Christians flock to ‘Life Surge’ event, learn God approves of wealth to advance his kingdom

Christians flock to ‘Life Surge’ event, learn God approves of wealth to advance his kingdom

Cars, luxury travel, fancy watches and the Lord’s service were all features of the celebrity-led Saturday event called Life Surge. It aimed to teach Christians how to grow their wealth to spread the gospel, and it included teaching that God approved of wealth and that gold is good.

This story was written in partnership between FāVS News and RANGE Media, a worker-owned newsroom in Spokane. Learn more about RANGE’s work here.

News Story by Aaron Hedge | FāVS News and RANGE

It wasn’t about the money itself for Mary Branda and Candice Dyreson, who sat high up in the cheapest tier of seats at the Spokane Arena Saturday. It was about maximizing Christians’ capacity to go into the world and spread the gospel.

Listening to former professional athletes, pastors, inspirational speakers and financial managers — all of whom professed they’d earned vast sums of money making biblically-prescribed investments in “passive income” — they’d learned that their God approved of wealth.

“ I think what it means is if you can build personal wealth, you’re able to give more back to the community around you,” Dyreson said.

The two women were among thousands of Spokane Christians who shelled out for tickets to the Spokane stop of Life Surge, a flashy national worship and speaking tour where God’s faithful gather “to learn why and how to create and multiply financial resources for kingdom impact.” It was the tour’s first Spokane stop, where stage smoke and a highly-produced light show had accompanied the kick-off concert by Grammy-nominated Christian music icon Natalie Grant. 

Life Surge bills itself as the “largest touring Christian brand.” (It’s unclear if that’s nation- or worldwide.)

Branda was retired, and Dyreson, a clinical trainer at CHAS Health, said she and her husband do not live hand-to-mouth because they have some amount of passive income, or earnings made with little to no labor. Some examples include stock investments, rent payments for real estate and royalties on copyrighted items. Most such income requires some investment upfront. (Dyreson did not say what kind she and her husband have.)

Both women said they go to churches that do important community work like feeding the hungry and clothing the poor. They saw that mission come alive at Life Surge.

But Life Surge is laser-focused on money as an avenue to serving the Lord. 

“The very first specific resource mentioned by name in the Bible is gold,” said David Benham, a former professional baseball player, businessman and Christian evangelist, during a Bible study he and his twin brother Jason Benham gave at the beginning of the event.

Is gold “good or is it bad?” David Benham asked the crowd, referencing Genesis 2, which tells part of the creation story. “Good. It is good. God made gold before he made man. … Then the Lord took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to do what? You see before sin, Adam was to acquire and develop, to cultivate the resources that were in the ground, including gold. To provide for his family and future generations and to promote God’s kingdom agenda on the earth. When did that call stop? It never stopped.”

Life Surge did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

An array of ‘surges’

Life Surge leverages the influence of celebrity professional sports players like former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow, who was at the Spokane event; the Benham brothers, who both played in baseball’s National League before becoming stalwart anti-queer entrepreneurs; and at least five prominent Philadelphia Eagles, who headlined a Life Surge event in Philadelphia earlier this year.

These athletes introduce the idea of “kingdom impact” through sermons, like the Benhams’. 

The twins are famous for having had a house-flipping reality TV show cancelled after David Benham told a pundit in 2012 America’s ills were the fault of Christians who accept homosexuality, no-fault divorce and abortion. They talked at length about this saga in their sermon, committing to maintaining their stance against legal gay marriage. 

The program then interweaves the athletes’ presentations with motivational speakers and financial managers who promise to revolutionize the way attendees manage their money.

They will do that, they say, by training people willing to pay $97 for a second set of three-day lessons that will be held in Spokane later this summer. These lessons come in three categories: Trade Surge, which teaches on how to invest in the stock market using a trial of Life Surge’s proprietary software; Real Estate Surge, which teaches how to invest in property; and Business Surge, which teaches how to create successful businesses. The presenters said the classes were fully refundable.

Life Surge would not be able to accommodate everyone who attended the Saturday event, so the pressure to sign up was on: “You need to do it while we’re here right now,” said Steve Champa, a stage presenter with Life Surge who introduced the first round of training sign-ups. “The reason is because we’ve got limited venue size. So in order to take advantage of it, you need to do it right now.”

Branda and Dyreson both signed up for Trade Surge; Dyreson said her husband, who was not at the event, would be surprised.

Attendees of those classes would then have the opportunity to purchase yearlong coaching relationships with financial managers for $38,000. These were the ways Spokane Christians could amass wealth in pursuit of advancing Christ’s kingdom.

Tickets to the Saturday event were sold in tiers, from lowest to highest: Executive, $40; Premier, $55; VIP, $95; and Ultimate, $497. But each was subject to discounts that would “expire” just before becoming available again. FāVS bought an Executive ticket a few days before the event for a 25% discount, paying $30.

The pitches from the stage were attractive in a similar way that pitches for time shares or multi-level marketing programs or other get-rich-quick schemes are attractive. But Life Surge has been the subject of a number of critical articles, including a Thursday piece by The Spokesman’s Emry Dinman, and a YouTube video by Missouri pastor John Simmons, who attended a Life Surge event last year.

“I thought it was more a time-share presentation than a good Christian representation of the Gospel of Christ,” Simmons said in his video.

These media critiques broadly accuse Life Surge founder Joe Johnson of a long history of business foibles and running Life Surge as a scam that encourages Christians to go into debt to access Life Surge services and classes.

Seven  Mountain Dominionism adjacent

The Life Surge event in Spokane was not explicitly Christian nationalist, but it contained some of the central common tropes of some of the most powerful sectors of the Christian nationalist movement.

A generous reading of the messaging that characterized the stage Saturday could be interpreted this way: If Christians have more money — which equates to influence — they will be in a better position to save as many souls as possible.

But it’s a short journey from there to what’s referred to in Christian circles as the “Seven Mountain Mandate” (7M) a theory of social control developed by the dominionist pastor Lance Wallnau. 7M says there are seven realms, or mountains, of social influence in society: education, religion, family, business, government-slash-military, arts and entertainment and the media.

If Christians take control of these mountains, Christianity can then flow down into the rest of society and control it.

One of the speakers at some of Life Surge’s tour stops is Kevin Sorbo, the television actor who played Hercules in the eponymous syndicated 1990s show. Sorbo started the film production company Sorbo Studios in recent years in order to exert Christian influence from the arts and entertainment mountain.

The “kingdom impact” rhetoric strongly follows dominionist rhetoric, which basically says Christians are not only supposed to save the individual souls of their fellow humans but to bring Christ’s kingdom to earth. It also asserts that Christians are supposed to govern other humans. 

The ties are not only aesthetic: Life Surge advertises on its website that it has a relationship with Bethel Music — the music label of Bethel Church in Redding, California — that has kickstarted the careers of overtly dominionist touring worship pastors like Sean Feucht. 

Feucht, who has strong ties to and prominent beefs with Spokane, has grown extremely wealthy off his ministry, even though he does not charge admission to his events, as Life Surge does. Former employees of Feucht’s ministries recently launched a website detailing a wide range of abuses committed by Feucht against his workers and followers. The website also lists a number of financial and real estate abuses, including using ministry credit cards for personal expenses, committing fraud on tax filings and failure to pay his employees the minimum wage.

Bill Johnson, the pastor of Bethel Church, co-authored a book with Wallnau in 2013 titled “Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate,” in which they lay out the theory of 7M.

Porsches, diamond Rolexes and lavish vacations

Though the audience was supposed to support mission trips and help the less fortunate, making money for kingdom impact was not entirely about service. Christians were expected to strive to give their families the finest material possessions and to bring them on voyages to exotic locations.

“We can afford to go on vacation,” said Nick Vujicic, the Australian-American motivational speaker and investment banker. “You see this tan?” He turned his bronzed face back and forth for the camera. “This is two weeks old. Do you know where we were for two weeks? Mexico — Cancun and Cozumel. It was beautiful. Very, very nice. It’s one of our vacations we’re having this summer. When you don’t have the money, you can’t do it.”

Vujicic had just told a rags to riches story in which his parents, who had fled oppression in communist Yugoslavia and landed in Australia before having him, instilled a hard work ethic rooted in free-market capitalism. He was making stock investments for his dad at 16.

This was despite having been born without arms or legs and only with incomplete feet at the bottom of his torso, he said, as he shuffled on his feet across a platform on the stage. Early in life, he said he tried to drown himself in the bathtub, but he realized he would be successful despite his disability by believing and investing in the free market. He’s the founder of Pro Life Fintech, an anti-abortion bank that provides “a financial choice for the world, through all aspects of banking, that honors God and aligns with His principles,” according to its mission statement.

James Smith, a prominent motivational speaker and real estate investor, told a story about a Honduran immigrant named Jose whom Smith helped become wealthy.

 ”He said, ‘I make, I make, I make $10 an hour an ACEC repairman helper,’” Smith said, crudely imitating a Latino accent. “‘And they put me in attics in Houston and I’ve worked so hard, and I live in an apartment with five other Hondurans and I’ve never heard anybody like you.’”

Smith, a 6-foot-6-inch man with wispy blond hair, bequeathed his generous knowledge on Jose, and though the immigrant was supposed to bring the magic stick of investor capitalism back to his country, he also became very comfortable in his personal life. 

“ He bought a black Ferrari, brand new, not used,” Smith said of Jose. “He bought a brand new red Porsche Carrera, brand new, not used. He bought a Rolex watch with diamonds, some custom clothes. He bought some stupid shoes that Gucci makes. I call ’em elf shoes. Real men should not wear Gucci shoes. If you have on a pair, you’re a fruit cup.”

The audience cracked up laughing.

Smith’s appearance was not advertised in the Life Surge promotional materials, he said, because he had a penchant for offending people, particularly “fruit cups.” He would be at the future classes in Spokane, and if anyone who was offended at Life Surge showed up to that they’d be worse off. “ If you’re a fruit cup, I’ll turn you into a smoothie.”

Dyreson seemed to believe in Smith’s message.

“I want to give back to people,” she told FāVS, just after Smith left the stage. “Having the income to do [that] allows you to do a lot more than if you were living paycheck to paycheck.” 

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