(CP) International House of Prayer Kansas City is reportedly winding down the operations of its movement and missions organization based in Missouri on account of the financial impact of the sexual abuse scandal connected to founder Mike Bickle, with whom the organization permanently cut ties last December.
Citing a leaked recording from leaders at an internal IHOP University staff meeting in addition to an email from IHOP University President Matt Candler, the leaders revealed that the ministry was losing some $500,000 per thirty days on account of donors being too connected to Bickle, the Roys Report said.
“IHOPKC as a company is starting to wind down … ” Candler said throughout the meeting. “We’re going to be maintaining our prayer room and eventually starting a recent organization.”
The 24/7 prayer ministry didn’t immediately reply to requests for confirmation of the report from The Christian Post on Tuesday, but Isaac Bennett, who leads IHOPKC’s Forerunner Church, noted that lawsuits from the victims in Bickle’s sexual abuse scandal presented the ministry with “significant liabilities”.
Boz Tchividjian, Billy Graham’s grandson, an attorney and longtime advocate of sexual abuse survivors who’s representing one among Bickle’s alleged victims, said if IHOPKC leaders imagine the ministry can just shutter to flee liability, they live in “fantasyland.”
“The notion that they’ll just shut it down and begin a recent organization and all of that prior potential liability is wiped away is fantasyland,” he told the news outlet. “To suddenly take all of the property, put it in name of [a] recent organization to limit liability that will what I think be called a fraudulent transfer. A court wouldn’t allow that.”
In February, after a 3rd woman alleged she was groomed and sexually abused by Bickle within the Nineteen Eighties when she was 14, Tchividjian, said the ministry should close permanently.
“It’s time. It’s time to permanently close the doors at IHOPKC,” Tchividjian said in a statement via the X account of his law firm, BozLaw P.A.
“It’s time to take whatever monies are left & put them right into a fund for those whose lives have been wrecked by a spot that claims to like Jesus a lot it prays to him 24/7. The praying hasn’t worked. It’s just made IHOPKC more pious in defending the indefensible. It’s time.”
Using her maiden name, the third woman, Tammy Woods, who’s now a 57-year-old mother and grandmother, told The Kansas City Star that Bickle abused her in St. Louis where he pastored a church before moving to Kansas City and starting IHOPKC in 1999.
Woods said Bickle abused her in his automotive, at her home, within the church and his office. She said the abuse, which began when she began babysitting his two sons, involved sexual contact but not intercourse. She revealed that the IHOPKC founder also told her several times that his wife, Diane, would die young and suggested that she might be the mother to his sons.
Woods’ revelation got here within the wake of an independent report released to the general public on Jan. 31 and ready by attorney Rosalee McNamara, where Bickle confessed to engaging in “consensual sexual contact” with a lady connected to the 24/7 prayer ministry along with a previously confessed relationship with a primary Jane Doe who alleged she was his kept woman for several years.
While Bickle never touched the second Jane Doe in McNamara’s report, Woods said he did touch her and that he can be remorseful every time he abused her.
“I even have witnessed him genuinely weep and repent, like ask the Lord’s forgiveness, ask my forgiveness,” she said. “I saw at 14, a person in anguish over failure, and he would all the time be like, ‘I am unable to, we will not do that again. And please forgive me.’ I believed all of that to be real … however it didn’t stop. We’d do good for some time after which crash.”
A day after the Star’s story was published, IHOPKC condemned Bickle’s actions as “sick” and apologized for the style wherein they handled the investigation into allegations of abuse against him, which has long been criticized by Tchividjian and a gaggle of former leaders at IHOPKC referred to as the advocate group.
Bennett said within the leaked recording that while IHOPKC has been taking a look at other ways to navigate the sexual abuse scandal, they’ve found no way across the liability the organization has been exposed to because of this of the allegations of the ministry’s mishandling of the abuse allegations.
“In cases where there’s clergy abuse, where there’s allegations which can be outstanding — when there’s now interest in having an investigation that goes back through all of our 24-year history to search out cases where there’s been mishandling of abuse, or where there’s been cover-up, or whatever else it’s people imagine has been gone on — those things will produce inevitably a contingent of people who’re wanting to get restitution,” Bennett said. “And they don’t seem to be going to go knock on Mike’s door because, well, he probably won’t answer. But they don’t seem to be going to knock on Mike’s door because he doesn’t have any money. But IHOPKC has facilities.”
To keep IHOPKC at its current operational level, IHOPKC would should let go of 90% of its paid staff, Bennett said. So, as a substitute of 500 staff, IHOPKC would should run the organization with just 50, Bennett said.
“We are at an impasse,” Bennett said. “There’s no other way forward. So, the Lord is kindly inviting us right into a recent era.”
