Pastor Michael Todd leads Transformation Church (TC.) He is known for crowd surfing during his church’s worship service and spending a lot of money. In the last two years, he’s given away $3,500,000 in houses, cash, and cars, spent $65,000 to buy 168 pairs of shoes, gave $600,000 in “reparations,” and purchased $66,000,000 in real estate.
He’s also known for preaching some good old-fashioned Modalism, giving the world perhaps the grossest illustration in church after he snorted and then hocked a loogie full of spit and snot into his hand and rubbed it in another man’s face and claiming his church had 75k salvations in the last 18 months even though practically none of them stuck around. He recently had a service where ballet dancers with bare butts danced around the stage and in a recent sermon, offered a muddled, confused, contradictory, and seeming apology for what God’s word says about homosexuality.
During their Easter Service, the church put on a high production value, hour-long production of their ‘Ransom’ show, featuring cover songs by Justin Timberlake, Ke$ha, a host of original songs, dancing, choreography, women talking about the size of their butts, and ultimately a retelling of the story of God rescuing mankind. Todd explains where the idea came from:
“In 2015 I became the pastor and I didn’t know what a pastor did. And so I was meeting with a group of people, and they were like, ‘what should we do for Easter?’ And I was like, ‘I never preached an Easter message, so I’m not going to start this year. We need to come up with an Easter play.”
They put on the play in 2015, with Todd explaining that they purposefully decided to go “right to the edge” and do everything “short of sin” in order to reach people. Now, however, with more money, talent, and production value, they decided to redo it in 2023 so that people can see it with the “level of anointing and excellence” that he envisioned seven years ago before he had the means to make it happen.
