# The Origins of Apostles, Prophets, and Spiritual Covering **Summary.** A YouTube video from the "Leaving the Message" channel traces three NAR doctrines back to the New Order of the Latter Rain and the 1949 Assemblies of God (AoG) resolution that condemned it: (1) the church built on present-day apostles and prophets; (2) confessing sin to a human "spiritual covering"; and (3) tongues taught as supernatural foreign-language equipment for missionaries. The throughline is a critique of charismatic structures that place a human mediator between God and people. (Source: [[3. Resources/Readwise/Articles/The Origins of Apostles, Prophets, and Spiritual Covering|The Origins of Apostles, Prophets, and Spiritual Covering]]) - **Source type:** YouTube video (discernment, polemical-historical) - **URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHkcgk4qlFs - **Author/channel:** Leaving the Message (ex-Message movement, William Branham–critical) - **Tradition represented:** Pentecostal/charismatic discernment — critical of NAR from within the broader charismatic family ## Key claims 1. **Error 1 — church founded on present-day apostles/prophets.** Latter Rain took the biblical ministry offices (pastor, prophet, apostle, teacher) and turned them into an authoritarian hierarchy — apostle at the top, prophet beneath, with authority over the laity. The host names this as the basis of the NAR's [[Five-Fold Ministry]] structure, the very thing the AoG began denouncing in 1949. 2. **Error 2 — confession of sin to man / "spiritual covering."** Latter Rain pressured members to confess sins to designated spiritual authorities, who then acted as mediators of restoration. The theological objection: Scripture names "one mediator between God and man, the Lord Jesus Christ," so human mediation violates it. The practical objection: the confession system gave leaders "dirt" on members, converting pastoral knowledge into coercive power. 3. **Error 3 — tongues as missionary equipment.** [[Charles Fox Parham]], after visiting Frank Sanford's commune and John Alexander Dowie's Zion City, theorized that biblical tongues meant supernaturally speaking real foreign languages, so missionaries would not need language training. Missionaries sent to China on this premise could not be understood and "nearly starved"; the movement then rebranded tongues as an unintelligible prayer language. 4. **The continuity thesis.** The authoritarian fivefold hierarchy and the spiritual-covering confession system both live in the NAR today, and both were already identified as abusive and unbiblical in 1949. ## Notable framing - The host objects most to the **mediator problem**: a human confessor or "covering" usurps the role Scripture reserves for Christ and creates an opening for abuse. Ex-member testimony on the channel's "Our Stories" segment reports the dynamic continuing today. - The China-missionary tongues anecdote is presented as settled history; the AoG's counter-position is that missions require real language study and long-term discipline. ## Connections to existing wiki - Companion to [[2026-06-14-assemblies-of-god-1949-nar-latter-rain-youtube|the 1949 AoG / Latter Rain source]] — same channel and same 1949-condemnation thesis, but this video adds two distinct errors the earlier page did not develop: the **spiritual-covering confession system** and the **tongues-as-missionary-equipment** origin via Parham. - Extends the Parham → Latter Rain → NAR lineage already recorded in [[Latter Rain]], [[Pentecostalism]], and [[Charles Fox Parham]]. - The confession-to-man / coercive-knowledge mechanic belongs with [[Spiritual Abuse]] and [[Apostolic Authority]]. > [!question] Open — concept page for "spiritual covering"? > "Spiritual covering" (confession to a human authority who mediates restoration and holds power over members) now appears across multiple NAR-critique sources. It is theologically distinct from generic apostolic authority. If a second source develops it, promote it to `concepts/spiritual-covering.md`, linked to [[Apostolic Authority]] and [[Spiritual Abuse]]. ## Source caution Polemical discernment content; the host is openly partisan and fills gaps in the deliberately vague 1949 resolution with inference ("reading between the lines"). Biographical and historical claims are recorded as stated, not endorsed — confirm against the published General Council record and independent Pentecostal-history scholarship (Synan, R. M. Riss) before anchoring an analysis page. ## Related - [[Latter Rain]] · [[New Apostolic Reformation]] · [[Apostolic Authority]] · [[Five-Fold Ministry]] · [[Pentecostalism]] · [[Charles Fox Parham]] · [[Spiritual Abuse]]