We’ve mentioned Bethel Church of Redding, California a few times around here. It’s the kooky-for-Jesus-Puffs evangelical group focused on spiritual gifts like magic healing and prophecy. They’ve landed in some real hot water recently because of their silence regarding one of their endorsed (but false) prophets, Shawn Bolz. And they deserve a lot more hot water, too. Today, let me show you this scandal—and we’ll explore the utter dealbreakers it reveals about evangelicalism.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 1/30/2026. They’re both available now! STATEMENT: All of my statements regarding Shawn Bolz being a sexual predator are my own opinions based on the information I’ve personally seen. They are allegations until a court of law or a confession confirms them. From introduction: My July post mentioning Shawn Bolz’ claim about ChatGPT validating speaking in tongues.)
SITUATION REPORT: Bethel, Shawn Bolz, and *gestures vaguely at everything*
Shawn Bolz is a false prophet, generic dipshitted evangelical hypocrite, and alleged sexual predator. He hasn’t ever worked directly for Bethel Church, but he definitely wouldn’t have had a career in ministry without their diligent efforts on his behalf.
On January 17, 2026, Mike Winger uploaded a nearly six-hour-long expose of Shawn Bolz and the church that allowed him to prey upon others and lie his ass off for years.
It’s a devastating video, to say the least. It covers Bethel’s creation of Shawn Bolz as a golden-child prophet in the 2000s, his faking of prophecies by hot-reading victims (meaning he got his information about them through their very own social media posts), his sexual predation of the men around him, and Bethel’s years-long silence regarding it all.
Some of it was new news, but the hot-reading came out a year ago. Bethel had to write a not-pology for that one. So did Shawn Bolz.
Once forced to say something about the new scandal, Bethel’s leaders finally released a second not-pology on January 25. In it, they totally pinky-promised to do better.
Today, I’ll show you an introduction to this story and a brief overview of how Shawn Bolz came to power—and successfully scammed Charismatic evangelicals for years despite being incompetent at his own game.
Background about Bethel and its leader, Bill Johnson
First, let me give you a brief background of Bethel Church and its history.
Bethel Church is a nondenominational megachurch based out of Redding, California. That’s about a 2.5-hour-long drive north from Sacramento. They run the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry, which sounds exactly like a fundie Hogwarts Academy. For about $5k, its classes teach students to do magic healing, prophecy, and other such flashy miracles.
We’ve talked about both the church and its senior pastor, Bill Johnson, a few times around here. Bethel hired him and his wife Beni in 1996. He’s thick as thieves with the Toronto Blessing movement in the 90s. He attended events led by John Wimber, who also led the Vineyard movement and was heavily involved in the Toronto Blessing. (His name pops up 117 times in this excellent timeline of it.)
There’s a lot more I could say here, but I’ll settle with this: Every single aspect of modern evangelicalism that is rotted, sick, and broken seems to associate with or link back to Bethel Church and Bill Johnson. His influence cannot be overestimated.
Building a power base with Bethel’s help
And Bill Johnson knows how to use that influence, too. To say the least, Johnson’s endorsements print money for his pals. He has a habit of lavishing praise upon particular favorites, like Randy Clark (the guy whose preaching kicked off the entire Toronto Blessing). Here’s a video of some of that praise, too:
So when he began talking up Shawn Bolz in 2016, it skyrocketed him into the evangelical stratosphere.
But way before that fateful event, Bolz was building a name for himself, as a 2024 interview with Premier Christianity reveals. Born in 1974, he grew up in an intensely religious, Charismatic evangelical home. His parents attended John Wimber’s Vineyard church from its very start. However, little Shawn headed into the arts in high school, especially musical theater.
At 16, Bolz attended a religious camp. There, a famous sportsball player (involved with Promise Keepers no less) prayed over him and predicted he’d totally become an evangelist and prophet. In the 90s and after high school, which I will generously assume resulted in his graduation, he joined the “International House of Prayer” in Kansas City (IHOPKC), led by Mike Bickle.
Around 2006-2007, Bolz planted his first church, Expression58 in Los Angeles. Naturally, he focused on recruiting people involved in the entertainment industry.
Toward the end of 2013, he gleefully wrote about the church’s restructuring and his own growing visibility in the Charismatic end of evangelicalism. Through Expression58, Bolz sponsored anti-trafficking meetings, evangelist group Youth With a Mission (YWAM), and more.
But something else was happening in the greater world around him and his church: Social media was starting to become a major part of people’s lives. That seismic cultural shift definitely included Charismatic evangelicals. And it would make his later grifting operation a lot easier!
The moment Bill Johnson of Bethel Church launched Shawn Bolz’ career
In 2016, Bill Johnson personally introduced Shawn Bolz onstage at a big conference in California, Azusa Now. (PreserveTube archive, in case.)
Of course, Johnson had likely known about Bolz for a while by then. Bolz had popped up sharing stages with other rising stars of the Charismatic movement like Todd Bentley (yes, the similar faker who kneed or front-kicked someone with stomach cancer in the stomach on stage at a revival event in 2008—and Bolz’ appearance with Bentley also took place in 2008). (Bill Johnson liked Bentley too, and had lavished him with praise and platforms plenty of times.) At a famous 2019 event called “The Send,” Bolz even got to rub shoulders with grandmaster grifter Benny Hinn!
So in terms of the Charismatic crony network, Bolz was extremely well-connected. (“Crony network” is my name for a professional clique whose members do favors for each other and protect each other—at least till it’s a disastrous PR move.)
As a result of Shawn Bolz’ careful forging of connections within his crony network, he got that 2016 Azusa Now speaking gig. Sure, it might have been short. But it signaled new beginnings for him. He hadn’t just shared a stage with Bill Johnson. He’d gotten Johnson’s personal seal of approval.
Fast Forward: Rumblings of fakery and worse
This scandal didn’t emerge overnight. It began cooking long before 2016. And even after Johnson’s powerful endorsement in 2016, Christians soon began calling him out for hot reading. (One example: A 2017 Atheology post over at Patheos.) YouTube commenters also had this guy’s number by then.
But Bethel did nothing about Shawn Bolz until 2019. And even when they kinda did, they kept it secret and handled everything internally—and it concerned something entirely different from his hot reading scam.
Instead, the internal kerfuffle concerned sexual abuse and harassment. According to Bethel leaders’ recent statement, they received these allegations in 2019 from someone who’d worked for Bolz. Three other ex-employees of his corroborated the accuser’s story. Shortly after Bolz insisted he was innocent, “some European church leaders” provided evidence of Bolz’ hot reading.
In response, Bethel leaders made none of these allegations public and did not warn anyone at Bethel of the con artist and predator associated with the church. They just quietly distanced themselves from him in early 2020. In February 2025, Bethel leaders finally told the flocks about the hot reading and sex abuse allegations. This statement appears to have reached only the members of Bethel.
Then, of course, Mike Winger’s huge video dropped in January 2026, forcing Bethel to address the allegations in a far more public manner than they’d ever have liked.
Until 2026, the entire Charismatic crony network protected Shawn Bolz at the expense of the many people he scammed and preyed upon. We’ll talk more next time about that protection. For now, I just want to focus on the hot reading.
Shawn Bolz is embarrassingly bad at prophecy flimflam, but Bethel didn’t notice anything wrong
While he enjoyed Charismatic leaders’ protection, Shawn Bolz never refined his prophecy grift. But thanks to a key element of the Charismatic psyche, he never needed to! As Mike Winger points out in his documentary (at around the 30-minute mark),
The people at Bethel and in the Charismatic movement sometimes have been desensitized to discernment. Discernment is the one thing you don’t do, because discernment kills the momentum of our prophetic movement. Discernment kills our ability to have a revival culture. It’s because I think that the unique thing that Bethel and some of the other bigger Charismatic church movements, some of the things they offer . . . is like wow, that’s the place where the holy spirit’s moving!” [. . .]
[Charismatic pastors have] “smashed down the discernment of their audience, so that they’ve been trained to be very gullible and receptive – and undiscerning. Discernment needs to be brought back into the charismatic church. [Spoiler alert from Cas: It won’t be.]
Nowhere is that lack of discernment more visible than in Shawn Bolz’ many, many (scare quotes) “prophecy” videos. He is so, so, so incredibly clumsy and inept at what he’s doing. Of course he’s not issuing divine prophecies. It’s impossible to think so.
Rather, he’s obviously just regurgitating what he could glean from victims’ social media, friends, and other earthly sources.
How hot reading works
In Mike Winger’s expose documentary, Shawn Bolz finds a victim around 27 minutes in:
Michell, so I saw Michelle and I saw a friend of mine from Singapore, Lim, is that somebody? Michelle Lim, does that make sense to anybody? [Audience woman says yes, barely audible in clip.] Are you Michelle Lim? [She says yes.] That’s good, you’re here, thank you Jesus, praise the Lord!
Do you have a September birthday, by chance? [Her response is louder because he’s walking over there. She says she does indeed.] Ahhh, that’s awesome!
Right after that, he offers an actual child a prophecy at a children’s evangelical event:
As we’re doing this, is there, um, I saw the name Judah and I saw Judges Road. Is there a Judah who lives on Judges Road or where you at? [He trails off, then brightens and leans back as if surprised when a boy in the audience responds.] Judah!
Here’s a clip of his process from around 2017 (and PreserveTube archive):
This conjob scam is called hot reading. The pleased smirk he gives after his mark responds is duper’s delight, which we’ve seen in many, many scammers over the years. It’s a little trickle of glee escaping him like steam escapes through a teakettle on the stove. He isn’t even telling his mark anything that wild or hard to guess, but he’s got some info that he knows is valid about her—and she doesn’t know he has it or how he got it.
The major difference between cold and hot reading, vis-à-vis “prophesying”
Cold reading involves observing cues that victims give off to make educated guesses about them. Almost all evangelicals use this technique during evangelism attempts without knowing what they’re doing. They’re taught that these cues, noticed subconsciously in almost all cases, are actually supernatural in nature.
But for hot reading, the con artist has obtained solid information about the victim that the victim doesn’t realize he has. Hot reading can be incredibly effective if victims aren’t aware of its existence—or if they’re indoctrinated to believe that sometimes, a guy just has info about them straight from Yahweh that nobody real could ever know, and gosh, that’s just how things do be sometimes.
It’s entirely possible for a Christian to cold read someone by accident and use a target’s cues during evangelism. When I was Christian, I did exactly this. I can 100% confirm that I did it innocently.
But it’s completely impossible for hot reading like Bolz does to be an accident. He’s pretending that very specific details about his marks are slowly coming to him through supernatural aether or something. This very pretense, as incompetent as it is, marks this as a scam, not an accident.
It’s over—at least for now—for Shawn Bolz
I think Bolz knows there’s no coming back from this accusation now that it’s so widely-spread and confirmed.
In early 2025, he got away with a hilariously weasel-worded statement on his official site about his hot reading. But when the truth reached much larger audiences who were far less willing to believe him in 2026, he DFE’d, which means heDELETED FUCKING EVERYTHING. Even his site, which was so very busy at the end of 2025, is empty now:
Same for his YouTube channel, which is just completely gone.
Too bad for him that I archived both of the videos in which he seriously claimed that Jesus liked to teleport him to various places. Weird how Jesus won’t cure pediatric cancer forever, but will help this guy travel instantaneously! Weird priorities for a god, huh?
The evangelical flaw that allows false prophets to flourish
Indeed, in the comments to the above YouTube link itself, Bolz’ target, Bre, shows up to insist repeatedly that some of the information he regurgitated at her couldn’t possibly have come from any earthly source. She just flat refuses to accept that divine information-sharing ain’t real, much less that anybody who has solid information about her had to have obtained it from somewhere real. She’s a great miniature case study in how Charismatic scammers get away with this act for years!
That’s exactly how Shawn Bolz could make so many cringey mistakes in his hot reading delivery, and sound so much like a “psychic medium” with his well-educated guesses. Because Charismatic evangelicals are trained not to use their own discernment, he could get away with being utterly incompetent at scammery and still successfully scam them for years.
This isn’t just a Charismatic flaw, though. The many, many liars-for-Jesus in right-wing Christianity could all tell us that in unison and three-part harmony. Right-wing Christians are indoctrinated to their bones and marrow to be extremely lenient (to the point of egregious willful ignorance) regarding what their so-called “prophets” peddle. All of the high-control Christian groups have their own versions of Shawn Bolz running around.
Next time, we’ll go over these statements more carefully. But for now, I wanted to show you how a con artist can run loose for years with his superiors’ full knowledge of what he’s doing and without them lifting a finger to stop him or warn anybody about him.
NEXT UP: Analyzing the 2026 statement of Bethel Church regarding their Shawn Bolz scandal. See you soon! <3
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