I was happy to be interviewed, & I think @7im did a very fair job of writing about the complex case of Derrick Peterson, a former sheriff deputy & candidate for Portland's school board who was commissioned as an apostle by Ché Ahn in 2020. rollingstone.com/politics/polit… 1/
Ché Ahn also listed Peterson as an advisory board member at 1Race4Life, an anti-abortion/racial-reconciliation org that he founded in 2020 after George Floyd's murder. web.archive.org/web/2021120511…. 2/
Last week Oregon Live ran a story where Peterson downplayed his 2020 apostolic commissioning & said he "is not affiliated" with 1Race4Life. oregonlive.com/education/2023…. Since then he was removed from Ahn's site & the 1Race4Life site has gone dark. What is going on here? 3/
To be clear, I haven't spoken to Peterson, & I'd be happy to do so, but, on the surface, his story doesn't hold water. Among #NAR leaders, Ché Ahn probably has the most clearly articulated theology/philosophy of apostleship (which he unapologetically got direct from Wagner). 5/
Ahn commissioned Peterson as a "marketplace apostle" (a phrase straight from Wagner's ideology), which connotes a leader who aligns with the #NAR agenda of societal transformation & #7MM/Christian supremacy but who doesn't work primarily in the church. place.asburyseminary.edu/cgi/viewconten… 6/
Ché Ahn has spoken & written for decades about his understanding of apostles, & here are a couple of key passages from his 2019 book "Modern-Day Apostles" amazon.com/Modern-Day-Apo… where he makes clear how rigorous & serious his vetting process is for these commissionings. 7/
Incidentally, one of the other people Ahn commissioned (as an evangelist) through HIM in 2020 was Jay Koopman, who was Ahn's associate pastor at HRC & is now Sean Feucht's right-hand man. harvestim.org/leadership/com… Again, this hardly suggests Peterson was some sort of outsider. 8/
Now the 1Race4Life website is down, but the advisory board also includes: Bill Johnson (Bethel), Cindy Jacobs, Jim Garlow, Eric Metaxas, Samuel Rodriguez, & Lance Wallnau, a veritable who's who of the #NewApostolicReformation cinematic universe. web.archive.org/web/2021120511… 9/
Each of these fellow 1Race4Life board members played an important role in instigating Christians to attend the protests/riot on #January6th. Ahn, Wallnau, & Jacobs were all in DC that day. Note that Peterson does not deny knowing these folks. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cha… 10/
If Peterson has so little connection to Ché Ahn & HIM, why is he showing up to preach at churches in the HIM & Bethel networks? And why is he doing FB live videos with Stacey Campbell, a core HIM apostle in Canada? facebook.com/mattoxkent/pos… 11/
The #NAR leadership culture is fundamentally relational, not organizational. While I'm sure not everyone in HIM shares all of Ché Ahn's politics, Peterson's effort to hide/dismiss his affiliations without explaining the nature of his connections there is downright confusing. 12/
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A roundtable of New Apostolic Reformation & other charismatic prophets issued a collective prophecy this week that traffics in some unbelievable Islamophobia & paranoia. This is very important.
You can watch a condensed clip here. I'm going to explore the full video below. 1/
This group of prophets is called the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders. It was 1st convened in 1999 by prophet Cindy Jacobs & her mentor apostle C. Peter Wagner. As I outlined in Charismatic Revival Fury, ACPE was 1 of the core networks of the NAR. 2/
I also described in that episode how the prophecy & spiritual warfare impulses of the NAR have often been targeted at American Muslims, even mobilizing Christian prayer warriors to pray against the "demon of Islam" outside Detroit-area mosques in 2011.
1st, if you want to understand the Christian nationalism & Christian theology that spurred much of the spirituality on display at the Capitol Riot, check out this award-winning, 25-minute documentary by @ICJSBaltimore titled "Spiritual Warriors." 2/
If you finish that, & want more, I recommend listening to Charismatic Revival Fury, a free, 8-hour podcast & audio documentary series I created (w/ much help from @BradleyOnishi & @RSokamoto):
1st, I'm sure some of Lake's supporters will claim this was a joke. But if you read the context, she's also talking about sacrifice, "lawfare" (a new favorite term on the right), & the intensity of the 2024 election.
She may have said it with a chuckle, but it's no joke. 2/
2nd, the most import. thing here is not the Glock comment alone, but the linkage bw spiritual warfare ("the armor of God") & the "Glock... just in case."
Lake is blending together a common evangelical notion of Christians fighting demons w/ a very physical weapon reference. 3/
Today's Sean Feucht podcast episode offers a textbook example of the charismaticization of the far-right & the radicalization of young Christians.
That might sound like an odd combo, but it's a very real & unstable paradox in our politics. Read on... 1/podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hop…
As I gestured to in Charismatic Revival Fury (), a major & underreported trend in right-wing politics is the spread of charismatic Christian spirituality.
"Charismatic" here means focused on restoring supernatural & ecstatic aspects of Christianity. 2/ icjs.org/charismatic-re…
Sean Feucht is a pioneering new prototype of the juncture of far-right activism, California hipsterism, & charismatic spirituality.
During the summer of 2020, he launched an insurgent worship crusade, violating local COVID regulations & counter-programming BLM protests. 3/
First, let me be clear that no NAR leader I've spoken to & no NAR-authored book I've read says they don't believe in the absolute primacy of the Bible. The NAR is contiguous enough with broader evangelicalism to know that crossing that line would be a big no-no. 2/
They know this is a touchy subject & a wrong-answer could lose them a lot of Christian credibility, so they're careful to affirm their robust view of the total authority (sometimes they'll even throw in the old evangelical shibboleths: inerrancy or infallibility) of the Bible. 3/
Among my most painful cuts in writing Charismatic Revival Fury was I didn't get to lay out Lance Wallnau's own disavowal of the origins of his Seven Mountains prophecy.
I'm so glad @wthrockmorton has told that story in his latest Telling Jefferson Lies:
In truth, my Charismatic Revival Fury episode on Wallnau (Ep. 3) was already verging on 2 hours - yikes! - & I couldn't justify the 10-15 minutes it'd take to contextualize & explain how Wallnau admitted the Seven Mountains image was based on a fake (or imagined?) prophecy.
When you consider how far this Seven Mountains teaching has spread, so that roughly 1/5 of all Americans affirm it () and how Wallnau built a career of fame on it, hearing him admit *in his own words* that it was all a bit of flim flam is staggering.religioninpublic.blog/2023/04/10/how…