What this is about
The teaching is rarely written down, which is part of why it is hard to argue with. Here it is as it is usually heard. This is written by this page, not quoted from anyone:
Three things are bundled together in that, and they are not the same thing.
The office
Ministers really do have authorityChrist gave the church pastors. They teach, they correct, they give you the sacraments, and you owe them real obedience. This page agrees, and so does every historic church.The covering
The man is what protects youStaying under him keeps harm away; leaving him lets harm in. This is the bit being tested.Nobody but Jesus
No one has authority over meChurch is optional, correction is intrusion, I answer to God alone. Every historic church rejects this, and so does this page.The usual defence of the middle one is to treat any criticism of it as an argument for the last one. It is not. The historic church is the standing proof that you can demand submission to ministers and put them on trial when they go wrong — and it did both, in writing, for nearly two thousand years.
The short answer
- “Touch not mine anointed” is about a wandering family, and there is no minister in it. Read the four verses before it. “When they were but a few men in number; yea, very few, and strangers in it. When they went from one nation to another… he suffered no man to do them wrong: yea, he reproved kings for their sakes” (Psalm 105:12–14). The anointed are Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. There was no priesthood and no temple yet, because they had not been invented. The kings being told off are Pharaoh and Abimelech. It is God protecting a defenceless migrant family from powerful rulers — which is the exact opposite of the use it is put to.
- “Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft” is said by a prophet to a king, about the king’s disobedience. 1 Samuel 15:23. Samuel is rebuking Saul. The rebel in the verse is the leader; the man doing the rebuking has no power at all. When it is quoted at a congregation, both roles have been swapped.
- David refused to harm Saul — and he also left, and never came back. He escaped through a window, hid in fields and caves, gathered four hundred men of his own, moved his parents abroad for safety, and ended up living among the Philistines. The example teaches: do not hurt him, do not take his job by force. It does not teach: stay. David’s protection in those years was a cave.
- Korah and Uzzah are real and serious, and they still do not say this. Moses’ own defence against Korah is “I have not taken one ass from them, neither have I hurt one of them” — a plain, checkable claim about his own conduct. And the Bible explains Uzzah itself: the ark was being carried on a Philistine cart instead of on the poles God had specified, and the man who got that wrong was David (1 Chronicles 15:13). Both passages take God’s instructions extremely seriously. Neither of them makes a modern preacher into Moses.
- The New Testament points the warnings at the shepherd, not the sheep. Elders are told not to be “lords over God’s heritage” (1 Peter 5:3). Teachers “shall receive the greater condemnation” (James 3:1). Ezekiel 34 spends a whole chapter on shepherds who feed themselves, and every word of judgement in it is addressed to them. Paul’s last warning to a group of elders is that some of them will go bad: “of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them” (Acts 20:30).
- The Bible tells congregations to check their teachers. That is the one thing the covering forbids. The Bereans “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” while Paul was preaching — and Luke calls them more noble for it (Acts 17:11). “Prove all things” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). “Try the spirits” (1 John 4:1). Paul puts himself under the test: “though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel… let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8). And 1 Timothy 5:19 does not forbid accusing an elder — it says how many witnesses you need.
- The early church went further than any covering preacher would dare, and for a completely different reason. Ignatius of Antioch, about the year 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.” But his reason is always the same, and it is never protection: it is that there should be one church and one communion service rather than several. In seven letters he never once says the bishop shields you from anything.
- The church decided long ago that a minister’s holiness adds nothing to what he gives you — which removes the pipe a covering would run in. When some clergy handed over the scriptures to be burned in a persecution, a party in North Africa said their baptisms were worthless. The church disagreed, and Augustine settled it: “Peter may baptize, but this is He that baptizes… Judas may baptize, still this is He that baptizes.” The Church of England has an article on it, headed Of the Unworthiness of the Ministers, which hinders not the effect of the Sacrament. If the holiest priest adds nothing to your baptism, it is hard to see how one man’s anointing is keeping the enemy off you.
- The church built courts to remove bad ministers. In 325, the Council of Nicaea ordered every province to hold two meetings a year partly to check whether people had been thrown out of the church because of “narrowness of mind, or contentiousness, or any such like ungraciousness” in the bishop. In 451, Chalcedon set up an appeal system for complaints against a bishop. The Thirty-Nine Articles say evil ministers are to “be accused by those that have knowledge of their offences” and, if guilty, deposed. The Augsburg Confession says that when bishops teach against the Gospel, congregations are commanded by God not to obey. None of that fits a doctrine whose only instruction is: stay, and say nothing.
- And the covering teaching is young. It is not in the Fathers, the councils, the medieval canonists, Luther, Calvin, Cranmer or the Westminster divines. In its modern form it is traceable to 1948 — a revival in Saskatchewan and, quite separately, a set of teaching messages in China — and to a Fort Lauderdale ministry that spread it from 1969. The nested-umbrella picture most people have seen comes from a seminar textbook of 1979.
The first exercise: who said it?
Five statements. Three are from a bishop of Antioch writing about the year 107, on his way to be executed. Two are written by this page in the style of a modern covering sermon. Most people get this the wrong way round, because the early church was far more hierarchical than they expect.
The point is not that Ignatius was soft on authority. He was the opposite. The point is what he thought the authority was for. Every time he tells the Smyrnaeans or the Ephesians to follow their bishop, the sentence that follows is about the one altar, the one communion, the one gathering. He is afraid of the church splitting into rival meetings. He is not offering anyone a shield.
And he is his own counter-example. He wrote all of it under Roman guard, on the road to be killed by animals in the arena — a bishop in perfect standing, obedient to everything, in rebellion against nothing. He did not think anything had gone wrong.
What the church did when the minister was the problem
This is the fact that ought to settle the argument. The churches with the highest view of clergy produced the most detailed law for getting rid of them. That is not an embarrassment; it follows. If a man holds an office given by Christ, then the office can be held badly, and the church that gave it can take it back.
“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.”
Opening address to the Seventh Council of Carthage. Cyprian died in 258.
Two synods a year, in every province, partly so “that it may be inquired whether they have been laid under sentence through narrowness of mind, or contentiousness, or any such like ungraciousness in the bishop.”
First Council of Nicaea, canon 5.
The first great council of the church put a twice-yearly review of the bishop’s own motives into permanent law. It did not think the possibility was unthinkable. It thought it was common enough to need a calendar.
“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.”
Article XXVI, Church of England.
There is no clause excusing you on the grounds that speaking up would be touching the Lord’s anointed.
“But when they teach or ordain anything against the Gospel, then the congregations have a commandment of God prohibiting obedience.”
Augsburg Confession, Article XXVIII.
Not allowed to refuse. Commanded to.
“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.”
Westminster Confession of Faith, 20.2.
The honest other side
The same traditions are hard on faction. Chalcedon in 451 deposes clergy caught “conspiring or banding together, or hatching plots against their bishops”. Westminster says that people who oppose lawful authority on the pretence of Christian liberty “resist the ordinance of God”. The historic position is not that you may grumble, organise a group, or walk out over a disagreement. It is that a real grievance is brought in the open, to a body with standing, by a person willing to put their name to it. That is a route. The covering teaching closes it and leaves silence.
The second exercise: did it protect them?
The covering teaching makes a claim you can test against cases. Six of them, every person in perfectly good standing with the church of his day. Say what happened before you look.
0 of 6 answered
What the New Testament actually promises is not that these things will be kept away. Romans 8 lists them by name — “tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword” — and says that none of them can separate a Christian from Christ. The promise is not a canopy over your head. It is a hold on you.
There is one more problem with the claim, and it is a serious one. Stay and prosper, and the covering worked. Stay and suffer, and it was a testing. Leave and suffer, and that is the covering removed. Leave and prosper, and judgement is coming later. Nothing that could possibly happen counts against it. A claim arranged like that is not a strong claim. It is a claim that has been put out of reach of evidence, which is a different thing altogether.
Where the umbrella came from
Three separate streams, on three continents, none of them connected to the others, all within about thirty years.
They are not one movement, and it would be a distortion to present them as a conspiracy. What they share is a single structural move: authority is shifted from an office — public, describable, removable — to a person, whose standing rests on a spiritual quality that only he and God can verify. Everything else follows on its own. Submission becomes personal. Checking becomes rebellion, because there is no public standard to check against. And because the relationship is now spiritual rather than constitutional, breaking it has spiritual consequences. That is the umbrella.
What the men who built it said afterwards
The Fort Lauderdale stream is unusually well documented, because several of its leaders wrote publicly about what they concluded it had done. These are their own published words.
“We were guilty of the Galatian error: having begun in the Spirit, we quickly degenerated into the flesh.”
Prince died in 2003. The Galatian error is Paul’s charge in Galatians 3:3 — a work begun by the Spirit and continued by human rule-keeping.
“I repent. I ask forgiveness.” — and, the following March: “there were deviations in the proper application of biblical truths I espoused.”
Formal statement of repentance, November 1989; and Christianity Today, 19 March 1990.
“Many, including myself, had been too domineering and had hurt others.”
Christianity Today, 19 March 1990. In the same article he defends the movement’s aims, which is part of the record and is stated here for that reason.
A doctrine is not refuted by its founders’ regrets — that would be an argument about origins rather than about truth, and the full dossier says so before anyone else can. What the record shows is narrower: that the failure the critics describe is the failure the practitioners describe, and that one of the men closest to it concluded within ten years that the thing had turned into law.
The two best replies, and what they are worth
“Hebrews 13:17 says obey and submit. You are explaining away a plain command.”
“Cyprian said nobody can have God for his Father who has not the Church for his mother. So there is a covering in historic Christianity.”
Where this page lands
What I find hardest about it is the direction of the fear. When scripture connects spiritual danger with teaching, it almost always addresses the teacher — stricter judgement, a millstone, the watchman’s bloodstained hands, the shepherds of Ezekiel who fed themselves. The covering teaching takes that fear, turns it round, and hands it to the person in the pew.
So here is the test I would apply when you hear it. Not does this exalt the ministry? — almost anything can do that. But does it tell me what happens if he is wrong? If the answer is that he cannot be, or that it is not your business, or that God will deal with him and your part is silence, then whatever is being described, the church that produced Nicaea and the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Westminster Confession would not have recognised it as a doctrine of ministry at all.
This page gives no advice about leaving any church, and it is not trying to. It does not know your church, your minister or your situation. Many pastors who use the word “covering” mean nothing by it beyond taking responsibility for the people in their care, which is their job. What the page denies is one specific claim: that the man is what is protecting you.
“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.”
John 10:27–29, Authorised Version. “No man” is unqualified, in both clauses.
Check it yourself
Five things, nearly all of them free.
- 1. Psalm 105, the whole psalm. Ten minutes, free. Start at verse 1 and do not stop. Verse 15 arrives in the middle of a sentence about a migrant family, and meeting it there is worth more than any amount of commentary.
- 2. 1 Samuel 15, and then 1 Samuel 22 to 27 straight through. An hour, free. The covering reading of David and Saul depends on stopping after chapter 26. Keep going.
- 3. Ezekiel 34, and James 3:1. Twenty minutes, free. Count, as you read, how many warnings are addressed to the flock and how many to the shepherds.
- 4. The seven letters of Ignatius of Antioch. Ninety minutes, free online in the old Roberts–Donaldson translation (make sure it says shorter recension). They are much more hierarchical than you expect and much less protective than the covering teaching needs, and both halves of that are the point.
- 5. Watchman Nee, Spiritual Authority (1972). In print and easy to find secondhand. This is the doctrine stated at full length by a serious man, and if you want to disagree with this page you should read it rather than take this page’s word for what it says.
Want the whole thing?
The full dossier has nine interactive sections, every quotation dated and attributed, all six proof texts with their context, what the early church and the Reformation confessions actually said about disciplining clergy, ten objections weighed one at a time, and the prompt that produced the page.
Read the full dossier → Simple English →