Published: October 18, 2026 | narconnections.com
Yesterday we met a movement that says it does not exist. Today we meet the second half of that same strategy, a movement that says it has no history. One of the most effective moves in the New Apostolic Reformation’s playbook is the claim of novelty: that it is a fresh work of the Spirit for a new generation, unprecedented, and therefore unable to be judged by anything that came before. The claim does two jobs at once. It makes the movement feel exciting and urgent, and it quietly immunizes it against scrutiny. If this is genuinely new, then the failures of every past movement are irrelevant to it. So today we test that claim against the record. And the record is unkind to it.
“Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls” (Jeremiah 6:16).
God’s counsel to a wandering people is the exact opposite of the movement’s instinct. Where the NAR prizes the new, the fresh word, the latest outpouring, the unprecedented move, Jeremiah calls Israel to stop, to look, and to ask for the old paths. Not the newest path, but the oldest and truest one. And notice what the old path yields: rest for your souls. There is a deep biblical suspicion of novelty in religion, precisely because what is genuinely from God is not a break with what He has already said but continuity with it. The command to seek the old paths is the perfect frame for this chapter, because the honest answer to “where did the NAR come from?” is not “heaven, last Tuesday.” It is a documented, century-long trail, and once you can see the trail, the claim of novelty collapses.
Azusa 1906: Worldwide From the Cradle
The earliest root deserves attention, because it establishes one of the two threads we’re following throughout this series. The Azusa Street Revival erupted in a modest Los Angeles mission in 1906, and from its first weeks it was an international event. Visitors carried its fire to dozens of nations within a few years, and the worldwide Pentecostal movement it birthed became one of the fastest-spreading religious phenomena in history.
This matters for a specific reason. The movement this book documents claims the Azusa legacy as its own inheritance, and it claims it worldwide. So the cross-continental character of the NAR is not a recent development or an accident of the internet age. It draws on a stream that was worldwide from its cradle and has always understood itself as a worldwide work. That is exactly why its modern institutions are organized by continent and its ambitions are measured in nations. The worldwide web we traced yesterday has deep roots.
1948: A Condemned Movement Refuses to Die
Here is the most direct theological ancestor of the New Apostolic Reformation, and it is a movement that was formally condemned as doctrinally aberrant. The Latter Rain erupted in February 1948 at the Sharon Orphanage and Schools in North Battleford, Saskatchewan. Its leaders had attended the meetings of William Branham, an itinerant healing revivalist who taught a heretical modalism and made claims of unique divine appointment that made him the prototype for the movement’s later prophetic culture. Inspired by Branham’s manifestations, and by Franklin Hall’s teaching that extended fasting could produce bodily immortality and even eliminate sickness and body odor, the Sharon leaders fasted and prayed and soon reported an outbreak of revival.
What that revival introduced is the exact cluster of doctrines the movement would later formalize and distribute worldwide: the restoration of the governing offices of apostle and prophet; the laying on of hands to impart spiritual gifts directly; personal directive prophecy as a primary authority mechanism; and the “Manifest Sons of God” teaching, the expectation of a final generation of glorified, sinless, supernaturally empowered believers who would subdue the earth before Christ’s return. In 1949 the General Council of the Assemblies of God condemned these teachings, citing the emphasis on present-day apostles and prophets, the distortion of Scripture, and the bestowing of gifts through human impartation.
Hold that 1949 condemnation in mind, because it is the hinge of the second thread we’re following, the denominational blur. The very denomination that drew the hard line in 1949 would, two generations later, sit beside the heirs of the doctrine it condemned on the Global Council of a worldwide organization we will examine later in this series. The line was never retracted. It was simply dissolved in shared platforms. The denominational blur is not an abstraction. It is a wall, built in 1949, and quietly abandoned in our own time.
And the condemnation did not kill the movement. It drove it underground, into independent networks where it developed and waited for its next flowering. The man most responsible for keeping it alive was a teenager named Bill Hamon, who joined the Latter Rain in 1951 at seventeen, not an adult weighing its claims from outside, but a boy formed by them from within. He would carry those teachings for more than seventy years. His is a story for its own day.
The 1970s: The Habit of “Covering”
Between the mid-century revivals and the decade that followed lies a root the movement rarely acknowledges but everywhere assumes: the Shepherding and Discipleship movement of the 1970s. Led by a group of respected Bible teachers, it built a system of “covering” in which every believer submitted to a personal shepherd, who submitted to another above him, a pyramid of spiritual authority that reached into the most intimate decisions of people’s lives: whom to marry, where to live, how to spend their money.
The Shepherding movement eventually collapsed under the weight of its own abuses, and several of its own leaders publicly repented of the harm it had done. But the instinct it trained did not die with it, the instinct that spiritual maturity means placing yourself under the personal authority of an anointed leader who answers only to those above him. That instinct was absorbed. The apostolic “covering” that governs the modern network is the Shepherding pyramid rebuilt on a worldwide scale, its abuses forgotten, its structure preserved. When a believer today is told he is spiritually “uncovered” and exposed unless he submits to an apostle, he is hearing a doctrine that already collapsed once, under the weight of its own damage, within living memory.
The 1980s: The Kansas City Prophets
By the 1980s the Latter Rain’s legacy found its most significant institutional expression in a loose network of prophetic ministries centered in Kansas City. Mike Bickle, a young pastor who would later found the International House of Prayer, gathered around him men who claimed prophetic gifts of extraordinary precision, among them Paul Cain, Bob Jones, John Paul Jackson, Rick Joyner, and Bobby Conner. These men did not merely claim the general gift of prophecy; they claimed the kind of precise, authoritative, thus-saith-the-Lord utterance that the Deuteronomy 18 standard was written to test.
They introduced the cultural idiom the movement would inherit wholesale: the prophet as seer, the prophetic word as binding directive, the conference as commissioning ceremony, the apostle-prophet relationship as the church’s true government. Many of their specific predictions failed, and the accountability mechanism was as absent then as it is now. It is a sobering detail, and one that cannot be left out of an honest history: Bickle himself, the most institutionally significant figure of the group, was confirmed by independent investigation in 2023 to have committed decades of sexual abuse that his own organization’s governance had enabled and concealed. A structure that silences the testing of its leaders will, sooner or later, have something terrible to hide.
The 1990s: Toronto and the Suspension of Judgment
Two events in the 1990s completed the transition from a network of distinct movements into a dominant worldwide force. In January 1994 the evangelist Randy Clark arrived at the Toronto Airport Vineyard, a small congregation pastored by John Arnott, and ignited what became known as the Toronto Blessing. The months-long outbreak of manifestations, uncontrollable laughter, violent shaking, falling, animal sounds, mass ecstasy, drew hundreds of thousands of visitors from across the world and was expelled from the Vineyard Association in 1995, precisely because it could not be brought under any recognizable biblical framework.
But expulsion did not diminish its influence. Toronto normalized, across an enormous cross-section of charismatic Christianity, a level of experiential intensity and a suspension of biblical evaluation that the movement’s theology required and had never before achieved at that scale. And among those profoundly influenced by it was a fifth-generation pastor about to take the leadership of a church in Redding, California: Bill Johnson. What he carried back from Toronto would make that church, Bethel, the most influential single institution in the worldwide network.
The Line You Can Now Trace
Stand back and look at the whole trail, because seeing it is the point. The theological DNA of the Latter Rain, carried through the Kansas City Prophets, watered by the Toronto Blessing, institutionalized at Bethel, and now distributed to the world through music, schools, and networks. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is a documented line of succession, each link publicly attested, each figure openly claiming the one before him.
And once you can see that line, the movement’s proudest claim, that it is an unprecedented, fresh work of the Spirit that cannot be judged by the past, simply collapses. It is not new. It is the same cluster of doctrines that erupted in a Saskatchewan orphanage in 1948, was condemned by a Pentecostal denomination in 1949, and has been rebranded for every generation since. The errors are not fresh mistakes to be gently corrected. They are inherited errors, refused correction again and again, because the very doctrines Scripture would use to test the movement are the doctrines it received as its inheritance and will not surrender.
This is why Jeremiah’s counsel cuts so deep. The old paths are not the enemy of the living church; they are its rest. A movement that must keep claiming to be new, that treats its own century-long history as an embarrassment to be hidden rather than a record to be examined, is telling you something important about itself. It cannot afford for you to ask for the old paths, because the old paths lead straight back to a wall built in 1949, and to a warning the church already sounded once and has been coaxed, slowly, to forget.
Tomorrow, the single doctrine that makes the entire structure possible: the restored office of apostle and prophet, and what Ephesians actually says about the foundation of the church.
“Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.” — Jeremiah 6:16 KJV
📖 This post is adapted from NAR Connections: Connecting The Dots. If it helped you, the full book is available on Amazon — or you can support this ministry directly.
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