Christian Hot Readings
Mark Honeychurch - 2nd February 2026
A nearly 6 hour long video was published on YouTube by Mike Winger last week on the topic of Bethel church. Bethel is a well-known and popular evangelical church in the US, but Mike didn’t have good things to say about the organisation. Instead he detailed the misdeeds of church leaders, including their handling of a “prophet” who has spoken frequently at Bethel church services, preacher Shawn Bolz.
Shawn Bolz
The video has some interesting information for skeptics, but to save you from having to watch all five hours and fifty minutes of it, I’m going to detail some of the more interesting parts of what Shawn was up to, because the way that he’s been exposed might point to a useful tool for skeptics.
Before I get started I have to say that Mike, despite also being a Christian, has done an amazing job of shining a light on the shady practices of Shawn and Bethel church. He’s no doubt taken a huge risk with his reputation in calling out the church, given how powerful and influential they are. Much of the information in this article comes from Mike’s excellent video.
Mike Winger
Shawn has a method of prophesying that may look familiar to people who remember pastor Peter Popoff, and James Randi’s investigation which showed that fraud was behind Popoff’s amazing ability. Both Peter and Shawn’s style of revealing information from God involve throwing out some very specific information. In Peter’s case, back in the 1980s, it was full names, home addresses and ailments that members of the congregation wanted God to heal. This data closely matched the information congregants were asked to fill in on prayer cards before the services, and Randi exposed that Popoff was wearing a small earpiece, and his wife was reading out the prayer cards through radio equipment connected to the earpiece. In Shawn Bolz’ case, the information he gives is usually people’s names, family members and birthdays, sometimes along with details of recent life events. Shawn says that this information is given to him in the hours and days leading up to the event he’s speaking at, and he writes down everything God tells him so that he can pass it on.
The nature of those details God supposedly gives to Shawn to write down should be enough to give anyone pause - this is the kind of information that is often available on people’s social media profiles. Indeed, there are examples online of people matching Shawn’s “messages from God” to publicly available information. Of course, this doesn’t prove fraud - it just opens up hot reading as a plausible alternative explanation to Shawn’s claim that God is supplying him with the information.
But there are other signs that Shawn’s gift may have an earthly origin. Sometimes he brings up people’s usernames in his prophecies, rather than their real names. This is a weird thing for a God to do, but it’s the kind of data that would be available if people are asked to sign up to a church event online, for example using an email address on a website, or an event RSVP on social media.
Apparently Shawn also sometimes gets prophetic words from God for people who RSVPd to the event but were then unable to attend - maybe they became sick, or their car broke down. Why would an all-knowing God give Shawn prophetic details of someone that won’t be at the event?
There are cases where Shawn has been caught throwing out some very specific information about people that is flat out wrong, and congregation members are left confused when these messages don’t make sense for them. This by itself isn’t proof of anything - it could be that he screwed up his hot reading, but it could also be argued that the connection with God isn’t always very strong, and therefore sometimes messages get garbled during their transmission from heaven.
Where this wrong information becomes damning, though, is where, despite it not making sense to the congregant Shawn is talking to, the information he mentions matches someone else who just happens to have the same name as the person he’s talking about.
The perfect example of this is from an event Shawn spoke at in 2017, called More Love More Power, organised by the Vineyard Church in Illinois. At the event, Shawn is calling out names and other information into the audience, and asks if there’s a woman in the audience called Kelly Rhoades - who, from what I can tell, travelled to the event from Pennsylvania.
Is there… I saw, um, a friend of mine, her name’s Kelly, and I saw her standing on a road. Does that mean something, like it’s maybe a last name? Kelly, is that you? Kelly Rhoades? God knew you’d be here. I didn’t, but God did. That’s awesome. Hi, Kelly Rhoades…
You’ve been like a good daughter to Doris and, uh, she’s like your best friend and, and, and, uh, I feel like God just saying that, um, everything that she prayed for and is prayed for is, is gonna still come for the family. And I feel like the Lord’s saying you’re going to start to see the manifestation of what you prayed for. You’re going to start to see the reality…
January 27th. That’s her birthday. Um, is there, is there, I saw Psalm 105 over your family and read that later on. But, did she or you ever live on a 105 like Slaughterhouse or 105 something, or does that make sense? For some reason, I saw the word Slaughterhouse, but it wasn’t bad. Um, I know it’s a weird, it’s a weird, I took the risk ‘cause everything else felt like it was, you know, connected to God.
But I just, just, you know, maybe, maybe research that a little bit if it’s, if, if I miss that part, it’s not a big deal.
Now, the bit about “105 Slaughterhouse” was a miss (a term often used in relation to psychics when one of their predictions is wrong), but what’s interesting is that if you search for “Doris Rhoades” in Google, even today, you quickly find several websites, such as Search People Free, that list a Doris Rhoades living at 105 Slaughterhouse Drive, in Derry, Pennsylvania:
This seems to me like clear evidence that Shawn is hot reading, where his googling has led him to the wrong person - someone who happens to have the same name, and lives in the same area, as the person he’s trying to pretend God has given him details of. Kudos to Matthew Hartke who originally found this example - as well as to Mike for getting a copy of the video of the event and adding it to his video, from where I was able to transcribe the text.
This slip up makes me wonder how many “misses” both Christian preachers and psychics/mediums have made over the years that can be traced back to misidentification of someone with the same name on the internet. It would be great to have the time and energy to go through the readings of the most well-known psychics around the world and try to trace their misses back to mistakes made while googling clients, although I suspect that even something this slam-dunk would likely be ignored by most people who are willing to pay money to hear from their dead loved ones.
It’s interesting to see Shawn’s theatrical attempts to obfuscate the information he’s imparting, to make it appear like it’s coming to him in a vision from God rather than a Facebook page. Instead of blurting out Kelly Rhoades’ full name, he talks about how God gave him a vision of his own friend Kelly standing on a road. Rather than just mentioning the number 105, he alludes to having been prompted by God about Psalm 105. This is a neat little trick, and works well for any number up to 150 - the number of Psalms in the Bible.
Mike’s video talks about how prevalent this kind of cheating is - that many preachers cheat sometimes when giving a prophetic word, to help pad out their “real” prophecies. Apparently the internal phrase in evangelical circles for this is “hamburger helper”, named after a US product that helps turn a cooked burger into a complete meal (usually using pasta and flavouring powder). Of course, as skeptics we know that in reality it’s most likely to be all filler and no hamburger. These preachers are using a mixture of acquired knowledge about the church members being prophesied to (through hot reading, as well as cold reading techniques such as observing someone’s body language, clothing, etc) and vague feel-good statements that are likely to apply to most people - Barnum or Forer statements - to wow an overly credulous crowd.
Once Shawn has “connected” his prophecy to people in the congregation, and proven his gift to them, he moves on to offering predictions about their future lives. And, at this point, the people being given these messages have no way of knowing whether they’re going to come true or not, so they have no way of testing Shawn’s validity. Worse than this, given that these people are being told that the messages about their future are coming straight from God, many of them are likely to actively work towards making these predictions come true. After all, the most important being in the universe has just told them what their future holds - not believing it, not working to make it come true, would likely be seen as a sign of a lack of faith in God.
There can be real-world negative consequences when using this kind of trickery on people. For example, Shawn has a history of telling Christian couples that God wants them to marry. One couple was told this by him after just a month of being together, and emboldened by this command they married not long afterwards. After the wedding the wife learned that her new, God-ordained husband was a violent person, and he ended up physically abusing her for years before she escaped the relationship.
Shawn has also been happy to prophesy to kids, tricking them into thinking that he hears words from God, and telling them what their future supposedly has in store for them. I can only hope that he’s an outlier by doing this, and that others in evangelical Christian circles aren’t similarly trying to trick children.
Like any well-known psychic, Shawn has made some notable failed predictions. For example he told Fox News in March 2020 that for COVID the “tide is turning now”, and that “we’re going to see it come to an end. It’s not going to be the pandemic that people are afraid of”. Shawn also said at an event in South Africa “the tide is turning shortly, whether it’s two weeks or two months. God cares about this. He’s answering prayer and I saw two vaccines coming. I think one will come from Israel, and another from an Asian nation, and they’re going to hit pretty quickly”. He also said of the artist currently known as Ye: “God showed me Kanye West as a prophet and worship leader in Christianity”. For anyone who knows just how much of a mess Kanye’s life has been over the last 5-10 years, this will definitely seem like a failed prediction.
Just like with psychics, Shawn and other Christians on the prophecy gravy train are making good money from this ruse, despite these missteps and revealing mistakes. In the case of Shawn, congregations are likely to have made cash “offerings” to him when he visited their church, and Christian event organisers would have paid a lot of money to get Shawn on their speaker list. Although I have no idea how much money Shawn is pulling in, at the very least he’s been making enough to be able to pay for several full time staff members to help him run his operation.
Speaking of his staff members, Shawn has been accused of inappropriate and unwanted sexual behaviour by several of his male employees. I won’t go into details here, but it’s the same tired old story of someone in a position of power in the church using that power to sexually gratify themselves at the expense of their victims. I hate how often holier-than-though religious people are found to be using their power and influence to get their sexual kicks in a way that harms other people. It’s almost as if they’re not actually chosen by God at all - they’re just flawed human beings with no divine light guiding them to be better people.
So, what has the Christian response been to Mike’s revelations? Unsurprisingly, Shawn the “prophet” has gone to ground, keeping his head down. His website says in large all-caps letters that he’s on a “SABBATICAL” - I wonder how often that word’s used as a euphemism for a preacher who’s fallen from grace.
One of Bethel church’s leaders, Kris Vallotton, spoke to their congregation at a church service just after the video went live. His sermon is a lesson in how not to respond to someone who has pointed out your failings - basically he chose to shoot the messenger, who in this case was Mike Winger, while casting doubt on the victims’ stories.
The following weekend Kris stood up in front of the congregation and preached a very different message. Apparently God had spoken to him after his previous train wreck of a message, and had changed his heart. Along with him the two other senior pastors, Bill Johnson and Dann Farrelly, also gave their own apologies for having dropped the ball when it came to Shawn Bolz.
I suspect the reality here is that something big happened to change the senior pastors’ minds so quickly. From what I can tell the rest of the leadership team of Bethel church are much younger than this trio, and likely more professional as well. I could imagine them going into damage control mode and giving Kris, Dann and Bill an ultimatum of walking back everything Kris had said and apologising profusely, or facing a mass resignation of staff and board members. But maybe the reality of what happened will never see the light of day.
Sadly even this second attempt at accepting culpability, with all its tears and apologies, turned out to be half-hearted, with much of Kris’ speaking time dedicated to giving personal excuses for some of the inexcusable things he’s done, including blocking one of the sexual abuse victims on social media who was asking him, as a church leader, to help them get justice.
Beyond Bethel church, others who have given Shawn Bolz a platform to speak from (such as Patricia King, Che Anh and Danny Silk) have been resolute in their declarations that none of this is their fault, saying that they were never really responsible for Shawn, or that they weren’t that close, or that they severed ties years ago. This is the same picture that Bethel tried to paint a couple of weeks ago, and it looks just as hollow from these guys as it did when Kris Vallotton tried it.
So, in conclusion (although it really won’t be news to skeptics), it turns out that at least one “prophet” in the modern Christian church is just cheating to make himself look like he has a hotline to God, and it’s likely that the other prophets that are still out there wowing congregations are just using parlour tricks as well. There may be some interesting ways that Christian prophets, like psychics, can trip up and reveal that they are hot reading. The evangelical church doesn’t seem to want to accept responsibility for their promotion of people who are later found out to be tricksters, presumably because it looks bad on them that their God never warned them to stay away from these false prophets. And, lastly, even the Christian who’s working hard to expose a lot of this deception within the church (Mike) is not a great guy…
Although Mike Winger has done a good job with this video, that doesn’t mean that he’s a decent man. A quick look at some of his other videos shows that he has pretty regressive views when it comes to topics such as sexuality and politics, and some of his videos appear to be based on information that’s unverified and likely to be false (such as his videos on the persecution of Christians in Nigeria). However I guess this conservatism is likely to make Mike appear more credible to many evangelicals, and if more of them listen to his warnings and believe them, that is likely to result in a positive change at least.