New Apostolic Reformation Explained

1. What the New Apostolic Reformation Is

The New Apostolic Reformation is a label for a broad current within charismatic Christianity that teaches God has restored the offices of apostle and prophet as governing offices in the church of the present day. Congregations described this way normally sit outside denominational structures and organise instead into apostolic networks, in which a recognised apostle gives spiritual oversight to pastors who have chosen to submit to him. The missiologist C. Peter Wagner supplied the name in the 1990s, and the churches he had in mind span Africa, Latin America, Asia and the English-speaking West.

Three features tend to travel together in churches that fit the description. The first is government by living apostles and prophets rather than by boards, synods or denominational assemblies. The second is an expectation of continuing supernatural activity as normal Christian life: healing, deliverance, personal prophecy, words of knowledge. The third is a strong interest in societal transformation, often expressed through the language of the seven mountains of culture. Any one of these on its own is far older and far broader than the movement under discussion.

Because the phrase carries so much weight in online argument, it helps to be precise about what it is. The New Apostolic Reformation has no doctrinal statement, no membership roll, no headquarters and no shared budget. It is a description imposed on a family resemblance among thousands of independent churches. Treating it as an organisation with a roster produces confident claims that fall apart on contact with the actual congregations, which differ from one another on the very points critics attribute to all of them.

Catholic teaching answers that sentence directly, and its answer has two halves that are usually separated. God still speaks, and the apostolic office is closed. The Catholic position is that the apostles were a foundation laid once, that their pastoral office continues in the bishops who succeeded them, and that the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit remain genuinely available and require discernment by those who hold that office. Sections 10 and 11 set that out with the texts.

2. Where the Name Came From: C. Peter Wagner

C. Peter Wagner (1930 to 2016) coined the phrase New Apostolic Reformation and remained its principal theorist until his death. Wagner served as a missionary in Bolivia before spending nearly three decades teaching church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary's School of World Mission, where he wrote extensively on why some congregations grow and others do not. His interest in the subject was descriptive first: he believed he had identified a category of fast-growing churches that no existing denominational map accounted for.

Wagner set out the idea across a series of books, including The New Apostolic Churches (1998), Churchquake! (1999) and Apostles Today (2006). His argument ran roughly as follows. Denominational structures were built for a previous era and have become slow. God is raising up apostles again, meaning leaders with genuine spiritual authority over networks of churches, and prophets who bring direction. The Reformation recovered the doctrine of justification; this second reformation recovers church government. Wagner described the change as the opening of a Second Apostolic Age, which he dated to around 2001.

What Wagner said the word apostle meant

Wagner distinguished the Twelve, whom he treated as unrepeatable, from an ongoing gift and office of apostle exercised by leaders today. On his account an apostle is someone whom God has given extraordinary authority over a defined sphere, whether a network of churches, a region or a field of work, and whose authority is recognised by those who voluntarily submit to it. He was explicit that this recognition is not conferred by ordination in a line of succession. It is discerned from fruit, from spiritual gifting and from the willingness of others to follow.

Wagner also convened the International Coalition of Apostles, later renamed the International Coalition of Apostolic Leaders, as a fellowship for those who accepted the title. He served as its presiding figure before handing the role on. The coalition was a membership association with dues, and it never claimed jurisdiction over its members' churches.

Wagner on whether this was a cult

When American news coverage in 2011 began treating the New Apostolic Reformation as a shadowy network, Wagner published a response arguing that it is a movement rather than an organisation, that it has no membership roll, and that its churches hold orthodox Christian doctrine on the Trinity, the divinity of Christ and salvation. Whatever one makes of his theology of apostleship, his description of the movement's shape has held up better than the conspiratorial version.

The books, dates and the Second Apostolic Age dating are drawn from C. Peter Wagner's own published works, principally The New Apostolic Churches (Regal, 1998) and Apostles Today (Regal, 2006). His 2011 reply to news coverage appeared in Charisma under the title "The New Apostolic Reformation Is Not a Cult."

3. Who Belongs, and Why Almost Nobody Uses the Label

Almost no church in the world describes itself as belonging to the New Apostolic Reformation. The label is applied from outside, usually by critics, and the leaders most often named by those critics generally reject it. That gap between who uses the term and who is described by it is the single most important thing to understand before reading anything else written about the movement.

Wagner himself named churches and leaders in his books, and those lists are the closest thing to a primary source. Beyond them, the naming becomes contested very quickly. Writers describing the movement commonly point to Bethel Church in Redding, California, and its pastor Bill Johnson, whose teaching on healing and revival is examined on his own page here, along with the worship catalogue produced by Bethel Music. Both pages set out what those ministries actually teach and where Catholic teaching agrees and differs. Bill Johnson has said publicly that he does not identify with a movement by that name.

Why the label spreads faster than the evidence

Three habits make discussion of this subject unreliable, and all three are worth naming plainly.

• Guilt by playlist. A congregation that sings one worship song from a church associated with the movement gets described as part of it. Singing a song is not adopting a doctrine of church government.
• Guilt by conference. Sharing a platform with a named leader becomes evidence of membership in a movement that has no membership.
• Retroactive inclusion. Figures who died before Wagner coined the phrase are counted as members of it, which makes the category meaningless.

The honest way to assess a particular church is to ask what it actually claims. Does its leader hold the title of apostle, and what does that title entitle him to do? Are prophecies given, and what happens when one fails? Who can correct the senior leader, and by what process? Is there a published financial account? Those questions have concrete answers in any given congregation, and the answers matter far more than whether a three-letter acronym is attached.

Related concerns often travel with these churches without being identical to them. Teaching about guaranteed health and wealth belongs to a different phenomenon, covered in our guide to the prosperity gospel and its biblical problems. The broader family of independent charismatic churches, including many with no apostolic claims at all, is covered under nondenominational Christianity and Pentecostal beliefs and churches.

4. The Claim: Apostles Restored as an Office

The central teaching of the movement is that the apostolic office is open in every generation and has now been reoccupied. The argument is built on a single verse, and its advocates read that verse as a permanent list of five ministries given to the church until a stated goal is reached.

The reading is straightforward on its own terms. Five ministries are listed together in one sentence. Nobody argues that evangelists, pastors and teachers expired with the first century. The clause "until we all reach unity in the faith" sets a terminus that has plainly not arrived. Therefore, the argument runs, all five continue, and a church without apostles and prophets is operating with two of its five given ministries missing. Advocates add that the New Testament itself uses the word apostle of people outside the Twelve: Barnabas (Acts 14:14), Andronicus and Junia (Romans 16:7), James the brother of the Lord (Galatians 1:19) and Epaphroditus, called the apostle of the Philippians (Philippians 2:25).

That last point deserves to be granted, because it is simply accurate. The Greek word apostolos means one who is sent, and the New Testament does apply it more widely than to the Twelve. Any response that pretends otherwise is arguing against a straw man.

What the office is said to include

In practice, apostolic authority in these networks includes appointing and removing pastors, setting doctrine for the network, receiving direction for the churches under oversight, and commissioning new works. Some networks require a covenant relationship in which a pastor submits to the apostle's decisions in matters of ministry. Financial arrangements vary widely, from voluntary honoraria to structured giving from congregations upward.

Where the Catholic objection lands

The Catholic objection is narrower than it is often assumed to be. Catholic teaching does not deny that Christ gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers, and it does not claim the supernatural gifts ceased. The objection is that Ephesians 4:11 has to be read alongside Ephesians 2:20, where the household of God is "built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone." A foundation is laid once. The building continues; the foundation is not relaid every generation.

Acts 1:21-26 supports the same reading. When the Eleven replace Judas, they set out a qualification: the candidate must have accompanied them from the baptism of John until the ascension, so as to be "a witness with us of his resurrection." Paul's own apostleship rests on the risen Christ appearing to him, and he calls himself the last of that line, "as to one abnormally born" (1 Corinthians 15:8). The New Testament does use apostle in a wider sense of sent messengers, and it also marks out a foundational group whose credentials were fixed by an event nobody can now repeat.

5. Prophets, Prophetic Words and Accountability

Alongside restored apostles, the movement teaches a restored prophetic office. Prophets in this framework deliver direction to churches, networks and sometimes nations, and personal prophecy over individuals is common practice: a prophet or a trained team speaks a word over a person about calling, healing, marriage or work. Advocates describe this as the ordinary equipping ministry of the church rather than as anything exotic.

Charismatic theology within the movement usually distinguishes levels. Scripture is closed and stands above everything. A prophetic word today is understood as fallible, subject to testing, and binding on nobody until confirmed. Wayne Grudem's account of fallible New Testament prophecy, though he is not part of the movement, is often invoked to defend the practice. Advocates cite 1 Corinthians 14:29, "let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said," as proof that testing is built into the practice from the start.

The accountability problem in practice

The difficulty is what happens when a word fails. Scripture is severe here.

Independent networks have no tribunal. When a widely publicised prediction fails, there is no body with standing to rule on it, and the usual outcomes are silence, reinterpretation of the word as conditional, or a claim that spiritual warfare delayed the fulfilment. Every one of those moves is available precisely because no structure exists to close them off.

Charismatic leaders have themselves recognised this. After a set of publicised predictions about a national election failed in 2020, a group of charismatic pastors and teachers drafted and circulated a statement on prophetic standards calling for public correction of failed words, accountability to identifiable authority, and restraint in political prediction. Several prophets issued public apologies; others did not. The episode is the clearest available illustration of the structural gap, and it came from inside the movement rather than from its critics.

Scripture treats the testing of claimed apostles as an ordinary duty of a healthy church, and commends a congregation for doing it.

The Ephesians are praised for examining apostolic claims and rejecting some. Testing is not disloyalty. Our guides to the biblical warning signs of a false prophet and to wolves in sheep's clothing work through the criteria Scripture actually gives.

6. The Seven Mountain Mandate

The seven mountain mandate teaches that Christians are called to gain influence over seven spheres of culture: religion, family, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business. Proponents trace the idea to a 1975 conversation between Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ and Loren Cunningham of Youth With A Mission, in which both men reported arriving independently at a similar list of spheres to be reached. The writer Lance Wallnau later supplied the mountain imagery and popularised the phrase.

Read in its mildest form, the teaching says something ordinary and true: Christians should work in every field, and should bring the moral seriousness of their faith into education, business and public life. Stated that way it is close to what Catholic teaching calls the apostolate of the laity, and to the vocation described in Lumen Gentium 31, where lay people are called to order temporal affairs according to the plan of God.

Where the objection begins

Stated in stronger forms, the teaching becomes a mandate to occupy and control the commanding heights of society, sometimes with the expectation that Christ returns to a church that has already taken them. Critics inside and outside charismatic Christianity call this dominionism. Three objections recur, and they are not confined to Catholics.

• Exegetical. No text assigns seven spheres to the church. The list is a modern organising device presented with the weight of a divine command.
• Eschatological. The New Testament expects the church to face opposition until the end and hands final victory to Christ at his return, a point made throughout our guide to the end times and what Scripture actually promises. A theology that requires cultural conquest before the return has to work hard against Luke 18:8 and 2 Timothy 3:12.
• Practical. A mandate framed as taking territory tends to justify the means, and it turns political opponents into spiritual enemies.

Catholic social teaching has its own long account of how faith engages public life, and it looks quite different. The state and the Church are distinct, the laity act in their own name and on their own responsibility, and the goal is the common good rather than the capture of institutions. Our guide to Catholic social teaching and justice sets out that framework, and the just war tradition shows the same instinct at work: define limits first, then act within them.

7. Territorial Spirits and Spiritual Mapping

Strategic-level spiritual warfare is the teaching that specific demonic powers hold authority over defined territories, cities and institutions, and that these powers can be identified by name and displaced through targeted prayer. Wagner promoted it energetically in the 1990s, together with spiritual mapping, a research method in which intercessors study a city's history, religions and traumas in order to identify the spiritual strongholds said to govern it. Prayer walks, prayer journeys to named sites and city-wide intercession campaigns followed from the theory.

The scriptural anchors offered are real texts. Daniel 10:13 speaks of the prince of the Persian kingdom resisting an angelic messenger for twenty-one days until Michael comes to help. Ephesians 6:12 names the struggle as being against rulers, authorities and powers of this dark world. Those passages do teach that spiritual powers are organised and that they oppose the work of God.

What Catholic teaching affirms and what it withholds

The Catholic Church affirms without hesitation that the devil and fallen angels are real personal beings, that they act in the world, and that Christians are engaged in a genuine spiritual conflict. The Catechism treats this seriously, and the Church retains a formal rite of exorcism reserved to a priest appointed by the bishop for that purpose. Our guide to spiritual warfare and how the Church actually fights it covers the ordinary means: the sacraments, prayer, fasting, the intercession of the saints and the discipline of a moral life.

What Catholic practice withholds is the confident naming of the specific demon assigned to a city. The Church's discipline in this area is deliberately restrictive. Formal exorcism requires the bishop's appointment, medical and psychological assessment, and the presumption that natural explanations come first. The reason is protective. A method that lets any intercessor announce which spirit rules a neighbourhood produces claims that cannot be tested, tends to identify particular ethnic or religious communities as the seat of a demonic power, and can slide toward the conspiracy thinking that this site refuses on principle.

Behind the caution sits a point of theology. In Catholic teaching the decisive victory over the powers has been won at the cross, and the Christian's role is to hold ground already taken through the ordinary channels Christ established. A model in which the outcome depends on intercessors correctly identifying and defeating a named power puts a weight on human technique that the New Testament puts on Christ.

8. Roots: Latter Rain, Kansas City, Third Wave

The New Apostolic Reformation did not begin with Wagner. Three earlier currents supplied its main ideas, and knowing them makes the movement far easier to read.

The Latter Rain revival of 1948

In 1948, a revival broke out at the Sharon Orphanage and Schools in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, and spread rapidly through Pentecostal churches in Canada and the United States. Its teachers held that God was restoring the offices of apostle and prophet before the end, that spiritual gifts could be imparted through the laying on of hands by those offices, and that a mature end-time church would be brought to perfection through this restored government. The Assemblies of God General Council condemned the teaching by resolution in 1949, singling out the imparting of gifts by prophecy and laying on of hands and the restoration of apostolic office. The movement lost institutional standing and continued in independent congregations, carrying its doctrine forward for decades.

The Kansas City prophets of the 1980s

A group of prophetic ministers associated with Kansas City Fellowship became widely known in the 1980s for personal prophecy and dramatic predictions. Their prominence generated the first sustained modern debate about how to handle a fallible prophetic ministry inside a local church, including a detailed critical report by a neighbouring pastor and a subsequent process of correction. Several figures from that circle later became influential across independent charismatic churches.

The Third Wave

Wagner coined the term Third Wave in the early 1980s for a renewal of interest in healing and prophecy among evangelicals who did not join Pentecostal denominations or the earlier charismatic renewal. The Vineyard movement associated with John Wimber was its best known expression. The Third Wave normalised supernatural expectation in churches with no Pentecostal heritage, and it prepared the ground for the apostolic teaching Wagner would argue for a decade later.

Read together, the three phases show a consistent trajectory: a restorationist instinct that treats the present church as deficient and looks for the recovery of something believed lost. Catholic ecclesiology begins from the opposite instinct, holding that Christ's promise in Matthew 16:18 and Matthew 28:20 guarantees the Church's continuity, so that reform means returning to what has been continuously held rather than recovering an office that lapsed. That contrast is worked out in our guide to Sacred Tradition and how doctrine is handed on.

9. How Other Protestants Respond

Criticism of the movement comes overwhelmingly from other Protestants, and it comes from two directions that disagree with each other almost as much as they disagree with the movement.

The Pentecostal and charismatic objection

Classical Pentecostal denominations believe in prophecy, healing and tongues for today, and many of them still reject the restoration of governing apostles. The Assemblies of God adopted a position paper on apostles and prophets in 2001 that affirmed the continuing gifts while rejecting the idea that apostles and prophets hold an office of government over the church, warning specifically against leaders whose authority cannot be reviewed. This is the most significant objection to answer, because it comes from people who cannot be dismissed as cessationists.

The 1949 resolution was adopted by the General Council of the Assemblies of God (USA). The position paper "Apostles and Prophets" was adopted by that body's General Presbytery in August 2001. Both texts are published by the Assemblies of God.

The Reformed and cessationist objection

Reformed and confessional Protestants generally hold that the revelatory gifts ceased with the apostolic age, so for them a claimed apostle or prophet is ruled out before the question of governance arises. A sustained book-length treatment from this side is A New Apostolic Reformation? A Biblical Response to a Worldwide Movement by R. Douglas Geivett and Holly Pivec (2014), which works through the movement's own primary sources. Our guide to Calvinism and Reformed theology explains the wider framework these critics work within, and Catholic teaching parts company with them on cessationism itself.

Where Catholic teaching stands relative to both

The Catholic position sits at an angle to both objections. Rome agrees with the Pentecostals that the charisms are alive and that the Spirit gives gifts freely in every age. Rome agrees with the Reformed that no new apostles are being appointed. The Catholic reason for the second point differs from the cessationist reason. In Catholic teaching the office is closed because the foundation was laid once and its pastoral continuation has a definite form, the college of bishops. The Spirit goes on giving gifts throughout.

10. What Catholic Apostolic Succession Means

Apostolic succession is the Catholic doctrine that the pastoral office Christ gave the apostles has been handed on without a break to the bishops, through the laying on of hands, so that the bishops of today govern, teach and sanctify with the authority the apostles received. Succession is a matter of office and sacrament rather than of personal charisma, which is why a bishop's authority does not rise or fall with his gifting, his popularity or his personal holiness.

The doctrine has three components, and separating them clarifies most arguments about it.

Succession in office

The apostles appointed men to continue their work and provided for the succession to continue after those men. Paul leaves Titus in Crete "to appoint elders in every town" (Titus 1:5), reminds Timothy of the gift given "through the laying on of my hands" (2 Timothy 1:6) and of the laying on of hands by the body of elders (1 Timothy 4:14), and appoints elders in each church he plants (Acts 14:23). Clement of Rome, writing to Corinth near the end of the first century, says the apostles appointed their first converts as overseers and gave instruction that when these died, other approved men should succeed to their ministry. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states the principle at 77 and 861: the apostles left bishops as their successors, giving them their own position of teaching authority.

Succession in doctrine

The Church is apostolic because she keeps and hands on the teaching received from the apostles. The Catechism at 857 gives the three senses together: the Church is built on the foundation of the apostles, she keeps and hands on the deposit of faith heard from them, and she continues to be taught and guided by them through their successors. The content is fixed. A bishop who taught a new revelation would be failing at the office rather than exercising it.

Succession in sacramental order

Episcopal consecration confers the fullness of the sacrament of Holy Orders, as Lumen Gentium 21 states, and it is conferred by bishops who were themselves consecrated in the same line. This is why the question of valid orders is so concrete in Catholic theology: it turns on who consecrated whom, with what rite and with what intention. The same test explains why Rome recognises the orders of the Eastern Orthodox Churches while rejecting the validity of Anglican ordinations, questions covered in our guides to the Eastern Orthodox Church and its valid orders and to Anglican orders and Apostolicae Curae.

Why the difference matters practically

A succession model and an anointing model produce different churches under pressure. When a leader in a succession model fails morally, his office remains and a defined authority above him can suspend or remove him; the sacraments he celebrated remain valid, because their validity never depended on his holiness. When a leader whose authority rests on personal anointing fails, there is often no one with standing to act, and the community is left arguing about whether the anointing was ever real. The Catholic Church's own record of handling abuse is a painful demonstration that having the structure is no guarantee of using it, a subject we treat directly in the Church scandals guide. The structure is what makes accountability possible; the will to use it has to be supplied.

For the office itself, and the difference between the ministerial priesthood and the priesthood of all the baptised, see our guides to the Catholic priesthood and the papacy and its authority.

11. Prophecy and Charisms in Catholic Teaching

Catholic teaching holds that God still gives prophetic gifts and that public Revelation is complete. Those two statements are held together by a distinction that has no equivalent in most Protestant frameworks, and it is the key to the whole subject.

Public Revelation is closed

The Catechism at 66 states that the Christian economy is the new and definitive covenant and that no new public revelation is to be expected before the glorious manifestation of Jesus Christ. The Letter to the Hebrews puts the same point at its opening: God spoke in many ways through the prophets, and in these last days has spoken by his Son (Hebrews 1:1-2). Christ is the Father's one, complete and definitive Word.

Private revelation exists and is subordinate

The Catechism at 67 addresses claimed revelations directly. Some private revelations have been recognised by the authority of the Church, and their role is to help people live more fully by Christ's definitive Revelation in a certain period of history. They do not improve or complete it. Christian faith cannot accept revelations that claim to surpass or correct the Revelation of which Christ is the fulfilment. No Catholic is obliged to believe any private revelation, including the most famous ones.

The Church's discernment process is public and documented. On 17 May 2024 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena. Under these norms the Church ordinarily does not declare an alleged apparition supernatural at all. The usual favourable outcome is a nihil obstat, meaning devotion is permitted with no declaration about supernatural origin, and there are six possible conclusions in total, running through to prohibition. Our guide to Marian apparition sites and their actual canonical status sets out the six outcomes and what each one does and does not say, and the case files behind Fatima show how differently these things were handled under the older framework.

The contrast with an unregulated prophetic ministry is structural. In the Catholic system a claimed revelation is examined by the local bishop under published criteria, the examination can take years, the outcome is published, and Rome can intervene. Nobody's word is beyond review, and the process is designed to be slow because credulity does more damage than delay.

Charisms are real and require discernment

The Catholic Church has never taught that the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit ceased. Lumen Gentium 12 teaches that the Holy Spirit distributes special graces among the faithful of every rank, and the Catechism at 799 to 801 treats the charisms as oriented to the building up of the Church and states that no charism is exempt from being referred and submitted to the Church's shepherds. In 2016 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued Iuvenescit Ecclesia, a letter on the relationship between hierarchical and charismatic gifts, teaching that both are essential, that they come from the same Spirit, and that the charismatic gifts are ordered to communion under the pastors rather than in competition with them.

Catholic charismatic renewal exists inside this framework, with bishops' oversight and no claim to apostolic office. Our guides to the Holy Spirit and his gifts and to how the Church verifies a miracle show what disciplined openness looks like: real expectation of God's action, combined with medical files, sworn testimony and years of examination before anything is affirmed.

12. Where the Two Accounts Agree and Collide

An honest comparison has to start with the agreements, because they are substantial and they are usually skipped.

Real common ground

• God acts supernaturally now. Catholic teaching and apostolic-restoration teaching both reject the view that the age of miracles is over. On this question the two stand together against cessationism.
• The church is meant to be governed. Both reject a purely congregational free-for-all and hold that Christ gave the church real authority structures.
• Christian faith is urgent. Both take seriously that no one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32) and that readiness is asked of believers now rather than at some convenient later point.
• The gospel is for every sphere of life. Both refuse to confine faith to a private compartment.

The genuine collisions

Four points cannot be reconciled, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

• The apostolic office. One holds it open and reoccupied. The other holds it closed and continued in the episcopate. There is no middle position.
• The source of authority. Personal anointing recognised by followers, against sacramental ordination in a traceable line.
• The status of new revelation. Directional prophecy for churches and nations, against private revelation that binds no one and can never correct what Christ revealed.
• The mechanism of correction. Voluntary peer relationships, against canon law with defined superiors and a court of final appeal.

Practical questions worth asking about any church

Whatever label is or is not attached, the following questions have answers, and a healthy church answers them without discomfort.

• Who can correct the senior leader, by what process, and has it ever happened?
• Are the finances independently audited, and are the results available to members?
• When a prophecy given publicly did not come to pass, what was said about it publicly?
• Is submission to leadership described as a condition of God's blessing on your life or family?
• Are people who leave treated as having left God, or as having left a congregation?
• Does the teaching stay inside the creed on the Trinity, the incarnation and the bodily resurrection?

If those questions cannot be asked out loud without consequences, the answer is already in hand. Many readers arrive at this page because a church they loved has changed, and the reasons people step away are worked through in why people leave the Church and in our guide to faith deconstruction. If you are weighing whether a group has crossed a line into something else entirely, cults compared with Christianity sets out the standard markers.

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