All right, friends, welcome back to Healed-ish! Today, I’m so excited because I have Jediah here, and if you are familiar with the Bethel circles, you are probably familiar with his dad, Bob Hartley. Um, I got a prophetic word from your dad, which we can talk about later. And yeah, thank you so much for coming on. I just really wanted to get into your story and hear—I don’t know, I know your story is so crazy, and so much has been happening just in the last few years. We connected a couple months ago, and we were able to talk, so yeah, welcome.

My pleasure. I mean, I’m so excited to be on here. I’ve been excited for your podcast just in general for a while, so to be on it is a privilege. So thanks for having me on.

Yeah, of course. I was wondering if we could start—what was it like being raised? Because being raised in the church, you were from this IHOP sector. So, for those not familiar, I was involved in Bethel, but I also had some family members who went and did the IHOP school. So I know that must have been a wild ride.

Yes, and to specify, it’s IHOP, the International House of Prayer, not the pancake place. Unfortunately. But yeah, no, I grew up—so my dad was—I mean, you kind of mentioned it a little bit, but for those who don’t know, my dad, Bob Hartley, is a prophetic minister, and he was a fairly prominent prophetic minister, especially in the late ’90s and early 2010s. Um, and so I grew up at the International House of Prayer, and that was where we were kind of based out of, and my family—not just my dad, but my mom and some of my extended family—were really involved with the formation of the International House of Prayer. So that was kind of home base for me. But I also, because of my dad, would travel around a lot with him. He was like an itinerant minister. He would speak at different places, and as a prophet, he was very revered, especially in leadership circles of like a lot of the—you know, what people term as the New Apostolic Reformation churches of Bethel. Obviously, International House of Prayer, MorningStar, some of these different churches, we would travel around and meet with a lot of the leaders. So, I got to see behind the scenes of a lot of how that world is run.

Yeah, and for those who are not familiar, these traveling prophets and ministers, they’re pretty much like celebrities in these circles. I mean, I know when I was at Bethel, it was like, “Bob Hartley’s coming!” or “Heidi Baker’s coming!” And it’s a very interesting dynamic. It’s like Christian famous a little bit. And I was wondering, how often were you on the road with your dad?

So when I was in high school, I would go a decent amount. Like, we—and especially even when I was younger, I would probably go two or three trips a year. I would go with him to all sorts of different places. But then when I graduated high school, I went to YWAM for a little while. I didn’t know that. Yeah, yeah, I went to YWAM. I was at the Kona base. So, I met Lauren Cunningham, and my dad would like speak to Lauren Cunningham too, so I should have mentioned that in the church group too. But I was heavily involved with them for about 3 years. And then after that, for about a two- to four-year period on and off, I was traveling with my dad. As a young adult, I would be his sort of warm-up intro. I would tell some sort of story, and then he would give his performance. After his performance… yeah, yeah, where he would tell all crazy stories and do his prophetic… which we—I can get into the specifics of that, of course, too. But absolutely. But yeah, so I traveled with him during that period of time as like a young adult, quite extensively. I was at conferences—we spoke at several conferences at Bethel. And that’s really where I was like super inundated into the behind-the-scenes of the non-denominational charismatic world.

Yeah, so going back to growing up in these IHOP circles, what was it like? Like, what was your day-to-day like? How often were you guys at church? And was it a happy time? Do you look back on those memories fondly, or was it kind of red flags from the beginning?

Yeah, I mean, just to get into it, it was terrible. All of it was awful. But I really am not being hyperbolic with that. Like, it was bad. I love my family, like my mom, I have three sisters, and I got along with my sisters really well, and my mom really well. And so, a lot of my childhood has been—I have a lot of pleasant memories of growing up with my sisters. And in some senses, it was kind of like we suffered through the same things together, so we, you know, bonded through the fire. But I was homeschooled. And so, like the International House of Prayer, my dad was actually the person who owned the first IHOP building, the first House of Prayer, where they did 24/7 prayer. He and my uncle helped kind of put it together. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it, but it’s very infamous because there were like four trailers that were put together. I mean, it was very shoddy. I talk about how when I—we, like, didn’t properly stretch the carpet. And of course, there were a lot of people coming in and out, so the carpets would get really stretched, and they would bubble up. And my dad would give me a staple gun to go and staple all of the carpet back, which, of course, didn’t help the situation. It was a total tripping hazard. But like, I grew up in like—because we were homeschooled and because my dad had like an office in the prayer room. I mean, the prayer room was my house, you know? Like, that was the place that I lived.

We should probably describe what these prayer rooms are like because some people may not be familiar with International House of Prayer. So, basically—correct me if I’m wrong—don’t they believe that we need 24/7 worship to usher in the second coming of Christ or something like that?

Right. Yeah, it’s an apocalyptic community. People try to dance around that sometimes afterwards, but it’s like, no. I mean, that’s the central tenet of what separated the International House of Prayer from other churches down the road. Mike Bickle, the leader of the International House of Prayer, was preaching a message of like, “We are raising up the end-times generation,” which was me and my generation—the Joel’s Army generation—that was going to like 100-fold that which happened in Acts. We were going to prophesy, dream dreams, have visions, heal people, do all of those sort of things. And that sometime in—not my generation, but the generation before Mike Bickle’s generation—they were going to see the end times. It wasn’t like we need to pray and usher in the end times—that’s going to happen in 2400 or something like that. It was very much, what made them so sure? I’m curious. They were currently living in the end times.

Okay, so the International House of Prayer came straight out of the Kansas City Prophets community, which was very influential in not just IHOP but Bethel and MorningStar, a lot of these different churches. But the Kansas City Prophets were like the hub where all of these prophetic messages were coming out. So, you had people like Paul Cain, Bob Jones, Mike Bickle. They were all having like, in the ’80s and ’90s, this dreams and visions hub. Mike Bickle claimed that he had the Archangel Gabriel, and then later he claimed that he had the Archangel Michael speak to him. Like, he would audibly hear them, or they would come to him and like… Yeah, you know, told him—which Mike Bickle is wonderful— we’ll get into that. I’m not being serious, by the way, horrible person. No, no, truly despicable human being.

But yeah, and that’s what I grew up believing—that the father, the spiritual father of my community, had spoken to one of the archangels. And Bob Jones was having all of these prophecies about revival that was going to happen in Kansas City. And a lot of it also, in the early days, had to do with Pat Bickle, which was Mike Bickle’s brother, who had been paraplegic. He had been in an accident, or he had been in a football accident and messed up his spine. From the neck down, he was completely paralyzed. And a lot of those early prophecies sort of revolved around Pat Bickle being healed and miracles coming to Kansas City. So, it was like super heavy on the prophecy and the heaven sort of opening up and seeing with your third eye. That’s what Bob Jones would talk about. So that’s, I think, that’s sort of what led to this feeling that like, ooh, it’s going to come, we’re right on the precipice of the end of days. And, you know, there was a lot of Zionism, a lot of like Israel being a nation and prophecies about that, you know, because that happened, you know, a generation before. My parents’ generation, it was like, okay, well, this is happening, things are starting to move and shake, and something’s happening.

That was what really birthed the International House of Prayer and the intercessory movement. So, getting back to your early question, the prayer room is a place where 24/7 prayer and worship happened. Every single moment of the day, at any point since 1997, you could go to the prayer room, and there was somebody—maybe it would just be a single person with their guitar—but someone was always lifting up prayer and worship to intercede for the end of days. Which, on one hand, was like, it always felt nice to have like a place where you could always go and get spiritually fed. You know, kind of like the spiritual version of the pancake place. You know, it was like, we could all— you could go at 24 hours, “Yeah, Jesus is there for you.” And I understand why a lot of people loved it. But this really was about this intercession to lead into the end times. And that intensity, although not everyone who got associated with IHOP got grafted into that apocalyptic intensity, for those who like grew up there and who were a part of like the core community, that was what it was about. And that’s why it was… Yeah, terrible.

And I know, side tangent, the other podcast that I’m doing over Share Hour with Kenzie. She’s my friend that I—she was married to my brother, and we’re still best friends. But her and my brother went to IHOP, and they did their Acts School. And then they went on a mission trip after that. She ended up coming home early because she got pregnant during IHOP, and she just has horrible stories of having to be in these worship rooms when she was super pregnant, super sick. She had to stay up till, you know, 3:00 a.m. because they had the time schedules that they made them be in the prayer room, you know? So, she was feeling sleep-deprived and pregnant, and when she was second-guessing things, the leadership ended up pulling her into a room and praying over her belly, praying that my niece would die, and that they would be martyrs for Christ overseas. Yeah, I mean, it’s shocking in the sense that, oh my god, that’s so horrific, but like, it’s not shocking insofar as like, that is not unfamiliar in my… Yeah, it just… ‘Cause it’s phrased like, “You should be so lucky to die for Christ,” like you should be so thankful that your child is going to die overseas for the mission. They were all about the 10/40 window, the place that really needed to hear the word of Jesus.

So, I mean, she ended up getting out of this by faking a cancer scare. So, she called her doctor from back home and had him write a fake note saying that her mole looked really weird, and she got out of there because there were bombs dropping. I mean, she was just not willing to die on her mission. Yeah, so she ended up going, she ended up going, and then she faked a cancer scare, saying that she needed to be seen by a doctor in the States, you know? And that was the only way that she could come back home. I think that this is what’s hard for people to understand sometimes, is just like how claustrophobic and intense these communities are. Where it really is like you don’t realize the boundaries of the community until you run up against them, and then it’s horrific. Where you’re like, I can’t not… I don’t have any agency. I can’t think differently than this group of people. I can’t ask questions. I can’t have, god forbid, different politics or, you know, sexual identity. I mean, like some of the really extreme cases of sexual assault and not being able to like talk about sexual assault and being a victim of abuse in that community and not being able to speak up against it for fear of being retaliated against or completely ostracized from the community or, you know? There are so many different mechanisms to keep people in this like frenzied state of desperation because we have to pray. We have to intercede. We have to give up everything. I mean, it was such like this spirit of anguish that really dictated the environment at the International House of Prayer, and it was so rough.

Yeah, and I was thinking about—I was going to ask you, like, what is it like being a kid and feeling so much pressure? Because your entire life is revolved around this very apocalyptic, the world is ending, and you have to be a warrior for Christ. It feels like your childhood would be pretty heavy with such responsibility in these circles.

Yeah, I mean, we’ll get into more of this, I’m sure. But like, on the front end of a lot of what I was dealing with as a child was like way more immediate of like, my dad was a very abusive individual, and there was a lot of like just survive within specifically in relationship to my father. Like, just find a way to like make it and deal with the blows that I was getting from him while also like— I still loved and cared about my dad and idolized him for a long period of time. So, like that was much more of my day-to-day, like present difficulty. I wasn’t like… people would come up to me and be like, “I just want to pray over you that God would like release the pressure that is on your shoulders for being, you know, the son of this prophet,” or whatever, and I was like… People had hero worship for him. Like, those individuals worshiped him. I loved and looked up to him, but I did not have that same reverence. I saw behind the curtains and saw that he was like a mess and couldn’t pack his own suitcase without my help. Like, there were so many things that he was dependent on me for, and the rest of my family, that I never really felt this pressure, or I didn’t consciously feel this pressure to do or be a particular way. Because that wasn’t really what I was consciously dealing with.

But in the last couple of years, I think that this is when I’ve started recognizing how much of my own worldview—I mean, even years out of this world, like, I am still having to unravel my own conception of myself and my own identity. And like, until I had spoken up against my dad and some of the crazy things that were going on, I felt like I was living most of my life with two hands tied behind my back, where I couldn’t be myself. I couldn’t express my own sort of beliefs and ideas without feeling that I would be criticized and ostracized. And I was like, “That is what happened.” But, yeah, so like, I think that that is way more… Like, I’ve talked with my therapist way more about that in recent years about the less obvious expectations and the pressure of being in this world. Not just being the son of a prophet, but just being a Joel’s Army kid and believing that, like, I need to prophesy, I need to dream dreams, I need to heal people. And then having a remarkable amount of faith and like things not happening. Like, I fully, especially as a teenager, I fully believed that, like, when I was going to lay hands on someone, they were going to be healed. Like, there was no lack of faith, and then it didn’t happen, and I felt like, “Oh, God must not love me or care about me or is not going to use me.” I never, when people would be like, “Oh, you didn’t have enough faith,” I was like, “That’s not it.” Because like, I could not have possibly had more faith in those instances.

Yeah, yeah. So, what was, um, or, oh, I wanted to ask you, can you explain to everybody kind of what your dad’s thing was? So we know that he’s a prophet, but we’ve also talked about how it was a bit of a performance. So, what was he kind of known for?

Yeah, so he was—I mean, a prophetic magician, for lack of a better term. He really had a performance, and it wasn’t just the, like, grand prophecy, “I believe that the nation is heading in this direction.” Like, it wasn’t those big-picture things. He would do that too, but it was very specific, where he would pick people out of the crowd and he would read their mail. That’s literally what people call it in these communities, like, “Oh, Bob read my mail.” Which is really, really eerie, knowing that that’s almost exactly literally what he was doing. He literally was like reading information about them online. But before getting into how he would do it, just to finish the idea of what he would do, is he would go up and speak at a conference or call someone out, like Jubilee, and call her out from the crowd and be like, “I saw over you.” He would usually do it in some performative way. Like, he would be like, “I see the 1839 woman,” and someone would be like, “Oh, that’s the last four digits of my phone number.” And then, let’s say it’s you, in that situation, you would like stand up because he said something that identified something over you, and then he would do something like, “I see it’s going to be a year of jubilee over your life.” And you’d be like, “What does that mean?” And you’d be like, “Oh, that’s my name.” Which is almost exactly what happened with Shawn Bolz, right? Yes, so if you guys listened to the first four episodes, you know Shawn Bolz is the one who said that God was giving me to my ex. They are very similar types of prophets. Shawn Bolz was very like charismatic, kind of like a showman, kind of thing. Your dad was very quiet, and he would talk in this voice that was like very serious, and you feel like the Holy Spirit is here. You know, whenever he was there.

So, I think two months before Shawn prophesied over me, your dad came to the school. And looking back, I mean, I really thought—I don’t know. I guess I thought that God was speaking to him and everything. At the time, I thought he was really legit. I had him on a huge pedestal because he was a big deal in these circles. And looking back, I noticed that he only called out the staff. So, he only called out the people who were working for the school. And me, being an intern, I got called out. And he had called me out. He said, “I heard Jubilee” or something like that. And then he said, “I see the gold place.” And what does that mean to you, the gold place? And I had no idea what he was talking about at the time, so that was kind of awkward. And then he started saying that God was going to build my physical and spiritual muscles. And I just realized this a couple years ago, because I really was trying to figure out where he got that from. But I used to go to Gold’s Gym, and I know that I had posted Gold’s Gym on my Facebook. He probably was like, “That’s it,” you know, saying, “I’m going to be a personal trainer” or something, because I think I had posted that maybe I wanted to do that at some point. And then what else did he do? He set a random date. He said, “Does that mean anything to you?” And to this day, I have no idea what that date was. I said, “No.” He said, “Well, it’s going to mean something to you.” And then he said that I needed to pray for Greg Popovich, who is the San Antonio Spurs coach, and I’m from San Antonio. So, you know, and we were in Pennsylvania at the time. So, the fact that he called out my home city’s coach and said, “You really need to intercede for this man,” and yeah, that was my word from your dad.

So, I think he must have gotten a list of all the staff members, you know? And that’s why we were all called out at that point. It’s such a—it’s such a good example too of what he would do because, I mean, he trained under Bob Jones, who was like very—I mean, I don’t want to diagnose people, but Bob Jones like definitely seemed like he had some real mental illnesses and like certainly had this one foot in reality, one foot out of reality. And my dad was kind of the same way. He was—and I mean, he still is—but in his prophecies, he would do a lot of this stuff where he would make a lot of connections that people wouldn’t understand. And it would come from these, like, he would Google or look at Facebook, or sometimes he would talk to— You were at the Banovs, right? Yes, so yeah. So, like, if we went to the Banovs, we would be with a host family, and like he would get the list of names of all of the staff, and then he would like talk with the host family and be like, “What do you think about Jubilee or this?” And maybe they would say, “Oh, I think she’s going to start, you know, a personal training business or something like that.” And he would write down those notes, but he wouldn’t really take a whole lot of time to think through some of this stuff. He would just kind of scattershot it, and from there, he would build stuff together. And so, a lot of times, he would do these performances, and people would be like, “I have legitimately no idea what you’re talking about.” And that’s so—’cause then you also kind of start to feel like, “Am I not holy, ‘cause I don’t really understand?” I know sometimes I would get prophetic words from—I got one from Bill Vanderbush too, and whenever I would get these prophetic words that didn’t make sense to me, I felt like something’s wrong with me. Like, I should have—I should understand what you’re saying, or at least that’s how it felt on my end, that I couldn’t put it together, you know?

Well, he would get mad at people. Like, we were at this—we were at a Bethel conference, and, um, he would prophesy to people who were international. Um, people who had come from all over. Like, that was—he—I don’t know why, but he, like, picked out the international people and people with interesting names, like, uh, because he could do good fun puns or something like that. So, even like when you first told your story, I was like, “Man, Jubilee, like that would 100% be a target.” He would like circle your name because it’s very memorable, and you could work it into different prophecies and stuff. So, there were definitely, like, types of targets that he would have. And if he was like, for international people who would come in—maybe they don’t speak English or they don’t, you know, it’s their second language or, um, there’s a lot of like idiomatic and weird phrasing that he would use, so a lot of people would just not get it, would not understand.

Or like if, you know, he says, “I’m looking for the 1839 woman,” people would be like, not even recognize that that’s their phone number. And what he would do, so at one of these conferences, he gave all of these different prophecies, and it wasn’t a very good performance because people weren’t like jumping up and shouting like, “It’s me! That’s me! Oh my God!” And then, like, weeping and falling over, which a lot of times they would do. That happened. Yeah, and so what he did is that he had—he originally asked me to do it, and I said that I wouldn’t. But he had one of the other ministers, um, who we were traveling with, get up and coach people how to receive a prophetic word. I have the footage of this too, like it’s… oh my gosh. He was like, “If you think that it’s about you, you have to jump up and raise your hand just so that I know that I’m doing the right thing.” The spiritual manipulation is crazy. I mean, yeah, that’s absolutely insane.

I mean, it’s absolutely insane. Yeah, and like, behind the scenes, I’m—for a while, I was like helping him. I didn’t realize what I was doing when I was younger, but I was helping him get this information. I would like, um, help him. I remember when I was really young, we went to a church, and this is when they still had, like, paper directories, and you could, like, look people up and find their addresses and phone numbers just by having the physical copy of the directory. And he had me, like, run and grab the directory from him, for him, and like bring it back to him, which is like, that’s just fraud. That’s just like a little kid at the time. Did you know why? Or it just didn’t really click?

So, he always talked about he needed the names, and he was pretty explicit about it behind the scenes. Of course, he didn’t ever preface before he did his performance that, like, “Okay, listen, I had these names,” or whatnot. But he was always very specific and almost required that, like, whenever he would go and minister to places, he would need the list of names so that he could pray over them. That was the whole thing. And, you know, looking back, I’m like, that’s obviously ridiculous, but I grew up with my dad’s prophetic ability being, like, something that was granted. Like, I never questioned it. It was just true. Just as, like, you grow up and you’re told, “My dad told me about how he was a college wrestler,” and I, like, never questioned whether he was a college wrestler because, like, he would wrestle around with people, and it’s like, of course that’s what he did, you know? And it just was a fact about who he was. There was never a moment where I, like, saw something and was like, “Oh my goodness, maybe my dad’s prophetic.” Like, I grew up with that being an attribute of him.

And so, when he would do these things like, “I need to, you know, get these names,” it was just like, it was a little bit of, like, “This is how the sausage is made behind the scenes,” and I knew that it was, like, not great. I felt kind of weird about it, but it felt like, well, this is just what all the prophets do. And that is, like, he was not like… and that was why it was like, everyone, you know, I don’t—I’m a 15-year-old who’s helping him put together these lists, and then I go and Bill Johnson is also helping him put together this list. And so I’m like, well, I don’t know better than Bill Johnson, so of course, this should be fine. And like, if they all know about it, then, yeah, everybody’s doing it. And I think, yeah, we’ll get more into that later, Bill Johnson and how—I mean, they knew that he was getting lists in advance, you know? And looking back at the Shawn Bolz thing, I mean, I’m sure they’re just looking at the registration of everybody who’s going to be at the conference because the reason they even called out my ex was because he had called out his friend the day before, and he wasn’t there.

But it’s like, well, why would Shawn call him out? Well, he called him out because he was registered, and he was supposed to be there, but then he didn’t show up, you know? So, he had to prophesy over him over the phone. And what you said about my name, I think that’s so true. I think that he probably was like, “Jubilee, oh, that’s a very fun word to give,” you know? And he led into it that way. “This is your year of Jubilee. What does that mean?” It’s right there, you know. Yeah, and that was the performance of it all, is how can you take this information that you had clearly gotten off, you know, online or just off of a registry and make it seem like God is giving it to you? So like, the phone numbers, it often wasn’t, “What does this number mean to you?” It was, “I saw this verse,” and often from the Psalms because Psalms have a lot of numbers. So, if it’s like, you know, Psalm 4:18, “You live off of 4:18, Cherry Street” or something like that, he would be like, “Psalm 4:18,” or he would pick Isaiah 4:18 or something like that where it was like spiritually significant, and then naturally, you know, significant.

And that was sort of like, the word in of itself could be a totally fine word. You could pray over someone and be like, “Oh, I saw this verse about you,” and it’s like, “Oh, okay, that’s a good generic, like Isaiah 60, arise and shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord shines upon you.” Like, you could say that and then be like, “Wait, hang on, 60:1, is that your address?” Or, “What does that number mean for you?” And then they’re like, “Oh, that’s my area code.” Or something. And then it becomes both a prophetic word in a very, like, ministering sense, and then it becomes also a spectacle, like a magic trick where it’s like, “Oh, man!” And people would get caught off guard all the time because you don’t realize what he’s doing until he kind of does it.

And a lot of times, if the audience was good, a lot of times the audience would help sell it because you just see people weep. I mean, I saw so many people double over in tears because of things that my father said that I knew for a fact weren’t real. And that was like such a wild experience growing up and having to, like, parse that out. And even now, I mean, part of the reason I didn’t speak up for a really long time about my father’s fraudulent activities is because, like, I didn’t want to be the person to come up to someone who had just gotten this, you know, great word and be like, “It’s not really true. He didn’t—or he had that information, like that didn’t come from God. God doesn’t know your name.” Or maybe God does know your name, but don’t use this as an indication that God knows your name because, you know, Bill Johnson knows your name because it’s on a list. Like, that’s all that happened there.

And I think your story is so powerful because, you know, it seemed like a very good thing on the onset. It’s like, “Oh, these people who are in love, you know, nice prophetic word.” And then it was like, “No, this is an abusive relationship that this fraudulent prophecy helped support and shows the corrosive consequences to deception.” Yeah, but when people haven’t seen the downside of it yet, it’s hard because you don’t want to crush their dreams if they feel like this is. Because one thing people who are not in these circles, you have to realize, is when you go to these conferences, you are desperate to be called out. You just want to know that God sees you. That in this massive group of people, God sees you as important enough for this prophet to pick you out.

So, it’s hard because on some of my videos, people have commented and said, you know, like, “I’m really sorry about what happened, but Shawn gave me a word that changed my life, and he’s great.” Or, you know, like, “He still is prophetic, and we’re just going to have to agree to disagree on that one.” But I think it’s hard because, obviously, it means something to you at the time, you know? And I think, especially in these circles, it’s difficult because everything is so overspiritualized. So for me, going back to when I got married, an exact year later from the day that I had prayed this prayer, I think something for me that I’ve really had to unpack is sometimes coincidences just happen, and things just happen. And the fireworks went off at the right time, and I thought that that was a sign from God. And you’re constantly just looking for these little confirmations from God because you want to know that you’re on the right track. So when you have somebody like Bob Hartley come in and, you know, say something that feels very meaningful to you at the time, I mean, you’re going to hold on to that very closely.

I was wondering, did he give directional words very much or things that could be tested or proven wrong, or were they kind of vague?

So, he was—he was less political. He was less directive than a lot of the other individuals, certainly Kansas City prophets. He tried, generally, to be very uplifting with it. And I think that’s how he excused it in his own head. And like part of the reason that I even excused it when I was in my, like, early 20s and started realizing that it was really fraudulent, it was like very generic. Just like, “God sees you and God cares,” and it’s like, who could—who could argue with that? It just seems like he—and there was one of the rules, um, I don’t—I don’t know if—obviously, this is not Shawn Bolz, didn’t stick to this rule, and none of these guys ever really stick to any rules, but like, it was explicitly stated—I remember Bob Jones talking about this. There was a rule that you cannot prophesy marriage within the community. Like, because that was like a no-no. And it was really interesting because I think that there needed to be—it’s like honor amongst thieves sort of thing of like, “We all know we’re in this, but this is like a little bit too far.” Because we can get in problematic territory. Not that it wasn’t all problematic, but like my dad tried to adhere to that, where he would try not to prophesy marriage. But then he did a few times, and like I know a couple who got divorced, and I don’t want to presume it’s anything like your situation where there was, you know, abuse or anything, but, you know, it—I know that that probably was incredibly difficult for them when they were deciding to separate, even if it was like a more healthy deciding-to-separate situation.

The weight of prophetic statements, um, even if you don’t— even if you take it with a grain of salt, that’s what everybody says: “Oh, I’ll take it with a grain of salt.” No, that’s just not what happens. That’s not what happens. If you believe it—if you believe in prophecy, those things weigh so much. Absolutely. And especially coming from these people who have such big stamps of approval, ‘cause that’s another thing that I get all the time, is people are like, “Well, you should have taken that to your spirit. That doesn’t mean that you should have followed that.” And I’m like, okay, guys, you know, because unless you’ve been in these circles and you know that these people are so idolized, they are supposed to be the direct connection to God, essentially. And if you feel like, “I have been praying that God is going to call me out,” and he finally did see me the one time at a conference that he saw me, now I’m going to disobey him? You know, like, yeah, you’re probably not going to do that, or at least not without a lot of wrestling internally. And Bethel did the same thing. They said no mates, dates, or babies. That was their little slogan—don’t prophesy those things. Yeah, but they did. They did. And, you know, I think I loved what you said, how you were like, it’s almost like this little nod of, maybe we kind of know what we’re doing, but that’s too far. Because say this is all real, okay? Say the prophetic and all of this is real. Why would God—like, are we telling God what to tell us, right? Because does God know these rules? Does God know, “No mates, dates, or babies”? You know? Um, and also, why no dates? I find that so funny because that’s something that could be fact-checked. Do you know what I mean? So, let’s stay away from things that are certain, ‘cause everything’s kind of just up here and, “God really loves you,” you know?

Well, and I think it could be fact-checked, but also, I think that it was like people were being abused behind the scenes so rampantly with prophecy. Like, prophecy was being used to coerce typically vulnerable women into relationships with the prophets, and whether sexual relationships or whether, like, romantic relationships. I have seen pretty much every prophet use prophecy to try to sexually or romantically exploit vulnerable women. And so, I think that some of Bethel—I think there are people who know what’s going on, who still have some measure of consciousness—like, or of a conscience—and recognize that they’ve seen these go horribly for people. Like, seen people like Bob Jones do some really horrific stuff and been like, “Okay, we need to put boundaries on our profits.” But what’s crazy is that it really then just is put on the students. It’s not really even like…

My dad prophesied to Bill Johnson. The last time I saw my dad prophesy to someone was—this was not long ago—but it was all about giving him prophetic permission to remarry or pursue another woman after Beni Johnson died. So it’s just like, as much as they talk about these rules, and those rules probably come from a sense of like, “We’ve seen horrific things happen,” no one takes it seriously. None of the leadership takes those rules seriously. Yeah, no. So when was it that you really started to realize for sure that you knew that your dad was being fraudulent? Because obviously, things felt a little uncertain with the “grab the list of names” and everything like that, but when were you like, “Oh no, this is not real”?

Yeah, so, I mean, there never was a time in my life where I didn’t realize some of it was production. I mean, my dad was a storyteller, and a lot of the stories that he told were just, like, frankly, not true. And so I knew there was always that sort of twisting of truth. But I think when I was like—where it flipped, where I was like, “My father is a con artist. Like, he built his world off of a con,” was when I was probably, I was like 27, or 26, and he tried to prophetically manipulate me. He had a bunch of information about me that he tried to leverage to get me to do something for him, and that’s where I was like, “I think that that sort of, like, violating of my own personal boundaries really opened up my eyes to how horrible it is, and how, like, unchecked my father had become.”

So, when did that happen? Or how? What, how did that occur?

Uh, yeah, okay. So, so my parents were separating, so it was—and my sisters and I had started really putting boundaries over my dad. My dad had just all sorts of issues that don’t even have to do with his prophecy or anything like that, just, you know, a lot of narcissistic, abusive traits. And my family was like really starting to be like, “Yeah, no more.” My mom had, like, separated from him, and, um, which I was so proud of her for doing. Like, that is so difficult to do. Did she get backlash when she made that decision? Oh, 100%. She was good about it, where she was kind of like, “I don’t…” I think the primary backlash was in her own head. And once she was able to like separate herself from, like, the internalized voice of, you know, whatever her community had, like, told her about divorce, once she was able to, like, come to that on her own, she did a good job. But yeah, absolutely, like, there were several community members who have now since apologized to her for trying to, you know, keep the marriage together at all costs while not addressing any of the issues that she was, like, talking about with my dad. But, um, but that’s a whole other story. But just to put it in context, my dad is in this place where he’s like really feeling like he’s losing control of his family, which he absolutely was. And he and I had had a rockier relationship, but I was always the person who was the closest to my dad throughout, I mean, pretty much my entire life. And so even when things were rocky with us, like, I would still try really hard to keep and maintain a relationship with him.

So, during this time, I’m also going back to school or going to real school for the first time. And I was at the University of Missouri Kansas City, and I was doing some writing for philosophy. A philosophy class that I was in. And, um, long story short, basically wrote a paper for one of these classes that talked about, um, a sort of philosophical perspective of faith, and, um, I had read some Kierkegaard. And anyway, the point in it—like, I very much was questioning my faith in that paper and dealing with some of the issues of faith that I was, you know, dealing with internally in that paper. And it was just like a small assignment that I was giving for like a writing credit. It wasn’t like this big, you know, thesis dissertation or some—or thesis or dissertation. It was just like just a single paper. And I sent it in to my professor. I literally handed it in to my professor, and then about two weeks later, my dad says that he wants to meet with me. And so we meet at a coffee shop, and he comes into the coffee shop, and he’s all, uh, beleaguered. Like, he literally had shaved one half of his face and forgot that he had not shaved the other. And there’s a lot of moments like that where he would just be like mad prophet vibes. Yeah, kind of disheveled. Yeah, and he leaned into that. And like, the world ate that up. The Christian world, or the charismatic world, ate that up.

Why do you think that is? I think so, Bob Jones was like that. I think it’s this, like, mad prophet from the hills vibe. And I like, you know, the John the Baptist God of this world. Yeah, John the Baptist ate locusts and like, you know, didn’t really have a home. And I think there’s this sort of like aesthetic of this person who is like so beyond our world, you know? It’s like, rejects societal norms. Exactly, yeah. Doesn’t, uh, kind of mad scientist vibes too. Brilliant for their own, to be able to like, put their shoes on straight, you know?

Which I think is so funny. I mean, it just shows that these people often have two different worlds going on. So, over here, he’s being so esteemed, and people think that he is this prophet vibe going on. But your family—y’all have seen behind the scenes. So, you guys see straight through this. You’re not like, “Oh my gosh, my dad.” You’re just seeing, okay, he didn’t shave half of his face, and things are pretty rough right now. And yeah, and like, I have to take care of that. Like, I especially when we were traveling, like, he legitimately could not pack his own suitcase. He—and whether he was doing it performatively because he didn’t want to and he wanted his children to or whatever, but like, he couldn’t feed himself. There were a lot of things where he just like, again, he either couldn’t or would choose not to, because he definitely leaned into this sort of vibe and mentality too. And everybody else on the outside would be like, “Wow, he’s got this mystique about him.” And I’m like, I have to make his food and pack his suitcase, and this is so stressful. I’m having to travel with him. And he was drinking to—this is a whole different thing, but like, he would get, like, six packs of, um, beer, and he would drink them.

So, literally, this conference that we were doing—that I was telling you about earlier—that was at, um, Bethel. He would speak at that conference, and then we were staying at Heidi Baker’s house, which was like 40 minutes away. And he would finish prophesying, and then we’d go get in the rental car. He would drive to a gas station, get a six-pack of beer, and then he would drink them while driving, like, 90 miles per hour to Heidi Baker’s house until I, like, I literally had to, like, physically take the keys from him. I was much smaller than him for most of my life. He’s a big or stocky dude, and I literally would have to like get in physical fights to take the keys from him while we just had this conference. Like, while he just gave these prophetic words.

So this, like, when he would come in disheveled, where he’s only, um, shaving half of his face—I mean, much of my role from like, honestly, like, 12 on was to take care of my father. And so, like, you’re like parenting him. Yeah, for sure. Like, and that was always the thing, is that, like, the roles reversed. Like, he would come to me for advice. He would—it wasn’t the other way around. Like, I was the parent in that relationship. Other than having the authority, like, he would still get angry at me and tell me what to do, but like, I would have to check on him. And when he—when my parents separated, this was especially the case, where I was like, I have to go to his house and make sure that all of his medication is in order and that he’s going to, like, take care of himself and he’s not going to, like, drink and drive and do these different things.

Going back to the drinking and driving, and, you know, getting drunk after the conferences and stuff, how do you feel like he justified that to himself? Like, do you think that he knew that he had a problem? And did he know—like, I mean, I guess he knew that he was conning people. What do you think he thought of himself?

Yeah, there was—I mean, there were two things that we never talked about, and it was alcohol or just substance abuse and prophetic abuse. Like, we would talk around it, and he would, at times, be, like, deeply remorseful for the things that he did, but always in a way that he couldn’t actually say it. He would be like, um, there were times where he would, like, admit to cheating on prophecy, where he would, you know, and he—and he would always be like, “Oh, but they just want so much from me.” And it’s like, “Well, just tell them that you’re not going to do it anymore.” But, you know, it—um, but yeah, but alcohol—like, we never, not one time in my life was I able to talk to him about that, and he was able to say it out loud and recognize it. He would, like, kind of do like, I would be like, “You cannot drive. You cannot drink and drive.” And I, uh, I confronted him about that so many different times. And recently, he just, like, five months ago, he broke both of his legs because he was drunk and drove off into a ditch. And that’s a whole different story. Oh my god. Yeah, but getting back to the coffee shop, so he comes into this coffee shop, and I can tell he’s disheveled, and like, right away, he starts prophesying to me. Like, there’s no “Hey, how you doing?” He’s like, “Let me jump right into it.” And basically, he tells me right away that, like, I’m falling away from the Lord and that God is calling me to repent and that—that I was falling away from the Lord and that I needed to repent and turn back to the Lord. I mean, it was very like this, you know, intense thing. And then he said, “I saw you, I had a dream where you were asking questions with a professor Swallwell,” and he, like, spelled out the name of my professor. And then he went on to reference very specific, like, Kierkegaardian notions that I had, like, talked about in the paper. And he was like, “I had a dream of, and saw all of this happening.” And I still remember that moment where I just got, like, chills down my spine because I had no idea how he knew that information. And I felt, I mean, immediately like my fight-or-flight was triggered, where, like, I—I felt like he was gonna—it’s hard to describe, but like, I felt like he was going to attack me.

Because he was very physically abusive when I was, especially when I was younger, until I got old enough to kind of fight back on some of that. And it was really weird because, like, before he would hit me when I was a child, I could see his tells. And I could see when he was getting in this, like, “I am going to abuse you” mode. It’s really hard for me to describe, but I think other people who have been with abusive individuals know that, where everything just slows down and you’re like, “Are we going to fight, or is this—are you going to hit me or are you going to do this?” And I’m, like, in the middle of a coffee shop, ready to, like, get in a physical fight with my own father. And of course, like, I take a deep breath. He’s like, “Does this mean anything to you?” And I’m like, “No.” And actually, I have to go. I just, like, get up, don’t give him anything, get up and leave.

And then for about—I go home, and I, like, am tearing through my entire, like, I literally tore my apartment apart because I wanted to find that physical copy of the—I had turned in the paper and then had it turned back to me. And I was like, “Did I, you know, leave it somewhere? Put it in my backpack? Leave it at his house when I was there?” Like, did he get the physical copy? And then I was like, “Maybe, you know, I just—I handed it to my professor, but maybe my professor put it on, like, turnitin to see if plagiarism or anything like that?” So, is it online? I’m like Googling everything that I can. I’m like, if you Google my name, does somehow my class show up? You know, I’m just… It’s so violating because you have no idea how he gained this access to you. I feel like I’d be ripping my apartment apart and thinking, “Are there cameras? Did you set up something? How do you know where this came from?” You know, so…

It’s scary. I was talking with my sisters about it, and they were like, “Um, did he—did he hire a private investigator?” Like, that was sort of what I started feeling like it was. Is that I was being followed or, or he— you know, IHOP is not a small world, and like, there is a very connected church. And so I’m like, “Is there someone in my class who is, like, feeding him information?” And I remember talking with my professor and, like, asking him, and he was like, totally—he had zero idea how to handle that conversation, which makes sense.

Well, this is like spiritual psychological warfare going on here. I mean, this is so abusive, you know? Because it makes you question everything. You don’t feel safe at school. You don’t feel safe in your apartment. You know, you’re like, “What the heck is going on? Is someone following me?” I mean, that’s ridiculous, you know? And no part of you right thought that this could be from God?

Well, this is what’s crazy is like, I… no and yes. Like, no in the, like, my logical brain was like, absolutely not, but my entire history had been, I had been groomed to believe that my father had, you know, had this ability. And, like, it was like, well, maybe he does have the ability, and he’s still, like—he—it could be both. And that’s what a lot of people, I think, believe. It’s what a lot of people say about Shawn, yeah, is that, like, it’s both. He’s just under pressure, and he, you know, cheats sometimes. Or, going back to, um—I don’t want to get too off-topic, but I know you’ve talked about the hamburger helper analogy, which… do you want to explain that real quick?

Uh, yeah, sure. So, one of the things that he would talk about and that, um, Bob Jones would talk about, and Mike Bickle would talk about, and just a lot of these prophets would talk about is this notion of hamburger helper, and they gave it that term. Because the idea was that, like, the meat was coming from God, but like there’s a little seasoning, a little extra, that is being added to the dish to, um, make the full meal. So, it’s like the main substance comes from God, but we sprinkle on a little bit extra to help with it. And it wasn’t—it wasn’t said in a way that, like, it wasn’t condoned or it wasn’t encouraged, but it was like implicitly condoned because it was like, we all kind of do this, you know? It’s all something, like, it’s like a prophetic boys’ club, you know?

Right, exactly. It’s the same way that, like, they would talk about, like, uh, masturbation or something like that behind the scenes, you know, where it’s like, we shouldn’t do this, we should keep—but, you know, sometimes people will. It’s better than sometimes. Yes, yeah, very consequentialist of like, well, if it keeps you from not cheating on your wife, then, you know, you got to… Yeah, but, and that was how it kind of was. It’s like, well, if, you know, you help—it helps convince people that God is good, then it’s good. But like, ideally, you don’t do it and stuff.

So, the question then for me was like, but does he have the ability to divine specific information, like addresses and phone numbers? Like, is that some—or in my context, like, the name of my professor? Could he have gotten that? Like, he could be intuitive, and he could have come and prophesied, like, “I believe the Lord’s telling me that you’re asking these deep questions.” And like, he could have just gotten that intuitively. And fine, whatever. I mean, that’s still manipulative, but that’s a different topic. But it’s—it’s like, is he able to do the magic tricks? That was the big question. And I remember calling my mom, which again, they were separated at this point. And one of the reasons that she, like, separated with him, among many others, was because he was like, she couldn’t stand that he was doing all these, like, fraudulent— all this fraudulent [ __ ] with the prophecy. And I remember talking with her and her being like, “I don’t know, buddy.” And she was like, “I mean, maybe, maybe it isn’t.” She didn’t say, “from God,” but she was like, “Maybe it is supernatural.” And this sort of, like—and her point was like, even if it is, that doesn’t mean that it’s of good fruit. Like, that it’s right. And that was super eerie too because I was like, does my dad talk to demons? Like, that was another thing I was dealing with in that time.

But yeah, so… oh, go ahead.

Well, I was going to say, I mean, even Bethel, they would acknowledge that maybe psychics were legit—they’re speaking to different spirits. So, this idea of, “Well, maybe it really was supernatural from your dad, but that doesn’t mean it was a good spirit,” you know? So, yeah, that is eerie, ‘cause you’re like, is he demonically possessed, you know?

Yeah, and especially when he’s in that, like—I felt, um, and like even now, looking at it, like, I don’t think he was demonically possessed. Like, I don’t believe and have that same, like, terminology. But in some senses, like, I do believe he was in a very, like, wicked spirit. And, you know, like, I think that’s similar to, like, when he would physically abuse me as a kid. Like, that’s what I was picking up when he was doing this prophecy, is that he had just become very unhinged, and he was doing something that was, like, deeply violating to me. But the question of, like, where did he get this information was just like—I was so desperate for an answer. And for like two weeks, I had no idea. And it legitimately was like driving me insane. And so, I went to his house to help him clean and to help him organize his medication. And I…

Meanwhile, in my head, I’m, like, so angry with him and so, like, feel unsafe with him because I don’t know what’s going on. But I’m having to put on this sort of show as if everything is fine, because I want to get to the heart of what’s going on. And so I go over to his house, and I am helping him with some stuff, and basically, I find an excuse to leave the sort of area that I’m helping him and hanging out with in, like, the family room, and I go into his office. And I go to his computer. And I didn’t recognize it at first, but I later recognized that it was the same computer that I had once used because I had worked for him in the past. And he had, like, an office, and he had several computers. And this was, like, my computer that I had used. And then I turn on the computer, and all of my information—so I had bank account information, I had emails, I had text threads with my partner at the time, like PDFs—all of this was on the desktop. It wasn’t even, like, in a folder or anything like that. All of my information from, like, present time—not from, like, when I was using the computer—was there, right there on the desktop. And so was my paper. And what I realized is, I logged into—or I opened up Chrome. And what had happened is, when I was using that computer four or five years previously, I had, like, logged into the Chrome keychain, and it was like, not only updating my password for Chrome, but it was updating my password for everything. Like, it had all of my safe passwords, and it was, like, a trusted device. And I just had, like, forgotten that I had used it. And so, I’m sure he had been using it and realized that he could log into all of my stuff. And because it was a trusted computer, I wasn’t getting any, like, notifications that you logged in from a specific area. And so, he was logging into my bank account, he was logging into, um, my, uh, account on my UMKC account. He was— I had, like, iMessages that he had been looking at, looking at, like, my text to my partner. And then, of course, which is so violating. I mean, the idea that he’s reading your personal text messages in real time… I can’t even imagine. And some of those text messages might even be you asking your siblings, “How would dad have known this stuff?” I mean, like, he could have been reading all of that as you’re trying to figure this out. That’s horrible.

I mean, when it had happened, I stopped texting people about it because I was like, “I think he has access to my phone.” And so I called, you know, because I was like… but yeah, it was extremely violating. And seeing it, I—it was—I will say, in that moment, it was very relieving because, like, I finally had the information to, like, I knew that he had done that, and it was like the final thread of me being like, “Yeah, he’s a con artist. Like, this is… this man’s just a con artist, and he doesn’t have boundaries. Like, he would try to con his own son.” And I did a factory reset of the computer. I knew that he had information that was important to him on that computer. I didn’t care. I was like, I love that, you know? I did a full factory reset on the computer. I walked out, uh, and I confronted him. I was like, “I saw what was on, uh, the computer.” He tried to—“Oh, buddy.” You know, I’m not good at this. He has a very deep, gravelly voice. But he’s like, “Ah, you know, I’m not good at, uh, online stuff.” And that was always his excuse. Like, when people were like, “Oh, you’re looking up stuff online,” he’s like, “Oh, I’m just not good. I’m tech.” He would say that he was technologically embarrassed or technologically illiterate. And it’s like, dude, I just saw all of these things on there. Like, I—I didn’t even have to go looking.

So many conversations I would have with my father would be very weird, where it’s like, I know you’re lying, and I know you know I know you’re lying. And he’s still sticking to it, still gaslighting, and he’s like, “No, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” It’s right here. You know? But he just wouldn’t, because I think that would really just tear down the whole Jenga of it all if he were to admit to that. So, it’s like deny, deny, deny. And I think a lot of these prophetic people, it’s hard because they’re probably being told, “Just never admit it.” And who can truly prove it? You know, I feel like that’s one thing with Shawn—it’s just like, well, as long as you don’t admit it, you know, then, I mean, how could they say for sure that you’re not hearing from God?

Well, and I think that’s why, to some extent, some of my—and not like I don’t want to overvalue my testimony—but like, because I was his son, I saw all of these things firsthand. I can literally testify in a court of law if we needed to. And that’s why, like, he threatens to sue me and he threatens other people, you know, but it’s like, he never would because like, I have all this information. Yeah, I have—I have the emails from, like, him to Bill Johnson asking for the names before the prophetic conferences. Like, I have some of the prophetic words that were sent to me that I printed out and put in his notebook. Like, I was there. I was a part of the grift, you know? Not always consciously, and like, you know, I was a kid. But like… yeah. And that is what’s crazy, because, like, for people like Shawn Bolz and others, it’s like, unless literally they’re betrayed by a family member or someone in their really close circle, they will never have proof, even though it’s so clear and obvious that this is what’s going on.

And I think that’s why I’m, like, really wanting to speak out against my dad, and not just against my dad, but like, Shawn Bolz is 100% playing from the same playbook. It’s like, you know, if you grew up with your parent being a magician, and then someone else is doing their act, you’re like, “This is the same act. I know I’ve seen this act. I’ve seen how it happens behind the scenes.” And like, Shawn Bolz has his iPad out and is like—like the whole time. He has it right there. He’s not… so people call him the iPad prophet, you know? Because it’s a great term for him.

And I think what’s so icky and sad, and the reason why your story and just people in general speaking out against this, I’m glad that it’s gained traction in this last year, um, is because these other prophets are not going to call out other prophets, because they’re doing the same grift. So, like, when it comes to their attention, they just publicly or they silently distance, but they don’t actually call it out because if you did that, it would mean kind of calling yourself out. So, it’s all very hush-hush, you know? And I wanted to get into Bethel. Oh my gosh, you’re amazing because you were like, “Bill Johnson, this is a problem.” Because at that point, didn’t you still have faith in Bill Johnson?

And that’s where we’re going to pause for part one of this conversation with Jediah Hartley. There is so much more to unpack, and you won’t believe, or maybe you will, the amount of cover-ups that have taken place in these circles. And part two is also going to be dropping today, so head over to part two now, and I will see you there.