When a church’s sexual abuse is so pernicious the church should close

This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on February 11, 2025.

“The nation of Israel was born because Joseph went to prison,” former IHOPKC pastor Mike Bickle told the congregation in what would become his final sermon in October,2023. “He’s thrown in prison because of the betrayal of his brothers.” Then he concluded, “The nation of Israel was born in the context of a man responding right in a family betrayal that put him in prison for a while.”

IHOPKC is an abbreviation for International House of Prayer Kansas City, a charismatic church and prayer movement.

Mike Bickle

Just days later, accusations of sexual abuse were made public and Bickle had to step aside. While the pastor admitted to sexual misconduct, he claimed everything happened more than 20 years earlier and was consensual. But as I asked in the piece I wrote last January, “If he is guilty merely of consensual sex more than 20 years ago, why did he mention possibly going to prison?”

One year later, we are beginning to find out the answer to that question. According to the Independent Sexual Abuse Investigation organization Firefly, which released its report last week, Mike Bickle sexually abused at least 17 women, including minors.

“We have identified and interviewed 17 survivors who were either sexually abused or experienced sexually abusive misconduct, including sexual abuse, rape, clergy abuse and spiritual abuse, perpetrated by Bickle beginning to our knowledge in the mid-1970s,” Firefly reported. “These acts of abuse have had profound and lasting impacts on the lives of the victims, causing significant emotional, psychological and spiritual harm.”

But the problem goes beyond just Bickle. Firefly’s report says, “We have been able to identify and interview 32 survivors who were sexually abused or experienced sexually abusive misconduct during their time at IHOPKC.”

Many of the details in the report are difficult to read. If you might be particularly triggered by the details, this may not be the best article for you to read. But as Firefly demonstrates, the abuse was carried out or covered up by a variety of people in the church and fell into consistent patterns. Also, kids today are being abused by their pastors. But like Bickle, the pastors aren’t going to be caught for another 20 to 30 years. And when they do, they’ll say it happened “30 years ago” to belittle its seriousness. But to the kids who are experiencing the abuse today, that distance in time is no comfort.

So as infuriating and perhaps triggering as some of these stories are to consider, it’s important that we learn to recognize how these abusers operate as part of our effort to prevent it from happening in our own communities.

(Source: Mike Bickle official Facebook page)

Drawing them in with worship and prophecy

As we considered a year ago, Bickle named “young 18-year-old drummers, 16-year-old singers and violin players” as who he wanted to recruit for “the greatest worship movement ever in history.”

But his focus on worship ultimately had a prophetic angle. He claimed, “Jesus will give the fulness of his power to release justice only when night and day prayer comes forth from the earth.” Bickle specifically defined this justice as Israel converting to evangelicalism.

He offered these teenagers the opportunity to be paid full-time to sit in a chapel at IHOPKC and participate in a 24/7 worship movement aimed at creating what he said were the conditions necessary for Jesus to return. And he claimed to have four or five people who were willing to “give a billion dollars to the worship movement,” even mentioning the possibility of raising $100 billion.

But at the same time he was attracting teens through worship and prophecy, he was warning them not to listen to accusations that may come out, or else Israel might not be saved. According to Bickle, these supposedly false accusations would be “all about getting you guys all, the global body of Christ, out of sync so you’re not in place to be salvation for Israel.’”

Individual grooming

“Sexual grooming is a manipulative process where an abuser builds a relationship, trust and emotional connection with a victim to exploit and abuse them,” the report explains. “And it often involves a series of calculated steps to gain the victim’s trust and isolate them from others.”

Continue reading at Baptist News Global.