocative question.
Why aren't there apostles and prophets in the church today?
We have the other three.
Teachers, evangelists, and pastors.
Where are all the apostles and prophets?
So the latter reign folks, who are still spiritually Pentecostal and believe in supernatural revelation, come to believe that God is telling them that in the course of the 20th century, the offices of the apostles and the prophets are going to be reconstituted through the work of the Holy Spirit.
This comes to be called the idea of five-fold ministry, because there are five roles listed in Ephesians 4.
The thing is, the latter rain movement is very fringy.
They're forced out of and denounced by the Pentecostal denominations.
But by the time Wagner's meandering through and networking with the independent charismatic world, these ideas about the revival of the apostles and prophets and five-fold ministry are still ping-ponging around.
And some people are even beginning to claim the apostle and prophet roles.
In the 1980s, some people in the independent charismatic world are starting to say they are the prophets, and that the office of the prophet itself has been reconstituted.
They believe they're receiving words directly from God.
And these are some of the people that Wagner starts hanging out with.
A central figure here is a woman named Cindy Jacobs, who becomes a very close associate of Wagner's, almost an adopted daughter to him.
Cindy Jacobs believes she's a prophet.
Not a Martin Luther King was a prophet kind of prophet, but a thus saith the Lord kind of prophet.
I have a prophecy about this government of Maryland and the Lord would say you have crossed the line.
And I am drawing a red line in the sand, says the Lord.
And the Lord says, I am getting ready to begin to do my own expose, says God.
And the Lord says, I am coming to put the fear of the Lord into Maryland.
Marilyn M.D., my destiny, I have a destiny for this state, says God.
I have a plan for this state.
I'm getting ready to reveal myself.
I'm getting ready to show my glory.
I'm getting ready to reveal my beautiful brilliance, says God, to a state that looks like they have turned away from me.
But I have a remnant that has been crying out.
And I am hearing your voices, says the Lord!
I am hearing the voice of the remnant!
So do not think you have failed!
For I say, the bowls of heaven are getting very, very full!
And my finger is going to tip that bowl!
And my glory will pour out in this state, says the Lord!
Somebody shout!
Now, Wagner is also a sociologist who's obsessed with church growth, and he's looking around and constantly asking, what are the churches or Christian movements that grow the fastest around the globe?
He concludes that the best and fastest growing movements are, one, charismatic and Pentecostal, two, led by singular dynamic characters, movers and shakers, who are not bound by denominational strictures.
And three, these singular dynamic characters don't just have one lonely megachurch they build, but they build networks of churches and ministries that all look to the one dynamic leader for inspiration.
So Wagner, combining the Lateran theology with his own sociological observations, says, these people, the dynamic network builders, are the new apostles.
In the mid-90s, Wagner coins the phrase, the New Apostolic Reformation, to describe this phenomenon of communities led by non-denominational, charismatic leaders who are functioning like modern-day apostles, and he thinks this is the exciting, cutting-edge growth of the Church.
In fact, for a while there, this term was a little bit in flux in Wagner's thinking.
And he's toying with another phrase to describe the movement.
Post-denominational Christianity.
What he's getting at there is, in Wagner's view, denominations are bureaucratic and slow and fussy and useless.
Denominations are the problem the church needs to evolve past.
He even convenes a big symposium of scholars and academics at Fuller Seminary in 1996 on the post-denominational church.
But some people push back there and say he's being a little bit unfair to denominations.
So he sticks with the New Apostolic Reformation title.
So what does Wagner believe this new Apostolic Reformation will be?
He says it's going to be a new branch of Christianity on a level of Protestantism or Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy.
Remember, Wagner isn't the only one talking about this five-fold ministry or restored apostles and prophets idea.
But he's the one who really theorizes it and writes books about it and brings it into the mainstream of the independent charismatic world.
In Wagner's view, the church has languished for centuries under the bureaucratic governance of bishops and pastors and elders, i.e.
denominations.
Now, along with this modern outpouring of supernatural charismatic ministry, the Holy Spirit is unleashing the apostolic and prophetic supernatural gifts again.
And Wagner, starting in the 1990s, begins saying that the 21st century will be the second apostolic age, right?
The first one is the first century with the founding of the Church, and now the 21st century will be the second one.
In Wagner's model, apostles are meant to build and lead the Church, and prophets hear directly from God and advise the apostles.
God has chosen certain people from the church to have the gift of prophecy.
And it says in the Old Testament, the Book of Amos, that God does nothing unless he first reveals his secrets to his servants, the prophet.
So that's a very key role.
It hasn't been recognized by the church very much up until the New Apostolic Reformation.
But we recognize the role of prophet, and God speaks to them, and so those of us who are apostles Okay, so that's Wagner's theory.
not every prophet, but to certain prophets.
And so we get a lot of our guidance from God through them.
Okay, so that's Wagner's theory.
The 21st century church will be led by apostles and prophets who are supernaturally endowed with charismatic insight.
You might look at that and say, "That's a little far-fetched." Or, hmm, that's curious.
I'd like to think about that some more.
And if it had all ended there, if Wagner just had this theory about apostles and prophets and the New Apostolic Reformation, we probably wouldn't be having this podcast today.
Wagner would just be another obscure seminary professor with a wild theory.
We might just chalk it up to a somewhat eccentric thesis that emerged at Fuller Seminary from the margins of the independent charismatic world.
I will note, this is what people who want to argue there's no such thing as the New Apostolic Reformation will say.
It was an idiosyncratic phrase that Peter Wagner made up in the 1990s, and who cares about that now?
But that is not the end of the story.
Remember that some of the people Wagner is hanging around with, like Cindy Jacobs, believe they are prophets.
And in 1995, Cindy Jacobs tells Peter, Hey, you know, I heard from God and God says, you're one of these apostles we've been talking about.
I'm pretty sure that Wagner was already thinking along these lines.
Before Sidney Jacobs or anyone else told him he was an apostle.
But by his own account, this really sets him on a new trajectory.
And Wagner, as a result of this and other prophecies that are given to him about being an apostle, retires from Fuller Seminary in 1999 and embarks upon the most productive phase of his career at the age of 70, building the infrastructure of the New Apostolic Reformation.
So it's one thing to coin a phrase or describe something.
It's another thing to build institutions that last over generations that are going to remain even when you're gone.
How did Wagner do that?
So Wagner retires from Fuller in 1999.
But he's already setting up a third career as a charismatic apostle and builder of the New Apostolic Reformation.
And I have to say, what he was able to accomplish in the 20 years from the time when he's conceptualizing this NAR idea until his death in 2016 is nothing short of remarkable.
Wagner winds up building and running, simultaneously, seven or eight institutions and networks that serve as the model infrastructure of what he calls the New Apostolic Reformation.
These include two educational institutions for training next-generation leaders, several national and international prayer networks with thousands of people in them, a set of professional networks, a roundtable of prophets, and an intense mentoring program.
Again, some of what I'm about to say might feel like I'm getting into the weeds of strange institutions that this eccentric retired seminary professor set up, but here's the key point.
The institutional networks that Peter Wagner built in the early 2000s and the people in these networks become the backbone, the spine of Christian Trumpism.
They are a major, though underappreciated force in the religious right today.
So it is definitely worth our time to pay attention to how Wagner goes about building out this idea of the New Apostolic Reformation and the people he loops into this idea and then the influence that it has had in charismatic evangelical circles.
I actually think this is part of the reason why getting a handle on the New Apostolic Reformation is so difficult.
It feels like wading into alphabet soup when you try to unpack all of these different groups and organizations and institutions.
And so, can you help us do that?
Yes, exactly.
Or maybe to put it slightly more paradoxically, it's a movement without any defining or conspicuous institutions.
Remember, Wagner does not want this to be a denomination.
So there's no central organizing structure of the NAR.
There are no membership cards.
There's no seminary.
No one can pull up an official roster of NAR churches.
Instead, Wagner builds an infrastructure that is loosely affiliated enough to maintain independent churches and ministries, but intentionally networked enough to keep all these people working together.
Wagner believed that the key to this next phase of the church that he called the New Apostolic Reformation was the relationships and friendships and collaborations among the key leaders.
But there should be no bylaws or official structures constraining those relationships.
So that can make these things pretty hard to track.
So, let me just give a few examples of these Wagner relationship-based, networked institutions that become central organizing elements of both this whole apostolic-prophetic model of doing church and then of Christian support for Donald Trump.
First, as he's leaving Fuller Seminary, Wagner moves to Colorado Springs and founds Wagner Leadership Institute, WLI.
It's meant to be a training ground for apostolic and prophetic leaders.
I'm very open to prophetic words that come to me.
This was, this Bill Hammond gave me several years ago before God gave me the vision for WLI.
He said, you are going to begin to touch new leaders.
They will touch hundreds and thousands and millions.
You're going to begin a chain reaction.
I've not called you to speak to multitudes.
I've called you to speak to my key leaders.
And that's, you know, I bear witness to that.
That's where I am.
I'm not a great Wagner recruits his own cohort of friends and disciples to teach courses.
The faculty there reads like a who's who of charismatic celebrities today.
Cindy Jacobs, Chuck Pierce, Dutch Sheets, Che Ahn, Mike Bickle of IHOP, Bill Johnson of Bethel Church, Lance Wallnau, Wagner doesn't like formalities or care about credentials, so the structure of WLI is a lot like those classes he ran with John Wimber in the 1980s.
There are no grades or exams, and the goal in Wagner's terminology was impartation instead of information.
Now, the vision of WLI is not the transfer of information from one head to somebody else's head.
The vision is impartation of activation for ministry.
That's a huge change.
Ministry both in the church and in the workplace.
As soon as you develop that as a principle of education, I'll tell you one thing it eliminates.
It eliminates final exams.
If I'm giving you information, then I can examine you on the information I'm giving.
But if I'm giving you an anointing for activation for ministry, how are you going to give a grade on that?
I mean, I couldn't figure that out.
Suppose you spend two days in class, 12-14 hours with Chuck Pierce, you know?
How are you going to give an exam on the impartation from Chuck Pierce?
Suppose you spend two days with Cindy Jacobs, or Cheyenne, or Bill Hammond, you know?
You can't do this.
And the problem I found is the old wineskin was 80% theory and 20% practice.
What we've done is reversed the whole thing, and we're giving you We're giving you 80% practice backed up by 20% theory.
Over the course of Wagner's leadership there, thousands of students would come and take courses with Wagner's inner circle on what it means to be an apostle or a prophet, how to do strategic spiritual warfare, how to grow a megachurch, how to perform miracles, how to lead revivals.
In an independent charismatic world that was still pretty unformed, Wagner Leadership Institute was a first-generation training school.
Eventually, WLI starts having regional and even global franchises where people are disseminating these ideas to thousands of pastors, Christian entrepreneurs, etc.
all around the globe.
It still exists today as Wagner University.
Wagner University was founded in 1998 after Cindy Jacobs prophesied over Peter Wagner that he would release a new wineskin for equipping leaders.
We offer bachelors, masters, and doctorate programs through a hybrid online learning system.
Your instructors are top leaders within the Kingdom of God who offer in-depth expertise in ministry and the marketplace.
If you believe God has called you to a higher level of strategic leadership as a forerunner in revival, At the same time that he's running Wagner Leadership Institute, Wagner also leads what is called the International Coalition of Apostles.
Wagner serves as the presiding apostle over the coalition.
Again, Wagner is very clear that the ICA, at least for him, is there to advance the New Apostolic Reformation.
And he builds the International Coalition of Apostles to be a sort of professional society for apostles, where they can network and mentor each other, and really flesh out some of their ideas about this NAR paradigm.
At its height, under Wagner's leadership, the International Coalition of Apostles has about 500 members.
One of the things that's so interesting to me about Wagner is he's a sort of paradoxical institution-building anti-institutionalist.
He doesn't look to committees or bylaws or professional standards to guide these institutions he's building.
But instead, everything rests on the authority of modern-day apostles.
The Bible teaches that apostles related to prophets, and also teachers, should form the basis of the government of the church.
Now up till now, recently, most churches in America function on a democratic system, so that the authority in the churches and the authority in the denominations resided in groups of people.
And of course that's what we're used to politically in America, so that That fits in very well with our culture.
But in terms of the role of the Apostle, one of the biggest changes from traditional churches to the New Apostolic Reformation is the amount of spiritual authority delegated by the Holy Spirit to individuals.
And the two key words are authority and individuals.
And individuals is contrasted to groups.
So now apostles have been raised up by God who have a tremendous authority in the churches of the New Apostolic Reformation.
And I think this is the most radical difference between the old and the new.
Now, it's easy to think, okay, who cares if 500 charismatic pastors want to join a professional society and pretend they're apostles?
But Wagner actually had pretty tough standards.
He wanted to only include people with a proven track record of starting multiple churches or ministries.
And because everything rests on the authority of an apostle, Wagner had carte blanche to kick people out or to not allow people to enter the ICA who he thought weren't up to snuff.
So the people who did join the International Coalition of Apostles are men and women, and it's worth noting that Wagner thought both men and women could equally serve as apostles and prophets.
These are some of the most talented and organizationally gifted leaders in the charismatic world in the U.S.
While he's running both Wagner Leadership Institute and the International Coalition of Apostles, Cindy Jacobs, who's one of Wagner's right-hand prophets, approaches him to say, let's set up something for prophets too.
You're doing all this stuff for apostles.
Let's do something for the prophets.
So together, they create the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders.
Jacobs asks Wagner to oversee the ACPE apostolically.
In other words, to kind of lend his apostolic authority to it.
And what the ACPE would do every year was to gather, usually towards the end of the year, and confer an issue of statement called The Word of the Lord 2007, or The Word of the Lord 2022, where they share a sort of consensus about what these prophets heard from God about the coming year.
These are supposed to have more solidity than the words of individual prophets, because they're coming from this respected group, this round table of prophets.
And then these Word of the Lord statements would be shared on charismatic media all over the place.
You can Google them and read them.
2016, the year the tide turned.
As we met, actually in this facility of Trinity Church, we're giving this message from Cedar Hill, Dallas, which is South Dallas.
We met with a roundtable of prophets in this church and the transcript was 105 pages.
And I mean, Gabriel started playing, and they started prophesying, and some are here that were at the meeting.
I think about eight hours later, it was amazing what happened.
The word of the Lord was so good, I'm going to include some of it in this report.
In the United States, we are at the beginning stages of a great awakening.
And the Lord said, not once, but several times, there is a patriot that God has waiting to put at the top position, the president of this nation.
If God's people pray, he's going to, he, she, got to have a plan, because God didn't tell us which one.
We ask him.
But God is going to put someone at the top of this nation that's going to turn us around.
There's going to be a reformer.
He has a reformer ready that's going to reform systems.
There are things in this nation that need to be pruned, need to be changed, and both parties are not right with God and not right what they should do.
And we can say that, whether we're Democrats or Republicans, all of us, I could say, probably are a bit ticked off at some of the things we see.
But God is bringing a people who will not bow their knees, and it doesn't matter what the label is.
And the Lord also says that it's time for people to vote their values.
I'm sure some people will scoff at this.
Because some of these prophecies sound kind of vague and generic.
But people in the charismatic world take it very seriously.
The people who are members of the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders are some of the most prominent charismatic prophets in the U.S.
today.
James Gaul, Kim Clement, Lou Engle, Bill Hammond, Jane Hammond.
The last of these Wagner non-institutions that I want to mention.
It's probably the most important when it comes to the Capitol Riot, but it's also the most mysterious.
Starting around 2000, Wagner formed something called the Eagle's Vision Apostolic Team, EVAT.
EVAT was supposed to be a mentoring group where Wagner acted as a spiritual father to his closest apostle and prophet mentees.
He capped the membership at around 25 to 30 people.
And this group was pretty stable and remained in effect from when Wagner founded it in 2000 until his death in 2016, where it disbanded.
Wagner called the members of EVAT his spiritual sons and daughters.
This language is pretty common in these apostolic and prophetic circles.
These were the folks who most clearly bought into Wagner's vision and program.
The membership lists of EVAT were never public, but there are some lists if you go digging, and some people who are part of it have been fairly open about their participation.
The EVAT members would gather annually to spend time together with Wagner, and all of them seemed to view Wagner as their mentor and very, very close advisor.
Here's what's so significant about EVAT and the Capitol Riot.
Out of this group of about 30 people, I have identified five who were present on January 6th, who helped to instigate the crowds and stage the rallies leading up to the riot.
And one of them actually joined the riot by speakerphone.
We'll get to that in a future episode.
What's more, I have found another 9 or 10 EVAT members who actively participated in the Stop the Steal campaign, helping to mobilize Christians to protest Trump's election loss and encouraging people to get involved in trying to get Trump reinstated.
Let me be clear about this.
These Eagles Vision Apostolic Team members are not obscure nobodies.
These are some of the most respected celebrities in charismatic Christianity today.
And they're some of the most important leaders of the New Apostolic Reformation.
So to review, C. Peter Wagner had this theory in the 1990s that in the 21st century a new form of Christianity would emerge and it would be led by modern day apostles and prophets.
This is what he called the New Apostolic Reformation.
After he retires from Fuller Seminary, he actually starts building the New Apostolic Reformation through all of these non-institution institutions.
These complicated, hard-to-follow networks of important people.
So what's the practical effect of this?
How does this unfold into something that we now recognize as a global phenomenon?
If I may offer an analogy.
What Wagner did was to take the inchoate and disparate world of non-denominational charismaticism and he helped to create a mesh network designed for it.
I have one of these mesh Wi-Fi networks in my home.
There are these little hubs.
Boxes that I distribute around my house and the internet comes in at one point into the hubs but all the hubs amplify each other to distribute the signal all over.
That's basically what Wagner does through the International Coalition of Apostles and his Eagle's Vision Apostolic Team.
He's creating what he calls apostolic hubs, or apostolic centers, that are not just megachurches, there often are megachurches, but huge networks of churches under the leadership of one apostle.
Wagner's not the only one working on this apostolic network model, but he's the most prominent and the most successful one.
He writes the books and he popularizes the concept, and he helps to build this massive infrastructure of, again, highly networked but loosely affiliated independent charismatic leaders.
To those listeners coming from a conventional denominational framework, this might seem odd, but this style of doing church has exploded in the charismatic world in the last 20 years.
Thousands of churches in America belong to these apostolic networks.
You now have thousands of people in the U.S.
calling themselves apostles, and thousands, again, calling themselves modern-day prophets.
But because Wagner wanted this whole model to be built upon relationships, not on bylaws or legal arrangements as in a denominational model, there's an aura of plausible deniability to the whole thing.
There's no such organization called the New Apostolic Reformation that someone has a membership in.
There are no rosters or clear statements of faith, just these dispersed leadership networks.
But Wagner made it clear that all these networks and low-grade institutions he was creating were all a part of the New Apostolic Reformation.
This model of apostolic networks, with prophets advising the apostles, has become a dominant force in the independent charismatic world.
And Wagner's closest disciples, the members of the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders and the Eagle's Vision Apostolic Team, are the mega-celebrities of charismatic media today, with hundreds of thousands, probably well into the millions, of American Christians following the latest prophetic words of the prophets.
You can't travel in charismatic circles for long without encountering these leaders or these ideas, leadership paradigms, apostolic and prophetic networking, strategic spiritual warfare concepts, and charismatic theologies that Wagner helped platform and articulate.
One of the things Wagner's acolytes and friends and mentees really create is this charismatic Revival Fury style.
Fervently, and often with violent language, praying for and hoping for dramatic change to American society.
What they sometimes shorthand as Revival and Reformation.
This revival fury is often organized around abortion, but also against gay marriage or even Islam.
And it usually includes shofar blowing and praise music as acts of spiritual warfare.
So this pattern we find in the chaos of the Capitol riot, it's very much tied to this New Apostolic Reformation paradigm and these networks that Wagner built.
Now that we have all that in place, I think we can kind of go back to where we started, which is the January 6 Capitol riot.
How do we get from apostles and prophets to an insurrection?
Well, we're going to try to unravel that over the next four episodes, but I can give the broad outlines here.
If you remember back to the 2016 presidential campaign, especially that bonkers Republican primary, With like 17 candidates.
There were a lot of candidates in there who appealed to evangelical voters and seemed plausible.
Ben Carson.
Marco Rubio.
Ted Cruz.
And a lot of people thought that that was Trump's major weakness.
How could a thrice married, debauched billionaire get evangelical values voters?
As soon as Trump entered the race, this independent charismatic world started perking up.
Because he really interested them.
He had a certain televangelist flair that stylistically resonated with the independent charismatics.
But many in that world, like the rest of evangelicalism, weren't quite ready to throw in their lot with Trump.
As all of this campaigning was going on, Peter Wagner was dying.
He had a heart arrhythmia and his body got an antibiotic-resistant infection.
He started pulling back from his public speaking and writing.
But in February of 2016, as the debate was still raging over whether Ted Cruz or Ben Carson or Donald Trump would consolidate the evangelical voting bloc, Peter Wagner decided to post on Facebook his support for Donald Trump.
I interviewed a member of the Eagle's Vision apostolic team named Becca Greenwood.
She was one of the people closest to Wagner at the end of his life.
And she told me that Peter's endorsement of Trump really cleared the way for his other friends and followers to consolidate their support around Trump.
This definitely wasn't one of the most prominent evangelical endorsements that Trump got.
Wagner wasn't a big Facebook user and only had a few hundred friends.
But it's probably one of the most consequential because Wagner's inner circle was watching.
One of the things Wagner always told his Eagle's Vision apostolic team, his spiritual sons and daughters, was, I want you to go further and farther than I ever have.
And they did.
C. Peter Wagner died in October of 2016, just a couple weeks before Trump was elected.
But one of his final conscious acts, in the midst of his hospice care at the end of his life, was to cast an absentee ballot for Donald Trump.
From the point of Wagner's endorsement in February 2016, all the way to today, you can see this incredible interlacing of the New Apostolic Reformation and Donald Trump.
Wagner's networks of leaders, his close friends and spiritual sons and daughters became the spearhead of Christian Trumpism.
In fact, one apostle remarked in the midst of the 2016 election cycle, and this is a quote, This is the first time in American history that apostles and prophets are the primary driving force behind the presidential election.
End quote.
They rallied around Trump during the primary, even when a lot of other evangelicals and religious right leaders did not want Trump.
The apostles and prophets mobilized their massive prayer networks and churches to support Trump through thick and thin.
And if you remember that election, it got really thin.
They celebrated effusively when Trump won.
For his part, whether he could tell a charismatic evangelical from a reformed evangelical, Trump totally embraced this support, and a number of apostles and prophets were brought in to serve on Trump's Evangelical Advisory Board.
Trump met with dozens of these apostles and prophets over the course of his presidency, attended their churches, had them speak words of prophecy over him, and allowed them to imbue him with special spiritual significance.
You can find these remarkable videos online of Trump, starting in 2015 during the campaign and running through the 2020 election, where he's being prayed over by charismatic pastors and messianic rabbis.
You see them laying hands on him, even though Trump is a notorious germaphobe.
And they're decreeing and declaring blessings over him.
You can even find videos of prophets directly prophesying to Donald Trump.
And the Lord said he is ready for the next four years and I'm giving him a second wind.
You understand that?
And there's also this.
A second wind, if you add D, it's the Holy Spirit.
And the Lord showed me today, He showed me today that you were coming to get a second wind, another infilling of the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit makes you able to finish.
Take this to the end, Mr. President.
And then, He said to me that you were the apple of His eye.
And that's Well, we are, friends.
We're the apple of his eye.
And that he's protecting you like he is protecting the ancient foundations of our nation.
God wants to be in the middle of our nation.
I can't think of another American president, including some recent Republican presidents or presidential candidates, Who would just stand there and let charismatic prophets stand on a stage and publicly prophesy over them, much less lay hands on them.
But Trump seemed to welcome it, and the independent charismatics loved him for it.
We'll get into the specific political vision and goals of the new Apostolic Reformation leaders in future episodes, but suffice it to say here that this independent charismatic world, its celebrities, the apostles and prophets, their followers and churches, became the most ardent regiments of evangelical support for Trump.
So, four years later, when the 2020 presidential campaign ramped up, Wagner's friends and closest followers began ramping up as well.
Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of charismatic prophets declared that God had revealed that Trump would win a second term in 2020.
It was a total prophetic mind meld.
Wagner's Eagle's Vision apostolic team members campaigned for Trump in their networks, pushed his agenda, and used Charismatic Revival Fury conferences to boost the Trump cause.
In fact, just days before the 2020 election, Trump declared that he was no longer a Presbyterian, the church he was raised and confirmed in, but he was now a non-denominational Christian.
What happened when Trump refused to concede the election to Joe Biden?
When Trump refused to concede the election, these legions of charismatic prophets also refused to disavow their prophecies.
The Trump Evangelical Advisors organized a series of daily prayer conference calls, they called them the Election Integrity Prayer Calls, between November 2020 and January 6, 2021, with apostles and prophets leading many of the calls and issuing prophetic decrees about how God would miraculously deliver the election to Donald Trump.
Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Doug Mastriano, and others would even call into these sessions to talk post-election strategy with apostles and prophets.
Apostles and prophets took the lead on the Jericho marches, these precursors that built up to January 6th.
They organized prayer and spiritual warfare campaigns to get Trump reinstated.
They petitioned heaven to see quote-unquote God's will be fulfilled to have Trump get another term.
And on January 6th, Those campaigns and spiritual warfare crusades that I think a lot of us were not even cognizant of burst into view around the U.S.
Capitol.
Prophets and apostles were scattered throughout the crowds around the besieged Capitol.
As I said, more than a handful of Wagner's closest friends were there, leading the charismatic revival fury in the crowds.
Countless more New Apostolic Reformation followers were watching with bated breath online and in person around the Capitol, hoping that God would miraculously intervene and fulfill the prophecies that day.
The spirituality, the charismatic revival theory, the Christian ethos of the Capitol riot was unmistakably marked by the leaders Wagner helped to mentor and the theological ideas he helped to platform and articulate.
A few months ago, I was interviewing one of Wagner's friends and acolytes, a man named James Nesbitt.
He does prophetic digital art, and if you want to get a feel for the emotional and theological world of the Apostles and Prophets, it's worth looking him up.
I mention this because James Nesbitt was present at the Capitol on January 6th, and he was a devoted friend and follower of Peter Wagner.
And I want to read you what he said to me.
I asked him, in the context of Trump and the aftermath of the 2020 election cycle, how do you think Peter Wagner would interpret his legacy and what the people he mentored are doing now?
Here's what James Nesbitt said to me.
What Peter Wagner saw way off in the distance, what he lived for, is happening now and will happen.
It's waves that are coming.
And every prayer that's been prayed, the waves are coming again, and again, and again.
Peter Wagner was a wave maker, and he started making waves, and the waves have not gotten any less since he's passed away.
They've grown more and more intense.
But I want to remind you that the new apostolic reformation is the most radical change in the way of doing church since the Protestant Reformation.
That's what we're springing off into the 21st century.
And Jehu's gonna rise up, and we're gonna rule and reign with President Trump, and under the worship of Jesus Christ, riots and revival actually erupt together.
Thanks for listening to Charismatic Revival Fury, a series by Straight White American Jesus, written and created by Dr. Matthew Taylor.
We'll be back next week with episode two.
For now, hit subscribe, give us a review, and check out all the other things we do here at Straight White American Jesus.
