Todd Bentley Returning To MorningStar Ministries?

As MorningStar Ministries continues to roil with scandal and eat itself up from within, former CEO Chris Reed is claiming that current leader Rick Joyner intends to bring back and promote notorious heretic and “seer” Todd Bentley into the ministry, joining forces with the disgraced “apostle” once more.

MorningStar Ministries, one of the most prominent entities in Charismatic Christendom, has become a symbol of the worst excesses of the New Apostolic Reformation and Pentecostal movement. Founded by Rick Joyner in 1985, it quickly became a platform for every false teacher and loon with a story of visiting heaven, a prophetic word to plug, and a book to sell.

A few years ago, the board appointed “apostle” Chris Reed to run it, even though Reed was caught kissing and sexting with another woman who was not his wife the previous year (she claims he also fondled her) and spent a few months in restoration before taking the helm, as what’s a little sexual misconduct among friends?

Reed resigned a month ago, citing institutional dysfunction and a looming sex abuse case against the ministry that he wants no part of, and Joyce has retaliated by telling anyone who will listen how unqualified Reed is, badmouthing him as a deceived liar and trashing his reputation.

In a recent video posted to his channel where he named Joyce as causing chaos and dysfunction within the organization, Reed dropped this tantalizing tidbit:

“there are people right now that are telling people in our fellowship of churches and ministries that we need to “reunite “and do all this stuff. And it’s like, these people are trying to disparage my character, trying to imply I’m some backslidden prodigal son, all because I’m not under Rick’s control while he is currently telling the current (School of Prophets) -Yeah, there were a couple of students that…reached out to me and said that Rick was talking about bringing back, they asked him, ‘are you going to bring back a former man who led the Lakeland revival?’ (Todd Bentley) And he said, ‘yes, I am.’ He said he was going to do it.“

As far as why bringing back Bentley would be a mistake, we have written extensively about him, chronicling his malfeasance from lauded anointed revivalist and miracle worker to drunkard, adulterer, liar, and sheep-fleecer extraordinaire, all the while being lifted up by a cadre of ne’er-do-wells like Rick Joyner as a great and supernaturally gifted man of God.

Recall that in the summer of 2008, Todd was flying high, filling stadiums with a world-renown revival in Lakeland, where he claimed to have raised multiple people from the dead. He was getting so much attention that 17 high-profile charismatic “apostles,” including Bill Johnson, Jon Arnott, Rick Joyner, Che Ahn, and C. Peter Wagner, came together in a ceremony of “apostolic alignment” over 32-year-old Todd Bentley, commissioning him to lead the Lakeland Revival and recognizing him as an evangelist doing the work of the Lord led by the Holy Spirit. We call this the Charismatic Day of Infamy.

Within a month of his alignment and commissioning ceremony, Bentley would announce that he was leaving Lakeland and stepping down. A few days later, he told the world he was divorcing his wife and it was revealed that during his time as leader of the revival, as he was getting aligned by the apostles, he had been engaging in “an unhealthy relationship on an emotional level with a female member of his staff,” whom he later married. He was also getting drunk all the time, spiraling into depression and anxiety, and babbling on stage in a series of pseudo-spiritual slurs.

The vaunted Lakeland Revival crashed into a smoldering heap of disillusionment immediately afterward, the populace burned by a charlatan who was able to garner the endorsement of 17 charismatic “apostles,” all the while acting like a devil.

Bentley sought out Rick Joyner, who quickly restored Todd back to ministry where he toiled in relative obscurity until 2019, when he was newly accused of drug use, adultery, and sexting, some of which he admitted.

A “New Apostolic Reformation” (NAR) tribunal report was launched. They found him “guilty”—a pointless summation, as Bentley had already checked out and declared the whole thing a scam and witch hunt anyway- a claim that Joyner also used when he called for Bentley to be restored back to ministry a second time.

Despite these findings, Bentley has maintained a high level of ministry support, with the revelation of decades of grossly immoral behavior being viewed as “just a scratch” to his reputation. This should surprise no one, however, as charismatics and NAR adherents historically have enjoyed infinitesimally low levels of discernment when it comes to the sinful behavior of their leaders, and this case has sadly proved to be no different.