Mike Bickle is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with evangelicalism

The founder of the International House of Prayer is facing a long-overdue reckoning. But what took so long?

Mike Bickle (screenshot via YouTube)

Earlier this month, one of the most prominent forces in the evangelical world was rocked to its very core. Three former top leaders in the International House of Prayer (IHOPKC), best known for running 24-7 prayer meetings in Kansas City since 1999, dropped an open letter accusing founder Mike Bickle of sexually assaulting a number of IHOPKC adherents.

According to former IHOPKC executive leadership members Dwayne Roberts and Brian Kim and former student affairs leader Wes Martin, there was “credible and long-standing” evidence going back “several decades” that Bickle had engaged in sexual misconduct. When they tried to confront Bickle about one accuser, he blew them off, forcing them to go to IHOPKC’s executive leadership team.

By Their Fruit, a site run by former IHOPKC members, obtained video of a staff meeting held at Forerunner Church, a church with ties to IHOPKC. Watch here.

When Forerunner pastor Isaac Bennett said that he and his colleagues “really care(d) about all those that are affected by this news,” some of those in attendance hit the ceiling. One of them—later identified as former IHOPKC senior leader Dean Briggs—said that they weren’t getting “an acceptable level of transparency,” but “well-intended, self-righteous bullshit.” A woman on hand responded, “I second that!”

Most of you know that I spent the first six months of my adult life in an abusive, NAR-aligned campus ministry. That ministry operated out of a church that, as it turned out, had once been the Carolina chapter of Maranatha Campus Ministries, one of the more notorious “campus cults” of the 1970s and 1980s. Based on my experience in that chamber of horrors, and my research into this outfit, I know that calling BS on leadership with others around, rather than behind closed doors, does not happen—ever. The fact that Briggs was willing to call out his former colleagues in public, rather than do so privately, and that another person shared his sentiment, is, as they say, a BFD.

The mood changed 24 hours later at Forerunner’s Sunday service. IHOPKC executive director Stuart Greaves told parishoners that Bickle indeed stood accused of “sexual immorality.” Greaves added that the leadership team had been told of the allegations that Thursday. At that time, as if he had a choice in the matter, Bickle had agreed to stand down from all public ministry and stay off social media pending investigation. Watch here.

Steve Strang of Charisma magazine, a longtime friend of Bickle, claims that at least two of the accusers have said nothing happened. If that’s true, then why was Bickle forced to stand down? I could be very wrong, but IHOPKC’s leadership wouldn’t have taken the step of forcing Bickle to take a sabbatical if it didn’t at least have reason to believe that there’s a there there.

When I saw this, I found myself wondering what took so long. After all, by all rights, Bickle should have been done, finished, kaput as early as 2011, and certainly by 2016. Where do those dates come from, you ask? Well, in 2011, Bruce Wilson of Talk2Action unearthed some very unnerving and very anti-Semitic clips from sermons Bickle preached between 2004 and 2009. Wilson dropped this mashup not long after Bickle led a prayer rally that proved to be the unofficial launch of Rick Perry’s 2012 presidential campaign. Watch here.

Bickle argued that in the near future, Jews who refuse to move to Israel and accept Jesus as Savior will be chased down by “hunters” sent by God. These hunters will kill something like two-thirds of the Jews, with only one-third of them surviving to “become lovesick followers of Jesus.”

One of the worst of these excerpts comes near the tail end of the mashup, at around the 5:53 mark. At a 2004 “Israel Mandate” conference, Bickle claimed that all Jews would be given “grace” to accept Jesus–and if they didn’t respond to that grace, God would “raise up the hunters” to slaughter most of them. He then went as far as to say that Adolf Hitler was “the most famous hunter in recent history” because he drove many of the Jews to Palestine.

Fast forward to 2016, when Right Wing Watch reported that Bickle, a man who claims to be apolitical, endorsed Ted Cruz for president. The Right Wing Watch writeup noted that Cruz had just picked up the endorsement of a guy who claimed that gays were demonic and called Oprah Winfrey a precursor of the Antichrist. Almost as an aside, it noted something even more disturbing—the blatantly anti-Semitic statements unearthed by Wilson five years prior.

So Bickle was caught on tape claiming that Jews need to convert or perish not once, not twice, but several times—and did so in a way that he couldn’t possibly claim plausible deniability. And yet, he somehow remained standing. How is this possible? We’ve seen politicians on both sides of the aisle being forced to apologize in no time at all for saying things far, far less offensive than what Bickle spewed. Shouldn’t a man purporting to be a minister of Jesus Christ be held to a higher standard?

I’m reminded of how the religious right remained all in for Donald Trump even in the face of proof not just beyond reasonable doubt, but ALL doubt that he was a boor, a bully, a gangster, a reprobate. Time and again, we were told that we were voting for a president, not a pastor. And yet, in the absence of something I haven’t heard or seen, an actual pastor hasn’t faced any accountability despite being caught on tape making statements that are anti-Semitic by any standard.

The more I think about it, the fact that Bickle faced no accountability for his anti-Semitic comments may explain why it took so long for the allegations of sexual assault to come to light. A ministry that condones its leaders making such hateful comments can hardly be expected to hold them to account for abusing the trust of their followers. Seen in this light, the accusers should count themselves very lucky that they found someone willing to listen to them. Indeed, I find myself wondering if this would have gone anywhere had people this close to Bickle not found them credible.

It makes me wonder—would Bickle have been cut down to size if someone close to him had spoken up about those anti-Semitic comments unearthed by Wilson? That I even have to ask that question is proof that IHOPKC is not a healthy ministry—and that God may be moving there in spite of Bickle, not because of him or through him.

Anti-Semitism is wrong, period. And sexual assault is wrong, period. If we even have to wonder if a minister will face accountability for these egregious wrongs because of who speaks up, something is fundamentally wrong. Any way you slice it, the fact that Bickle is facing a reckoning now when he should have been facing a reckoning far sooner is proof that he embodies evangelicalism in its most unacceptable form.