Transcript for:
Church Accountability and Reform

how do I even start to explain the need for this video how important this long video is with tons of evidence tons of evidence um there is a culture of cover up going on inside charismatic churches um I've confirmed this i've spoken to many many witnesses already i have a number of videos that'll be coming in this year basically um and this is one of them this in particular relates to a guy named Shawn BS on your screen now this guy is a false prophet how about um May 3rd does that mean something to you that's your birthday god knows you he knows when you've been born i've never seen you in my entire life that I know of he looks at people's data online he then goes around and says "God told me to tell you this." And I've talked to multiple of his victims whose lives he messed up because he gave them a fake prophecy there are other ministries that are still echoing his fake prophecies but anyways that's for another video where I'll talk more about that one particular victim of his is a guy named Elijah Stevens that's who I interviewed today now Elijah you have to understand Elijah now coming out and sharing his story is a really big deal because he has been he's been the guy going around telling people "Hey you guys are getting Bethl wrong he's defending Bethl." And he has a great heart for Bethl okay he was a member of their church and in his membership and while he's at their church that's where Shawn falsely prophesies to him actually let me just add this the reason why we're doing this video is to help bring positive change inside charismatic churches not to destroy them the desire is that if accountability will not rise from the leadership and they're actually creating a culture of cover up that accountability can be demanded from the people that's you you can demand that kind of accountability and that kind of integrity that should be in these ministries because you cannot build your house on the sand of fake prophecy fake miracles fake words from the Lord it's going to fail and I say if it's going to fail sooner better let's clean it up let's get real integrity let's have real biblical methodologies for how we handle the gifts and not this culture of cover up throughout this video you're going to see you're going to hear you know Elijah's story if you're listening on audio I recommend you watch this on video not audio because there's a ton of stuff on screen that's very relevant very important that you're going to want to see he spent 175 grand of his retirement all of him and his wife what they had just about all of what they had saved for retirement it's hurt him it's hurt his marriage it's caused him major psychological trauma he is currently just benching himself because of Well you'll hear you'll hear all this stuff when he started to suspect something might have been wrong with this word this prophetic word that he got from Shawn BS he reached out to his leadership at Bethl bethl knew that there was evidence a significant amount of evidence to prove that Shawn BS was a false prophet at this time they were not warning their people though they were warning some other leaders the elites but not their people the people who Shawn had prophesied to the people who they had put Shawn in front of as a trusted prophet they didn't warn them and other stuff you'll hear it all the the the short version of the story is here's a false prophet here's a member of a church at Bethl he should have been protected by his leaders who had evidence of what was going on they chose not to and it has damaged him severely as a result this is one example that we're going to focus in on there are so many other examples I'll bring of this type of thing sometimes connected with Bethl or Morning Star or Jesus image or just other churches i am sorry to do this it would grieves me to do this i don't take joy in it i want to add that I think you should watch this entire video like I strongly encourage you to watch the whole video i'm going to not monetize this video like I now the monetization doesn't affect my paycheck that's the way my ministry is structured it has no effect on my paycheck but I'm going to cancel monetization for this video just so that you'll know when I say please watch the whole thing it's not for me to get better ad revenue or something like that this is just because it's so important it's the long version of the story so with that let's start and there are of course timestamps down below if you feel like you need to skip around a little bit although I recommend watching the whole thing you know I hardly ever say that i I I kind of never say that just about so uh yeah with that my cat I b you do [Music] so Elijah tell me about your background and your connection to Bethl in particular [Music] my background is uh grew up in a Christian home uh somewhat abusive uh met Jesus when I was 12 um because I wasn't sure if God was real or not and I prayed "God if you're real show me in a way that I know that I know." And uh had a very powerful encounter and gave my life to Christ went to college uh studied philosophy and psychology at Covenant it's a reform school and then uh started asking questions about miracles and I went to a vineyard church and started doing vineyard stuff i deployed to Iraq for a year and I read tons of books on on the charismatic movement came back started a small group where basically what we do is just dial down and uh wait on the Holy Spirit and I saw tons of miracles i I I saw people get free from demons i I saw people get saved and that was my thing and so what drew me to Bethl honestly was when Heaven Invades Earth uh came out and I read that and I'm like this is like Anaheim in in the 80s where John Wimber was the pastor and I was like I didn't get to see that and I wanted to be a part of something like that and so I uh one night I I had a dream where Bill Johnson said "What do you want to do with your life?" And I said "Plant churches that see signs and wonders." And he said "Come to California." And I told Allison about it and she's like "No I'm not moving my family's here." And so we went to Reading for about three months and uh just traveled there to see it and I had some of the craziest experiences of my life like that was glory cloud time this was and this it was 2009 right i want to say 2009 but my memory sometimes is a little off it was about that time um and then uh while I was there uh one day we were feeding migrant workers or going to feed migrant workers and I asked this girl "Have you you ever seen a miracle with your own eyes?" She tells me the story of like praying for a man with a bone on bone knee injury and he holds up like this brace and so I'm like "This is amazing." And I thought of a guy I'd prayed about or prayed with last Sunday at uh Kevin Deadman's fire starter class and so I started uh thinking about him and I thought he had a bone on bony knee injury from a motorcycle accident and so he walked with a cane for 30 years and was in pain i thought well Bill Johnson says tell the testimony uh whenever you pray for people if if you have one that's similar and sometimes God uses that uh as as a part of the process and so as we're driving down the road um I see Dave pass us in the other car like in the other lane and so the driver then was Jason Chin and he I tell him the story and he turns the car around flags the guy down and then what happens is uh he we pull into a lumber yard and he's like "Tell this guy the story." And so I I or or what you just told me and so I was like I asked her this question and I thought about telling you a testimony and uh can I pray for you and so I pray for him and then I'm like test it out and so instead of just putting a little bit of weight because these are very bone painful injuries like bone on bone means like the nerves is touching the bone he jumps on it and falls to the ground and starts crying and I think to myself "Oh no we just injured this guy." And he gets up and runs off and he doesn't come back like 5 minutes go by 10 minutes go by and I'm like "Okay we've got to go." Oh and we get in the car and we drive down the road and I see him running down the road going "Thank you Jesus thank you Jesus thank you Jesus." Wow and like that was Bethl to me and so I go back home um I think I work in ministry for a few years and I want to say 2011ish in October Allison told me we went to Reading uh I become a member there i go through BSSM and I love it man like I I learn to renew my mind they're really good at teaching identity in Christ stuff like right and this for anybody who doesn't know this is this is the the uh school of supernatural ministry that Bethl has and it's a two to threeyear program mhm or third year you're an intern right but but yeah so it's a it's a program people go through to get trained in how to do supernatural ministry yeah and and it's different and it takes me a while to learn how it's different um because Bethl was was renewal and vineyard was third wave and so third wave is word and spirit and renewal is kind of like let's take all the charismatic Pentecostal people um and even those outside of that framework and put them together in an environment where like maybe primary issues matter but secondary and third uh issues we're not really going to focus on too much in the school and let's teach them to learn to push past fear and not be afraid and and to dream with God and so I I really enjoyed the place like I I made a lot of good friends uh people I still call to this day and like I I don't have this like Bethl is this negative place vibe um it it's my church i think that's why I think that's what's what makes everything that you're about to share um Yeah it just it just comes off with a different tone and with a certain kind of credibility because of how you're you're going to get into it how involved you were how committed you were how on board you were and then uh some concerns yeah and I I loved my church like to the point like I wanted this thing to be as healthy as it could to leave something for the next generation um because I I benefited from it a ton so once I graduate uh I start leading missions trips there i went to Costa Rica a few times um I taught the equip classes which is like Sunday school so first John Philippians um I taught what are called advanced ministry trainings AMTs on thinking deeply about the supernatural so I took all of my apologetics trainings and taught on like God's existence the resurrection uh how how to critically think about miracles um like it it was on like how to integrate your intellect in the supernatural um and I helped launch like networks in my home like we took our master bedroom out um we helped Michael Berdor launch pastor's coach and then catch the fire which is uh John and Carol all know uh he coached their churches and we put up a studio for him uh in our master bedroom um and I I I still love it to this day um and so while I was there I became a member uh back in 2012 and I want to talk about this because I I feel like one of the things I want to do with this podcast is encourage us to like take stepward steps upwards into integrity and like maybe even a bit of reformation back to some scriptural principles because I see like it it really harming us not thinking through some of these issues um and one of the things in our membership class and covenant is that our leaders would foster trustworthy leadership that is you could always trust them to submit to the word of God and that they were willing shepherds and they would be approachable and I'm like I love that like you want that for your church everybody wants that for theirs and um and and I can sense it every time I've looked at stuff with with Bethl or people from Bethl I I see the amount of trust the incredibly high amount of trust there is especially for the leadership for kind of kind of all the leadership but but Bill and Chris you know being the more unquestioning trust almost um and in a lot of ways that works h it's helpful to just be like all right I'm not going to look for the bad in a person uh and yeah um and so but just to be clear you were would it be fair to say that you were in leadership in Bethl because you're you're you're teaching classes uh yeah on staff there though right not staff level leadership uh but they would they would call me an empowered leader in the environment um okay and so and I over time once I got out of school I began seeing that covenant broken uh and and and the integrity piece falling apart and I'm not telling this to call people out i'm I'm saying this because I got really harmed in that process and I want to help call people up to remember who they are in God uh in kingdom culture Dan's book it it's the Bethl values and it says we are responsible to speak up with loving confrontation when others in the family of God sin based on the truth that as a new creation in Christ that they are too amazing to behave that way well when I was a third year um in February of 2015 I'm at my house and I start getting texts and the texts say uh Sean Boltz just called your name out and I think to myself huh and then another person says he called out Allison Elijah and so I drive to the church he tells me my name my birth date that I lived in Chattanooga grew up in Georgia my wife's name uh that she's an occupational therapist and um that God's commissioned me to make a film it'll touch lots of doctor's lives and he goes on to tell me that uh Allison has an aunt named Karen and a daughter named Silky and so this is like eight pieces of information and as he's telling me all of that I knew the first part was on the internet and uh the last part about Karen and Silky I was like "Huh?" And so I go home just for anybody who doesn't understand like you just mentioned Shawn Bulls's name but Shawn BS was seen at the time as a very reliable friend of the house uh a prophet a reliable prophet um Bill Johnson introduced him as one of his most trusted friends uh Terresa Deadman introduced him I believe as one of the most prophetic people on the planet uh to a Bethl audience and so I want you to get on your feet and honor one of the most prophetic creative people I know on the planet Sean the good friend of the house he's amazing we'll get you a podium but we're also weaving in the prophetic and one of our dearest friends one of our most trusted friends is Sean BS and the Lord's shown him several things and so he calls out your name he's got like words of knowledge it seems about you and instructions about what you're supposed to do with your life yeah so it was a big deal and so it was a huge transformative deal [Applause] so Elijah and Austin got here i'm Elijah here yes i I was pulling out my driveway and I started getting texts and you're from the beach state are you from Chattanooga by a chance or Yes chattanooga Tennessee i I live there and I grew up in Georgia yeah wow so uh does November 24th my birthday yeah um so God God wants to really um touch you and this this year I'm glad you're in third year because you're starting to come into the formulation of the greater destiny that's on your life and I saw your birthday related to it and I heard the Lord when I was here at the creative conference I heard the Lord speak to me in my left ear again and he the same way he spoke to Darren Wilson he said "Make the film." Can I hear what I'm saying yeah I'm I'm making a documentary on miracles with medical evidence before and after you're making a documentary on miracles and before and after evidence so this is a commission from heaven for you [Applause] something that Mike Alison will have to do with the future of your film projects she's a therapist I believe that's right an occupational therapist yeah therapy was important for her because it developed a life perspective she needed to be able to help people break through and understand their house there's there's so much she won't be necessarily her long-term career it'll be part of her but it won't be your long-term career because something that you'll do together that she's going to get inspired for something you're inspired for is going to redefine a whole genre of ministry and especially because you're going to take it to media and it's not that you guys are the most gifted or annoyed you don't have to worry about being the most gifted you're showing up first you're literally showing up one of the first people to show up in that whole genre of media with the documentary and because you're showing up at the right time first God's going to use that you're getting one of the first impressions that people in the church world have of what God's doing and also doctors and medical professionals who are going to trust you and so I'm telling you like make the movie your commission yes thank you Jesus thank you Jesus yes yes i saw you because I saw the spirit of Elijah on you that's how I saw you and uh and I I saw your wife's family and I saw like the Lord wants to touch some family members um especially in pain and one of them's name is Karen maybe an aunt or Yeah she's got an aunt Karen yeah and Karen's going to God's going to touch Karen either her heart or her body there's a pain issue that he's going to touch and then her daughter it's like silky or silky yeah what yeah god's going to touch this daughter he's going to transform their lives and uh give them a greater opportunity than we've ever had in their entire lives and you're going to see as that happens with them it's going to be a dominoes with the rest of her family all this family is about to get apprehended by Yes thank you Jesus yes um like people were sharing about it online uh and like after that like my life changed like people were paying for mission trips for me um and just opening doors and it it was an amazing experience i went home and told Allison and uh I mean she couldn't sleep that night uh and like we I want to say start film a Kickstarter and raise about a $132,000 to make this film that God's commissioned me to touch doctor's lives with and that how could you not go all in at that point right if you're feel like this is the Lord then Yeah okay i give it all only thing else I could think of is seeing Jesus or an angel like there it turned the knob of at one point I thought about making a documentary and tried collecting cases and I was done with that but but it was still online to uh from a two and I I was going to like take over a church uh in another city to a 10 like I'm like you get this once in your life you marry this like you cannot do anything else but this and so the So you held off on other ministry stuff you were going to do oh yeah pastoral ministry you were going to do and you you you set that aside you redirected your whole life to this because now because of what Sean said right no jobs for eight years to finish this this thing so like and that causes a little marriage stress because I'd imagine cuz my wife thought this would be over in like one and I I didn't have a film background like I started from um just like I've got a dream in my heart to like you wanted to you wanted to marry together this like apologetics evidence intellectual like pursuit with miraculous and the work of God and have evidence for the miracle working of of God through Christians um so this would this fit into your background but yeah you had to learn all the film stuff and all the cinematography things and like one of my best friends in Chattanooga who who was a pastor I work for apostated and he said there's no God no miracles and I thought um well we are seeing them there has to be medical evidence somewhere and I thought about writing a paper on it but I'm like no one reads papers uh especially in that environment and so I'm like uh making a film would be awesome and so this guy calls me out and so I I put together a team and uh we end up traveling the world what I'll call call this is organizational integrity where it's it's not about a person lying to me it's about an institution uh is that when Lindsay Davis left and went on the Cultish podcast I listened to that because you know I'm I'm very apologetic minded and um she'd watched American Gospel and came to the conclusion that uh Bethl was teaching heresy the Kosis uh understanding of Christ which is he was a man and not God uh or ontological kinosis like we all believe in functional kinosis which is sometimes Jesus restricted himself or set aside his prerogatives um and we didn't talk about par repentance or didn't teach the Bible in school um and we were synchizing the new age with physics of heaven and I thought a lot of what she said was false and I come from a reformed background so like Westminster confession of faith a talks about like in in one of the questions on lying is like not giving a just defense a as a form of lying and I felt like Bethl was misrepresented in this and so on my own dime well first of all I got permission from like Eric and Dan hey I want to go down and set the record straight right and so just so Eric is Eric Johnson one of the pastors of Bethl and then Dan Fairley who's like the teaching a teaching pastor of Bethl yeah yeah and so I go down and uh I we set the record straight and they're like they thought we were heretics like we denied the God man uh Mhm and they're like "Man you're our brother." And like we even said it on the podcast and so like there's this unity happening as we just tell the truth about Yeah we we look at this our our students do read the Bible and here's examples of repentance and like everybody at Bethl loved this and then the one thing I got tripped up on was physics of heaven um right um I'm like I can't uh defend this like No this is a book this is this is a book that they're teaching uh well Bethl leadership has endorsed it there's written endorsements bill Johnson's a contributor to the book a number of main leaders have endorsed the book in the actual matter of the front matter of the book and it's also something that um people in the school of supernatural ministry are there's a good chance they'll be exposed to judy Franklin at least would routinely come the author of the book come and do some of the practices that she writes about in the book for the students in the school well there there's a partly true uh so I'm just going to tell you what my memory of school was i heard her teach once um I don't think it was from that book and like when I went down to cultish it had sold 50 copies out of Bethl Media in the last year so I don't think it's as pervasive as media made it but there are It wasn't so much about I think for people who criticize it wasn't so much about how influential is it it was about what is this telling us about the doctrines that are floating around yeah yeah and and on the podcast uh I I read this quote about uh quantum light and how it it's everywhere and Jesus had access to it um you can probably pull it up and read it so it says Jesus redeemed everything we need to know what this power is a seal of quantum light that undergrads everything and most importantly we need to know how to access it we have the zero point field within us individually each of us may not have a square yard of 0 point filled energy in us uh but two or three of us do and the Bible says whatever two or three of us agree on will be done uh so we truly have the power within us and around us to move many mountains jesus calms storms we should be able to do that too jesus healed the sick cast out demons raised the dead we have the same power within us and we have power all around us undergarding the universe and so what a language game is is that what the words mean in something is contingent upon the game being played so if I'm telling you a joke and uh the words mean something different if I'm giving you a command or if I'm praying or if I'm doing a question and so when prophetic people read that they just edit everything out in their head and they go "All right well I see the big bang and I see God's power and this inspires me to be like Jesus and pray for the sick." In the teaching language game the the thing you do is try to communicate truth accurately and you judge something based on whether or not it matches reality and so what prophets tend to do is they feel like if you're critiquing something that a prophetic person is writing then um it's kind of like being a word policeman like if I said uh I want to get better at this versus I want to get goodter at this and you came to me and you called me out and you're like "Hey Mike uh or Elijah uh you use the word goodter look at how stupid you are." Like that's how they feel about that but wow but if I did uh through the teaching lens is like you're talking about the deity of Christ and um if you're saying he pulled on energy or a quantum field then what you're doing is talking about like he he's sinning or he may not be God and like if you think about sins there's like a they're all wrong but there's degrees like stealing is less than murder and if you think of the highest degree of sin um well there's blaspheming the Holy Spirit there is denying Christ and then there's heresy and heresy is uh like if you have there's two types formal and informal so formal heresy is like I believe something false about Christ like Christ was an angel or he was just a good man rather than the God man and so what teachers are supposed to do is say "Whoa stop you're touching the glory of God." And it's not just a minor thing um and so like you have to you don't get a pass on that at all and the and it hurts the heart of God whether it's material or formal and so I'm like no like this needs to be pulled uh and rewritten i also said uh when heaven invades earth uh needs to be rewritten and w that's Bill Johnson's book right yeah yeah yeah and he did it and I admire him for that and this So did he rewrite this section that people about uh That's what I understand i think he talks about it in the rediscover BETHL videos hey guys this is uh me after the fact i'm currently editing the video that you're watching and here's me to interrupt briefly to tell you um yes Bethl did claim to change these exact passages in the book i'll play a little clip of that now uh in the next uh releases of that book I I just wrote the publisher cuz it's maybe 8 months or so ago and and said you know it's causing too much of a stir it's not communicating what I intended so let's change the language there that was four years ago but I got the most recent edition I could find and I've asked others if they can find another edition i emailed Bethl to try to see if they would give me a newer edition it appears as though the book was never updated so I think that this was actually in the end kind of a misleading thing for uh Bill Johnson and Bethl to do to have for four years a video up saying that they have edited and changed or that they were going to edit and change four years ago a book that they never edited or changed yeah he says he wrote the publisher but the implication is clear anyways it didn't happen um the reason why this was included in the interview in the first place was to give credit to Bill to say "Hey thank you good job here what a great example this was thanks for that." But because I checked and I usually try to fact check stuff you know and it turns out to not be the case so me and my cat are very disappointed and so this leads to reconciliation uh over the long term between everybody um Lindseay Davis a few years later reaches out to Bill and like "Hey Bill I'm sorry i got some things wrong on you i still disagree with some stuff but I see you're my brother." Jerry calls me up hey Elijah we got some things wrong thank you and like like everyone is cleaning up their mess except Physics of Heaven and that is a huge deal for me um it was for for anybody who's curious I I do have a video at least from my perspective i don't know how much Elijah would agree or disagree but uh on the physics of heaven and I would agree it was it was a shocking red flags like just shocking shocking stuff that was in there it caused me to ramp up my concerns about Bethl as a result right because of the endorsements that were in there yeah right and we don't catch that stuff very easily because we're just trained like read into stuff the good rather than like discern it at that level and I I think you need to do both like I And so I'm not saying Judy is a material heretic that that would really surprise me uh no no no no i am not saying Judy was is a formal heretic what I am saying is she wrote material heresy uh and that's an easy fix all you do is say "I'm wrong publicly because you published it publicly." That's how you clean up your mess you go back and you fix your book just like Bill did and so when I do that uh a few days I realize like Chris is going to get a ton of emails when this drops shoot him an email over i tell him the problems with it shoots me an email back i agree with this okay um and then uh he said "I wrote the forward because I love her and I want to be loyal." And I'm like "I love her." are like loving somebody is good i'm not saying that should be a moral thing i'm just saying this is what happened and uh what I'm saying is ethics is like it's not deciding between right and wrong it's deciding between two goods and which one should be ranked higher and so I would say loyalty is a good I think articulating the cause of Christ correctly is a higher one and in scripture when loyalty like you can be loyal and tell someone to fix something like Nathan came to David and was like hey you took the the one sheep and gave that prophecy and he's like yeah uh he was being loyal and still calling something out right and so and there's there's a concern for that incredible high level of trust that people have for Chris in the movement yeah for the fact that when he writes an endorsement nobody thinks he's writing it because he loves the person he they think he's writing it because he's endorsing the content of the book that's fair and so that that message comes across you can trust this book because look I read it and you trust me and I endorsed it it has little to do with how you emotionally feel about the author um but he his endorsement was a shining endorsement he's I if I remember right he called them prophets like said that they were he said something along the lines of God this is this is God using them this isn't even just their opinions mhm so that was a pretty powerful thing and I could say this uh when I read books I read like okay this is a fact this is a fact this is false this is a fact and so I don't think everything in that book is wrong like every sentence is wrong but that clearly was and um it can be fixed and so uh Chris is like the next day when the emails comes in is like "You're talking about this in public?" And I'm like "Yeah uh I was told by the church to or not told by the church they they didn't tell me i I volunteered but yeah uh it's like don't write me again." Yeah and he this is this I really want to highlight Elijah is this was a this this was public endorsements public material and it was publicly being scrutinized and you responded to it publicly as well and said yep here's here's one one where we can take a lesson and we can go this is a problem we should address this this this book has material heresy um and and then his response to you was it seems the fact that you openly talked about this thing that you were you were right you were speaking truth the fact that you said it out loud publicly you were cut off from him relationally do not contact me again and that was my duty like I I I could be a propagandist or have integrity like and sometimes you get put into situations where telling the truth it it it cost and for me that was just like what like and in the back of my mind as as they're asking me about the book I'm thinking about our value we always clean up our mess like there's just no possible world in which anyone at that church would want us to val break our values and there's not a Christian ministry in the world that I think doesn't believe you should clean up your messes or or if you make mistakes like that's just confess you know make restoration like this is Christianity 101 right and so it it was just weird um and it says it you know in in kingdom culture uh God's word transforms is our value every word in the Bible should be applied with proper interpretation and it's possible for a Christian to be deceived and so like assuming she can be wrong is just normative uh in in the movement and so I end up uh within a few months like it's always hard to get an audience with Chris uh we end up sitting down and I talk through him through it and he's like you know I I don't think Judy's practicing witchcraft and I'm like I I don't think she's trying to uh but what I do think is this book is so problematic for us as a movement um when I'm outside of renewal revival alliance circles and I would say in third wave or people just coming out of cessationism circles this comes up when I'm online this comes up uh and and I'm teaching against witchcraft listen I'm I'm so with you on this because even though my my criticisms of Bethl would be probably more numerous than yours and uh and and we would interpret some of that stuff differently which is fine the you know my background was Calvary Chapel mhm and when I started reaching out online and my my like sort of window opens to groups of Christians outside my own tradition outside my own circles normally and my influence is far beyond my local church now and people are reaching out going Mike you know Pastor Chuck predicted the rapture what do you say about that you know you have teaching against Jehovah's Witnesses and their end times predictions but he predicted the rapture right what do you say about this and I felt really compelled to actually make a video where I said "Look I got the books i got the proof." I said "Look he really did in print." Like this wasn't a private this wasn't a one-off little weird thing he said one time this was like in print he says "Jesus is coming back 1988." Mhm and so I shared it and I did an honest evaluation of where he got scripture wrong how he misinterpreted this here and this was a mistake and I just did a very honest evaluation i thought it was a good just like you i thought this is a good thing for the movement this is a good thing for integrity some Calvary pastors reached out to me said 'Mike thank you so much for doing this but there were others and the reaction was that of you've betrayed you have you you I can't believe you did this and um and I'm in this we're aligned in our thinking was like "No no this was this was good for everyone." Oh yeah yeah yeah every this is good for everybody to do this people afterwards at the church came and thank me like they were so happy because or well also I went to Biola uh where like they are really good apologist and so like all of a sudden that book switched from hey bethl may be Bible light to you are new age synretatizers and like that brand in AC Christian academia is huge and it is blowing up across academia but they're they're not academics there uh maybe global Randy Clark really cares about that stuff um but I gave Chris a copy of Randy Clark's healing energy and a book uh on the new age by Ron Rhodess and I'm like "Dude look at these things." And then we leave the meeting and I'm like "All right h how do we clean this mess up?" And so I shoot over an email and I'm like "Hey let's get Judy meet with my wife we can or set up a meeting and we can set him up quantum her quantum physicist new age apologist." Um I go through the book give tons of recommendations and like um and I go like here's five teachers I would have her listen to and kind of help recraft the book so like this is Bethl you said in the beginning of our discussion you're trying to call this is this is you all the time you're trying to say "Hey this isn't over let's let's call this let's call for change let's call for a reformation in this area let's just fix it yeah and the emails went nowhere um there was there's no followup on it and so that that's really hard because that is our core value um and Chris in How Heaven Invades Earth says "When the body lacks the adequate influence of true five-fold teachers biblical foundations give way to subjective experiences and feelings." And so um that is a big issue also um Denny Silk in Culture of Honor says "This is gold standard Bethl by the way." um is like when you make a mistake uh what you do is it's kind of like a paint can and you drop it and you go who did this affect and so who did physics of heaven affect the entire charismatic movement the entire Protestant conversation the like this requires public address um and so and like when I was in school just to give you some examples of things people that they've made cleanup messes is one I had a good friend and uh she had been a stripper prior to coming to Bethl and she ended up getting a boyfriend during third year and ended up getting pregnant and so they they talked to her about it and you know she said I want to clean up my mess and so she confessed her sin in front of the whole school so that's normative um I had two students so there was a there was a public accountability everybody who knew and then prayed for it and it was like a celebration moment of like yeah you got free and you did the right thing and like that's beautiful like that is the most beautiful thing in the world and then there was uh these two girls on a missions trip with me i led them and uh they ended up drinking alcohol and that's forbidden on missions trips and so it was it was a sip and we had them confess and I said don't shame them like let's celebrate them and never may we'll never talk about this again and like that's who we are and so the fact that leaders in our environment didn't do that is a is an ethical betrayal this to me is so key because this keys into a bunch of stuff I'm currently investigating and researching i see it over and over again if if anybody's wondering why are we having you tell all this stuff so far I I think that one of the reasons is to to reveal this what I would call elitism um it's rules for you not for us m this is why he can endorse a book because she's you know Judy's part of the in crowd um she's one of the ones of the important ones you know and then Bill's important and Chris is important and these the there's the important people and they have a different kind of accountability than the rest it's almost like the the the the whole movement's in danger if they have to be open about something whereas other people have to be open about it just for the sake of integrity mhm and and Chris wrote spiritual intelligence one of the ways we can tell that people have a healthy relationship with God is that their weird and anti-biblical revelation gets pruned off and so he's saying like "Hey if if there's material heresy or like weird things about energy the evidence that you're growing closer to Jesus is you when given evidence of that you go "All right." Yes and that book stayed there for a long time I would say years and so we didn't have this like try everybody rising up and doing the right thing that uh now I I want to interject if I can because it was it was a quite a while later when that book actually got on my radar and I did my video on on the physics of heaven it was I don't know if it was two years later three years I don't know it was sometime significantly later cuz I don't follow this stuff and I'm not normally looking into it and I was like I read it and I was so shocked i did a video on the topic i did a bunch of research really thorough and detailed mhm right after my video they pulled it from the bookstore mhm and the only public statement I could find was where I think it was Chris who said it but somebody about the public it was a public statement official statement it was to say um we we took it out of our bookstore because there are some things in it we don't agree with okay super no other details but the problem I have is that that looks suspicious given that you were you had already publicly called this out you had you had sat down you had created a document to try to walk through the problems to try to say "Hey let's fix this." You had been reaching out to the leadership let's talk about this you'd had conversations and and it stayed in the bookstore at that point and so it starts to feel like the book was just more P suddenly they're like "Oh this is too much PR problem for us let's just pull it and have a vague statement about it." Instead of an integrity move about the about the contents of the material yeah and so well I didn't even know that so I'm happy to hear that at least that's some type of step forward uh but but I I I hear you Mike uh sort of but at that time it was still there and so what I did by the way so because all this stuff is going on at this time about physics of heaven and American gospel I spend hundreds of hours studying occult apologetics at Biola like I I took so many classes every time I could I would write my paper on some weird area like what's the difference between ESP and philosophy or excuse me prophecy what's the difference between uh astral projection and what happened to Paul and uh I I've read uh like the history of the occult in the west like all of western history like I I am engaging in this stuff and what I realize if if this book is not moving maybe a better way to move it is to put together some notes where I go through this is what the new age is this is how to to separate Bethl language that may sound similar like manifestations and stuff like that uh Dan told me he'd help me make videos never happened and so I would I would put hundreds of hours into something get it to the finish line and he would be like I got to go talk to Chris about this and then it just stopped and like it just felt like this thing that was we could not get out and for me it's it's the integrity of well I put my time into this and we never made them and this is why this is so so important um there is a rising movement of Christian witchcraft and you can probably look at the books on the screen right now like there everywhere there's Christian witchcraft conferences and I'm not saying people are doing this at Bethl what I am saying is those people watch Bethl stuff i listen to hundreds of hours of people practicing Christian witchcraft and what we're going to do right now is play a clip by uh a Pentecostal prophet named Calvin Witcher and he's going to give his testimony of practicing Christian witchcraft and I want you to see what happens when teachers don't teach uh about the difference between the spiritual gifts and the occult but I grew up Christian and really did every position throughout the Christian church i was a minister of music i was the choir director the youth president i was an associate minister and then a pastor i was a pro house prophet what they called it in Tennessee to two churches i've been to seminary i go by prophet people know me by that still love Jesus and I I always like to say that um love Jesus love the Christ which to me are different um entities i teach mysticism I teach the occult I teach witchcraft I teach sorcery I also teach um the scriptures when you start to unravel the history of the Bible it's full of astrology other faiths Egyptology and other cultures if I were to own the term Christian witch here's how I look at it one Christ is not even a name christ is the position the power he operates you know lots of Christ consciousness we talk about this our Buddhist friends say Buddhahood bodhic safas by different names than other sex but the energy remains the same which is the one that is anointed i I happily take that on because I be pro a prophet like that i am willingly the messenger of the divine and so even witchcraft just means the craft of the wise christian witch is someone that is able to understand the magic that is inate in everything very much like the the orendas the native Americans someone that's able to tap into their destiny tap into the divine use that for their own unfolding to affect change in the world and to do that with the level of divine power it's that superhuman aspect of us i know a lot of people that love Jesus that are wicked and pagan and a cultist jesus was a huge alchemist and I you know I've said this on many occasions he was a magician by you know you know there's no stretch of the imagination with the miracles that he did my my personal belief is if you don't police the boundaries between the new age and Christianity and make it absolutely clear in 5 to 10 years the charismatic movements going that direction cuz they're always looking for the new thing and also inside of let's say a Bethl kingdom now theology what happens is you get people who uh believe well if a miracle is not happening it's not on God's end and so we've got to figure out how to get access to miracles and so either you go toward intimacy which is I fast I pray or you start looking at mechanism and so that is what leads people into the occult is they're going how do I get more of the supernatural in my life and I love the supernatural you love the supernatural but there's a difference between the supernatural and Jesus and if you have to pick between the two you pick Jesus every time and he says don't do this stuff and the Old Testament describes uh magical practices occult practices as detestable and I I want to help prophetic people get pictures of what's detestable like if I went into a church and I took a cigarette out lit it and put it on a kid's arm that's detestable like you should feel like this is disgusting and that's how God feels about the stuff you just heard from Calvin Witcher yeah absolutely and and and the reason why this is so relevant to the physics of heaven is because that book if you were to just read and follow the instructions of the book you would you would have a bridge to exactly what Calvin Witcher is talking about um maybe not as extreme but like it it could become a starting point you would have Yeah you would have no safeguards against it and you would have assurances that it's okay to experiment with these things because the Holy Spirit will just protect you you effectively Christians aren't going to be deceived um and so they can have this overconfidence about this this is something I highlighted in my review of of the of the physics of heaven and um and talked about in Deuteronomy about like don't learn the ways of the pagans like don't don't worship me using their methods this is not safe and and the thing that turned me on to what they were doing was uh I just one day started asking the question what happened with Jason Westerfield like this is the guy Bill Johnson i've only seen him once formally excommunicate someone from the pulpit like if you've pushed Bill Johnson to there you're into some crazy stuff and uh the what got me to Truth Seeker's site uh wi-i which is one of the guys in the video the white guy uh was that Jason Westerfeld uh was appearing on there talking to how to have telepathy and and and the blue beings and so I feel we really need to turn the volume up on taking educating people in the movement because against the new age because when I see students apostatize um or I meet people or I met people in reading I always asked them uh what did you read and they they would tell me physics of heaven and I'm not saying Judy was advocating for that i'm saying I talked to at least two or three people that would have a magic worldview now that got there and so why not produce content that goes this is how you tell the two apart and uh one of the phrases that I hear all the time is redeeming the occult in in the movement and what what the idea is there's something neutral out there or good in it and and I there's something called common grace insights so God causes the rain to fall on everyone and uh that has happened a few times in church history like spiritual alchemy became chemistry but the way you redeemed it was you took the spiritual out and then uh you gave it a new name so that you could tell the sin and the pseudocience from the new science and so uh you know people used to do astrology and they'd look at the stars and try to write down omens and then someone came along and was like this is sin but what you can do is study the stars and learn how to guide ships or whatever and we'll we'll call this astronomy and so that happens occasionally but not that often and the possibility for error is so high like if if you're at a graduate level in seminary at an apologetics program that may be something worth pursuing academically when you're surrounded by like occult apologist but like this is not something you teach an 18-year-old to do with their spirit and it's it's explicitly you're trying to import spiritual things it's not it's not these examples of like scientific kind of observations uh being brought over with spiritual things being ditched this is different this is let's just import spiritual things purely and we'll color it Christian is how I would put it anyways that's what the physics of heaven was getting at um that's that's a that is inherently um unbiblical god says don't even inquire of these of these pagan nations like how did they worship their gods and then I'll I'll do that with my God he goes "Don't even don't even find out if that's if that's what your plan is don't even dig into it." Yeah it's it's such a huge danger and then he repeatedly comes at Israel when they try to start treating him the way that these other religions functioned um it's a great example for us you know when in Acts when they when they have a bunch of people from from from witchcraft and the occult all that kind of thing they come into the church they burn their books mhm they don't they don't copy and paste all the bits they can see yeah yeah they just destroy it yeah yeah and when I study the ancient near east uh I see what we would say are modern like energy practices uh you can see in Egyptian literature like I'm going to say this wrong because I don't speak Egyptians but it's Ka and Ba so KBA uh is like they believed spirit their spirits could leave their body um you would see quotes of people talking about uh channeling uh life energy into them um and so this is not like hey we're just discovering this it it's Moses who lived in Egypt saw all of this and said this is detestable and so we we need to think about the then and there and do good hermeneutics uh a as we go through this process so that was something that just didn't get cleaned up for a really long time and I it looks like it's going better but cleaning it up is not just we pulled a book it's we have to teach a new paradigm [Music] the next big thing is my movie so I told you I got the word from Sean and uh like we raised the money and I share and I go around the world and film you know recently we see this alumni statement come out it says in about Yeah yeah yeah and it said in 2019 uh world leaders came to us and told us about this uh like uh words that he may have looked up i was never told about that in 2019 but what did happen in 2019 is I showed my movie to Dan uh and the communications team let me let me say for anybody who doesn't know the the statement that came out so Bethl um it it was leaked online that people were highlighting look here's examples that Sean has been getting information from people online he's been faking prophecies he has been he even has bring been bringing harm to some people who follow his instructions thinking God's leading them all this stuff started coming out online and it just got so big that Bethl finally made a statement that they released just to the alumni not to everybody but to the alumni from the school of ministry and supernatural ministry and then they in this statement they said yeah there were you know years ago we heard some stuff and we didn't tell everybody um this means that at least some of the leaders you're interacting with at this time while you're working on your movie while you're gathering evidence while you're getting footage from it they they know that that that some of them actually have a packet of information with a bunch of evidence Sean has been and you have not been warned nobody Nobody outside of some small circle knows about what's going on with Shawn you you were not warned the the public has not warned people are not given a big public hey if you're packing your bags to move to South you know India because you're going to be doing a missionary work because Shawn Bulls gave you a prophecy take that to the Lord and double check because he's been doing this nothing none of that happened right but they date it to 2019 and so 20 uh 2020 January that's when I'm meeting with Chris and Dan talking about physics of heaven and I'm introduced as Elijah the guy that got the word from Sean and uh like that's a perfect time to sit down and be like "Hey buddy let's have a hard conversation." And I'm open because I'm very truthdriven let's do a lot of any option if we need to clean up a mess um and so that that hurt that that stung um is that and I know I know for for a fact Chris was at this time calling other leaders he says in a text messages that I have that he was at this time calling other leaders and warning them about Sean but only only a certain kind of elite circle of leaders not not you right in front of him no no who's literally investing your entire life savings Yeah in a in a movie because of a word from Shawn and he knows this yeah well I'm not elite uh I'm just kidding but uh like you're you're it's true though it's true though i mean that is certainly what I think is the case i think that you were not viewed as um in and of yourself important enough whereas a a true Christian perspective is every single believer is important enough um for that kind of a a warning to go out or or not trusted enough oh you expose physics of heaven maybe if you know about Sean you'll expose that and they're trying to not have it exposed yeah hey guys Mike Winger editing here adding a very important piece of information i was looking over this statement that Bethl made where they said that in 2019 they had first become aware of Shawn's fraudulent behavior or evidence of it on your screen here it says "We communicated our concern confusion and his denials to the leaders who initially raised concerns about the words of knowledge with us as well as and this would include Elijah realistically to leaders closely connected to Shawn and made the evidence available to them for them to make their own decision." Did they make the evidence available to Elijah no they did not he asked about it you will you will see the emails and got this curt response and then Dan later tells him "Oh I haven't heard anything about this that was very misleading it it it looks to me okay Elijah is not saying this it looks to me as though he was lied to." And then everybody else most recently in this announcement from Bethl was lied to about the situation i I don't know how to reconcile these statements with the reality that this is not what happened so it looks like Bethl not only dropped the ball but is now lying or deceiving or at least misleading misrepresenting the facts about what actually happened when they took care of this situation in the first place the whole thing is just atrocious and offensive and I'm asking for Bethl to be accountable and take responsibility for what they have done and have not done and what they have misled others to believe about what they did according to this Elijah should have been told he was not and he paid the price i'll just tell you what this cost me um I worked on this film eight years no salary if you put me at $50,000 a year that's $400,000 if you put me at a h 100red um which I've made before that's $800,000 um we pulled $175,000 uh out of our savings uh to pay for it and then paid that back uh so like that's that's 300 grand and like the irony of this is that on April 2020 April 17th 2020 is when Chris and this intern start this dialogue and the next day is when I'm pulling my money out and so right this is this is all your personal money beyond all the fundraising you did and the promises you made in the name of of of what Sean Bulls said you're fundraising you're telling people look the Lord is in this yeah and he's and you're getting support from others for it yeah and he's texting him i've told many leaders in our network about Sean's dishonics prophetic ministry um I told him he needs to clean up his mess before we can have relationship with our people i've told our entire team that they're not to min like right what on earth yeah yeah yeah and so um this is in May 2021 so 3 years later uh which is I launch in September 2021 someone reaches out to me he's a producer and he said I showed him my movie and he's like Shambol is in this uh no one tell you like so I'm finding out about this for the first time someone uh outside of the states that I would not have ran across had it not been for Providence at some level and um so Chris in school of the prophets says uh about prophets they must uh create equipping cultures where there are coaches and refs coaches are expected to give feedback to the players and the refs will call fouls when people behave in a way that is destructive to the game so to say and so we're in this culture where they're saying we are trusted leaders you can trust us put your trust in us trust is we'll protect you you'll be safe we'll do the right thing always and um one of the promises Chris makes at as the prophet of Bethl is that he will call balls and strikes and uh students they do this with other people other people have to openly deal with their issues and it's as public as the problem is that's how public the the mess clean up is is right but not with shambles and so I not with physics of heaven and I write it and uh I say uh I talked to the producer of blank he told you uh that you suspected Sean Bulls uh of hot reading from Facebook and conference lists and that he gave you evidence and that you concluded uh it was most likely the case he said that Shawn was no longer invited to the church and people were no longer to read allowed to read from their phones is that true is that still your position and then I go on to tell him how I'm editing my film i I I need to know to make a cut i leave my phone number and he says "I would cut it out if I were you." like he doesn't make a one it's a oneline response he does not answer your question he does not confirm or deny um you have currently you're operating under the belief that God is in this and you are you are obeying the word of the Lord right so so this is going to take a lot to derail something like you've invested your life savings you've invested other people's savings you've taken loans um Yeah and you get a you get a one-s sentence response i would cut it out and what did you think that meant uh it could mean a lot of things like it could mean uh he did it it could mean hey I'm talking about skeptics in this email and I'm nervous about him it could mean and I I don't think you would mean it this way but like hey stop asking about this um but it's like asking uh "Hey Chris was my child molested at church?" And him coming back and saying "I would take him to therapy if I were you." Like it it's such a gut punch like who does this stuff um in March of this year I I reached out to Bethl to kind of set up a Matthew 18 meeting uh between or not I uh someone and myself and uh he wrote the email but uh to Dan and Chris uh Chris doesn't show up uh and he's like "Hey I told him I would cut it out." Like what more could he want is what was relayed to me and so he scheduled the meeting and he was a no-show for it well he didn't schedule it i I I don't think he thought he should come um but like it was like trying to have like this conversation and you just don't miss Matthew 18 meetings um especially when people have been harmed at this level and like I couldn't just stop right that second and be like "Well you told me to cut it out." Like I I'm an evidentialist and like this is my word and like I I needed more clarity um and there's more to the story for people who are currently thinking like "Well yeah he told you to cut it out why didn't you cut it out?" Well you're going to find out elijah is going to share other pieces of the puzzle and you'll very much see why he thought "Oh okay maybe this was some cautionary thing well I'm willing to walk in faith and trust the word of the Lord yeah um Yeah so there's reasons for that but but the the idea here is that um I think in my this is my read of it is that Chris's message to you seems in hindsight um to be calculated to have the least amount of person of responsibility and the least amount of exposure at the same time um we don't want to expose this thing you know if Elijah knows about it you know maybe he'll he talked about physics of heaven on cultish maybe he'll talk about Shawn publicly which is be the godly thing to do but the thing that they were working they were all working very hard to make sure it didn't happen for Shawn to be publicly exposed it's crazy but they all knew they all knew chaon knew right they all all these people the elite people I would call them knew about it and didn't warn anybody but I'm I'm getting I'm getting flustered thinking about that so let me I'll put pass it back to you well just think about how many messages in this culture are about pastoring people in the prophetic like at the very least like let's have a phone call uh like that's a weighty thing to tell a man I put my retirement into this um and what happens at these points is the Bethl spin machine comes on when I ask people about it and they're like "Oh Chris doesn't write back more than one sentence in emails sometimes i can't figure it out." And like I think that's something that needs to stop in the culture if if you want a culture of integrity is we can't keep putting these types of things in the best light because there's not a good light to put it into um I felt subhuman like I felt like a dog uh like this man is a guy I've went to his church for eight years he knows me we've we've talked together and it's like this is terrible to treat somebody like this yeah and so and school of prophets says prophetic cultures require that every prophetic declaration is judged and scrutinized for its authentication and application uh the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets therefore everyone's personally responsible for their prophetic words and that's the time to call foul ball it's it's time to say my duty that I proclaim in my book is to protect you and our culture and they sat on that until it was forced up and so right I Yeah um I couldn't figure things out uh for a while and so I ended up writing Sean uh and being like "Hey dude i've got to figure this out." I mean I'm I'm launching in three or four months and he writes me a beautiful letter explaining he's never done this he's never Facebook researched that there's this right and for those who are listening if you're listening the audio version of this you should know there's a bunch of things that Elijah is sharing that we're going to show vid physical video evidence of emails and pictures and stuff like that so you may want to look at the actual video of this but yeah we'll put that on screen yeah um and uh School of Prophet says "I want to make two points for this powerful illustration first uh we want to raise up a prophetic company of people who are giant killers and can destroy the works of the devil we must uh become empowering prophets and propheticesses who developing a power an empowering culture and as we talked about previously leaders who are empowered allow people to experiment and to make mistakes but such leaders uh also make decisions with people not for people uh they do not withhold information or tell people only what they need to know to get the job done because this produces slave camps in which one person does all the thinking i agree with you Chris that's that's like a perfect description of what Chris did to you and and to be honest it's not just you Elijah and this is why I'm glad you're speaking out it's you and it's so many other people you know we know about Jubilee Dawn but there's other people as well you know she you know experienced ongoing abuse partly as a result of Shawn BS and his lies and I have example after example i'll be releasing a video about Shawn BS where I go through tons of examples of this sort of thing witness testimony this stuff could so much of the harm could have been avoided if when they found out they had just told people not withheld information and told people um not only what they need to know to get the job done where Chris says oh we we shouldn't it'll it'll hurt the prophetic no this is this is what's going to cleanse the prophetic this is going to be a case in point for this is why scripture says you know the elder who's sitting like rebuke in the presence of all that the rest also may fear is that it produces a unleavening effect on everyone Yeah it's just it's crazy um to see that this happened and and it seems as though it's ingrained amongst leaders that even would would otherwise say that this is the wrong way to do things yeah one part of the spin machine is uh it it adjusts to we're an apostolic team and we weren't completely in agreement and I think that's the case um but what I also think is the case is that referees don't go get agreement they make the call to the best of their knowledge and um it's okay to sit someone you know down and say half our team disagrees um but uh this is my opinion and I think there's a moral duty to your sheep at this point um it it's kind of like if let's pretend there's two people and they both see my wife and one think she are they talk and they're like this one goes I wonder if she's having an affair and this one goes I know she's having an affair um the one end's like who's not sure I don't hold accountable at all so anyone at Bethl at that time who goes I was not sure that uh he did this okay because I I was in that case at at the time but once you cross that line you have a moral duty to go to that person and tell them and and that's where the spin machine tries to blur that is like he had a moral duty at that point and he writes about it in his book and so right um Right and they and they pulled Shawn they pulled him from from events they he instructed at least some of his team members certainly not you you would have thought of yourself as being on the team to some degree yeah yeah yeah i found out I guess yeah apparently not um he he instructed some of them like "Don't do stuff with Shawn." According to Chris he calls up other leaders of other ministries outside of Bethl to warn them about Shawn yeah and he goes and confronts Shawn and openly tells him like I I I believe that you are that you're guilty of this and it seems it seems to me that Bill did not believe this um but that that the the mature thing for them to do to treat people as not slaves is to say there are some legitimate questions about Shawn's ministry we've put him on hold for a while you guys should know that if you have any words from him maybe take it back to the testing block and and and think about it that would be a conservative safe like respectful thing to do for the for the movement and it would have allowed you to have the liberty to say "Okay this is this is legit this isn't just rumor." Well that BSSM alumni letter could have went out as was at that time um and so after that I go to Dan and I'm like "Hey Dan." because Chris and I had had this like conflict and uh on on Physics of Heaven and so I I don't write Chris back because it's like if you write that short of a sentence you're not wanting to have a conversation and and so I asked it's socially it's socially obvious that that he's out he's out that's all I don't want to talk about that yeah yeah yeah so I and I mean he's my closest leader and I'm like "Hey I had this thing with Chris." Um and this this guy told me about sent over some evidence but he didn't want to send it to me and so I I'm like "Have have you heard anything about this?" He's like "No I'm I'm a senior leadership team member like of course I would have heard it." And so I this is this is this is revealing though because it's like Chris said his his whole team you didn't know but but Dan didn't know dan is a major pillar in in Bethl i'm just telling you it's seared in my mind uh and so like I'm like well can you follow up about this and he's like sure and so a few weeks go by uh nothing happens and uh I like go back to him have you talked no uh and so I just start reasoning well maybe some wires got crossed with this producer and this happens all the time by the way is I'll hear a story I'll think something happened and it's just something's off and I'm not saying that guy lied to to me or I even thought he lied it's just it's just normal in a culture that large for wires to get crossed and then I think well Chris would have called a foul and Dan's not heard of anything let's keep going and uh like uh I have an investor sign on after that like just because Sean's looking clean like coming back is clean and there's questions but suspicion isn't knowledge right right and Bethl's used to operating in the realm of suspicion yeah so it's not probably that alarming Yeah that there's rumors or suspicions if you see your leaders are not confirming it then then yeah it makes logical sense with you and this sort of vacuum information you're trying to sus things out especially after you talk to Dan fairly and you have extended periods of time for him to confirm here's a major prophetic voice in our movement and Dan continuously seems seems to from your perspective know nothing about any legitimacy to this at that point yeah and so but for me I still have questions and even though he and I talked recently I think more of emerged is just like that feels like a five alarm fire question um and when this is an emergency meeting question this is a yeah or or a text voicemail like um and it just makes me go well why wasn't it a higher priority uh finding out that information um and so September comes around and this is I want to say 12 days before launch and uh I start posting social media which starts attracting attention and some people reach out and they're like why is this guy in your film and uh they tell me about kind of the the exchange the text exchange between him and Chris and uh another guy sends over some words and Uh there there's some more details that they told me and I go back to Dan and I'm like Dan I don't know what to do um I'm not convinced these words are showing that mine is false like I had some correlation between Facebook and I had some parts that weren't on there right you had some stuff you had you had really tried to find and you didn't find and that helps you think yeah were you were you kind of thinking at this point Elijah like maybe Sean pressure and expectations cheated you know he looked up some information for some people sometimes but but it seems like maybe what he shared with me was still legit is that what you were thinking i didn't go that direction i I went maybe it's logically possible that some people had more overlap than others um and so maybe it was still the Lord just happened to be that you could find that yeah and uh I think for me the discernment piece was like what happened with mine more than anything else and so I would ask these people have you seen direct evidence of what he's done and they could not point me to I saw him on a computer and then I saw this they could point me to indirect evidence uh you know sometimes he'd ask for a conference list uh but that was he would ask for a list of who's going to be at a conference yeah but also that would not be odd if you were not in that type of ministry if if you're like "Hey is so and so coming?" or whatever um did we also talk yet about about um the continued connection that you did still see in public between Shawn and Bethl leadership uh that's coming up okay it's coming up so there's there's still more there as far as like people need to understand I think why the there were there were legitimately these kind of mixed signals you know seeming affirmation type signals from leadership and you're you're operating in a void you're not being given the actual information they have or have promised to give you if they do have it so you're thinking okay maybe it doesn't exist because that's their leadership commitment is that they would they would be transparent with me yeah and Yeah and I'm asking him for the evidence every time I see him is like "Dude whatever you got I would love to see it." Asking uh Dan or Chris dan uh I Dan I Yeah Chris uh I didn't go back to him to talk about this uh right and so like at this point he kind of tells me like yeah there's some different views on our team about Chris and uh you mean Sean oh sorry Sean and uh like it's what I find near impossible is pulling how do I put it i want to have a truth conversation where I am told this is what's most likely the case and here's how to make the best decision I can and the language game he's playing is what I'd call Bethl empowerment coaching which is what's in your heart what do you think you should do and I would say that's classic Danny Silk Culture of Honor 101 but it's not helpful in that case um right so this is just days before launch mhm people are reaching out to you you're getting more information you find out about text messages and you're I'd imagine you're internally panicking you He's There's footage of him in your thing he's part of the reason you did it you've invested so much yeah it's the whole the whole point of this movie that you're making is to try to demonstrate the reality of the supernatural to skeptics and to have him as like some sort of a key element this late in this days before um Yeah so yeah so what you're I imagine Yeah you're just going through the ringer but what what happened next yeah so you know the next thing I do is I think well at some point prior to this Benny Johnson had gotten sick and uh Bethl was like "Do not write Bill he needs to be with his wife um she's in instage uh cancer." Uh and so I think well I wonder what Bill's doing about this and so in the Bethl alumni statement on Shumboltz it says "We received uh and value the feedback that our actions may have been too subtle and difficult to decipher and that it would have been more helpful to at least openly acknowledge that we were creating distance with Shawn due to our concerns." But I went on Bill's uh Instagram page and just scroll back that's 2025 just happened this year whereas what you're about to discuss is like you're back in 21 September and I go through and I'm seeing like pictures of him and Shawn from 2020 also I'm seeing pictures of him and Chris and Shawn which uh in in in 2020 and so it's giving me this impression that maybe whatever happened in 20189 uh has fixed itself at some level because they're not just taking pictures together they're doing public ministry yeah yeah yeah together they're on stage together they're doing events together uh Bill's Bill's writing uh let me see it he says um love being with this guy again such a great word in Johannesburg at Shawn BS this is this is sending you a message of like this is obviously not a guy who's like lying in the name of God who's mining people's information and then going public with it at least the impression you get is that um there you wouldn't treat someone this way if they were guilty of those things and so you're getting these mixed signals from the leadership to what some people are telling you and the latest one is April 30th 2021 and so I write Chris in May and I just think well maybe that's why he wrote a short sentence uh and so this is the confusion I'm trying I'm struggling in of making a decision and so I just go "All right well I've still got those two missing parts of my word i'm I'm married to this and if I need to stop I'll stop but like also it's the abandonment that we're talking about of a word that's turned everything up to a 10 um I I'm getting feedback from Sean and so we launch uh go around the world and uh start sharing this stuff [Music] yeah and it got a lot of attention it did um the movie is the movie's called Sin Proof there'll be a link for it down below if anybody wants to check it out uh I mean I was on Eric Mataxis i showed this at Oxford i did an Australia tour um I Craig Keenir in Miracles Today uh like thanks us for helping him uh like I I was on podcast with like Keenir and Michael Shurmer like this is it blows up we win awards like we won a Remy award uh I spoke at Google i was on Fox News um a Remy is like uh I I came in second and I need to note this second place goes to a lot of people with these but like Stephen Spielberg won this like this is a big deal um Mhm and uh I won a crown reward at the N national radio broadcasters and so like this is too big to just do this to if that makes sense like it it it's right right it's you're not just hitting pause on something you you are you are um worldwide launch you're killing something that is it's a it's the momentum is there this the snowball has been rolling for a long time so I I think that I I just want to help help others by knowing at least that I understand why you thought I'm going to continue with it you have Shawn himself boldface telling you there's no way no sir and super gracious he wrote a very well-crafted email to Yeah yeah yeah you know I Yeah you can believe what you need to believe i I I would never do such a thing oh I'm pure as driven snow and he encourages you and he uplifts you you've got Bill who's still fellowshipping and doing ministry with him even in public you have Dan who says "Yeah I don't really know anything about that." You have Chris who gives you one line chris who already has been hostile to you back and forth in emails who you already feel is like an irritable Yeah individual and and so you you and you have others who come and are bringing criticisms but you feel that you've heard a lot of invalid criticisms brought to Beth and like I knew Chris had like talked to Sean at this point but also I I saw how he reacted to me at Physics of Heaven and I thought maybe this is just like his em emotionalism getting the best of him and like also I can't slander a like I need evidence to convince me that uh he has committed a crime um and like falsely telling words in public it it gets close to something like that like it's a big crime i mean it that is you're blaspheing it is blasphemy to say God said and God didn't say and you know it you know it um that is Yeah that is high level highlevel evil that it goes on there and and when you start to realize Mhm like what that what Sean has done it you go from suspicion to rightfully indignation that is that is wicked how do you think so lowly of people that you would do this to them how do you think so lowly of God that you would exalt yourself like this and do this it's it's hard to overstate how big of a deal it is yeah so one of the things that happened uh as I was prepping the movie like Dan promised me like I'll I'll help you launch it i'll help you launch it through VSSSM um and I set up a private viewing for the healing rooms and uh they send out like a full invite of the church like 4 hours before the film and like it throws me into a panic because I have investors and backers I've told I will fly you out when we show this at Bethl and So um one of his admins so Bethl Bethl's official healing rooms email sends out to everybody hey we're we're No no no no no so the the whole church email sends out to everyone 4 hours before and then I get an email from an admin that's not an email but like "Oh my gosh we made a mistake i'm so sorry." Um Elijah uh Dan said he'll help you launch it to the church and then I come back later and they never helped me launch it to the church um he told me like I'm busy uh I can't do BSSM and like I spent 8 years of my life on this film and you're like not showing it to your organization and you're not calling a spade a spade on Shawn and so like it just puts me in this awkward position where I know there's some discussion about whether this is right or wrong with Shawn as I'm watching a film where every leader in the movement has been notified of something and so they're kind of just like some of them are pulling back and that's just a weird place to be Mike uh yeah do you think that the reason they didn't want to show it was because Shawn was in it possibly i mean Bill's in it you've got major leaders from Beth yeah yeah sean's also in it um and you've been trying to get a clear answer on this you also see you know Bill doing stuff with him and he even even just earlier this year 2025 endorsed Sean on uh on on on Yeah what what what network was that they did i think TVN possibly tbnn but you wrote that this was one of the most exciting books that you had read why was that well the book by itself is incredible knowing the life that backs it up adds a a power to it because it's so it's so practical it's it's what you dream of it's like 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 yeah yeah and so you're seeing this stuff even even still going on but but uh but you got to wonder why why you were just left out in the dust your your your film everybody's celebrating it and all this stuff but they're not going to do it and the story I was told is "Oh we don't want to launch a documentary every few months." I'm like "We're not launching documentaries every few months." Um and so and after I left Bethl in August of 22 they showed Darren Wilson a few months later and so like it it's if you're calling yourselves fathers like there's no father that doesn't sit his son down and go "This is what you need to do this is how to have success you've put your whole life into this and uh it was pretty miserable going through that time and and the rejection and yet still trying to push something out and like I I felt set up to fail just to be honest and it's just so it the amount of investment the amount of time Mhm the number of opportunities that were there for you just to be told the truth mhm which is which is what they've covenanted with you to do um to to then like feel like I've I've done all this mhm because partly because of the trust I have in in the leadership here and then they just drop you like Yeah yeah like almost like you they don't care if you just epically fail and bring embarrassment to yourself and the very movement that you're trying to create apologetics for and you could say at the end well I told him to cut that scene uh and like it feels inhuman at times like it it's wounded my soul at some level and so that that was kind of it um I well there I will mention you you talk about this uh you let me know about this anyways is that Dan had he promised to help you he then said all of a sudden we're not they they told you we're not going to do it we don't want to launch stuff all the time nine months later they show another documentary film bethl helps launch it helps encourage people to watch it one by Darren Wilson you're not ripping on that film at all you're just trying to show I I think that's the real story here yeah yeah yeah yeah and so that going through that I I'm just like I don't know what to believe anymore like it's logically possible everything I've ever heard from them is the exact truth exactly as it happened but so are unicorns existing and I I just go like I just want the truth conversation with no spin of exactly what happened and if you're a BETHL student and you're in BSSM why don't you ask really good questions during question time about this or about uh what is the edge of the new age or or stuff of that nature um I feel that we need to figure things out thought I was just thinking it would be cool to have like at some point a timeline of just a few bullet points like in this year Sean gave you a word in this year they knew to question Sean's words in this year um you you went to them and asked about it so let me let me run through that so in in what year was it that Sean gave you a word 15 19 they knew 21 uh I went to them uh late 24 um I I found out Wow that's that says everything mhm yeah [Music] uh by December I find out about like Allison finds the picture online and like it just mentally breaks me and what picture online uh the one of Silky and uh Karen that uh Sean had looked up the one thing that you can hang on to is you have some aspects of what Sean communicated that to your knowledge he couldn't he couldn't have data mined one thing you've been you've been clinging to this whole time this whole time it's been like in the back of your mind you're like I looked it up i tried to find it i couldn't find it and then sadly is was your wife that found it and so she shows you this and I'll put it on screen for people to see the word that Sean gave that you couldn't find was in just a photo from on Facebook and I don't know how we missed it just to be honest like I spent hours online um but like this is consistent with my research in Sean is I found that I would scroll through people's Facebook page forever and I didn't find what he shared and then I would click on their photos and I would go "Oh he probably didn't scroll their whole Facebook page." I mean maybe maybe in this case at least he just looks through their photos cuz that's when you find people's names connections between different individuals people are tagged and that's what he finds okay you've got you've got the names of the people he calls out the stuff that you thought he couldn't have known and this this must have been like such a gut punch because this this seemed I would have taken this as confirmation like absolute confirmation that in your specific case Yeah he data mine well yeah and so this is what pe people listening may struggle with is well isn't it logically possible that God gave him everything online and uh but it's still a word from God and I'm like prophecy is to reveal the secrets of your heart not the secrets of Facebook and like he could have told me I had a dog named Duchess when I was a kid and that would not be online or that I love uh vanilla ice cream and so there's a ton of stuff he could have revealed and when it comes to knowledge I think something we need to think about is there's a spectrum from logically impossible like square circles doubtful very doubtful 50/50 probable highly probable 100% certain like I exist and in court or whatever if you reach more likely than not 51% in not a capital case but like fraud or something you convict on that and so that at least pushes it to 51% uh if not very generous yeah yeah yeah yeah and so well when you add when you add some other elements and I'll share some of this in a future video about Sean you add other elements like there's a a a woman who he calls out by name in a in a in a meeting and then he mentions to her among other things that he got right on he's like "Does this mean something to you does that?" And she's like "Yes yes yes." And then he says "How about Slaughterhouse does Slaughterhouse mean anything to you?" And then some researchers confirm this that there was another woman cuz she says "No Slaughterhouse doesn't mean anything." And he moves on right mhm there's another woman by the exact same name who lives in the exact same area who lives on Slaughterhouse Road ah yeah and so even a miss a wrong calling out of something was a piece of information that was publicly on Facebook this is the kind of thing that um it's too consistent there's just too many things and it's detailed Yeah words of knowledge that are public information and then vague prophetic statements about the future yeah you know from details to vagory which I'm not saying that can never happen but when it always happens you add that to your ratio right right right right and so you just take this case this case this case this case and you combine them together and you're like man God has given 400 pieces of Facebook information or he's or he's looking up stuff the Holy Spirit really likes Facebook right right maybe he's the one doing the data away i'm kidding uh and so like [Music] and so I want to apologize uh I'm I'm I'm so sorry i I'm not sure why we missed this and I want to apologize to our backers uh people that supported me um and I was naive uh perhaps overconfident in my ability to check and I wish I'd hired some type of prov private investigator and I'm asking for your forgiveness um and Sean had looked me up to the best of my knowledge and uh like I wouldn't have ran a Kickstarter if I'd known that and I told people I thought this was from God and I spent years of my life showed it around the world and I am very saddened by my failure and uh I've dishonored the name of Jesus and I ask you as my audience and friends and family to forgive me and uh I'm sorry for breaking your trust and Uh yeah and I I also went on his podcast at one point and that was naive and foolish and I regret that and I'm sorry to all the researchers in my film the apologist um some of them didn't even know I had this word and I I I hope it doesn't bring any shame to you um that this happened um yeah thank you Elijah for sharing that yeah and I want to I think that that's I think that's you doing what you just described is trying to say let me deal with the plank in my eye yeah yeah this is may have felt like a big wind up where you're just criticizing a bunch of other people but instead you're explaining the whole story and now you're taking accountability and I'm grateful for you doing that and I think that's a healthy thing and um and where else can we go if we're going to be pursuing truth than to do that um uh there's so much more i will be releasing a video on Shawn Bulls where I have so much more stuff we haven't even touched that is um the man is and these are my words not yours sick demented wicked evil a plague upon the church i do not exaggerate at all those are my words not yours Elijah i won't you're not accountable for them this is based on a bunch of witnesses that I've talked to and a bunch of evidence I'll be sharing in the future um I wanted you to be able to share your story because it ties together these two different things is not only the kind of like Shawn BS and the stuff he's been doing and he needs to be called out publicly more publicly than he ever has been from the leaders who knew and didn't say anything but also to affect some change within the movement where there's going to be even if the leaders didn't listen if they don't pay attention to this video even if they toss it off they just get mad even if that happens the people in within Bethl I think they'll listen i think the people who are part of the the the alumni the BSSM students I think they'll listen and they'll be like "We need we need to grow from this we need to see change this stuff cannot just be washed under the culture of honor it has to be dealt with." And let let me tell you the consequences of this uh since December like my anxiety rest at a 5 to 7 or an eight each day i sleep three hours a night uh I have contacted the VA filed for disability uh my psychologist wrote uh you know a note saying that this will probably affect employment uh for me and so this is a big deal like the truth matters and when you withhold it you set people up for major injury and uh if you're a leader or an apostle or a prophet or a teacher inside the renewal is this okay with you if if you if you go to Bethl Leadership Network is that okay with you if you're a Bethl student or staff member is that okay with you because if it's not then you need to break the cycle of when these things happen and someone's talks about it in public is patting people on the back and being like "Oh you you're suffering." What if you said "Let's take the high road and get your integrity back." What if you said "Um let what what if you encouraged people to start calling this stuff out?" Uh what if you started going public with stuff you knew um because I I think we're at a point in the charismatic movement where we are on fire we uh God snuffed out IHOP and he is pruning the church and we're supposed to find out what God's doing and join him and part of it bringing holiness back bringing integrity back going back to the word and we need a reformation right now um to like take the Bible seriously again as our functional authority where if we disagree with it um it wins instead of the pastor of the house or saving the organization yeah i don't know i don't know what else to say to that except Elijah that's Yeah um if Bethl had dealt honestly and properly and with integrity this we would not be doing this you would not need to cuz you would have received early warning yeah but but but at every stage in my opinion it is damage control and preservation of of their p perceived self-preservation which is ultimately often times that's the thing that undermines us is what we the things we perceive that are preserving us but um but yeah that from the statement they made but I'll I'll be I'll be making my own videos my own commentary on this stuff i want this is your chance to share I want to talk about ethical betrayal and moral injury so uh the VA has this concept for soldiers that have went to war where they were raised in a like a moral environment let's say a Christian home and then there there's two ways to get a moral injury one is you break your own values and that is where you let's say are driving down the road and it's a time where there's IEDs on on the side of the road and so you're ordered like do not stop for anything and you run over a kid or something because you can't stop like like that's a type of moral injury the second is ethical betrayal by leaders and so um I feel at some level being in the charismatic movement I have gotten some type of ethical betrayal uh moral injury and like that's how important integrity is [Music] and like I think a lot of people are going through that type of traumatization right now especially those who were affected by IHOP or Shawn or the sexual falling out and we really need to look at how to heal and we also need to look at how to expose predators um and we also need to start by cleaning up these messes i think we need to clean up the new age and I'm still open to making those videos i I I think we need to clean up my movie and make restitution for it and and and not pretend like oh man this is a uh uh too much for us or we're busy like this is the call and the duty of the day and the leaders of the next generation will be marked by the courage to tell the truth in institutions where that's not common yeah it's you know what it is what I I think I think one way to look at it is holding the same knowledge you have about integrity and right after you're in a place where having integrity is going to cost you mhm so once you get when you're not when you've only been a leader for two months when you're not in you're not a leader you're just in the pews it's a little easier somehow to see it because you don't you don't anticipate how much it'll cost you oh yeah to to clean things up and um and then once you become a leader you you can get in the situation i I I think of it in a drama analogy i want you to think of this for um uh for improv there's a rule no blocking you you can't block that that's so someone comes up to you and they say something like um you're dying of cancer and you're in an improv and you you can't go no I'm not right instead you'll say yeah oh well I am but here's the cure and you and you can take it and then oh and I you have to work with it you can't block it right and I feel like there's something going on amongst the the the elites of these movements that feels the same way that even though you have a guy like Sean who should be rightly exposed it's too much blocking to call it out and hurt in Chris's words hurts the prophetic movement so they won't do it when because it'll just bring the whole like thing to a screeching halt but that but that's how you create improv versions of spiritual gifts you know we're we're faking it instead of the real thing that's how you create an avenue where where there's going to be either a mixed bag or something but there isn't going to be the kind of filtering that that has to be there because of the fallenness of humanity because of the work of the enemy because of the desire of people for attention and the and and just these sometimes well-meaning um fabrications that come and I think telling the truth is not safe it is not safe to speak um but it's the best of all possible outcomes for the world and it sets things right it sets the world in order and um what happens is we are beings that uh we are designed to survive first of all like you know you're not doing much if you're dead and so humans early on lived in tribes of about 150 people and if you got kicked out of your tribe you like were dead you couldn't survive and so what happens is the rejection and shame tell us like don't say something that will get you kicked out of the tribe and it it's like pushing past the hardest thing you can possibly do is to say the truth in public knowing that there's a part of the tribe that may reject you um I'm doing that right now i was going to ask you if you had any specific words you wanted to give to any of the leaders at Bethl yeah yeah yeah i would say this okay so here we are back in the studio it has been about two months since we recorded the rest of this video and me and Elijah are cutting in because he he wanted time to think about and work through how to answer that question and also it's just taken this long to edit the video so here's our final addition to the video elijah has a lot of things he spent a lot of time thinking about to answer this question that I just asked and answered I believe very well so um Elijah take it away yeah um I want to talk to Bill uh and to say this i think there's a big difference between missing a prophecy which is what Chris did with the uh 2020 Trump elections and he said "Hey uh I think Trump's going to be president." And then he corrected it when he was wrong obviously I I got it wrong and I felt immediately like I should apologize other people have said things like "Well he may run again and and and he'll win then and your word will come to pass." I'd also like to point out that my prophetic word was specifically that he would win the next term that doesn't help that doesn't help the prophetic word I gave and I think that's how continuationism should work if you believe in the prophetic uh between missing it and faking it which is someone going online and looking up another person's information and pretending it's supernatural and I think scripture speaks into this quite clearly um and and Bill I' I' I've seen you excommunicate one person from the pulpit and it was Jason Westerfield for encouraging people to follow false gods through the new age then he said "Are you ready?" I said "Okay." So we looked at each other eye to eye till it connected in here in the core and locked on goes "Here we go." Next thing you know I went up to the galactic center and as I went through that time tunnel went through that passageway it's really like kind of a wormhole that goes through and as I went there and I sat on that throne a screen opened up and I began to watch all the galactic history on the celestia of the cosmos and the dimensions that was in the DNA but was also in the soul history and I I I think this kind of applies to this situation Deuteronomy 18 20-22 um and it's talking about two people the person who uh calls people after false gods like Jason Westerfield did and the person who fakes it but the prophet who presumes to speak the word to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak or who speaks in the name of other gods that prophet shall die and so the same consequences are for both both consistently in the Old Testament and in the New and uh I believe Sean faked it uh and I I can give you evidence for why this is but like it's ruined my life it's ruined my mental health it's harmed my marriage it's ruined my finances um and and the reason I think my case is different than anything that has happened is because it happened at Bethl like when I read the alumni letter and they're like "Hey we don't speak to ministries outside of us." I'm like "Okay if that's your position that's your position." But on uh like for me uh it happened there in your house under your jurisdiction and so I think it is definitive that Shawn Boltz faked prophecy and gave me a fake prophecy on February 4th Chris F posted on Facebook that I was making a film of 2015 on the 24th I was given eight pieces of data all eight pieces are the first six I knew was on Facebook or other places on the internet and then two years or a few months ago I I found out that the last pieces were that's eight pieces of data and either God looked me up on Facebook and and pushed him to give those words or he did but the that that's the question is who did that um and I I I am as convinced that Shawn BS looked me up online as I am convinced Bernie Maidoff did a Ponzi scheme and and I understand the gravity of that um and so I I think that's why Bethl needs to look into this and uh I think this is what should happen if you conclude that uh one either he faked it or two we need an investigation i'm open to an investigation if you guys want to hire an outside investigator um I I would love to recommend those but I don't think the option is we just don't talk about it uh we we sit there silently and I think if you conclude this is sufficient evidence that he faked me um I I think 1 Corinthians 5 and6 comes into play and in that uh Paul is writing to the church at Corenth about this guy and he was a member of the church and he had uh sexual relations with his stepmother and Paul is like "What are you guys doing um this dishonors Christ um it dishonors the reputation of the people of God and it's harmful to this man's soul and you guys are okay with this." And so he in writing this letter in chapter 5:9-11 he says this "I wrote you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people." not meaning people of this world who are moral or the greedy or swindlers or idolatrous in that case you would have to leave this world and so he's saying hey this isn't for people outside the church but he goes on to say now I'm writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister claims that but is sexually immoral greedy an adulterer slanderer drunkard or a sl a swindler do not even eat with such people and the Greek word I'm going to say this wrong harpax which is translated swindler describes someone who's greedy and deceitful exploiting others through predatory or dishonest means and what I am saying is fake prophecy is swindling because it opens people up to financial contracts it opens them up to speaking engagements that helps them sells books at the expense of others and what I am claiming should be done is in the same way uh type of church discipline that Paul had for this man it should happen to Shawn if you conclude this is fake prophecy which is when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit and the power of our Lord Jesus is present hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh so that his spirit might be saved on the day of the Lord and so Paul's vision isn't to harm the guy it's actually to help him out as a last chance is for the whole community to say "Hey man you're doing something so evil you don't even need to consider yourself right with God and as a community we're shooting up one final flare to hopefully help you repent." And the beautiful part of this story is that uh this is the best example of New Testament apostolic discipline because uh the guy actually repents he he's actually sees his own sin and starts to grieve so much that in 2 Corinthians 2 5-7 it says if anyone ha has caused grief he has not so much grieved me as he's grieved all of you to some extent not to put it severely the punishment inflicted on him by the majority is sufficient so you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow and so what Paul's saying is hey this guy who fell into immorality doing church discipline right actually did something in his heart where he met God and really grieved the evil that he did and since Shawn clearly has been unrepentant of this stuff I think that's the proper step on this uh and one of the Bethl values uh honor affirms value is if our brothers and sisters sin we help them to find the root cause of their behavior so that they can be restored to wholeness and so scripture God God's opinion is not mine uh is that the way you help someone that's just that unrepentant that's been swindling or or highly sexual immoral is that you call them out in front of the church and and and you publicly say "We cannot associate with you until you repent." I just I just want to jump in and say I I so agree i so think this is the right call and this is the right request it is not um let us cast him off forever and his name be blotted out like no no no actually this would be hopefully for his restoration his repentance his restoration to Christ I don't think we can trust him as a prophet but it would be for his good and for his benefit and Bethl this is the call this is what Elijah is saying to you this is one of your members this is one of the guys who you've done ministry with who's gone on podcasts all over the place defending you trying to build men mind men mind men mind men mind men mind men mind men mind men mind men mind men mind men mind mend fences and build bridges and and speak highly of you and he is he is asking you to do this and I think that he's not the only one i'm going to I'm going to go out on a limb a little bit and say that I'll bet you a lot of your alumni and even people in your own fellowship would ask the same thing hey let's let's have accountability let's deal with this and you have either you expose Shawn for who he is for his own sake but also really primarily for the sake of all the people he continues to victimize because he's he's still ongoingly uh in a very high place and in high respect to many people because it has not been dealt with by those who platformed him you and the other option is to do this investigation and and you can simply have an investigation now you may not like that but you've already got reportedly like a 20 something page document with a bunch of other people in their stories you also have people like Jubilee Dawn and I'll be sharing many stories in a video coming up um on Shawn BS where there's just an overwhelming amount of evidence you I don't think a reasonable person needs an investigation but if Bethl won't openly admit it then maybe they can at least do an investigation and say "Yeah we're not hiding things we just think he's innocent." And I assume you're willing to provide all the information you've gathered uh to absolutely help um absolutely i'd be willing to provide that help connect witnesses with an investigator and then be completely open and I'd help publicize the results even if it somehow vindicated Sean yeah and if I'm in the wrong I I I want to repent publicly but I I would not be here at this point if I didn't think fake prophecy had occurred and was as confident of it as I am in other type of faking cases um and I'm I'm just calling on every apostle in the Revival Alliance to either call this out say "I believe it's fake online." Randy Chay Heidi Roland uh Georgian John and and and and Carol Lou Engel Cindy Jacobs TBNN the board members for Shawn or say "Let's investigate this." Like the these are big charges uh spiritual charges uh but they need to come to light and and there needs to be a decision made um and and especially at Bethl like elders at Bethl like I I was one of your sheep when this happened and if someone broke into the church and like beat someone up you would investigate it if sexual abuse had happened you would investigate it this is the worst form of spiritual abuse imaginable and has done significant harm throughout the body of Christ and you say "I believe and I have hope in a glorious church." That's one of your core values and so bringing darkness to light says to every predator out there every uh con artist don't come inside of our movement you have no safe harbor and and and that's the heart of of Christ for his church is that victims are protected and restored and that predators are afraid to enter it because the light will be shown uh for what they're doing amen amen amen to that we need predator predators cannot be safe in the church or else nobody is safe in the church the following statements from Elijah this is about a 30-day deadline that he would like and I agree we would like to ask for Bethl to abide by let me read to you these words they're from Elijah uh his words i've thought deeply about how to address Bethl's leadership and I want to propose a clear path forward instead of an ultimatum which might feel manipulative I'm setting a 30-day deadline from this video's release for Bethl to respond to allegations against Shawn BS my goal is to give BETHL's board and leaders enough time to make an educated decision recognizing that inaction is a choice with realworld consequences i don't want Bethl or its leaders to feel pushed into a corner but the history of indecision on these issues leaves me no choice but to set a deadline in good faith I'm willing to extend this to 45 or 60 days if Bethl requests a clear end date with legitimate reason however I will interpret silence as a choice not to engage i ask Bethl to take one of two actions one launch an investigation hire a thirdparty ministry like Grace Investigations netgrace.org to investigate Shawn Bulls's prophetic practices i'll provide all evidence I've gathered connect witnesses and publicize the results even if they vindicate Shawn if I'm wrong I'll repent publicly i can add my name to this as well if I'm wrong I will publicly repent and I'm happy to provide all the evidence which I have quite a lot that I could give to investigators number two apply church discipline and if the evidence confirms Shawn faked prophecies follow 1 Corinthians 5:es 4 to 5 when you were assembled hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord this is not about harm but restoration as seen in 2 Corinthians 2 5-7 where discipline led to repentance i also request Bethl hire a third party ministry like Peacemaker Ministries to repair my relationship with Chris Valatin and Bethl practicing 1 Corinthians 6 1-6 we should discuss a clear path forward for other victims to be reconciled and restored ensuring that they are treated with dignity my highest priority is God's glory living biblically accountability reconciliation and structural change in the charismatic movement i want all parties to take the high road so that Christ may be exalted i urge BETHL donors members BSSM students alumni and Bethl Leadership Network members to let leaders know you desire an investigation or church discipline for Shawn and proper care for victims your voices matter more than what is said in this podcast i want Bethl to be a model for other organizations showing how to take the high road with integrity can I add that would be a wonderful and beautiful thing finally I ask Bethl to greenlight videos addressing occult influences in the charismatic movement as I proposed years ago that would educate believers protect the movement and honor God's word if Bethl acts I'll celebrate it if not this deadline ensures clarity on where you stand right uh I would also like to speak into if there is a restoration process one thing that I've really seen done poorly in the charismatic movement is that people will kind of go off and just get back in and talk to maybe some shady people or whatever and I I would like to maybe have a thoughtful process which is myself another victim a Christian psychologist with a PhD i pick a theologian with a PhD and uh maybe maybe someone from the Revival Alliance as a rep but like it not be very simple of just crying a few tears but like an actual change of heart that takes place that convinces victims like this man's changed like I I people can check Paul changed under the power of Christ but like you don't want to create a situation where a predatory person can easily talk themselves back into something yeah yeah often what happens in the movement is the the person who's been busted been caught been found out they will often just relocate to a particular leader who's very favorable towards them and then they will be quiet for a little bit and they'll get back on stage and then everyone's like I guess they're restored but there isn't necessarily an accounting so yeah this this would be a process where you you're suggesting before Sean could be restored considered like back in the fold he would he would have to be and we're saying restore we don't mean on stage as a prophet we mean restored into the body of Christ you would want to see like yourself a Bethl rep a psychologist a theologian maybe another another victim as well and say "Hey let us be a panel who can say and and you'd be willing to see Shawn forgiven." You just would want to see Shawn repentant i would also love to see this is for him to move into a space where he takes his mask off and is like I have sinned and to teach ministers who do dark things how to repent how to go back to their victims like that's a beautiful ministry for them to teach uh how to spot cons uh like it it it doesn't mean there's no place to serve in the body of Christ like that would be a beautiful service uh and and like man I love reconciliation between victims like that that is the heart of Jesus and so like I I I I think that with with these things you're talking about those are such good things and then in this movement where you've got a number of people we've seen now who are like this in different ways I think if any one of them was truly repentant they would also help expose the other people they know about yeah because it's not a coincidence that they're often on each other's boards they're often there's there's a connection you know between some of these guys this is part of my own research not not so much what you've done I guess but there's connections between them where I thought if one of them was really repentant he would be helping warn people about the other the other ones he knows you know when uh Bob Hartley's son found out he was researching people to give false prophecies fake prophecies about them Jedodiah confronted his dad and his dad said "We all do it." Yeah and uh that reality is I'm not saying every single person in the movement does it that's not what I'm saying at all but the point is that he's aware of a network of leaders who are doing this yeah yeah yeah and Sean if I understand history correctly originated out of that IHOP space and so like stuff is not done in isolation and like there's an interesting story of him to tell of like how did I get down this path when did this become okay um and uh I I I think of a a long time ago there's a guy named Marjo Gunthy have you ever heard this story um not not to my knowledge okay so Marjo was a fake faith healer and his parents had raised him up marjo was that they they named him after Mary and Joseph and just stuck the name together uh and so like poor kid uh but like he was raised in con artistry and he's like I'm disgusted with this i'm getting out and he made a documentary god is going to do something for you and I'll turn around to the crowd and I say everyone do you believe it and you know everyone say yes you know I said that's not enough if there's no faith here tonight I can't do anything you've got to believe it and I do believe do you believe it and then by this time the cries yeah I'll say "Sister as I lay my hands on you it's going to happen by this time you're just like this sitting on you cuz I do a whole thing on you." Then I know I sort of like get down to now I'm going to pray the prayer and everyone bow your heads and all in the name okay but what is interesting about it is he fell away from the faith and my hope for Shawn is that this is the moment of grace like rock bottom is where people meet the real Christ and when you take that mask off and you start confessing stuff like the presence of God is there uh the healthiest churches I've been in are like addiction groups uh where the goal is we just confess our sins and we are real and raw and honest about the darkest parts of our lives and I'm like that's where Jesus is and uh like I I have so much hope that uh that mask can come off and just be transparent and real um [Music] I want to move on to the second leader I want to talk to which is Chris um and I want to begin by just talking about Bethl's this is the from the BSSM handbook it is read to every student on the first day of school and it talks about like what a revivalist is in the culture it's a believer who's focused on who's focused and passionate and willing to pay any price to live in community purity and power because they are loved by God whose manifest presence transforms lives and cultures and I'm like man yes I want I want to pay any price for purity and community and uh that and it says that part of being in community I'm just going to read uh is that we confront one another in love and if someone is doing something scary or destructive tell them we have an honor code and I I love you too much to let you make poor choices going on going unchallenged by love and holiness and then it kind of gives you a formula and I want to do that Chris uh we have an honor code around here and I love and honor you too much to let poor choices go unchallenged by love and holiness and I am concerned when you break the leadership covenant at Bethl and are silent when you believe people have committed fraud against your sheep because it destroys lives and so we could we agree that if you become suspicious you will act like a wreck uh and let's keep it checking in with each other because I think we share a vision that anyone who's a con artist should be afraid of practicing in the charismatic movement uh because when you don't do that you lose your trustworthiness and I I want to commend Chris on something when he found out about Shawn he went to Shawn which is a part of Matthew 18 and confronted him way to go buddy he went to the TBN board and said "Hey we got a problem." He went to Sean's board and said "Here's some evidence." Way to go like that is commendable it's just the next part of Matthew 18 said when he became convinced this guy's not repenting says uh Matthew 18:17 if they refuse to listen tell it to the church and if they refuse to listen to even the church treat them as you would a pagan or tax collector and truly I tell you whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven and so when you reach this point where someone's in such grievous darkness the final stage is we tell the people of God about it not and and that goes back to the first Corinthians uh five passage which is God sees the putting out a person from the people of God when it's done with the right motives and the right heart and the right evidence he's like I honor that um and and reading this passage in its historical context is like it it's not about binding and loosing demons it's about like if if you put someone outside the fold because they are in darkness uh I I've committed myself to that um Elijah let me let me hit you up with something real quick because I I want to know what you think of this um in one sense you know Chris uh you know reportedly warned some people about Shawn and others he didn't you even when you asked for it and yeah you know Dan said Dan Fairle was acted as though he had no idea what was any news at all about and maybe he didn't so let if he didn't he didn't if he did he did yeah i just know he acted that way yeah but um but early this year Chris had a post on uh Instagram where he was being asked about Shawn and he says uh in response I I have a screenshot of this he said this is in January he said in response to uh Spencer Dalton on Instagram he says uh there's always more to the story than meets the eye about Shawn BS he also says and I can read it and I can put these on screen later uh wisdom is not always played out in front of the crowd the crowd demands to know every detail but there are things that are not for the crowd this would be a lot easier if you knew me i believe you'd trust me he also said "Do you know this is the weird part do you know for a fact Shawn did this?" As far as faking prophecy he goes "Do you know for a fact Shawn did this are you 100% sure he's guilty have you seen the evidence or are you listening to people on social media as far as I know it's alleged and last I heard Shawn hasn't admitted to anything maybe more facts have to come out i haven't followed the situation for years if he's guilty and refused to deal 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 mhm um he also said uh in a reply to another person on on that same thread I saw the evidence spent days examining it talked to Shawn for hours there's it's the conflict it's it's the sense of okay are you are you warning people i don't even know what he really told TBN or these other people and I I I don't know if he warned them like hey Sean's untrustworthy faking things or if he was like hey buddies we're part of the inner circle sean's got some red flags may you may not want to be too connected to him for like a self-preservation thing i couldn't tell you but even in 2025 he was writing something where it was all these leading questions that suggest that Shawn is not really guilty in the way that he seems to be from all the evidence we've seen and also suggest that Chris isn't convinced that he was he was guilty so it's just really strange almost double speak is what it comes off to me as double speak but I wanted to share that with you because it kind of connects to what you were sharing earlier and um what do you think well I I I can address some of this first of all there's an epistemological issue that I think if we get to the bottom of would actually be so helpful for this situation which is where Chris says "Are you 100% certain?" Um and there's a guy back in history called Decart he's the father of modern philosophy and he wanted everything to be 100% certain and and he's the guy that says "I think therefore I am." Which is what's the one thing you can be 100% certain of is that I exist um and then if you push that to its logical conclusion um well I can't be certain 100% certain you have thoughts i can't be a 100% certain I'm not a brain in a vat and so what philosophers have done especially Christian philosophers is go well truth is true or false but knowledge is something we have degrees of confidence in from logical impossibility square circles don't exist highly improbable uh improbable 5050 probable highly probable 100% certaint 2 plus 2 equals 4 type stuff um and so yeah you can't be 100% certain of that uh what what you can do is go am I 5050 on it like that that would be very strange looking at this evidence just be like it's a coin toss yeah um I I would be highly probable yeah and he's not 50/50 because he's later he he says it other times like I told my whole team don't minister with him even though he didn't tell you he didn't tell he wasn't openly being told um but he says this which would imply that he had some kind of confidence about it cuz you're not going to tell someone they can't minister alongside you because you're 50/50 on something similarly he then was on stage with him at an event after this stuff happened as well as you've already showed and we have the screenshots for that that it it doesn't make sense and I I I'll be I'll be honest these are my words not yours is I I question Chris's personal integrity because he seems to be answering different crowds in different ways throughout the throughout the things that are going on and including the public message so I felt like I have to share that i don't know if you agree i'm not going to make you just sign off on that but because you're speaking of how he handled it and I think he actually handled it in a PR fashion and not in an integrity fashion let me keep going and I'll I'll come back to that i I think the most concerning line in the Bethl alumni statement is this the leaders who previously investigated and gathered evidence were of course free to do what they thought best going forward and so what that's saying is there was no one at Bethl telling him not to speak not to come to me and so in that covenant where it says like hey we want to be trustworthy leaders is um trust is knowing my best interests are taken care of by another person that I'm safe and so when you're saying like there's a level of trust broken I I I think that's real at least in my case because um like at any point he could have sat me down i was in his office uh and and just be like "Hey son uh I have suspicions i've talked to TBN i've talked to these people." And uh when you say I'm going to be a ref and then you sign a covenant that says I will be trustworthy it also creates like these weird legal things that are going on because like as an organization you're binding something to members uh people are donating to Shawn trusting that uh Bethl has sponsored them like um and and so I think for me personally I have been more hurt by Chris Chris's response throughout this entire process than Sean's because I'm like cons are going to con uh predators are going to prey on people But like I trusted you i trusted you that you would come to me if and and call a foul and like and when I reach out you don't come to a Matthew 18 meeting like that is devastatingly crushing um and so my trust is very low and I think you can rebuild trust uh Henry Cloud wrote a great book called Trust when to give it when to keep it um I I highly recommend anyone going through this process or asking should this leader or that leader be trusted is to read that book uh or if you want to restore trust with with people like me um I think my second concern Chris is well you were invited to a Matthew 18 meeting and you talk about the importance of covenants like being a covenant people you have sermon series online about this and we were in covenant and like did didn't bother to live it out and I think that's destructive uh my third concern and I want to use BSSM language i love you and honor you too much to let your poor choices go unchallenged by love and holiness i am concerned when you teach on culture of honor without addressing celebrity culture because it creates an environment for covering for predators uh and so could we agree that you would take steps to correct this um because I think we both want to see a glorious church when Christ returns uh Chris talks about you talk about a R&D culture which is like hey we do a lot of experiments and sometimes we fail um there's a part of honor culture that I love uh truly honoring and respecting people seeing the best and relating to people as the best empowerment over control you know asking good questions to reveal hearts having grace and conflict resolution that's beautiful but the most dangerous part is somehow a celebrity culture emerges out of that that punishes those who speak out against cons and predators uh and I would just recommend reading Tove by Scott Mcnite and Pivot and it's about addressing uh that type of celebrity culture and like how to recognize it and how to make a culture of justice so that victims are able to speak up in church environments and that it actually justice comes and uh like I I think it would create a culture of integrity at Bethl um where silence in this stuff is not okay and I think that's what heaven coming to earth looks like like I I I think that's the heart of God um and so like Chris you're the best man in the right position to do that like you can fix this problem better than any other voice uh in the renewal right now and so I I want to remind you of how amazing you are and call you back to your identity in Christ and be like "Hey live from justice." Uh let's let's dismantle the unhealthy parts of the culture of honor keep the the good ones uh the biblical ones and incorporate more scriptural values in that so that it matches the heart of God more clearly um and do you have anything to say on that um I I just No I just want to amplify your voice and help people hear it this this is good stuff it's very important and I appreciate you that this you know you took quite a long time to sit and think through everything you wanted to say and and this is us later going hey there's a lot more to add after uh our our previous discussion so this is your chance to say it okay uh the the next concern is that uh at Bethl um I think every teacher and this is way insider of baseball but it'll help my community so much every teacher can prophesy because they sit under prophetic people and they they do that with the right heart prophets can't execute scripture um in that environment and they don't they don't do that well and there's not that cross equipping where um and I think that's the fundamental problem everyone's blind to is that if you really believe in a five-fold ministry then apostles would exede better and teach better doctrine um that prophetic people would teach scripture in its historical grammatical and cultural context um and in the same way that you know I'm I'm more of a teacher person like I learned to go out to the streets and pray for the sick because evangelists trained me to go share the gospel and to talk about sin and repentance and the need for Jesus and so like when we see these like gross doctrinal errors coming out of the movement it's because I think the prophetic side hasn't humbled itself enough to say I need to learn this and master this and put the time into it and I I just imagine a future where people who c have prophetic giftings actually go to seminary and learn the word of God and can teach it accurately so that these grievous errors aren't made and and the last concern I have is I I love and honor you too much to let your poor choices go unchallenged by love and holiness i am concerned when you allow books like Physics of Heaven to sit in the bookstore for years uh because it's a covering for people who went into magic and uh and let's keep checking in with each other because we want to see a glorious choice church when Christ returns um like I have shared with you Chris multiple times the entirety of church history has believed in energy channeling came from the demonic it's not neutral um you can read just go into AI and just be like what did church historians say about channeling life energy um you'll find quote after quote and Bill Johnson said we need to figure out why revival sustain themselves and die and one of the reasons I found over and over and over again is during times of spiritual renewal like the great awakenings or the Holy Spirit is moving there's a group of the church that opens itself up to exploring the occult and I want to tell you about a revivalist in the 1800s his name was Joe and uh like he started using sear stones which is in the you know people in the Old Testament sometimes used sear stones um and so he he would use it to kind of like find treasures and stuff but he also had a passion for revival and and the things of God and so he's just opening the door a little to what we'd call the occult and so Joe starts uh just praying crying out to God and when I think he's 14 he has a vision where he sees Jesus and he hears "This is my son who I love." And Jesus tells him not to join any existing churches quote "Because they draw near to me with their lips but their hearts are far from me they teach doctrines for doctrines of the commandments of men having a form of godliness but they deny the power thereof later in his life he sees an angel and the angel's like "Hey up on this hill is a book." And if you dig it up um what you'll find is is like someone buried it and and it's got teachings about Jesus in it and so he digs it up dude starts a five-fold ministry he's got prophets he's called an apostle um teachers he sees healings has visions and my fear is if he kind of worked next to you Chris for 20 years and was like "Hey can you write a forward to my book and be like "Cool yeah I love you." Um but the problem is Joe is Joseph Smith and that book is the Book of Mormon and this happens again and again and again in church history it happened in the Renaissance uh when people found the Hermetica um and so what they're doing is they're going back in church history and or back in pagan history and they're finding really cool stuff like this is how we do paintings and it helped the 16 chapel um this is how we do architecture great and then they find this magic book and they start incorporating it into Christianity and the true heart of the prophet is we don't syncretatize at all and so I don't have a problem with finding great architecture in pagan religion and incorporating it in the church i I think we have more beautiful churches today cuz someone learned how to do that what I am highly concerned about is when we start bringing in those practices and and scriptures so clear don't do that and uh I really want to catch a vision for you buddy uh imagine if you took on the prophetic mantel of of someone who became the greatest champion of getting the new age out of the church like imagine if you became a champion of driving predators out of driving con artists out uh what if you became uh someone who had prophetic gifting and is like I'm going to teach the Bible in its historical grammatical and cultural context and what if you lived your teaching and became the most trustworthy ref in the renewal like I think that's what remembering who you are in Christ is and uh I I would love to see that for you um but I think the first step is the same step that Bethl's asked that pregnant girl to do uh which is to look at where the paint got and to clean up your mess and I I I think that requires a clear apology and and a plan to fix things um and uh I want to ask you to turn off the Bethl propaganda machine that spins stuff don't put anything in its best light and just apologize uh I wrote out something that I think could be a template uh I promised the charismatic movement I would ref prophetic words that came into Bethl in my book The School of the Prophets and when I was convinced Boltz had data mind uh I told leaders but not our sheep i had the freedom to do what I wanted to according to the Bethl alumni later and I chose silence and that was sin and it harmed people like Elijah and Sean's former interns uh I concealed the fact from you Elijah for two years um and I had a duty to you and your investor and it harmed your marriage and your finances and your mental health being silent and I didn't show up for an Matthew 18 meeting and that broke our covenant and I failed to give feedback to our environment about the occult about the new age and put it in its proper place and I want to clean up my mess and I'm sorry it might have given students permission to explore the occult uh and not commenting publicly about the relationship between the new age and Christianity harm people um and I call for an investigation of Shawn Bolts a or B uh I hand him over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh uh that his soul might be saved on the day of the Lord and Chris you taught me the dogs of doom stand outside the door of your destiny and I know this is scary to say but I think you want to become that man based on what you say publicly and if that's in your heart go down the hard path and become the man who lives the lifestyle you say with your lips i uh I want to encourage uh Chris too before you move on to addressing Shawn directly um I want to encourage Chris as well and just say "Hey Chris you know you it's it it might be easy this isn't a judgment it's just a possibility it might be easy to think that someone like myself or many of the people who have been showing up in the comments on social media and stuff would receive there's nothing you could do to appease us i think that that can be a thought that you have to that causes paralysis to keep you from doing the right thing you should do the right thing regardless of whether it appeases anyone or not but I would encourage you if you did the things that Elijah just suggested I would be applauding and I would be very very grateful and I would consider that a wonderful thing um that would be a healthy thing it is it is not impossible to please the critics that is an excuse that can sometimes be used to insulate ourselves from some of the criticisms that are quite valid and I am 100% rooting for you like I want to believe you're that man i I want to see you become that if you're not um like the entire church is rooting for you like this is your moment to in and use your own language walk into your destiny um and and like become the revivalist that they teach us to be in BSSM1 which pays any price for purity and like Jesus will honor that and it may cost you a little bit of social status and there's always going to be people that call you names online but like you start walking in that level of integrity and the integr will recognize it and like you don't want fans you want people of character to say that guy's got character and more than that you want the person with the highest character to say that and that's Christ himself and he sees the heart and he sees the actions of people who go I am doing this for you God um lastly I want to talk to Sean and say bro with the same confidence I think the earth is round I think you looked me up online uh and like uh when I heard things I I saw yellow flags and I should have saw red flags and and and that was wrong on my part uh and you faked prophecy and and you need to repent publicly and uh before you do so write it out write all the ugly and say the last 10% that's the most embarrassing and like get clean uh and I have a grid for people coming back to ministry uh but I I I do think it's in the form probably going to be for you which is the guy who had to take his mask off and go make things right with and and restore things with victims but those guys are celebrated zakius is celebrated matthew the uh tax collector is celebrated in church history it it's the most beautiful thing and sometimes people lose their way um and sometimes people never even had their way um but I I think there's a a beautiful life ahead of you and there's a freedom that comes when you hit rock bottom and you go I can't do this anymore and I believe your world is crashing down and I have nothing but love and compassion for that process and mercy for it because I I've I've been there um and like Jesus put you in this situation to meet you and God organizes all of history sometimes well he organizes all of history all the time so that it can push us toward him and he's it's grace the opportunity to repent is grace and you don't get an unlimited set of opportunities in this lifetime and so take this now and get free and find real love because if you have to pretend if you have to put on a mask what you can't do is let real love in and I think there's people who will really love you through this process and the love of God will meet you there and uh I also uh I'm going to step out of ministry to deal with my mental health uh I'm I'm still at the worst spot of my life i I can't regulate my nervous system um I just want to thank everyone that's poured into my life and maybe I'll be back maybe not um Elijah listen um just thank you for doing this thank you for sharing these things and I I'd encourage anybody who watches this stuff later to to uh leave leave Elijah alone please best advice I can give you please leave the man alone he's he's doing this hopefully as part of his healing is to say "Hey this is off my chest this is I've I've I've shared the things that I feel like had to be shared publicly so that he could kind of like let that anxiety pass from him." Yeah um and I'm hoping that that that's the effect it has for you and and it brings healthy accountability you did you did an amazing job and I'm really grateful for you love you Mike and thank you for your ministry and you actually help this world out a lot i know you don't get that feedback much but uh people listen like myself who go "Hey I'm not going to agree with everything this man says but if he says something true I'll take it to heart and champion it in whatever way I can." And so thank you for the work you do yeah awesome yeah cool thanks Elijah all right well Elijah you uh also have some stuff you want to talk about about the topic of getting sexual predators and frauds out of the renewal yeah yeah yeah and what drives out uh predators what drives out uh like con artist is people who see them and the whole crowd is saying "Hey uh we're pretending this is not real." And that one person goes "I will speak up i will not be silent." Every tribe has something called a taboo and a taboo is something you can't say or do without the tribe punishing you so um in our tribe of the renewal critiquing leaders is that so what we did here today um the whole tribe like I I'm fairly sure I will lose friends on Facebook i'm sure that people will talk negatively about me um that's okay i think that the the basic encouragement for people to like say it may cost me but I'm going to speak the truth you know when I taught about like uh Calvary Chapel Chuck Smith predicting the rapture that that that it it wasn't the biggest thing in the world in my life but it did cost me and I knew I knew going into it that that there would be a cost but I also knew that the the cost of my u my integrity was there because I thought the same way I do all like I would normally think here's an issue I better address and the only reasons I can think not to address it is that I might be like losing status yeah yeah yeah you know well I I think the one thing you people don't understand about the renewal is like at Bethl we have 2,000 students come in each year half of them for are from around the world there's three million people in it and they're all like "Man I want to be at this church." And so if you get a job there or teach there like you are many famous and it's it's a type of fame you can't get in any other part of life and so well yeah like if you're a mid-tier leader why throw that away if you see someone you know faking a healing or faking a prophecy um and why throw away all the money that would come in to the movement if you had to turn your number one profit uh and and show him as as lying like those things fall apart fast and and you can tell Bethl's on the decline like schools shrinking and like every one of these stories makes someone go do I really want to like travel all the way out to a school like this and so right I've been this has been blowing my mind what you just hit on because as I've been researching into this I'm realizing how many of these different movements all are really um working hard to become the place to come to yeah yeah so that they can have the reputation of like if I could just get in the building if I could just get to that location then God would be you know I would be in the midst of amazing things God's doing and this the the the impression of that would obviously falter incredibly if they're like "Here's the most prophetic guy on the planet oh sorry he was a fraud." Yeah um that would that would obviously hurt that i would also add this that uh we don't know really study the connection between marketing and revivalism like uh George Whitfield was a master marketer and so this whole thing has this like marketing ploy of oh let me post this testimony on social media let me show myself eating uh lunch with Bill Johnson which is way more exclusive than just someone at church with like that we we don't see but like every revival let's say influencer traveler ministry they're doing these status photo things all the time and once you see it for what it is you realize oh they're they're not really helping people sometimes as much as like showing they're important enough to get into your organization and bring status to it and like that is mind-boggling to me i think this this is kicked up to a next to to a it's the same thing but a a more intense level in charismatic circles in particular because there's all these connotations of impartation or of you know having those connections is important it's important to speakers to sometimes be able to say I met soand so he prayed for me yeah or he's my spiritual father yeah he's my spiritual father or he told me that God was going to give me his mantle yeah or phrases like that that outside of the charismatic movement you're not going to hear or see that stuff you're not going to you know it just there isn't it doesn't make sense to to do it um not to the same degree it's there but not as intense you want to know the fastest way to status faking a miracle faking a m Yeah faking prophecy that's what Sean got maybe um I I would have one more I would add to that having an amazing conversion story okay yeah yeah yeah i know i think because you could be a baby Christian and you could be like I just and but you have this like amazing conversion story and then like God this happened and he I was blind for 3 hours and God started flooding all this knowledge and you could you could tell us now imagine for a second if you were willing to lie yeah yeah yeah um I think that that is a very quick way to be like even with no training and with no special skills except storytelling you're on stage and you're in you know you're drawing crowds you're inspiring people this is my favorite part of the conversation by the way so yeah all right yeah yeah todd I mean if some of these guys if you evaluate it's it's interesting you brought up marketing because I' I've thought that I even had a conversation earlier today with somebody i was interviewing I've been doing the whole day's interview so yeah this earlier I was doing an interview with somebody and I said a lot of the stuff takes on that you're seeing in these movements takes on a different connotation if you interpret it as though it was just about marketing mhm yeah yeah yeah so it's trippy to hear you say that cuz I thought yeah that's that's an element that I I asked myself is it imagine for a second it was all about marketing would that explain everything that's happened so far and you go oh it it has more explanatory power than you'd like it to have at that point well going back to that study I was showing you about the people looking at the three lines and like the group telling like "Hey dude." Uh yeah solomon Ash's conformity experiment yeah and so like if you start off and there's seven people in the room and all of them be go around and pick the wrong line the last guy who will pick the wrong line 37% of the time just to conform when you start doing that with miracle stories in a high trust culture where it's the senior leader the revival group pastor doing that like you can create this ethos that miracles are occurring when it's just confirmation bias and conformity um and that's the dangerous space to me yeah yeah I agree i there's so much more we could talk about we Well let me ask Elijah is there is there anything else that you had that you were like I want to bring this up uh no [Music] at the end of this interview Mike asked me "Is there anything else uh you want to say?" And I said "No." and we have refilmed and refilmed and so I just thought I would record this into my phone uh there is something um I think we need to really work toward restoration and of relationship i think that's a Bethl value of creating a healthy family and covenant relationships we purposely grow our capacity to trust and be trusted as we empower and confront one another in order to live out who we are or who we truly are and so the Bible talks about this and especially in a case like mine where there's monetary stuff and all that that goodness uh and it's in 1 Corinthians 6 says "If any of you has a dispute with one another," and I I think I certainly qualify with Bethl and and Chris and Shawn BS in those areas uh do you dare take it before the ungodly for judgment um instead of the Lord's people or do you not know that the Lord's people will judge the world and if you are to judge the world are you not competent to judge trivial cases and this is certainly what this is uh it's not a eternal soul issue maybe maybe it is for Shawn um but uh especially between me and Bethl it it is it does not compare at all to the significance of souls coming to Jesus uh therefore if you have disputes about such matters do you ask for a ruling from those whose way of life is scorned uh in the church i say this to shame you and shame here is is in a different culture where um it means that you're not being like the people of God should be is it possible that there is no one among you wise enough to judge a dispute between believers and so Paul is saying we need people to help bring judgment and reconciliation and in modern times those are called mediators and their purpose is to help apply biblical practices um to these situations and one model that I particularly love um is the peacemaker ministry model um and basically the idea is that you go into this process to glorify Jesus Christ and it starts by every party sitting down and like writing out where they sinned in this process and get the log out of their own eye and uh I mean there's mistakes I've made along the way um and maybe even mentioning to each other like I I think this is something you need to think about uh you confess to each other restore gently um and I I would like to ask Bethl to pay for Peacemaker Ministries uh for mediator and I happen to I want to disclose this uh I happen to know uh Lorie Stewart who's on the team there um she's the one that turned me on to this and so I would ask her not to be involved i think impartial justice is really important in these cases and I think the reason people Paul says like he says the people of God not the elders or the five-fold ministers in Bethl's context is because sometimes you have to take something outside of a ministry um in order to have it judged impartially and I I think that's God's justice um also uh I would like for this to be a trauma-informed process that is like you guys study up on how to talk to people who've been through trauma and who report trauma um and I ask the mediator to be trauma informed um and I want to encourage any other victims that uh you go through a mediation process rather than take this to court um and uh I also want to say that uh I would like post either handing Sean over to Satan or post having an investigation and me him either being shown in the wrong or uh being shown hey yeah you did look stuff up uh that he and I have a peacemaker talk and that uh Bethl be willing to pay for mediation for that since it happened at Bethl um and I'm asking Bethl and Boltz Ministries to offer impartial third party mediation services to any alleged victims and uh data mining or sexual predators um and I asked every church and apostolic network who hosted a known data minor or predator you know that we've got lots of those in the movement uh to have that type of reconciliation um and I ask uh members and donors to let your voice be heard if you would like to see that happen uh in these churches and I'm calling on the elders and fifold ministers of Bethl to take steps to uh dismantle the unhealthy parts of culture of honor and incorporate a culture of reconciliation and justice and I highly encourage you guys to again read to by Scott Mcnai and Pivot um and I'm asking all five-fold teachers and pastors to read books on moral injury and ethical betrayal and begin teaching on it um and I'm encouraging internet influencers to speak on those topics and to amplify those that we may be an example of a city on a hill so that the light of Christ teaching can be shown in the world and I want to pray for us now and I just feel the Holy Spirit in my heart jesus you are the hero of history and you are worthy to be celebrated and you have taught us wise things that rebuild broken communities and you say that you orchestrate all things for our good and by that you mean make us like you and so I pray that you act in the the churches uh all around the world right now that need to apply your teaching that we could all take the high road together and that we experience you in this situation amen [Music]