The charismatic church is undergoing a long-overdue reckoning for several reasons as the misconduct of Shawn Bolz has come under heightened scrutiny, particularly in light of Mike Winger’s diligent YouTube exposés.
On Sunday, the senior leadership team at Bethel Church in Redding, Calif., including Dann Farrelly, Kris Vallotton, and Bill Johnson, admitted their multiple failures and repented publicly for specific actions and inactions regarding Bolz’s misconduct, specifically datamining social media for personal information and presenting it as prophecy, and alleged workplace sexual harassment. This came after many months of pressure from Bethel's School of Ministry alumni and others around the world who had been demanding greater accountability after various podcasters, especially Winger, started publishing videos documenting the deception and manipulation.
Also under scrutiny is how those leaders — who promoted and platformed Bolz for several years — presided over a culture of “unsanctified mercy” and lack of accountability, which effectively covered up Bolz’s egregious sins.
In the interest of full transparency, I am an alumnus of Bethel's ministry school, a fact I have not hidden and has been in my public byline biography for several years, and is noted elsewhere online. Despite some theological differences I have with them, particularly regarding ecclesiology and a few other issues, as I said in a recent interview with Wanda Alger, my time there was largely positive, and it helped equip me for my next season. But this essay is not about those differences.
Now that my CP colleague, Leah Klett, has independently reported on the Bolz exposure on the news side, the time has come for me to provide perspective as an alum who works in media and, for reasons I’m about to describe, has been watching from afar, and in frustrated anguish, as this unfolded.
Since I’m employed by The Christian Post, as the story emerged, I’ve had to exercise serious restraint on social media lest anyone interpret any comment I make as indicative of CP’s editorial posture. As an alumnus, due to journalistic ethics and conflict of interest considerations, my editors do not allow those with personal affiliations and relationships within ministries to investigate and report under the CP masthead when controversies and scandals of this sort erupt. I am thus bound by certain rules that podcasters like Winger and JonMark Baker of the Minor Prophets, who have been exposing this (and for whom I am most grateful), are not.
Among the many things documented in these podcasts are how, over the course of several years and in several settings, Bolz datamined social media to give “words of knowledge” as though the personal information about people that he obtained online was supernaturally revealed to him by the Holy Spirit. There are many victims of this heinous spiritual abuse. Bolz is also alleged to have engaged in gross sexual impropriety that constitutes workplace harassment, of which there are reportedly several adult male victims, one of whom I know. I first started hearing chatter about this in the spring of 2022, in my final weeks of graduate school.
While I do not have the bandwidth to speak to every facet of what has transpired and what may yet unfold, it is important to address what I am intimately familiar with, particularly in light of the journalistic work I have already done.
I have written about Elijah Stephens’ documentary film, Send Proof, a few times, once as a Patheos blogger before joining The Christian Post in 2016, and two times as a CP reporter. We also recorded an interview on a separate podcast about the project. Part of the history of the film’s origin was when Bolz gave Stephens a stunningly specific “word” in the spring of 2015 at Bethel about the very project Stephens had dreamed of doing — a documentary about the scientific evidence for miracles of healing and corroborating the supernatural with medical testing and physical evidence.
In fact, as Stephens and I discussed in the podcast, I was the one who called him to inform him in 2015 that Bolz had called his name out from the stage while speaking at Bethel. Stephens, who was at home at the time, drove there to receive this “word” from Bolz, and it seemed like an extraordinary, indeed divine, confirmation of his creative vision. After years of diligence and enormous sacrifice on his part, the film was released in 2021. It was compelling and well-received.
Let me be unequivocal here: I find the evidence that Winger and others have provided that Bolz datamined social media for fake prophecies to be incontrovertible, and I consider what he did to be an appallingly outrageous perversion of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Due to this malpractice, Stephens’ obedience and labor of love were gravely ruptured as Bolz’s fraudulent words were featured in the film's storyline. It was especially tainted because Stephens documented in the film the problem of religious shysters and how they damage faith, deliberately mentioning charlatans like the infamous televangelist Peter Popoff, who was exposed giving “words from God” to people when he was in fact being fed personal information about who he was speaking to through an earpiece. You could say that Bolz is Popoff 2.0. At the very least, Stephens deserves a personal apology from Bethel's leaders for their role in this terrible deception. I was quite glad to see Winger interview Stephens last year to help bring further light.
Increasingly troubled as I learned more, but knowing I could not investigate and report on the story in my professional capacity because of my personal affiliations, I began doing what I could — curating op-eds on the larger but related issues from like-minded people, who were similarly troubled and would point out the structural problems, weak leadership, and lack of accountability within charismatic circles. I know I speak for many alums that when Bethel’s leadership team responded to the Bolz fallout in February 2025, the statement fell extremely short, and it came across as too little, too late. Nor did it adequately address the roots of the spiritual malfeasance and layers of manipulation.
Finally, in late January 2025, a few weeks before the February statement, one of the victims who made allegations of Bolz's sexual impropriety reached out to me by phone to share his story and seek my advice. I told him that if he wanted to go on the record, I would gladly connect him with an investigative reporter since I was precluded from covering it myself, again, given my alumni status and the conflict of interest and journalistic ethics issues at hand. He understood and ultimately decided that he was not ready to come forward at the time, and he was still processing how to proceed. I called this man last week, and he confirmed that I could mention in this essay that we conversed approximately one year ago about this. I have also spoken with two advocates for victims of sexual misconduct, whom I trust, and they corroborrated his story and the accounts of several others they knew.
It has been a fraught and heavy burden to carry this dreadful knowledge all these months while operating within certain professional constraints, though not nearly as hard as those who have been directly manipulated and harmed by Bolz and ministry leaders who, by their misguided actions and inaction, covered for him.
Much will be hashed out in the coming weeks about protocols within Bethel, its affiliated ministries, and other charismatic streams that have contributed to this grievous morass. Although I was grateful to see the senior leadership team's repentance that occurred on Sunday, this process will take time, especially as more wounded people emerge, and it must not be rushed.
May God have mercy on all the victims.
Shawn Bolz has been contacted for comment.
