By Bruce Wilson — Cross posted at Talk2Action

Seven Mountains Apostles come to Harvard

On April 1-2, 2011, the Harvard Extension Service and Learning Society will host, at the Harvard Northwest Science Building, the “Social Transformation Conference”. The upcoming event has already generated considerable controversy, and Truth Wins Out, a “Non-profit organization that defends the GLBT community against anti-gay misinformation campaigns”, plans to run a full page ad in the Harvard Crimson, on Thursday March 31st, protesting the event–which is being billed as advancing the “Seven Mountains” program. One of the scheduled speakers is linked (intimately) with a professed co-author of Uganda’s so-called “kill the gays bill”, and the 7 Mountains movement is already impacting US national politics. Below are 7 facts you should know about 7M movement and its speakers lined up for the Harvard conference.

Prominently featured on the Social Transformation Conference website is a professionally-produced video on the “Seven Mountains mandate”, which instructs “Bible believing” Christians to seek control of seven key sectors of society: education, government, media, business, arts & entertainment, religion, and the family. According to the video, the “church” must regain control of those sectors, which are now occupied by “darkness”. [below: Seven Mountains video]

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

The Seven Mountains concept is a vision for the total eradication of secular society and church-state separation. Os Hillman and Lance Wallnau, two of the scheduled Social Transformation Conference speakers, are in the vanguard of promoting the 7M idea, which Wallnau calls “a template for warfare.”

The ‘Seven Mountains movement’ is a newly formed global Protestant mega-denomination that has coalesced out of independent charismatic Christianity; Four of the speakers, Hillman, Wallnau, Pat Francis, and Bill Hamon, are all apostles within the biggest organizational body in this movement, the International Coalition of Apostles (ICA), launched in 2001 [see footnote #1], and three are on the ICA’s elite “Apostolic Council”.

[see this article, Resource Directory for the New Apostolic Reformation, for a list of Seven Mountains / NAR entities, initiatives, and prayer networks. For a short academic overview of the overall movement, see: Who are the Apostles? What is the New Apostolic Reformation? Seven Mountains Campaign?]

7 Notable facts about the Social Transformation Conference speakers

—Three of the apostles, Lance Wallnau, Os Hillman, and Bill Hamon, are on record promoting virulently antigay rhetoric. Two have labeled homosexuality an “abomination” and one, Bill Hamon, advocates the death penalty not only for homosexuality but for all sex outside of marriage.

—Two of the apostles, Os Hillman and Pat Francis, are close colleagues of ICA apostle Julius Oyet, a professed architect and co-author of Uganda’s Anti Homosexuality Bill–that would impose the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality” and require citizens, upon pain of three-year prison terms, to report all homosexual activity to police and government authorities. Hillman has played a role in the American evangelical financing of Oyet. In a March 2010 interview, Julius Oyet stated that the Seven Mountains movement was successfully “infiltrating” its ideology into the grassroots of Ugandan society.

—All four apostles promote the claim that witchcraft is a pressing contemporary societal problem.

—Three of these apostles, Hamon, Francis, and Wallnau, claim that families and even entire people groups can be plagued by “generational curses” incurred by ancestral involvement in idolatry and witchcraft.

—These same three apostles also serve on the ICA’s elite Apostolic Council, the ICA’s accountability agency, along with top founders of the movement who are on record (with books in-print) advocating the burning of native art, Catholic religious relics, and Books of Mormon. ICA leaders also have boasted of having helped to kill Mother Theresa, through prayer-warfare.

–One apostle, Bill Hamon, serves, along with The Call founder Lou Engle, on the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders (ACPE), the top prophetic body of the Seven Mountains movement, whose prophets profess to communicate directly with, and receive prophetic insight, from God. ACPE prophet Mary Glazier has suggested that believers will drive the unrighteous from “the land” and has has stated that at 24, Sarah Palin joined her personal prayer group which in 1995, according to Glazier, successfully hounded an alleged witch out of Alaska. In September 2008, Glazier released a prophecy suggesting that Sarah Palin, following a tragic death, would ascend, after a period of national mourning, to a higher national office.

—In November 2009, at a Hawaii conference event attended by Cam Cavasso, the Republican senate candidate running against Democratic Senator Daniel Inouye, apostle and Harvard conference speaker Pat Francis told her evangelical audience, “We put our foot on Hawaii! And you said every place we put our foot, we will rule. So we are the Kingdom, the Kingdom is here!” Francis’ rhetoric dramatically contradicts apostle and and top 7M promoter Os Hillman’s claim that “The 7 mountains initiative is not an initiative to establish dominion over all the earth or in governments.” Footage from 2009 Hawaii event shows Francis inveighing against “generational curses” and “witchcraft”.

The New Apostolic Reformation / Seven Mountains movement

ACPE and the ICA are top organizational entities in the collective movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation–an attempt to remake Christianity that is as ambitious as was the original Protestant Reformation. Leaders and membership in this global, US-based movement are not waiting for the “Rapture”. They are seeking earthly power.

Leaders of the NAR/Seven Mountains movement are aggressively working to move from the fringes into the mainstream. While their underlying ideology is extreme compared to traditional fundamentalism, they have managed to re-brand as pseudo-progressive by emphasizing ethnic and racial inclusivity (towards the creation of a new ‘rainbow right’), and through the faith-based provision of social services. This protective facade allows ICA apostles to move within Democratic Party centrist policy circles with ease and one ICA apostle, head of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference Samuel Rodriguez, has helped write the “Third Way Come Let Us Reason Together governing agenda.

Movement ties to national politicians

The Seven Mountains/NAR leadership is being aggressively courted by top-level Republican Party politicians including several who may run for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination (including Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann (see footnote #2)), and its leaders over the past two years have shared stages with many Republican senators and Congress members, including Senator Jim DeMint and former Senator Sam Brownback, now governor of Kansas, who was Lou Engle’s roommate for seven months, in a rented Washington DC condominium, as Brownback confirmed in September 2010.

Former Hawaii Lt. Governor James “Duke” Aiona, who ran in the 2010 election for the Hawaii governor’s seat, is closely tied to a Hawaii effort, “Transformation Hawaii”, run by an international ministry one of of the ICA’s top apostles, Argentine-born Ed Silvoso, who head the International Transformation Network. The movement has plied considerable resources into politically organizing in Hawaii [see Transforming Hawaii, parts 1 and 2]. Apostles Ed Silvoso and Pat Francis performed a ceremony, at a 2009 Hawaii conference at which Aiona gave the keynote address, to drive out demons, curses, and “false Gods” from the State of Hawaii.

Evangelist Jack Hayford, who gave the gave the closing prayer at the 54th Inaugural Prayer Service for President George W. Bush, in 2001, at the Washington National Cathedral, has played a major role in promoting Wagner’s ideas, including the use of exorcism to heal medical and psychological maladies, and has endorsed Wagner’s claim that Japanese emperors have ritual sexual intercourse with demons.

Political organizing methods

The NAR / Seven Mountains movement organizes through “prayer warrior” networks and has launched dozens of ground-level political organizing efforts (see: Resource Directory for the New Apostolic Reformation) in cities across the United States. In some cases, as in Newark, NJ, Baltimore, MD, and Orlando, FL, these efforts, generally branded with the term “transformation”, publicly presented as benign citywide prayer initiatives against crime and social problems, are nonetheless tied directly to top New Apostolic Reformation apostles and prophets.

The movement’s top leaders, especially C. Peter Wagner, Cindy Jacobs, and Ed Silvoso, have developed novel theological concepts (see: Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare (SLSW) Glossary) that involve the need to fight demon powers, which are held to cause societal problems and crime, and prevent successful evangelizing efforts (see: Muthee and the Transformations Franchise (PDF file)).

“Spiritual Mapping” has been a key organizing tool for the movement. It involves squads of believers walking city and town streets to identify sources of demon-infestation, which according to spiritual mapping teaching are often associated with businesses, institutions, and even specific individuals. Spiritual Mapping ideas have inspired local initiatives, such as in Amarillo, Texas, which appear to be evolving into faith-based vigilante efforts. During the 1990’s methods for Spiritual Mapping (and its public euphemism, called “Prayer Walking”) were developed by C. Peter Wagner and Ted Hagard, at Haggard’s Colorado Springs New Life Church. This American Life journalist Alix Spiegel reported on Haggard’s church activities, in This American Life segment #77, “Pray”. One of the ICA’s apostles has taught that enemies/sources of demon infestation can be pinpointed on a map with colored pushpins.

“Dog Whistle” politics and faith-based health care

The movement has developed its own Biblical scripture-based lingo, through which its apostles and prophets can communicate political ideas in a manner that outsiders almost wholly miss. One example of this Bible-based code-talking, sometimes referred to as “dog whistle” politics, was Sarah Palin’s recent claim to be a victim of “blood libel”. Another example is the battlecry of the Seven Mountains movement, “The Head Not The Tail”.

The 7 Mountains / New Apostolic Reformation movement is developing an international network of miracle-healing centers under ICA apostle Cal Pierce, who describes his network as a “Kingdom Health Care System.” These centers, called “healing rooms”, purport to heal cancer and other serious illnesses, and drive out demons. The Lifeline Ministry of professed co-author of Uganda’s “Kill the gays bill” Julius Oyet runs one of Pierce’s healing room franchises.

Footnotes:

1. As of 2010, the International Coalition of Apostles removed its “short list” of ICA apostles from public circulation. Here is the 2009 members list [PDF file], courtesy of the Internet Archive, listing Os Hillman, Pat Francis, and Bill Hamon as ICA apostles. Lance Wallnau became listed as an ICA apostle in 2010 and now serves on the ICA’s elite apostolic council.

All four Harvard Social Transformation Conference speakers, apostles Pat Francis, Lance Wallnau, Bill Hamon, and Os Hillman, are also faculty members of the Wagner Leadership Institute (PDF file of WLI faculty members), which serves as the primary teaching institute for training evangelical leaders in the ideas and practices of C. Peter Wagner’s New Apostolic Reformation / 7 Mountains movement.

2. In the linked video, evangelist Rick Joyner describes a post-2008 election trip to Congress, where Joyner met with Congressional Representatives including Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. Joyner is not officially part of C. Peter Wagner’s several NAR entities but serves as a key strategist of the Seven Mountains / New Apostolic Reformation movement, participates in numerous NAR events, and contributes writing to books by Peter Wagner and his apostles. In this 2008 video footage, Joyner can be seen together onstage with C. Peter Wagner, at a ceremony for the “former apostolic alignment” of evangelist Todd Bentley, who was covered in the Southern Poverty Law Center Fall 2008 report, ‘Armin’ For Armageddon.

Truth Wins Out ad: