Editor’s Note: The following essay is based on Julia Duin’s book, “Days of Fire and Glory.” Though written more than 15 years ago, it provides key insight into the development of false doctrines of submission alive and well today.

(Opinion) – Beware of the toxic teachings on authority and submission, like:

• Obey your pastor, even if he – or she – is wrong and God will bless you for it.
• If you criticize anyone in authority over you, you are setting yourself in judgment over them and that is rebellion. Rebellion is as bad as the sin of witchcraft, and you are bringing a curse on yourself and inviting demonic oppression by criticizing others.
• If you are not in total submission to your pastor, you will miss out on God’s blessings
• The Old Testament verse 1 Chronicles 16:22: “Do not touch my anointed ones; do my prophets no harm,” refers to not criticizing Christian leaders.
• Women are especially called to submit and trust church leaders and submit to their husbands as they would to God and if your husband is doing something wrong, you do not reprove him. You wait for God to reprove him (through someone else).

Heard anything like this lately?

There have been many revelations lately of certain Christian personalities claiming god-like authority for themselves. Daystar TV President Joni Lamb spouted phrases like these after her son and daughter-in-law, Jonathan and Suzy Lamb, accused a family member of sexually abusing their daughter. Similarly, Joni’s ally, Jimmy Evans, claimed Joni was the “voice of God” when Jonathan and Suzy refused to endorse Joni’s marriage to Doug Weiss.

But Joni and Jimmy are just two in a long line of charismatic leaders who use such phrases to manipulate.

Some may think such teachings are of recent vintage. But these doctrines go way back – before Joni and Jimmy and a wide range of teachers, ranging from John Bevere and Benny Hinn to Bill Gothard of Basic Youth Conflicts fame began promulgating them.

Starting in the 1960s, they were incubated in a network of covenant Christian communities across the United States. These were groups of households – usually under the umbrella of a church or denomination but not always – that were dedicated to living the Christian life as described in Acts 2, where they shared all things in common.

Often dedicated to noble pursuits such as evangelism, helping the poor, or living an unsullied existence much like the Amish, they were where many converts in the Jesus movement learned the basics of Christianity.

But the charismatic communities came with an extra set of baggage. They were an experimental playground for a vague doctrine that came to be known under several titles: shepherding, discipleship, authority, and submission.

One of the major originators may be a surprise: Watchman Nee, the well-known spiritual writer who valiantly suffered long years of imprisonment by the Chinese Communists.

Let me explain.

In the early 1990s, I had just spent most of the previous decade, either living in a covenant community or interviewing those who lived in the legendary ones of the 1970s and 80s. We’re talking about the massive Catholic charismatic communities like Word of God in Ann Arbor and Mother of God in Potomac, Maryland; the Anabaptist Reba Place Fellowship in Evanston, Illinois, and the liberal evangelical Sojourners in Washington DC.

These communities date back to a phenomenon that sprang up in the 1960s when hippies began living together in communes. Anabaptist, Mennonite, and Amish groups had been living in communal set-ups for decades. But what started in churches toward the late 1960s was a new creature altogether.

I was especially interested in Church of the Redeemer in Houston, an Episcopal parish in the city’s run-down East End. It was headed by a priest, Graham Pulkingham, who had just encountered the charismatic renewal at the hands of David Wilkerson in 1964. It wasn’t long before Pulkingham got key members of his parish involved in the renewal.

Houston was on the hippie trail to California at the time, and many lost youths were showing up – and staying – at Redeemer. They moved in with some of the elders and their families – sometimes with up to 20 people to a household (fortunately Houston had minimal zoning regulations) – and some kind of rule of life had to be applied. Houston’s community households were the first experiments in an almost monastic style of living with a hierarchical structure with your household ‘head’ as the sole authority.

For the drugged-out hippies, this worked. But as people matured and got healed, the system based on submission felt restrictive.

People from all over the world visited Redeemer to copy their community/household style of living and their numinous three-hour worship liturgies that packed the church on Sundays, and produced multiple worship albums.

Communities sprung up worldwide, yet, by the early 1990s, many of them had fallen apart. And I was curious to find out why something with such high aspirations had collapsed. I was earning a master’s degree at an Episcopal seminary at the time, and I asked if I could pursue this question in my thesis. This piece is taken from that 106-page document and from my 2009 book: “Days of Fire and Glory: The Rise and Fall of a Charismatic Community,” about Redeemer.

Transport yourself back to the late 1960s for a moment. Charismatic theology was in such an infancy stage at the time that one could get away with almost anything, provided there were Bible verses to support it.

Ironically, the authority and submission teachings were originally imposed as a way to tame the charismatic renewal. Like the hippies of that era, this new form of Pentecostalism was known for its perceived emotionalism, its preference for folk-type music, its informality and lack of tradition.

What does Watchman Nee have to do with this? After he died in 1972, Nee’s works became famous among young evangelicals in the States, primarily those involved in the Jesus movement.

God is the source of all authority, he wrote, delegating this authority through a chain of command whereby each person has another person who is a “covering.”

One is never to question that “covering,” because all authority comes from God, based on 1 Peter 2:13-14 and Romans 13:1. To question authority and refuse submission is to rebel against God, Nee wrote.

Out of this grew the idea that we should obey our authority right or wrong because God does not hold us culpable for wrong decisions; he holds our authority responsible. Right or wrong is not as important as is obedience. One cannot even appeal to one’s own moral compass that says the elder is wrong.

By the 1970s, this idea was widespread in the kind of covenant communities mentioned above. I experienced this when I questioned the way I was being made to give up my ego, as it were, while living in a women’s household in a Portland (Oregon) community in the early 1980s.

I was told I wasn’t to question but to obey. It felt like being in the military or in a religious order; (in fact, a few years after I left, this community became a lay Catholic order.) Paul “Bono” Hewson of the band U2 had a similar experience in the early 80s while living in an Irish community called Shalom – and he was reading Watchman Nee too.

You can imagine how this philosophy affected Christian marriage counseling. Women had to obey their husbands without question. The teaching was that one’s husband was one’s covering; that he was solely responsible for the wife’s actions and that even if the husband’s counsel was wrong, God would honor the wife for obeying.

In other words, the way to experience spiritual victory was to submit to your spiritual authority who has revelation from God about you, which was more accurate than what God might be saying to you.

“No one can expect to have light directly from the Lord if he refuses to have light from the delegated authority,” Nee wrote in his book “Spiritual Authority.”

What this did was cripple peoples’ ability to hear God for themselves.

Not only would elders or leaders advise church members on moral issues, they would also advise them on non- doctrinal and non-moral issues, i.e. who to date, where to move, what kind of clothing to wear, child raising and more.

The concept of discipling got added to this mix with the help of Argentinian pastor Juan Carlos Ortiz, whose 1975 book “Call to Discipleship” emphasized being discipled by a teacher (like Jesus with the disciples) and in turn reaching out to others and discipling them.

This idea was not bad in itself, but five Florida teachers based in Fort Lauderdale: Bob Mumford, Charles Simpson, Ern Baxter, Don Basham and Derek Prince, expanded on this concept greatly. “The Fort Lauderdale five” as some called them,  ended up as unofficial apostles in a movement of thousands of men submitted to them through networks of “shepherds” and “sheep.”

Covenants between shepherd and sheep were considered lifelong and one’s salvation was in danger should it be abrogated. Shepherds decided who and when their sheep should marry, who to shun, how to dress, what news publications to read and other details that go miles beyond the biblical mandates for pastoring or shepherding. One’s financial and sex life was also open to scrutiny.

The hope was that the shepherd will chip away at the raw material of the sheep, attempting to create a disciple patterned after the biblical model.

Remember, these were the days of the Jesus movement where (in my memory) you couldn’t go on the streets of any major city without running into a street evangelist. People were hungry.  Charles Simpson was working with 80 persons in the discipleship process in 1973. By 1976, his influence had expanded to 2,500 persons. By 1979, it was 10,000.

Early in the 1970s, Mumford preached a series, “Knowing Authority and Submission” that described shepherding. Here are two juicy paragraphs:

“Don’t get involved in groups and teachings . . . unless your shepherd knows where you are,” he said. Going on vacation? “Call your shepherd and let him know,” he said. “That way you will be covered while you are on vacation; his covering, his authority and his spirit will be with you while you are away.”

And then, “I know of one particular church that has had continual revival for nine years,” Mumford added. “The philosophy of that church is: The pastor is right, even when he is wrong.” If you think that is stupid, you ought to drink of it and see what happens. Who will God deal with the fastest when the sheep are submitted? The shepherd. The Lord will grab that shepherd and ‘clean his plow.’ ”

These ideas spread quickly across all sectors of the renewal because its leaders were talking with each other. Derek Prince and Don Basham dropped by the 3,000-member Catholic charismatic Word of God community in February 1970 to introduce the concept of deliverance from evil spirits (a specialty of Basham’s). Small wonder, then, that their ideas on authority and submission got picked up as well.

Meanwhile charismatics from the Word of God community were winding their way to Houston to get pointers on community living (Redeemer already had a well-established household system by the time the Catholics got involved in the early ‘70s) and to pick up new music from Redeemer’s popular coffeehouse. They may also have listened to some of Pulkingham’s teachings on the idea of “perfect elders.”

Here’s a sample of Pulkingham’s thoughts: “In the midst of any community, there must be persons who, for the lack of a better term I will call elders, whose lives are absolutely perfect in Christ, without a single flaw, who are absolutely, unconditionally, totally committed to live the life of the Father and who in fact do it: Publicly, openly, powerfully and who therefore by the exemplary fashion of their life, by the precept of their teachings and by their words command every member of the community to follow their example and will not countenance anything that is compromise.”

That was from a sermon series he gave in 1975, but he was thinking along those lines much earlier. They had learned at Redeemer that the easiest way to bring about the right kind of elder/younger relationship was for the “younger” to literally move in with the elder where their responses and behavior are observed 24 hours a day. This kind of hothouse atmosphere tended to mature the ‘youngers’ fast.

To know how things ended at Redeemer, please read my book, but be warned. As it says in the musical Carousel, “the ending will be sad.”

When I was preparing the book for publication and going over the notes for some 182 interviews, the overriding emotion I picked up was anger. These were people who’d wanted one thing for their lives, but their leaders wanted another. So, they gave up college, careers, even marriages to obey, only to find out many of those leaders were wrong after all and they were left holding the bag.

Some people never got over the potential fiancé they were talked out of; the college they never got to attend; the years they lost because of a flawed principle of authority and submission.

Eventually, apologies were made. On the January/February 1990 cover of Ministries Today magazine in stark black and white were these words by Bob Mumford: “Discipleship was wrong. I repent. I ask forgiveness,” along with an article on how this movement went wrong.

Leaders at Word of God and other communities confessed they had overstepped their bounds. I was amazed at how fast judgment descended. The more fervent and powerful the ministry, the greater the fall. A lot of the communities and ministries into heavy submission teachings crashed and burned. Redeemer itself was de-consecrated in 2011 and eventually turned into a set of apartments in east Houston. 

Authority and submission concepts went underground – for a time. Then I was shocked to hear echoes of it at Mark Driscoll‘s Mars Hill Church in Seattle two decades later. And then I heard about it at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City.

And then I heard of more places, with some new twists, such as non-disclosure agreements that Christians were mandated to sign. Or, if you wanted to become a member at a certain church, you had to sign an agreement promising not to gossip about any of the leaders. (However, said leaders were under no obligation not to talk behind your back).

New techniques at enforcing submission were out there in full swing. No one had learned from the utter mess and chaos they had caused back in the 1970s to the 1990s.

And so, I’m posting this as a warning. Christians who are trained under elders using strict authority/submission teachings often mature quickly as believers and show a lot of spiritual fruit quickly.

But results of those teachings are almost always toxic in the long run. No elder can hear God’s voice for another Christian; the same is true for a husband over a wife. We each rise or fall before God on our own.

Julia Duin is a Seattle-based writer, who has been a reporter or editor for six newspapers or magazines, most recently as Newsweek’s religion correspondent, ending in 2023. In addition to freelance reporting, she also edits articles for The Roys Report (TRR). Direct any questions about this article or her other books to her site, juliaduin.com.

During April, TRR is offering Duin’s “Days of Fire and Glory” as our gift to supporters (click below for details).