How should we respond to the scandal at Bethel?

Question 60027.

Bethel Church in Redding, California has been under sustained public scrutiny for several years now, and the questions have grown sharper rather than quieter. In January 2026 the apologist Mike Winger published a lengthy investigation setting out evidence that Shawn Bolz, a prominent figure closely associated with the movement, had fabricated prophetic words, and that material has been widely discussed since.

I want to handle this carefully. There is a way of responding to failure in another church that leaves the responder worse than he started, and I have no interest in producing more of that. But silence is not an option either, because a great many British believers sing music from Bethel Church, attend conferences influenced by it, and send their young people to schools modelled on it.

What the concerns actually are

The presenting issue at Bethel Church is prophecy. A ministry culture that produces a steady stream of personal words about names, ailments and futures, and which never publicly reckons with the words that do not come true, has a structural problem rather than an occasional lapse. Where evidence emerges that some of those words were manufactured, the problem is no longer structural, it is dishonesty.

Underneath that sit a set of practices that have drawn attention for years, including the healing rooms, the school of supernatural ministry, the reports of grave soaking at the tombs of past revivalists, and a general expectation that the miraculous should be routinely on tap. My concern with Bethel Church has never been mainly about scandal. It was about theology long before any investigation appeared.

Why doctrine has to come first

If we make the moral failure the whole story, we will be satisfied when the individuals concerned are removed, and we will have missed the point. The teaching that generated the culture will still be there. Bethel Church operates within the stream usually called the New Apostolic Reformation, with its restored apostles and prophets, its dominion expectations, and its treatment of prophetic ministry as a normal weekly service rather than a rare and sober thing. I have set that out at more length in what the New Apostolic Reformation teaches.

I write as a continuationist. I have not concluded that God has withdrawn the gifts, and I am not looking for reasons to be suspicious of them. That is exactly why this matters to me. A movement that treats prophecy casually, refuses to test it, and never counts the misses does more damage to the credibility of the Spirit’s gifts than any cessationist argument ever has.

The biblical test that was skipped

Scripture is not vague about this. The test given in Deuteronomy is that if a word does not come to pass, the prophet has not spoken from God, and Israel was told not to be afraid of him. Paul tells the Corinthians that others should weigh what is said, and tells the Thessalonians to test everything and hold fast what is good.

Notice that the New Testament assumes prophetic words will be evaluated by the congregation rather than protected by the platform. The Greek verb behind testing, dokimazo, is the word used for assaying metal to see whether it is genuine. Any environment where asking that question marks you out as unspiritual has already abandoned the apostolic practice it claims to be recovering.

Responding without becoming a cynic

There is a real spiritual danger for those of us who watch these things. It is possible to develop an appetite for exposure, to enjoy the video, to feel our own soundness confirmed by someone else’s disgrace, and to call that discernment. Paul told the Galatians that those who are spiritual should restore a brother caught in transgression in a spirit of gentleness, watching themselves.

So I would say this. Read enough to know what you are dealing with, and then stop reading. Do not build a diet out of other people’s failures. Pray for the individuals involved, including the ones you think are in the wrong, because you cannot pray for a man and gloat over him at the same time. And notice what this could do to your own heart before it does it.

Believers caught in the middle

There are sincere Christians in Bethel Church and in churches that have drawn from it, and there are people whose conversion, or whose recovery from something dreadful, is genuinely bound up with that setting. Telling them that everything they experienced was fake will not help them and would not be true. God has repeatedly been kind to people in places where the teaching was poor, which is a mercy every one of us depends on.

So if you are talking to someone in that position, aim at the teaching rather than at their memory. Ask what happens in their church when a prophetic word fails. Ask where accountability sits. Ask how the sick are cared for when they are not healed. Those questions do their own work, and they leave a person their dignity.

What it asks of our own churches

The temptation is to read all this as a story about somebody else. It is more useful as a mirror. Is there anyone in my church who is functionally beyond challenge? Are our finances open to inspection? What happens to a member who raises a concern about a leader? Does our teaching produce sober believers or a hunger for the next experience?

Bethel Church did not arrive at its present position overnight, and neither does any congregation that ends up in trouble. It happens by a hundred small permissions, most of them granted for good reasons at the time. The honest response to another church’s failure is usually a governance conversation in your own.

Keeping perspective

One more thing needs saying, because scandal has a way of shrinking our view of God. Jesus said He would build His church, and He has done it through two thousand years of leaders who failed, movements that went wrong, and correction that came slowly. The exposure of dishonesty is not evidence that God has lost control of His church. It is closer to the opposite.

Nothing hidden will stay hidden. That is a warning to every one of us in ministry and it is also a comfort, because it means truth is not finally at the mercy of whoever has the largest platform. Learning how to recognise false teachers is part of ordinary Christian maturity, not a specialist hobby.

Why Bethel Church matters here

Some British readers will wonder why a church in northern California deserves attention at all. The answer is that its influence arrives here whether or not anyone notices its address. The songs are sung in our churches, the conferences are streamed, the schools of ministry are replicated, and young people from our congregations travel there and come home with an expectation of church life shaped by what they saw.

That influence is mostly informal, which is precisely what makes it hard to talk about. Nobody in a British congregation votes to adopt the theology of Bethel Church. It arrives one song, one podcast and one visiting speaker at a time, and by the time it is noticeable it has already formed the assumptions of a good number of people about what God is normally doing in a meeting.

So the question for a British church leader is not whether to write a public critique of an American ministry. It is a much more local one: what are our people actually being formed by during the week, and are we teaching well enough that they can tell the difference?

That is the work, and it is slower than commentary. Teach the whole counsel of God so that your people have a settled expectation of what the Christian life normally looks like. Then the strange thing, when it arrives with excellent production values and a good tune, will simply not fit the shape of what they already know to be true.

So, now what?

If your church uses material from Bethel Church, this is worth a proper conversation among your leaders rather than an argument in the car park. Look at the songs, look at the conferences you promote, and decide together what you are content to put into the hands of your young people. I have written specifically on the music question in whether we should sing worship music from Bethel, Elevation and Hillsong.

And if all this has left you unsettled about whether anything is real, do not let it end there. Test everything, yes, and then hold fast to what is good, because that is the second half of the sentence and it is the half people forget. There is a great deal that is good, in ordinary faithful churches, with no cameras and no scandal, quietly getting on with it.

Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good. Abstain from every form of evil.

1 Thessalonians 5:19 to 22 (ESV)