Charles Peter Wagner (August 15, 1930 – October 21, 2016) was a theologian, missiologist, missionary, writer, teacher, and founder of several organizations. In his early years, Wagner was known as a key leader of the Church Growth Movement and later for his writings on spiritual warfare.

Wagner served as a missionary in Bolivia with the South American Mission and the Andes Evangelical Mission (now SIM International) from 1956 to 1971. He then served for 30 years (1971 to 2001) as Professor of Church Growth at Fuller Theological Seminary’s School. world missions until his retirement in 2001. He is the author of 80 books. He was founding president of Global Harvest Ministries from 1993 to 2011 and founder and chancellor emeritus of the Wagner Leadership Institute (now Wagner University), which trains revivalists and reformers to bring about a global movement for transformation. He also founded the Reform Prayer Network, International Coalition of Apostles, Eagles Vision Apostolic Team and the Hamilton Group and served as Vice President of Global Spheres, Inc.

Wagner wrote about spiritual warfare, in books like Confronting the Powers: How the New Testament Church Experienced the Power of Spiritual Warfare at the Strategic Level and Engaging the Enemy. In Confronting the Powers, Wagner breaks down spiritual warfare as having three levels: “Ground level: person to person, praying for each person’s personal needs. Occult level: deals with demonic forces released through activities related to Satanism, witchcraft , to astrology and many other forms of structured occultism. Strategic Level or Cosmic Level: To bind and bring down spiritual principalities and powers that govern governments. Intercession at the strategic level” uses “spiritual mapping” and “destroy strongholds” to engage in spiritual warfare against “territorial spirits”.

According to Wagner, these methods “were virtually unknown to the majority of Christians before the 1990s.” The premise of engaging the enemy is that Satan and his demons are literally in the world, Satan’s territorial spirit demons can be identified by name, and Christians must engage in spiritual warfare with them.

In Hard-Core Idolatry: Facing the Facts, Wagner asserts that the idolatry of Catholic saints honors the spirits of darkness and promotes the burning of their statues in Argentina. Wagner claims that the Holy Spirit came to his associate, Cindy Jacobs (a prophet from Wagner’s Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders) and “told her that in [the Argentine city of] Resistencia they need to burn the idols, as the magicians did at Ephesus in Acts of the Apostles”.

New Apostolic Reform

Wagner used the term New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) to describe what he observed as a movement within the Pentecostal and Charismatic churches. The title is not an organization and has no formal membership.

Wagner said: “The roots of the NAR go back to the beginning of the African Independent Churches Movement in 1900, the Chinese House Churches Movement from 1976, the American Independent Charismatic Movement from the 1970s and the Latin American base starting around the same time. I was neither the founder nor a member of any of these movements, I was merely a teacher who observed that they were the fastest growing churches in their respective areas and had a number of common characteristics. ”

Dr. Roger Olson writes: “…the closer I looked at NARM [New Apostolic Reform Movement], the less convinced I was that it was a coherent movement. It’s more like some sort of umbrella term for a loose collection of independent ministries that have some common interests…I’ve looked at the websites of several independent evangelists who claim to represent this affinity…So far, no d between them does seem patently heretical. Quirky, not main, maybe a little bigoted. “Another term coined by Wagner is the Third Wave of the Holy Spirit. The NAR includes key elements of the Third Wave such as claims of miraculous healing.

Wagner provides the main differences between the NAR and mainstream Protestantism in his article The New Apostolic Reformation is not a cult. He noted that those who participate in the movement believe in the Apostles’ Creed and adhere to Orthodox Christian doctrine.