Do you want to understand more fully this concept of “Joel’s Army”? The second edition of Joel’s Army, a booklet by Jewel Grewe, has just been re-published. This completely updated book is now available on-line at: http://www.discernment-ministries.org/JoelsArmy1.htm. It can also be purchased for only $3.50 a copy from Discernment Ministries. See http://www.discernment-ministries.org for details.
Today’s Herescope reprints the Preface, which explains the historical significance of this book. Tomorrow’s Herescope will continue the series about Transformation and Change.
PREFACE
This book is a snapshot in time. Originally published in 1991, it was a helpful sketch of the Latter Rain doctrines coming forth from the “Kansas City Prophets” and entering the Charismatic and Pentecostal churches. This movement had existed on the fringes of the Pentecostal community, and there was little reason to worry that these aberrant teachings would affect the mainstream evangelicalism.
In retrospect, this book is so much more important than anyone ever realized. We now know that what was then called the “New Wave Theology” movement has now tremendously grown to become the New Apostolic Reformation.
This book is a still photo, capturing a pivotal moment in history. The new doctrines of the New Apostolic Reformation were still “emerging” fifteen years ago. As such, these new doctrines were much more blatant. None of the church growth movement experts had come in to “tweak” them so that they would be marketable to the greater evangelical community. Nobody had come in to scale them down yet, in order to gradually introduce them as “progressive revelation.” In this book, you read the actual doctrines in their most pure, unadulterated form. And it is quite chilling!
The New Order of the Latter Rain, a cult that began in the late 1940s, taught a number of heresies, including 1) an overemphasis on “imparting” spiritual gifts and 2) the erroneous teaching that the Church must be built on a foundation of present-day apostles and prophets. Leaders at that time included William Branham, George Warnock, Ern Baxter, and George Hawtin. This cult eventually developed connections with the Shepherding and Charismatic Renewal movements, and the “Kansas City Prophets.”
This self-proclaimed group of modern-day “prophets,” at the Kansas City Fellowship perpetuated the doctrines of Latter Rain through the teachings of Mike Bickle, Paul Cain and others. It is here that this booklet picks up the story, for many of the quoted excerpts come from leaders at the Kansas City Fellowship prophecy conferences.
Just at this moment in history, a confluence was beginning which was to have massive repercussions throughout the rest of evangelicalism: John Wimber of the Vineyard Movement connected with the Kansas City Prophets. John Wimber had previously been picked up as an “experiment” by C. Peter Wagner at Fuller Theological Seminary for “signs and wonders” classes. For several decades Fuller had been laying considerable groundwork for the formation of new doctrines – ecclesiology, eschatology, missiology, soteriology, etc. Wimber’s connection to KCF proved to be the catalyst for the beginnings of what C. Peter Wagner was to later call the “New Apostolic Reformation.” The esoteric doctrines of the Latter Rain movement became an integral part of his post-modern evangelical canon. And because of Wagner’s influence, KCF leaders who would have been obscure in 1991, such as Mike Bickle, are now widely known throughout evangelicalism.
What you are about to read exposes some of the most pure forms of the New Apostolic Reformation doctrines – unadulterated – that can be found. They are wholly heretical and deeply disturbing. As this book goes to press as a second edition, these teachings are rapidly gaining impact and influence in the wider Christian world. What would have shocked fifteen years ago is now easily accepted.
May the Lord use this book to lead many back to His Word.
Sarah Leslie
“And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, In meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth; And that they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, who are taken captive by him at his will.” (2 Timothy 2:24-26)