Two Roads Diverged: A Tale of Two Five-Fold Stories

Announcing a new series: NAR vs. the Healthy Fivefold—Why the Future of the Church Hangs in the Balance

“So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers… to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up… until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature.”
— Ephesians 4:11–13

For over two decades, a quiet reformation has been humming beneath the noise. Some of us have been stumbling—gratefully—into the rediscovery of the fivefold gifts. Not as fancy titles or ecclesial name tags, but as the living ministry of Jesus distributed across His body like holy electricity.

Apostles spark movement.
Prophets shake us awake.
Evangelists won’t shut up (in the best way).
Shepherds bind wounds and hold space.
Teachers build the scaffolding under our feet.

And when these gifts walk in step? We don’t just talk about the fullness of Christ—we actually start to look like Him.

This is the fivefold vision Alan Hirsch laid out in The Forgotten Ways and 5Q—and let’s be honest, it wrecked us (in the best way). Many of you—like us in the KC Underground—are doing the deep work of weaving this into the everyday fabric of your life together. And here’s what we’re seeing: when the fivefold is more than theory, ordinary people start living like disciple-makers. Simples expressions of churches pop up in neighborhoods and networks. Elders stop managing and start coaching. Leaders stop hoarding and start equipping and releasing. The Body begins to breathe again—and move.

Together, we’re rediscovering an ancient and beautifully subversive vision of church—one that is decentralized, Spirit-led, and carried by every member of the Body. At the center of this reawakening lies a simple, powerful idea: Jesus has given his Church five gifts—apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, and teacher (APEST)—and those gifts are meant to be distributed, activated, and harmonized throughout the whole Body, not concentrated in a few.

But that’s only one of the stories being told.

There is another.

Meanwhile, another movement has staked its claim on Ephesians 4 too—but the fruit couldn’t be more different. The New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), launched and platformed by C. Peter Wagner, has taken the fivefold and weaponized it. Instead of releasing the Body, they’ve built pyramids—stacking authority, crowning modern apostles and prophets with near-biblical clout, and broadcasting fresh “revelations” like spiritual influencers. All this in the name of reclaiming culture, taking back the seven mountains, and “ruling and reigning with Christ”—which somehow keeps aligning with nationalism, conquest, and strongman politics.

Same scripture.
Two visions.
Two roads.

This series is about those roads. And the deep, often unnoticed divergence that has occurred within the body of Christ over the last 25 years.

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🌱 Why This Matters Now

In an age of collapsing trust in institutions, rising spiritual hunger, and cultural fault lines that crack open wider by the day—like the streets of Los Angeles this week—the Church stands at a crossroads. Will we embody the way of Jesus, whose power is revealed through self-giving love, whose Kingdom comes not by force but by the Spirit? Or will we double down on a path that fuses spiritual authority with political conquest—wielding the fivefold not to equip the saints but to control the stage? One road leads to cruciform community. The other to chaos dressed in religious clothing.

APEST isn’t just a theological footnote anymore—it’s front and center in the battle for the Church’s future. What started as a framework for equipping is now a contested ecclesiology shaping how we think about leadership, power, authority, and the very nature of the Church. And make no mistake: the way we live it out will determine which Jesus the world encounters.

This series is a side-by-side comparison—more like a reality check—between two divergent visions:

• The New Apostolic Reformation (NAR):
  A top-down movement rooted in hierarchy, dominion theology, and charismatic spectacle—where apostles and prophets climb the mountain of influence rather than carry a cross.

• The Healthy Fivefold Vision (Hirsch & beyond):
  A movement-shaped, biblically grounded, Spirit-distributed model of equipping—where leadership looks like servanthood, power is shared not hoarded, and the Body gets to breathe.

We’ll draw from Scripture, church history, and the gritty lessons of real-world practice. Along the way, we’ll lean into voices like Alan Hirsch (5Q, The Forgotten Ways), Lance Ford, and the decentralized wisdom of the Starfish framework. But we’ll also listen closely to the caution lights—scholars like Dr. Matthew Taylor, R. Douglas Geivett, and Holly Pivec (A New Apostolic Reformation?), who’ve done the hard work of documenting the theological drift and practical damage of NAR ideology.

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✈️ When Two Books Became a Rosetta Stone

In the early 2000s, during the wild, early days of a disciple-making movement in India, I (Rob) boarded a long flight with two books in my hands: The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch and The Starfish and the Spider by Brafman and Beckstrom. I had just witnessed something staggering—a movement that grew from a handful of believers to over tens of thousands of new disciples and thousands of microchurches in less than a decade.

But how?

Like the Rosetta Stone, those books helped me decipher and articulate what we were seeing unfold on the ground.

• Apostolic DNA pulsing beneath the surface.

• Spiritual authority that was distributed, not hoarded.

• Leadership as catalyst, not control.

• Ordinary disciple-makers leading the charge—not professionals with titles.

Hirsch’s fivefold framework—and the way he wove APEST into the larger movement DNA (mDNA)—became a kind of decoder ring for what the Spirit was doing. It gave language to what we were living.

When we co-authored The Starfish and the Spirit, we were seeking to add our voice to these dynamics in our own small way as well, by naming seven “starfish” dimensions of movement leadership. When it comes to movement leadership, if there’s a silver bullet, this might be it: APEST—the distributed ministry of Jesus released through His Body.

Now rewind the tape to the mid-90s.

Long before I ever cracked open The Forgotten Ways, I was reading C. Peter Wagner. And to be honest, his books left a mark. Back then, I was part of a group of guys who met in the early dark to pray—hungry for revival in the Church and awakening in our city. We started studying global prayer movements, drawing strength from leaders like Pastor Cho in South Korea, and leaning into the kind of intercession that rattled our categories.

That journey eventually led us to Wagner’s writings on spiritual warfare. He was drawing from what he’d seen in churches across the Global South—places like Africa, India, and Latin America—where spiritual battle wasn’t theoretical, it was reality.

I still remember when The New Apostolic Reformation hit the shelves. I picked it up with genuine interest. But as I read, something in me tightened. It felt theologically unmoored—like Wagner had lost something vital along the way. And to be honest, his spiritual warfare writings were already getting… weird. But that book? It felt like the moment he jumped the shark. It was the last one I read.

The chase after the pragmatic and the supernatural had given way to what I could only describe as strange fire.

So I moved on. Wagner faded into the background of my imagination.

What I never could have imagined? That the ideas in that book would metastasize into a movement—one that now shapes tens of thousands of churches and exerts influence over millions across the globe. I had no clue how far it would spread. Or how much it would matter.

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⚖️ Same Text. Different Spirit.

NAR leaders often use the same fivefold language—but don’t be fooled. They may say “apostle” and “prophet,” but they mean something very different. For Hirsch, the fivefold are the ontological architecture of the Church—gifts rooted in the nature of Jesus, meant to equip the whole Body for mission. But Wagner took those gifts and turned them into hierarchical offices, with apostles and prophets claiming top-tier authority over churches, cities, and even nations. One vision empowers the many. The other crowns the few.

🔍 Two Interpretations at a Glance

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🧬 The Stakes: Formed by What We Follow

The danger of the NAR model isn’t just theological—it’s formational. It doesn’t just distort our structures; it deforms our souls.

In 5Q, Hirsch reminds us that APEST isn’t about ministry roles—it’s about shaping people. When apostles dominate and prophets decree from on high, we don’t just end up with bad governance. We end up with malformed disciples. We create churches hooked on platforms, chasing spiritual fireworks, conditioned to consume rather than embody the mission.

How we view apostles, prophets, and the other equipping gifts shapes everything:

• Who gets access (and who gets silenced)

• What leadership looks like (generals or foot-washers?)

• How we understand revelation (solo downloads or communal discernment?)

• Where spiritual authority lives (on a stage or around a table?)

And in the end, it defines the kind of Church we’re becoming:

A spiritual oligarchy?

Or a Spirit-empowered priesthood of all believers?

Because in the healthy fivefold:

• Apostles spark new mission.

• Prophets call out compromise.

• Evangelists welcome the searching.

• Shepherds walk alongside.

• Teachers anchor us in truth.

This Substack is for those of us walking the decentralized road—networks, microchurches, missional communities, neighborhood and network-based expressions of the Church. And let’s be honest: we’re often the ones most passionate about APEST.

But that means we bear a unique responsibility.

We must distinguish ourselves from the NAR-story of the Five-Fold—not only in theology, but in practice and perception. Because this isn’t just leadership theory. It’s about the future of the Church.

The fivefold ministry is not some novelty. It’s embedded in the architecture of the early Church. In Acts 13, we see a Spirit-soaked community of prophets and teachers fasting, worshiping, and listening together. Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus describe elder-level leadership marked by care, discernment, and grounded teaching—not domination or decree.

And in 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4, we find it plain: these gifts are given “to equip the saints for the work of ministry… so that we all may become mature.”

Maturity—not control.
Mutuality—not hierarchy.
Christ as Head—not anointed human intermediaries.

In 5Q, Hirsch puts it bluntly:

“The fivefold is the means by which the Church becomes the Church. Without the activation of all five, we cannot reflect the full measure of Christ.”

That’s what we’re after.
Not apostles on stages.
But Jesus in every street.

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🔍 Where We Go From Here

This series (alongside our usual posts in the coming weeks) will dig deeper into both streams—tracing their roots, unpacking their implications, and exploring what’s at stake for the future of the Church. We’ll look at:

1. APOSTLES OR ARCHITECTS? – How apostolic leadership became militarized in the NAR, and how Hirsch reframes it for movement.

2. WHEN PROPHECY BECOMES A MEME - When prophecy becomes a meme, we trade sacred discernment for viral spectacle—and the Church forgets how to listen.

3. REVIVAL OR RULE? – Why worship gatherings turned political, and why revival divorced from cruciformity leads to idolatry.

4. NETWORK OR EMPIRE? – What structures best support Spirit-led community and mission.

5. RECLAIMING THE FIVEFOLD – A vision for equipping and maturing the Church in the way of Jesus.

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✨ Final Reflection

It’s no longer enough to say “we believe in APEST.”
The question is: What kind of APEST?

Is it a system of power? Or a pathway to maturity?

Is it a framework to equip the body? Or a ladder to climb?

Is it aligned with the self-giving way of Jesus? Or baptized ambition wearing apostolic robes?

The New Apostolic Reformation doesn’t have to be the future of the Church. The fivefold gifts—properly understood—remain one of the greatest treasures hidden in the soil of the Church.

Let us dig them out again.
Let us return to the Ephesians 4 vision of a body growing up into Christ, with every part doing its work, every gift released, and every disciple activated.

Let’s walk the narrow road.
The road of presence. The road of cruciform power.
The road where Jesus, not man, is the Head.

Next up: Apostles or Architects.