Rick Joyner thinks predator pastor Mike Bickle should be restored

Even though there is overwhelming evidence Bickle is a sexual predator, Joyner had the audacity to say he should get another shot at ministry.

Mike Bickle (screenshot via YouTube)

It has been amply established that this country needs to have a long conversation about how it responds to sexual assault. It has also been amply established that significant elements of the church are a major part of the problem. All too often, sexual assault in the church has been swept under the rug for reasons that should outrage any fair-minded American. Some victims are told that coming forward with accusations could risk destroying a ministry that is still doing good word. Others are told that it could prevent people from hearing about Jesus. This obscene and degrading list goes on and on.

Well, add another entry to the list. One of the titans of the charismatic/Pentecostal world believes that one of his fellow charismatic titans should be restored to ministry even though he has been exposed as a serial sexual predator.

In case you missed it, Mike Bickle, founder of the International House of Prayer (IHOPKC), collapsed with dramatic speed in the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Two months earlier, his executive board forced him to stand down from all public ministry pending investigation of allegations that he sexually abused a number of his adherents.

Any chance of Bickle returning from that sabbatical all but evaporated in the space of three weeks after Thanksgiving. First, on Nov. 30, a former IHOPKC intern, “Jane Doe,” told Julie Roys that Bickle used a bogus prophecy to manipulate and sexually assault her. Then, on Dec. 7, Roys reported that Bickle had made a breathtaking confession to frequent IHOPKC speaker Bob Bohi—he’d engaged in “bad judgments and bad mistakes” with one of his accusers. Bohi later said that while Bickle didn’t confess to sexual misconduct, he had “disqualified himself” as a minister and didn’t have any business being in any sort of ministry until he “made (things) right.”

On Dec. 12, while this was still percolating, Bickle released a statement confessing to “inappropriate behavior” 20 years earlier, but denied the “more intense sexual activities” at the center of the allegations. When led the lawyer for the accusers, Boz Tchvidjian—best known for his yeoman’s work advocating for victims of emotional and sexual abuse in evangelical circles—read this statement, he immediately called BS. Tchividjian wondered if Bickle had unwittingly confessed to “less intense sexual activities.”

The shit really hit the fan on Dec. 21, when one of Bickle’s former colleagues, Stephen Magnuson, warned IHOPKC and its newly-minted spokesman, Eric Volz—best known for being wrongfully accused of sexually assaulting his former girlfriend—that more revelations about Bickle were due to come. This sent IHOPKC into full-blown panic. Forerunner Church, a Kansas City church with close ties to IHOPKC, issued a statement warning that Magnuson was about to “release details of extremely sensitive, private information about members of our community” unless IHOPKC’s leadership came clean. Less than 24 hours later, IHOPKC, through Volz, announced that Bickle was out altogether. Watch here.

Volz stated that IHOPKC effort to “diffuse the situation” had unearthed solid proof that Bickle had indeed engaged in “inappropriate behavior.” While Volz didn’t go into specifics, he revealed that Bickle’s behavior was of a nature that required IHOPKC to “immediately, formally, and permanently” cut all ties with him.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. On Feb. 7, The Kansas City Star published an interview with Tammy Woods, who claimed Bickle groomed and sexually abused her in the 1980s when she was 14 and Bickle was on staff at a St. Louis-area church. She hadn’t intended to speak up, but felt compelled to come forward when it became apparent that she wasn’t Bickle’s only victim.

Any right-thinking person would conclude that this would be enough to prove that Bickle was manifestly unfit for ministry. But apparently Rick Joyner isn’t of that mind. He made that much clear on March 3, when he was the guest speaker at The Gathering in Moravian Falls, North Carolina. He actually had the audacity to claim that Bickle deserved a second chance. Watch a clip here (sorry, it won’t embed).

I first saw this clip roll across my Twitter feed on Sunday afternoon while tending to my mother at the hospital. It was I could do to keep from screaming, “You evil sonofabitch!” I’m sorry, but there is no other way to describe someone who believes someone who engaged in Bickle’s depravities has any business in ministry.

When I got home that night, I actually had to hear that clip to believe it—and it was even worse than I first thought. After relating how he’d encountered a young Bickle at a conference, Joyner casually claimed that Bickle had endured some “troubles.” Quoting Galatians 6:1, Joyner said that he believed in “restoring people,” and believed that we would be “seeing and hearing” from Bickle again.

Most of my longtime friends and readers know that I’ve seen a lot of outrageous and depraved behavior from people purporting to be men and women of God in my time. But this video made me physically ill. Indeed, I can think of only one case of a pastor acting nearly as depraved. That would be when John MacArthur found it acceptable to publicly shame a domestic violence survivor for not taking her abusive jerk of a husband back. It was the first time that watching outrageous conduct from a pastor actually made me want to vomit. I thought it would take some effort to top that. Well, Joyner’s ignorant—at best—defense of Bickle managed to do that, and then some.

Many of you know that I don’t think much of Joyner. He is one of the leading lights in the New Apostolic Reformation, an overtly fascist offshoot of the religious right that believes it can bring about the Second Coming by taking over the “seven mountains,” or forces, that influence our society. His mask has fallen off on more than one occasion. For instance, in 2012, he laughed—yes, LAUGHED—about the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy, saying it was God’s way of punishing the Northeast for allowing marriage equality. In the same video, he expressed the frankly delusional line that Obama would help the NAR in its quest to take over the world. By 2013, when it became apparent Obama wasn’t willing to play along, he declared that the only chance of bringing change to this country was a military coup.

It initially appeared that Joyner had finally bottomed out when he joined in the religious right’s campaign to make the nation bow down to The Messiah, Lord Donald Trump, The Most Merciful. And he did so even when it was plainly obvious that Trump was a bully, a boor, and a gangster. He warned his followers that the devil himself was behind the opposition to Trump, and explained that those who persisted in their opposition risk getting “smacked” by God himself. He openly called for martial law to derail any attempt to impeach Trump.

But if possible, Joyner’s willingness to make us bow and pray to the orange god he helped made looks minor league compared to his willingness to defend Bickle. Joyner is defending a man betrayed the trust of his adherents in a despicable way—and, based on the published record, crossed the line into criminal conduct. We shouldn’t be talking about restoring Bickle. We should be asking why he isn’t being criminally investigated if he isn’t already. To put it in the most diplomatic terms I can use, anyone who believes Bickle should be restored can eff right off. All the way off.

I wondered how any pastor with an iota of decency could have allowed Joyner to continue. Well, it turns out that The Gathering is part of Joyner’s MorningStar Fellowship of Ministries—meaning that Joyner is the spiritual father to The Gathering’s pastor, David White. Put yourself in the shoes of a sexual assault survivor who attends that church. You’re thinking of coming forward, only to hear your pastor’s spiritual father claim that a serial sexual predator and pedophile is only enduring “troubles” and ought to be restored to ministry. And what if those who watched Joyner’s sermon around the world and may have gone through a similar ordeal of sexual assault? If you’re wondering why victims of sexual assault don’t come forward for years if they do so at all, here’s your answer.

I was particularly unnerved when I considered a lot of people were watching this who attended Joyner’s church, MorningStar Fellowship Church in Fort Mill, South Carolina—located in what was once the Heritage USA complex. That church is big enough that it’s a near-mathematical certainty a survivor of sexual assault who attends that church was dissuaded from coming forward. I am literally at a loss for words to describe just how damned obscene this is.

The closest thing I’ve seen to responses from Joyner show a lot about his character—or rather, lack thereof. On March 4, he shared a “word from the Lord” about a coming recession and the impending implosion of the “woke agenda,” particularly the end of the battle over pronouns. The following day, he shared another “word” about how God was building the church out of “living stones—people.”

Really, Rick? You clutch your pearls about wokeness after defending a guy who engaged in something more depraved than wokeness ever was or will be. And then you extol how the church is built by people after you essentially threw some of those people under the bus? This, friends, is what an empty shell looks like.

When this story first broke, I braced myself to hear a lot of claptrap along the lines of what Joyner spewed. After all, one of the first people to speak up was Bickle’s longtime friend, Steve Strang, who claimed that it was one helluva coincidence that the accusers came forward after Hamas attacked Israel. I initially feared that we would be seeing a repeat of what happened in 2015 when Josh Duggar’s depravities came to light. A lot of people wailed that the Duggars were a good Christian family being attacked by those evil, God-hating libruls.

But it turns out that Joyner is an outlier—and a massive one at that. As the Bickle saga played out, I noticed that some of the very people whom I expected to be defending Bickle were kicking him up, down, sideways, and in every direction in between. For instance, in late January, Johnny Enlow took to social media to condemn Bickle for “us(ing) his sacred and honored position…for his own purposes” and engaging in behavior that was “so very wrong on a scary level.” On Feb. 6, soon afterWoods came forward, Lou Engle publicly echoed calls from IHOPKC survivors for an independent third-party investigation and called for Bickle to make “a full confession of all that is hidden.” Moreover, when Joyner posted his March 4 “word” on Twitter, he was slammed up and down by a lot of people whose profiles suggested they had MAGA hats glued to their heads.

I would suspect that more people would be calling out Joyner if they considered that he is downplaying Bickle’s depravities while operating a Christian school. Specifically, the Comenius School for Creative Leadership, located next door to MorningStar’s headquarters. I don’t think I need to tell you why a guy defending a sexual predator, especially one who groomed and assaulted a minor, is the last person who should be anywhere near a private school of any shade. Indeed, it makes his March 4 word even more outrageous. He wails about “wokeness” when he defends a guy who engaged in conduct more depraved than all the things the religious right has smeared drag queens, critical race theory, and gender identity combined. I live just 10 minutes north of MorningStar, and I can say unequivocally that you can’t buy cojones that big anywhere in the Charlotte area.

This isn’t the first time that Joyner has shown a dangerous blind spot about sexual assault. For many years, Joyner platformed fellow prophet Bob Jones—no relation to the founder of Bob Jones University. Jones was laughing alongside Joyner about the damage Sandy wrought on the Northeast. However, in 1991, Jones was on the ministerial staff of Metro Vineyard Fellowship in Kansas City when two women revealed he’d used his “prophetic anointing” to get them to disrobe in front of him in his office. Metro Vineyard’s leadership held Jones responsible for the incident and briefly suspended him, but never reported it to the police.

Jones was ultimately allowed back into ministry, and remained active almost until his death in 2014. Anyone who believes a guy who engaged in such depraved conduct deserved to be “restored” to ministry has a severely warped moral compass. Oh, and the cherry on top? Metro Vineyard’s pastor at the time of the 1991 incident was one Michael Leroy Bickle. He led what was then Kansas City Fellowship into the Vineyard in 1991, but pulled out in 1996 when it became apparent the Vineyard didn’t share his views on prophecy.

It turns out that Jones first gave Bickle the word for what became IHOPKC, as shown in the first part of a retrospective on IHOPKC’s 20-year anniversary. Watch here.

Jones figures very prominently in this video, even though Bickle had known exactly who Jones was for some time. That fact is proof not just beyond reasonable doubt, but ALL doubt, that IHOPKC was planted in contaminated ground. Said contamination spread to Joyner when he had no qualms about promoting Jones. His willingness to defend not just one, but two perverts masquerading as men of God leads me to question whether he has any moral compass at all.

It also explains why Joyner, Bickle, and the nation’s other so-called moral guardians prostrated themselves before Trump. They were willing to support him, even enable him, even after he reveled in degrading women. They did so after a long line of women came forward to say he’d sexually assaulted them. But none of that mattered to Joyner, Bickle and their religious right compatriots. All that mattered was that Trump was making the right clucking noises on social issues. When you’re willing to excuse Trump behaving in a way that would never be tolerated from anyone else, it’s not too big of a leap to turn a blind eye to criminal conduct—as Joyner did with Bickle.

Joyner’s willingness to defend Trump when it was evident that he was a boor, a bully and a criminal was enough by itself to raise questions about his fitness for ministry. His willingness to defend Bickle even though is clear that he is a sexual predator would be enough by itself to raise questions about his fitness for ministry—especially so considering that he runs a Christian school. Both together? If Joyner has even an iota of decency, the only thing we need to hear from him is an apology to Bickle’s victims—and an announcement that he is standing down from all ministry while he can at least appear to be doing so decently.