DAVIS: How I Investigated a Secretive Bible College

When I started investigating the drama surrounding the Woodland Park school board in late spring of last year, the elephant in the small mountain town’s room was difficult to ignore: the Bible college and international ministry organization which had relocated its world headquarters to a massive compound just outside of the scenic hamlet’s downtown. The same Bible college and ministry whose leader, Andrew Wommack, told his followers in 2021 that they “ought to take over” the town – and which had then taken steps to do so. It did not take long for me to realize that Wommack’s organizations were heavily involved in the local feuding over school politics, or that their influence on the town stretched far beyond the classroom. 

Despite Wommack’s obvious importance to the situation in Woodland Park, I don’t think I would have believed you if you had told me last spring that I would spend the next 15 months asking questions about him, and pursuing answers to those questions. I definitely would not believe you if you had told me that the pursuit would eventually lead me to interview sources in five countries, spread across three continents, or that I would ultimately write and publish the first-ever investigative report looking at the globe-spanning ministry empire. 

But that’s just what happened. That series, “Fire on the Mountain: Inside a Secretive Colorado Bible College,” was published in the Colorado Times Recorder last week. It details what sources say is a culture of silence, abuse, and manipulation within the Bible college and ministry, in the words of nearly two-dozen sources who have lived it. But the existence of that series, that first-ever perforation in the bubble of secrecy surrounding the global ministry, is not a testament to my doggedness as a reporter and researcher – as much as I’d like to claim that it is. Rather, it is a testament to the boldness and resilience of the sources who came forward to speak with me, often needing to overcome years of programming and abuse in order to do so. And, as much as I’d like to pretend that I cleverly orchestrated the entire thing, a chess player moving pieces around a board, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, the series, the most intense and emotional deep-dive reporting I have ever done, came together almost by accident. 

This is the story of how it happened.

Rabey’s work on Wommack has been extensive, and was invaluable to my own reporting on the community, but even his excellent reporting did not satisfy my curiosity. If anything, it amplified it. Every thread dangling into the public record from the hem of Wommack’s garment gave me a sensation that any researcher knows well, but each experiences differently (for some, it’s a prickling on the scalp or the back of the neck, though I experience it more as a weight on the solar plexus): the intangible certainty that there’s something more here. 

With no real access inside the community, though, I struggled to pursue my gut instinct that there was a larger story to be told about Charis Bible College and Andrew Wommack Ministries (AWMI). Every thread I pulled on came loose, leading me nowhere. Then a series of unplanned events occurred which left me not just with more threads to pull, but with proverbial balls of yarn unspooling themselves in front of me. 

The first unplanned event which started the unraveling of the ministry’s secrecy came in September. AWMI’s Senior Vice President, Andrew Wertz, submitted an op-ed to the Colorado Times Recorder taking issue with the piece I had written about Wommack’s involvement in the grappling around the Woodland Park school board. The Times Recorder ran Wertz’s op-ed, and thought nothing more of it. On the other side of the country, though, someone’s long-dormant Google news alert was triggered by our publishing of the name “Andrew Wertz.” Within a week, I had received emails from three people – including Wertz’s sister-in-law – telling me a shocking story: Andrew Wertz, they alleged, had been their cult leader in Pennsylvania three decades ago. And so, as can happen when one receives such fascinating emails, I spent the next five months investigating the Narrowgate cult, and the man who had led it. In March of this year, that investigation culminated in a story titled “Bad Faith: The Narrowgate Cult.”

The months I spent pursuing the Narrowgate story were not a detour from my interest in Wommack’s ministry empire, though. How could they be, when the man I was learning so much about – the man who my sources said had controlled their lives for years – was currently serving in the upper echelons of Wommack’s ministry? How could I stop thinking about what was going on within the walled confines of that compound outside of downtown Woodland Park when Narrowgate survivors spent months telling me not only that they had informed AWMI of Wertz’s past two years prior, but that Narrowgate was originally based on Wommack’s teachings? I told myself that I would redouble my efforts to find sources with experience inside Wommack’s community when I was done with the Narrowgate story. But in January, six weeks before I published my Narrowgate piece, that plan was knocked off the rails by the second in the series of unplanned events: instead of finding a source, a source found me.

On Tuesday, January 23, I received an email out of the blue from a former Charis student. “I’d be happy to assist in any way I can by sharing my own stories and personal experience of living there and attending Charis,” he wrote. “I have lots to share.” Still sorting through all the Wommack-related threads hanging from the Narrowgate skein, I suddenly found myself with the chance I’d spent months looking for: the chance to learn more about what’s happening behind Wommack’s walls. I set up a call with the student who had emailed me. The first time we spoke, we spoke for four hours. Then we scheduled another call for the next day. 

Things were beginning to line up. I was learning more about Charis and AWMI from my new source every day, eager to finish the Narrowgate story and get back to work investigating Charis. But I knew it would be an uphill struggle: I had one off-record source, and nothing else. Still, it was a start. Just over a week after receiving that first email, though, the third unplanned event occurred, and the yarn started unspooling faster than I could keep up with it.

The great irony of reporting “Fire on the Mountain” is that the third in that series of unplanned events, the one which really sent the dominoes falling, was orchestrated by Charis itself.

On February 2, I drove to Woodland Park to speak to a crowd at the local library which, for whatever reason, had gathered for the express purpose of listening to me deliver remarks on Christian nationalism (Woodland Park is a wonderful town, but perhaps lacking in nightlife). When I arrived, I found that turnout had been bolstered by a few dozen protesters from Charis. Though the library had offered to keep the protesters out of the presentation, I invited them into the room, and gave them plenty of time to speak during the Q&A. Afterwards, I had great conversations with many folks who had turned out with the initially aggressive protest crowd. 

I don’t know if what happened next was a result of my name circulating in Charis circles as the protest was planned, or if it was spurred by the presentation – and protest – making the local news. Whatever spurred it, though, the protest opened the floodgates. I started receiving emails from new sources. Those new sources, and the source who had initially reached out to me in January, started suggesting other people for me to reach out to, and the thread kept unspooling.

I spent months this spring having long, difficult conversations with sources who had given years of their lives to Andrew Wommack’s work, as Charis students, AWMI employees, or both. As we spoke, the raw curiosity which had driven my interest in Wommack and his community evolved into concern. That concern was not driven by the stories any single source shared with me as much as it was driven by the similarities between the stories all the sources shared with me. Stories of emotional manipulation and psychological abuse. Stories of physical abuse gone unaddressed. Stories of a culture in which the sick are often blamed for their own illnesses, and the abused find themselves blamed for their abuse. They told me about a community which they each independently felt had turned down a dark path in recent years. In many cases, they told me those stories despite fear of retribution, despite fearing that their friends and family members who still follow Wommack might ostracize them for it. And they told me those stories in the hope, however slim, that their voices might break through to people still involved in Wommack’s community and resonate there.

Those stories – the difficult ones, the ones most representative of everything my sources told me – can be read at length in “Fire on the Mountain.” The first part of the 3-part series focuses on the school-and-ministry’s culture, which one source described as “cruel and harsh at its core.” The second part looks at the ministry’s “prosperity Gospel” claims of health and wealth, and the dark side of those claims. Finally, the third part in the series looks at claims of widespread domestic violence in the community, and tells the story of a young woman who was murdered by her husband after being encouraged to stay in her abusive marriage.

But these difficult realities about life inside the closed-off compound are not the only things I learned about Charis. I learned a lot about the people there, too, much of which challenged my assumptions and complicated any attempt I could have made to use a broad brush to describe them. The members of Wommack’s community are not monolithic. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that they are significantly more diverse than the average Colorado community, across the categories of age, race, national origin, and socioeconomic tier. Charis students are 17 years-old and 77 years-old. They are Americans joined by Canadians, Ugandans, and students from a dozen other countries. They are Ivy League-educated attorneys rubbing elbows in classrooms with recently sober meth addicts. And, despite what they may now be involved in, none of them came to Charis to participate in the kinds of difficult stories and bad behavior my sources shared with me. Almost all of them came for noble reasons: to better themselves, to seek understanding, and to deepen their belief in the God of their chosen faith. In many cases, it is the earnest pursuit of those noble motives which has kept them there, and convinced them to ignore the red flags and the ringing alarms. 

There has been no official response to my reporting from the school or ministry, and I have not received any emails in defense of Wommack or his organizations. I have, however, received dozens of emails from former Charis students and former AWMI employees in the last week. More often than not, those emails have been heartbreaking: stories of mistreatment, manipulation, and outright abuse. Stories from as recent as last year, and as long as 20 years ago. As I read through them, I was once again struck by the overlap, by what they all had in common. The same wounds my sources took such pains to describe to me. Sources – I realized as I read through the emails – who, by the act of speaking, let others know that they are not alone. 

“It’s heartbreaking to hear that we had such a similar experience,” one woman who emailed me wrote, referring to one of the sources in the series, “yet it’s somehow comforting to know that I’m not alone.”

Wommack’s former followers are not the only people I have received emails from in the last week, though. I also received a handful from Woodland Park locals, folks who have only ever known Charis as an entity intent on taking over their town. For better or worse, with the way the town’s inflamed local politics have unfolded over the past three years, many longtime locals have been set against Wommack’s flock, and vice versa. They have been on opposite sides of school board races, city council races, local ordinance fights and tax decisions. In accordance with human nature as much as with local circumstances, both factions in the fight over Woodland Park have come to see themselves as factions, as an Us and a Them. 

I’m not here to say that’s wrong, or that the fight is over nothing. I’m not here to say “why can’t we all just get along?” or “they’re not so different after all.” I do not believe that’s an accurate portrayal of what is happening in Woodland Park, and simple truisms often do more to hide the truth than reveal it. One of the lessons I’ve taken away from the time I spent working on this series, though, is that people are more complicated than the flags they fly; that there might be an Us and a Them but that each contains multitudes; and that individuals can often find overlap where entities cannot.

So it warmed my heart when I received emails from locals last week showing that many of them were ahead of me in reaching that conclusion. “If you communicate with any of the sources from your latest articles,” one wrote, “please tell them that there are people here to love and support them.”

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Read Fire on the Mountain: Inside a Secretive Colorado Bible College at these links: [Part I] [Part II] [Part III]