Anthea Butler: I was a master's student at Fuller Theological Seminary in the early 1990s, working the switchboard part-time, and the number one phone call that came through went something like this: "Can you connect me to C Peter Wagner's Church Growth Institute? I'd like to buy some materials." No one was happier than I was when he retired from Fuller and moved to Colorado Springs! I felt like I worked at a catalogue call-in centre.

C Peter Wagner was the Donald McGavran professor of church growth at Fuller. He was considered to be the heir of McGavran, founder of the church growth movement. That movement essentially said "whatever grows a church is good" and needs to be nurtured. When McGavran retired in the early 1980s, Wagner was his heir apparent. He had had a career on the mission field in South America before coming to Fuller, and what brought him there was a book he had written about his time as a missionary called Look out! The Pentecostals Are Coming.

That book chronicled what he termed the "move of the holy spirit" in the world today, and that the healing and deliverance ministries of Pentecostalism would reform the church. Wagner is not a theologian – and this is an important point – because much of what he is teaching is not filtered through systematic theology, or any other creed or doctrine. Rather, it is from the realm of the "holy spirit" and is "spirit-led" or derives from "divine revelation". That makes it difficult to characterise, since he is mixing a lot of old doctrines and "heresy" together to make his New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) movement.

Wagner's founding of the NAR comes out of two streams: one, his time at Fuller seminary from the 1970s on, working with John Wimber, founder of the Vineyard church movement; and second, from his work in the church growth movement.

What Wagner added to McGavran's teachings was John Wimber's teaching on "power evangelism", which supported signs and wonders in the ministry and church service, and encouraged people to find their spiritual gifts.

Wimber's Vineyard fellowship had experienced tremendous growth in the late 1970s because of his emphasis on spiritual gifts of healing and prophecy. Wimber and Wagner's partnership was dynamic, and they even taught a controversial class together at Fuller where students "exercised" their spiritual gifts on each other. It was a cause of great consternation for Fuller's administration, and, because of problems in the course, they asked Wimber to leave. Wagner, as a tenured professor, continued to teach the class with lay persons, which also became problematic.

In the late 1980s, however, Wagner turned to "spiritual mapping". One of the first books that outlined spiritual mapping was Breaking Strongholds in Your City: How to Use Spiritual Mapping to Make your Prayers More Strategic, Effective and Targeted, published in 1993. Wagner's spiritual mapping started in Pasadena, where, in a workbook sold in Fuller's bookstore, he identified various demonic spirits over Pasadena – including the Masonic lodge bordering Fuller's campus, and the former Worldwide Church of God campus in South Pasadena.

Wagner's career has been demarcated by how all of these teachings have translated into a cash bonanza. The sales of his church growth materials and workshops were very strong, and the coupling of these with the spiritual warfare component enabled him to retire and build an empire in Colorado Springs to train those involved in the New Apostolic Reformation movement.

All of the groups are enmeshed in a symbiotic web. These evangelists', apostles' and leaders' messages are the commodity, and you have to buy the books, conferences and other materials in order to get the blessings. I know that will seem distasteful and a caricature to some, but these events are well-attended, and at a hundred bucks a person, revenues from book and DVD sales. Conferences and meetings like Lou Engles' The Call are not just prayer meetings, they are Christian marketplaces, with all sorts of spiritual wares being sold.

It also bears saying that none of what Wagner has touted as new, is new; rather, it is the recapitulation of old Pentecostal teachings – and actually heresy to some Pentecostals (like the Latter Rain and Shepherding movements).

Sarah Posner: As you noted, Wagner continues to be controversial among conservative Christians. Like many of his predecessors in various neo-Pentecostal movements, his views are considered heretical by many apologetics and discernment ministries – Christians who believe they are defending what they insist is the only true, orthodox faith against heresies that also include Mormonism, the emergent church, paganism and more.

I think it's crucial to grasp how these various neo-Pentecostal movements interact with each other, both theologically and politically. When I cover a conference or other event, I've found speakers affiliated with the NAR (take, for example, IHOP's Mike Bickle, or The Call's Lou Engle, or the prophesiers Dutch Sheets and Chuck Pierce) alongside people more strongly affiliated with other movements, like Word of Faith or other strands of neo-Pentecostalism that don't really have a label. These various neo-Pentecostal movements don't exist in a vacuum.

As you point out, Wagner didn't invent the idea of modern-day prophets and apostles or spiritual warfare or any of the gifts of the holy spirit that he drew on. There are a lot of ideas, strategies and so forth that are shared and cross-pollinated, and are in the ether, so to speak, at conferences and gatherings.

And, as I've reported before, the alliance between non-charismatic evangelicals and the neo-Pentecostals dates back to the late 1970s. Bill Bright, founder of the hugely influential Campus Crusade for Christ, was one of the pioneers of bringing Pentecostals into the political fold with John Gimenez and the America for Jesus movement. Rick Perry did not invent this. The AFA's Don Wildmon, who played a big role in The Response, had carried on this tradition through the Arlington Group, through which he sought to widen the field of religious right leadership. For anyone who thinks that the NAR brought an army to Houston on 6 August, I met plenty of people there who had no idea who some of the prayer leaders were, and just came because Perry had issued the call.

There's another crucial point here that I think is frequently overlooked by some people who focus too hard on the NAR rhetoric without contextualising it: how people actually live and experience these movements.

Anthea Butler: There are streams of people crossing each other, and what is happening can have a multiplicity of meanings. That is how to think about the NAR, dominionism, all of these movements that people are involved in. In evangelical and Pentecostal churches, most people have a home church they identify with, but you have a favourite pastor or evangelist that you listen to occasionally. Studying scripture means you don't just read the Bible, you read devotional books, and books designed to help your spiritual walk or the church broadly construed. That is the problem with focusing in only on NAR and dominionism. If you don't know the everyday context of how people, churches, and organisations deal with these broad-based movements, it can sound like a vast conspiracy theory.

People who are in that web don't often recognise differences, or they don't care about them. They care about their spiritual lives, and that's what keeps these movements going. They can go from one meeting to the next if they have the funds to do so, and the highs are good. Who doesn't want to go to a meeting that feeds your soul where you meet like-minded people?

As to the political interaction, all of these groups know they don't have the numbers alone to bring folks in, they need to interact for like-minded causes. Electing a "Christian" is a like-minded cause, whether you believe in dominionism or not.

Sarah: Like you said, theological disagreements among these folks are largely inconsequential from a broad political perspective; the overarching Christian nation ideology, along with opposition to secularism, LGBT rights and abortion rights, and favouring public prayer and 10 commandments and so forth are unifying.

Anthea: Not every conservative Christian is a dominionist, but to say a movement doesn't exist, as some pundits and journalists have, without even being able to say what it is in an op-ed is just irresponsible … The big story is that the religious right isn't dead.