Show me the Toes!
Mark Honeychurch - 2nd February 2026
While watching the six hour long video from Mike Winger about Bethel church for another article in this newsletter issue, I was tickled by a story that was mentioned briefly about a supposed miracle healing.
Evangelical churches the world over host healing and miracle events where preachers (often someone who travels from church to church, rather than the church’s own preacher) ask for members of the church to volunteer themselves for healing prayer. At these events it’s often claimed that tens, hundreds or even thousands of people (in the case of very popular healers like Benny Hinn) are healed from physical ailments.
A common theme with these healings, though, is that they are often the kinds of conditions that come and go, with believers being asked after five minutes of prayer if their pain feels like it’s abated, for example. Many of these conditions are internal, with no external way of validating that anything has actually changed as a result of the prayer.
Some preachers are known for offering wheelchairs to people who suffer from pain when walking or standing for long periods; when these people are prayed over and then manage to step out of the wheelchair and walk across the stage, something they were already able to do before the “healing”, it’s proclaimed to be a miracle - with the audience just seeing someone they wrongly assumed was unable to walk doing something that is assumed to be impossible.
There are people who go on stage for pain and are told that their legs are different length legs. They find their legs prayed over and held, and their brand new ailment fixed; there are several different ways that preachers can make legs look like they’re different lengths when someone’s sitting down on a chair with their legs stretched out in front of them, including partially pulling off the shoe on one foot, or even more simply moving both legs to one side - using parallax to make them appear to be different lengths. Both of these tricks allow for small, slow movements that make the legs appear to return to being the same length - and when this is done while praying, it looks like a miracle. Here’s a great example of Derren Brown using the shoe trick:
I’ve been to several faith healing events in the past, and they’re usually fairly unexciting. The healings often involve someone being prayed over and then being “slain” in the holy spirit - which on a practical level means that they fall over backwards into the arms of waiting assistants, who then gently lower them to the ground where they lay in some kind of fake trance or blissful state. It’s only after the healing meeting, when pastors recount the evening’s events, that the healings start to sound more miraculous.
With all of these nebulous, hard to disprove healings that happen at these events, I was surprised to learn in Mike Winger’s video about a more concrete healing claim that happened at a church in the US called James River Church. In March 2023, Bill Johnson (the patriarch at Bethel church) was visiting the church and preached that “creative miracles” were going to be experienced that night. Kristina Dines was at the church’s Joplin campus, where the sermon was being live streamed to, and she figured that she qualified as being deserving of a creative miracle, as she had three toes missing.
Three of Kristina’s toes had been amputated after a gun-related incident involving her then ex-husband a few years earlier. All that was left of her three middle toes on her right foot was three short stumps. Kristina asked for healing, and several women from the church prayed over her toes, asking God to restore her toes. Here’s what happened next, in Kristina’s own words from a video testimony she gave after the event:
So, I had three toes that were amputated in a terrible accident. I heard the word for creative miracles, and I thought “well, I certainly have a creative miracle that I might need. I need three toes to grow back”. The person next to me said “do you want new toes?”, and I was like “well, sure!”. All the women got down and they prayed over my foot, and I decided to take my shoe off to see what was happening when he said “let’s see the progress, or if anything’s happened”. And when I did, I had to grab the person next to me and say “do you see what I see?”. And I saw three toes that were forming, and now there’s length to them tonight. I can stand on my tippy toes. Listen, do you understand? I can stand on tippy toes. No, I couldn’t do that before, because I didn’t have toes to tippy on!
Several pastors went on to use this story as proof of miracles, making claims that a full regrowth of the missing toes happened as the women were praying. John Lindell, the pastor at James River church, said:
So Kelli had her take off her shoe, anointed where each of the toes would be, and began to pray. The skin began to change colour. Pretty soon there was a pulse in the foot that she could feel. All of a sudden, Krissi said “are you kidding me?”, and they saw the toes began to grow. Several other team members joined in to pray with Kelli. Bone began to form where there was none before. As the ladies prayed for Krissi, over the next 30 minutes, all three toes grew, and by that point were longer than her pinkie toe. Within an hour her nails began to grow on all the toes. This morning she went to… a medical doctor, she went and was examined; she has three toes.
Bill Johnson, from Bethel church, preached:
Another girl was praying for her, and… it took about 30 minutes, but they saw the bone come, wrap in flesh, completely grow out and by morning the toenails, everything had formed. She’s got three brand new toes.
Of course, the obvious question that many people started asking was whether they could see a picture of these regrown toes - ideally a before and after, for comparison. There’s no need to trust the word of a medical doctor when we could all see this with our own eyes. However pastor Lindell explained to his congregation why it was wrong to ask for evidence:
How many miracles do you have to see before you believe? You know, there are some of you and you’ve heard miracles, over 4,000 now. You’ve heard miracle after miracle of healing and you’re still sitting there, saying, “Well, you know, I just don’t know. I got to see the toes.” I’m going to tell you what, see the toes all you want, you’re still not going to believe, because unbelief never has enough proof.
One enterprising ex-member of the James River church thought that this wasn’t good enough, and they started a website called Show Me The Toes (at showmethetoes.com). The site demanded before and after photos of Kristina’s toes, and asked anyone who had a copy of photos to email them to the site.
Sure enough, eventually someone managed to get their hands on a picture of Kristina’s toes from after the healing:
For comparison, someone also found a low quality image on her Facebook feed from before the healing (although sadly it’s now been deleted from the source, along with all of Kristina’s older Facebook history, so I haven’t been able to get hold of the original photo).
Now, it’s a little hard to compare these before and after photos, as they’re of varying quality. But I think we can be very confident in saying that her toes did not actually fully grow back. I also think we can be fairly confident in going further, and saying that it doesn’t look like her toes grew at all that night. In the after picture her three middle toes all appear to be a little longer than her little toe, and a lot shorter than her big toe, and that description also matches the before picture pretty well - although with a lower level of confidence, given how grainy and off-colour the picture is.
Here’s a screenshot I managed to find of the before foot picture in the context of being posted to Facebook. It appears to show that the toes on her left foot are longer than those on her right foot, and also shows just how low quality the source photo was. I wonder whether maybe this was a frame from a video, maybe even a security camera, given the washed out colours and its blurriness.
To put this event into the context of Kristina’s life, she’s had the kind of life journey that both makes me feel sorry for her, and makes me wonder if it could be turned into one of those “true story” movies that seems just too weird to be true.
For example, the incident in which she lost her toes was a deliberate shooting where her ex-husband shot both Kristina and her female partner at the time, Carissa Gerard. Carissa died, and Kristina was in a coma for several months - during which time her toes were amputated. Although I’ve read that her toes had been shot off, it turns out that Kristina was actually shot in the stomach, with shotgun pellets - and her toes may have been amputated due to kidney issues while she was in the coma. More recently, Kristina’s teenage son tragically committed suicide.
Kristina is not just the victim of misfortune, though. It turns out she was only at the church in an attempt to help convince a judge that she was reformed, and should be released from a half-way house into the community. Kristina has spent time in prison for being part of an illegal methamphetamine distribution ring (at the time her husband shot her, both Kristina and her husband had lost custody of their child due to their meth addiction). She has also been convicted for various other minor offences, including possession of a controlled substance, possession of drug paraphernalia, and driving while intoxicated.
Given this background, I’m not surprised that Kristina is the kind of person that would be happy to fabricate a story that her toes were growing back while women prayed over her. I’m also not surprised that church leaders uncritically retold this fantastical story without even bothering to look at her toes.
It’s great that a churchgoer eventually decided to actually ask for evidence, but it shouldn’t be up to the congregation do this kind of skeptical work - the church leaders who claim to be looking out for their flock need to stop being so gullible, and start thinking about the responsibility they have to protect everyone from misinformation. I guess, given just how often Christian churches mistreat and mislead their members, I’m a little naive in expecting them to have any sort of duty of care.
