An Open Letter to Bethel Redding...
When people focus on a few tiny verses in the Bible and ignore the rest we all suffer from it.
I am about to say highly unpleasant but true things so please distract yourself with this view of the beach during sunset at Brasilito, Costa Rica. It’s a little slice of heaven.
Every time I used to write about certain churches and theologies for my Patheos column No Longer Quivering I could count on one thing. Contact. How much contact there is depends on the church. The one I disliked writing about the most is a place I used to be affiliated with, Bethel Redding and Bill Johnson.
It’s not that I am not used to the usual assortment of true believers contacting me to tell me I’m so wrong that they think I’m doing the Watusi with Satan himself around a bubbling lava pool in Hades. I expect that. I usually do not even respond now, and move the most interesting ones to my website Jerks 4 Jesus.
Bethel Redding brings its own special set of problems. I would get two distinctly different sets of messages involving Bethel.
The first type of messages I got were from people who have never encountered Bethel and say I must be making up their Death Raising Team, healing theology and soul sucking practices. If you’re from standard Protestant theology what the theology of Bethel sounds like is science fiction. Badly cobbled together scifi!
Oh it was the second type that was the most problematic. The overwhelming flood of crap from Bethelites is why at January 1st of my final year writing for Patheos I turned off all messaging options for No Longer Quivering’s Facebook page. It’s why when someone does manage to message me still to this day if it’s someone I do not know the is shunted to the garbage chute. The sender would get a “Thank you for contacting me, but I am busy” type of automatic message in return.
What I found is that people tended to be a little extra nasty on NLQ FB messenger and my personal messenger, and reasonably normal in comments or emails. I tended to melt down when I have to spend hours each day dealing with five trillion messages. It’s just too time consuming. Hence the automatic messages now.
Towards the end I’d started to get a distinctly different set of messages involving Bethel. Emails in a reasonable and measured tone, clearly from people involved in the ministry, within the church management. Emails that read pretty much all the same.
One involved correcting me on saying that Bethel Music released the worship song “Come Out of That Grave” after the death of Olive Heiligenthal. Olive was the toddler daughter of on the worship leaders who tragically died, and the church tried unsuccessfully to resurrect that sweet baby with prayers and round the clock worship.
Yes, it’s true the song was released after her death. It turns out it was actually played at their prayer sessions to resurrect the child. Both of which I stated. The writers seemed to think I was implying that the church wrote the song at or after her death and released it just to exploit the death. I said it still did strike me as exploitative days after receiving that email. It still does. That’s just my personal opinion.
Every single time one of the local churches does that song during a worship service I cringe because I know the history behind the song. Bethel Redding has had a number of worship songs go on to achieve enormous success. I don’t get how great music can come from such toxic seeming places.
I didn’t answer that email, nor have I answered the chorus of similar ones insisting I was defaming the church in my last piece for Patheos by not bothering to interview them or ask their opinion, when I talked about their use of magical imagery, magical thinking about healing, about the worship services lead by one of their members without using any social distancing or masking during the early days of the pandemic. Sean Feucht took his traveling worship team antics nationwide in open defiance of Covid lockdowns. Feucht, and by extension Bethel Redding, bears some responsibility for jump-starting the toxic ideas in the outer reaches of Christian Nationalism that Covid was not dangerous. Yet here we are after the deaths of over one million U.S. citizens and residents. One million.
The church’s PR department did not seem to understand that No Longer Quivering, and by extension Patheos itself, is not a news organization so much as a host for opinion pieces by writers all over the faith spectrum.
A few days later I got one from my editor, passed on with a brief “FYI”. Same stuff, different day. It was from someone else at Bethel Redding’s public relations department, and it was just another futile a repetition of what I had been receiving and not answering:
First, again NLQ is an opinion column, and one cannot dictate what my opinion might be. I am guaranteed that right under the Constitution. My opinion has been formed by the many years I sat under the teachings of Bill Johnson and Bethel at my old home church, at conferences like Voice of the Apostles at Randy Clark’s church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The literal years put in at the Healing Rooms of Central Virginia futilely praying for serious situations. The years when I made my Mast Cell much worse by being pushed to give up all treatment and trust that I was healed. The words of knowledge that were anything but knowledgeable.
Ignore your symptoms or you’re giving the devil a foothold and all the glory, we were told.
I watched as people around me were likewise manipulated into avoiding medical care. Chloe, long dead now, who became convinced that yearly cancer screenings were not trusting God because of what she’d heard in conferences. Cheri, whose Parkinson’s is now so progressed she’s bedridden after putting her entire trust in being healed miraculously relying on what she’d been taught in conference. Pam, who stopped all conventional treatment for her breast cancer and died quickly in horrendous pain. Gary, encouraged to only pray for healing, now also dead of cancer, treatable prostrate cancer. Deborah, ending up in a coma because she refused to take the medications for her diabetes and claimed her healing. I could go on and on, naming so many more who either died or suffered the sad effects of stopping treatment for serious illnesses. So much suffering so needlessly compounded by that particular theology. This is the real life consequences of healing ministries who promote miraculous healings above all other options.
You know what we all had in common? We all went to a church that taught books by Bill Johnson like “The Supernatural Power of the Transformed Mind” and “When Heaven Invades Earth” We believed, we prayed, nothing happened. Just our church turned more insular and toxic.
But Bethel is hardly the only ones teaching these things that literally harm people. I hold other ministries and ministers responsible as well. This is a theology that harms people, creating a broad swath of devastation even in those who do not die. It’s a modern Evangelical version of Moloch. It has a body count!
Plus here’s the thing about the constant flow of missives towards me. It’s not like they have any real desire for the truth to be known. This is all simply publicity spin, they want only good press. Their only aim is to politely bully me into parroting the party line, which I find reprehensible and disgusting during that particularly early era of the Covid pandemic when no vaccine was available. The things that works were denigrated and dismissed.
Plus add in the fact that I am a woman. The constant attempts to ‘correct’ my opinions also seems likely to be from a place of white male privilege. I’m guessing they did not continually email the male writers at Pulpit and Pen that routinely write negative pieces about Bethel. Or the guys at SacBee and other local papers who have been covering the COVID denying conferences. This is just another case of trying to put a little woman in her place that they think God ordained for her.
By the continual sending of those emails they are exhibiting a level of control that is one of the warning signs of a high demand organization. It should be a huge red flag for anyone thinking about attending.
I am under no illusions about Bethel Redding, just like I am under zero obligation to answer toxic emails.