Jenn Johnson, a worship “pastor” at Bethel Church in Redding, California, and co-founder of Bethel Music, propagates an extreme form of charismaticism that deviates alarmingly from orthodox Biblical Christianity. Jenn Johnson is the lead pastor, Bill Johnson’s daughter-in-law. She is married to Brian Johnson, who is Bill Johnson’s son and also a worship pastor. Her approach to worship is tinged with mystical overtones and strays far from the biblical instructions about orderly and structured worship.
Johnson’s influence is all-encompassing, promoting aberrant theology and unbiblical practices, like grave sucking, that brazenly goes against biblical teaching while claiming ongoing prophetic revelation and signs-and-wonders style “miracles” that look more like parlor tricks than anything remotely Christian. Johnson and Bethel’s approach to worship and doctrine is a dangerous departure from Scripture’s clear boundaries and an exploitation of faith for emotional spectacle.
In a recent video, Jenn Johnson claims she had a vision of worship where she veers into the realm of spiritual fantasy. She describes worship as a tangible substance, which God absorbs and grows from, contradicting God’s unchanging nature as depicted in Scripture. Her outlandish notion of God possessing a “reflector mirror under His armpit” that reflects affirmations back to worshippers is, quite frankly, absurd.
Not only does this lack any biblical foundation but ludicrously anthropomorphizes the Divine in a trivializing manner. Moreover, it dangerously suggests that we can acquire God’s divine attributes simply through worship, thereby inflating human ego and diminishing the distinction between Creator and creature.
Her casual disregard for the absence of this vision in Scripture should serve as a red flag to discerning Christians. It’s a stark reminder to stay rooted in the timeless truth of Scripture and not be swayed by whimsical spiritual imaginings, however captivating they may seem. But what else would we expect from the cult of Bethel?
