Jenn Johnson is the senior worship ‘pastor’ at Bethel Church in Redding, California. The co-founder of Bethel Music and Bethel Music Worship School, she is also a musician, songwriter, singer, author, and speaker. She is considered part of Bethel Church leader Bill Johnson’s inner circle, being his daughter-in-law and head pastor for decades.
A key player in driving people to Bethe’s weird and wonky theology through her involvement in sixteen Bethel worship albums, we last covered her after she revealed that angels sit around the throne of God and have ‘farting contests.’ and that Jesus has ‘armpit reflectors’ that bounce our worship off Him and back to us.
Johnson recently appeared on the Worship Ministry Training where she addressed several questions relating to her ministry, including one about the recent controversies with Bethel and their platforming and promoting abusers, and then covering it up:
Bethel Church’s Chief Prophet, Ben Armstrong, On Leave Following New Allegations of Sex Abuse
Apologist Mike Winger Releases 6 Hour Expose on Bethel Church, Shawn Bolz
The interview was catastrophically tone-deaf. A visibly irritated and haughty Johnson, her demeanor and body language telegraphing what she really thinks, minimized their culpability and then lamented that only one side of the story was being told.
Yet in the case of Armstrong, Bethel’s story was the only one being told for YEARS, before the victim finally came forward. And in the case of Bolz, the story was told to Bethel about his abuses, but they hid and ignored it, with Bethel’s chief prophet Kris Vallotton admitting that he ghosted the victim because he didn’t want to deal with it.
In fact, the impression Johnson gives is that the whole conversation is beneath her, isn’t something worth being discussed, and despite being a senior leader, she doesn’t know nearly anything about it, or even cares to.
Within days however, WMT deleted about 12 minutes of the video, pinning a comment that reads:
Of course, we saved the deleted segment, which can be seen below:
Question: I will not mention any names due to legal reasons, (Shawn Bolz) but recently a closely associated Bethel partner in ministry was caught using social media to gather information about people before publicly giving words of knowledge and prophecy about those specific people. In other words, he was scraping the internet to look like he had words of knowledge and prophecy about people. And that same leader also has allegations of sexual abuse.
Similarly, one of the key pastors on staff (Ben Armstrong) recently was accused by an intern. This happened in the past, but it was brought to light recently that he tried to drag her into bed. And then we also know that Bethel Music had had to separate themselves from some key artists for posting inappropriate or compromising situations, right?So my question in lumping all these together is, what has God taught you and the Bethel leadership through these scandals? And should worship leaders who are singing your songs be concerned that these things are even taking place?
Answer:
Tough stuff. That’s what I’d say at the top. It’s just, it’s tough. And I know and love the people that are accused. And I think at the end of the day humans are human. And for me, the tough part is that oftentimes people only hear the internet. They only hear one side of the story. They only hear what someone who wasn’t even connected to the experience is saying about it or what they’ve heard or oftentimes it’s just one side of the story that is broadcasted and that’s really painful.
I don’t know about you but if I was accused of something, I would really hope that there would be two sides of the story heard by the world and not just one, not just mine, not just someone else’s, but both.
It was interesting because I’ve been really studying Judges this past year, really just in Judges, and the Lord had me just kind of combing over and learning, know, justice and judges.
And oftentimes in social media era, it’s pretty wild because oftentimes whoever is the loudest and the broadest, that’s what gets the attention. And oftentimes the other sides of the story are not heard.And so I’m not in any way belittling the situation or saying that there’s no one that’s innocent in these situations. However, I do think that it’s a pretty impossible situation we live in, to camp our entire emotion as humans around something that we’re hearing on the internet that is, that is again, only from one side of the conversation. (Ed. Note. Johnson is acting like we don’t have text messages, witness testimony, images, video, etc of these incidences)
So things need to go to a legal court, and they need to be processed and weighed and tried, and details matter.
And so in a lot of these things, that’s where they are. As we spoke earlier, that we are not going to be speaking about specific things which we spoke about a bit more than we were supposed to.
But legally, these things are going to be processed and tried in court with both sides of the story and all the details. And I think that’s important as humans that we can’t ever side with just something that we hear from one side of the fence. It needs to be processed legally, probably in a lot of these situations.
She continues
You know, we all have sinned. We have all fallen short. He who is without sin cast the first stone. And so I think there’s a lot of difficult things that people are trying to accomplish on the internet that need to happen again, like Paul said, face to face and need to be tried and executed and processed in court, and not just opinions flying around on the internet.
So it really is difficult. Obviously, there’s just some situations that take time for all the truth to come out, and there are some people who just want to ruin those lives. And then right in the middle of that you have intense terrible stuff that has happened to people that are victims, at the same time.
Uses a poop analogy:
There’s a movie called ‘The Help’ and I don’t like to endorse movies but there’s a very important scene when she’s making a pie, a chocolate pie, and she mixes in poop into that pie, and you can’t tell poop from pie.
And I think, know, Revelation says that there’s a spirit of the accuser of the brethren, and that is in Revelation, and Revelation’s a pretty intense book, but the accuser of the brethren’s spirit, I think, is mixed in a lot of very legitimate things that have not been okay, have not been acceptable, and they need to be processed and tried.And there needs to be actual Godly justice, which is a much bigger thing than someone just giving their opinion or pulling facts off the internet.
And then concludes, with a bit more after
But we just need to be very careful what we believe as Christians, that we’re not just hearing little details and forming our opinion around that. But really, like, we would all want that the sides of the story on both the accused and the accuser, that both sides would be heard and processed. I think that’s what we would all want to happen if we were accused of something.
And you know, with being a leader, know, there’s a lot that’s happening that we can’t and don’t want to talk about on a public platform, especially where discipline is happening. When someone does something wrong, the thing I know to be very true about Bethel it is that they deal with it and they have action. You know, one of the main accused people was not even on our staff. It was just someone who was a guest at our conferences. (Ed. note. He was waaaaaay more than that)
Again, Bethel didn’t even have to go out of their way to be the disciplinarians and to confront. And they didn’t even have to do that because they were not our staff. But I applaud and commend that they actually did that.”
For a good breeakdown of why Johnson’s response was so bad, Ruslan does a good job here:
