C. Peter Wagner (1930—2016)
Country of Origin
-
United States
Countries/Regions of Ministry
- United States
- Latin America
Traditions
- Charismatic
- Third Wave
Ministries
- apostolic leader
- teacher
As a young missionary to Bolivia, C. Peter Wagner originally wanted no part of the Spirit-empowered movement. The sending agencies under which he served were members in good standing with the Interdenominational Foreign Missions Association, which required each mission to “maintain a non-Charismatic orientation." Peter Wagner recalled,
I was a dispensationalist who carried a Scofield [Reference] Bible and could construct all the charts from memory. I recall very clearly that when a faith healer came to our city of Cochabamba, Bolivia, I warned our Bolivian believers not to go to the meetings and wrote an article for the national evangelical magazine refuting his claims.
However, E. Stanley Jones, the renowned Methodist evangelist, soon came to his city. Wagner and his wife, Doris, were wary of the theology but went to hear him. It turned out to be a healing service, and they arrived late and sat in the back. Wagner was not interested in going forward for prayer, but when he woke the next morning, the cyst on his neck that was scheduled for a second surgery had suddenly dried up.
Not long afterward, Wagner traveled to Chile to do research on church growth. His passion for the subject came from his mentor, Donald McGavran, founding dean of the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary, where Wagner had earned his Master of Divinity degree. Wagner was drawn to the phenomenal growth of the Chilean Pentecostal churches. He witnessed healings, speaking in tongues, concert prayers, baptisms in the Spirit, dancing in the Spirit, prophecies, and visions as if they were a normal part of twentieth-century Christian experience. From that, he wrote a book, What Are We Missing? that described what God was doing in Latin American Pentecostalism.
The Wagners did not abruptly shift theological gears, however. Following sixteen years of missionary service, the couple joined nearby Lake Avenue Congregational Church. Peter took a faculty position at his California alma mater in 1971, where he would teach for the next three decades. He still carried his Scofield Bible and considered himself “just a straight-line evangelical.”
For the next thirty years at Fuller, though, Wagner’s voice and pen challenged the Christian community’s assumptions. He sincerely wanted to spotlight spiritual activity in contemporary contexts. In the 1970s, he and McGavran ignited the “Church Growth” emphasis, seeking to make congregations more effective in evangelism. They observed, sociologically, that human beings prefer to associate with others like themselves—which they dubbed the “homogeneous-unit principle.” Wagner wrote a book entitled Our Kind of People, which generated a lot of discussion among pastors. The aim was not to affirm segregation by race or economic class, for he had been a cross-cultural missionary himself, but that is what some heard. Further, debates arose over whether churches needed to become “seeker-sensitive” and how to do so. Some Pentecostal churches began suppressing tongues and verbal gifts of the Spirit on Sunday mornings.
Church growth would be accelerated, Wagner believed, by activating the members’ other spiritual gifts. His bestseller Discover Your Spiritual Gifts (1979) was quickly followed by an innovative questionnaire (137 questions) that people could use to identify which of the twenty-eight charismata mentioned in Scripture might be theirs. Next, he published Your Spiritual Gifts Can Help Your Church Grow. By the beginning of the 1980s, Wagner was emphasizing signs and wonders as fuel for church growth. He had become acquainted with John Wimber (Vineyard Christian Fellowship, Anaheim, California), who was an adjunct professor at Fuller. Together, they conceived of and got permission to co-teach a Monday night course called “Signs, Wonders, & Church Growth.” They not only lectured on the topic but included in-class “ministry time” where students put into practice what they had learned, including how to pray for the sick.
The results were dramatic—healings, words of knowledge, prophecies. Attendance grew so large that the course had to be moved to the seminary’s largest classroom. Fuller’s sizable portion of international students defended this as normal Christianity, based on what they had practiced in their home countries. North Americans, on the other hand, were generally amazed. Christian Life magazine ran a full issue (Oct. 1982) on the awakening. President David Allan Hubbard wrote:
For 35 years at Fuller Seminary we have sought both to teach the tenets of Biblical faith as interpreted by the reformers and to be open to the experiences and contributions of the current movement of the Holy Spirit which came into prominence about the turn of our century. The course … is an expression of our long-term interest in preserving a Biblical balance between the extremes. Hazarding the risks of this approach to the life of the Spirit is part of what Fuller is prepared to do.
The course was offered from 1982 to 1985, before being blended into another course called “The Ministry of Healing in World Evangelization.”
By 1988, Wagner had constructed a historical framework that he expressed in The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit: Encountering the Power of Signs and Wonders Today. His three “waves” were (1) the classical Pentecostal outpouring that started at the Azusa Street Mission in 1906, (2) the Charismatic awakening in mainline churches (Protestant and Catholic) beginning around 1960, and now (3) the “signs and wonders” surge, similar to the first two but different in some ways (for example, he affirmed no distinct baptism in the Holy Spirit).
In the 1990s, Wagner’s attention shifted to combating the resistance of Satan and the demonic. His books Confronting the Powers and Engaging the Enemy taught a three-tiered construct of spiritual warfare: (1) Ground Level, resisting the Devil’s everyday temptations, (2) Occult Level, casting out demonic forces someone might have absorbed through witchcraft, astrology, or satanic contact, and (3) Strategic Level, which theorized that certain “principalities and powers” ruled over certain cities or regions of the world as “territorial spirits” needing to be ousted. Prayer movements emphasizing intercession, prayer-walking, and taking authority over territorial strongholds began to become mainstream.
In the 1990s, Wagner returned to the matter of spiritual giftings but emphasized the role of modern-day apostles and prophets in the church. Heralding what he termed a “New Apostolic Reformation” (NAR), Wagner wrote a book called Apostles Today, and helped found an International Coalition of Apostolic Leaders in 1999. He served as its Presiding Apostle for eight years and defined the twenty-first century as a Second Apostolic Age (the first being in the first century A.D.). Membership in the NAR was by invitation only. Wagner had to defend this informal network against charges of being a cult.
In 2008, his book Dominion! How Kingdom Action Can Change the World called apostles in the church and “workplace apostles” to “a paradigm shift to the Church’s approach to salvation and societal change.” This involved taking authority over the “seven mountains” of culture: education, religion, family, business, government/military, arts/entertainment, and media.
When Wagner passed away at age eighty-six, a solidly Southern Baptist acquaintance (Ed Stetzer, then-Executive Director of Wheaton College’s Billy Graham Center) wrote in an online tribute, “If you knew Peter Wagner, people would often ask, ‘Which Peter Wagner?’ …. He was a friend to many of us, even when we disagreed with early Peter and/or later Peter! He was always a kind voice, looking for how God was at work, and seeking to celebrate what he saw as the move of the Spirit.”