# Decisions and Terminology ## Audience assumptions - Distressed beginner: parent, spouse, friend, questioning/former member. No theology, no church-governance background assumed. Reading state: anxious, possibly late at night, needs a next step more than a literature review. - Reader may love charismatic Christianity; the page never treats charismatic practice as the problem. - Reader cannot be assumed to apply the NAR label correctly — the page front-loads "evaluate behavior, not label." ## Information architecture (final) Opening reassurance → choose-your-path anchors → plain-language definition → network mechanics (Mermaid) → concise history → 10 risk mechanisms (teaching → everyday appearance → safeguard → sources) → church evaluation (11 questions + 6 evidence tiers + 2 worked examples) → worship music → conversation guidance (5 persona openers) → safeguarding for minors/vulnerable adults → questioning-reader section → resources by need → evidentiary limits → next steps. Beginner questions woven in as collapsible callouts, not an FAQ. ## Definitions adopted - **NAR:** a movement/networked ecosystem, not a denomination — following Pivec & Geivett's working definition, Taylor, and Christerson & Flory's "Independent Network Charismatic" frame. - **Covering / alignment:** vertical authority relationship; page quotes Counterfeit Kingdom's finding that alignment functions as submission vocabulary. - **Spiritual father/son:** relational authority model; grounded in Soleyn's primary texts and the Welton case; explicitly distinguished from ordinary mentorship. - **Spiritual abuse:** the wiki's bounded definition — the authority structure itself as harm mechanism; explicitly NOT any painful church experience (guards the term's analytical power). - **Grooming:** used only for the documented escalation pattern (secrecy, engineered access, special destiny, escalating obligations, exit threats), never as a synonym for mentoring. ## Disputed-terminology rulings 1. **Use "NAR" with the dispute stated**, since the reader arrives with the term; never argue classification when structure can be described instead. 2. **"Movement/tendency/network," never "denomination" or "church"** for the whole. 3. **Charismatic ≠ NAR** stated twice (definition + evaluation section) — the vault's classical-Pentecostal sources (AoG 1949) make this a documented, not diplomatic, distinction. 4. **Influence ≠ continuity** in the history section — Latter Rain is "doctrinal ancestor," shepherding is "DNA persists," never "the same movement." 5. **Allegation language:** Feucht suit described as motion-stage allegation; Bickle as credible allegations + investigation + organizational collapse; Welton as documented (multiple consistent first-person accounts + his own "wolf" self-description). ## Claims rejected or narrowed during drafting - Rejected: any implication that Bethel-song use marks a congregation as NAR (kept as "limited/indirect influence" tier). - Rejected: "Hidden Ladder" source's Gnosticism/Freemasonry convergence thesis — single polemical source; not load-bearing anywhere on the page. - Narrowed: the WHO/Oasis South-Africa network link — the vault's own research could not document it; page omits it entirely. - Narrowed: deliverance-ministry harm stated as "can replace qualified care," not "does" — per the source notes' own scope. - Omitted: Charismania/WBHR genealogical claims (Parham arrest cover-up, Klan links) — flagged source-caution in the wiki; too contested for a beginner page. ## Source-quality criteria applied Primary > first-person (multiple, consistent) > scholarly > journalism > discernment commentary. Commentary never cited as sole support for a factual claim about a named person; used for pattern corroboration with the wiki's `source-caution` flags carried through. Attribution always from file metadata (Readwise `author:` platform trap documented in [[evidence-map]]). ## Placement, linking, and privacy decisions - **Placement:** theology wiki root (`wiki/start-here-new-apostolic-reformation.md`, `type: guide`) — the wiki holds nearly all link targets and is the vault's NAR home. Indexed from the wiki index + both MOCs. - **Aliases:** deliberately excludes "NAR," "New Apostolic Reformation," and "Spiritual abuse" — those aliases already belong to existing pages; duplicating them would make long-standing links ambiguous. - **Link forms:** Title-Case aliases for wiki pages; `[[danny-silk|Danny Silk]]` / `[[brian-simmons|Brian Simmons]]` (no aliases blocks); dated sources by kebab filename; full-path pipes for anything outside the wiki. - **Privacy/publication (corrected 2026-07-20):** the vault IS published selectively via Obsidian Publish (publish.obsidian.md/courtneyr-dev, ~28,880 files — selection-based, not `publish: true` frontmatter, which is why the frontmatter scan found zero). The entrance page and the whole theology wiki (including the local-church entity pages) are public; `1. Projects/Religious Research/` and this project folder are private. The entrance page was therefore edited to route all links to published targets only (private dossier links replaced with the published entity/source pages) and verified: 0 non-public internal links, all external links HTTP 200. The survivor-name table stays in this private [[evidence-map]] only. - Named individuals on the page appear only with the status their source notes document; no new characterizations were added.