It’s a strange kind of grief—not the grief of surprise, but the grief of confirmation. The kind where you’ve been standing on the train tracks for years, waving both arms, shouting that the light in the distance isn’t the sunrise, it’s a locomotive—and then one day you hear the impact and everybody else finally looks up.

We’ve been writing about Bethel Church for years. Not because it was trendy or because it drove clicks. But because what comes out of that pulpit and that ministry machine has been a theological landfill fire for a long time—blasphemy dressed like revival, heresy sprayed with glitter, heterodoxy running around in skinny jeans calling itself “presence.”

We documented the “apostles and prophets” cosplay—grown men claiming functional authority on par with New Testament offices that laid the foundation of the Church once for all. We covered the manufactured prophetic culture where vague impressions and Instagram research get baptized as “the Lord showed me.”

We called out the “signs and wonders” theater—the shaking, the falling, the so‑called glory clouds that looked suspiciously like arts‑and‑crafts fallout from the HVAC system. We wrote about grave‑soaking—yes, people lying on the graves of dead preachers to “absorb anointing,” a practice that would make pagan necromancers blush.

We exposed the prosperity gospel humming under the surface—speak it, decree it, seed it, name it, frame it—as if God were a cosmic vending machine and faith the correct coin combination. We dealt with the anthropological heresy that says people are basically good, just waiting to discover their destiny, instead of dead in trespasses and sins. We pointed out the anti‑intellectual swagger that treats careful exegesis like a lack of faith, as though the Holy Spirit suffers from stage fright around Greek verbs.

We addressed the worship pipeline—Bethel Music floating downstream into churches everywhere, lyrics soaked in experience‑chasing mysticism, merely a theological Trojan horse with a reverb pedal. We warned about the culture of manifestations that look more like altered states than sanctified minds.

We showed how Scripture gets bent, twisted, and “reimagined,” including leaders suggesting Jesus Himself treated the Old Testament like a grab bag of inspirational slogans rather than divine revelation with authorial intent. And worst of all, one of Bethel’s pastors even claimed that Jesus appeared to him and asked HIM for forgiveness.

Get that, Jesus asked a Bethel pastor for forgiveness.
Right.

And for years, most people shrugged. “They love Jesus.” “You’re just nitpicking.” “Don’t touch the Lord’s anointed.” The machine kept droning. Conferences packed. Albums charting. Instagram prophets prophesying over coffee mugs and airport terminals. And Bethel’s music played in nearly every evangelical church around the world.

Then comes the Shawn Bolz scandal.

Bolz, we’ve also covered over the years, at The Dissenter and compared his “prophecies” to the art of cold reading.

For readers who haven’t tracked it—Bolz, a high‑profile “prophetic” blowhard long associated with the Bethel ecosystem, has been publicly accused of fabricating prophetic words by harvesting personal information ahead of time and presenting it as supernatural revelation.

On top of that are allegations of longstanding moral misconduct and manipulative behavior behind the scenes. The picture painted is not of a flawed brother who stumbled, but of a system where “prophetic ministry” blurred into performance, and performance blurred into deception.

The real earthquake wasn’t just what Bolz allegedly did. It was that leaders at Bethel, including Bill Johnson and Kris Vallotton, acknowledged they knew serious issues existed and failed to communicate clearly, publicly, and promptly. Silence. Internal handling. No broad warning to the thousands who saw this man as a mouthpiece for God. Only after outside pressure and public exposure did the apologies roll out—the corporate version of “we should’ve said something sooner.”

And suddenly, people who wouldn’t listen to years of doctrinal critique are wide‑eyed. Now it’s serious. Now it’s a problem. Not when God is misrepresented. Not when Scripture is twisted. Not when people are trained to chase experiences over truth. No—when sexual misconduct and public scandal hit the stage, that’s when the spell breaks.

It’s a shame it took sin of this kind to decapitate the credibility of a movement that was already theologically bankrupt. Blasphemy should have been enough. Heresy should have been enough. Teaching people they can function like little gods, that prophets walk among us with fresh revelation, that weird manifestations equal holiness—that should have been enough to send people running.

But this is where we are. The theological rot was tolerated. The spectacle was excused. The glitter was called glory. And it takes a scandal you can’t explain away with “don’t be religious” to make people finally ask, “Wait… is this whole thing off?”

Yeah. It’s been off. For a long time.