Attending Bethel’s School of Supernatural Ministry (or any of their churches) is a Dangerous Mistake for Any Christian

Logan Winkelman

Published in

Searching for Truth

19 min readMay 26, 2019

“If you meet with a system of theology which magnifies man, flee from it as far as you can.” — Charles Spurgeon

Too Long; Don’t Want to Read? Here’s A Summary.

Q. What is Bethel’s School of Supernatural Ministry?
A. BSSM is a so-called “Christian” school and church located in Redding, CA, though they have churches spread across the world. It claims to teach young Christians how to become modern-day prophets, mystics, and raisers-of-the-dead. They (barely) teach the Bible in illogical and unhistorical ways which skew the Scripture into new doctrines that cannot be called biblical Christianity.
Q. What does Bethel teach?
A. Bethel teaches many things which go against common sense and clear biblical teachings which almost all Christian denominations (which disagree on many things) agree are certainly not biblical. Among these teachings are that the average Christian not only can, but should be able to perform miracles at will as the Apostles did in the first century. This includes speaking directly with God in conversational form, communicating with and seeing angels, performing healings at-will on a daily basis, and manipulating God into doing just about anything they want Him to do. In short, this church teaches that God is every Christian’s puppet. God is not in charge of what He does, we are.
Q. Are Bethel’s pastors reliable interpreters of Scripture?
A. Absolutely not. They rely upon a Bible translation which was translated almost solely by one individual. This individual, whose prior work associates agree that he is not fit for the translation of ancient languages, produced a Bible which has 50% more content than the average translation. The pastors of Bethel rely upon this translation heavily. They also exegete (interpret) Scripture based on it’s English, taking apart the words used in this terrible excuse for a Bible and interpreting that, altogether ignoring the fact that the volume was written in Hebrew and Greek. They take vast amounts of money for cheap, useless products such as a demon-exorcising puppet, and they lie to their parishioners about binders full of conversations they’ve had with God, and manipulate them into believing that their ill-informed conscience is the mind of God itself, allowing them to inflate their egos to the point where they can pridefully assert anything they believe was given to them from God Himself.
Q. Does Bethel provide any proof for their supposed miracles?
A. Nope. None. Leader Bill Johnson says he sees no need to provide any sort of documentation or proof for the miracles supposedly performed and seen at Bethel. This doesn’t stop him from proclaiming the almost-constant appearance of things such as the Glory Cloud from the Old Testament and falling “angel-feathers,” not to mention the people they’ve allegedly raised from the dead and healed of diseases including cancer. The fact that the news hasn’t heard of any of this seems to bypass believer’s in Bethel’s nonsense.
Q. What other things does Bethel teach?
A. Bethel’s lead pastors advocate for many strange, unbiblical things such as “Christian tarot cards,” “grave-soaking” (the practice of literally stealing supernatural energy from dead Christians by getting close to their dead body), searching for prophecies in storms (?), and storming the streets of their local towns to heal random strangers in order to promote not the Gospel, but “revival,” which apparently is something God specifically has told them is important. Strange how none of these things are in the Bible…
Q. What happened with that witch at Bethel Redding?
A. A self-identified ex-Christian witch visited Bethel for a “prophetic word,” — a somehow not-weird expectation for those acquainted with the delusional world that Bethel’s followers are living in. She was given support for her writing job at a witchcraft blog called “Witches and Pagans,” — support supposedly coming directly from God. The Church has not opposed the prophetic words of the student who told the witch these things, because it would be clear proof that what they teach the students are words from God are in reality just egotistic manifestations of their own biased, ill-informed, brainwashed theology and skewed perception of what the world is really like.
Q. Is Bethel a force for good in the world?
A. A question like this must be answered with more questions. Is it a good thing for people to be wandering around declaring their own thoughts are words directly from God? Is it a good thing for people to ignore medical intervention and prioritize prayer in hopes that their own supernatural power is enough to raise someone from the dead? Is it a good thing for people to rely upon themselves and ignore what the Bible teaches? The answer is obvious. Bethel is not teaching Christianity, it’s teaching what can only be called New Age spirituality wrapped up in Christian lingo. It’s teaching young adults to expect the world to bend to their wishes as if their desires are the desires of God, and they have the power to enact their wishes with the power of God. It’s teaching people to function as delusional fanatics in a world that is already tired of their ridiculous antics.
Q. Is Bethel influenced by demonic activity?
A. Most likely. They not only support divination and outright prideful idolatry of the self, ignorance of all sin and conviction of it, and avoidance of dying to self under any circumstance — which are all clearly things which the Bible opposes and any evil spirit would rejoice in — but they teach with the self-proclaimed authority of God Himself and tell people not that they need to reorient themselves to align their morality and theology with God’s, but that what they’re doing is perfect and that they don’t need to change. This is obviously the work of the devil.
Q. Is Bethel a cult?
A. Yeah, it totally is. They’ve taught their followers to ignore reason and follow their leaders to the point of ignoring what Scripture says, because they feel the need to “go beyond Scripture.” They’ve ceased to be Christian, and it’s clear they’re just manipulating young people for the pursuit of power and money.

I felt the need to write this because of Bethel church’s growing popularity and the people around me who are seriously considering joining their school of “supernatural ministry” in Redding. The school, sometimes called the “Christian Hogwarts,” is an unaccredited, work-intensive program focused on “revival” (not Christ) and educating young Christians to effectively become modern-day prophets, mystics, and raisers-of-the-dead through a series of manipulatively cult-like practices and unhistorical and illogical biblical interpretation taught by people with sketchy scandal-wrought histories.

Bethel Teaches That All Christians Can and Should Receive Prophecies Directly From God and Perform Miracles

At the heart of Bethel’s theology is the belief that all Christians are able to partner with God to perform miracles, including receiving revelation directly from God, asking for and receiving prophecies, and even raising dead people back to life (Source 1). This is a belief gleaned from a fundamental misunderstanding of what Jesus taught His apostles near the end of His life on earth. I think all Protestants miss out on this bit of what Jesus taught here, but Bethel takes it to an extreme unheard of before.

They claim that since Jesus told the apostles that “whoever believes in me will do greater works than these” (Jn 14) once He left to go to Heaven, that this applies to all Christians. The thing is, Jesus specifically only invited the Twelve to the Last Supper, where He taught this. The other verses Bethel cites, John 17; 20:21–23, curiously, also feature Jesus alone with the apostles. In fact, every spot where Jesus tells His followers that authority has been given to Him, and thus He is giving it to them, or when He tells them they can forgive sins or whatever, it’s only Him with the Twelve. But Jesus had many more followers. It’s almost like Jesus was specifically anointing the apostles for a special mission. Catholics believe this points toward the priesthood (along with the foot-washing, a Jewish way of anointing someone a priest, and the sacrificial language used in commandments to “do this in remembrance of me,” etc). But even if you reject that, I think most Christians can realize that it is highly unlikely that Jesus was actually teaching that all Christians are capable of performing miracles in His name on a daily basis, yet no Christians were aware of this until this so-called “revival.”

This brings up the same problem that forced me to convert to Catholicism: If God really was teaching Protestantism (or in this case Revivalism), but the Church misunderstood until a ‘reformation’ that corrected its theology, then what are we to believe about Christ’s promises to us that the Church would not prevailed against by Hell? What about His promise to lead the Church into “all truth” (Jn 16:13)? Did Christ lie about that? If Revivalism is true, and the central focus of Christianity is not Jesus Himself, the Eucharist, one’s own salvation or the salvation of others, but rather “the encounter with God’s supernatural power through miracles that we owe every person” then Christ lied, effectively allowing billions of Christians to believe things which He did not intend for us. This is what it means to be prevailed against by Satan. Jesus promised this would not happen, yet Revivalism requires it. Bill Johnson may not have a problem believing in a god who allows that, but the God of Christianity could not in His perfect nature allow such a thing. The god that Bethel worships is one that is Himself focused on “revivals,” is supposedly content with providing all Christians mystical and supernatural abilities that have no basis in Scripture, and all but ignores Christ and His message.

The real-life implications of these dangerous teachings have already been taken to their extremes in situations such as the cliff incident of 2008 (Source 2). Jason Carlsen and friends were hanging out near a cliff, and he fell off. Instead of calling 911, or even attempting to help, his friends 1) assumed he had died, and 2) began to pray in hopes their BSSM training had equipped them with the ability to raise him from the dead. After eventually being saved by an actual search and rescue team, he accounted that he could hear the friends debating for hours whether they should call someone or not, after their prayers of resurrection yielded no results. This school is teachings young people by the thousands that they have the ability to do this and much more.

Lead pastor Bill Johnson has said that healings such as the disappearance of brain tumors happen “all the time” yet he feels no need provide any sort of documentation or concrete evidence for them (Source 2). Apparently, angel feathers and gold dust fall from the sky at their worship meetings often, as well as their home. They also claim to see “the glory cloud,” or something similar, which shows that God’s Presence is with them at their services, supposedly. You can see videos of this online, and it’s altogether nothing short of ridiculous. What they call church seems nothing like it to anyone whos been to a real church before. It’s a room full of people screaming at the top of their lungs and laughing and having fun, involving likely no sacrifice or death-to-self in order to recognize something greater than themselves whatsoever. At least they sing worship songs to God, but who knows what their intent in that action is when their main goal is to have encounters and perform and see miracles. The “cloud” itself is basically just dust being poured from the rafters of the building.

Even the Catholic Church, which claims miraculous healings and actually attempts to outrule them using science until they find it unexplainable by science, has only documented 70 healings from the shrine at Lourdes, for example, where some believe The Virgin Mary appeared to St. Bernadette in 1858 to deliver a message from God. Bethel seems to claim healings are happening on a daily basis. They would have to to combat the obvious flaw in Bethel’s business plan — and make no mistake, that’s what this whole thing is — the glaring contradiction in the belief that miracles are to be performed by lay-Christians at will, yet the lack of evidence that this occurs at all. As one ex-student explained, “what I see now is, those [the prophecies given directly from God] are random thoughts. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, your prophecies are horrible misses. But you don’t remember them being a terrible flop — you remember the one time it worked… the focus was on testimonies of success. No one talked about the times they had failed (Source 2). Maybe, had they been taught the actual Bible, they’d realize that 1) Jesus was the prophet of all prophets, the one that all others pointed toward, and there is no evidence that we are all expected to be prophets, and 2) the Bible teaches that the way to tell if someone is a true prophet or not is to see if their prophecies come true (Deut 18:20–22).

A Fundamental Misunderstanding of What the Bible is and Who God is

Lead pastor Bill Johnson apparently doesn’t realize that the Bible was not written in English, but Greek and Hebrew. He attempts to provide biblical exegesis based on the english words the translation he uses provides him with. This translation, by the way, is often the Passion Translation, a ridiculous excuse for a Bible that was translated solely by Brian Simmons. That’s right, it was translated by one guy. Johnson claims this translation is “one of the greatest things to happen with Bible translation in my lifetime.” Andrew G. Shead concluded in his review of this translation that “Simmons abandons ‘all interest in textual accuracy, playing fast and loose with the original languages, and inserting so much new material into the text that it is at least 50% longer than the original. The result is a strongly sectarian translation that no longer counts as Scripture; by masquerading as a Bible it threatens to bind entire churches in thrall to a false god’” (Source 3). Anyone who even considers using a Bible translation that has 50% added material is a severely compromised Christian who has mortally misunderstood both the nature of biblical inspiration by God and the purpose of the Bible in the first place.

Back to Johnson’s interpretations: In his book, “The Supernatural Power of a Transformed Mind,” he argues that “renewing the mind begins with repentance… ‘re’ means to go back. ‘Pent,’ is like the penthouse, the top floor of a building. Repent, then, means to go back to God’s perspective on reality. (pg 44). This means nothing. He literally just made that up and it has nothing to do with the Bible. The Scriptures of the Bible were written in Greek and Hebrew, and the word used for repent is metanoia, transliterated. It means to change one’s mind, according to Strong’s concordance, a reliable and trusted biblical concordance which Johnson neglected to consult before interpreting Scripture willy-nilly with no reason behind it. He also says that the word “desire” is made up of “de” and “sire,” “de” meaning “of” and “sire” meaning “father.” So, he argues, desire is by nature, “of the Father,” and God “wants to be impacted by what you think and dream.”

First off, “desire” comes from the Latin word “desiderare,” not “de” and “sire,” and secondly, again, this means nothing. Nothing he’s saying here means anything. If he had any basic understanding of philosophy or theology, which he claims to be teaching at his school, he’d understand that God cannot be “impacted” by us. He is unchanging and is perfect in all ways, as He has been since before time itself was created. He is totally “actualized” and has no “potential” to be filled in with any impact we provide Him. In fact, we can “provide” Him nothing. He has everything. Everything that exists besides Him is because His love is self-giving. Nobody can give Him anything He doesn’t already have.

It’s unfortunate — I’ve read descriptions of Bill and he seems to be a very prayerful person. But as Rick Warren said in “The Purpose Driven Life,” worship [and theology along with it] must not only be sincere, but also true. If it’s not true, then it’s just sincerely wrong, which doesn’t get you very far. In Bethel’s case, their sincere love of false doctrine has landed them in a place that’s supportive of witchcraft, New Age subjectivism, and delusional theology. Bill may be “more committed to revival than anyone” but that doesn’t mean much when “revival” is antithetical to real Christianity. Charles Spurgeon, with whom I disagree on many things, turned out to be very helpful in the writing of this piece — he said to “be assured, there is nothing new in theology except that which is false.” This he taught in agreement with Catholicism and rational Christians of all denominations, because it is rooted in the fact that the Early Christian Church, led by the apostles and their direct disciples, practiced the most pure form of the Christian religion. Throughout the time since Christ, so much has been written about theology. Any idea that cannot be explicitly found in Scripture or expounded upon by trustworthy Christians who had a connection to the tradition of The Twelve Apostles must be looked upon with great suspicion as creations of man. Revivalism is certainly one of these ideas.

Johnson’s interpretations and “biblical insights” are posted in infographics on Bethel’s site. One particularly ridiculous one says that “You can’t have peace that passes understanding until you give up your right to understand.” So, like Martin Luther, Johnson believes that reason is antithetical to faith. This makes sense when you read one of their core values, that the Christian life is characterized by a willingness to take risks. This is how these kids get sucked into doctrines that result in them believing that they can raise people from the dead and receive revelation from God at their will, and teach others to do so.

“If it’s risky and strange and charismatic, it must be from God and that means you’re doing your “revivalism” better. Don’t worry about logic. Don’t worry about physical reality and what the world is actually like and what the Bible actually teaches. Give up your reason and we’ll tell you what to think.” This is what this church is teaching.

God’s Will to Heal

They also teach that it is “always God’s will” to heal people’s ailments. This of course, is clearly not the truth, since billions of Christians pray for healing daily and do not receive it. Apart from the vast character-building and appreciation for life gained from daily sufferings, the Bible teaches that suffering is not only necessary but is the path to salvation for us. As St. Paul teaches, we are children of God through adoption, “and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if only we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom. 8:17). In the next few verses, Paul goes on to explain several things: 1) that suffering is to be expected, and he shows no sign of any expectation that God will relieve us of all of it; 2) that we pray our best when we are suffering, because the Holy Spirit Himself intercedes for us; and 3) that we await our salvation from pain and suffering until we die, because hope counts for nothing if we receive what we hope for immediately. Hope for something we are not guaranteed immediate satisfaction of is real hope. In short, the Bible teaches nowhere this matter-of-fact Bethel teaching that “it is always God’s will to heal our ailments.” This is not a lesson of Christianity, but of a New Age religionless, subjective spirituality which is unbiblical.

Oh, and Bill Johnson, the main pastor and founder of Bethel, wears prescription glasses and has required a hernia surgery within recent years. Yet he teaches definitively that God uses every single Christian to perform miracles and that all it takes to heal people are prayers. Yes, prayers help, but an over-emphasis on signs and an ignorance of what signs point to (Jesus) is all too similar to how the Jews often misunderstood Jesus in the gospels, and results in a me-focused Christianity, not a Jesus-focused one. This is not the purpose of prayer — to get what we want from God (Bethel also teaches that God is “for us,” as if He was bored waiting around for all of eternity before He made us) — but it is rather to conform our will to the will of God, which the Bible teaches may contain some suffering at times. If you want to avoid suffering, go become a Buddhist or something, because avoidance of suffering is antithetical to Christianity.

The church also teaches the “Encounter Gospel,” which claims that people cannot believe in God unless we perform supernatural miracles for them, and this eliminates the need for them to repent for their sins. This is nonsense.

Beni Johnson

Bill’s wife, Beni, also preaches and teaches at BSSM. She holds some particularly unorthodox and unreasonable views regarding angels and death. She has posted pictures of herself lying on graves of Christians such as C.S. Lewis, hoping to absorb some sort of spiritual energy from him. This is called “grave-soaking,” and Bethel has helped make this practice widespread, and though they have denied supporting this, Beni has been pictured participating and Bill has taught that the concept behind it — transferring spiritual energy from one to another — is legitimate. This of course, has no biblical basis whatsoever, like many of their teachings that don’t coincide with Catholic or Protestant Christianity. Bill Johnson and Kris Vallotton have admitted that they want the “mantle” of William Branham. This means that they want to somehow steal the “anointing” or spiritual energy that his dead body still has. This man was a bonafide cult leader, by the way, who taught that Eve had sex with the serpent to give birth to Cain, so all women were inferior to men because they carried the literal seed of the devil. He also didn’t believe in the Trinity. Johnson and Vallotton are big fans for whatever reason.

Back to Beni: her teachings on angels are just as absurd. She teaches that there are several kinds of angels. This is true. But she goes further to claim that there are angels that are messengers, some that are fiery, some that are healers, and some that have “fallen asleep,” or “gotten bored and are waiting to be woken up and put to work (Source 3). In a story relayed on a blog post, she recounts a student who had an encounter with God and an angel: she claims

“God said to her, “I want you to go to Moriah Chapel and say ‘wakey wakey.’” She thought, “You want me to do what?! I’m sorry God, but I’m not doing that!” Then He said to her again, “I want you to go to Moriah Chapel and say ‘wakey wakey.’” At that point, she knew that if she didn’t do it, she would regret it for the rest of her life. The next day when she got to the chapel, there were a lot of people outside. She said normally the chapel was empty. She asked God why there were so many people there and He said to her, “Because I had to tell you twice.” She stood outside of the chapel and whispered “wakey wakey” because she did not want anyone to hear her. God then said to her, “Is that how much you want revival in Wales?” She then… yelled at the top of her lungs, “WAKEY WAKEY”!… she felt the ground begin to shake and heard this huge yawn. She looked back at the chapel, and a huge angel stepped out. All she could see were his feet because he was that large. She asked him who he was, and he turned to her and said, “I am the angel from the 1904 revival and you just woke me up.” She asked him, “Why have you been asleep?” The angel answered and said, “Because no one has been calling out for revival anymore.” She then asked him if he was the angel that was going to bring the next revival. He told her no because the next revival would bring in many more souls for the Kingdom (Source 4).

At this point, it should be becoming clear that their curriculum and theology are not Bible based, or even reality-based, but Bethel-based. They’ve established a set of beliefs which are divorced from the 2000+ year belief system Christians have held since Christ taught the apostles and they ordained and taught others to carry on that specific set of beliefs. What they perceive and teach to be the central tenets of Christianity, which I’m not even sure is what they call themselves (they’re probably more likely to call themselves revivalists), are things which were not even part of the religion at all until recent times. In short, they’ve created a whole new religion and are living in a world different from average people, a world in which God communicates with humans directly and more often than He ever did in Scripture. They have made a new dialect of Christian language, calling themselves “revivalists” and purporting that God and His angels are more focused on “revivals” than anything else, and calling the Church “The Kingdom.” Kris Vallotton, a lead pastor, posted on Facebook just today a picture of a thunderstorm that raged in Redding today. He asked his followers “what prophetic declaration does this inspire in you?” What does this even mean? Are pictures of thunderstorms supposed to activate direct revelation from God? It’s like the leaders of this church are living in an alternate reality where the things they say make sense. At least the Kingdom part comes from the Bible, but it’s still strange when they don’t give context and just say that like its a vocabulary word all Christians should be acquainted with. Just a bit too culty for me. This can barely be called Christianity anymore. At best, it’s a mix of Christianity, New Age spirituality, and witchcraft, at times — which brings us to our next problem, and it’s a big one.

Bethel’s Prophecies Approve of Witchcraft

One story in particular about the school and their practice of prophesying shocked me. Annika Mongan, a self-proclaimed ex-Christian turned witch, visited Bethel for a prophecy. She joined in a regular prophesying meeting, whatever that could possibly be like, and began having “prophetic words” spoken over her. What’s surprising is that they were somehow actually pretty accurate, and they were not vague at all. Of course, they weren’t predicting the future, which is what prophesying actually means, but instead recounting things about Annika’s life that had happened previously. Sort of like a horoscope but more specific. The “prophet” talked to Annika about how she had moved through several “faith communities” and how though she had never felt like any of them was a home, the one she had recently found was one she could stick with — that is, her coven. Apparently, God was telling this prophet that He approved of Annika’s witch community and was impressed with her writing for “Witches and Pagans (Source 5). Now the only possible explanations for this are 1) that this is all made up, 2) that the “prophet” had previously been given information about Annika, or 3) that this involves real knowledge being given to humans by some sort of presence that approves of witchcraft. We know that can’t be God.

I must admit, the “prophecy” of one prophet doesn’t speak for the whole institution, but it does show the biblical ignorance of the students at this school and the potential demonic influence at work there. Regardless of whether witchcraft really does anything, this is at best an example of a rogue student trying to use what they’ve learned, and failing miserably because approval of witchcraft is certainly not of God. At worst, this is church-sanctioned approval of witchcraft and demonic practices. The whole school is likely compromised based on this incident and all the other crazy stuff going on here. The things they are doing are not biblical, and are not anything that any Christian has done before. “Grave soaking,” and the like are new practices which are just that — new. They have nothing to do with Christianity and are in fact contradictory with clear biblical teaching.

There are so many things terribly wrong with this organization, from the $400 thumb drive to the $100 exorcism puppets they sell to their students (probably to pay for Bill Johnson’s freaking Aston Martin), but the worst thing of all is that these people are stealing money and time from people who are searching for the truth in Jesus and leaving them with a paradigm of life that is only useful if your goal is to end up in a mental hospital. The people of Redding have spoken. They are tired of living in a town where everyone’s a mystic who believes they have actual conversations with God and angels and can perform miracles, all on a daily basis. This is not Christianity, and it’s not even reality. This place is bad news.

Sources