The abuses of Bethel Church in Redding California have been well documented in my, and many other ministries. Led by Bill Johnson, Bethel is a cesspool of false teachings and heresies unmatched in the world. The embrace nearly all of the mainstream heresies such as prosperity, word faith and the NAR. The also delve into more niche heresies such as divine healing, grave sucking and dead raising. They have manipulated their sheep with all sorts of absurd false signs and lying wonders from gem stones to angel feathers to glory clouds. The operate a school of the stupidnatural, where they charge you thousands of dollars to pretend to teach you how to manifest the gifts of the spirit, despite the bible saying only God can apportion them out. Their number two in charge is the Jedi level huckster, Kris Vallotton. He fleeces hundreds of thousands of dollars at a time with bogus prophecy schools and conferences while creating ridiculous things to train people on like "solutionaries." The guy that flies under the radar however is the Bethel resident false prophet, Shawn Bolz. We have widely reported on Bolz, who's shtick is faking words of knowledge by culling social media and then pretending that God is giving him the information. Keep in mind that as I have explained before, there are always victims from false teachings and prophecies. Many people have their faith shipwrecked because of them. Many blame God for not delivering on their lies. Many never return to church, and mistakenly believe they are saved when they never were. I say all of this as the backdrop to the above reporting from Protestia, who has exposed an actual direct victim of the Shawn Bolz, faked word of knowledge grift. Let us reason once more beloved.
Prominent charismatic "prophet" Shawn Bolz is accused of using personal information derived from Facebook to put a woman in harm's way by "prophesying" that she marry a man who tried to kill her. Bolz is the poster child for false prophecies, a man whose prophetic predictions have proven less accurate than a drunken meteorologist. He falsely prophesied about the end of COVID-19 back on February 28, 2020, before there were any deaths in the United States and only 2800 deaths worldwide, saying: Within a short amount of time, the extreme threat will feel as though it is in the distant past." The Lord showed me the end of the coronavirus. The tide is turning now! He is answering the prayers and cries of the nations and is putting an end in sight".Even now, several vaccines are coming out, as well as a natural dying out of the virus itself. The Lord is saying, 'I am removing the threat of this.'
I think this might be an insult to drunken meteorologists. At least they are not pretending to speak for God. Let us pause here for a second on this point. Prophecy is claiming God has directly spoken to you, in order that you might speak to someone else on His behalf. It is claiming to speak on behalf of He who created the entire universe. That is a pretty big deal, which is why the guidelines the Lord laid out were very simple. If what is prophesied comes true - good prophet. If it does not come true, just one time, they are a false prophet who can be completely discounted. There are no oopsies. There are no backsies. There are no moving the goalposts and pretending you just didn't realize the time frame involved, as all the false 2020 Trump prophets are trying to do now. God does not stutter. He is not secretly trying to be obtuse. Just consider the sheer lunacy of this COVID prophecy. Shawn Bolz claimed that God showed him that the coronavirus was ending. That the tide was turning at 28,000 deaths. He claims God said, I am removing the threat of this. Then seven million more people died. How many died unnecessarily because they believed God had spoken through Shawn Bolz? This is the point that people from Rodney Howard Browne to Shawn Bolz to even John MacArthur never stopped to consider. How many people did they feed into the COVID woodchipper by not listening to experts and instead thinking they could defy science, the law and even God? Protestia continues:
Bolz has also long been accused of using social media to derive information about people that he's going to prophesy over, where he searches a church's Facebook page for events he will be speaking at, finds people connected to the church who say they are attending, and reads up about them. Later, at the event, he'll seek them out in the crowd and regurgitate details that he's learned about them as if they are words from God. It is a sick, sick practice, to the point that even arch-heretic Benny Hinn has called out Bolz for doing this: My son-in-law Michael (Michael Koulianos, founder of Jesus Image Church) was telling about some guy that came to some big meeting and they found out later he was actually searching people's material and names and information and acted like it was prophesying and it was not. And that guy prophesied from its own spirit- it says so in the bible. What does it mean? It means they are not true prophets. They find out information like that guy who was searching people's information and making it sound like he knew it all, giving details that were not, and are not biblical. He told a guy about a phone call he had, you remember, that same gentleman pointed at a section and said 'there's a guy named so-and-so over here and you were talking to so-and-so on the phone and you said so in a such-and-such thing'. And the whole crowd went, 'oh my god hallelujah,' and he was prophesying out of his own heart. It's not in the word, it's not in the bible, I'm sorry."
This strategy is not new. Fraudster Peter Popoff used to have details from submitted prayer cards radioed into him as he was preaching to make it appear as if God was giving him words of knowledge. In this age of advanced social media, Bolz just took that to the next level. He even brazenly used his smart phone to read these details to his victims, not caring about the appearance. Protestia is right that this is just a sick and depraved practice. How sick are you when Benny Hinn calls you out? Now Benny was obviously not a prophet either, but Bolz deceitfulness is otherworldly. Hinn of course is subtly whitewashing at the same time he is pretending to condemn it. Shawn Bolz was not prophesying at all! Forget out of his own heart. He was LYING about God speaking to him. That is the point! Now, let us see how this practice can directly harm someone:
Recently, a woman named Jubilee, who was part of Bethel Church's School of Supernatural Ministry, recounted her experiences with Bolz. She reveals that she was dating a man with a couple of red flags that was a decade older than her, but at a church meeting her boyfriend was attending, Bolz prophesied that he was hearing from Jesus, asking the boyfriend: "I saw fifty, but I know that fifty is a Jubilee year. There's something about God's giving you a Jubilee. What does that mean to you? Oh! Your girlfriend's name is Jubilee? That's awesome! Well, God's giving you this girl." Bolz then pulls out the name of a nearby cafe with delicious food he's eaten at while there and asks if she has anything to do with it, and the boyfriend says that she works there. Later, the boyfriend/ husband reposted this video and captioned it on his Facebook page.
Jubilee notes that all this information was readily available on her Facebook page, but at the time, she didn't know this was how he knew so much about them. She explains that her belief that Bolz was a true prophet who was hearing from God about their future and marriage, based on these prophetic words, overode her instincts and quieted her doubts about marrying this man, pointing to the fact that she was told that God wanted them to be together. Seeing it as a sign from God, she got engaged at the age of 20 after dating for only two months.
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