John Leong had a decision to make. The finances were a mess: the ministry was underwater after its latest land acquisition, and no one else in leadership seemed to take that fact into account. In an organization seized by the need to expand at all costs, the $18 million debt on the balance sheet was treated as an abstract problem. As Chief Operating Officer for Andrew Wommack Ministries (AWMI), John saw it in more concrete terms. Instead of dialing back their projected spending or slowing Charis Bible College’s desired rate of expansion, though, a new board member had proposed a riskier idea: selling investment opportunities to Wommack’s loyal followers.
“Personally, I didn’t want to be involved,” John told me when we spoke, our faces and voices carried to each other by video call over the breadth of the Pacific Ocean. Despite the night sky outside my window, it was a bright morning for John in Australia. “I thought, ‘I don’t want my name on this because I don’t feel this is correct.”
The proposal to sell securities to non-accredited investors – those who don’t meet the income or net worth requirements established by the SEC to protect small investors from complex or predatory schemes – was not the first time John wondered what he had gotten himself into when he joined the ministry.
Like many prosperity preachers, Andrew Wommack has built a sizable portion of his own brand around health and wealth, and the promise that he can teach his followers to receive those blessings through faith.
Wommack tells his followers that he will teach them how to achieve wealth, even as much of his ministry’s wealth comes from them. “God is the One who gives us power to get wealth,” Wommack teaches. “Financial prosperity isn’t God giving you money. He gives you an anointing that enables you to prosper,” he wrote. “The real asset is not the money. …It is the anointing from God to produce wealth.”
But there is a subtle and effective sleight-of-hand in the message: the best way to receive that anointing, Wommack teaches, is by giving money to his ministry.
“Those who don’t give financially to the work of the gospel will not have God’s financial blessings in their personal lives,” Wommack said. “On the other hand, those who do give to the work of the Lord will have an abundant harvest of finances.”
Prowling the stage in bootcut jeans, soliciting much-needed donations at every turn, Wommack frequently touts his prowess as a healer, claiming that his teachings have not only kept him free from sickness for years, but that he has “ministered healing to multitudes.”
“I’ve seen the blind receive sight,” Wommack wrote in his 2010 book, God Wants You Well. “I’ve seen both totally and partially deaf people hear,” he claimed. “I’ve seen individuals who couldn’t even talk because their larynx was gone receive a miracle and start speaking in tongues.”
Other Wommack claims have gone further. “My own son was raised from the dead,” the evangelist frequently proclaims, telling the story of when his younger son, Jonathan Peter, overdosed in 2001. Wommack has variously claimed that his son was dead for four or five hours, that he had “turned black and blue,” and that he was in the morgue with a toe-tag on when he came back to life. He has not attempted to substantiate the claim with documentation, and Jonathan Peter Wommack does not appear to have ever publicly validated his father’s version of the story.
On an operational level at Charis and AWMI, the ministries of health and wealth are deeply entwined with each other. Healing is a central part of Wommack’s ministry, but it’s also a revenue stream for a ministry badly in need of cash flow.
The ministry has leveraged this self-built reputation for healing into a number of lucrative offerings. Followers who want to learn Wommack’s healing secrets can simply pay $499 for the Healing University DVD course. Or, for a more personal experience, they can attend the annual Healing Is Here conference. Those truly committed to harnessing the power of healing can attend Charis and enroll in the Healing Discipleship Program.
Charis students, already paying tuition, are frequently targeted for donations. “At the end of every chapel, there would be an opportunity for people to ‘sow into the kingdom,'” CJ, a Charis graduate who asked that we not use his last name, told me, referencing prosperity teachings on believers reaping what they “sow” by contributing to the ministry. “How could you not start to think, ‘Am I sowing into the kingdom of God, or the kingdom of Charis?'”
Representatives from Charis and AWMI did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
In the quest to monetize the healing claims and recruit students to Charis, though, sources say that the ministry has resorted to exaggerations and lies, all while ostracizing and abandoning students struggling with sickness, leaving some to die alone. And, despite his promise to help his followers generate wealth, Wommack’s ministry has struggled with tens of millions of dollars of debt in recent years, accrued in his breakneck quest to expand his operations at any cost. But, as Deborah McDermott told me, these facts are not unknown within the ministry; they are simply understood as the price of doing business
“From what I can see, Andrew Wommack believes that the ends justify the means,” she said. “He has a vision, and the vision has become more important than the people.”
Born into a Christian family, John Leong was raised in Malaysia and Singapore before moving to Melbourne in 1984 to work at a church planted by his uncle. After his stint as a youth pastor, he spent much of his career in business, eventually becoming the head of IT for Deloitte’s Asia-Pacific region. When his wife first suggested they move halfway around the world to attend Bible college in the Rocky Mountains, he could not even fathom it.
“I’m not moving my whole family – at that point with two kids – to a different country, where I’m not allowed to work, to attend a Bible college,” he thought. So they compromised, and both he and his wife enrolled in one of Charis’ first-year correspondence courses. They quickly became enamored with what they were seeing.
“At that point, Andrew seemed like a different kind of ministry from the outside.” Things escalated quickly. “From the time we started the correspondence course to the time we landed in Colorado was about 9 months.” John and his wife relocated to Colorado in September 2012, two young children in tow, to start their second year as Charis students on-campus.
After graduating in May 2014, the family returned to Australia just long enough to get their work visas organized, then hopped on a flight back to Colorado to begin working for the ministry. John’s experience in the business world was an asset other Charis leaders knew they’d need as the ministry expanded from a mom-and-pop operation to a global empire. He started as a project coordinator, then rose to become director of IT and, eventually, COO.
Despite his rise through the ranks, John quickly became uncomfortable with the ministry’s inner workings. “From the beginning, once I saw inside, I started getting concerned,” he told me. “But, only having experience in the corporate world and smaller churches, I gave it a lot of the benefit of the doubt.” He had come to Bible college for a reason, he told himself, trying to put his concerns to rest.
“I essentially said, alright, maybe I don’t know it all, maybe there are sides of this that I’m not seeing,” he said. “Maybe I’m too carnal, or not spiritual enough to understand.”
John was also concerned by aspects of the prosperity gospel message pushed by the ministry. Though Wommack himself is known to live frugally by the standards of prosperity preachers – his home in Florissant is valued at just over $500,000, according to property records – the other ministries John routinely interfaced with in his various roles left him unsettled.
“I’d be meeting with my counterparts from Kenneth Copeland Ministries and Creflo Dollar and stuff like that, and I used to ask them, how do you guys justify the use of private jets, right?” he told me. “And they would say, ‘Well, what’s the cost of a soul?’ And that’s just bullshit. The cost of a soul? A soul can be reached just as well on YouTube nowadays.”
John’s concerns did not diminish as he rose to the rank of COO and gained a full view of how the ministry operated, how managers scrapped with each other for power and influence, and for the source of those things: proximity to Wommack.
“These are the people who are intensely loyal to Andrew. These are the ones who would talk in meetings all the time about ‘Andrew’s heart,’” he told me, using a term I heard from many sources, internal parlance for signaling one’s closeness to Wommack and allegiance to his vision. “That phrase is so cultish.”
He was struck by the ministry’s willingness to exaggerate – even to exaggerate his own resume, repeatedly billing him as the “former CEO of Deloitte in Australia,” despite the fact that he never held that job, as he informed them many times.
“To them, I think the ends justify the means,” John told me. “The message that they sell is so valuable that, if they have to fluff things up a little bit, it’s justifiable. As long as the people hearing it believe it, it’s okay.”
As COO, John learned that the ministry’s penchant for exaggeration extended well into the finances.
Deborah McDermott had known about Charis for years before she moved to Colorado to enroll in classes at the school’s flagship campus in Woodland Park. With her son, Tim, she had attended some classes at the school’s Walsall, England campus. Once Tim started working for the ministry in the United States, and with her younger son hoping to attend a few years later, Deborah moved across the pond to establish a McDermott family foothold in the mountains.
“We are the sort of Christians that would be automatically attracted to a ministry that is overly charismatic,” Deborah told me. “We believe in speaking in tongues. We believe in healing.”
And Deborah did not just believe in healing: she’d seen it. As reported in the first part of this series, both of the McDermotts’ sons were diagnosed during their early years with symptoms of a developmental disorder. And both of them, after Deborah and her husband Christopher sought prayer and healing from several faith leaders – including Andrew Wommack – fully recovered from those symptoms in adolescence. Their diagnoses were rescinded. To the McDermotts, it was a miracle.
When Deborah arrived at Charis’ would-be city on a hill in Woodland Park, she realized that the story of her boys’ healing – their healing journey, in Charis lingo – made her someone worth knowing. “I was Miss Special,” she told me with something like an eye roll.
“There was this strange sort of class system that formed, where people who had seen miracles, or people who were financially successful – because we’re in full-on prosperity gospel mode here, as well – were seen as a cut above,” her son Tim told me. “There was status.”
Because Deborah’s faith, according to Wommack’s teachings, had healed her sons, she was quickly ushered into the in-crowd on the Colorado campus. But Deborah’s story was not just another healing journey to add to the list: because it was so well-documented, because the boys were both officially diagnosed and then later had those diagnoses officially rescinded, her story was valuable to the ministry.
“Because my mom had this healing testimony, we were known by everyone upstairs,” Tim told me, explaining how the family, and their story, were quickly co-opted by the ministry’s public relations machine and put to work as walking, talking advertisements for Andrew Wommack’s healing powers after Deborah arrived in Colorado. “We went to the conferences. We’ve been interviewed live. I’ve done branding and marketing stuff for the ministry. I’ve spoken in the little videos that they put out.”
At first, feeling that Wommack had played a meaningful role in their lives, the McDermotts were happy to be of use to the ministry. As their story started appearing in more and more promotional material for the organization, though, they were taken aback to find it stretched beyond recognition. Instead of a story in which Deborah, out of faith and desperation, sought prayer from all kinds of ministries and Christian leaders, it became a story in which Andrew Wommack personally healed the McDermott boys, and in which their condition was exaggerated.
“They have a tendency to exaggerate,” Deborah told me. “In their own minds, there’s obviously some leeway as far as the truth is concerned. And I think that leeway comes down to the ends justifying the means if they’re doing it for God.” Plus, she told me, “They’ll get away with it because they’re forgiven anyway.”
In the months since we first spoke, Deborah has recorded a series of videos sharing her story and explaining her decision to leave Charis.
During his rise to the ministry’s C-suite, John Leong also grew concerned about the healing ministry’s willingness to stretch the truth. “When I was there, they made a healing journey about someone who had passed away from the thing they were apparently healed of.”
I found the story John told me echoed in a 6-year-old blog comment by a woman identified only as Linette, who claims that the man who was featured in a healing journeys story after having died of his illness was her nephew.
“My nephew died 4-11-2018. He was a student at Charis Colorado. He died of cancer following this false teacher,” Linette wrote. In May of 2018, though, the “Charis web page posted a blog of my nephew claiming he was healed from stage 4 cancer and a 2nd year student working for AWM…They removed the article but first kept deleting our comments.”
Despite his death, Charis claimed that he had been healed, and used that claim in promotional materials, according to both John and Linette.
Put off by the exaggerations, the McDermotts opened their eyes a little wider, and came to understand the darker implications of Wommack’s healing message.
“The whole thing with the Word of Faith is that we have the power God has given us, the power to enact His will upon the earth. We are conduits, and our faith is the pipe system through which the power of God is taken into the world, right? So,” Tim explained to me, “if you have an illness and you are not seeing miraculous healing from it, it’s your fault. Because you don’t have enough faith.”
Wommack himself has declared that believers can “refuse to have cancer,” telling them, “Satan can’t make you sick without your consent and cooperation.” To be sick, then, is to be in collusion with the devil.
As the McDermotts became aware of the double-edged teaching, they also came to see the impact it was having on people in the community.
“There was this one lady who had some serious health difficulties, and she didn’t feel comfortable speaking to most people about it,” Tim told me. “She had a son who had been healed. They were a ‘healed family.’” She was concerned that if she admitted “that she had a sickness which wasn’t being healed automatically, a kind of social ostracizing might have happened.” She couldn’t risk going from being seen as blessed to being seen as cursed.
“I also saw a lot of self-ostracizing,” CJ told me. “People who were struggling basically removing themselves because they couldn’t handle that kind of rhetoric, that they were missing something, that they needed to dig deep in their soul or in their personal lives,” to find the root of their illness.
Despite spending nearly a decade with the ministry, John has serious doubts about the claims of miraculous healing. “I didn’t see a lot of the fruits of healing, the God Wants You Well type of thing,” he said, referencing one of Wommack’s books on healing. “The thing I can’t reconcile is that in seven years I never saw a healing.”
“All I know is what I saw,” he told me, “And I didn’t see any healing.”
In 2011, Andrew Wommack made a public pledge to build his ministry without going into debt. “I’ve made a decision not to go into debt. …I think that’s what God wants me to do,” he said. “If the money comes in, I’ll do it. And if it doesn’t, I won’t.”
When John Leong became COO of Andrew Wommack Ministries, he learned that Wommack had not kept that pledge. In 2017, Wommack set his eyes on the 336-acre property across the street from Charis’ Woodland Park headquarters, then owned and occupied by Sturman Industries, an aerospace company. They entered into a deal to buy the property for $21 million.
But they didn’t have $21 million.
“The way the Sturman property was purchased, Andrew would go online and say, ‘There’s no debt,’ right?” John told me. “But it’s just that it wasn’t a conventional mortgage. It was funded – sort of like owner-financed. The Sturmans essentially financed the deal because there were no other buyers.”
“Essentially what they were doing was paying a lease as payments towards the property. So that gave Andrew the ability to stand up there and say we’re not in debt,” John explained. “Which, look, that’s technically correct. But, ethically, it’s completely inaccurate.”
Plus, he told me, the ministry could not have gotten a loan if it had tried. “Their finances really weren’t strong enough for that. They were spending as much as was coming in.”
But the organization’s financial problems were not limited to the land deal – they were millions of dollars in the hole even before acquiring the Sturman property. According to a 2017 audit report, AWMI was already $3.7 million in debt by September of that year “as a result of…the organization’s expanding activities.”
Because of the nature of AWMI’s owner-financed deal for the Sturman property, they would not be required to disclose the new debt from the $21 million purchase — or acknowledge the broken pledge — until 2019, when it would actually appear as debt for the first time.
“The deal with the Sturmans was coming to an end and, basically, they were all of a sudden going to have to carry about $18 million of debt,” John said. “All of that would show up on the balance sheets.”
When Billy Epperhart was brought in as a new member of the board, though, he had a different idea: what if the debt, and the rest of the ministry’s financial information, was not available for public scrutiny? Epperhart, known in charismatic circles as a ministry finance whiz, was brought in to right the ship – but not by cutting spending. When Epperhart started at AWMI, John was struck to realize that he was less focused on fixing the budget than on protecting the ministry’s wealth and reputation. Under Epperhart’s guidance, the organization embarked on a corporate restructuring which John remembers as “The New Life Association debacle.”
“The moment Billy got involved, he was like, ‘You need to protect the assets,’” John told me. “The ministry is very asset-rich, so the aim was to protect the assets so that, if anything happens, no one can sue the organization and get the property.” So Epperhart proposed a new structure: gathering AWMI, Charis, and several of the organization’s ancillary arms under a new parent company named the New Life Association, effectively reclassifying the organization as a church association – a status that restricts the IRS’s ability to audit them. “All the property was moved to a different entity within that association.” The hundreds of acres which house the school and ministry are now owned by the New Life Holding Company, an entity that lists Jamie Wommack, Andrew’s wife, as its president.
As an added benefit: the reorganization would exempt Wommack’s organizations from the IRS requirement to publish their 990s going forward – the financial disclosure documents filed by nonprofit organizations. Under the new structure, the debt, but not its origin, would show up on the last public financials the ministry would be required to publish. After those last public disclosures were filed, the ministry would be able to enter a new era of financial opacity.
Until the reorganization, Charis and AWMI prided themselves on financial transparency. “I remember Andrew boasting really publicly in like 2015 about how transparent the ministry is,” Tim McDermott told me. “It was like, you want to know where the money’s going? Just look online.” From 2016 to 2019, AWMI reported annual revenue between $45 million and $60 million.
Neither Charis nor AWMI have publicly released financial audit documents since 2020. That year, in documents reflecting fiscal year 2019, the ministry posted its final public financials showing $22 million in debt. AWMI has acknowledged going into debt to build a parking garage on campus, but has rarely publicly acknowledged debt from acquiring the Sturman property. AWMI claims to have paid off the parking garage debt in 2021, a year in which they also claim to have brought in $100 million; due to their lack of public financial documents, neither claim is verifiable.
As John became more familiar with Epperhart’s other work, red flags leapt out at him. Epperhart runs an organization named Tricord Global, which raises investor capital and lends it to microfinance projects in Uganda. John asked him about it over dinner one night.
“You go out and essentially you’re taking money from the people you speak to at Andrew’s conferences. They put money in – the minimum is something like $20,000 – and it’s locked away for 5 to 10 years,” John relayed the conversation to me, using approximate numbers. “You take it to Uganda, loan it out at 15%, then you pay your investors 5%. Where is the rest going? Aren’t you supposed to be a nonprofit? And he goes, ‘Oh, we’ve got operational expenses.” (According to Tricord’s website, the figures John cited were only slightly off: funds are loaned out at a 12% rate, and Tricord guarantees investors a return of 4-8%).
The setup didn’t sit right with John: “It would be a perfect cover for a Ponzi scheme,” he told me. “I asked him, are you sure this is cool with the SEC? And he goes ‘As long as we keep paying the people back, we won’t have a problem.’”
Mr. Epperhart did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
On the ministry front, Epperhart had figured out how to conceal the internal finances with the reorganization, but the other problem still existed: money was not coming in fast enough. “They had reached this point of expansion where they couldn’t get enough donations to fuel the expansion quickly enough,” John told me. “Andrew wanted to build housing, he wanted this activity center, all sorts of things. And all of that needed funds which weren’t coming in quickly enough.”
That’s when Epperhart let the leadership team know about another benefit of the reorg: “Billy’s idea was, under this association thing, there is a provision that they can raise investments,” John told me. “It was presented to us as the solution, right? ‘You can’t get enough money from donations, so get it as investments.’” The plan was to sell it to followers as “investing in the kingdom.”
“You can roll over your IRAs into this and invest in the kingdom,” he explained the pitch, “and you can get a return here and get a return in heaven.”
“That’s when I started having a problem.” He had a decision to make.
Like the McDermotts, Shawn Savage saw the dark side of Wommack’s healing ministry. A Navy veteran, Shawn came to Charis from Florida, where he had lived for a few years after leaving the service. “If your theology is more about your own healing than it is about God, what does that say about why you believe?” he asked me when we spoke earlier this year.
It was a conclusion Shawn had not arrived at lightly. He spent five years in the Charis community – three as a student and two more living in a house with Charis roommates and Charis landlords – before leaving, as so many others have, out of the kind of heartbreak born of having seen too much. Today, still a Christian and deeply committed to the reformed tradition within the faith, he now speaks about his time at Charis with the clarity of someone who has spent many long hours wrestling with the subject.
“It’s toxic faith,” what they teach at Charis, he told me. What the school and ministry teach about health – and how they treat people struggling with sickness – played a role in bringing Shawn to that conclusion.
“I actually got terribly ill while I was at Charis,” Shawn said. “I was seen as having no faith. People talked behind my back.” Shawn recovered, but the way illness was treated by others in the community hung with him. “They would slander people who were sick, and say ‘look at their faith,’ or ‘I don’t want to dirty my faith with that.’”
Faith, Shawn came to realize, was everything at Charis. Not the actual experience of it, but the display of it. “They say ‘faith it til you make it,’” he told me. “If you pretend hard enough, it will be real. But that’s not real faith. That’s not Christian faith.”
That outward display of faith was a yardstick, and students experiencing sickness clearly did not measure up – a lesson that was driven home for Shawn when he volunteered to help care for a fellow student suffering from cancer.
“Someone asked, hey, we need to bring food for this woman,” he told me. She was a widow, an older woman who had come to Charis to find healing from her cancer. “And no one would bring her food. No one.”
Even before the request for meal help, Shawn says, the widow had been ostracized from the school community because of her illness. “She wasn’t allowed to actually go to the school anymore because people complained about her being there,” he told me. “You could smell her dying.”
When no one else volunteered, Shawn started bringing her meals. “She was very kind, very gentle. And she’s in this cheap apartment outside of town, alone, dying there,” he told me, teary-eyed with the memory. “And no one is visiting her. No one.”
Eventually, the cancer took her.
“I went there after she died,” to help clean up, Shawn recalled to me. “And what is that beside her bed?” A stack of books. “Nothing but Andrew Wommack, Kenneth Copeland, Joyce Meyer. All the prosperity, all the get-well, ‘God guarantees your healing’ stuff. And that is such a sad legacy to leave behind.”
“I saw death for the first time at Charis.” But it was not the last time. “That has happened to so many poor, old widows who move out here in a last ditch effort of ‘this is where I get healed,’” he told me.
“They’re sold a bill of goods and then they die. Everyone forgets, and they move on,” he said. “That’s not a unique story.”
John was not on board with the plan to sell investments in the kingdom of God to Wommack’s followers. He did not think it was right, and he did not want his name anywhere near it. But he also knew what would happen if he refused.
“So I have to make a decision, right? And I know how it works in that place,” he told me. “If I don’t take it on, there are ten people lining up to take it.”
Within a year from that point, John would be gone from the ministry – tossed out the door at the climax of an internal struggle which Wommack still personally refers to as “a coup attempt.” Within the ministry, rumors about what led to his ouster have taken on a life of their own in recent years, with different versions of the narrative suggesting that John “called Andrew a false prophet” or “wanted to take over the ministry” – but neither of those claims are true. For John’s part, he believes his reservations about the investment scheme played a role in his ouster.
“So I took it on. I took the project on,” he told me, “And I guess this is where there’s some truth to what they’re accusing me of, because the only thing I did that could be interpreted as [a coup] was that I didn’t push that project forward.” He did not take the project on in order to complete it, John told me – he took it on in order to kill it.
“I slow-rolled it. Absolutely.” Though John was ousted in part because of his opposition to it, the plan never came to fruition.
But his ouster was not driven purely by his opposition to the investment scheme. It was the last major chess move in a series of backroom fights driven by ascendant newer members of the leadership team who had been empowered when Epperhart joined the ministry. One of those newer leaders, Andrew Wertz, set his sights on John’s job – but John was still in the way.
Earlier this year, I published a long investigative piece about Wertz, and the cult he ran in Pennsylvania in the 1990s: Narrowgate. Former members of Narrowgate allege that Wertz exerted extreme control over their lives, stole tens of thousands of dollars from them, and groomed a cult member who is now his wife – despite the fact that he already had a wife and baby at the time. Though primarily based on Wommack’s teachings, Wertz took Narrowgate firmly off the rails with teachings of partner-swapping “spiritual marriage,” which not only caused a revolt among members, but prompted Wertz’s wife and child to flee in fear that he might kill them. After Narrowgate collapsed, Wertz and his new wife moved to Colorado Springs to work in AWMI’s call center, which Wertz eventually became the manager of. By the time he set his eyes on John’s job, Wertz was the ministry’s director of communications.
Mr. Wertz did not respond to requests for comment on this story.
Four sources who worked in the school or ministry at the time of John’s ouster told me that they believe that Andrew Wertz fabricated rumors that John “called Wommack a false prophet” or “wanted to take over the ministry,” and that he did so in order to get John out of the way. All four of those sources also agree that things within the ministry – the cruel culture, the financial opacity, and the organization’s increasingly isolated and aggressive posture towards the outside world – got markedly worse as soon as Wertz reached the top.
Though former Narrowgate members approached AWMI in 2021 to inform the ministry about what Wertz had done to them, no action was taken. Today, Andrew Wertz is the organization’s Senior Vice President, serving under CEO Billy Epperhart.
John, a seasoned veteran of the business world, tried not to take it too personally. “Look,” he told me, “Someone under you choosing to come stab you in the back is kind of part of leadership. It’s going to happen. As far as Andy was concerned,” he said, referring to Wertz, “I didn’t see something like that coming, and that’s on me.”
In the end, John was fired without so much as an in-person meeting. “They just called me on a Monday morning and said ‘Don’t come to work.’” In the haste to dismiss him, no one asked the former Chief Operating Officer to sign an NDA. Once he was out, it was like the clouds broke. He was unburdened: from the tens of millions of dollars in debt, from the exaggerated healing claims, from the dog-eat-dog culture he had come to loathe.
“If I wanted to play those sorts of political games,” he told me, “If I wanted to backstab and lie and cheat, I didn’t need to go to a ministry to do that.”
Health and wealth are central to Andrew Wommack’s ministry. They are also, according to these sources, responsible for much of that ministry’s descent into something that long-time supporters now find unrecognizable.
The problem, as Deborah lays it out, is not just that Wommack exaggerates or fabricates his healing claims. The problem is not just that he broke his debt-free pledge to pursue rapid growth for his ministry empire. The problem, as she sees it, is that he became the kind of man who was willing to do those things; that he became the kind of man who was not only willing to break his own promises, but who seems, to her, willing to lie to keep cash coming in the door.
“There is a steady stream of income and it’s making them greedy for more,” she told me. “And people are being milked of their finances by these people with no conscience.”
“It’s diabolical,” Shawn said. “And yet they tout it as the greatest, most spiritual, most enlightened form of Christianity that exists, because they’re hearing directly from God himself.”
For John, the tragedy lies in the distance between what students are promised and what they receive. “These are people with feelings, with needs, with problems that are not really being tackled, not being met,” he told me. “And you tell them, ‘just come and we’ll change it.’ The people that go to Charis tend to be looking for something. They have something that isn’t right, and they need much more than they’re getting.”
The heartbreak for Deborah, as the McDermotts came to accept that Charis was mistreating the flock it was supposed to be tending, was more personal. “It’s been a difficult and I would personally say traumatic journey to get to this place,” she told me. “It’s very hard for me as a practicing Christian to stand up and say these things, knowing our history and what a blessing Andrew has been to our family.”
But, she said, “At this point, we are publicly suggesting that people do not get involved with the ministry, do not give money to the ministry. We are saying do not trust Andrew Wommack Ministries, and don’t send your young people to Charis.”
“The Bible says you will know them by their fruits,” she told me, “and what I’m seeing is not very wholesome.”
She knows it would have been easier to stay blind to what was happening around her, but she couldn’t hold the revelations at bay. “Once you see the corruption and you realize you can no longer make excuses for these people in authority, it has a terrible effect on your own confidence,” she told me.
It forced her to wonder: “Have I just been taken in by a charlatan this whole time?”
This is Part II of a three-part series looking at life inside Andrew Wommack’s Charis Bible College. If you or your loved ones have had experiences with the school or the ministry and are interested in sharing your story, please reach out.
