Mike Bickle is everything wrong with right-wing Christianity

An evangelical leader named Mike Bickle has been dealing with the consequences of his actions for perhaps the first time in his entire life. Throughout his career, he has escaped accountability by taking advantage of the serious flaws within evangelical culture. Today, we’ll examine those flaws—and see how they allowed a sex abuser to operate for literal decades without a single problem.

(This post first went live on Patreon on 4/15/2025. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now!)

SITUATION REPORT: Mike Bickle may finally be facing actual accountability for the first time in his entire career

Mike Bickle is a big-name evangelical leader. He’s been one for decades. He is perhaps best-known for his role in founding IHOPKC (International House of Prayers).

Also for decades, he’s been caught up in one abuse and sex scandal and rumor after another. This time, though, perhaps he’s finally gone just a touch too far even for his loyal followers.

On February 5th, Religion News ran an article about Mike Bickle. It concerns a third-party group’s investigation regarding his behavior and potential misuse of power over others. This investigation’s report and conclusions (local PDF archive) are beyond damning:

[T]his investigation concludes that BICKLE has committed spiritual, emotional, and sexual abuse within IHOPKC. BICKLE’S reported abuse was an ongoing course of action and patterned behavior starting as early as the 1970s based on victim accounts. Through the identified IHOPKC programs, BICKLE systematically groomed and developed inappropriate relationships with women in the congregation while using “Matthew 18 Meetings” to conceal, minimize, and silence victims of sexual abuse within the church.

IHOPKC had already cut ties with Mike Bickle back in 2023 over similar accusations, but this report really puts the whole situation into context:

According to this report, for decades Mike Bickle has been using his position as a big-name Christian leader to groom and sexually prey upon young women. At least some of his victims were underage. Thanks to a culture of idolizing leaders and IHOPKC’s utter lack of accountability for those leaders, he got away with this behavior for years. Every single time accountability whispered “is it time yet?” Bickle’s enablers screeched at it to shut up and go away.

I want to show you how this man got into leadership and kept it despite being an obvious public-relations nightmare for everyone involved in his groups’ leadership. At any one of the points we’ll discuss today, Bickle’s crony network could have found their courage and held him to account at last. But at every one of them, these cronies did nothing—thus allowing him to continue his predation upon young women.

Mike Bickle’s story is a stark reminder of why many are turning away from evangelical Christianity, even as a lifestyle choice, when so many of its leaders fail to uphold their own moral claims.

Everyone, meet Mike Bickle

Born in 1955 in Kansas City, Mike Bickle just might be one of the most well-connected evangelical leaders in right-wing Christianity. But he’s far, far less well-known outside of his little niche.

Mike Bickle first pinged my radar in 2020. I briefly covered him a long series of posts about the Toronto Blessing (TTB). TTB was an enormous evangelical event that began in 1994 in Toronto and continued for years in various places around the world. However, it—like Mike Bickle himself—largely didn’t ping outsiders’ radar either. It was almost entirely unknown outside the Christ-o-sphere.

Mike Bickle seems to pop up a lot when we talk about big movements and important events within that end of Christianity. He wasn’t directly involved in TTB, but he’s definitely one of the people who helped birth the whole thing. Theologically speaking, he’s a product of the “Latter Rain” revival movement from the 1940s-1950s, as well as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR)—though he didn’t formally associate with it.

That said, his main claim to fame is starting IHOPKC. They used to just call themselves “IHOP,” but they ran into legal trouble starting in 2008 with the restaurant chain that also goes by that abbreviation. Though I don’t know for sure why he called his group “IHOP,” I suspect he thought it’d be a playful allusion. At any rate, the name change was finalized in 2010.

But he’s also the kind of dysfunctional authoritarian who gravitates to Low Christian, high-control flavors of his religion because those flavors are where the easiest prey can be found.

And for decades, other Christian leaders have enabled him and repeatedly allowed him (back) into positions of enormous power within that end of Christianity.

The first fork in the road: Mike Bickle and the Kansas City Fellowship

As a college student in the early 1970s, Mike Bickle became a born-again Christian. At the time, leadership-minded evangelical men could work their way into powerful positions through the equivalent of “sweat equity.” Bickle did this by leading Bible studies and small groups.

That’s how, in 1978 at age 23, he became a pastor for the first time at Memorial Christian Church in St. Louis, after leading Bible studies as a student. His church was a small but enthusiastic part of the “charismatic renewal movement.” That meant they got into very Low Christian practices like speaking in tongues, magic healing, and prophecy.

In 1982, though, Mike Bickle left St. Louis to start Kansas City Fellowship (KCF). It ran along similar doctrinal and devotional lines as Memorial Christian Church had. KCF grew incredibly quickly.

As it did, Mike Bickle got familiar with other like-minded Christian leaders, particularly Bob Jones—not the Bob Jones with the university or his son; this is another dude by the same name (officially, Robert Vernon “Bob” Jones, 1930-2014) who was locally famous around Kansas City for his prophecies. These guys collectively became known as the Kansas City Prophets—and I’ll let you guess why.

In 1990, another pastor, Ernest Gruen, released a detailed and absolutely damning report about all the problems he’d noticed at KCF. This report was a bombshell. It reflected very poorly on both Mike Bickle and his leadership.

In response, Mike Bickle submitted himself to the authority of John Wimber. Wimber had helped to start the “Vineyard Movement” of churches. As part of that show of submission, KCF formally joined Wimber’s Vineyard movement. Wimber renamed KCF to “Metro Vineyard Fellowship” and fired Bob Jones for sexual misconduct. But he kept Mike Bickle as its senior pastor.

This was the first fork in the road for Mike Bickle. Wimber should not have allowed Bickle to stay in leadership after such a damning exposure of hypocrisy. Wimber’s presence lent Bickle way too much legitimacy at a critical time in his career. And his congregation should have turned their backs on him.

The second fork in the road: Mike Bickle, Metro Christian Fellowship, and IHOPKC

Mike Bickle’s not the kind of guy who stays submitted to others for long. In 1996, he left Vineyard.

At the time, he cited disagreements over TTB, a revival movement that broke out in 1994. Vineyard embraced this movement, but he didn’t. I still think this is a weird disagreement, considering just how instrumental Mike Bickle’s charismatic practices and beliefs were to that movement. And I don’t think TTB would have happened without the growing popularity of the Kansas City Prophets and those associated ideas. In fact, Randy Clark—the preacher whose preaching actually started TTB—was closely associated with the Vineyard and the general culture of the Kansas City Prophets (see: p. 15 of the timeline).

Around 1995, Mike Bickle even co-authored an essay that aligned with TTB. You can learn more about it starting on p. 21 of this critical essay (you can find the report itself here). I can see why Bickle was upset: That essayist automatically assumed Bickle was on board with TTB because he was a Vineyard-affiliated pastor and endorsed behaviors similar to those seen in TTB. However, Bickle actually felt critical of the excesses he perceived in TTB devotions.

Ironically, Mike Bickle wrote in his essay about the importance of “submit[ting] to those in authority for the sake of peace and unity.” But he rejected the Vineyard leaders’ authority.

As part of his leaving Vineyard, Mike Bickle renamed the church—yes, again—to Metro Christian Fellowship. With that, they went non-denominational again.

But in 1999, he craved new lands to conquer. So that year, he started IHOPKC.

This is the second fork in the road for Mike Bickle. His rebellion against John Wimber and the Vineyard Church movement is a serious black mark against him—and a red flag indicating his authoritarian hunger for unfettered power. NOBODY should have given this guy the time of day after he left Vineyard. His congregation should have recognized the danger of having a leader who proudly operated without oversight. But they didn’t.

The third fork in the road: Mike Bickle and IHOPKC, Part I

So far, I haven’t talked much about Mike Bickle’s prophecies or his intense Endtimes focus, but both were very important to him. In almost every career move he’s made, he’s claimed to have been given the assignment by Jesus through prophecy.

IHOPKC was no different. Matthew Taylor, a scholar who studies far-right religious movements, tells us that the Kansas City Prophets inspired him to found the group. His idea for it was that it would feature 24/7/365 intercessory prayer. (Intercessory prayer is when a Christian asks Jesus to help someone.) Mike Bickle believed that all this prayer would finally get Jesus up off his lazy ass to spark a worldwide revival.

IHOPKC-affiliated churches focused on the 24/7/365 prayer model Mike Bickle wanted, as well as teaching his doctrinal and theological views. These churches tended to be intensely charismatic with equally-charismatic leaders with a very tight rein on their followers.

I could probably point to any number of weird authoritarian things going on in IHOPKC between 1999 and 2023. But this might be one of the more definitive signs of Bickle’s unsuitability for leadership:

In 2004-2005, Paul Cain, another Kansas City Prophet, was publicly exposed for sexual misconduct and alcoholism. In many ways, Cain was like a “spiritual father” to Bickle and helped to shape Bickle’s Christian worldview. Cain admitted to the allegations and submitted himself to the care of a pastoral restoration committee that included Bickle. Rick Joyner, another committee member (and a name that keeps cropping up around these abusers’ so-called restorations), returned Cain to ministry in 2007 with Bickle’s full support.

This was the third publicly-known fork in the road for Mike Bickle. He obviously treasured Cain’s leadership skills over his breaking of serious evangelical rules. Any group that allows its leaders to openly break rules is breaking a lot more in private. It is not safe for its members. His congregation should have begun asking questions about why their top leader was okay with such hypocrisy in the leadership ranks below him. But they didn’t. Various essays came out to expose their extremely authoritarian culture, like this 2011 essay criticizing their political stances and this story from 2014 about a murder committed by a low-level IHOP leader. Mike Bickle’s flocks could easily dismiss these stories as demonic attacks. Alas, almost none of them dared to question their Dear Leader.

The hidden zeroth fork in the road: Mike Bickle himself

While all of this was going on, Mike Bickle enjoyed a very secret private life as a sexual predator. Various young women had been accusing him of sexual predation since the 1990s. For all that time, IHOPKC somehow kept them quiet.

But in October 2023, his house of cards came crashing down. That’s when some former IHOPKC leaders came together to formally inform IHOPKC’s current leaders of these accusations. I suspect Mike Bickle had a feeling this was coming: Just six days earlier, he’d preached about how awful false allegations are. IHOPKC leaped to action by suspending him from ministerial duties.

The leaders of IHOPKC also conducted an internal investigation, which they published on their site in November 2023. The investigation concluded there was ‘insufficient evidence’ to substantiate the allegations at the time, as the accusers remained anonymous. IHOPKC also speculated about potentially-unfriendly motivations of the former IHOPKC leaders who had brought the claims forward. Most of all, IHOPKC didn’t want to have an external third party do any investigating because it’d be totally “premature,” especially without the women involved coming forward publicly.

(I’m screaming right now in Purity Culture. Those women were likely silent for years for a very good reason. Their tribe tends to blame the victims of sexual assault rather than the assaulters—especially assaulters in leadership.)

I’m sure their report went over like a lead balloon, because it is gonegonegone from IHOPKC’s website now. You can find it on the Wayback Machine here (and this local archive, just in case). By December, they’d hired a crisis manager—and Mike Bickle released a public statement of his own (local PDF archive). In it, he naturally framed his decades of sex abuse as “past sins” and “past failures.”

Also naturally, he offered up two defenses. First, these “sins” had occurred a long time ago. And second, Jesus had totally already forgiven him for everything.

Unimpressed, IHOPKC severed all ties with him a week or so after he made that statement.

This was the zeroth fork in the road for Mike Bickle. Nobody but his enablers could have stopped him here. And none of them did. Nobody abuses that many people for that long in that tight-knit a group without someone noticing. Witnesses also repeatedly reported seeing Mike Bickle behaving inappropriately. So given the large number and the scale of all of these allegations, I personally find it hard to believe that his closest associates were unaware of what he was doing. But none of them said a word. The defenses he offered in his statement had worked for many abusers for many decades. And they worked for him again.

Accountability looms on the horizon for Mike Bickle with IHOPKC Part II

The next February, the Kansas City Star published the story of a woman who claimed Mike Bickle had begun sexually abusing her when she was only 14 years old. At the time, he was pastoring that first church in St. Louis! Even that early in his career, he was already using his power to abuse women.

His victim that time thought the two of them had resolved the situation. But eventually, she learned that he’d repeated his grooming routine on at least one other young woman. The “parallels” with the other victim “took [her] breath away.” I hope nobody’s surprised.

The next year, February 2025, a more independent examination of the sex abuse allegations came out (local PDF archive). It was conducted by a third-party group often referred to as Firefly, though the official name isn’t widely confirmed. It discovered 17 victims making allegations of spiritual abuse, sexual misconduct, grooming, and rape.

And this month, another of Mike Bickle’s accusers shared her story with the Roys Report on its podcast.

Things look pretty bad for Mike Bickle, don’t they? But he’s only standing at the latest fork in his road.

The current fork in the road: Mike Bickle and more pastoral restoration

Christian Post, a very evangelical, very dysfunctionally authoritarian website, thinks there is “a biblical path” for him to return to ministry.

And Firefly itself has given this path their blessing. In March 2025, they released a “Recommendations” report for IHOPKC (and local archive). It follows the usual bullshit song-and-dance pony show of pastoral restoration with lots of telling Jesus he’s sorry, pretending to care what Rick Joyner et al think, promising never to do it again, and making mouth-noises about accountability with no substance behind them. Its writers do say that they think Mike Bickle should never, ever, ever again hold any formal/paid position of leadership within Christianity. However, they leave the door open for him to return to informal, unpaid leadership.

Even Christian Post doesn’t seem enthusiastic about the idea of an informal, unpaid leadership position for Mike Bickle, noting in one March 2025 article:

The independent investigation of Bickle and IHOPKC published last month, paints the embattled founder of the 24-hour prayer ministry as a predator who used his influence, gifts, money, and position as a spiritual leader to bend young and vulnerable women to his will.

As they hint in that post, Mike Bickle’s behavior is a regular pattern for him. Jesus hasn’t done a thing to change those patterns, either.

But his followers are what matter here. If they decide they want him back, then nobody else can stop him from coming back to formal leadership. And their track record so far has been uninspiring. On his official Facebook page, his official statement from 2023 (screenshot) has about a thousand “care” and “love” upvotes.

Now Christians stand at another fork in the road. Will they support Mike Bickle’s inevitable comeback attempt? Or will they tell him he brings nothing to the table that could possibly outweigh his sexual abuse of so many women for so many years?

I wish I weren’t as familiar with evangelicals as I am, because I’m already bracing for his triumphant return to ministry. But that’s a tale for next time.

NEXT UP: Why dysfunctional authoritarian Christianity can’t exist without abuse scandals. See you next time!

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