"Matthew 18 for thee, but not for me." -The IHOPKC emperor has no clothes
IHOPKC leader, Bickle, creates Bible rules to suit his personal desires, avoid accountability; resembles naked, conceited emperor in children's fable
In the old folktale “The Emperor's New Clothes,” by Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen, an arrogant leader who is obsessed with his own lavish lifestyle is put in his place by con men who “weave” him luxurious linen and parade him out in the nude before the townspeople. The tale tells us that these con men, “not only were their colors and patterns uncommonly fine, but clothes made of this cloth had a wonderful way of becoming invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office, or who was unusually stupid” (Andersen1). In fact, the emperor is traipsing around in the nude, and the entire town bought it—except for one child.
"But he hasn't got anything on," a little child said.
Often it takes the innocence of a child to call out what is glaringly incongruous in their world. My little toddler buddy used to ask me why “that brown thing” was on my neck (a mole). I was the only person in his immediate world with a mole. My little buddy was being a child, just like the child in the fabled tale who inquires why the esteemed emperor is traipsing proudly about with his private parts showing.
Listen child, the emperor is stark raving mad, that’s why.
Madness costs everyone as it tries to control them
As an English professor, a lesson I taught on denotation versus connotation always asked students what I meant if I said I was “mad.” They surmised I’d be angry. We’d discuss how the our language contains many words that have similar, but not precise, meanings. If I am incensed if someone cuts me off in traffic, it is probably I who has the problem, more so than the other driver. Irritated, that’s a better word, maybe irked. It is why my favorite English professor correctly taught us that there truly are no synonyms in the English language—only words that mean close to what another word means.
English lessons aside, the “emperor” of IHOPKC, Mike Bickle—while apparently prone to anger at times—is a fitting image of a mad, emperor, guided by uncontrolled reason and judgment, and that madness proves itself a cost everyone—both in dollars and sense (and that’s not a misspelling).
Make no mistake though: “uncontrolled by reason” does not mean Bickle, himself, is uncontrolled. In fact, he is proving himself to be a cunning and controlling cult leader, as evidenced not only by his former staffers, but by experts in the field.
Elizabeth Herder: A sound voice from the Advocate Group
Most readers here likely saw the YouTube interview conducted this past week by Blaise and Christina Forêt with Elizabeth Herder, a longtime IHOPKC leader, board member, fundraiser, and insider from the beginning.
We never know how various people speaking out will be received afterwards; in this case, Herder’s story seemed to be well-received for several dominant reasons:
People appreciated her lack of self-centeredness
People were grateful she owned her owned and apologized humbly for any of her own complicit actions and asked those who felt she had wronged them to further reach out to her.
She disclosed that she had advocated to Bickle for higher stipends/pay for staffers, arguing that no one could possibly live on these tiny paltry sums of money.
More than anything, people wept with her as she shared her account of her friend Mark (25:38+), his life wrecked by his wife having an affair with Bickle’s son. Mark’s wife, she explained, began her interactions by feeding Mike daily, believing Mike would live to be 120. (While I knew this story already, I admit, it was as bizarre to hear it explained as Herder said it would be as she told it.)
But even prior to this interview, Herder took part in an interaction on X, after Austin Roberts shared a thread from a staff meeting. Piquing my interest on that thread, it comes up on the interview as well. Let’s take a look at the thread first, then I’ll take you back through some ideas.
The entire thread with videos is available here.
Cult mentality: Twist brains in knots and wear ‘em out
Herder’s comment about the goal being to drain them on every level struck me most. If you will indulge me here, I try not to pretend I have all the answers, since I totally don’t. This post does lend itself to some insights I happen to have previously researched, though. Years ago, as I completed my master’s degree, I researched two books—a novel on the Holocaust I paralleled with a novel presenting a dystopian, controlled future. I presented a thesis that argued our future was in danger of not learning from the Holocaust and we would “hurtle forward toward the past.” There’s more to it, and it actually is in the US Memorial Holocaust Museum in DC, but today I am highlighting the cult and groupthink research I did for it, which has never left me. I suppose I am required to cite myself (Not my style, but proper, so here you are.2) The research I conducted for my thesis was rooted in studies of high-control groups, groupthink, and obedience to authority. I’ll share a couple parts and then look at some of what Herder shared. These parallels are eerie.
Stanley Milgram
The study that most engaged me to propose my thesis was one many of you likely know: Stanley Milgram’s electric shock experiments at Yale in the 1960s, which, of course, is post-World War II.
Milgram found that average people—post-Holocaust—would push buttons to administer electric shocks that would not only hurt, but would kill, people, simply because they were asked. About two-thirds, 65 percent, of participants kept going to the point of deathly shock levels. The “teacher-student” scenario was conducted without yelling or harsh demands Yet a majority of people—that’s you and I—administered the shocks. (Spoiler: It was fake, and was before we had better ethics controls on research, so no one was actually hurt, though subjects were traumatized). We all like to think we would not hurt someone just because we were told to, but history shows us time and again that we absolutely would because we are conditioned to believe something is correct. Milgram calls “the science of regulation or control” (125), which he explains deal with the changes that must occur in the design of an evolving organism as it moves from a capacity for autonomous functioning to a capacity for functioning within an organization3.
John D. Goldhammer
The sense of community presented here in standardized fashion is what Goldhammer labels the “Destruction of the Individual” (113). He classifies individuality as the characteristic in people that distinguishes each person from the rest of the crowd, asserting that “individuals cannot be classified, labeled, normalized; these are dehumanizing, collective mechanisms reducing people to things.” 4
My thesis also discusses Goldhammer’s analysis of how cults and control groups use the group sharing of intimate feelings. Explaining a similar process in modern society, Goldhammer writes, “Most groups, both commercial, and religious, have frequent ‘sharing’ or ‘testimony’ sessions, similar to confessions, which reinforce behavior that conforms to the group doctrine—a potent form of peer pressure” (108).
I have been part of more than one group where sharing dreams so other people can tell you what they mean is normal. Our dreams are occasionally not personal, but neuroscience research actually reveals a close relation to our inner emotions 5:
Dreams might be seen as an expression of emotional self-state and are usually associated with unconscious memories that can be traced back to early childhood and attachment-related experiences and have been stored implicitly in memory without access to the actual consciousness.
Having group members share dreams has always troubled me.
And just today I read the magnificent and insightful Chloe Roberts’ latest Substack, where she analyzes the mass inappropriateness of the testimonies of “healing” from multiple intimate areas at the “IHOPU Awakening.” Roberts holds wisdom far beyond those of people many times her age. She’s smart enough to lead a cult; she’s loving enough not to try.
Flavil R. Yeakley
Psychologist Flavil R. Yeakley also conducted tests on cult members in the 1980s. Using the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator to analyze the mindset of the cults/high control groups, he reported:
“People in certain cults appeared to be all moving toward having the same types of personalities, regardless of the original personalities they brought with them to the group” (Yeakley 191). He calls this idea “cloning” and says that it is a way of eradicating the individual persona for the group persona (191) 6.
I’m sure I don’t need to explain to many readers about IHOPKC vocabulary. After all, when Zeal for His House Consumes us, we are Marked by the Anna Anointing and called unto being a Watchman on the Wall in the House of the Lord for 24/7 Intercession until the End of the Age. The Urgency of this Hour cannot be underestimated, Beloved. Amen, let’s stand.
Look, obviously some of that is biblical allusion; therefore, it is not completely whackadoodle. But it is completely whackadoodle to walk around talking that way instead of like you talk. You don’t even have to “Matthew 18 Someone” to know that.
Mike Bickle
If this were a game of “which of these doesn’t belong here?” the correct answer would, of course, be “Mike Bickle” because he is not the real researcher or psychologist. He is the one who is smart enough, mad enough, cunning enough, to manipulate the findings and realities that men like Milgram, Goldhammer, Yeakley, and many others know, and turn them into his own empire.
As a matter of fact, Bickle is a student of World War II. He has a reputation for inviting groups over to watch movies from the era. He often cites books from that time. He preaches about the way the Jews found fortitude to survive, for example. While some think that is simply related to his advocacy for Israel, the fact is, it’s unrelated. Bickle was doing this before Bob Jones told him via prophetic word that he would pastor a young adult movement for Israel. (Bob, Bickle, and Israel—and Bickle’s theological contradictions on Darby are probably a miniseries for a time I have more time (maybe over the summer). The research there will also be surprising if you have been Goldhammered.
Now let’s return to the articulate Herder and that interview…
Note: as I post relevant quotations here, please note I am cutting out filler words such as “um” and “you know,” and using ellipses only for clarity. I have included timestamps so you can hear the unedited version.
“The cardinal sin at IHOP is talking—Cardinal sin.” -Elizabeth Herder
Herder’s statement about 34 minutes in reveals the sheer level of control exerted over the ministry’s leaders and staffers as they tried to help a man who was the victim of an affair proved devastating. Herder explains:
“We were all operating in …every minute was fear…. We're going to say the wrong thing; we're going to say it to the wrong person. But we have to get help. This is wrong. So in the first two months after our initial contact with the leadership team: ‘Matthew 18,’ ‘godly speech,’ ‘gossip,’ every single sermon,” she explains.
“Have you seen the videos that Austin posted? So that was a staff meeting… that was about us. We got a phone call it was happening, tuned in, and saw it. You’ve got to remember, I'm not the me right now watching it; I'm the me who thinks I'm still part of the family. And I am—literally—watching Mike mock me and the couple other people that were involved in this and do the role play…. I cried till I couldn't breathe; it was just awful….. The shame and the torment; that's the word for it; it's a torment to, like, know you have to do the right thing…
Herder expounds that despite knowing she was doing the right thing, despite speaking boldly and standing on scriptures she had known and studied, she also found herself doing what those in cults (my word and analysis, not Herder’s here), end up doing: questioning herself. Realizing she was effectively ousted as she was watching Bickle mock her publicly, she admits that internally she was saying, “oh my gosh, I thought, what if I am a gossip?”
Meanwhile, the elder Bickle was sending her emails refusing to meet with them, which had been unheard of previously for Herder, who’d spent her IHOPKC years working closely with her friend and brother, able to pop in for meetings within five minutes for the past 20-plus years.
“For him to refuse to meet with me and then come back [to] these emails from him like “I hear you've been talking… I hear you've been talking to multiple people, questioning my leadership I'm not going to meet with you and give you a chance to twist my words.”
She describes it as “horrifying.”
Herder adds that while she felt tormented internally, she also went to her follow ELT members and repeatedly said “we are in step three of Matthew 18,” but it was useless. As the pictures above illustrate, it was a cyclical effect of having to return again and again, to no avail. The hamsters were on the wheel, spinning.
Meanwhile, Mike’s son, lived in liberty facilitated by Daddy-O, leader of this international ministry, pastor of all, head of everything, who could likely teach Congress how to filibuster. (Heads up Mikey: That’s nothing to be proud of having the skill to do).
Herder’s horror didn’t begin or end with the double Bickle debacle, however. Attempting to meet with other ELT members regarding Luke, as well as Brad Tebbutt being in leadership, after the revelations of his admissions of child molestation (though Tebbutt watered down the description of his “inappropriate” behavior with the 15-year old girl in his care as a married adult youth pastor). Further, Herder mentions what appears to be IHOPKC’s near miss of appointing another man to run the media institute who had left his wife for his assistant—and though Bickle and company knew this, they were positioned to allow him to take his stance and lead.
(For interested parties, Dr. Dénouement knows about this one personally because said leader was a personal and formerly respected friend, and Dr. D was saddened to learn that this had happened. This was relayed much differently to me at the time—as if IHOPKC had made the decision not to position him, and not that the man’s own children and other outside leaders had created the uproar. Also, even if Herder was not referring to this case also, since Dr. D knows about this firsthand she is still referencing it because it obviously holds tragic relevance to the toleration of promoting leaders who destroy their families.)
Returning to our horror story, narrated by Herder, she details that, despite the Matthew 18 runaround in which Stuart Greaves had been the only person initially who would meet with them, she and her husband finally were granted an audience with David Sliker.
It did not go well.
The three hour meeting, which is detailed about an hour and 16 minutes into the interview, apparently resulted in a defense of hiring alleged sex offenders, she says:
He defended it his whole heart, you guys, his whole heart. I mean, he believed that this was… he said, “I don't find any biblical… there's no biblical precedent to not to exclude him….” In that meeting, Dave said to us, he said “Elizabeth, IHOPU will never have a policy against hiring someone with sexual predation or offense in their background. Never.”
“My husband was with me. We were just we were like… say it again, what? The logic was what about the poor… 18-year-old who slept with a 16-year-old who said she was 17 and then it was [classified as] statutory rape, and now he's a sex offender for the rest of his life—so there was always these bizarre outlier reasons.”
This reference to how sex offender lists may classify a statutory rape offenders alongside a genuine pedophile is a red herring. Sex offender laws allow for tiers of offense; not all offenders are required to register for life. In other words, even if the scenario above actually occurred, this teenager would be viewed under the law differently than the 28-year old youth pastor who sexually molests a 15-year old child who does not consent, or a serial rapist or pedophile. In sum, this is a poor argument for never having a policy. (Dr. D. does not support a ministry hiring a sex offender, for the record.)
Herder adds that the meeting with Sliker continued its poor trajectory when he focused more on the division and accusation. She says Sliker told her, “The holy spirit is more concerned about divisive people than about molestation.”
Herder shares that her camel back-breaking straw came when Forerunner Church leaders insisted she wait for the “long ark of mercy” that would come. “Mike would say ‘things look different in three months, three weeks, three years’.” But as Herder points out, there was not an allowance in that wait for mercy for the people who needed it most: Mark, Ricci (Luke’s wife)—and the children in both families. Where was their mercy, the people whose worlds were decimated? Instead the church leaders themselves, led by the elder Bickle, were enabling the ongoing destruction of these families; Luke’s oldest daughter has made several public posts herself commenting on the situation. Clearly the long ark of mercy extended by IHOPKC and the church didn’t make it to anyone but those committing the egregious sins.
Abuse of mercy as control of actions
As the discussion of this “long ark of mercy” continues during the interview, it’s clearer that within IHOPKC’s structure, the idea of mercy is abused as a controlling element. At approximately 1:08:30 Herder emphasizes that Mike and others should have had the right definition of mercy. She says:
Mercy is severe sometimes… and so it is merciful to deal justly and swiftly and strongly. It would have been merciful for the body of Christ here in Kansas City to put Luke Bickle out of the church. Dave Sliker said, “Elizabeth, I just think if his last name wasn't Bickle, you'd be you'd be treating this really differently; you need to act like it's just anybody else who's having an affair. I don't know, the ludicrous nature of that statement stands alone. But it would have been mercy to deal swiftly, and instead we have this slow hemorrhage bleed out of all these lives.
We appealed to Lenny to do something, to Isaac to do something, to Dave to do something, to Stuart to do something, to Mike to do something, to Marci [Sorge] to do something. We left no stone unturned, and everybody was under Mike's power, and he said “leave it to me… leave it to me—and everybody obeyed.
I think what people experience is that we're taught to suppress our instinct for so many years, [we] probably experience that place to bypass our intuition and our conscience to accept the narrative that's coming from the leader and it feels really enlightened; it feels like, oh, like long ark of mercy… it's so dangerous, and I think we got numb, so our reactions got numb.
And as Herder concludes this line of discussion, she addresses viewers. Around 1:13:55, she says:
I want to just affirm the people that are watching that are in that cognitive dissonance that place of still it’s almost impossible to get your mind around that Mike is a bad guy. It is so traumatic on every level, and I just want to affirm that it was programming for a long time, and it was not something that just happened kind of accidentally. We were all groomed, we were all programmed to see something and to not see something else.
Adding Herder’s articulate insider voice to the conversation only further implicates the entire organization. I actually met Herder one day many years ago in one of those back rooms when I was working back there myself, so she is not some random stranger to me. If you watch the entire interview, you can easily tell she is intelligent, educated, passionate, and honest. Examining Herder’s comments regarding her attempts to confront both Mike and fellow ELT members on Luke Bickle’s adultery with Mark’s wife, as well as the parallel controlling manipulation of Mike Bickle himself, set side-by-side with research on groupthink and control you can delve further into, perhaps you will see the we have a powder keg combustible that only masks itself as a haven of worship and prayer.
Unfortunately, Bickle refuses to meet with people who are attempting to help or correct him. Figuratively speaking, the man is parading around stark naked, but he’s too proud to let anyone tell him.
Wow, wow, wow!
“The holy spirit is more concerned about divisive people than about molestation.”
"Elizabeth, IHOPU will never have a policy against hiring someone with sexual predation or offense in their background. Never.”
"Forerunner Church leaders insisted she wait for the “long ark of mercy” that would come. “Mike would say ‘things look different in three months, three weeks, three years’.”
Abuse of mercy to control actions, indeed! I am seeing now that this type of cultish control is widespread in churches. We have experienced in several times. How well I relate to the fear of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person! I have seen how quickly elders forgive abusers on the basis of a conversation or two, and require instant and full restoration by the victims, only to have the offens repeated. (The dog returns to its vomit.)
I am so grateful that you are revealing what had been hidden. This is a clarion call of warning to all who fancy themselves shepherds of the followers of Jesus Christ, and it is a healing balm to those of us who for years were misled by them.