This story was written in partnership between RANGE and FāVS News, a nonprofit newsroom covering faith and values in the Inland Northwest. Learn more about FāVS’s work here.
Pastor Matt Shea had something to say about accountability in the Christian church during his February. 1 sermon.
“There has to be joy in our hearts when God sweeps the house clean,” said Shea, a former state representative who House Republicans, in 2020, ousted from their caucus over domestic terrorism allegations. Now, Shea was speaking in his role as the pastor of the charismatic church he founded in downtown Spokane, On Fire Ministries (OFM).
God’s divine justice — whether symbolized by cleansing fire, cleansing flood or, in this case, a diligent housekeeper — is a central motif in charismatic traditions and a popular sermon topic. Pastors like Shea don’t need a newshook to talk about the scouring wrath of the lord, but on this particular Sunday, he had one: A wolf had invaded Jesus’s flock.
The occasion for Shea’s sermon: Bethel Church, a California megachurch with extensive connections to OFM, had severed ties with a Los Angeles minister accused of being a false prophet and, perhaps more saliently, sexually and financially abusing his followers for more than a decade. Though Bethel leaders knew about the abuse for years, which they publicly acknowledged on Jan. 25, Bethel continued to platform the pastor, Shawn Bolz, until now.
Both Bethel and OFM embody “high-control” religious environments in which the flock of the church must follow the dictates of leaders like Shea, an apostle, and Bolz, a prophet, who claim direct access to the Christian god that normal believers don’t have.
This environment allowed Bolz to avoid accountability for many years. Leaders at Bethel had been aware since 2016 that Bolz mined data from parishioners’ social media and, using the information he gathered, performed sham prophecies, convincing some in the Bethel congregation that he was literally talking to God. (The homepage of Bolz’s website now reads, simply, “On a Sabbattical.”)
OFM had also known about the abuse for some time. Reading from a letter drafted to his congregation by the church’s board of elders, Shea said that OFM had “over the last two years” been ending “certain relationships” with Bethel in light of recent publicity surrounding Bolz, though he did not specify which relationships. (There’s an exhaustive down and dirty by the Christian apologist Mike Winger on the Bolz scandal here.)
The letter, which was later posted to OFM’s Facebook feed, was careful not to say that the church was formally separating from Bethel, which is one of the most powerful players in a steam-gathering movement to reclaim America for Jesus.
Shea acknowledged in his February. 1 sermon that some of his congregants may think OFM is being too harsh by severing ties with Bethel. Shea also alluded to problems similar to those in the Bolz scandal that have cropped up at OFM, which has seen an exodus of top leadership in recent months. Neither Shea nor the letter have gone into detail about those troubles.
“Scripture gives us a clear pattern for addressing sin and protecting the Church,” the OFM letter says. “We are committed to following the biblical standards laid out in Matthew 18 and 1 Timothy 5. At times, we have had to walk that process more than once, and we know some have accused us of lacking grace.”
OFM did not return a request for comment on this story, but one thing is almost certain: despite intimate ties to Bethel and its failed accountability structure, OFM will continue to advance God’s kingdom here in Spokane and abroad — and they’ll do it using Bethel’s playbook.
Its members will keep hosting large gatherings on the OFM campus on Pacific Avenue and under the clock tower in Riverfront Park, during which they will proclaim Spokane belongs to their deity. They’ll continue instigating high-profile standoffs with progressive counterprotesters.
Shea will continue his forays across the country to convince legislators to sideline minority communities he sees as a threat. It is the OFM way and the way of the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR).
What’s up between Spokane and the NAR
Shea is one of the loudest Inland Northwest voices of the movement that binds OFM and Bethel together, which is known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). The NAR, which comprises a narrow but increasingly powerful sector of evangelical Christianity, was an unmistakable force of support for Donald Trump leading to his second election to the American presidency. It asserts that Christians should control the world.
Shea has a radio show dedicated to advancing the NAR’s politics and worldview. He is frequently courted by NAR apostles — the most prestigious rank in its ministry hierarchy — to organize high-profile worship events, including the notorious Mayday 2025 event in Seattle’s Cal Anderson Park last spring at which police violently arrested peaceful counterprotesters.
And though Shea denies the NAR exists — arguing that the term is part of a leftist campaign to smear everyday Christians — that argument is largely semantic; he himself was anointed in 2024 as an apostle by the Ukrainian NAR pastor Andrey Shapoval during a four-hour special service at OFM. Whatever term you give it, Shea and OFM are part of a continuum that has powerful nodes everywhere, from Redding, California, to the White House.
OFM would not exist in the way that it does without Bethel. That’s because the connections between the churches are not just ideological but financial and physical. OFM, located near Second and Division streets, is part of a campus of low-slung buildings that house a K-12 school, an office complex, conference rooms, ministry spaces and a sanctuary.
In 2006, the Bethel elder Cal Pierce, who’d left California for the Inland Northwest in 1999 to reboot an old prayer healing ministry, bought the property for nearly $1 million. (In 2023, Pierce sold the property for $2.4 million, and leased it from the new property owner. With that money, he bought a $1 million home overlooking Long Lake.) He leased parts of the downtown campus to Shea in or about 2021, after Shea had founded OFM. Pierce is a member of Shea’s church.
Pierce occasionally preaches at OFM and at Bethel.
The machine of the apostolic universe
The NAR is not a card-issuing, member-focused organization but a loosely-defined term that describes churches that derive their governance structure from the biblical passage Ephesians 4:11-13. At the top of this structure, within any given church, there should be an apostle who establishes, directs and advises ministries.
NAR churches work in overlapping networks characterized by shared theological frameworks, conference speaker circuits and organizational partnerships. But they are not formally or legally bound to each other and can nimbly sever connections from each other.
NAR doctrine says Christians should take over every sector of social influence in the world and control society from atop them, a philosophy known as dominionism. Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain is an NAR apostle and prophet; Lance Wallnau, who’s considered the “father of American dominionism,” was the first prophet who predicted Trump’s rise.
He constructed a moral framework by which Christians could support a thrice-divorced real estate mogul who excluded Black people from his properties and had an abiding friendship with the late convicted child sex trafficker Jefferey Epstein.
The term NAR was coined by late dominionist pastor and intellectual C. Peter Wagner in the mid-1990s. Wagner wrote, “Our theological bedrock is what has been known as Dominion Theology. This means that our divine mandate is … to retake the dominion of God’s creation which Adam forfeited to Satan in the Garden of Eden. It is nothing less than seeing God’s kingdom coming and His will being done here on earth as it is in heaven.”
The center of the apostolic universe
Bethel, which boasts a membership of about 11,000, is at the center of that movement. Headquartered in Redding, California, Bethel isn’t a single church but a sprawling organism. Its robust network of satellite churches are far-flung, including to New York City; Whangarei, New Zealand; and Sydney, Australia. There is also an all-online ministry.
Its reach has shaped the philosophy, culture and aesthetics of most if not all NAR-style churches, including OFM. Beyond its direct ministry and influence on the NAR movement, Bethel has been enormously influential on broader evangelical culture for conservative Christians for two decades, after it split with the Assemblies of God.
The ministry has a record label that’s released 27 albums since 2001, a streaming service and a three-year ministry school that educates nearly 2,000 students. Its members, including Johnson and Pierce, have written a vast literature that describes how NAR churches should operate.
Shea has been Bethel’s touchstone in the Inlance Northwest.
Conflict resolution & a web of connections
In his February. 1 sermon, Shea described OFM’s conflict resolution structure, which, like many churches’, emphasizes solving conflict at the lowest level possible. If a conflict can’t be resolved at that level, the issue is brought to increasingly important leaders until the conflict is resolved. Sometimes that rises to a level above a specific church.
This process mirrors the military’s system of non-judicial punishment, whereby soldiers and sailors who’ve disobeyed orders or broken the law endure a crucible of criticism from their chain of command are often demoted and detained for short periods of time. That system has been roundly criticized by people who say it’s designed to obscure misdeeds, including sexual and financial corruption.
“We have a minister that is our covering in this body who we go to when we have a disagreement on something or we can’t solve things here,” Shea said in the Feb. 1 sermon. “His name is Andrey Shapoval.”
Shapoval, the pastor and apostle at Flame of Fire Ministries in Orangevale, California, maintains ties to Bethel, including a prominent speaking engagement last year in Seattle alongside Ben Fitzgerald, a graduate of the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry.
And Shea has bragged to his congregation at the pulpit about rubbing elbows with NAR pastor Wallnau, the Texas NAR pastor Wallnau, who wrote with Bethel pastor Johnson on one of the founding texts of American dominionism, “Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate,” which describes seven realms of power in American public life and directs Christian to take them over. (Read more about this here.)
These represent only a few of the many connections between OFM and Bethel.
Highly networked but loosely affiliated
None of this shows that OFM was complicit in Bolz’s alleged crimes or even aware of the scandals before they started coming to light in 2016. The individual ministries in the NAR conform to a relatively rigid hierarchy — apostles and prophets at the top and pastors, teachers and evangelists underneath. This structure allows them to keep problems from breaching the church’s walls.
But the larger movement is not hampered by this structure. Experts describe the NAR as “highly networked but loosely affiliated,” which allows its churches to mobilize sometimes millions of people toward a larger goal; they are capable of operating under the radar until the moment of execution.
The most salient example of this nimbleness: the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol Building, which was largely organized and choreographed by top figures in prominent NAR churches. No one who could have stopped it knew the hours-long attack was planned until the violence — which killed five people — was screaming across the nation’s newsfeeds. This organizing is detailed by the scholar Matthew D. Taylor in his podcast series “Charismatic Revival Fury.”
By the same token, it also means that when one node in the NAR does something wrong, other ministries can easily cut it off, like a lizard releasing its tail to a predator.
This flexibility is especially concerning to Holly Pivec, a prominent Christian apologist and author.
“There’s this exposure of coverup culture in large part due to Mike Winger’s video exposé,” she said in an interview. “My concern is, there are leaders in this movement who are celebrating the exposure of this coverup culture.” She worried that “people will leave Bethel and just find another church and think they’re okay and that they’re safe.”
