Should Christians pray against principalities over cities?

Question 08076

The question of whether praying against principalities over cities is a legitimate Christian practice sounds technical, but a great deal hangs on it. Entire prayer movements have been built on the assumption that it is, and many believers have been made to feel unspiritual for hesitating.

I do hesitate, and I want to explain why carefully rather than dismissively. The people who do this are usually praying because they love their towns, and that deserves respect even where I think the method is mistaken.

What Is Actually Being Proposed

The proposal is that above a city sits a ruling spiritual power, that this power accounts for the city’s particular character and its resistance to the gospel, and that believers can address that power directly in prayer in order to weaken or displace it.

In practice this means intercessors gathering, often at a significant location, and speaking to the power. It may be named, commanded, bound, or told that its authority is broken. The language is confident and the atmosphere is usually intense.

So praying against principalities is not simply asking God to work in a place. It is a specific practice of verbal engagement with a spiritual being, on the initiative of the believers involved.

C. Peter Wagner and Strategic-Level Warfare

The framework was set out most fully by C. Peter Wagner, who taught church growth at Fuller and became the leading advocate of what he called strategic-level spiritual warfare. He distinguished ground-level warfare, meaning ordinary deliverance, from occult-level warfare, and then from strategic-level engagement with territorial powers.

Wagner argued that this third level was the missing key to worldwide evangelisation, and he built a substantial international network around it during the nineteen nineties. He later became a central figure in the New Apostolic Reformation, which tells you a good deal about where the trajectory led.

I mention his name because he is the source, and because the practice is often taught now by people who have never read him and do not know where the ideas came from. It is worth knowing that praying against principalities in this fashion has a traceable origin in the last forty years.

Ephesians 6 and the Direction of Prayer

The passage always cited is Ephesians 6, and it is worth reading with the question in mind. Paul describes the enemy, describes the armour, and then in Ephesians 6:18 tells the believers to be praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication, keeping alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints.

Look at where that prayer is directed. It is offered in the Spirit, and it is offered for the saints. It is not addressed to the powers named six verses earlier. If ever there were a place for Paul to instruct a church in praying against principalities, this is it, and he does not.

He then asks them to pray for him, that words may be given him boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel. The apostle’s own prayer request, in the middle of the great spiritual warfare passage, is for courage to preach.

Whether Praying Against Principalities Has Any Warrant

Search the New Testament for a single instance of a believer praying against principalities and you will not find one. Not in the recorded prayers of Acts, not in the prayers Paul writes out in his letters, not in the model prayer Jesus gave, not in Revelation.

The recorded prayers of the early church are striking for what they ask. In Acts 4, facing genuine persecution, the believers pray for boldness and for God to stretch out His hand. They do not address the powers behind Herod and Pilate, though they mention them.

That is a considerable body of evidence. When the whole New Testament shows us people praying and none of them prays this way, the burden of proof sits heavily on those who say we should.

Daniel’s Prayer as the Test Case

Daniel 10 is the passage that generates the whole idea, so it should be decisive. What was Daniel doing during the twenty-one days in which the prince of Persia opposed the messenger? He was mourning, fasting and praying to God, exactly as he had been in Daniel 9:3.

He did not know a conflict was taking place. He learned of it only when the messenger arrived and explained the delay. His prayer had been effective from the first day, we are told, and its effectiveness had nothing to do with addressing anything.

So the founding text of the practice shows a man doing the opposite of the practice. That is not a small difficulty, and in my experience it is rarely faced by those who teach praying against principalities.

The Problems with the Wagner Framework

Beyond the exegesis there are structural problems. The framework requires knowledge nobody can verify, since the identity of a power must be discerned rather than demonstrated. It creates a tier of specialists whose authority rests on that discernment. And it makes evangelistic outcomes dependent on a preliminary spiritual operation that Scripture never mentions.

It also sits awkwardly with the cross. Colossians 2:15 says God disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, triumphing over them in Jesus. If that is true, and it is, then the powers over any city are already publicly defeated, and the church’s task is to announce the victory rather than to secure it.

There is a final concern about the fruit. The movement that made praying against principalities central has produced a great deal of extravagant claim and very little verifiable change, and it has drifted steadily toward the apostolic and prophetic structures I would want no part of.

What the New Testament Tells Us to Pray for a City

The instructions are not scarce. Pray for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way, which 1 Timothy 2:1-2 sets out plainly. Pray that the word of the Lord may speed ahead and be honoured. Pray for open doors and clear speech. Pray for labourers for the harvest. Pray for the salvation of specific people.

Every one of those is addressed to God and concerns people. That is the shape of New Testament prayer for a place, and it is a great deal more demanding than it sounds, because it requires you to know the people you are praying for.

See also what territorial spirits are and what spiritual mapping involves.

Where the Practice Leaves People

I have watched congregations invest years in this. What tends to remain afterwards is tiredness and a quiet embarrassment that nobody names. The city looks much as it did. The explanations for that grow more complicated over time.

Meanwhile the ordinary work often went undone. Nobody objects to intercession, and I would never discourage a church from praying long and hard for its town. The question is what the praying consists of, and whether it has been aimed at God or at the air.

Praying Against Principalities and the Question of Fruit

Jesus told us to assess teaching by its fruit, so it is fair to ask what this movement has produced. Three decades on, we have a large body of claim and very little that anyone can point to. Cities that were declared open have not noticeably changed. Campaigns announced as decisive turning points have passed without measurable effect.

Meanwhile the movement most committed to praying against principalities went on to develop structures of self-appointed apostles and prophets, extravagant claims of authority, and a habit of announcing outcomes that did not arrive. That trajectory is not incidental. It follows naturally from a framework in which spiritual reality is known by impression and success is measured by declaration.

I would set that against the quieter record of ordinary churches preaching the gospel week after week in unremarkable towns, seeing people converted one at a time over decades. That is unglamorous and it is what actually changes a place, and Romans 1:16 tells us why: the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.

So, now what?

Let me add one qualification so I am not misread. I am not saying spiritual opposition to gospel work is imaginary. Paul says plainly that Satan hindered him from visiting Thessalonica, and anyone who has laboured in a hard place knows the resistance is real.

The question is what to do about it, and the apostolic answer is to keep going, to pray to God, and to ask for boldness. Endurance is the weapon here, and it is more effective than it looks.

If you are part of a group that practises this, I would not walk out. I would gently steer the praying toward God, toward named people, toward the local authorities, and toward boldness for the members who will actually speak to someone this week. Most groups follow that lead more readily than you would expect.

If you have been told your hesitation shows a lack of faith, take heart. Daniel prayed for three weeks without ever addressing a power, and heaven was fully engaged the whole time.

Who are the people in your town that you could start praying for by name tomorrow morning?

“First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.”

1 Timothy 2:1-2, ESV