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Mainstream coverage of Bickle scandal at International House of Prayer is sparse -- at best

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Mainstream coverage of Bickle scandal at International House of Prayer is sparse -- at best

The announcements have a dreary familiarity to them.

The name of a major Christian leader is blasted in the headline. In the text below are phrases like “sexual abuse;” “investigation,” “scandal,” “unwanted touching,” “sexual misconduct” and “disgraced megachurch pastor.” (For instance, type in the words “Australian church” into Google and the word “scandal” automatically pops up (no doubt due to the many searches involving the Sydney-based Hillsong Church).  

Which is why the recent news about Mike Bickle, the founder of the International House of Prayer (IHOP) in Kansas City, received next to no attention outside of Christian circles. Which is a shame; Mike Bickle is a major figure in the Pentecostal/charismatic movement and the fact that his church’s 24-hour prayer rooms have lasted nearly 25 years is a major feat.

Bickle is also known as a major teacher in the movement on the end times (aka eschatology), intimacy with God, worship, prayer, prophecy and more.  He’s a man who claims encounters with the Archangel Michael and insight as to how the world will end.

I first heard him at a 1990 charismatic conference in Indianapolis and was impressed. When other speakers were exceeding their time limits and boring the wits out of everyone, Bickle stuck to his and enthralled everyone with his clear, concise delivery. Agree with him or not, you didn’t fall asleep listening to him.

I next saw Bickle in 2001, when I visited Kansas City as part of a series I was working on for the Washington Times. Whereas the charismatic renewal was on life support elsewhere in the country, it was fresh and vibrant at IHOP. Bickel told me they were “an oasis in the desert” in terms of the use of the prophetic “gifts” of the Holy Spirit.

And in 2013, while living in Tennessee, I drove to a conference at IHOP, which had grown tremendously over the intervening 12 years. The 24-hour prayer room was a much more sophisticated set-up in a separate building; as for Bickle, I only saw him from a distance.

There’s been little-to-no secular media coverage about this scandal (I’ll get to Kansas City media in a minute), so I’ll start with what Christianity Today published:


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Can nonprofits or government policies shrink local 'news deserts' across America?

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Can nonprofits or government policies shrink local 'news deserts' across America?

This Memo is about the news biz, not our special corner of it — the religion-news biz.

Here’s the theme: America’s alarming decline of journalists and journalistic outlets from coast to coast endangers a functioning democracy at a time of political polarization, and lack of trust in central institutions that includes a low point in public regard for the news media.

One major aspect of this dire situation is dramatized in the November 15 release of the fifth report by the State of Local News Project, commendably operated by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism with support from key media foundations.

“Many news organizations are hanging on by a thread,” this report says.

Much can be said about the failings of the old mainstream media, or of this or that news organization, or of a particular story — and should be said. Solid criticism is fair game.

But something very fundamental to the republic is occurring in the 21st Century.

Washington politics will always get lots of coverage, and likewise for national-level treatment of other subjects that newspaper executives value, such as business, entertainment and sports. The crisis comes with information at the state and local level. The Medill report, focused on local rather than state-level journalism problems, documents the following geography of “news deserts” where coverage is iffy or even non-existent.

Out of the nation’s 3,144 counties, 1,562 have only one surviving source for local news in any format, whether print, digital or broadcast, usually a weekly newspaper. Of these counties, 228 are on Medill’s Watch List, signifying “high risk” that the one existing outlet will die.

Then there are 204 counties without a single local journalistic shop.


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Americans who never attend worship services are a bit of a political puzzle these days

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Americans who never attend worship services are a bit of a political puzzle these days

I was thinking a bit today about the idea of subgroup composition in the world of politics and religion.

For example, evangelicals could be the same share of the population today as they were in the early 1980s, but that doesn’t mean that the composition of the group hasn’t changed significantly during the previous four decades. In fact, it would be pretty shocking if the racial composition of evangelicals hadn’t shifted and the average educational attainment hadn’t climbed, given the overall macro-level movement in American society.

That got me thinking quite a bit about a specific group — those who never attend religious services.

In 2008, according to the Cooperative Election Study, about 20% of all respondents reported that they never attended religious services. By 2022, that share had risen to 34%. A fourteen point jump is a whole lot of folks, by the way. In fact, in real numbers that’s over 45 million Americans.

But the composition of never attenders has also changed as that group has grown so much larger. What I really wanted to do is help readers better conceptualize this group — especially when it comes to politics.

One of my hobby horses recently has been trying to convince people that they need to stop thinking about Republicans as incredibly religiously active and Democrats are the ones who have nothing to do with religion. The Republican coalition is looking less and less religious every year and this is going to have big impacts in the elections to come.

Let’s start broad — with the share of each party identification that never attended religious services between 2008 and 2022.

In 2008, Independents were the most likely to be never attenders — bet you wouldn’t have guessed that.

Twenty-eight percent of them checked the “never” box, which was four points higher than Democrats. There were very few Republicans who were never attenders back when Barack Obama faced off against John McCain for the White House — just 10%.


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When you 'Wish' upon a sermon: Is there a religion ghost in the latest Disney flop?

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When you 'Wish' upon a sermon: Is there a religion ghost in the latest Disney flop?

Anyone who has been paying attention to the pop-culture marketplace during 2023 knows that even the most secular business analyst would be tempted to think that the Walt Disney Company has done something to provoke the wrath of whatever Supreme Being the Mouse lords are willing to acknowledge.

Marvel at this Inside the Magic headline, if you will: “Disney Chief Predicts Total Disaster for Studio Before End of Year.”

That’s a take that will awaken even the most woke studio boss.

This brings is the the latest Disney box-office flop — “Wish.” At the time I wrote this post, I could not even get any of the “Wish” links to work at the Rotten Tomatoes website — which is never a good sign. If you’re interested in the tomato-past details, see this story at Screen Rant: “7 Reasons Wish's Rotten Tomatoes Score Is So Divisive.”

Is there a “religion ghost” in this drama? Not if you read Variety. This latest Disney nightmare is simply another example of Disney+ being overextended and the American movie audience suffering from lingering COVID-19 fears. Here’s that headline: “Disney’s Bleak Box Office Streak: ‘Wish’ Is the Latest Crack in the Studio’s Once-Invincible Armor.”

Hold that “religion ghost” thought for a moment. Here is the stunning overture of the Variety piece, showing the wider context of the “Wish” crash:

“Wish” misfired in its opening weekend, extending Disney‘s bleak box office fortunes.

The animated musical fable, about the Wishing Star that so many Disney characters have wished upon over the studio’s century-long history, failed to become the de facto choice for families around Thanksgiving. “Wish” opened in third place with a dull $31.7 million over the five-day holiday, a far cry from Disney’s past Turkey Day feasts. Perhaps King Magnifico, the movie’s villain (voiced by Chris Pine), is holding hostage the wishes of Disney executives?

Instead of recapturing the studio’s magic, “Wish” joins a long list of its underperforming 2023 tentpoles, such as “The Marvels,” “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “The Haunted Mansion,” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.”


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What's the difference between 'Holidays' and the 'Christmas season'? Ask Amazon.com ...

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What's the difference between 'Holidays' and the 'Christmas season'? Ask Amazon.com ...

There was a time, long ago, when it was easy to pinpoint the beginning and end of the "Christmas season."

In cultures linked to centuries of Christian tradition, the feast of Christmas -- the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ or Christ Mass -- was on December 25, the start of a festive 12-day season that ended with the Feast of the Epiphany. Many Eastern Orthodox churches continue to use the ancient Julian calendar, celebrating Christmas on January 7.

Then there is the "Christmas season" for the whole culture. One big change occurred on December 26, 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt -- focusing on Christmas shopping -- signed a joint resolution of Congress defining Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in November. That established an official starting line for the dash to Christmas.

By the early 1960s, the name "Black Friday" was attached to the day after Thanksgiving, with armies of shoppers heading to downtown stores and, eventually, the shopping malls that replaced them. This brand of Christmas opened with a bang, with throngs gathering before dawn to grab "Black Friday" bargains, with police present to control the inevitable pushing and shoving.

Then came the Internet, with more changes in the size and shape of the commercial steamroller known as the "Holidays."

"It's safe to say that Black Friday has become a concept, not an event. We have ended up with Black Fridays all the way down" the calendar during November, said Jeremy Lott, managing editor for publications at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and former editor of the Real Clear Religion website.

"Basically, we're talking about Black Friday after Black Friday everywhere, world without end. Amen," he added, in a telephone interview.


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Thinking about funding real online news: The following is not a promo for The Pillar

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Thinking about funding real online news: The following is not a promo for The Pillar

Let me stress something right up front.

The following is not a fundraising effort for The Pillar, the alternative Catholic news source that I think (and I believe Clemente Lisi is raising his hand as well) has become a must-read item in this age of crazy Catholic news events and trends. OK, news that is even crazier than NORMAL on that front.

We all struggle, in this age in which the Internet has debundled our news world and readers who really care about specific subjects — think Catholic news — have myriad options to choose from. The problem is figuring out which ones to support with, you know, money.

How many Substack options does one reader have the time to read? How many can said reader wave a credit card at, month after month?

Anyway, this week I received an email missive from The Pillar — “This is all a choice” — that was clearly a reminder to readers about the factors of time and money that I just mentioned.

But it was also a meditation by Ed Condon on one of the most painful realities in our splinted, niche-media world. Repeat after me: News is expensive. Opinion is cheap.

Thus, I want to point readers to sections of this letter that were valid “think piece” material for news-consumers who care about the digital religion beat. The “JD” is, of course, a reference to scribe J.D. Flynn.

Let’s start with a news event. Try to guess which one:

After the news first surfaced on an Italian site, a lot of people called, texted, and emailed us to ask what was going on, and if we were going to cover it. It took us a few hours to confirm things with our own sources, and the story made it into JD’s newsletter yesterday. 

But as more outlets were picking up the story, one American cleric told us that he simply couldn’t be sure it was true until he read it on The Pillar. 

That kind of feedback means a lot. It’s a confirmation of what we want The Pillar to be all about and how we want it to work. We don’t ever want to write something you could read somewhere else, or worse just repeat what someone else has said they heard. 

If you read it at The Pillar, it matters to us that you know it's true because you know we did the legwork to make sure of the facts — no matter if everyone else is already talking about some version of it, or no one else has got the story at all.


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Podcast: Is Cardinal Burke being 'political' by asking the pope questions about 'doctrine'?

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Podcast: Is Cardinal Burke being 'political' by asking the pope questions about 'doctrine'?

Let’s start with some basic facts about a hot, hot story on the religion-news beat — the escalating clashes between Pope Francis and doctrinal conservatives in his church.

We know that Pope Francis and the wider Synod on Synodality camp wants to bring a wave of “reform” to the Roman Catholic Church, with some openly stating that this includes the modernization of doctrines as well as the pastoral-care practices linked to traditional doctrines.

We know that Cardinal Raymond Burke and others — mostly leaders from the era of Pope St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI — insist that their primary goals are to defend the church’s doctrines, primarily on moral issues, as stated in the Catechism and centuries of church tradition.

Thus, journalists need to thinking about the meaning of several words that they are using, over and over, in coverage of this clash inside the Church of Rome. These three words were at the heart of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in).

What three words?

The first word is “reform.” In a previous post, I turned to online dictionaries and found this useful set of definitions for that loaded term:

Reform …. * make changes for improvement in order to remove abuse and injustices; "reform a political system" * bring, lead, or force to abandon a wrong or evil course of life, conduct, and adopt a right one; "The Church reformed me"; "reform your conduct" ... * a change for the better as a result of correcting abuses; "justice was for sale before the reform of the law courts" ... * improve by alteration or correction of errors or defects and put into a better condition; "reform the health system in this country" * a campaign aimed to correct abuses or malpractices. ...

What doctrines and pastoral traditions are we talking about?

The Associated Press report focusing on the pope’s latest actions against Cardinal Burke — the loss of his apartment in Rome and, most likely, his stipend — offers the following:

Burke, a 75-year-old canon lawyer whom Francis had fired as the Vatican’s high court justice in 2014, has become one of the most outspoken critics of the pope, his outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics and his reform project to make the church more responsive to the needs of ordinary faithful.

Twice, Burke has joined other conservative cardinals in issuing formal questions to the pontiff, known as “dubia,” asking him to clarify questions of doctrine that upset conservatives and traditionalists.


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Rosalynn Carter memorials, with coverage about faith, family and, yes, political fashions

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Rosalynn Carter memorials, with coverage about faith, family and, yes, political fashions

The public drama of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter continues this week with a public memorial service and a family funeral, the kind of events that pull people into church sanctuaries, especially in the Bible Belt.

It’s safe to say that the more private funeral today — in the couple’s home church, Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia — will be a worship service in a progressive Baptist congregation. It will be interesting to see if footage is provided featuring the eulogy, along with the hymns and scriptures chosen by the Carters.

The memorial service was held in Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church, near the Carter Center at Emory University. The 99-year-old president — 10 months into home hospice care — spent Monday night at the center, close to where is wife’s body lay in repose. Atlanta is 164 miles from the Carter home in Plains.

Let’s give credit to the Associated Press for getting some mention of the couple’s faith into the lede of its story about the public, rather political, memorial service:

ATLANTA (AP) — Rosalynn Carter was remembered Tuesday as a former U.S. first lady who leveraged her fierce intellect and political power to put her deep Christian faith into action by always helping others, especially those who needed it most.

A gathering of first ladies and presidents — including her 99-year-old husband Jimmy Carter — joined other political figures in tribute. But a parade of speakers said her global stature wasn’t what defined her.

Later on, there was this, as well:

Family members described how Rosalynn Carter went from growing up in a small town where she had never spoken to a group larger than her Sunday school class to being a global figure who visited more than 120 countries.

Kathryn Cade, who stayed on as a close adviser as Rosalynn Carter helped build The Carter Center and its global reach, called Rosalynn Carter’s time as first lady “really just one chapter in a life that was about caring for others.”

GetReligion readers may recall that I chided AP for producing a stunningly faith-free obit for the former First Lady.


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