Vance Boelter and the Rise of “Spiritual Warfare”
In the lobby of Christ for the Nations Institute in early 2024, a mural read, “Everyone ought to pray at least one violent prayer each day,” a quote from the institute’s founder. On a visit to the institute, the journalist Jeff Sharlet spoke to a student about what “violent prayer” meant. It was necessary, the student said, “to remind yourself every day that ‘the culture’—the rest of us, the unsaved—are the enemy,” Sharlet remembered. The student clarified: “‘Not you, in particular,’ he said. ‘Just, you know, the culture.’” That’s the two-step independent charismatics commonly deploy. They dismiss calls for violent prayer and spiritual warfare as calls for merely spiritual, not actual, violence. The discourse of spiritual war is an ordinary part of the vocabulary of the people who would be in Boelter’s orbit, Taylor told me. “I think you hear it in some of his preaching as well, this sense of demonic forces that are gathered against Christians and that need to be battled back.”
In this light, some of Boelter’s seemingly half-baked ventures—from ministry to private security, to international development—make a little more sense. “Reverend Vance Boelter” has been “ordained since 1993,” stated the website of Revoformation Ministries (according to an archived copy), a nonprofit organization Boelter said he heads, which has an IRS paper trail back to 2007 but no substantive activity. The site also claimed that Boelter “sought out militant Islamists in order to share the gospel and tell them that violence wasn’t the answer.” On the nonprofit’s most recent tax filing, its address was given as what appears to be a private family home, seen on Google Street View with a dark vehicle with police lights parked in the driveway. It is nearly identical to the vehicle recently on the home page (also now archived) forBoelter’s private security service firm, Praetorian Guard Services, which boasted, “Our presence, including vehicles, guards, and signs, is designed to say, ‘This isn’t a target worth looking at because the potential consequences would be too great.’”
Identifying himself as “Dr. Vance Boelter E.d.D., CEO of Red Lion Group” on LinkedIn, Boelter gives some hint of what he considered his real vocation: being a kind of entrepreneurial missionary. In fact, as Taylor explained, it’s a common type among nondenominational charismatics. “There’s a lot of people like this,” Taylor told me, “who’ve been trained and have some ministry background … [but] can’t quite make a career out of that, or for individual or familial reasons,” who still maintain “a kind of ministry platform or business or something, on the side.”
Over the course of four sermons given by “Dr. Vance” in 2021, 2022, and 2023 at La Borne Matadi, an evangelical church in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Boelter had for perhaps the first time a significant platform, visible to thousands of people; his hosts also introduced him as a successful businessman. Over these sermons, Boelter’s remarks undeniably show animus toward people who he would say deviated from God’s plan, who support abortion and queer and trans people. But this appears alongside equally strident preaching against a church just as much in need of rescue, in the words of the independent charismatics he shares, by “apostles and prophets.”
