Howard Carter (Evangelist)

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Baptist Minister, Pastor Howard Carter was a Fundamentalist Evangelical Christian religious leader possibly best known for his creation of Logos Foundation c.1966 which in the mid-1980s became the Covenant Evangelical Church. Carter moved his family from New Zealand to Australia in 1969. He earned a L.Th.(NZ Baptist Theological College) and a M.A. degree (field & awarding institution unknown).

[edit] Biography

Through the late 60s and throughout the 1970s he was influential in the charismatic movement's growth in the mainstream churches in Australia and regularly organised "Holy Spirit Teaching Seminars" in Sydney. His teaching was centred on themes of Christ's pre-eminence, Victorious living, and Charisma. The majority of his teachings were distributed through the "Logos/Restore magazine" and short books. Carter was a charismatic leader, who became involved with a number of Authoritarian Protestant religious groups and churches in Australia and the South Pacific.

In the mid-1970s he was instrumental in introducing "heavy discipleship/shepherding" (from the "Fort Lauderdale Five" of Christian Growth Ministries) to Oceania. This teaching promoted a pyramid-like hierarchy in which each disciple was accountable to a personal pastor (usually the "cell group" leader) for whole-life aspects and decisions, and written covenants were encouraged - aspects that theologically distanced the Logos movement from the New Testament's "priesthood of believers" as understood by the majority of Evangelical Christians.

Doctrines of submission to God's delegated authorities in order to provide "covering", and complete spiritual protection, were regularly promoted and were narrowly applied to wives obeying husbands, children obeying parents, and disciples obeying leaders. Leaders in the movement were required to be addressed by titles "Brother" and "Sister", Carter taught, which had a side-effect of distancing them socially even further from the ordinary disciples of Jesus in the movement. 'Brother Howard' announced that he was in "a submitted relationship" to the apostolic group at CGM of Bob Mumford, Ern Baxter, Charles Simpson, Derek Prince and Don Basham. This inferred that he was being discipled in the same way he was discipling his followers. While the teachings appeared to be biblical and promoting disciplined living, the result for non-leaders was a disempowering of their abilities, and a neglect of utilisation of their individual charisms and insights - focusing on "star" leaders rather than developing the unique ministries of every believer ("body life").

The Logos-related churches in 1980 became the Australian Fellowship of Covenant Communities, and in the mid-80s were renamed the Covenant Evangelical Church.

In the early 1980s he led the Logos movement through a shift in eschatology from Premillennialism (which was described as a theology of defeat) to Postmillenialism (a theology of victory !) of the specific stream of Dominionist, Reconstructionist Theonomy. Some of his leadership team, including Pastor David Jackson of Christian Faith Centre Sydney, left the movement as a result.

Carter is arguably most infamous for the Logos Foundation political campaign in the 1989 Queensland State election, where he pushed the position that adherence to Fundamentalist Christian doctrine was a more important consideration than opposition to the widespread corruption that had been exposed by the Fitzgerald Inquiry.

In the late 1980s, Carter lost control of Logos Foundation as a result of a very public adultery scandal. The "submitted relationship" to 'modern-day apostles' did not protect him , nor his family nor his many followers from his own struggle. [1]

Carter died in Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia on July 28th 1992.