Bethel’s Silence on Shawn Bolz: Carelessness or Cover-Up?

Featured Speakers: Julie Roys, Lance Ford, Jono Hall, Mike Winger (from recording)

This transcript has been auto-generated and may contain some spelling errors.

Mike Winger: This video is not for everybody.

julio: The charismatic Christian community is reeling from Mike Winger’s explosive expose, revealing that. Suppose prophetic minister Sean Bowles is both a fraud and a sexual predator. What’s worse? Wingers showed that leaders at Bethel Church knew the truth about Bowles for years.

And not only did they fail to warn the public, they continued to endorse Bowles.

Bill Johnson: If you could have a perfect relationship with the Lord and see its impact on humanity, that’s what it would look like.

Mike Winger: Bill endorsing him like this, you will see very clearly was an atrocious and evil act.

julio: Equally evil.

Bethel gaslit, those who urged them to warn people about Sean’s misconduct. This included a pattern of faking prophecies and pleasuring himself in front of staff.

Mike Winger: He says to Spencer, do you know for a fact Sean did this? And this is the most egregious thing, Chris, I can’t believe, I cannot believe you said this.

There are only two options for what I’m about to read. One, a bunch more data came out that made you think Sean’s really innocent. Or two, you are, you’re doing a bad thing.

julio: In his first response to Winger a week and a half ago, Bethel Pastor Chris Valentin lamented being attacked online by Lynch mods. He admitted some errors like prioritizing mercy over judgment, but defended himself against critics.

Kris Vallotton: You didn’t confront evil. Nobody who knows me would ever accuse me of that. I have never been accused of being afraid to confront anyone. That’s just stupid.

julio: But a week later, Gallatin changed his tomb.

Kris Vallotton: It was our responsibility to tell the people that we told, we trust this man. I know that it sounds like we were hiding something.

I wanna point out to everyone who knows me in our global audience too, I confess my own sins. When the Lord talked to me about cussing, I’m like, about a week later, I told the whole world I’ve never been I’ve never been able to live with. I do something wrong and I don’t confess it. So it wasn’t in my mind to cover up anything.

julio: Similarly, Bethel Senior Pastor Bill Johnson apologized for sympathizing with bulls instead of his victims, but he also claimed none of it was intentional.

Kris Vallotton: I showed mercy in, in one category that seriously affected those. Who shouldn’t have been traumatized any more than they were. And it was just it was just careless.

It was careless on my part. It obviously, it’s not intentional. You don’t think through that stuff.

julio: So how should Christians respond to Bethel now? Should they forgive and move on, or should they demand resignations? And what should believers make of Bethel’s ministry? Was this a single misstep or an indication of a deeper, more systemic problem?

In this live broadcast, I’ll explore these issues in depth with guests. John O. Hall, a former leader at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, and Lance Ford, director of Restoration Resources at the Roys report.

Lance: Welcome to this live edition of the Roys Report,

julio: a podcast dedicated to reporting the truth and restoring the church.

I’m Julie Royce.

I have some incredible guests today to discuss Bethel’s response to the allegations in Mike Winger’s, nearly six hour podcast. First John O. Hall is someone with Keen insight into the prophetic and charismatic movement. He served for more than 15 years at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, both as the media director and then as the Chief operating officer.

He left IHOP in 2023 and then was a key member of the Advocate Group, which was key in exposing the clergy sex abuse perpetrated by IHOP founder Mike Bickle. And just last week he wrote a powerful opinion piece published by the Royce Report entitled Mike Winger Expose Shows, Bethel Church’s Extended Mercy Failed Victims.

And that article, by the way, has nearly 100,000 views to date. So Jono welcome and I’m just so glad you could join us.

Jono: It’s a pleasure to be with you today.

julio: And a hundred thousand views for an article is quite a bit, you’re still trailing winger, though, whose video has more than a million views, so you got a little ways to go there.

Jono: Yeah, I, when you texted me the number, I was like I don’t know what that means. Is that good or bad? My, my only hope is that people can have an idea of what is going on. So give a little bit of a insight from behind, behind the scenes in some of the ministries.

julio: Yeah. And that was a powerful I thought just a really powerful article. And I think the reason so many people viewed it is because there were real insights in there. And so I’m looking forward to everything that you have to say about this situation. But what’s happened since you wrote that article, which are the apologies.

That were there at Bethel last week with Chris Velain especially, and Bill Johnson, and we’re gonna take a look at those. We’re gonna dig into those. But I think having been behind the scenes like you were, I’m guessing you are seeing things that I probably don’t see and that our next guest may not see.

And so I think you’ll have a lot to add. So thanks again for joining us. And also joining me is a familiar face here at the Roars Report, which is Lance Ford. I call Lance our resident theologian because he is a trained theologian, but he is also our systems guy. And if you’ve listened to any of Lance’s talks at our Restore conferences or in my podcast with him, he is fond of saying it’s the system stupid.

And this is a play on James Carville’s motto for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, which was, as you will recall, if you’re a little bit older than 40 or so, or 50, or in my case just turned 60 it’s the economy stupid, right? And the point is that all these scandals that we’re seeing in the church, it’s not just the result of a few bad apples.

And I think some people would have us believe that actually at this point it’s several bushels of apples. But the reason that these bad actors are preying on the church is because there’s an entire system supporting them. And so I’m just really thrilled to have you join us, Lance, and help us identify some of that system.

When it comes to this latest scandal with Sean Bowles and Bethel. So Lance, welcome and thanks so much for joining us.

Lance: Yeah, it’s good to be here and looking forward to this conversation.

julio: Yeah, me as well, so I don’t feel like I need to rehash Mike Winger’s six hour video. It dropped, I think it was like nearly two weeks ago now.

If you haven’t seen that, I know it’s really long. I encourage you to take the time if you can, or you can do what I do. Just put the podcast in one and a half speed and listen to it while you work out or do something like that. It took me several days, but I’m really glad I got through it because there is really good stuff throughout the entire thing and it’s sad.

And it’s shocking what happened. But the Cliff notes are that there was a mountain of evidence that Sean Bowles, a prophetic minister mine social media to find out information about people. In other words, he would find out who was going to be at events and then he would find out their Facebook accounts or their Instagram accounts, he’d go on, and then he would pretend that information he got on social media, that God was telling him these things and he faked these prophecies.

And these are prophecies that in some cases. Really impacted people’s lives, like who they should marry or where they should move to be close. Once in one of them he pretended that he was speaking Russian. He knew that the Russian phrase that he was saying was, move that you need to move here.

In other words, he wanted people to move to his church and be there. And, lo and behold, there’s a guy in the audience who recognizes Russian and can interpret this forum. But again, all of these fake prophecies that preyed on people believed them. And I’m sure they all feel, taken advantage of at this point.

And then there were also reports by numerous staff. And I can tell you that I spoke to one of the staff members nearly a year ago who came to me with one of these stories. So I can tell you this is true. The person wasn’t ready to go public with the story yet, but I heard the exact same things.

And I can give confirmation that what Mike reported is true, that Bolts had a habit of walking around in front of his staff naked. And then, I don’t know what word to call this other than pleasuring himself in front of them, I don’t wanna use a word that might get this flagged by YouTube, but absolutely disgusting behavior of someone who supposedly is operating in the prophetic ministry that is close to God.

And really this is and Lance, we’ve talked about this before. We talk about taking the Lord’s name in vain. And often we think of that as saying, oh my, G word. But it really, taking the Lord’s name in vain, it is attributing something to God that really should be attributed to man.

This is what Sean Bowles was doing, almost just blasphemous.

Lance: Yeah, that’s, it’s so much more dangerous than of course I’m a Texan, so I don’t know if you wanna say cursing or cussing. We say cussing. Usually a lot of people, most people think that’s what it means to take the name of the Lord’s the Lord’s name in vain.

But I’m convinced and there’s some, a lot of scholars that are convinced that, and purport that it is this type of thing. It’s, I think that the best way to say it, it’s if you’re gonna wear the Lord’s jersey with his name on the back don’t misrepresent him. And so you’re taking his name in vain when you’re representing and going out.

And we know that so often that, and it’s very it’s very frivolous. The phrase God told me God spoke to me this morning while I was in the shower. God told me, and, Hey, I believe God speaks to us. I’m completely believe God speaks to us, but. It shouldn’t be treated as something flippant.

In fact, you just don’t, you don’t see it flippantly used in the New Testament. By the writers and by Paul. It’s not on many occasions where they actually use that phrase. And so I definitely believe that we’re dealing with that issue along with all the other issues here too.

julio: Yeah. And the other issue that people tried for years to expose Sean Bowles, some people got out on social media and gave their accounts of what he was doing, but without it coming from a major platform or a trusted voice, he just kept doing this. And what happened was they went to Bethel leaders and Bethel had platformed, Sean Bold’s for years.

In 2023 when we saw that in, in the Open. Bill Johnson writes the forward for his book and makes it sound like he, Sean Bowles is living a perfect life. We find out that four years before this, in 2019, people came, international leaders came to Bethel Leaders to Bill Johnson, to Chris Valentin, to, a number of these leaders there, Danny Silk Dan Farley, they came and they wanted these men who had platformed Sean to say something.

And they didn’t, they refused to say something. And then again, 2023, unbelievable. Bill Johnson endorses the guy on TBN. So it’s absolutely shocking. It became more and more shocking the longer I listened to Mike Win’s video. And kudos to Mike for doing just an incredible job. But, Jono, this has to be, the past, what, five years for you has been unbelievable.

Here you go from being at IHOP where Mike Bickell is the leader of that movement, believing in this movement, and then finding out Mike Bickell, who again, very tied into Bethel. All of these guys operated in the same vein, but now not just Mike Bickell, who we know now sexually abused.

We, we know of at least, what was it, 16, 17, an invest, an investigation showed, but it’s probably, that’s probably much more. Those are just the people who came forward. But now, bill Johnson, Bethel, Sean Bowles, Chris Reed Todd White. We could go on and on. What is this like for you to see yet another person on the platform, not just those, not just Sean Bulls the one bad apple, so to speak, but all of these people around him that propped him up for years. And to see this all exposed in this way. What, what did, what does that do for you when you heard this, what was your response?

Jono: Yeah, there’s a reframing of certain events in the past.

I’ve known Sean as an acquaintance slash friend. I not, I’m not really in any depths for about 30 years. I think 1996 was the first time I met him. But I remember after the Azua now meeting in 2016, sitting with Mike on the patio outside of ihop and everybody was talking about what Sean had done at this meeting.

And I had my, I don’t know, I had my doubts even before Matt Hokey, I dunno if you’ve seen the Matt Hokey correlation between the Facebook and that added more questions, but I was asking questions, was this real? And Mike basically went pretty hard by and saying he didn’t consider Sean Bolt said, told Prophetic.

And I was like and added to the fact that he hadn’t ever allowed Sean’s books in the bookstore. He had from time to time, but he removed them. He didn’t have him on a preaching stage. The fact that Mike traveled with Sean and Paul Cain in the nineties. Now I’m asking questions.

What did Mike see that made him say Sean wasn’t prophetic? It’s interesting ’cause the Sean question and the Bob Hartley story came up together. I’d literally, I think that we’d been called into meeting with Toronto leadership, Bethel leadership, and they were asking whether we covered as I and I, whether we covered Bob Hartley and Mike was like, I absolutely, we don’t cover Bob Hartley.

I don’t consider him prophetic. And now I’m looking back, I’m like, number one, what did Mike know? But number two, it’s, it further uncover this kind of operating system that, that I laid out in my article in terms of it’s this culture of honor, but it’s actually a dereliction of duty as a shepherd.

It’s it’s very much kind of a mafia approach to, to honor. The loyalty among, amongst thieves honestly is how it is. It’s not a, what I would call a kingdom loyalty. And this is, I was just thinking this morning as I was like, why is this knee jerk reaction of all of these guys to be overly merciful to the abuser?

And really putting a label on it is I am being overly merciful. And I’m like, you are not being merciful to anybody in this entire situation, including. The abuser because the abuser in the eternal perspective is actually heaping up further judgment for themselves in the judgment seat of Christ.

julio: That’s a very good point. There’s nothing merciful to anyone about covering up sin. And it’s so odd to me that any Christian would think that the way to respond to sin is to be silent or to cover it up. This is the gospel, right? We confess our sin. He’s faithful and just to forgive us a sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, but buried sin.

I think of Aiken taking, that gold into his tent that he was supposed the Israelites are supposed to destroy and then that infected the whole camp. And what we’re seeing is just this infection of the Christian body due to these leaders who as you rightly put just complete dereliction of their duty.

And we’re gonna dig into this. We’re gonna talk about the system, but we’re also gonna talk about these apologies ’cause there were two apologies that were given. And Dan Fairley. So Dan Fairley got up lead pastor of Bethel and introduced them, but the apologies I thought the main two were from Chris Vain there at Bethel and also Bill Johnson.

And so I, what I wanna do is we’re gonna ki we’re gonna go through them and as we do, I’m just gonna stop it at several points, and I think we’re gonna play it at one and a half speed. I found that I can listen at one and a half speed and it almost seems normal, so there’s a lot of pauses.

It speaking slowly, which is fine. But I think for, just for our purposes here, this was 35 minutes of apologies and we’d like to get through through it as quickly as we can. So that although now that Mike’s done a six hour video, I’m like, Hey, however long we go. He set the new bar, the new standard.

So I feel a little bit of liberty there to go a little bit longer, but there is, there’s a graphic that I’m hoping we can put up of what’s called image Repair Theory. And I just want folks to see this image repair theory because I think when we hear these apologies and we don’t know what to make of them, right?

Sometimes we’re just like what exactly are they saying? And we hear things that sound good but sometimes aren’t so good. I think this image repair theory really helps us EE evaluate those and you can see in this graphic Can we go full screen with that graphic if we could? I’m not sure if people are seeing that full screen, but Yeah.

Okay. There’s different areas on there. You can see some there’s some tactics that can be used to minimize or to deflect, or there’s also this thing called mortification. So that, so there’s minimizing, deflecting, evading responsibility. All of those would be the negative tactics.

But then we wanna get to is what’s called mortification, which is a really old term, which basically means, we, we have that the root, the Latin root, which means death, right? So mortification is putting to death the sin, right? That’s what we wanna do. We wanna put to death the sin, and then we wanna take corrective action.

And we’re gonna go through this apology, but as we do I just really want people to be able to see to see some of these what I believe are positive. And when we say tactic never sounds positive, but there are some positive tactics or some techniques and things that we do when we’re caught in a crisis, but there are some negative ones.

And so I wanna point those out while we also just unpack this in the broader system of what’s going on there in the charismatic movement. But let’s start with Chris Velain again. Here’s a leader who as we noted in the intro, Chris Velain knew about Sean Voles. He knew about ’em at least in 2019, maybe earlier he had a mountain of evidence about the faking of prophecy.

He also had a mountain of evidence about about this sexual harassment of Sean’s own staff. And if you can understand, he lived with a bunch of young men and regularly was unclothed in front of them and regularly pleasuring himself in front of them. In fact, one staff person told me every morning, this is how he would start his morning.

So imagine you believe in this guy as a prophet, and this is how he’s behaving in front of you. So Chris knows about this. He sits on it, and I’ll show you as we go through more evidence that he not only sat on it, but he tried to silence whistleblowers who wanted to come forward. It was really egregious, sat on it until again, this was exposed.

And I’ve said to people many times, exposure sadly, is the only thing that moves the dial in a lot of these cases. And that’s why the Roy’s report exists, is to expose these things. But I’m really glad for the work that Mike’s been doing some fantastic work. So let’s play this clip. This is Chris Ballin last Sunday at Bethel.

And this is what he had to say.

Kris Vallotton: Iki Mor. I’m incredibly anxious. I’ve not ever done anything like this before. I’ve done it twice today already. I feel a little bit like my emotional tank is emptying, but I feel loved by you. So I’m gonna take you on a little journey and tell you about the process with Sean Bolton.

I, I wanna say I had, I’ve had a heart change in the, on Monday morning I had an encounter with the Lord and I see things quite differently and I’ll talk about the change in my heart since that encounter to that. So in 2019, it came to our attention through European leaders

julio: that, okay, we just stop that that Sean Bolt

Kris Vallotton: was using Facebook.

julio: Can you stop that? Yeah. That first part, I’ve had a heart change on Monday morning, had an encounter with the Lord. Okay. This guy, for six years, people have been coming to him privately, numerous people, and then he has an encounter with the Lord on Monday morning. Jono, what’s your take on that?

Jono: There’s two things.

Strike me initially with this. One is the public pressure that had been mounting, and I know outside of Bethel, but also within Bethel. But it’s nothing to do with the fact that his brothers are coming to him with issues. It actually, he’s positioning himself. It’s actually only the Lord who can actually.

Bring about the change. So that was the first thing that, the second thing, which is maybe a bigger issue, is the fact that actually allegations have been made by Mike Winger against an elder, against Bill and against Chris. And yet it’s the elders themselves, the accused who are up on stage actually managing the situation themselves.

So despite the fact that they’re saying we have 25, 28, I can’t remember what the size of their senior leadership team is, they’re all absent. All we have is the senior independent, the top profits, the top apostles. They’re gonna manage the situation. Now, they were humble, but there’s other questions.

Why was it just them who were up on the stage that, that those are the questions I’ve got. I immediately

julio: And Lance, you said in the open, this language of the Lord spoke to me. I had an encounter with the Lord

Lance: Y Yeah, it was almost predictable. You, this is what you would expect.

And one of my thoughts, and I thought Johno just made great points just now, but one of the additional thoughts that I had in this is, okay, your 70, you are 70 years old. You are set up as an elder. You’re the number two or number one a guy at Bethel. So you have all this weight of responsibility.

You’re representing a weighty position and a weighty voice. And so in all of your experience of reading the Bible, studying the Bible, being in situations, cumulative wisdom and knowledge, biblical knowledge that you should have, none of that changed your heart. It was Monday morning you had an encounter with the Lord.

You should have had an encounter with the word a long time ago. And to me, this is just one example of the shallowness and the lack of responsibility, and I would say ability to be a leader. I think it indicts his own ability to be a leadership to be a leader. If you don’t have the acumen way before this encounter with the Lord, that should have done something in your heart in the first place.

julio: Yeah. And if I could go to that image repair theory, there’s something called bolstering on there. And this is when you get up there and you emphasize your positive traits. Right? And so what he does at the very outset, and I don’t even think it’s I don’t, he’s probably done this so long that he just doesn’t even think about it.

I, I don’t know that this is on purpose. This may be very unintentional. But when he says, I had an encounter with the Lord, it’s like he’s, again, he’s bolstering his credibility, his authority. He hears from God, he had an encounter with the Lord. Now we’re going to hear what he heard from the Lord.

Whether he had an encounter with the Lord or not. This isn’t the place to talk about it after you’ve blown it this big. We don’t wanna hear about your encounters with the Lord. How about you just own it? You just own it. So let’s keep going

Kris Vallotton: to get some of his words of knowledge. And we got involved Danny and I, Danny Silk and I, bill was out with his wife was passing sick.

And we got involved and we began to do an investigation as we, we were doing that somewhere in the midst of that, it might have even started first sexual allegations about Sean’s ministry. And specifically around his employees came harassment, sexual harassment came to light. And Danny got in the trenches there and began to investigate the sexual allegations.

And also the and Danny got the, there was 14 Facebook videos that the Europeans had put together in their own investigation. And they said, can you guys do something about this? So Danny, who was we were, I’ll say we were all friends of Sean. Sean was here many times. In 2014 when I had a nervous breakdown, he ministered to me several times through my nervous breakdown.

And so he’s a friend of the house at the time.

julio: Yeah. And so this right here I appreciate that Chris is talking very vulnerably about something that, some people would try to hide. About his nervous breakdown. But Lance, I was talking to you and when you heard this, you had some concerns.

Lance: Yeah. And once again and listen, I’ve had friends that are in ministry today and strongly and healthy, that literally had nervous breakdowns. And that’s what they’ve labeled it. But I’ve been around these people for a long time and I’ve seen health, I’ve seen, fruit in a, in and lasting fruit that, that demonstrates mental health.

I’m concerned that, and I’m no doctor, I’m not gonna say, Hey, I’m not a doctor, but I stayed in a Holiday Inn Express here. Okay? So I’m not, trying to project here. But there is a concern that is is Chris totally mentally healthy, and his ability to lead. That wasn’t that long ago.

And he said that he had Sean as one of his counselors back then.

julio: Yikes.

Lance: Now that’s the scary, that’s the scary part. He had Sean as one of his counselors, he mentions that I think that was in some of what Mike had presented.

julio: Yeah. John, are you have anything you wanna add to that?

Jono: No, I was interviewed a number of years ago by two scholars who brought out a book called Independent Networks Christianity.

I think it was Inc. And it talked about these various different network de guise and I think what Lan just said there is it’s evidence of this, you have all of these kind of networked friendships, but nobody is actually really accountable to one another in terms of any kind of church discipline.

I’ll bring them in for whatever my particular needs are, but not in terms of I think the wounds of a friend are needed faithful. And yet and yet often it’s, Cha’s I’m not responsible. It was Bethel pointing the finger over here. Nobody’s really responsible.

And in this case it’s it’s just a bunch of friends together, not actually what, how the Bible prescribes we should have some form of ecclesiology.

julio: And you mentioned that before, just who’s covering whom, this idea of covering and we’ve talked about that, the covering, the umbrellas, all that.

Yeah. Little extra biblical kind of stuff. How about just some real accountability in your local body with elders doing their job. Yeah. That would be really nice to see.

Lance: And Julie, can I throw something in here? And I think we want this verse in, in to frame things early on because this is a verse that we use a lot in our work.

’cause a lot of people say you’re judging you, who are you to judge? Blah, blah, blah. You, this is gossip. All that kind of thing. So one of the verses that’s quite, I’ve heard Mike Winger, I’ve heard lots of us use this verse very often is first Timothy five 20. And I’m just wanna read it.

But those elders who are sinning, you are to reprove before everyone so that the others may take warning. There’s, the next verse is vital Here I charge you in the sight of God in Christ Jesus and the elect angels to keep these instructions without partiality and to do nothing out of favoritism.

That is a strong point made here by Paul saying, Hey, don’t be partial with this stuff. Don’t show favoritism. No. Good old buddy stuff. And I think that the good old buddy stuff is exactly. It’s precisely. What runs the thread through all of these, it runs the thread through what Jono experienced at ihop.

It runs through almost every investigation. We see that, where leaders are not coming forward and being honest about their buddies. They’re in complete disobedience to Paul’s instruction here.

julio: Very true. And Chris goes on to explain it. Let’s take a listen.

Kris Vallotton: And Danny looked at the videos and flew to LA and showed him the videos and also showed him the sexual allegations.

And he flatly denied it. I didn’t do that. I would never do that. I don’t know why you think I’d do that. And it just went nowhere. And so Danny I took on the prophetic side, I said I’ll work on the prophetic thing, and you work on the allegations, the sexual allegations. So Danny did some research, got ahold of some other former employees, and it turned out, I’ll share, I’ll spare you all the facts, but it turned out that those allegations were not only true, but it was a culture for a long time.

Sorry. And so I flew to LA and confronted him, and it was a four hour meeting. The first two hours was confronting him as Galatians one, as a friend who had sinned and calling him to repentance. And he’s flatly denied that he had done anything wrong, that he would never do that. And it really got nowhere.

The last two hours were a very different meeting, a very passionate meeting. And I was saying to him, if you don’t confess your sin. If someone else has to confess your sin, it’s gonna get ugly. ’cause if you confess your sin, you’re gonna get forgiveness, and you’re gonna get repentance and you’re gonna get whole.

But if someone else confesses your sin, your whole ministry’s gonna burn down. And I was like, bro, your ministry’s gonna burn down if you don’t, if you don’t get in here and do the right thing.

julio: Okay? Couple things here. One, he talks about Galatians one here and that’s about restoring a brother to do it gently, compassionately, right?

But watch that. You don’t fall into a sin. I don’t think that’s appropriate passage here. This is a man who, he’s faking words of prophecy. That means he’s a fraud. He is preying on the body of Christ, pretending to speak for God, and he’s lying, which we know is an abomination to God.

And we’re acting like this is a, like Galatians, one thing that we wanna reconcile and restore. I’m mind-blown by this. In my family you lied because God said lying was an abomination. That was probably the worst thing you could possibly do in my household. And the punishment would be swift and it would be harsh.

Not overly harsh but I’m just saying it was dealt with. And I feel like they’re dealing with this like it’s an oops I don’t understand this. And the sexual harassment is unbelievable. The other thing in and I think this is really telling is that Chris says to Sean, come forward now, like you do this.

I know people are gracious, they’ll forgive you and you can still have your ministry, but

Bill Johnson: yeah,

julio: you don’t do that. You’re g you’re gonna lose your whole ministry. What about concern for the victims? Man, do you understand all the people you’ve wounded with this? I’m not hearing that. What I’m hearing is, we know Christians are forgiving people.

You come forward now, they’ll all forgive you and you can just keep going. And that is exactly what we’re seeing in spades, not just here, but elsewhere. I find that shocking. I, that was really troubling to me. What about you guys?

Jono: Yeah, I’ll just say so something, maybe it’s a, obviously Sean had some grievous sin, but I think it highlights something about our ministry world, how utilitarian we are that ministry or church itself is good.

I was just looking at some comments on the, Mike Winger brought out the whole Todd White video yesterday and I was just looking at some comments and people were going, yes, but he is brought a ton of people to the Lord. And I’m like what is our benchmark? What are we aiming at? Are we aiming at, when we say fruit, are we saying that’s healings?

Or people that put their hands up in a meeting or the size of the crowd? Always our metric conformity to Christ. Because if our metric is actually becoming like Jesus and becoming a disciple of Jesus, we need to change a lot of things in our ministry. And so what Chris is saying here is, you can save your ministry if you do this kind of almost performative repentance rather than actually the bigger deal here is what about changing your life to become more like Jesus?

julio: Yeah, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. And I’m convinced that fruit, we think of fruit as in numbers and all these people that came to the Lord. And these, how many people are following your social media platform and sub buying your books? This is what we think of as fruit.

When I look at fruit, I’m thinking, what about the fruit of the spirit? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness. Good as self-control. These are the things, this is the aroma of Christ. That’s the sign of Christ in your life. But this unreal. Good point.

Lance: Yeah. And I would say on this too this Galatians one that you brought up about. Restore such you want, and that’s brought up a lot restore such you want in a spirit of meekness. The problem here and in so many of these cases is you don’t get to res, you don’t get to the stage of restore until you’ve first gone to the stage of repent. And, that’s restore such a one is when someone starts showing repentance.

In fact, Paul dealt with this in second Corinthians after he had to write the letter early on about the young man that was involved in this, incestuous relationship or with his stepmother or whatever it was. And they were allowing it to happen. And he just really goes at the Corinthians, you’re allowing this to happen.

It seems that there were some repentance that must have happened because Paul later on comes and goes, Hey, you start showing some love to this guy. But you have to get to the point where you’re repenting you. And we’re not even close to that yet. So yeah we all wanna live out, restore such a one in a spirit of meekness, but first there has to be a sense of repentance.

julio: And I think too, there’s a difference between falling into sin and actually preying on the sheet. And I do think when it goes into this is abuse, and I would say there’s sa involved here. It, it’s a kind of clergy sa that is abusive to those under you. That when it goes into that I don’t think these people can be dis restored.

They can be restored to the body. They can be restored to Christ. They cannot be restored to their ministry. And I wish to God that charismatic movement, which I’m not outside that, we were talking before we came on that Lance, both you and I spent many years on at a vineyard. And so we come out of that johno, you come out of that.

So I’m not, I do believe God speaks today. I do believe in the gifts of the spirit. I’m not anti charismatic, but I think that’s why this makes me so angry and so just grieved is because it’s making a mockery out of Christ, but out of his spirit and the way his spirit works. And just really difficult.

Lance: And I would say, I would say one of the other real concerns this should be a huge concern for the body. So I think it carries weight if we do emphasize our love for the charismatic body. So it, I know for Julie, you and I. Because I work with you and so we’ve talked about this a lot.

We don’t look at our experience with the charismatic church as something in our past. It’s something in my present. I’m I covet the gifts, I, I speak in tongues more than ya all, I, so I have not left the gifts. My wife and I, as 19 and 21 year olds met at one of the major charismatic Bible colleges.

So that’s all part of me. I’ve not left it, but I’ve been concerned for decades about this type of stuff that goes on and it’s just not dealt with. And the misuse of gifts and gifts over character. And one of the scary parts for me, even with the downfall of IHOP and and now with Bethel what’s going on with Bethel is these are large influencers upon young people.

And the heartbreak is this, is that you’ve got these young people that are hungry. That are wanting to seek the Lord. They’re earnest and they’re hungry for God. They’re longing for purpose and prayer and depth and meaning. And it’s hard to find young people like that today. And so we’ve got young people going to these institutions and what they’re being offered is not historic Christian discipleship.

Nor that slow, faithful formation of Jesus like character, that’s rooted in scripture, that’s rooted in true community, in, in true a servantship presented as leadership. Instead, they’re drawn into this spirituality that is built on emotional intensity and spiritual elitism and new revelation all the time authority figures that are unaccountable and that claim to have a direct line to God.

It’s a travesty that’s right before us. And I think the young people are, which is the next generation. And the church is in trending Kline right now, just exist in North America. And so we’re taking our best that are hungry and ready to go, and we’re baptizing them in something that is debauchery.

And so that should really concern all of us,

Jono: I think I, I said to Alan Hood one of my friends a few weeks ago, I was like, my assumption had been the charismatic church. The Pentecostal church came out of the Protestant stream with the Protestant Solars. So scripture being one of those, and it’s just an assumption that you think, and at IHOP we love the word, and many people love the word, but when push comes to shove, are you willing to actually apply some of the maybe harder verses of scripture and say, this is what it means to actually follow Jesus.

Because I don’t think that is the case. I wrote a tweet on Saturday, I think before things came out, and I was picturing the boardroom at IHOP and the various different voices that would be coming in to make the decision of how do we present this to the world. And I can think of myself saying, W why don’t we bring in the Bible?

And almost being pushed back of no, we need the pr, we need to listen to the lawyer. What about actually listening to what scripture actually demands that we do?

julio: We’re so hungry for words from the Lord, and yet we ignore his word. Yeah. Excellent point. You know what let’s keep playing.

I wanna get through this. I know there’s a lot to say, but let’s keep going. With Chris’s apology.

Kris Vallotton: So he did it. It went on for a long time. We all felt that we should give him some time. We were texting back and forth and pretty soon it was just like no, no messages back. I’m not doing anything.

This is not happening. And I just, so we began to meet, this is like almost a year past and part of it is so part of the, I think the timeline is that, where it was COVID, we were in COVID, Vinny was passing what’s that? Eric Canis left. And one of my very close family members began a divorce and I was completely exhausted.

That’s not an excuse, but that was where we were.

julio: And I don’t mean to pick on him here, but again, when you have to say that’s not an excuse, you probably just shouldn’t be saying it because so often what happens with these apologies, it’s something called conversion in image repair Theory. Theory. But it’s basically trying to shift the sympathy away from those who are harmed and to yourself as the focus of what’s going on.

And I think, John, you made an excellent point at the beginning that he shouldn’t even be up there right now. It, this should have been the elders coming forward to talk about the discipline. And I don’t hear any words of discipline that these men are gonna be under for what they did.

But again, to me, that’s just unwise when you’re in this situation. And certainly we, it’s an easy thing to get into. Who of us hasn’t done this, right? When we’ve been in a situation where we have to apologize and we’re like, oh, but you just don’t understand. It was such a rough time, and I get it, but probably not the best place to put this because again, the sympathy needs to be with those who are harmed and it needs to just stay there.

Let’s keep playing.

Kris Vallotton: And so we had a conversation like, what should we do? And he’s not repentant. Okay, let’s take him off of all of our platforms. So we took him off of all of our platforms. We took all of his books outta our bookstore, we took all his messages off our off of our network.

And we told a bunch of our close ministry friends that we knew were having him on their platform. But here’s the challenge that I didn’t understand till four days ago, five days ago, I thought we were helping somebody else with their problem. He was on many platforms, I don’t know, a hundred, 200 churches.

Those European leaders asked us to help. We weren’t on his board. We went to his board on a couple of occasions. They did nothing. And I was I wasn’t thinking of it like I would think of a staff member like that happens on our staff. That is not gonna go. I was like, this is not our re this is not our responsibility.

This is someone else’s responsibility. We’ve done what we could. And that was a serious mistake. We put him on a global platform and as soon as we did that, other people believed in him because we believed in him. And consequently, when he failed and then failed to repent after giving him time to repent, it was our responsibility to tell the people that we told, we trust this man to tell them we don’t trust this man.

And that didn’t happen. And that’s on me. I made the decision. I know that it sounds like we were hiding something. I wanna point out for everyone who knows me in our global audience too, I confess my own sins. When the Lord talked to me about cussing, I’m like, about a week later, I told the whole world I’ve never been I’ve never been able to live with.

I do something wrong and I don’t confess it. So it wasn’t in my mind to cover up anything. It was a couple of things. One, I struggled with what is our responsibility, which I see completely different. And by the way,

julio: okay, there’s a lot there. I’ll let you guys go first, John? Or do you wanna comment on that?

Jono: I’m actually just gonna say something to the opposite ’cause I’ve been there’s so many people that don’t believe Chris and I was saying to, to somebody, I was like, you know what I do appreciate about this is we never got anything like this at ihop.

julio: That’s true. Nothing even close.

A partial apology or a flawed apology is so much better than none at all. Yeah, the

Jono: fact, good point. The, there’s almost like a 180 from the week before is wow, this is something. But yeah we can go back into the critique. One of the other thing I was just gonna say was in the charismatic world, and maybe Lance can speak to this ’cause.

Maybe because there isn’t a biblical understanding of repentance, almost like repentance is actually a platform for formative thing. So people are going, you are critiquing their repentance. And actually the critique is actually just of what was said on the stage. The repentance itself is a changing of the way, and it’s a changing of culture, and it’s a changing of so many things.

And, restitution and there’s a lot of different components to repentance. And yet we have these big events in stadiums, and we’re gonna do a repentance. We’re gonna do a repentance to of racism. We’re gonna do a repentance of this. I’m like, I was always a big, oh my God, that’s great.

You’ve acknowledged that we’ve done wrong. But repentance is so much more than the words that you speak from a platform. And I’m not sure that people actually realize that.

Lance: I think that’s a huge point, Jono. It’s really good. And we see so often that in these repentance ceremonies that there ends up now we haven’t gotten to that yet in this in, in this episode, but they’re all, it always ends up with a big ovation for the repenter.

So I can’t even imagine that happening in the New Testament church. No, there should be sackcloth and ashes.

julio: Yeah. Lament

Lance: when Yeah. Lament you. We I think about the Tony Evans situation, and of course you think about. The, just over and over. And you’ll see these guys get these big ovations and they use the platform once again to get people’s sympathy for them.

All the while the victims are nowhere to be acknowledged or to be seen. Or to be lamented for.

julio: Yeah. I do appreciate Jono, I think you’re right that, there is an element of taking responsibility, which is exactly what we hope to see. But then, and again I just wanna point these things out because I know I feel like the public needs to be educated about how these are sometimes used.

I don’t know if there’s repentance or not. We will find out over time. But I will say when you get in there and you say things like, Hey, listen, I’m so open and vulnerable when the Lord convicted me of cussing, like I told the whole world about it. So I would never cover this up and again that’s a little concerning.

And then this whole, there’s something called differentiation, which is this tactic to reduce the offensiveness of what was done. And I feel like, he’s doing that here where he’s saying, yes, I did something bad. But it’s less bad than you think. I didn’t cover anything up.

I would never do this on purpose. It was unintentional. I’m just not really buying that to be honest, because one, I should just mention, James four 17 says, if someone knows the good to do and doesn’t do it to him and his sin, right? So that’s a pretty egregious thing.

It’s not a small thing. And he does get into how bad that is, and I do appreciate that. But I wanna play a clip from Mike Winger’s video, and this is someone who’s in a conversation over text with Chris Valentin. And this is a few years ago. And this person is urging Chris, please expose Sean for what he’s done for the fake prophecies, for the sexual harassment for, there’s so many people, he’s harmed.

And the way that Chris responds is extremely telling. So I wanna play this.

Mike Winger: Chris responds again. He says to Spencer, do you know for a fact Sean did this? And this is the most egregious thing, Chris, I can’t believe, I cannot believe you said this. There are only two options for what I’m about to read. One, a bunch more data came out that made you think Sean’s really innocent.

Or two, you are, you’re doing a bad thing. I think it’s number two. My, I’m gonna give you conjecture guys. This is total conjecture. Maybe it’s wrong. I don’t think it is. I think that Bill Johnson was still wanting to be in Sean’s corner, and Chris Velain tried to fall in line so that privately he could chew him out all he wanted, but publicly they couldn’t say anything.

And so even now, this public thing, he’s trying to spin, he’s trying to balance and get on the fence. So he says, do you know for sure for a fact that Sean did this? Are you 100% sure he’s guilty? Actually, you only have to be convinced me beyond a reasonable doubt. Have you seen the evidence? No, Chris, because you have the evidence and you won’t show it to people.

You have a packet of information you’ve received, you’ve talked to witnesses, you have a recording of one of his victims. You’re the one withholding the evidence. So when you ask the people, do you have the evidence that you wouldn’t let them see? I tried to petition Bethel. If you don’t, if you wanna say you’re on the fence and you don’t know if he’s guilty or not, just release the packet of info you got back in 2017 with all the list of words and the things that were found on Facebook.

’cause it was all right there. How about you just release it if it’s so uncertain and so in the air, just make it public, huh? Because all of his prophecies are public. No. So have you seen the evidence? No. No. Chris, he hasn’t seen the evidence. He hasn’t seen the evidence because you guys covered it up. Or are you listening to people on social media?

Chris, you’re on social media, just so you know right now. That’s a, that’s such a weird passive aggressive statement to make. You’re listening to people. It. Social media’s a mixed bag. There’s plenty of bad, there’s plenty of good, but you can’t just ignore people because they’re on social media.

Where does Sean focus his ministry on social media? Where do the majority of people who listen to Bethel listen to them on social media? Where does Chris impact the most people on a regular basis on social media? It’s just so weird. As far as I know, it’s alleged that’s a lie. I don’t know.

I don’t know what else to call this, except that is a boldfaced lie from Chris Velain in a very important issue that is, it appears to try to do some kind of damage control, play some weird game with the body of Christ, he says, as far as I know, it’s alleged. And last I heard, Sean hasn’t admitted to anything.

Actually, Sean has denied it publicly, and maybe more facts have come out. I haven’t followed this situation for years. If he’s guilty and refuse to deal with it, with his sin in private, yikes. It’s a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living. God so sad. He used to be my friend. If he’s guilty, if he refused to deal with his sin, what did Chris tell the actual victim?

One of the victims of Sean. He was like, he won’t, he’s not gonna clean up his mess. I’m sorry. We were gonna try to bring restoration, but we have no authority over him. There’s nothing else we can do. Anybody who asks us, we tell them the truth about Sean. This guy asked you, you lied. How many other times has this happened?

julio: And that’s sobering to think about, huh? How many times this has happened. But was this just, oh, we didn’t see it as our responsibility and. Now after how many years of being confronted on this now they finally get it after the exposure come, after they get the heat, and then we get up and say, oh, this was just, I didn’t see it as our responsibility, but now I do.

No, you gaslit people. You made people think that something that was true was a lie, and you knew what you were doing. This is not unintentional. Oops, Chris. And I know I’m probably gonna get attacked by people who are like, oh, you’re just so ungracious friends. No.

You gotta look at the facts. This wasn’t an, oops. This isn’t just

honestly, how gullible does he think the body of Christ is, and how gullible are we friends? Really? This is not okay. It really, this is really not okay. So I the apology does not go nearly far enough in my opinion.

Jono: It’s interest. It’s interesting how they dissect intentionality and behavior.

I’d assume the best of themselves, but assume the worst of the victims. So even in Danny Silks statement about Bill, he says Bill’s hesitation. Hesitation. What? Because Bill was a gonna get on a stage and expose. I don’t think he was, in fact, he went to TBN and Exult his character was not a coverup.

And I remember when the first time I heard the word coverup as it pertains to ihop, I think, what was it? I can’t even remember. I was like, no, we would never do that. But it’s not even about intentionality, it’s actually about the actions that you take. The actions that you take cover up wrongdoing, if they did, it was a coverup.

It actually doesn’t matter about your intentionality. We were you an automaton that couldn’t do no. Chris was actually there on his cell phone texting the guy. Bad stuff. And yeah it’s

Mike Winger’s Guest Clip: terrible.

Jono: But then when it comes to the, when it comes to the victims, Hey, you accused of the brethren, we just gotta watch our mouth.

We gotta have the fear of the Lord. I’m like, where is the fear of the Lord on this side?

julio: Very well put. Let’s continue with this and honestly what we’re about to hear, this is the best part of his apology on Sunday. I would say we’re, this is some good stuff

Kris Vallotton: I see completely different. And by the way, it’s so sad that somebody has to put out a video that creates a firestorm to get someone who’s 70 years old.

To do something that’s an indictment against my leadership. I should have known better. And if I didn’t know better, I should have went and got counsel. And I didn’t do that. And I’m very sorry. I take full responsibility for that.

Mike Bickle: I’m very

Kris Vallotton: sorry. And being sorry doesn’t fix anything because the side effects of that are that people took prophetic words from Sean and as news came out, and of course it will, we live in a social media world. They didn’t know what to do. What I do with this prophetic word by somebody who’s been getting mining Facebook to get his words of knowledge, what do I do with these?

And instead of stepping in and helping process, like what do you do with these words? And then the sexual allegations, what do we do? One of the victims, ugh, I’m sorry. One of the Vic,

julio: This is what’s called mortification, right? Here he is getting close to, okay, now we’re finally getting on this side of really owning of saying, isn’t it so sad that we have to have this kind of exposure?

A six hour video come out for us to get this? Isn’t it sad? Yeah. You know what? It is so sad and we should be lamenting this because I have yet to go to somebody. Have them. We always, as a part of our, as a journalist, you have to go to the accused and get their side of the story.

At least give them an opportunity. And I have yet for one of them to fall on a sword and say, I’m so sorry. Everything that you just heard, it’s true. We did it. We did it a hundred percent. And it’s egregious. So I’m glad he is doing it now, but he’s absolutely right. How sad is this? And this is the pattern.

I have not seen any apologies, as you’ve noted Jono many times, even after the exposure, but certainly not before. And that is sad. That is an indictment. Lance, you wanted to say something?

Lance: Yeah, I was just gonna say, yeah, it’s, so first off and I think you’ve made the point, and we really want, wanna accentuate that kudos that Chris went there with it.

And just, what else could he say? That, that shows more sincerity. I’m gonna take his word at that and would to God that we would see this most often, much less, more often. I, but I think what would’ve been an appropriate follow up real quick after this apology would’ve been, and either one.

I resign effectively right now.

Or number two we are calling in a third party. I am stepping down at, on a sabbatical temporarily. Whatever they ask me to do, I submit myself to some other leaders or another council per from the body maybe. That would be very New Testament.

But it didn’t go far enough. It’s oh, but hey, we’re doing this and we’re gonna do this safe church thing, and we’re, man, we’re getting it together, and it’s all gonna be good. That’s what’s coming in the rest of the video. It’s, it’s, we’re gonna get it toge. We’ll be all right.

It’s, so it’s a very sincere, my bad, and maybe I’m but here’s the deal. Large ministries don’t just have bigger audiences. They have bigger blast radiuses when they do get it wrong. And the size of your platform. This is what these leaders have to understand in these mega ministries.

The size of your platform determines the speed and clarity that you have to tell the truth. So delay is not neutral when there’s thousands of people being shaped and affected by your example, that is a very weighty accountability. You’re gonna have to look the eyes of the Lord. An answer to not just in the sweet buy and bye, but in the now and now.

julio: Well said, let’s continue.

Kris Vallotton: I’m sorry. One of the victims of the sexual allegations reached out to me and wanted me to help. I did. I reached out Toan on several occasions, and after a while just got Stonewall and it didn’t go anywhere. Danny was meeting with him too, and that he was persistent like he should have been.

He’s asking a spiritual father’s life, can you help me? I’m in a crisis. And unfortunately, his persistence and my not knowing what else to do, cau caused my, to me to make a decision outta frustration instead of compassion. And I just blocked him. It wasn’t the first day or anything like that went on for a long time.

And I think this, my, my capacity for stress was at an all time lows. I was trying to help my family member, Benny and COVID and all the issues that were happening all at once. And it was sad to look back and realize that someone reached out to me for help. And not only did they not get help, they got stonewalled.

It’s not the way a leader should behave. And I wanna say publicly, I’m so sorry for all the people, like everyone in this room, you’re carrying a stigma of my inability to do the right thing, which was to post, Hey, we put this guy on stage and we trusted him. Hey, we no longer trust him. Everyone should know that.

And I didn’t do that. So I, especially to the victims this, the victims of the inappropriate sexual culture and obvious the victims of all the people of Sean’s prophetic ministry who struggled with, what do I do with this word? Some of the words were amazing. Do I believe this word? Do I put faith in it anymore?

How do I process this? And. And frankly, we had never processed that on that level before. So it was new territory for us. It’s again, not excuse I Sunday night, I was not in this is our responsibility mode. I was still in, Hey, we did more than a hundred platforms. He was on, Hey, we took our own time to investigate this.

We confronted and confronted to no solution. And it’s and I was in this mode of I dunno why everybody’s mad at us. Who else did anything? Not realizing like we’re the ones that put him on a global platform.

julio: More, more owning. More owning. I appreciate what he’s saying here.

Let’s go ahead and just play out it’s own. We’re almost to the end of it. I’m seeing him begin to own it, but I think Lance, exactly what you said, there’s no discipline, there’s no resignation. And to me that’s just obvious that he should be resigning. Yeah. Jona. Jonna, would you agree with that?

Do you think he should be resigning?

Jono: I think he should be submitting himself to whatever, a real elder board and there should be consequences, whatever those consequences are. I’m not gonna specify what I think they should be. I think it’s very telling that this is a 180 that he’s done from his previous message.

I think in his previous message he was like. Hey, if I go to people and they say, I didn’t do it, what can I do? I’m like, come on. Yeah. And I’m sure he got pressure internally and yeah. I am not aware of any other big pr moment in the history of Bethel like this. This is one of the biggest moments in Bethel and they better get it right.

So whatever they’re gonna say on stage has to be as polished and contrite and humble as possible. Yeah. There’s so much more than that needs to be done actually off stage than actually on stage. But I do appreciate that it is a 180 10 from what he said the week before.

julio: Yeah, Lance.

Lance: Yeah. And this is what happens so often in these situations. I think about Willow Creek and I think about how inept the elders the two co-pastors at least one of them anyway, we’re not going into that but they were completely inept. And yet they are held, they were Willow Creek’s held up as the leader of leadership.

Hey, we know how to do it. Come to us and we’ll teach you how to lead. And yet they couldn’t lead theirself out of a paper bag. When they faced the why was that? It was because it was always all built on one central personality that at the end of the day, we know had all the power. Same thing happened at Mars Hill.

You had 32 elders that in the moment couldn’t lead, couldn’t stand up to Mark Driscoll, and it wasn’t until he was gone and it all melted down that they came back and you had others in high level C-suite positions that go, ah, I we had it wrong. And in ept in leadership. And so that’s what I see here.

I want to totally have mercy on Chris as because he is showing contrite. But it needs to, the scripture says that you should present fruit that is meat for repentance. That pro that, that proves repentance has taken place. And sometimes you, you have to fall on the sword or, sometimes you have to really take a hit in that.

And so I would hope that’s gonna be followed up because it’s clear that there is an inept of leadership at Bethel and it’s right at the top.

julio: Let’s keep playing this. I think it’s queued up now.

Kris Vallotton: We’re the ones who caused it to go from this to this. It was on us. And honestly. Till, I’ll say sometimes adversity introduces a man to himself and I saw in me a man I did not like Monday morning, and I wanna thank people who pushed back and were dedicated to the body of Christ being a healthy body.

We, we need, it’s not fun, but we need that kind pushback. Last Sunday night, I was trying to process externally, which I’m famous for doing. Like I don’t totally have it figured out, but I think I’ll just tell everybody about it and maybe it’ll be a good message. I had a sincere heart.

I was really trying to share with our body, with all of these Facebook, all these, social media swirl. My friends are like, say something and I’m like, oh, what am I gonna say? What am I’m gonna say is, wow, it’s really hard to pastor a global body in 21st century of social media. That was really a pretty dumb response actually, especially since I hadn’t worked out how to do it.

Let’s just tell everybody I don’t know what I’m doing. And I actually quoted Revelation two where it says, I know your deeds, that you love, your love and faith and service and perseverance, that your deeds of later are greater than at first. That’s good, but I obviously against you that you tolerated the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, and she teaches and leads my bond servants astray so that they commit acts of immorality and each sac think sacrifice idols.

I gave her time to repent and she does not want to repent of her immorality. Funny, I don’t know how you be that verse and emphasize, I gave her time to repent instead of you tolerated the prophetess who was perverted, but somehow I didn’t get that. Somehow I read right over that and not saw, I didn’t see that the Lord was actually speaking to us.

Hey, you’re doing these greater works. That’s awesome. You’re tolerating this prophetic person who’s actually perverted his ministry. And I gave him time and I’m emphasizing in my message, I gave him time when I should have been emphasizing, I called him the judgment that was dumb at best.

julio: Dumb as is minimizing.

Yeah. I don’t think that’s just dumb. I think it’s a pattern. I think it’s I’m glad for a lot of things he says and he calls him out, and I appreciate that. But I wanna point out, this isn’t just about Sean Bulls, right? Chris Valentin got up and I think it’s time for him to own that this is much bigger than just this Sean Bowles, he got up after we began to hear about the essay that Mike Bickle had done of these young, just incredibly sincere, earnest, godly women that he took advantage of.

And he got up and what he had to say, defending Mike Bickel in the midst of this and the way, listen to how he treats a whistleblower in this one. It is egregious. So I want you to hear this clip again. This was back when we first started hearing about the essay of Mike Bickel. To so many of these women,

Kris Vallotton: we have to break the power of, we need justice.

And we have to be people who say, no, we need reconciliation. And by the way, in reconciliation, there is a line of justice. I don’t want you to say, we’ve just been, I watching what’s happening with ihop, and by the way, I wanna say publicly, I love Mike Bickle. I don’t know what the outcome will be, but it won’t change the fact that I love him, that he’s my

brother.

It won’t change the fact that he’s my dad.

julio: A clapping

Kris Vallotton: somebody placed it on my

social page a couple days ago, and they’re like they said, oh, you haven’t said anything about, IHOP situation. So you obviously are part of the problem. I’m like, I just, I text up. I wrote back, replied, I wrote, you’re an idiot.

But then I realized that I was the idiot for calling an idiot. And I had just answered a fool according to his foolishness, and became a fool right with him. So I immediately took it down. I’m just pointing out like,

if I have a problem with somebody, I know I don’t need to post something on social media. So you all know where I stand. This is not entertainment. This is a tragedy. That’s right. I’m not gonna play out on social media to let you all know. I believe that Mike Dickel should and this is the way it should happen.

I just want everybody to know I’m against it too. Listen, if you can’t look at my life and know where I stand, I guess I don’t have much of a life

Mike Winger: talk to us.

Kris Vallotton: My goal for Mike Fickle and IHOP and everyone else who’s struggling, including the Bethel struggles we have, is that we would reconcile and that we would see righteousness grow out of it.

Not another documentary.

julio: So many things about that are just one that did not age well. But he’s talking, this is not entertainment. This is a tragedy. While people are laughing and he’s making them laugh like he’s a comedian up there. This is not funny. This is disgusting. That is one of the worst ways to respond.

He says, you look at my life. Here’s what your life is, Chris. You’re have a pattern of protecting predators or being silent when predators are preying on the sheep. That’s your pattern, Chris. That’s what we see in your life. It’s not funny. And this is egregious. This is sin. Let’s call it what it is.

And the way that and again and Johnna, you saw this in spades and your situation, and this is why at the last Restore conference we had just. Two of the victims, and then Elizabeth heard her up there and on a panel and talking about the way that the advocate group came around these women and supported them.

Why you need to support them because that’s how they get treated by the people that should be protecting them when they come forward or when their husband comes forward. We gaslight ’em, we shame them. We call them idiots. That’s how we treat them.

Jono: Yeah. The, it’s interesting, of course, a lot of people are now understand the term davo the deny attack, reverse victim order.

But I see a, maybe a unique pattern in, in, in ministries. And it’s this, my first knee jerk reaction is, I love the ministry brother or sister, and I’m gonna express my public support for them. That’s generally what happens. Then I’m gonna come up with a secondary statement about how that, I’m, of course I’m against abuse for the victims, but it’s like super vague.

I’m like, what does, how, what does that mean? Because actually the guy that you’ve just supported. Is actually abusing people. But you’ve just said two opposite things.

julio: Si.

Jono: And then we’re going to go into a big diatribe about accusation, gossip, control of the tongue and how the spirit’s coming into the church to, to bring the spirit of accusation and we need to put down the rocks, which then provides this massive chilling effect on anybody that’s gonna bring any situation forward.

Because they’re like, hang on, I don’t want to be the accuser of the brethren. I don’t wanna be Satan himself, which is

Bill Johnson: Derecha.

Jono: And we see this again and again. And I was actually texting some of the guys this morning. I’m like, because I remember this him saying this. I’m like, did he ever retract that?

And Elizabeth was like, yeah, I think he said something vague. But I have no recollection of that ever being retracted. What I do see is these kind of very vague statements about how if real sex abuse happens, we’re gonna stand with the victims, but actually in reality, never actually standing with the victims.

julio: Put good observations. Yeah. Let’s keep hearing this,

Kris Vallotton: especially since I hadn’t worked out how to do it. Let’s just tell everybody I don’t know what I’m doing. And I actually quoted Revelation two, where it says, I know your deeds, that you love, your love and faith and service and perseverance, that your deeds of later are greater than at first.

That’s good, but I have this against you that you tolerated the woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess, and she teaches and leads my bond servant astray so that they commit acts of immorality.

julio: You can keep playing that

Kris Vallotton: and each thing sacrifice idols. I gave her time to repent, and she does not want to repent of her immorality.

Funny, I don’t know how you read that verse and emphasize, I gave her time to repent instead of you tolerated the prophetess who was perverted, but somehow I didn’t get that. Somehow I read right over that and not saw, I didn’t see that the Lord was actually speaking to us like, Hey, you’re doing these greater works.

That’s awesome. You’re tolerating this prophetic person who’s actually perverted his ministry, and I gave him time and I’m emphasizing in my message, I gave him time when I should have been emphasizing. I called him the judgment that was dumb at best. I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it till Monday morning.

I saw it when I realized this is our, this isn’t just, this isn’t our fault, but it is definitely our responsibility.

These are the things you know, repentance means that you take ownership of your failure. So number one, I need to take ownership of my failure. We failed you as a body. We failed the students, failed everyone who trusts us. And I sincerely, I’m sorry, but repentance requires bringing forth fruit. ’cause sorry, doesn’t really get it if you just keep doing the same stupid thing over and over.

So we need to be a shift in our cultural values in that we focus on safety and security of our global community. We have to focus like it’s it. I used to say it’s not our responsibility to keep everybody safe. We can’t keep everybody safe, but it is our responsibility to do our best as it, it depends on us to keep our people safe and to keep the people who trust us safe.

That was a very bad core value on my part. Number three, we must realize that leaders who have graced our podium and being promoted by us are thereby we have to care as much about their character as we do about their gift. And we put somebody on stage. We have to care if we’re gonna take responsibility.

When somebody that gets on our stage falls, we gotta care that they have a track record. Now, obviously you can do all the investigation you want and still make a mistake, and that’s a mistake. But when you don’t even try, that’s not a mistake. Number four, we have to take steps to bring greater accountability to our own leadership teams and ensure that we together live out these values.

We have to call each other to account. And when we break these core values that we’re creating, when we say. Hey, it is our job to keep people safe, at least as it depends on us. This is our job. This is not their job because he’s in some other ministry or he’s not on our board. We’re not on his board. And we just slough it off.

And then what happens comes into our network. He comes into our people and in the body of Christ and leaks havoc. And we’re like that’s not my problem. I’m sorry. From now on it is our problem. And from now on we better think of how are we gonna solve that problem? And I don’t know if that’s gonna be an easy solution, but the Lord will give us wisdom and grace and we’ll figure it out and we will be a better movement in the future.

julio: Okay. There was a lot in there. Some stuff that sounds really good, but I think the thing that, that’s really stunning to me, one and I keep coming back to what you said at the very beginning, Jono, he’s going into, these are the corrective actions we’re gonna take. What moral platform does he have to start outlining the corrective, actions they’re gonna take.

Here’s someone who has blown it so majorly for so long and now he’s gonna give the corrective actions. And then it’s we’re gonna be a better movement in the future. So Chris thinks, oh, it our better best years are ahead of us. I was just waiting for that line. ’cause that’s such a frequent one, but it’s like one, you have no moral platform to do to say these things, but then really better days are ahead.

We’re gonna be better in the future. You’re assuming, it sounds like that you’re gonna continue to lead this movement. Yeah, that’s what I’m hearing. And the one thing that, that seems really systemic about this whole thing and this is one of the most shocking parts, I think of Mike Winger’s video and I wanna play a clip from it, but he cites you, Jono, I’m sure you heard this part, and it was when you confirmed that even among the Kansas City prophets, so these are the founders of Morningstar, Bethel ihop, all of these big guys, right?

They said it’s okay to be wrong 70% of the time. Is that true?

Jono: I was, I think I was just quoting Mike back from the public thing he said from stage, which I think I think Mike also played that in terms of Mike saying he was willing to, but it was 70 to eight 80% of false, so that he gets the 20% of real.

But yeah,

julio: which by the way, just Lance, can you help us out in the Old Testament, and I know we’re not and they’ll make a point, this isn’t Old Testament prophecy, this New Testament, but let’s just remember in the Old Testament, if you got a prophecy wrong, what happened to you?

Lance: You didn’t get a 70 per you, you didn’t get a 30 per, 300 Batten average, let’s put it that way.

So let’s put it that way. No one strike. You’re out. And we mean out. You mean. You’re right. You’re gonna go see your maker. You’re up the, you’re pushing the daisies up, right? And once again, as you said, this is not the New Testament, but here’s the problem, is this prophetic abuse culture raises the level of prophetic to a level of import where it’s actually, I would, I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that people show up to these meetings hoping that they get a word, hoping that Sean or whoever the traveling prophet is, points them out.

So they’ve elevated it to such a high level, but they’ve placed such a low accountability to match it. If you’re gonna raise it to this high of a level of import, then you have to have the accountability that matches or surpasses that level. And that is not the case whatsoever in this prophetic abuse culture.

And that’s one of the things, by the way, that Chris is not repented of, and I haven’t seen Bill Johnson repent of it either. And that is at the root of all this. Anyway,

julio: I wanna play that clip from Mike Winger’s podcast where he talks about interviewing someone getting the down low, and this is what was tolerated.

This is the hamburger helper as he puts it, and then it butts right up to a pretty stunning clip. From Mike Bickell, who by the way, let me just say prophesied to the women. He was saying that his wife was gonna die and he was gonna marry them. That’s how he used prophecy. So listen to this. Stunning.

Kris Vallotton: Have to break the power of we need justice and we

julio: have to be That’s wrong One.

People say, that’s the wrong one. No, we need stop that clip. Okay. This is, I wanna see Mike Winger’s clip. Do you have the clip of Mike Winger,

Lance: is it the one where he’s presenting Bickell with the hamburger helper? Is that the one

julio: that, that Yeah. So one of the defenses my dad gave me was he’s got yeah, that’s

Lance: what he,

julio: it’s the son of there it is.

Yep. There it’s, I think we got it queued up. This is the one. This is the one Bob

Lance: Harley’s son.

Mike Winger’s Guest Clip: So one of the defenses that my dad gave was that everyone does it. The second was this hamburger helper defense, which was not to totally defend it, but it was to contextualize it. It was, the idea was that it’s not good.

We shouldn’t do it, but everyone does it a little bit. It’s okay. It’s just this idea of the meat is still God. Most of it is still God, but then we will add some extra fabrication. Just to add a little sizzle prophecy is hard. It makes it more palatable for people. So when you’re caught with it, it’s you’re right, I should stop doing it.

But it’s not like this invalidates my entire ministry. This is some huge thing. It’s getting caught speeding or something like that. It’s like we shouldn’t do it.

Mike Bickle: Si.

Mike Winger’s Guest Clip: But it’s understandable and it makes sense. And Mike Bickel and Bob Jones would talk about it in the same way behind closed doors in front of camera.

Mike talked about it and he used it in a slightly more, in a slightly different sense to be like, there’s a lot of fakers out there, but I don’t pay attention to the fakers. I just pay attention to the people who are genuine. But that’s not how it was used. It was everyone has a little bit of fake and everyone has a little of genuine ‘

Mike Bickle: cause I know that, I know the value of genuine manifestations that are real.

Again, I’ve seen, and I’ve had it happen to me, but I’ve seen people thrashed around and I’ve seen people thrown against walls and across rooms and I’ve seen a lot of fake, but I’ve seen a lot of real, and the reels worth it. I will allow the fake, I don’t want the fake on the platform because I don’t wanna promote the fake, but I’ll allow the fake in the room because I still believe in the genuine, I’ve had people say that over the years, they said, I’ve had students, some of this seems fake.

I go, it’s, they go, what? I go, most of it’s fake. I go, what do you mean? I said, I’ve been watching this 40 years. Most places that I’ve been, the majority of the manifestations are not caused by the Holy Spirit. They go, really? But I said, but the problem is. It’s not all fake, and the genuine is in our midst, and I will allow a whole lot of hamburger helper to allow the genuine take place.

I said, I won’t promote it, but I will allow it because the genuine is so important to the kingdom of God. But that always throws off people. If they’re young and new at this, they go, it is I go, yeah. I go, just, don’t be so open-minded. Your brains fall out. You can understand that the real and the genuine and the fake all exist together in one setting.

And it’s that way everywhere. There’s nothing unique here. It’s not any different here than anywhere. It’s that way everywhere. I’ve been in re revival, renewal, holy Spirit settings in many countries.

julio: Wow. I couldn’t help but think as I’m listening to him, could you imagine if we did our journalism this way?

You know what? 70% of our journalism facts are wrong, but 30%, that 30% is so good.

Lance: It’s so good.

julio: The truth is and this is why I think in the Old Testament, God said if you call yourself a prophet of God, you get it wrong. Once you’re done, you’re you. That’s it. His, we are making a mockery out of God.

We are undermining the credibility of God’s church, of his people. I’m like did Mike Bickle, did Bethel do they read the New Testament like Annia and Savara? They lied once and boom, they were struck dead and there was fear. There’s the sons of Skiva and they were trying to, manufacture the miraculous gifts that they were seeing the apostles do.

What happened to them? The demons attack them, right? And they go out fleeing wounded, and I’m like, what Bible are these people reading? Like God’s okay with us having, a 70% error. It’s shocking. It’s just absolutely shocking that anybody would’ve bought this. This is horrific.

I’m, where is our, I guess I, I just, I feel like God’s glory, his name is being run through the mud and to me, but who is jealous for his glory anymore? It just it’s so upsetting to me that people call themselves ministers of the gospel would not care about this kind of fraudulent behavior going on.

Lance: It’s incredibly flippant. It’s very incredibly flippant. I was thinking, Julia, my analogy since, since, and I’ve heard, and I’m sure John Hass heard it many times, the whole hamburger hel helper deal from Mike Bickle. And I lived in Kansas City for quite a while and. I going back to early vineyard days in the nineties I’ve heard Bickell a lot, and so I’ve heard the hamburger helper deal, and I thought, staying with that analogy if I walk in for dinner some night and my wife said, Hey man, I got a gr I’m, we’re serving burgers tonight.

I’ve used some hamburger helper. I gr now, Hey, listen, there’s some poison mushrooms in there, but the beef is fantastic. Yeah. It’s insane. It’s really insane and it’s so flippant. And so I’m curious to ask you a question, Jono, in your time there, when y’all would hear this these things from Mike, did people like ever look at each other?

Like what how was that dealt with? Was it just quiet?

Jono: No, I’ll say this Mike portrayed himself as the biggest opponent of hamburger helper. That’s now that clip with, it was in the context of the student awakening and there was like lots of Toronto ish kind of flipping and flailing.

And that’s what he was talking about in terms of that. But in terms of the prophetic words, mike had different faces, and looking back, I’m like I, he could read a person and he would, he knew that I was like, I was hardcore certain things. So he would be like I’m gonna talk to Jono this way and I’m not gonna I’m not gonna fudge.

But in terms of he is, he’s telling me Bob Hartley isn’t prophetic. John Paul Jackson isn’t prophetic. Sean Bolts is not prophetic. I do not consider these men prophetic because of and I’m like asking, okay, I’ve got further questions, but let me tell you about something which is real over here, but I don’t con So I’m like, but okay, now I’m confused. And of course now I look back and go, I should have asked more questions. I’m the dummy. But you, you think that this is a righteous guy. I don’t think that now

julio: And we’ve all been there, right?

Lance: Por supuesto.

julio: I’ve followed leaders that now I look back and think, how dumb was I?

Yeah. I didn’t see it. So we’ve all done it and it’s live and learn. And I think there’s an awful lot of people at Bethel right now who are saying this exact same thing. And I would just encourage them to listen to that voice. We’re getting near the end of Chris’s apology.

But let’s go ahead.

Jono: Or maybe I just I always wanna add a point because, ’cause Chris is basically going and he’s saying the right thing. I can say this, but if we don’t have change, then it doesn’t mean anything, which will like yes and amen, but we are going to have change. And I’m like, wow.

One, that’s a huge statement. But I remember when I became COO at IHOP and we had, we were in a lot of hot water in a lot of different areas, and I remember reading this book about leading successful change, and it was just a corporate book. And they said 75% of change initiatives in organizations fail.

Why? Because you underestimate the power of culture in organizations.

Bill Johnson: Si.

Jono: And that’s just a corporate culture. Forget about a church culture, which is swimming in Megachurch America. And then you have culture of honor in there, and then you have wider charismatic culture. And then you have leaders who are 70-year-old leaders who let’s be honest, as you get older, you become more resistant to change.

And then you have Danny, who’s one of the three main leaders, Danny Silk, saying, we don’t want people from outside who have no emotional investment. IE let me rephrase that. We are gonna do it ourselves. And I’m like, what kind of ego number one? Have you got to say that? Yeah. And number two. How can any of us see our blind spots like that?

Like you really think that you can actually do that and that said just a mountain to climb in terms of what repentance actually looks like so that these things will not happen again.

julio: Tan verdadero.

Lance: Great point.

julio: Let’s keep playing it.

Kris Vallotton: We want to remain a place of restoration for leaders but not at the expense of protecting the flock. Listen, people come here from all over the world, some of them you know, some of ’em you don’t. It happens a lot here. A leader who has fallen comes into our mist and we help restore them. And we’ve restored so many people and I’m gonna tell you that I a product of that restoration.

I met this man when I was 26 years old and I was in the middle of a three and a half year nervous breakdown. And he wrapped his arms around a broken kid with two little kids and a wife who moved to the mountains. ’cause I was mentally ill and he believed in me and I never wanna lose that. But in the midst of that core value, we have to protect the flock.

You can’t let predators and people who are unrepentant

julio: in here. I just want to draw a distinction between is who’s broken and needs help is very different than a predator who is purposefully. Lying and deceiving so that he can not protect the sheep, but prey on the sheep. It’s very different. And I think that needs to be, that needs to be brought out. These are not people to be restored.

And this is probably my pet peeve because I’ve done so much reporting on not just these kind of churches, but in the whole association of related churches arc. It has just been pastor, after pastor. They just built a five, over $5 million lodge to restore pastors. And many of these pastors should never be restored.

And they get back out there and they re-offend, and they re-offend and they re-offend predators should never, ever they’re not candidates for restoration. And somewhere that needs to be said it’s almost like he’s lumping in his, being a broken person and having a mental breakdown with being purposefully lying and deceiving people and giving false words of prophecy.

I, I see those on totally two totally different levels. Am I’ve

Lance: never on I’ve never heard of a rancher or a shepherd taking a wolf and say, I’m gonna rehab this wolf. I’m gonna make him my sheep dog. You, no. There, there has been a, there has been something fouled up in your wiring to such a degree that you are disqualified from that.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t be useful for the kingdom. You can literally, you can be useful for the kingdom working anywhere and just in, by interacting with people. But you don’t get to lead the body. You’re done. And that’s one of the things that this misuse of restoration. No, you’re restored to Christ.

You’re restored to community. You’re restored to the family. As our brother, our sister that once was falling, we brought you back. But you are not restored to office. You’re not restored to rank and to position. We gotta get over that.

julio: Sure do. All right. Let’s keep playing this,

Kris Vallotton: have our podiums and be among our people when they are still destructive.

And I’m so sorry for that. And we will do better where we get it right every time. No, but at least we should try. At least we should build culture where we can say, oh, we got through the cracks. Not like we have an open door. There’s a big difference between open door and he fell through the cracks.

Sunday night’s message I thought was good is inappropriately placed in the long context and sent the message. And he cared more about the leader than I did the victim. I just, I say this for people who don’t know me ’cause this is probably going all over the place ’cause my failure has gone all over the place.

I grew up in a very violent home till I was eight years old. I remember my mom being beaten and I left that house with a huge heart for every victim. I’ve had two nervous breakdowns, one of them mentally mental illness. I have a huge compassion for people who have broken. We spent five years with broken kids in a non-Christian youth group.

I, I just wanna point out like I didn’t extend my compassion to people, but I have great compassion for people who are broken and I’m really sorry. And it trolls me so bad because I can’t imagine if one of my kids was on his team or got some great prophetic word and was running their life after it and found out later that man was incredible.

I can’t imagine how that would’ve broke my heart. And for some reason, that idea that’s not our responsibility dictated my actions. And I’m deeply sorry. I’d like to say it’ll never happen again, but I hold you to, I hold my leadership team to please don’t ever let me do that again.

julio: Good way for him to never do it again is for him to resign.

And I know John, are you’ve held back from that, but I will say a hundred percent this man should not be in leadership after what he did. It is time to step down. I believe he is disqualified. He has failed in hi, in his job, in his duty. So again, seems to be an assumption that he’s gonna stay in leadership and.

They’re still running the show ’cause they’re running this apology. Let’s keep playing it.

Kris Vallotton: I just wanna say to the victims super sorry. It’s not just a scripted message. It’s like deeply grieved from Monday on, haven’t slept much. When you have this much experience as a leader and you get something that wrong, you should be troubled. Spent a lot of time and our team has spent a lot of time giving feedback.

How do we get it wrong? What was the value that was misplaced? How do we change the culture? How do we make sure that we don’t just fix this or say we’re sorry, but how do we make sure that we build a culture that 20 years from now, this is not okay, no one’s gonna ever say, that’s not our responsibility ever again.

And I promise you, from this day forward, no one will ever say that in this house again. That guy, we put on a platform, not our responsibility. We learn to be more vigilant. We have a lot to learn. This. For me, this is the first week of a journey that I’ve never been here before. And how we navigate a global movement in the 21st century.

It’s got to be possible and it’s definitely gotta be way better than we’ve done. And prayerfully a lot of other leaders will learn from our mistakes and prayerfully, we don’t just get, prayerfully, the body of Christ becomes a safe, godly place for our children, for people to get well, for leaders to get well, for victims to get healed.

Without creating a huge mess. Please forgive me. I understand that your trust for me is broken. I know for some of you that’ll take time to heal. I’m very sorry. I do give you my word that we will move to maturity in this. Bill’s gonna speak now. God bless you. Thank you so much for listening.

julio: Okay, we’re gonna get into to Bill’s. His message, what his apology, what he says. It’s actually not quite as long as Chris is. But I just, again, he’s giving some corrective measures and that is where we wanna see things get to right. Some correction. Again, I just don’t think he is anywhere near being able or qualified to map out those steps.

And I will say too, ’cause he said a number of times about how great their new team is, how brilliant they are. Bill, you’ll hear Bill do the same thing. They were trained by this team and this is why so often when this happens, friends, it is not one bad apple’s, not two bad apples. Lance, it’s exactly what you said.

It’s the system and you can take one person out of a system. The system remains. These people have been trained. In fact they don’t even see it. They probably don’t even hear it. ’cause when you’re a part of it. You don’t, it takes a while now, I’m sure Jono, it’s been a process for you, right? Getting out of it to be able to look back and have some objectivity to be able to see some things, and then you go wow, that was so obvious, but I didn’t see it then.

Am I right?

Jono: I’m just thinking through your statement about it. I haven’t, he should be, he should resign. I wanna say I do think there should be consequences. And the interesting thing in Bethel, and I have in all of these places, further down the organization, there’s always consequences for wrong behavior.

Imagine I’ll just Bethel music, they have an accountant.

And suddenly they find out over a five year period they’ve been siphoning $200 a month and giving it to the Democratic party. I’m just saying that ’cause it, it’s

julio: yeah.

Jono: They’re

julio: like, exactly.

Jono: Okay, this guy is out of here.

Forget about just once, twice, three, three strikes you’re out. Forget about a five year period of covering something up. And we’re just talking about Sean Bolts here. We haven’t talked about the other things that Mike Winger brought that brought up at all because the Bob Hartley thing is just right alongside that and that wasn’t even brought up at all.

Lance: Si.

julio: So much here. Alright, let’s get into

Lance: both. Yeah. And so that’s that partiality, that’s, that, that’s that one rule for this one. Another rule for that one when. James, the book of James tells us clearly that leaders have to actually be held to a higher level of accountability. In fact, you get less you get less margin for error.

As a leader, especially biblical in weighty matters biblically. Not in

julio: practice in a lot of these places, but then look

Lance: at it. No. So I just think that what John is saying there is just huge great point. That should run the thread of this.

julio: Yep. Alright. Let’s listen to Bill’s apology.

Kris Vallotton: Thanks. Chris very nobly takes all the responsibility when everybody comes back to me. Both Chris and Danny were much more willing to pursue bringing correction not just the initial correction, but actually walking through long term. This whole journey. And I was the part of the process that slowed it down. You know what, sometimes your strongest trait becomes your weakest trait.

And one of the things I do well is I believe in people and you don’t deserve it, but it can move into what some, I called Unsanctified mercy, and that’s actually what I did. I became sole not impressed with the gift. I don’t do gifts over character, but I became so committed to seeing Sean protected and come into a place of health and that I just was hoed and.

julio: So I tried to get Dr. Julia Dahl, who is an image repair analyst to be able to join us. And I don’t feel like I’m able to analyze this from image repair theory, but I will just say again, he is framing things from the very beginning, very similarly to how Chris did when he is just too merciful.

That’s what’s going on here. I think that’s really minimizing what he did. And I think it’s quite frankly it and Mike Winger gets at this in his six hour video when he says that Bethel constantly and it wasn’t alone in doing this, there’s other charismatic groups that do this too, of saying this is where the spirit’s moving.

This is the place to be. I’m sure that happened at IHOP too. God is moving here. We are ushering in the end times. We are bringing it about so everybody wants to be there, right? ’cause this is it. And there’s a grandiosity in that. And there’s a grandiosity in so many. In fact, bill gave a pretty grandiose kind of message when he said that ba basically reading California was gonna be the epicenter of what God was doing.

And it was gonna double, the population was gonna double, never happened. So again, this whole thing that he’s, he was just too merciful. I don’t think it gets at, what I think is likely there, if they’re willing to admit it to themselves and to others, is that they got something from Sean, Sean helped them build this message or this aura that this is the place to be.

And that meant something to them. ’cause they wanted to be the place and build a movement, and they were willing to allow deception to be at the root of some of that building. And I think people need to let that sink in. I don’t think Bill, I, I really don’t think Bill or Chris have done, they haven’t had time.

If this is true repentance, which I hope to God it is, but it’s gonna take a lot of time for you to get to some of these root sin issues that allowed this to fester. Again I don’t buy that. It was just foolish. And I hope other people don’t buy it either, because I think that is a gross minimization of what happened.

Let’s keep playing. Bill Johnson,

Kris Vallotton: what started as I, I believed I, I didn’t believe the allegations were true initially. I think probably all of us wondered, man, this can’t be true. We love this guy. We spent time with him. He spent time here. But over a period of time, it became obvious. It’s true, but I became blind to it because my loyalty to him as a friend, as somebody who administered deeply to me, as Chris mentioned to him, and so many people authentically, that we became blind to the fact I became blind to the fact that there was a real issue that needed to be addressed completely blind to it.

I see it now. It’s embarrassing to to see what was right in front of you all the time. And I were surrounded by such a, an incredible group of leaders and team phenomenal discernment. I, on a number of occasions, I’ve come to Chris I’ll ask him a question, how do you see the situation?

I trust your perspective more than mine. And there are just times where you just trust in other people, skip more than your old, but this was an occasion when I didn’t do that and should have, because I easily could have seen through their eyes, through their heart, through their discernment, something that was really obvious.

It’s obvious as the nose on your face

Lance: how this is the issue. Yeah. He framed it as loyalty. This is loyalty. Loyalty is just another word for that. First Timothy 5 21 word, favoritism, partiality, the very thing that is forbidden in these cases. This has to be right in the middle of your forehead as a leader, that I will not do this.

And that if there are those around me that are abusive, abusing the flock, then my mercy for the sheep are definitely going to override my mercy for a false shepherd that should never, even you. That’s not a hard decision. For a true shepherd, that should not be a hard decision for you to make at all.

Jono: This under understanding of, go ahead. No, this understanding of loyalty is crazy to me. Just a very unbiblical understanding of loyalty that runs right through the charismatic church. It is way, way more mafia like. Even recently we heard Mike Bickle, betrayal of the Absaloms, his former leaders, and eventually they’ll come back.

But but the Bickle families, very broken, but very much loyalty. So if it’s truth or loyalty, we’re gonna go with the loyalty. But I’m like, what about loyalty to Kingdom values? Because for me, I’m like, all of these guys are in their seventies. They’re gonna be standing before Jesus.

Like in a in a second.

julio: Si.

Jono: And isn’t loyalty if, if Lens falls into sin and I’m like, okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna do what feels really uncomfortable and actually try to deal with it so that ultimately lens can stand before Jesus. Isn’t that a greater degree of loyalty than cov covering stuff up

julio: a hundred percent.

And the people that TI trust in my life are people that I know would do that to me. Like they would never let me get away with stuff. Like I know that. When they, this whole, I got your six or I got your back. I know to them that means I love you enough to confront you if you did something wrong.

That’s love. That’s, and yeah, the loyalty, and I’ve seen this so often. It’s so close. Like people say, as a board member, I need to protect the organization. And it’s no, as a board member, you need to protect the mission of the organization. And sometimes that’s two different things, right?

Lance: Si.

julio: We just missed it, we loyal to God above all. Above all else.

Lance: Go ahead. Absolutely. And the other thing besides this loyalty issue is then when you mix that in and ENM mesh it with the honor culture and Jono you had mentioned, and for people that don’t know Danny Silk, that’s his specialty is honor culture, which is a bit of a spin on the covering doctrine.

John Bevere is very well known for that. So you wrap all this up in, and it becomes a really safe, insular place for a well-known leader in your midst to be able to get away with a lot of things without being called out, without being, having to, stand in front of everybody and be held accountable and without having to pay the price for their deeds.

It’s it’s the system. And every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.

julio: Amen. And that’s what they should be addressing right now. And it should be addressed by someone outside who can have enough objectivity to look at it and point it out. Instead, we’re hearing more from Bill Johnson.

Here’s what he had to say.

Kris Vallotton: I didn’t say I missed it. I missed it because, just not wanting to believe something that, that could be true. And it was as a result of my slowing a process down just affected more and more people, more and more injuries took place. And through the prophetic and through his own teams where people were traumatized over some of the sexual issues.

Just horrible sad stuff. And I spent time with one individual that I know and we actually had a real, I felt a really honoring time going both ways. I, he was coming up for help. He was expressing the pain of his own journey and the trauma that he had faced of being on that staff.

And we had a really good time of connection. And I was so thankful for what followed, however, is I did, I was invited to do an interview on TBN, which I agreed to do, and found out it was to promote Sean in his book, and I went through with it.

julio: Okay. I played a short clip of this in the intro of Bill at tbn.

Again, get what he’s saying. So I, you understand the context here. Somebody came to him. Who was a victim of Sean’s sexual harassment. He heard how devastating this was to him. He also knew about people traumatized from this misuse of the prophetic, this lying and deceiving, let’s call it what it is. And then he went on TPNI played a short clip.

I wanna play a longer clip that Mike played in his video because it’s really breathtaking.

TBN Host: But Bill, you wrote the foreword to this book. It’s called Translating God, hearing God’s Voice for Yourself and the word around world around you. But you wrote that this was one of the most exciting books Yeah.

That you had read. Why was that?

Bill Johnson: The book by itself is incredible. Knowing the life that backs it up adds a power to it because it’s so practical. It’s what you dream of. It’s if you could see, if you could have a perfect relationship with the Lord and see its impact on humanity, that’s what it would look like.

I get excited knowing that we could actually raise up generations of people to do the same thing.

julio: So knowing what he knows, he is making Sean a model to all of the rest who are watching. And this is carelessness. He labels as careless. I was careless. I like, wow. I’m glad he addressed this. I’m glad he addressed the TVN thing, but.

Dear Lord, what you did Bill unconscionable. How could he do that?

Jono: He’s humble. But this is, for me, one of the most troubling moments of the whole thing. That, and Danny Silk tries to cover him. The intentionality is he has a hesitation. But that wasn’t a hesitation. The facts don’t back that up.

I’ve talked to a victim. I’ve lent my time to him. I believe him. And then a very short amount of time later I go on and I don’t just sell the book, I back it up with the character of a perpetrator and it’s what is going on there that, is that some kind of dementia? I don’t think so.

If you’re going to give some kind of excuse there, there isn’t really an excuse. He calls it foolishness, I think is what he says it is. And it’s great that he acknowledges it. I’m wondering whether the victim was like, if you don’t acknowledge it, I’m gonna come out and tell it anyway.

And it’s gonna be worse for you if that happens. But this is probably one of the most troubling aspects of it. And I think there should be a consequence for that because that is not the action of a shepherd.

Lance: Si.

julio: Yeah. That’s wicked.

Lance: That, yeah, that’s that. You know what occurred to me about that?

And I’ve watched this clip several times and as you said, John, oh, he, knowing what he, he’s admitted. He, knew what he knew when he sat there at the, at TBN and I thought, boy, this is a twist on bearing false witness. You, this is actually the you’re actually endorsing someone that you blatantly know.

Their character doesn’t back this up. So you’re being dishonest, which is a softer word for lying, to millions of people.

julio: And who would follow this man after this? That’s what I don’t get. I really do not understand after

Lance: this. Yeah. If I was a if I was a parent of a young person at Bethel, right now their plane ticket as soon as I saw their plane ticket would’ve arrived, FedEx real quickly, Hey, pack it up.

You’re coming home. No way. No way. Yeah. Once again, the victims, we can’t even count the victims, the direct victims of the SA situation, they’re the victims. The horrific false prophecies that have ruined people’s lives. And then again, I can’t emphasize it enough, all of these thousands of young people, what Bethel has 18,000 alumni.

All these young people that are being affected, and then they’re sent out into the world to start more churches and more ministries and to perpetuate this stuff, I would pull my kids outta Bethel immediately.

julio: Yeah. And actually on, on Monday, probably shouldn’t mention this earlier in this live stream, but on Monday, Mike Winger is gonna join me for another live stream, and I know tomorrow he’s going on and going to be speaking a response to Bethel.

Very curious to hear that. But you brought up his video just this week on Todd White, and I’m gonna, I’m gonna hold this until I, I interview Mike, but I’ve got an email with a leader about Todd White. And it’s just like you said, if I were the father of someone I’m the mother of a daughter.

Who was that? Why wham. When they were endorsing Todd White.

And I’m gonna share the correspondence that I had with those leaders and how they responded when I, to me, it was just clear from looking at his nine nineties, look at the money tells a story.

But again, it just the lack of care.

Again, these are our children. And one of the things I grieve the most about all this. Is, I wonder what’s gonna be left for my children and my grandchildren.

What is going to be left? I know that God will rebuild and out of the ashes, something new will grow. But it is time for this to be ashes.

This is time for this to go. It is time for there to be lamenting, for there to be repentance, for this system to be called out and to be honestly just done away with the system is wrong. It’s not biblical. So let’s keep listening.

Kris Vallotton: And I went through with it. And so if you can imagine making a heartfelt connection with somebody and lending support for their healing, and then a week, a month, three months, whatever it was I don’t recall.

Now let’s just say two months later, endorsing the very guy that he just brought a report to me on. And it was just a slap in the face to this young man. And it was just such a horrible misjudgment on my part. Just absolutely foolish. I followed up, we spent more time together, a couple hours, and to be frank he helped me in a kind way to say how foolish my decision was and the effect it had on him.

And I know if it affected him that way, then it’s countless of others that it also affected and I’m so sorry.

Some things are inexcusable. I’m just glad they’re not unforgivable

julio: that line. I appreciate the tears. I do, I appreciate that he’s broken over this, but again, that, that line just did not strike me right, because I felt like he was almost saying right there. I can be like we have to forgive him, and y yes, he can be forgiven. Yes, he will be forgiven. If this is real repentance, God will forgive him, which is what’s most important. But I also feel like when he says a line like that, I feel like there’s an expectation that we have to forgive him and that we have to put him back in leadership, because he hasn’t even mentioned, there’s no sense in any of this.

It’s we’ll learn, we’ll do better. But no sense that he should be stepping down though. Is that just me or do you guys, that hit you wrong too.

Jono: I think I, I often think there’s a lot of people, bill has a very winsome manner that, that draws you in. You are like, oh, I love this. I love this person.

And I, yes, of course we have to express forgiveness. And I think I, I don’t know about, I even if Mike Bickle was before me now and was like, he wants forgiveness. I’m like, yes. Let’s talk about that. But yes, my, my heart is actually to forgive and to reconcile. But let’s separate that from all of the requirements of a leader and the dereliction of duty here that we wouldn’t accept in any other profession.

If it happened in the healthcare or any other, we’d be like, no. Like I, I love you, but you can’t be a doctor anymore. I’m sorry. Yeah. Because of that. Or you need to go through all of these steps in order to become a doc. And that’s not about race or mercy, that’s just about the Bible gives us clear steps of what an overseer needs to be.

And if you haven’t step, if you haven’t lived up to that in the same way that you haven’t got your medical degrees and all of your experience, you actually can’t be a doctor. And so I think for Bill, my, my heart goes out, but I’m, but on also we’re not actually seeing the victims here on stage at all.

And there should actually be consequence, even if there is grace in the midst of how we deal with it.

Lance: Yeah. Yeah. We, we don’t divorce grace and truth, mercy and truth. They come in a package, right? This idea once again, and we’ve belabored the point, but apparently it has to be belabored it that just because you’re forgiven doesn’t and you are reconciled to Christ, into the body, into the family, doesn’t mean you get your position back.

We have got to take seriously ministry leadership malpractice to the degree, and you were alluding to it, johno, that the healthcare industry would that if you’re a lawyer and you commit malpractice or fraud or, you you’re defrocked you’re done. You don’t get to do that to go and victimize people again.

And once again, these are leaders that are not 30 5-year-old leaders. These are guys in their seventies. It’s my goodness, you should have learned it by now.

julio: Si.

Lance: You had to have, we’re gonna hold you to it.

julio: And I guess I, I feel like we should always be open to reconciliation, always open to forgiveness, but again, we don’t know if there’s repentance at this point.

Everything just seems a little premature. And we really don’t, we know there’s sadness, but we don’t know if there’s repentance. Yeah. And two different things. All right. Let’s keep here listening.

Kris Vallotton: Oftentimes far beyond what they deserve. And I, I don’t apologize for that because I think it’s a proper way to do life. And so I’m committed to that. But what I did wrong was I did it at the expense of the victims. In other words I showed mercy in, in one category that seriously affected those who shouldn’t have been traumatized anymore than they were.

And it was just it was just careless. It was careless on my part. It obviously’s not intentional. You don’t think through that stuff, but

julio: just careless, again, not intentional.

Jono: And I don’t think he was merciful to Sean, actually. That’s my

julio: good point. Very good point. Yeah. Again, this is, I don’t wanna hear it anymore. I don’t wanna hear anymore about how this wasn’t one thing. It was lesser than you think. It wasn’t a coverup, it was just this no.

We don’t need to hear that. It’s sin, it’s wrong. And you profited from your silence. The movement profited for a time. This is pa Yeah.

Lance: Everything comes

julio: back. But,

Lance: and the, and then, the fact of the matter is this, if this is repentance and I, and it’s definitely sorrow.

It didn’t happen until Mike Winger put. All this time and my, to my understanding, he’s been working on this a year or two. He has been, and you can tell, you don’t sit down and cut and be able to present a five and a half hour video. You don’t do that in five and a half hours.

You do that in about 500 hours. Seriously. And it was after all that pressure and everything that this came. So the repentance didn’t come because something happened in your heart or because you had an encounter with God. It came because you had an encounter with the masses. You had an encounter with exposure.

You got caught, you got exposed with receipts, with evidence, with verifiable witnesses, and now you’re really sorry. You’re really sorry for it. It would seem a lot more genuine if there had been self-reporting on this, or when Mike and I know that Mike Winger contacted these guys over and over, gave them a chance

Without him going public. That was the last, that was the last resort for Mike was to do the videos.

julio: Wait, you saw that he put that up where he did like that poll on social media, like should Bethel release everything? I believe that was back in like April of last year. So

Lance: time. Yeah. It was, seemed like it was a long time ago.

julio: They have had. And I hear this in so many of the investigations that I do that, that the person who ends up getting exposed has been ga, has been granted mercy upon mercy. They have been given so many opportunities to repent so many. And yet it takes something like this to finally get it.

Lance: Yeah. And it goes years and years. It did with Mike Bickle. It did. With Robert Morris.

julio: Si.

Lance: Seriously it’s years and years that these people are coming to him and it’s not until the exposure.

julio: Yeah. And I really hope this does have the effect of one Timothy five 20 that others may stand in fear.

Lance: Si.

julio: That others are going, oh my word. I’ve got skeletons in my closet. I’ve done bad things. I better just bring it out now. And you know what? You should. You really should. And I hope the fear of the Lord every single time and nice and survivor, same thing. There’s this fear of the Lord.

Every, a good fear. We’ve lost the fear of the Lord. Yeah. We’ve got the idea that he’s just like this good buddy that’s so overly gracious and we got, we have this extreme grace movement now. We forgot that he’s holy. We have totally forgotten it. And I hope this is sobering for anyone else out there who has things that they need to be repenting of and should be repenting publicly of.

I would say do it now, because exposure’s coming. It is coming. Yeah. God’s cleaning house. There’s no doubt in my mind, let’s keep hearing this apology.

Kris Vallotton: The fact that I could be that careless and work to defend somebody who not defend anything that he did that was wrong, just work to see them restored.

But in the effort to do that, to do it at the expense of those who had really suffered. And it’s there, there’s the trauma from the sexual issues and there’s the trauma from mis prophetic words and stuff that has been promoted throughout our movement. And and I’m so sorry. I actually, I contributed to the trauma.

I contributed. I wasn’t just there to help bring healing as I thought I was, but I actually contributed to the trauma.

That’s a horrible realization, to, to realize that, that you’re making something worse. And my, sometimes it’s your actions, sometimes it’s the lack of action. And I have this horrible trait of just not confronting well and sometimes I’m just afraid of getting it wrong. So I just avoid it all together.

And we’ve got a, such an amazing team that I have purpose to to be much more eager to receive input on these issues instead of just delay, which is what I’m known for. And I just apologize to you for the effect on your lives, your heart, your trust, and just the life of this family, this movement because of delay and because of avoiding confrontation, avoiding conflict.

And I want to continue to grow in showing appropriate mercy in, in situations, but it really comes down to when there’s, we’re pursuing justice. It’s gotta be the victim first. The priority has to be to show those who have been traumatized. And you know what, sometimes it’s just really painful to be involved with people in trauma.

It’s hard ’cause oftentimes they don’t need advice. They need somebody to listen. They need somebody just to be there. And so I’m repurposing my own heart, my own gift, my own life to give much cleaner attention to the victim as a priority.

julio: I love that he seems to be getting it now, but I hate that he seems to just be assuming that he’s staying in ministry as a result. That is just the assumption throughout this, I’m gonna do better. I’m gonna do, and I hope the elders at Bethel hold him to accountability. I hope they, as you said, Lance third party investigation into all of this would be good.

Although, honestly, Mike’s already done it. Like why pay another, however many tens of thousands. But she could bring in a group like Grace to, given what has already been exposed, how should you be responding? What corrective steps can you take? We don’t need to hear from Bill and from Chris about the corrective steps.

We need some professionals to come in and people who have done this for a really long time and have a track record of seeing it and getting it and let them teach you, that’s what needs to happen and the entire staff needs to be taught. So it’s, yeah.

Lance: Their whole leadership system and culture needs to be rebuilt.

And one of, one of the things that, that this is a perfect example of is when you’ve got the C-suite leadership of one or two at the top, and it’s clear it’s Bill and Chris at the top. There’s not been anything that I’ve heard in all the hours and hours of of these episodes where Bill or Chris says we sit down with our elders and we shared all the, it’s never mentioned.

It’s never said whatsoever. Why? Because these two guys call the shots. It’s all on them. If you have a true biblical plurality of elders where you, that, that are mutual accountable and that are not afraid of the guy at the top, that there’s not this, and I’m just gonna call it not this bs a plurality of elders with a chief among equals, it’s just, that’s just ridiculous to say there’s a chief among equals, it’s a oxymoron.

But if you have a true plurality of elders, as you would in the early church, and you’re truly sharing these things as you’re living it out and moving on, people can call you out and deal with this stuff and deal with it, right? Would to God that there would be an, a council of elders, that there would be someone with enough wisdom and chutzpah to call it out and demand that they do the right thing?

It would’ve never gotten to this point all along, but once again, it, this is part of their system, so it’s not a little tweak here. And let’s put a screwdriver on this screw and let’s put a little oil in over here and we’ll be all right. The whole thing needs to be rebuilt.

Jono: I think there may be a blind spot.

Your point, Lance, which is, I am completely, amen. It’s, the system is something that I don’t think, and I’m not hearing that coming from the stage. What I am hearing is there’s an isolated moral failure,

julio: Uhhuh. Yes. And

Jono: it’s an isolated moral failure that, that we failed to deal with correctly. But guys, hands up, we did wrong.

We’ll do better in the future rather than actually it wasn’t an isolated issue. There were other issues as well. And all of it is as a result of systemic failure. And you need to look at this, not at this isolated issue.

julio: Absolutely. This was a systemic moral collapse.

Lance: Si.

julio: That’s what it needs to

Lance: be. Now, the miracle, listen, the miracle would be if these kinds of things didn’t happen in a system like that, because it is designed to produce this stuff.

julio: And when you say that, when you talk about the system, even, and we were talking about this and I know we don’t have the time and we’re almost done folks, there’s not the whole lunch less left of his statement. But we were talking earlier this week, like again, we both were in prophetic kind of, charismatic movements.

And I’ve said and I said this to my husband 30 years ago when we were in Vineyard, and I remember this, couple people who were purported as prophetic. And they would get up and they would, and I said to Neil, why is it that every single time you hear one of these prophecies, it’s so grandiose.

It’s you are going to, you are gonna preach to thousands or tens of thousands or millions and billions. Do you know what I mean? It sounds like Carl Sagan. I would be like, why are there always so big? The truth is most of us just live normal lives, like, why don’t we ever get a prophecy like you are gonna live a faithful life, a faithful quiet life, but you’re gonna impact.

A couple of people for the kingdom, or a handful of people will be in heaven because of you, because of your faithfulness and because of your faithfulness to your spouse, you’re gonna raise Godly children and they’re gonna impact their children and children’s children. And that’s, that I, to be honest, that’s really if we do that’s phenomenal.

Really. And that’s what most of us live, most of us get. God is the one with the big plans and we’re a bit player in his grand plan. Like we it’s always about the grandiosity of the person and how big this whatever is that they, and I think that’s why we show up because we want to be affirmed, and God’s already affirmed us as worthwhile, as important and all that, but we don’t have to do grandiose things to earn that.

It’s ours. And I just said to him, why? It just, it struck me wrong at the time. I said there’s no way all these people are gonna bleed these huge movements. It just doesn’t happen. It, it doesn’t, so what’s going on here? And that’s where you’re like, when you see the prophetic used and we can see just a very few times in the whole New Testament, like when was a agabus bound Paul’s hands and said, you’re gonna be, handed over and go to Rome and be bound there and.

So there’s a few places like that where we see specific prophecies given to people, but we don’t see this like calling out dates and you live on this street and you’re the whole thing. It just it’s goofy people. It’s goofy. It’s not even in scripture, where do we get this prophetic, I this idea of what prophecy is.

Jono: But we live in a, we live in a culture of fame and numbers and crowds, and that is what equals success. And we need to talk land murder. I remember showing up to Paul Cain meetings in the middle of the nineties and him picking out, I would be like a late teenage early 20, and him picking out other 19-year-old buddies that like, oh, you are a sovereign vessel.

And it’s oh, I want to be a sovereign vessel. And it’s you’re like,

Bill Johnson: hang on.

Jono: What, how is any of this theological like how can I actually be in a better position than adopted by the king of the universe?

Lance: Amén.

Jono: Is there any like promotion from there? I don’t think so.

Lance: Yeah. And, hey, you want a word from God?

Hey man, it’s

julio: worse.

Lance: You got it. It’s right there. You got it. But Jono, and we were in those crowds and you’re hoping that prophet points you out.

Hey, young man with the mullet. Yeah, that’s me. I know. It doesn’t look like it was right. So it’s like you’re just hoping you know that you’re gonna get some word and it’s addictive and it’s hype, and so it really leaves people vulnerable and ripe for the Pickens.

And it’s, hopefully we are coming into an era that, that the Lord is shaking this, it sure seems like he is. And that what’s gonna bloom out of it and what will be restored, truly will be appreciative believers that are doing extraordinary things truthfully in the name of Jesus.

And that we do see a generation of revival. We’re up for it. It’s been a while. It’d be great to see the next Jesus movement happen and, while we’re still around but it’s gonna take this breaking down. It’s the work of Jeremiah rooting out, pulling down, throwing down, tearing down so that he can build and restore, because he’s not gonna build on the foundation that we’ve seen in, in, in hyper Christianity and celebrity culture.

But it’s clear he is tearing he’s going at it aslan’s on the move, I think.

julio: And to your point, if we wanna see revival, it starts with repentance.

Lance: Si.

julio: So I would say to these men at Bethel. Really it can you wanna spur revival, start repenting? Yeah. Because it’s contagious. I’ve heard about revivals.

My mother saw, a mini revival when she was at Houghton College back in the, I don’t know what that was, probably the forties or fifties. But she saw, she witnessed some of that when she was a kid. And and it started with leaders at the school getting up and repenting, confessing their sins.

That’s how revival starts. So yeah we could see that happening if amen, if the church would begin to repent. And that’s what needs to happen. Let’s listen to the rest of this

Kris Vallotton: and the whole church, and then of course the victimizer. We want to see healing and restoration everywhere, but the mandate really is to care for the victim.

And please forgive me for anything and everything I have said or done that would put less value on attending to the hurt and broken people. That’s just wrong. That’s just wrong. My my delay has caused so much frustration in family and staff. And please forgive me. I promise to try to learn this one better.

I, I I just, I don’t do that well, but I’m praying with your forgiveness and grace to, to be able to attend these things in a much wiser way. The Lord has gifted us with a brilliant team. And back when all of this started, there was just a few of us trying to make decisions and all of us were under incredible pressure because of.

All this stuff going on just in our personal lives. And now we have such a brighter, broader team to really help to speak into these situations. So I pray that with the wisdom of the whole group, the scripture says we have the mind of Christ. It doesn’t say I have the emphasis is on corporate, that together we have the mind of Christ.

julio: Let’s go ahead and play that to the end. We’re almost done.

Kris Vallotton: And so that is our pursuit. That is my commitment is that together for us to hear from the Lord what to do appropriately in given situations. And I do ask you, the victims of the prophetic, any other sexual tension stuff that could exist, please forgive us as a leadership to, to drop the ball as we have, and to increase the pressure and the conflict in your own souls.

And I just ask you to forgive me, and I do pray that the Lord would truly bring healing to us as a movement, healing to us as a team, healing to me as an individual.

Yeah. Please forgive me.

julio: And there’s the clapping. I’m again grateful for what’s good there, but it needs to go much further and let’s not clap when these things happen and when people get up and own. Let’s lament this. Let’s grieve this. Let’s reach out to the victims who I know are still reeling.

This has been incredibly, if you can imagine. Coming forward and for years and years being shamed, being told. Do you know, are you a hundred percent sure? Oh I, they have been through so much. You know what, to draw this to close I wanna thank both of you, gentlemen, but I really would love to just end in prayer for for all those hurt, for all those who right now are feeling so disillusioned, confused.

Lance, could you do that for us?

Lance: Sure. Your, our father we come to you and we know you’re present already. We do lament the continuation of hype and taking your name in vain all the while. Jesus needs no hype. The Holy Spirit doesn’t need any help from us. You’re a good father. You’re a good Lord.

And the Holy Spirit is a good counselor. And our prayer, Lord is for the victims of your name being used in vain would find.

Green pastures that would find that habitation of shepherds that’s promised to us in Jeremiah. We pray that’ll happen all across, not just the charismatic movement, but the body of Christ everywhere, that you would continue to raise up true shepherds after your heart that love you and that will obey you and it will step aside and let Jesus build his church something you never ask us to do.

And so Father, we we just in faith Julie and Johno and myself, we just in faith we put our hearts before you and just ask that, as Julie had said, that what we’ve done tonight would really bear witness to one Timothy five, that this would be something in the work that Mike winger and others have done so excellently and obedience to you would cause others to fear and would cause other leaders to step down if they need to step down or to not dare touch what they thought about touching, and that there would just be beautiful repentance come across the body so that we could reflect you in your glory and wear your name the way it should be worn.

Bear your name and represent your name the way it should be, Lord, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

julio: Amen. Amen. Again, gentlemen, thank you so much great conversation with you this evening. And I do just wanna mention again that we will I will be interviewing Mike Winger on Monday at five o’clock. We will release a live stream five o’clock central time, six o’clock Eastern.

You can hear that right here at the Roy’s report. But again, thank you so much for joining us this evening. Hope you were blessed and encouraged.