Over twenty years ago Sarah Leslie of Discernment Ministries began doing research on the early stages of the New Apostolic Reformation which was being launched by C. Peter Wagner. In her research she covered what she refers to as the networking hierarchical cell church structure. In this piece she tells us exactly what this all means. This is not the local church, says Sarah, “This is also the structure of a city-wide church (ecumenical) as envisioned and described by the cell church architects. It is also the structure of the multi-site church of Leadership Network.” Before we continue, those of you who are unfamiliar with Leadership Network (LN) should know that this group is the foremost training agency for Christian leaders. LN has trained a generation of “change agent” pastors. That’s right. Change agent pastors. That’s why it’s extremely important for the discerning Christian to discover who LR’s leaders are, the people they’ve trained, and the purpose of their training. Speaking of “purpose” one pastor who went through LN’s training is none other than the Purpose Driven Pope, Rick Warren.
Back to what Sarah was saying: “It would become the model for C. Peter Wagner’s hierarchies — now called the 7 mountains (quite literally a pyramid marketing structure) for apostolic dominion.”
What this is about is transforming the Church through an army of modern day prophets and apostles. These people are highly organized — and they mean business.
Much has changed since Sara started her research twenty-five years ago:
For example, we weren’t sure if we were looking at a multi-headed hydra or a one-headed octopus. The downline networks that were forming in Christendom seemed to be independent of one another, yet there was an ongoing call for unity. It seemed destined to culminate in a one-world church. … For example, the false prophets of the NAR had been calling for a merging of streams into rivers for several decades.
It is now quite obvious that the downline networking model functions by stealth, superimposing its own structure on top of an existing model (such as denominations), until it sucks the old life out of it and ends up totally controlling it. Parachurch organizations such as Leadership Network, trained pastors and leaders across a global spectrum in this new model of church governance. The excessive evangelical fascination with leadership has given rise to cult-like status for its superstars and created lockstep blind followers. (emphasis added)
We hope you’ll visit Herescope to read Sarah Leslie’s informative and fascinating piece. She has provided the reader with a number of charts and graphs. (Link)