What this page is asking
The teaching under examination is rarely written down in a systematic form, which is part of why it is so difficult to argue with. It is preached, and it is felt, and it is repeated by people who would struggle to say which verse it comes from. So here it is in the register in which it is actually heard. This passage is composed by this page, in keeping with the rule set out below; it is not a quotation from any person, church or ministry, living or dead.
Three claims are packed into that paragraph, and they need separating, because the first of them is true, the second is arguable, and the third is where the whole weight falls.
The first is that Christians are not free agents accountable to nobody. That is not only true; it is one of the least negotiable things the New Testament says, and every historic Christian tradition has said it with more force than the modern churches do. The second is that this accountability runs through particular named people rather than through the church in the abstract. That too is broadly the historic position. The third claim is the one this page is about: that submission to a particular man produces spiritual protection, and that withdrawing from it produces spiritual exposure — that there is, in effect, a canopy, and that the man is holding it.
Three positions, labelled, and used consistently throughout
Most of the confusion in this argument comes from people defending one position while their opponent is attacking a different one. So the page labels three, and keeps them apart from here to the end.
Position O — the Office
Christ gave the church ministersChrist instituted a ministry. Pastors, presbyters and bishops really hold it; they teach, administer the sacraments, correct error, exercise discipline and shepherd. Christians owe them real obedience. But the authority is the office’s, not the man’s; it is bounded by the Word he is commissioned to preach; and he is accountable to the church and to Christ for how he uses it.Position C — the Covering
The man is your protectionBy remaining under the authority or anointing of a particular man of God, a Christian receives spiritual protection; by stepping out from under it he becomes exposed to Satan, deception, calamity or loss of blessing. The relationship to the man is itself a channel of safety, and leaving it is itself a danger.Position A — the Autonomous Believer
Nobody but JesusNo human being holds any authority over a Christian’s faith or conduct. Church membership is voluntary association; correction is intrusion; the believer answers to God directly and to nobody else. Every historic tradition rejects this, and so does this page.This page holds O, rejects A outright, and tests C. That matters, because the most common defence of C is to treat any criticism of it as an argument for A — as though the only alternative to a covering were a Christian who answers to no one. The historic church is the standing refutation of that dilemma. It obeyed its bishops, and it also tried them, deposed them, and wrote the appeal procedure down in canon law. It said the minister acts in Christ’s name, and it said that his personal holiness therefore adds nothing to what he gives you. It demanded submission, and it forbade blind obedience in the same sentence. Those are not contradictions. They are what a doctrine of office looks like when it is not a doctrine of a man.
The thesis under test
That the New Testament and the historic church gave the pastoral office more authority than most modern churches do, and gave it none of the protective function the covering teaching assigns to it; that the six texts the teaching runs on — “touch not mine anointed”, Korah, Miriam, Uzzah, David sparing Saul, and “rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft” — are, in context, doing something else, and in two cases the opposite thing; that the New Testament commands the congregation to test its teachers and provides a formal procedure for accusing an elder, which is the precise act the covering teaching forbids; that the ancient church’s doctrine of the bishop, which is far stronger than anything a covering preacher claims, is ecclesial and eucharistic rather than protective, and grounds obedience in the unity of the church rather than in the safety of the individual; that the Donatist controversy settled, by the fifth century and in every subsequent confession, that grace does not run through the minister’s personal holiness — which removes the pipe a covering would have to run in; that the church built accusation, trial, appeal and deposition machinery for bad clergy, in canon law from 325 and in the Reformation confessions from 1530, which is the structural opposite of a canopy you must not step out from under; that the Reformation stated an explicit limit on obedience, and Chrysostom had stated it twelve centuries earlier; that the covering doctrine as now preached has a traceable history beginning in 1948 and consolidating between 1974 and 1986; and that the men who built it published, in their own names, the account of what it did.
The scope of this page, stated narrowly
This page is not an argument against pastoral authority, church membership, submission or discipline; it assumes all four and defends them. It does not adjudicate between episcopal, presbyterian and congregational polities — it draws on all three, and where they differ it says so. It does not argue that anyone who uses the word “covering” holds the full doctrine described here; many people use it loosely to mean accountability, which is a different and unobjectionable thing, and the page says where the line is. It makes no claim about any individual’s salvation, sincerity or motives. No living person, church or ministry is named except where that person’s own published words are quoted verbatim with a dated citation; every other named figure is deceased and quoted from a dated, published source; every modern example is composed by this page and labelled as composed at the point of use. No third-party allegation of misconduct against anybody, living or dead, is repeated here. Scripture is quoted from the Authorised Version, which is out of copyright, so that every biblical citation on this page can be checked at no cost.
What the page concludes, stated up front
- The central proof text is about a wandering family, and there is no minister in it. “Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm” (Psalm 105:15; 1 Chronicles 16:22) sits inside a sentence that begins four verses earlier: “When they were but a few men in number; yea, very few, and strangers in it. When they went from one nation to another, from one kingdom to another people; he suffered no man to do them wrong: yea, he reproved kings for their sakes” (105:12–14). The anointed are Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — a defenceless migrant household with no priesthood, no temple and no office of any kind, since none of these existed yet. The kings reproved are Pharaoh and Abimelech. The verse is God protecting the powerless from the powerful. In the covering teaching it is made to protect the powerful from the powerless, which is the one thing the passage cannot be made to say.
- Korah contains the defence Moses actually offered, and it is not the one a covering preacher would want quoted. “I have not taken one ass from them, neither have I hurt one of them” (Numbers 16:15). Moses’ answer to the charge of self-exaltation is that he has taken nothing and injured nobody — a checkable, material claim about his own conduct. He also falls on his face and intercedes for the rebels (16:22), and when the whole congregation turns on him the next day he sends Aaron running with a censer to stop the plague (16:47). Korah is also, in the text’s own terms, a dispute about a uniquely instituted priesthood, settled by a public sign; it is not a template for a modern congregation.
- Numbers 12 grounds the rebuke of Miriam in a claim about Moses that the text explicitly refuses to generalise. “My servant Moses is not so… With him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches” (12:7–8). God distinguishes Moses from prophets, and the whole force of the rebuke depends on the distinction. Applying it to any subsequent leader requires the claim the passage was written to deny. And Moses’ response to Miriam’s leprosy is four words: “Heal her now, O God” (12:13).
- Uzzah is about an object and a written instruction, and the leader was the one who got it wrong. Scripture supplies its own explanation: “because ye did it not at the first, the LORD our God made a breach upon us, for that we sought him not after the due order” (1 Chronicles 15:13). The cart was a Philistine method (1 Samuel 6:7); the staves were commanded and were never to be taken out (Exodus 25:14–15). The lesson of the passage is that God’s written instruction outranks the anointed leader’s improvisation — which is very nearly the reverse of the use it is put to.
- David and Saul is the strongest text the teaching has, and it stops being helpful as soon as you read to the end of it. David will not lift his hand against the king (1 Samuel 24:6; 26:9). He also flees the palace (19:12), hides, gathers four hundred distressed and indebted men in a cave (22:2), refuses every summons to return, and eventually takes refuge among the Philistines (27:1). The example teaches: do not harm him, do not avenge yourself, do not take his office by force — and do not stay. David’s protection during those years is a cave in the wilderness of En-gedi. It is not Saul.
- “Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft” is spoken by a prophet to a king, about the king’s disobedience. 1 Samuel 15:23. Samuel is rebuking Saul for sparing Agag and the spoil. The rebel in the verse is the anointed leader; the man delivering the rebuke has no throne and no army. When the sentence is used to tell a congregation not to question its pastor, both roles have been swapped.
- The New Testament gives ministers real authority and, in the same breath, refuses them this particular one. “Obey them that have the rule over you” — and the reason given is “for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account” (Hebrews 13:17). Peter tells elders to shepherd “not for filthy lucre… neither as being lords over God’s heritage”, and reminds them that “the chief Shepherd” is someone else (1 Peter 5:2–4). Paul: “Not for that we have dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy” (2 Corinthians 1:24). Christ: “The princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them… But it shall not be so among you” (Matthew 20:25–26). The burden runs upward, from the shepherd to God, in every one of these texts. The covering teaching turns it around and makes the sheep’s safety depend on the sheep’s submission.
- Scripture commands the congregation to do the exact thing the covering teaching forbids. The Bereans “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” — while Paul was preaching to them — and Luke calls them more noble for it (Acts 17:11). “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). “Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God” (1 John 4:1). Paul submits himself to the test: “though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you… let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8). And 1 Timothy 5:19–20 does not forbid accusing an elder; it sets out the evidential standard for doing so, and requires public rebuke if the charge is proved. Paul’s own farewell warning to the elders of Ephesus is that the danger will come from among them: “of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them” (Acts 20:30).
- The early church’s doctrine of the bishop is stronger than anything a covering preacher says, and it is not a covering. Ignatius of Antioch, writing on the way to his execution about 107: “See that ye all follow the bishop, even as Jesus Christ does the Father”; “Let no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop” (Smyrnaeans 8); “we ought to receive every one whom the Master of the house sends to be over His household, as we would do Him that sent him” (Ephesians 6); “if any one be not within the altar, he is deprived of the bread of God” (Ephesians 5). Part IV will show you those sentences mixed with modern covering statements and ask you to tell them apart. The difference is not in the height of the claim — Ignatius is higher — but in what the claim is for. In every case his reason is the unity of the church around one altar and one Eucharist. Not once, in seven letters, does he offer the bishop as a shield.
- The church decided, by the fifth century, that grace does not run through the minister’s personal holiness — which removes the pipe a covering would have to run in. The Donatists held that sacraments administered by unworthy clergy were void. Augustine answered with a sentence the whole later tradition repeats: “Peter may baptize, but this is He that baptizes; Paul may baptize, yet this is He that baptizes; Judas may baptize, still this is He that baptizes” (Tractates on John 6.7). The Augsburg Confession (1530), Article VIII, condemns the Donatists by name. The Thirty-Nine Articles (1571), Article XXVI, is headed Of the Unworthiness of the Ministers, which hinders not the effect of the Sacrament. If the man’s holiness adds nothing to the sacraments, it is difficult to see how his anointing could be supplying a private protective benefit alongside them.
- The church built machinery to accuse, try and depose bad clergy, and wrote it into canon law within a decade of legalisation. Cyprian, opening a council at Carthage in 256: “neither does any of us set himself up as a bishop of bishops, nor by tyrannical terror does any compel his colleague to the necessity of obedience.” Nicaea (325), canon 5, requires provincial synods twice a year, in part to examine whether men were excommunicated out of “narrowness of mind, or contentiousness, or any such like ungraciousness” in the bishop — a written presumption that the bishop himself might be the problem. Chalcedon (451), canon 9, provides an appeal from a bishop to the provincial synod, and from a metropolitan to the exarch or to Constantinople. Article XXVI’s second paragraph: “it appertaineth to the discipline of the Church, that inquiry be made of evil Ministers, and that they be accused by those that have knowledge of their offences; and finally being found guilty, by just judgement be deposed.” The Westminster Confession gives synods authority “to receive complaints in cases of maladministration, and authoritatively to determine the same” (31.3), and adds that all such synods “may err; and many have erred” (31.4). None of this is compatible with a doctrine in which the safe course is always to stay under and say nothing.
- Both the Reformation and the Fathers state an explicit limit on obedience. Augsburg Confession, Article XXVIII: “But when they teach or ordain anything against the Gospel, then the congregations have a commandment of God prohibiting obedience, Matt. 7:15: Beware of false prophets; Gal. 1:8: Though an angel from heaven preach any other gospel, let him be accursed.” Westminster Confession 20.2: “God alone is Lord of the conscience… the requiring of an implicit faith, and an absolute and blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of conscience, and reason also.” And Chrysostom, preaching on Hebrews 13:17 around the year 400, having just told his congregation to obey their rulers: “If indeed in regard to Faith, flee and avoid him; not only if he be a man, but even if he be an angel come down from Heaven.”
- Where the tradition locates protection is not ambiguous, and the people who said it loudest were not spared. “I am the good shepherd” (John 10:11). Romans 8 does not promise that tribulation will be kept away; it lists it — “tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword” — and says none of it separates. Paul was imprisoned and executed. Peter was executed. Ignatius, who wrote the strongest sentences in Christian literature about following your bishop, was eaten by beasts at Rome while writing them. Polycarp was burned. Perfect submission to properly constituted authority did not protect any of them from anything, and none of them expected it to. Part VII sets this out as a series of predictions and asks you to make them before you see the answers.
- The covering doctrine in its modern form has a datable history, and it is not an old one. 1948: a revival at North Battleford in Saskatchewan teaches restored apostles and prophets, the impartation of gifts by the laying on of hands, and personal directive prophecy; the Assemblies of God formally disapprove it the following year (Resolution 7, Seattle, September 1949). 1948, independently: a series of training messages given at Kuling in China, published in English in 1972 as Spiritual Authority, in which “to rebel against God’s representative authority is the same as to rebel against God” and “no one can reject God’s delegated authority with one hand and receive God with the other.” 1969–1986: a Fort Lauderdale teaching ministry and its magazine develop the discipleship or shepherding model, in which every Christian is personally submitted to a shepherd. 1979: an American seminar ministry publishes a textbook diagramming authority as a set of nested umbrellas, which is where most people who use the word first saw the picture. Part VIII asks you to date each of these before it tells you.
- And the men who built the best-documented version of it published, over their own names, what they thought it had done. One of the five leaders withdrew in 1983 saying they had been “guilty of the Galatian error: having begun in the Spirit, we quickly degenerated into the flesh.” Another issued a formal statement of repentance in November 1989 and told Christianity Today in March 1990 that “there were deviations in the proper application of biblical truths I espoused”. A third, in the same article, acknowledged that “many, including myself, had been too domineering and had hurt others”. That is not an allegation made by critics. It is the founders’ own published account, and it is the closest thing this subject has to a controlled experiment.
The prompt behind this page
Everything below was produced by putting the following brief to a frontier language model with web search, which assembled and verified the sources. It is published so you can run it yourself, change it, sharpen it, or reverse it and see what comes back. If you get a materially different answer, that is information, and worth publishing too.
Write a detailed, source-first investigation of the following question, in
British English, for a general reader who is willing to work. Quote
scripture from the Authorised Version throughout, so that every citation
can be checked free of charge. Date and attribute every other quotation:
give the work, the edition or translation, the section, and where
possible the page.
THE TEACHING UNDER EXAMINATION. In some modern church circles there is
a doctrine of the "umbrella of protection" or the "covering" of a man
of God: that a Christian receives special spiritual protection by
remaining under the authority, covering or anointing of a particular
leader, and that stepping outside that authority exposes him to Satan,
calamity, deception or loss of blessing.
Test this against historic Christianity.
Distinguish three positions throughout and use the labels consistently:
O. THE OFFICE. Christ instituted a ministry; pastors and bishops hold
it; Christians owe them real obedience; but the authority belongs
to the office, is bounded by the Word, and is accountable.
C. THE COVERING. Submission to a particular man produces spiritual
protection; withdrawal from him produces spiritual exposure.
A. THE AUTONOMOUS BELIEVER. No human being has any authority over me
except Jesus.
Affirm O. Reject A explicitly and early, so that the page cannot be
read as an argument for it. Test C. The most common defence of C is to
treat all criticism of it as an argument for A, and the page must close
that move off in its opening pages.
Work through, at minimum:
1. THE TEACHING, STATED FAIRLY. Compose and label a statement of C in
the register in which it is actually preached. Then build an
interactive that assembles the covering syllogism one link at a
time and asks the reader, at each link, what carries it - a text, an
inference, or nothing - so that the reader can see where the chain
breaks rather than being told.
2. THE PROOF TEXTS. Take the six texts the teaching runs on: Psalm
105:15 / 1 Chronicles 16:22 ("touch not mine anointed"); Numbers 16
(Korah); Numbers 12 (Miriam); 2 Samuel 6 (Uzzah); 1 Samuel 24 and 26
(David spares Saul); 1 Samuel 15:23 ("rebellion is as the sin of
witchcraft"). For each, build an interactive that asks the reader
who the anointed person in the passage actually is and what the
passage is doing, BEFORE the context is shown. Include the surrounding
verses in every case. Note especially: that Psalm 105:12-15 is about
the patriarchs as a defenceless migrant family and contains no
office at all; that Moses' own defence in Numbers 16:15 is that he
has taken nothing; that Numbers 12:6-8 grounds the rebuke in a
uniqueness claim the text refuses to generalise; that 1 Chronicles
15:13 supplies the explanation for Uzzah and it concerns a written
instruction the leader ignored; that David fled and stayed away; and
that in 1 Samuel 15:23 the rebel is the king and the speaker has no
power at all.
3. WHAT THE NEW TESTAMENT GIVES MINISTERS. Hebrews 13:17; 1 Peter
5:1-4; 2 Corinthians 1:24; 1 Corinthians 4:1-5; Matthew 20:25-28;
Matthew 23:8-12; Acts 20:28-31; 1 Timothy 5:19-20; James 3:1;
Ezekiel 34; Jeremiah 23. Show that the authority is real and that
the accountability runs upward from the shepherd. Build an
interactive on the direction of accountability in each text.
4. THE COMMAND TO TEST THE TEACHER. Acts 17:11; 1 Thessalonians 5:21;
1 John 4:1; Galatians 1:8-9; 1 Timothy 5:19-20. Show that the act
the covering teaching forbids is the act scripture commands, and
that Paul places himself under it.
5. THE EARLY CHURCH. Ignatius of Antioch at full strength - Smyrnaeans
8-9, Ephesians 4-6, Magnesians 3, 6, 7, 13, Trallians 2-3 - plus
1 Clement 44, 54, 57, and the Didache. Build a who-said-it
interactive that mixes genuine Ignatian sentences with composed
covering statements, designed so that a reader who has been told
the early church was congregational and egalitarian gets it badly
wrong. Then show what Ignatius's reason always is - the unity of
the church around one bishop, one altar, one Eucharist - and that
he never once offers the bishop as a shield against harm.
6. DONATISM AND THE MINISTER'S WORTHINESS. The Donatist controversy;
Augustine, Tractates on John 6.7 ("Peter may baptize, but this is He
that baptizes... Judas may baptize, still this is He that
baptizes"); the Augsburg Confession Article VIII; the Thirty-Nine
Articles XXVI; Westminster 27.3. Show that the settled answer -
grace does not depend on the minister's holiness - removes the
channel a covering would have to run in, and that it cuts BOTH ways:
it also means a bad pastor's sacraments are still valid, which is a
comfort, not a licence.
7. HOW THE CHURCH DISCIPLINED BAD CLERGY. 1 Clement 44; Cyprian's
opening address to the Seventh Council of Carthage, 256 ("neither
does any of us set himself up as a bishop of bishops, nor by
tyrannical terror does any compel his colleague to the necessity of
obedience"); Nicaea 325 canon 5; Chalcedon 451 canons 9 and 18;
Article XXVI's second paragraph; Augsburg XXVIII; Westminster 31.3-4
and 20.2; Chrysostom on Hebrews 13:17. Build a scenario interactive:
the reader is given a case and asked what he should do, and the page
shows what each historic polity actually provides. Include Chalcedon
canon 18 against conspiracy, because it cuts the other way and the
page must not hide it.
8. WHERE PROTECTION IS LOCATED. John 10:11; Romans 8:35-39; the
martyrdoms of Paul, Peter, Ignatius, Polycarp. Build a prediction
interactive in which the reader says, before seeing the answer,
whether each of these men was protected from calamity by being
under proper authority.
9. WHERE THE TEACHING CAME FROM. Build a guess-the-year timeline
covering: the 1948 revival at North Battleford and the Assemblies of
God Resolution 7 of September 1949; Watchman Nee's 1948 Kuling
messages published in English as Spiritual Authority (1972); the
Fort Lauderdale discipleship or shepherding teaching and its
magazine, 1969-1986; the 1979 seminar textbook that diagrammed
authority as nested umbrellas; the 1983 withdrawal of one of the
five leaders; the November 1989 statement of repentance; and the
March 1990 Christianity Today article. Quote Nee verbatim. Quote the
leaders' own published retractions verbatim.
10. THE OBJECTIONS, ANSWERED INSIDE THE ARGUMENT. Do NOT include a
separate "case against this page" section. Build an interactive that
states each objection in the strongest form its proponents would
use, asks the reader to weigh it BEFORE the page replies, and then
replies. Cover at least: Hebrews 13:17; that Korah really did die;
that the apostolic church had real authority and modern individualism
is the greater danger; that "covering" only means accountability;
that Chalcedon canon 18 forbids banding together against a bishop;
that Westminster 20.4 condemns opposing lawful power under pretence
of liberty; that leaving a church is not a neutral act; and that
Cyprian said no one can have God for his Father who has not the
Church for his mother. Concede what is true in each.
11. FOR THE READER WHO HAS BEEN TOLD THIS. Close with what the historic
church actually offers the person who is afraid to leave or afraid
to ask, in its own words. Do NOT give practical advice about
leaving a congregation, and say plainly that the page is not doing
so.
CONSTRAINTS. Name no living person, church, ministry or organisation
except where that person's own published words are quoted verbatim with
a dated citation. Everyone else named must be deceased and cited from a
dated, published source. Repeat no third-party allegation of misconduct
against anybody. Where an example of the covering teaching is needed,
compose it and label it as composed. Make no claim about anyone's
salvation, sincerity or motives. Do not argue against pastoral
authority, church membership or discipline; assume and defend all
three. Label every evaluative conclusion as opinion and rest it on
facts disclosed on the page.
Output a single self-contained interactive HTML page with at least eight
interactive sections that make the reader commit to an answer before the
sources are revealed. At least two must be capable of showing the reader
that his instinct is wrong, and at least one must be capable of
embarrassing a reader who already agrees with the page. Publish this
prompt on the page.
Three instructions did most of the shaping. Requiring the page to affirm the office and reject the autonomous believer in its opening pages is what stops it from becoming an anti-clerical tract, and it is why the argument is harder to escape: the comparison is not between submission and independence but between two rival accounts of what submission is for. Requiring the Ignatius sentences to be mixed with composed covering statements produced Part V, which is the part most likely to embarrass a reader who already agrees with the page, because the early church turns out to be far more hierarchical than he assumed. And requiring Chalcedon canon 18 and Westminster 20.4 to be included, both of which cut against the page, produced the two strongest objections in Part X.
What do you currently think?
Nine questions, three minutes. Answer from what you believe now, not from what you suspect this page wants. Your answers come back at the end alongside what the sources say. Most readers miss the same three, and two of the three are cases where the early church turns out to be on the opposite side from where they placed it.
What follows
The chain, link by link
The covering teaching is an argument, and like every argument it is a chain. Nobody preaches the last link on its own; it arrives at the end of a sequence that begins with something nearly everyone accepts. That is what makes it persuasive, and it is also what makes it possible to examine. A chain is exactly as strong as the weakest link in it, and the weak link is never the first one.
Below, the chain is laid out in six links. Open them one at a time and, before you read the note, decide for yourself what carries that link: a text of scripture, an inference from a text, or nothing at either. The meters at the bottom keep score.
Tap each link to see what carries it.
The two pictures
It helps to see the two structures side by side. Neither of these is a reproduction of any published diagram; both are this page’s own drawing of the two accounts, and the point of putting them together is that they are not the same shape.
Position O
What the early church and every historic confession describe
Position C
What the covering teaching describes
The difference is not the height of the authority; it is the direction of the protection. On the left, the minister and the believer stand in the same place, under the same Lord, inside the same church, and what passes from the one to the other is word, sacrament, correction and care. On the right, the minister stands between God and the believer, and what passes from him is cover. The left-hand picture can survive a bad minister, because the thing protecting the believer is not the minister. The right-hand picture cannot, because it is.
Six texts, and who the anointed is in each
Six passages carry almost the whole weight of the covering teaching. Each of them is real, each is in the Bible, and each is normally quoted at a length of about nine words. Below, each is given with its surrounding verses. Before you read the context, say what you think the passage is doing. There is no trick in the options; two of the six do in fact support a strong doctrine of authority, and the page says so.
0 of 6 answered
What they add up to
Two of the six — Korah and Miriam — really are about the seriousness of despising an authority God has instituted, and any honest treatment has to concede it. God is not indifferent to how Israel treated Moses, and Numbers does not read like a book that would be relaxed about a congregation sneering at its pastor. The historic church took that seriously, which is one reason it wrote so much law about the respect due to clergy.
But notice what has to be added to get from there to a covering. In Numbers, the authority in question is attested by a public, repeatable, physical sign — a rod that buds, an earth that opens, a cloud that settles — and the text itself says why Moses is not comparable to anybody else. The covering teaching asks a congregation to grant the same standing to a man on the sole evidence that he says he has it. That is not a small gap. It is the whole gap.
The one passage in the New Testament about “the anointing” that Christians have
The word doing the heaviest lifting in the covering teaching is anointed. It is worth asking where the New Testament puts it. The Greek χριστός, anointed, is used of Christ — it is the word that becomes his title. It is never used as a title for a Christian minister. The noun the covering preacher usually means, χρῖσμα, an anointing or unction, occurs three times in the whole New Testament, all of them in five verses of one letter, and this is what they say:
“But ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things… But the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him.”
1 John 2:20, 27, Authorised Version
The anointing, in the only place the New Testament discusses one that belongs to Christians, is on all of them; and the thing it is said to do is exactly the thing the covering is said to do — keep them from being deceived. John is writing about teachers who have left the congregation and are now telling it a lie (2:18–19), and his reassurance is not stay under your elder. It is you have already received what you need to recognise this.
The honest qualification, because this verse is also abused
“Ye need not that any man teach you” has been used for centuries to justify Position A — the Christian who will not be taught by anybody. It cannot mean that, for the plain reason that John is teaching them while he writes it, and the same letter tells them to listen to those who are of God (4:6). The historic reading, which is also the natural one, is that they do not need these teachers, the ones who have gone out from them, to supply some further knowledge without which they cannot be saved. What the verse does establish, and what is relevant here, is that the New Testament’s one description of an anointing possessed by Christians places it in all of them and gives it a discriminating function. It does not place it in one man and give it a sheltering function.
Which way the accountability runs
Nobody who has read the New Testament can claim it is relaxed about church authority. It appoints elders, it tells congregations to obey them, it warns against despising them, and it treats a Christian who answers to nobody as an anomaly. The question is not whether the authority is real. The question is which direction the danger runs in — who, in these texts, is being warned.
Ten passages. For each, before the answer is shown, say who the text puts at risk: the flock, the shepherd, or both.
0 of 10 answered
The pattern, once you have done all ten
The New Testament is not silent about the danger of despising a minister; 1 Thessalonians 5:12–13 and 1 Timothy 5:17 are real and the page does not pretend otherwise. But the ratio is striking, and it is the opposite of what a congregation raised on the covering teaching would predict. Where scripture connects spiritual peril with the relationship between a teacher and those he teaches, it overwhelmingly addresses the teacher.
“Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks?… The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them.” The chapter is the Old Testament’s longest treatment of shepherds who fail, and every single sentence of judgement in it is addressed to the shepherds. The sheep, who have been scattered, are the ones God undertakes to go and find.
Set beside that the covering teaching’s characteristic move, which is to take the language of spiritual danger and point it at the person in the seat. The New Testament does have a category for the Christian who is in peril from a church relationship, and it is not the one who leaves. It is the one who is being devoured. “Ye suffer, if a man bring you into bondage, if a man devour you, if a man take of you, if a man exalt himself, if a man smite you on the face” (2 Corinthians 11:20) — Paul’s bitter description of what the Corinthians were putting up with from teachers who had impressed them.
The command to test the teacher
The practical effect of the covering teaching, whatever its intention, is to make the examination of a leader’s doctrine and conduct into a spiritual offence — something that itself endangers the person doing it. This is usually expressed in the phrase if you have a problem with the man of God, take it to God, not to men. It is worth setting that instruction beside the New Testament’s own, because they are not compatible.
“These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.”
Authorised Version. The speaker they are checking is Paul, and the checking is going on while he preaches.
Luke does not say they were tolerated. He says they were more noble — the comparative is his, not a later commentator’s. Whatever else this verse establishes, it establishes that verifying a preacher against scripture, in real time, is a mark of a better congregation rather than a worse one.
“But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.”
Authorised Version. Repeated in the next verse, in case it was taken for rhetoric.
The apostle names himself first. He is telling a congregation that his own authority is conditional on the content of what he preaches, and that they are competent to make the comparison. There is no version of the covering teaching that can accommodate this sentence, because the sentence hands the decisive judgement to the congregation.
“Quench not the Spirit. Despise not prophesyings. Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”
Authorised Version. The Greek δοκιμάζετε is the word used of assaying metal.
Note the order. Do not despise prophecy — and test it. The same letter that forbids contempt for the prophetic word requires it to be assayed, which means the congregation is expected to hold both at once. Nothing here suggests that testing is a lower-grade spiritual activity for people with a rebellious spirit.
“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.”
Authorised Version. Addressed to the whole congregation, not to its officers.
The command is in the plural and it is given to everybody. If discernment were a function of office, this is the verse in which to have said so.
“Against an elder receive not an accusation, but before two or three witnesses. Them that sin rebuke before all, that others also may fear.”
Authorised Version. Verse 21 adds: “that thou observe these things without preferring one before another, doing nothing by partiality.”
This is the verse most often quoted to stop a complaint, and it is doing the opposite. It does not say an elder may not be accused; it sets the evidential standard for accusing one, which presupposes that accusations will be brought and heard. And it requires that a sinning elder be rebuked publicly. The clause about partiality exists because everyone involved knew how these cases go.
“Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers… For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock. Also of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them.”
Authorised Version. Paul’s farewell to the elders of Ephesus at Miletus.
The last warning the apostle gives to a body of elders is that some of them will become the problem, and that the distinguishing mark will be men drawing disciples after themselves. A congregation that has been taught it may not evaluate its leaders has been disarmed against precisely the danger Paul names last and names most urgently.
Who said it: Antioch or the modern pulpit
This is the part of the page most likely to embarrass a reader who already agrees with it. The usual way of criticising the covering teaching is to say that the early church was simple, flat and congregational, and that hierarchy is a later corruption. That is not true, and a page that relied on it would deserve to lose the argument.
Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, was arrested and sent to Rome to be killed in the arena. On the journey, some time around the year 107, he wrote seven letters. He is the earliest Christian writer after the apostles whose views on church order survive at length, and his views are ferocious. Clement of Rome, writing to Corinth about a decade earlier, is milder but not much.
Below are nine statements. Six are genuine sentences from those two men, in the standard nineteenth-century English translation. Three are composed by this page in the register of a modern covering sermon. Decide which is which before you look.
What Ignatius is actually doing
If you found the ancient sentences harder to pick than you expected, that is the point. Ignatius makes claims for the bishop that no modern covering preacher would dare make from an English pulpit. He is not a mild figure who was later exaggerated; he is the high-water mark, and he is writing sixty years after Paul.
So the difference between him and the covering teaching cannot be the height of the claim. It has to be found somewhere else, and it is found in the reason. Ignatius always gives one, and it is always the same one. Read these three with the because clauses left in:
“See that ye all follow the bishop, even as Jesus Christ does the Father, and the presbytery as ye would the apostles… Let no man do anything connected with the Church without the bishop. Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist, which is administered either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it. Wheresoever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude also be; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”
Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Smyrnaeans 8, c. AD 107. Roberts–Donaldson translation, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1 (1885).
“As therefore the Lord did nothing without the Father, being united to Him, neither by Himself nor by the apostles, so neither do ye anything without the bishop and presbyters. Neither endeavour that anything appear reasonable and proper to yourselves apart; but being come together into the same place, let there be one prayer, one supplication, one mind, one hope…”
Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Magnesians 7, c. AD 107. Roberts–Donaldson.
“If any one be not within the altar, he is deprived of the bread of God… Let no man deceive himself: if any one be not within the altar, he is deprived of the bread of God.”
Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Ephesians 5, c. AD 107. Roberts–Donaldson.
The argument, every time, is about unity. One church, one altar, one Eucharist, one bishop, one assembly in one place. Ignatius is writing against people who were holding rival meetings and rival Eucharists, and his fear is schism and docetic teaching, not that individual Christians will lose their shield. His bishop is not standing between the believer and danger. He is standing at the altar, and the point of following him there is that the church is one thing rather than several.
What is missing from seven letters
In the whole Ignatian corpus — and in 1 Clement, the Didache, Polycarp’s letter to the Philippians and the Shepherd of Hermas, which is the rest of what survives from the sub-apostolic period — there is no statement that submission to a bishop protects a Christian from Satan, calamity, illness, poverty or deception, and no statement that leaving one exposes him to any of these. The literature is not short of warnings. It warns about schism, about heresy, about denying the incarnation, about the Eucharist, about martyrdom, about wealth and about fasting. The one thing it never does is offer the bishop as a covering. That is an argument from silence, and arguments from silence are weak — except where the silence falls in exactly the place a doctrine claims to have come from.
And there is a second thing missing. Ignatius is himself the most spectacular counter-example his own century could have produced. He is a bishop in perfect standing, in unbroken communion with the church, submitted to nobody improperly and rebelling against no one, writing these sentences from inside a Roman military escort on his way to be killed by animals for public entertainment. He knows it, and he does not think anything has gone wrong. “I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ” (Romans 4). Whatever being under the bishop was for, in the mind of the man who insisted on it most, it was plainly not for keeping bad things away.
Does the gift depend on the man?
There is one question the church was forced to settle early, at length, and with unusual clarity, and settling it happens to demolish the mechanism a covering would need. The question is whether what a minister gives depends on what he personally is.
It came up because of a persecution. Under Diocletian, some African clergy handed over the scriptures to be burned rather than be killed; they were called traditores, the handers-over. When the persecution ended, a party in North Africa held that ordinations and baptisms performed by such men, and by anyone in communion with them, were void — that the sacrament ran through the minister, so a polluted minister delivered nothing. They were called Donatists, after one of their bishops, and the dispute ran for a century.
Below are six documents spanning fourteen centuries. For each, say what you think it holds about whether the minister’s personal character affects what the congregation receives, then see the text. The second one is a twist.
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Why this matters here
The settled answer, held by Rome, by the East, and by every Reformation confession that addressed it, is that the efficacy of what the minister does rests on Christ’s institution and the work of the Spirit, not on the minister. The practical consequence, and the reason the church fought so hard for it, is pastoral: no Christian ever has to wonder whether his baptism took, or whether his communion was real, or whether his absolution counted, on the basis of what the man administering it was privately like.
Now set that beside the covering. A covering requires the opposite architecture. It requires that something spiritually substantial — protection — flows to the believer through the person of the minister, in virtue of a quality he personally possesses, and that it can be interrupted by the believer’s relationship to him. If the church was right about the sacraments, that architecture does not exist. The one channel Christianity has ever claimed runs from a minister to a believer is the ministry of word and sacrament, and the church’s considered position is that this channel does not depend on the man at all.
Which cuts both ways, and the page had better say so
This argument is not a licence. If the minister’s character does not affect what he gives, then it also follows that a Christian who discovers his pastor has been a fraud has not thereby lost anything he received. His baptism stands. His communions were real. The vows he made were made to God. This was exactly the comfort Augustine was defending, and it is worth stating plainly for any reader who needs it, because the modern version of the Donatist anxiety — was any of it real, given what he turned out to be? — is answered by the church in the same three words it used in 411. It was Christ who baptised you.
What the church did when the shepherd was the problem
Here is the fact that ought to settle this argument on its own. The Christian traditions with the highest doctrines of clerical authority are the ones that produced the most elaborate law for accusing, trying, suspending and deposing clergy. That is not a coincidence or an embarrassment. It follows directly. If you believe a man holds an office given by Christ, you must also believe the office can be held badly, and that the church which gave it can take it away. The two beliefs are one belief.
The covering teaching has no equivalent machinery, and cannot have any, because it has located the authority in the man rather than in the office. There is nothing to depose him from, and no body with standing to do it. What it offers instead is a single instruction, which is to stay.
Three situations below. Say what you would do before you look at what the church actually provides. The third one is where this page concedes something.
The written record, in date order
Clement’s complaint is that Corinth has ejected presbyters who did not deserve it. His argument is not that presbyters may never be removed — it is that these ones were blameless, and that the criterion is their conduct in office:
Note what is being asserted and what is being conceded. The protection Clement claims for a presbyter is conditional on blameless service, humility, peaceableness and disinterest — four things a congregation can observe. And it is the church that appointed him, with its consent, that is in view throughout. This is the earliest surviving Christian document on the removal of a minister, and it already assumes both that ministers can be removed and that there are right and wrong grounds for it.
Cyprian is not a low-church figure; he is the man who said that no one can have God for his Father who has not the Church for his mother, and Part X deals with that sentence honestly. But the phrase tyrannical terror is his, and he uses it to describe what happens when one churchman compels another into obedience by fear. He thought that was worth forbidding by name, in the first sentence of a council, in the year 256.
Canon 5 requires every province to hold two synods a year, one before Lent and one in the autumn. Part of their business is to review excommunications —
Read that again with the covering teaching in mind. The first ecumenical council, twelve years after Christianity became legal, wrote into permanent law a standing biannual inquiry into whether a bishop had excommunicated somebody out of pettiness, quarrelsomeness or spite. The church did not regard the possibility as unthinkable. It regarded it as frequent enough to need a calendar.
A complaint against a bishop goes to the provincial synod; a complaint against the metropolitan goes higher still. This is an appellate structure, and it exists because the church expected complaints against bishops to be made and to need hearing.
The same council, nine canons later, cuts the other way, and this page is obliged to say so:
Taken together, the two canons say something precise, and it is not what either side would like. A grievance against a bishop is to be brought — formally, through a body with standing, in the open. What is forbidden is the faction: the whispering group, the parallel organisation, the plot. The historic church’s objection to a congregation that murmurs against its minister is real. Its remedy is not silence. Its remedy is a court.
Three things are being said at once. The bishop’s power is genuinely from God. Its content is entirely specified — preach, absolve, administer. And where he goes outside it, the congregation is not merely permitted to refuse but commanded to. Obedience has a boundary drawn by the same authority that requires the obedience.
This is the second half of the article whose first half says the minister’s wickedness cannot spoil the sacrament. The two halves belong together and are usually separated. The church says: his character does not affect what you receive from him — and if you know what he is, you are the one who must say so. The duty falls on the person with the knowledge. There is no clause excusing him on the grounds that speaking would be touching the Lord’s anointed.
The Reformed tradition is the most court-minded of them all: presbyteries, synods, assemblies, complaints, appeals, records. And having built the whole apparatus, it says in the next breath that the apparatus is fallible and that no man’s conscience belongs to it. Implicit faith and absolute and blind obedience are named as the two things that destroy Christian liberty. They are also a reasonable description of what the covering teaching asks for.
Seven predictions about protection
The covering teaching makes an empirical claim. It says that being properly under authority correlates with protection from calamity, and that stepping out correlates with exposure to it. Claims of that kind can be tested against cases, and Christianity supplies a very large number of cases about which nobody disputes the facts.
Below are seven cases. For each, two things are stated as fact: the person’s standing with respect to church authority, and what happened to him. Predict, before you look, whether the outcome was protection or calamity. The last one has two people in it.
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What the New Testament promises instead
Romans 8 is the passage most often invoked for the comfort of Christians in trouble, and it is worth reading with attention to what it does not say. It does not say that these things will not happen. It names them.
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.”
Romans 8:35–37, Authorised Version
Seven calamities, listed by name, in a passage about security. The promise is not that the sword will be kept away; it is that the sword cannot separate. The structure of Christian assurance in this text is not a canopy over the head. It is a hold on the person.
There is a second observation, and it is uncomfortable for anyone who has been on the receiving end of this teaching. The covering doctrine is unfalsifiable in the direction that matters. If a person stays and prospers, the covering worked. If a person stays and suffers, it was a testing, or sin in the camp, or the enemy attacking the ministry. If a person leaves and suffers, that is the covering removed. If a person leaves and prospers, it is the prosperity of Egypt, and judgement is coming later. No possible outcome counts against it. A claim arranged like that is not a strong claim; it is a claim that has been protected from evidence, which is a different thing from being true.
What would have to be true for the covering teaching to be right
It is only fair to say what would count. If the doctrine were true, we should expect to find at least some of the following: a New Testament text connecting submission to a leader with protection from harm; an early Christian writer, in a literature obsessed with church order, offering the bishop as a shield; a historic confession that makes the believer’s safety depend on his relationship with a particular minister; or a pattern in which the most submitted Christians in history — monks, curates, missionaries under episcopal discipline — suffered conspicuously less than everyone else. This page has not found any of the four. A reader who finds one is invited to say which, and where, because a single genuine instance of the first two would be worth more than everything in Part IX.
Where the umbrella came from
Doctrines have histories, and a doctrine’s history is not the same thing as an argument against it — a teaching first articulated in 1948 could in principle be a recovery of something apostolic that the church had mislaid. But a teaching which presents itself as the plain sense of scripture, and which turns out to be absent from nineteen centuries of Christian writing about church authority and then to appear suddenly, in traceable places, within living memory, has a question to answer.
Ten items below. Date each one before you look. The last is not a date question, and it is the point of the section.
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Three streams, and what they share
These are not one movement. The North Battleford revival, the Kuling messages and the Fort Lauderdale teaching arose independently, on three continents, from people with different theological commitments, and the seminar material came from a fourth and quite separate tradition. Some of the men involved would have disowned the others. It would be a distortion to present them as a single conspiracy, and this page does not.
What they share is a structural move, and it is the same move in each case. Authority is relocated from an office, which is public, describable and removable, to a person, whose standing rests on a spiritual quality — anointing, apostleship, delegated authority — that only he and God can verify. Once that move is made, everything else follows on its own. Submission becomes personal rather than institutional. Evaluation becomes rebellion, because there is no public standard to evaluate against. And because the relationship is now spiritual rather than constitutional, the consequences of breaking it become spiritual too. That is the umbrella. It is not a doctrine anyone sat down and invented; it is what a doctrine of authority collapses into when the office is removed and the man is left.
The founders’ own account
The Fort Lauderdale teaching is the best-documented of the three, for a reason that is unusual in religious history: several of the men who built it wrote publicly, over their own names, about what they concluded it had done. What follows are their own published words. Two of the men quoted here are living, and under this page’s rule they are quoted verbatim from dated published sources and are not otherwise characterised; no allegation about anyone’s conduct is made or repeated.
“We were guilty of the Galatian error: having begun in the Spirit, we quickly degenerated into the flesh.”
Statement on his withdrawal from the discipleship teaching, reported and repeated in subsequent accounts of the movement. Prince died in 2003.
The Galatian error is Paul’s charge in Galatians 3:3 — that a work begun by the Spirit is continued by human effort and rule-keeping. Prince is not saying the intention was bad. He is saying the mechanism was.
“I repent. I ask forgiveness.”
From a formal statement of repentance issued in November 1989.
“I got involved in spiritual-growth ministries because I have a love for ministry and a concern for the unity and spiritual maturity of the church. But there were deviations in the proper application of biblical truths I espoused.”
Quoted in Robert Digitale, ‘Shepherding Movement: An Idea Whose Time Has Gone?’, Christianity Today, 19 March 1990. Mumford is living; these are his own published words and nothing further is stated about him here.
“many, including myself, had been too domineering and had hurt others as they tried to find ways to lead the movement.”
Quoted in the same Christianity Today article, 19 March 1990. Simpson is living; these are his own published words and nothing further is stated about him here. In the same article he defends the movement’s aims, which this page records because it is part of the record.
Simpson’s position in that article is not a retraction of the teaching, and presenting it as one would be dishonest. What it is, is a leader of the movement conceding, in print, that its practice produced domineering and injury. That concession is evidence about the mechanism regardless of what he concluded about the doctrine.
What this does and does not prove
A doctrine is not refuted by the fact that its founders later regretted it. That would be a genetic argument, and this page has to be honest that it is one. Plenty of true teachings have been badly applied by the people who recovered them, and Prince’s own diagnosis — that they began in the Spirit and continued in the flesh — is itself a claim that the underlying teaching was sound and the practice went wrong. A defender of the covering is entitled to say exactly that, and Part X lets him. What the record does establish is narrower and still useful: that this is not an abstract worry raised by outsiders, that the failure mode critics describe is the failure mode the practitioners describe, and that at least one of the men closest to it concluded within a decade that the thing had turned into law.
The replies, weighed before they are answered
Ten objections. Each is stated in the strongest form its proponents would use, and several of them are good. Weigh each one before the page replies — say whether you think it defeats the argument, qualifies it, or fails — and then read the reply. Three of the ten are conceded in substance, and one of those three is conceded entirely.
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For the reader who has been told this
Some people will have arrived here because of a sermon, or a conversation, or a phrase that has been sitting uncomfortably for a while. This section is not advice about what to do. This page does not know your church, your pastor or your situation, it is not in a position to give counsel, and it would be an impertinence to try. It is also worth saying plainly that a great many pastors who have used the word covering mean nothing more by it than that they take responsibility for the people in their care, which is their job.
What this page can offer is what the historic church said, in its own words, to a Christian who was afraid.
“I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep… My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand.”
Authorised Version. “No man” is unqualified in both clauses.
“Peter may baptize, but this is He that baptizes; Paul may baptize, yet this is He that baptizes; Judas may baptize, still this is He that baptizes.”
Tractates on the Gospel of John 6.7, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 1, vol. 7. Augustine died in 430.
He names Judas deliberately. The sentence exists to tell a frightened African congregation that what they received was not contaminated by the man who handed it over.
“If indeed in regard to Faith, flee and avoid him; not only if he be a man, but even if he be an angel come down from Heaven; but if in regard to life, be not over-curious.”
Homily 34 on Hebrews, on Hebrews 13:17. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 1, vol. 14. Chrysostom died in 407.
This is said by a man who has spent the preceding paragraphs insisting on obedience to church rulers, and who elsewhere describes the terror of the priesthood in the strongest terms. The distinction he draws — doctrine is your business, private life is not — is a good deal more useful than either extreme.
“God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men, which are in any thing contrary to His Word; or beside it, in matters of faith or worship… the requiring of an implicit faith, and an absolute and blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of conscience, and reason also.”
Westminster Confession of Faith 20.2. The phrase “or beside it” means: not only commands contrary to scripture, but commands scripture simply does not make.
“Not for that we have dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy: for by faith ye stand… For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus’ sake.”
Authorised Version. Written by a man who had just spent a chapter defending his apostolic authority.
And one last thing, because it is the sentence in this whole subject that has the most weight behind it and it is almost never quoted in a covering sermon. It is Peter, writing to elders, and it contains both halves of the historic position in four lines: the authority is real, the manner is prescribed, and the shepherd is himself a sheep.
“Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly; not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind; neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock. And when the chief Shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away.”
1 Peter 5:2–4, Authorised Version. “God’s heritage” renders τῶν κλήρων — the portions allotted to the elders. The point of the clause is that the flock is not theirs.
Your answers, revisited
Here is what you said before you read the page, next to what the sources show.
You did not lock in answers at the top. If you would like to, go back and do it — it takes three minutes and it is the part of the page most likely to be useful.
Check it yourself
Fourteen items. Nearly all of this subject is free: the Fathers and the councils are out of copyright and online in the standard nineteenth-century translations, the confessions are published by the churches that hold them, and the Authorised Version is free, which is why it was used throughout. If you read only four, read the ones marked Read this first — between them they contain the entire evidential spine of this page, and two of the four are a single psalm and a single chapter. Modern works by living authors are listed by title rather than by author, in keeping with this page’s naming rule.
- 1. Psalm 105, whole, and 1 Chronicles 16:7–36. Read this first. Ten minutes, free. Read the psalm from verse 1 without stopping. Verse 15 arrives in the middle of a sentence about a migrant family and God reproving foreign kings on their behalf, and the experience of meeting it in its own context is worth more than any amount of commentary. Then read the Chronicles version, which is the same text used as a hymn at the bringing of the ark — and note who is singing it and about whom.
- 2. Numbers 12 and 16, whole; 1 Samuel 15, 24 and 26; 2 Samuel 6 alongside 1 Chronicles 13 and 15. Read this first. Ninety minutes, free. This is Part II done for yourself, and it is the part of the page a reader is most able to check without any external source at all. Read 1 Samuel 22–27 continuously rather than only the two chapters usually quoted; the covering reading of David and Saul depends on stopping early.
- 3. Ignatius of Antioch, the seven genuine letters, in the shorter recension. Read this first. Ninety minutes, free in the Roberts–Donaldson translation at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, at New Advent and at earlychristianwritings.com. Read all seven; they are short. Be warned that they are much more hierarchical than most Protestants expect and much less protective than most covering preachers would like, and that both halves of that sentence are the point. Make sure you are reading the shorter recension — the longer version is a later interpolated text, and reputable sites label it.
- 4. Ezekiel 34, Jeremiah 23:1–4, Matthew 23 and James 3:1. Read this first. Thirty minutes, free. The scriptural material on bad shepherds, read in one sitting. Count, as you go, how many sentences of warning are addressed to the flock and how many to the shepherds. That count is the argument of Part III and you can perform it yourself in half an hour.
- 5. 1 Clement, chapters 1–3 and 40–57. Forty minutes, free. The earliest Christian document on a congregation removing its ministers, written from Rome to Corinth about AD 96. Read it for the shape of the argument, which is neither what a modern independent nor a modern covering preacher would expect.
- 6. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, tractate 6; and On Baptism, Against the Donatists, book 1. Two hours, free in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 1, volumes 7 and 4. The tractate is short and contains the Peter–Paul–Judas sentence in its setting. Book 1 of On Baptism is the sustained argument, and it is worth seeing how much of it is pastoral rather than polemical.
- 7. The canons of Nicaea (325), canon 5, and of Chalcedon (451), canons 9, 17 and 18. Twenty minutes, free in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2, volume 14, with Hefele’s notes. Read canon 18 as carefully as canon 9; a reader who takes only the appeal machinery and ignores the prohibition on faction has not read the council.
- 8. The Augsburg Confession (1530), articles VII, VIII and XXVIII. Forty minutes, free at bookofconcord.org and at Project Wittenberg in the Triglot translation. Article XXVIII is long and most of it concerns the temporal power of bishops in the sixteenth century; the section on the limits of obedience is near the middle and is worth reading with the surrounding material rather than as a pull quote.
- 9. The Thirty-Nine Articles (1571), articles XIX, XX, XXI, XXIII, XXVI and XXXIV. Twenty minutes, free from the Church of England and in Schaff’s Creeds of Christendom, which is out of copyright. Article XXVI is the one this page leans on; read XX and XXI beside it for the Anglican statement that the church itself may not ordain anything contrary to God’s Word and that councils may err.
- 10. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), chapters 20, 25, 27, 30 and 31; and the Second London Baptist Confession (1689), chapters 21, 26 and 28. An hour and a half, both free online. Chapters 30 and 31 of Westminster are the censure and synod chapters and are the fullest Protestant statement of clerical discipline. The 1689 Baptist parallels are worth reading because congregational polity is where the covering teaching has spread furthest, and the confession of the English Baptists is not on its side.
- 11. Chrysostom, Homily 34 on Hebrews; and On the Priesthood, books 3 and 6. Two hours, free in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 1, volumes 14 and 9. The homily contains the flee and avoid him sentence; On the Priesthood is the classic ancient statement of how terrifying the office is to the man who holds it, and reading the two together is the best available corrective to the idea that a high view of ministry and a fearful view of ministers are opposites.
- 12. Watchman Nee, Spiritual Authority (Christian Fellowship Publishers, 1972), from messages given at Kuling in 1948. Three hours. In print and widely available secondhand. This is the primary source for the doctrine this page is examining, and a reader who wants to disagree with the page should start here rather than with any critic. Nee died in 1972. Read especially the chapters on the Old Testament instances of rebellion and on obeying delegated authority, and judge the exegesis for yourself against Part II.
- 13. On the Fort Lauderdale material: the article ‘Shepherding Movement: An Idea Whose Time Has Gone?’, Christianity Today, 19 March 1990, for the leaders’ own words; the General Council of the Assemblies of God, Resolution 7, ‘The New Order of the Latter Rain’, September 1949, printed in the Pentecostal Evangel of 15 October 1949 and held by the Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center; and the standard academic monograph on the movement, published by T&T Clark in 2003 under the title The Shepherding Movement: Controversy and Charismatic Ecclesiology, which is listed by title because its author is living. The monograph is sympathetic to the participants and is the fairest treatment available; a reader who suspects this page of hostility should read it.
- 14. On the other side of the argument: Cyprian, On the Unity of the Catholic Church (c. 251), free in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume 5 — the strongest statement in ancient Christian literature that there is no safety outside the church and no communion with Christ apart from communion with the bishop. It is the closest thing the early church produced to a covering doctrine, it is quoted against this page in Part X, and a reader should hear it from Cyprian rather than from this page’s summary of him. Read it beside his address to the council of 256, quoted in Part VII, and decide for yourself whether the two are in tension.
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