# DOVE International **Summary.** Apostolic church-planting network founded by Larry & LaVerne Kreider in Lancaster County, PA (as DOVE Christian Fellowship, October 1980; roots in a late-1970s Jesus-movement "underground church"). Governed by an **International Apostolic Council** (Kreider until the April 2024 succession to Merle & Cheree Shenk). DOVE is **self-identified NAR in the strict Wagner sense** — Kreider authored the DOVE chapter in [[C. Peter Wagner]]'s *The New Apostolic Churches* (1998), the book that popularized the term, and sat on Wagner's "Apostolic Roundtable" — yet it sits at the **soft/relational end** of the spectrum: egalitarian, globally oriented, no Seven Mountains militancy, no election prophecy. Full dossier: [[DOVE International and Overflow Community Church]] (Religious Research). ## Core Facts - **Headquarters.** Lititz, PA. Historic flagship: DOVE Westgate Church, Ephrata. - **Governance.** International Apostolic Council; fivefold role tags on leaders ("Apostolic/Teaching," "Apostolic/Prophetic"); "apostolic covering" defined as "protection, direction and correction"; partner-church onboarding includes steps literally named "Apostolic coverage begins" and "Tithing begins." - **Signature teaching.** Kreider's "spiritual fathers and mothers" (*The Cry for Spiritual Fathers and Mothers*) — the NAR spiritual-parenting frame Pivec/Geivett decode in *Counterfeit Kingdom*. - **Genealogy.** Cell-church (Cho, Comiskey) + house-church (Simson) models on an acknowledged **Shepherding-movement** heritage; DOVE decentralized into eight small-group churches in 1996. Third-party discernment writers credit DOVE with apologizing for its shepherding-era abuses; DOVE's own published language is euphemistic ("growing pains," "releasing"). - **Network ties.** Wagner (primary-source, self-definitional); Tony Fitzgerald / Church of the Nations (recognized spiritual advisor, succession confirmer); Keith Yoder; [[danny-silk|Danny Silk]] (featured guest, 2025 DOVE Leadership Conference — a soft Bethel-orbit link); Joel Comiskey (cell church). - **Egalitarian.** Affirms women in governing church leadership — atypical for hard-NAR complementarian dominionism. ## Hard/Soft Calibration Documented: apostolic self-ID via Wagner, IAC governance, covering + upward tithing, fivefold offices, spiritual parenting. **Not established:** Seven Mountain Mandate (uses generic Kuyperian "spheres of society" language only), strategic-level spiritual warfare/spiritual mapping, election/Trump prophecy, Christian nationalism, ICAL membership. Net: **soft NAR / relational-apostolic**. "NAR" is taxonomically accurate but misleading if read as the Wallnau/Sheets political variant. > [!contradiction] > **The apology paradox.** DOVE is the rare covering-network that publicly course-corrected from shepherding-era authoritarianism — and yet retained the entire structural architecture that produced it: covering, spiritual authority, upward tithing, apostolic council. The softer surface makes the authority structure *less visible*, not less operative. This is the textbook [[Lateral Transfer Risk]] shape at institutional scale, and why hermeneutical genealogy ("covering" → Shepherding → Latter Rain) matters more than the network's self-presentation. ## Why This Matters for St. John's UCC DOVE is the covering network over [[Overflow Community Church]] in Chambersburg — the *soft* pole of the local NAR landscape opposite [[World Harvest Outreach (Chambersburg)]]. Congregants arriving from DOVE-orbit churches will carry covering/spiritual-parenting vocabulary without the hard-dominionist markers that make NAR formation easy to recognize. ## Open Threads - Kreider's *Biblical Foundation Series* Book 9 ("Authority and Accountability") — softened shepherding successor text; not yet ingested. - Verbatim DOVE shepherding apology — never located; claim rests on third-party discernment sources. - ICAL membership status — unconfirmed. ## Related - [[DOVE International and Overflow Community Church]] — full Religious Research dossier - [[Overflow Community Church]] · [[New Apostolic Reformation]] · [[C. Peter Wagner]] · [[Apostolic Authority]] · [[Five-Fold Ministry]] · [[Translocal Networking, Local Isolation]]