Spiritual warfare Wagner wrote about
spiritual warfare, in books including
Confronting the Powers: How the New Testament Church Experienced the Power of Strategic-Level Spiritual Warfare and
Engaging the Enemy. New Apostolic Reformation prophet
Cindy Jacobs was a main influence on this aspect of Wagner's theology. In
Confronting the Powers, Wagner breaks down spiritual warfare as having three levels: "Ground Level: Person-to-person, praying for each other's personal needs. Occult Level: deals with
demonic forces released through activities related to
Satanism,
witchcraft,
astrology and many other forms of structured
occultism. Strategic-Level or Cosmic-Level: To bind and bring down spiritual principalities and powers that rule over governments." Wagner's method of accomplishing strategic-level spiritual warfare involves six steps: • The area is selected. "Prayer armies" are deployed for a large area (e.g. the
40/70 window between 40 and 70 degrees north latitude). • The participants establish unity together; particularly, the pastors as "spiritual gatekeepers" of an area must join. • Building on this, Christian congregations in an area should also join for the purpose of spiritual warfare. • The prayer warriors prepare themselves for the upcoming spiritual warfare through personal
sanctification. • Christians with the
spiritual gift of
prophecy locate and
identify the
demons to be found in the area (
spiritual mapping). For example, places with
pagan or
Nazi history are identified as their strongholds. • Practical prayer warfare, specifically as a
prayer march: the believers proclaim God's power and command the demons to leave, tearing down their strongholds. 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, that Satan's territorial spirit-demons may be identified by name, and that Christians are to engage in spiritual warfare with them. Wagner preached a
fivefold ministry view based on Ephesians 4:13, in which apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers are considered legitimate offices of the church. While mainline Protestant denominations see prophets and apostles as dispensed of within the early period of Christianity, Wagner's spiritual-warfare theology depicted these figures as
prayer-warriors actively interceding in the contemporary world. These prayer warriors are responsible for ushering in the
return of Jesus and the
Kingdom of God through warfare prayer. In
Hard-Core Idolatry: Facing the Facts, Wagner asserts that idolizing
Catholic saints brings honor to the spirits of darkness, and promotes the burning of their statues in
Argentina. Wagner also asserts that the
Holy Spirit came to his associate,
Cindy Jacobs (a prophet in Wagner's Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders) and "told her that in [the Argentinian city of] Resistencia they need to burn the idols, like the magicians did in Ephesus in Acts of the Apostles". Wagner had close ties to
Ted Haggard's
New Life Church, which found an early focus on spiritual mapping and confronting territorial spirits through strategic-level spiritual warfare. The church "and the adjacent World Prayer Center that was dedicated in 1998 were, for roughly a decade, the epicenter of an ongoing, radical redefinition of Christianity."
New Apostolic Reformation Wagner used the term
New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) to describe what he observed as a movement within
Pentecostal and
charismatic churches. The title is not an organization and does not have formal membership. Wagner's organizational acumen helped the movement expand through networks of apostles and prophets and their organizations, while their ideas, such as
dominionism, and more specifically the
Seven Mountain Mandate, also spread back into the movement. In response to an
NPR article entitled "The New Apostolic Reformation: The Evangelicals Engaged in Spiritual Warfare", Wagner stated to
Charisma News, "The roots of the NAR go back to the beginning of the African Independent Church Movement in 1900, the
Chinese House Church Movement beginning in 1976, the U.S. Independent Charismatic Movement beginning in the 1970s and the Latin American Grassroots Church Movement beginning around the same time. I was neither the founder nor a member of any of these movements, I was simply a professor who observed that they were the fastest growing churches in their respective regions and that they had a number of common characteristics." The term
NAR has been described as "relatively well established in the academic community". Religion scholar and theologian Geir Otto Holmås states that the "NAR is not a denomination or an organization with membership lists and an unambiguous doctrinal foundation, but a loose movement which primarily operates through informal or semi-formal channels," continuing on to say that the movement is spread in bits and pieces: religion scholar Matthew D. Taylor terms this "prophetic
memes". Holmås states that "this explains the slightly odd fact that that people who are associated with the NAR do not necessarily identify with the movement. Some of them will not even
have heard the term 'New Apostolic Reformation'". 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 provided the key differences between the NAR and traditional Protestantism in his article "The New Apostolic Reformation is Not a Cult". He noted that those participating in the movement believe the
Apostles' Creed and adhere to
orthodox Christian doctrine.
Dominionism In his 1998 book
Churchquake!, Wagner denied that NAR had any political orientation. Ten years later he published
Dominion!, an endorsement of
dominion theology which seeks to institute a nation governed by Christians and based on their
understandings of
biblical law: "the church should be governed primarily by charismatic apostles and prophets, who will lead it into concerted and orchestrated campaigns of strategic-level spiritual warfare, through which the church can transform societies." ==Selected works==