We tend to protect our leaders

I was having lunch with a few other church and ministry leaders within the charismatic movement when I first heard that International House of Prayer (IHOP) founder Mike Bickle had been credibly accused of sexual misconduct. The news was met with a solemn silence. 

That silence was suddenly broken with a confident declaration; “I don’t believe it.” 

In my heart, however, I feared that this was only the first domino to fall, and the confident assertion of innocence without the facts even being brought out was a microcosm of a systemic problem within our movement: we tend to protect our leaders. But why?

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I am a charismatic

I grew up in the Charismatic movement. When I was a child, the peculiar phenomena associated with the Toronto Blessing and the Brownsville Revival had come to visit my little church in Northern Michigan. But even as a 7-year-old, I knew there was something special happening. People were coming to Christ, and deep healing was happening in people’s hearts. We even saw dramatic physical healings, including the needle tracks disappearing from the arms of a young woman who had been delivered from a heroin addiction. I loved it. God was real to me. 

At 17, my hunger for more experiences with God grew to a white-hot intensity. I prayed constantly. I worked at a grocery store and wept in prayer and worship to Jesus as I stacked cans and bagged groceries. It was during this time that I began to hear testimonies of healings, prophecy, and the tangible experiences with the Lord that I desperately sought after coming from various leaders within the charismatic movement.

I devoured the sermons, music, books, and most importantly, the testimonies of those encounters with the God I love with a ravenous appetite for more. Leaders like Bill Johnson, John Arnott, Heidi Baker, Randy Clark, and many more became my heroes. I revered them as more than mere men. These were people whom God had chosen to trust with the thing I longed for so desperately: “revival.” And if God trusted them, so should I.

The silence of the shepherds

When the Lakeland Outpouring imploded, I was sad, but not devastated. “People fall sometimes,” I told myself. Todd Bentley seemed like a gifted man who needed maturity. I trusted Bill Johnson and Rick Joyner to handle the matter with wisdom. “Maybe Todd could actually be restored?”

Then in 2019 news broke that Todd Bentley had returned to ministry and had carried on with horrific abuse and sin that a panel of Charismatic leaders (people that I had never heard of) deemed to be disqualifying. But the big-name leaders of this movement that had so inspired me, the ones I knew and trusted were completely silent.

I was furious. Why the silence? Shouldn’t victims of abuse hear the voices of their ostensible shepherds rebuking wolves on their behalf? The very ones who took responsibility for “restoring” Todd Bentley after 2008, the very men who had laid hands on him that same year and appointed him as an apostle and authority figure within this movement are silent as church mice except to provide a rebuke to the whistleblower who had exposed things in the first place.

Then news about Mike Bickle’s alleged serial sexual misconduct began to drip out and people like Rick Joyner called it a “nothing burger” and even suggested Mike would return to ministry shortly. Others of my former heroes have yet to say a word to this day. Bickle’s alleged victims are all members of this movement, and those women deserved to hear the voices they respected speak a word in their defense. 

Silence. Deafening silence.

Amos’ rebuke to Israel (and to us)

I have wept much in prayer over the last year. I pray for the saints whose faith may have been rocked by these scandals. But it seems painfully obvious to me that in our desire to experience God, we have forgotten to obey Him.

“I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me.
Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.
Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream! (Amos 5:21-24 NIV).

In the charismatic movement, much attention is given to praise, worship, contemplative prayer, and the types of disciplines that lead to spiritual experience. These are good. But the Lord says these practices are a stench to Him if while doing them, we have neglected justice. When the shepherds and sheep are silent in the face of the accusations against Mike Bickle, Robert Morris, Daystar Television, Todd Bentley, Chris Reed, Bob Hartley, and many more; when we merely shut our ears and sing our songs hoping for the next personal encounter, the Lord says He despises it because while we praise Him with our lips we neglect justice for the victims of these predators. I wonder if we have loved the experience of praising God more than we have loved the God of our praise?

To love God is to love what He loves, and to hate what He hates. Our God is the avenger of the abused and the punisher of the wicked. Our God is the Good Shepherd who lays down His life for His sheep. He leaves the 99 to find the 1. Our God sides with the oppressed.

Seek God, not the structures we have built around God

The charismatic movement is filled with people like me who long for a deep, experiential walk with God. When we discovered places like Bethel and ministries like it, we felt as though we “found our tribe.” And many, like me, began to trust these leaders and even outsource our discernment and walk with God to those who had seen more than we had.

But the prophet Amos has a rebuke to us as well:

This is what the Lord says to Israel:
“Seek me and live;
do not seek Bethel,
do not go to Gilgal,
do not journey to Beersheba.
For Gilgal will surely go into exile,
and Bethel will be reduced to nothing” (Amos 5:4-5 NIV).

Resist the temptation to eisegete here. 

Bethel was the city of the King of Israel, Jeroboam. It was the seat of his power. Bethel was likely chosen because of its history of being a place where people met with God. After all, that’s where Jacob encountered the Lord and how the place got its name. (Bethel means “House of God.”) Bethel is where Eli judged Israel and facilitated the sacrificial system of worship to the Lord. Bethel became a place of power and safety for the Northern Kingdom and represented military might in which Israel could place their trust if an invading army came.

But in this passage, Amos is rebuking Israel for putting their trust in the structures that they had built around their history with God rather than in God Himself. God is saying through Amos, “Stop seeking the institutions that supposedly represent Me. Seek Me and live!”

Many charismatics have substituted the structures that surround our history with God for a genuine relationship with the Lord Himself. Many charismatics have forgotten what got us into this movement in the first place: a desire to love and experience God. Instead, many became infatuated with the personalities and institutions that have been built up around these encounters. We put our trust in the curators of “revival” and outsourced our discernment and more to those we considered to be fathers in this movement. We began to seek Bethel and not God and the Lord is displeased.

Let’s return to our first love. Let us seek to know and love Him. Let us seek to please Him by speaking for the voiceless and holding to account those who have abused the vulnerable. “Let justice roll on like a river.”