IHOPKC Figure Aided Other Abusers, Sought to Buy "Forgiveness"

A virulent strain of deception in IHOPKC's "Prophetic History" personified by Paul Cain.

Here, on Earth, your vision is immersed in the immediate: trees arching overhead, buildings rising against the sky, people weaving through the clamor of daily existence.

Perception is tethered to proximity.

But from the vast expanse of space, the planet’s superficial distinctions disappear. Overarching patterns and interconnections become apparent, while remaining invisible to those chained to the ground.

Since the allegations of systemic sexual and psychological abuse surfaced at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City (IHOPKC), I have been re-examining my own past connections to the cult-like organization.

Time is a powerful tool for gaining distance and new insights. So too, is learning to identify assumptions and rigorously question them. This latter skill, though never fully mastered and often accompanied by pain, invariably offers a liberation that feels like being continuously reborn.

As founder Mike Bickle’s sex scandal has unfolded publicly, and widespread reports of rape and bullying within Bickle's cult-like organization come to light, many have peered into the petri dish where the abuse festered: IHOPKC’s “Prophetic History” — a mythologized historical narrative that propelled IHOPKC and the prayer movement's explosive growth.

The scrutiny has highlighted a particularly virulent strain of deception personified by the late Paul Cain.

Paul, who rose to prominence as one of the Charismatic movement’s premier prophets in the 1990s, and his disciple, Bickle, were adept at leading their audience to conflate their stage personas with God by drawing on histories rich with miracles, signs, and wonders — some, if not all, were completely fabricated.

They frequently retold these stories themselves or manipulated others into doing so, building auras from which they derived enormous power, enabling them to inflict tremendous harm.

Former IHOPKC members have described how questions regarding the Prophetic History were promptly squashed, along with the person raising them.

Moreover, in addition to abusing young men himself, Paul, who died in 2019, helped other abusers within the church.

And after being exposed, Paul attempted to purchase his way back to prominence albeit under the guise of “forgiveness.”

A PAYOFF DECLINED

In 2004, Bickle, Rick Joyner, and my father, Jack Deere, confronted Paul after receiving incontrovertible evidence that he was a serial sexual predator.

My father never spoke to Paul after those confrontations. However, every so often, my father would receive emails from Paul. My sister and I also received several Facebook requests and messages from him. They went unanswered.

“I had to block him,” my sister, Alese, recalled this week. “He sent me a creepy message asking about mom’s health, and referring to himself as ‘Papa Paul.’ I thought, ‘I never called you that, asshole.’ He said he was praying for us every night. I always thought those prayers were curses.”

Meanwhile, significant evidence exists that Bickle provided Paul with a young male assistant even after Paul’s exposure, according to correspondence I have reviewed.

Bickle continued to cite Paul's prophetic ministry as a critical component in the development of his own theology and ministry. Paul’s emphasis on the prophetic and supernatural elements of Christianity influenced Bickle’s vision for IHOPKC, which integrates continuous prayer with worship and prophetic ministry.

In 2015, my dad received a late-night phone call with news that Paul had a heart attack and was near death. Despite his imminent transition to the great beyond, Paul somehow found the strength to email my dad within 24 hours of that phone call.

I remember telling him something along the lines of: “Whatever you say, say it for you, not for him.”

I also faintly recall reading the email, quickly recognizing the typical patterns of attempted coercion mingled with awkward punctuation.

Paul had written the entire message in capital letters. The most plausible explanation for this peculiarity isn’t an aversion to the lowercase; rather, it seems he was simply too indifferent or hasty to press the caps lock key.

What escaped me at the time of the 2015 email, however, was something subtler: an offer of money embedded within the message, an incentive for forgiveness. I’m not sure how to characterize the offer. The proposed arrangement mirrors the “indulgences” Catholic priests sold during the Middle Ages.

“I DO NOT HAVE THE MONEY I USED TO HAVE, BUT I WOULD LOVE SHARING IF YOU COULD FIND FORGIVENESS IN YOUR HEART?” Paul wrote.

“DO YOU USE PAYPAL?”

‘NEVER SAFE FROM THE MAFIA’

My father understood exactly what Paul meant by forgiveness.

Paul was willing to exploit any words as a springboard back to prominence. By then, my dad had stopped responding to Paul’s emails. After their falling out, he once made the error of sending brief replies. But Paul doctored these emails, altering their content to falsely suggest my father had endorsed his return to ministry.

Through fabricated prophecies and words of knowledge, Paul facilitated clergy sexual abuse by directing young people to abusers and discouraging the prosecution of abusers once they were discovered.

My brother, David “Scott” Deere, who, at 22, tragically killed himself on December 27, 2000, was one of these young people.

It was only after my brother's death and when Paul’s misconduct came to light that my parents realized the devastating impact of his self-serving lies masquerading as divine words of knowledge. Because of Paul, they had overlooked warning signs about my brother's relationship with his abuser, a volunteer in a youth group at the former Anaheim Vineyard. Because of Paul, they had chosen not to prosecute the abuser.

My brother would have been about 14 at the time of his abuse.

I don’t know all the particulars, but I do know that Vineyard founder John Wimber called my father personally shortly after my father left the Vineyard in 1992 to inform him about what happened. Their relationship was strained at the time, and such a disclosure undoubtedly created substantial liability.

However, unlike IHOPKC leaders, including Mike Bickle, Wimber refused to cower or coverup. Wimber also didn’t adopt some bullshit tactics of strategic silence and feigned persecution.

Authorities were notified.

'When Scott was abused at the Vineyard and John Wimber called to let Mom and Dad know that there were two other boys who had been abused, Paul convinced them to stay silent,” Alese said. “The police came to Mom and Dad and wanted a statement. Paul said not to dare talk to them because the guy was in the mafia and would pursue our family. We would never be safe from the mafia."

‘HOW DARE HE GO AFTER MY SON’

I spent decades reporting and writing highly complex investigative stories for newspapers across the country. I have dragged entire law firms — including the tenth largest in the country at the time — into state and federal investigations, disrupting their ability to provide criminal defenses to corrupt politicians at a rate of $1,300 per hour to the taxpayers.

As a result of that experience, I know the aliases my brother’s abuser assumed when he relocated to a different state. I know everywhere he’s lived. And I know how to identify the VIN number on his car from thousands of miles away. I’ve learned how to assess a threat, and no evidence exists that my brother’s abuser had connections to organized crime.

This revelation about the concocted mafia connection set the stage for a deeper, more personal betrayal, that unfolded at Scott’s funeral.

“I remember at Scott’s funeral Paul saying Scott had so many chances,” Alese said. “He threw him away, or something to that affect. Paul said he had even given him the chance to be his assistant, but Scott didn’t pursue that … Later on, Dad was infuriated … ‘How dare he go after my son!’ … Even with Scott’s death, there was no peace from Paul or his prophetic bullshit.”

That was the Paul Cain that I knew.

This is the man that Bickle continued to tout as a grand architect of IHOPKC’s precious Prophetic History.

When my father replied to Paul in 2015, he wrote: “I have not responded to your former emails because you never acknowledged the enormity of your violation of our confidence and betrayal of our trust … I lost all trust in you and did not want to give you any more ammunition to use against us. Nothing I have heard through the years from friends we once had in common has been positive.”

“I hope you feel the love of God in your present crisis and that your heart finds the grace to leave nothing undone that the Lord would have you do before you stand before him.”

Paul died four years later. Bickle eulogized him. My father refused.

“Paul never repented of anything,” my father wrote in an email to one of Paul’s victims when Paul died in 2019. “His goal in life was to be worshipped. Paul did more damage to me and my family than anyone I’ve ever known … I will always love you. I am so sorry that we did not have the discernment to rescue you sooner.”

‘AN EXCLUSIVE CULT’

Despite all the harm Paul inflicted for the past quarter century, bits and pieces of the charlatan’s backstory have bolstered IHOPKC’s overarching narrative.

The cult-like organization’s Prophetic History coincidentally—or perhaps not—bears a striking `resemblance to the mind control tactics of totalitarian regimes.

“Any ideology— that is, any set of emotionally charged convictions about man and his relationship to the natural or supernatural world—may be carried by its adherents in a totalistic direction,” wrote Robert J. Lifton, a renowned authority on totalitarian systems and ideologies. “But this is most likely to occur with those ideologies which are most sweeping in their content and most ambitious or messianic in their claim, whether a religious or political organization. And where totalism exists, a religion or a political movement becomes little more than an exclusive cult.”

Paul emerged from obscurity in the late 1980s, claiming miraculous birth and unsubstantiated miracles during the healing revivals of the 1950s and early 1960s, as well as his association with William Branham, who died in 1965.

Branham’s followers continued to uphold his teachings, and some groups regard him as a forerunner to the second coming of Christ.

Paul, however, ingeniously tweaked the narrative. Rather than positioning himself as Christ’s forerunner, he claimed that God had instructed him to withdraw from ministry after Branham’s death due to corruption. Paul said God had promised him that one day he would stand before a “New Breed” of men who would conquer the earth for God in the last days. These men would all be forerunners. For some, like my father, this invitation tapped into their own grandiosity with a promise dependent on their continued association with Paul.

Bickle continued to perfect this art. Many of IHOPKC’s ministries, including its church, bear the name Forerunner.

Rather than simply extending the invitation of being a forerunner to influential ministers, Bickle promised everyone a role in God’s last day army.

IHOPKC’s prophetic history and Bickle’s accounts of direct encounters with God and the Archangel Michael always seemed to place Bickle at the center of a story about hastening Christ’s second coming.

Perhaps this claim is as close as any man can come to declaring himself the Messiah without appearing to cross into madness.