Home church: The tax man says a religious ‘retreat’ must pay
Spokane apostle Cal Pierce bought a $1M home through his nonprofit Healing Rooms Ministries — a 25-year project with a global presence and ties to far-right Christianity. He tried to exempt it from property taxes, but Washington denied his application.
News Story by Aaron Hedge | RANGE
This is a story about an apostle, his million-dollar house and a global ministry empire based in Spokane.
Cal Pierce grew up in the Northern California city of Redding as a member — and eventually a leader — in the Bethel Assemblies of God, now Bethel Church. That church has developed a reputation as being at the vanguard of “dominionist” Christianity, the independent charismatic movement that believes Christians should have political control over nonbelievers and is eagerly helping drive the success of MAGA (Make America Great Again) politics.
Pierce believed in the power of prayer; his teenage son, who was dying of muscular dystrophy, stayed up one night in 1989 praying for the liberation of East Germany from communism. Four days later, the Berlin Wall fell, Pierce told RANGE. His son died two years later, he said.
This is the kind of spiritual warfare charismatic churches like Bethel are known for — fervent prayer aimed at upending “powers and principalities,” the perception that secular politicians and institutions are controlled by demons. It’s controversial even in Christian circles and in recent years has spilled into the streets; spiritual warfare was one of the central themes driving the attempt to overthrow the last presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021.
But the apostle’s online profile suggests Bethel wasn’t as vibrant a religious environment as he wanted: He was “the most bored board member the church had.” So, in 1997, Pierce sought deeper religious fulfillment in Spokane, where in the early 1900s the famous Christian revival healer John G. Lake ran a ministry called the Healing Rooms, claiming thousands had been healed through the organization’s prayers.
Healing Rooms Ministries were born again
Pierce reestablished the Healing Rooms Ministries, incorporating it as a nonprofit religious organization — and therefore exempt from taxes — in 1999. The ministry calls people in from the street to be prayed for by prayer healers, who claim to vanquish their illnesses. It also leases downtown office space to former-Spokane Valley Republican Rep. Matt Shea, who left the Legislature amid accusations from his own caucus that he’d committed acts of domestic terrorism in 2020.
While prayer healing is its primary religious mission, the Healing Rooms has a global presence and engages in an array of commercial activity, like the sale of classes and Christian books. There are Healing Rooms all around the world, owned locally as franchises analogous to the McDonald’s business model.
One of the latest properties brought into the Healing Rooms apostolic universe is home to a bucolic two-bedroom, two-bath ranch-style house with an attached three-car garage. Across the driveway sits another two-story building twice the size of the main house, with an apartment and its own garage and common area.
From the back of the main home, a veranda opens onto a hot tub overlooking the Spokane River and a sprawling brick patio with a built-in grill and a burbling water fountain. The 10-acre plot, which Healing Rooms purchased on Aug.10, 2023, for $1.05 million, towers at a grand vantage over Long Lake.
Pierce lives there.
New home hosting religious services?
According to Washington Department of Revenue (DOR) records obtained by RANGE, Pierce applied with DOR for a property tax exemption on Oct. 31, 2023, saying the home had begun hosting religious services on Sept. 15 of that year. On its application, it listed weekly Sunday worship at 10 a.m. as the regular service an exemption would require.
Those services never took place.
A sign reading “Healing Rooms Ministries Retreat Center & Chapel” was planted near the keypad-controlled gate, which sits a quarter of a mile from a “No Trespassing” sign on the winding gravel drive leading to the property in the Southbank Highlands subdevelopment.
It’s about 15 miles from Spokane and 7.5 miles from Nine Mile Falls. Spokane County lists total taxes for the property at $6,374.04 for 2024. Half that bill has been paid.
DOR denied Pierce’s application, saying it could not determine whether Pierce was holding religious services there. An agent had visited the home on three Sundays — Nov. 5 and 19 and Dec. 17, 2023, at 10 a.m. Each time, no one was home.
RANGE recently recreated this inspection, visiting on two Sundays — Aug. 15 and Sept. 29 at 10 am. — knocking on the front and back doors of the house and garage. Everything was locked up, and no one answered.
Property changes hands; a charismatic church enters
DOR’s audit report on the property states that, “the exclusive use test as a Church is difficult to meet in a residential setting. A portion of the property would need to be exclusively dedicated to Church use inside the home.”
In an Oct. 8 interview, Pierce told RANGE he has never hosted regular worship at the property. The Healing Rooms wanted to exempt it from taxes, he said, because the ministry — which he emphasized does not host regular services in the traditional sense, but “heals” people through prayer — lost a property tax exemption on its Pacific Avenue headquarters, on the border between downtown and East Central. People can visit from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday and Saturday to be prayed for.
The two low-slung buildings sit on an outcropping of basalt just around the corner from Second Avenue and Division Street. Originally purchased in 2006 for $980,000, Pierce sold that property to Waymaker Properties, LLC, a for-profit corporation based in Bellevue for $2.4 million in 2021. The DOR canceled its property tax exemption that same year.
“As owners with a [nonprofit], we were tax exempt,” Pierce said. “When we sold the property — Waymaker buys it, they’re not tax exempt — when we invested the funds to buy the retreat center, we naturally thought as a [nonprofit] owning the retreat center, we could still be tax exempt.”
In the four tax years since then, Waymaker Properties has paid the county $72,405.86 in property taxes for the Pacific Avenue campus. As of press time, it owes $11,371.40 for the remainder of 2024. Pierce now leases it from Waymaker.
Connection to Shea’s On Fire Ministries
The same year he sold the Pacific Avenue property and lost the exemption, Pierce began subletting the sanctuary there and some office space to On Fire Ministries, Shea’s church. Pierce told RANGE that he, his wife and the caretakers of the Nine Mile Falls property are all members of Shea’s ministry.
On Fire frequently hosts some of the most prominent dominionist figures activating Christian nationalist sentiment in the U.S. Some examples are the traveling Christian rock musician Sean Feucht, former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, the anti-trans activist Jenny Donnelly, the charismatic faith healer Chris Overstreet and many others.
Pierce said he used the sale of the Pacific Avenue buildings to finance the purchase of the Nine Mile Falls property.
Though no prayer services have ever been held at the Nine Mile Falls house, Pierce said, he often houses officials there from the International Association of Healing Rooms, a global umbrella nonprofit that runs locations all over the world, including 60 in the United Kingdom and 2,000 in India, according to the website of the UK branch.
“The idea is that we have a retreat center for ministry leaders that might want to come and hang out for four or five days or that type of thing,” Pierce said. They stay in the apartment in the larger building or in an RV that sits between the buildings, he said.
The caretakers of the property
Pierce’s application lists two people, Ron and Elizabeth Channess, as caretakers of the property. Pierce often posts images to Facebook of Long Lake taken from the veranda, of mule deer meandering through the property and of stunning sunsets. Friends comment that the place looks “peaceful.”
The Channesses signed an agreement attached to the application to DOR that they would set up for church services, schedule guest activities, be on call to help with “pastoral duties” and manage building and landscape maintenance. Since the application was filed, Pierce said, those regular duties stopped because they assumed the state would not be interested in granting the exemption.
Elizabeth Channess “prepares meals for myself and my wife five days a week because my wife can’t cook any longer,” Pierce told RANGE, adding that his wife suffers from dementia.
In an email to RANGE, DOR spokesperson Mikhail Carpenter said the agency fielded 170 applications for property tax exemptions in 2023 from religious organizations. It granted partial or complete exemptions to 164 applicants and denied six.
A global enterprise
Pierce has developed the Healing Rooms into a global operation boasting “hundreds of locations, in 68 different countries.” Seven separate Healing Rooms Ministries are incorporated as nonprofits in Washington state alone.
“We have state directors and regional directors and national directors,” Pierce told RANGE.
At a recent summit held at the Pacific Avenue headquarters, Pierce hosted Healing Rooms leaders from New Zealand, Mexico, Canada, Finland and Australia. Some of them stayed at the Nine Mile Falls retreat, he said.
Spokane’s Healing Rooms Ministries declares on some of its tax filings that, “Our Ministry team is here to serve the community and the Body of Christ while contending for all that Christ promised the church would move in. We minister a Salvation Message, the Healing Word, the Anointing that Empowers the Word, and Prayer and Deliverance of the Sick.”
Dozens of testimonies — essentially reviews of the services — written by people saying they’d been miraculously healed by prayer at the Healing Rooms are posted to the ministry’s website. The testimonies are searchable by disease name or a drop-down menu of categories, such as abuse, addiction and eating disorders.
Does healing prayer work?
But researchers have not been able to determine whether prayer healing works. In fact, belief in the healing power of prayer has the potential of discouraging people from visiting doctors.
For decades, Idaho has protected the rights of parents to pray for children in their homes when they’re ill instead of taking them to the doctor, even though a state report attributed deaths of at least two children to religiously motivated neglect.
At Bethel, congregants prayed for a full week in 2019 for a child of a congregant who’d stopped breathing to be resurrected in a remarkable show of faith that ultimately failed when the church posted a statement to Facebook reading, “Olive hasn’t been raised.” The parents later laid the child to rest.
Nonprofit & for-profit
The Healing Rooms revenue fluctuates, pulling in between $340,000 and $900,000 annually. (In 2021, it earned more than $2 million, but most of that came from the sale of the Pacific Avenue property.)
Anyone can show up to the Healing Rooms headquarters in downtown to be “healed” by a team of prayer healers for free. But the various iterations of the Healing Rooms Ministries — including the for-profit Healing Rooms Ministries Conferencing, Inc. — sell many other services and products. Some of the revenue goes to the nonprofit, but sales of Pierce’s books go to the for-profit.
It is not uncommon for religious nonprofits to build large money-making operations.
One of the most prominent is run by Feucht, the worship pastor who started his career at Bethel and built Sean Feucht Ministries into a fundraising juggernaut from the political turmoil of the COVID-19 pandemic. That traveling organization raises millions from the raw material of normal people’s conversion stories — at least one of which took place in Spokane and was later renounced by the man Feucht claimed to have saved.
Feucht appears to have amassed immense personal wealth from this operation, which sends near-daily fundraising emails to a national listserv. Feucht was recently raising money to buy supplies for victims of hurricanes Helene and Milton — and couching his pitch in conspiracy theories that shadowy powers created the storms.
According to the DOR’s audit report on the Healing Rooms property, Pierce uses the downtown building to host training sessions six times a year for people who want to plant their own satellite locations of the Healing Rooms. Tuition for those classes is $50 per person per session.
Classes on the supernatural
The website advertises other classes given through the Healing Rooms School of Transformation (HRSOT), where students “become proficient in the supernatural realms of God.”
The classes include lessons from Bethel Church Senior Pastor Bill Johnson. Johnson co-authored the book “Invading Babylon” with self-proclaimed apostle Lance Wallnau, a famous Christian nationalist tract that pioneered the Seven Mountain Mandate (7M), an influential philosophy among dominionists that states that Christians must control the seven mountains of social influence: government, education, family, religion, media, arts and commerce.
Asked whether the United States is a Christian nation, Pierce said, “There are a lot of things that point to that.”
The HRSOT curriculum includes a course titled “Developing a Kingdom Mindset,” which teaches students how to “bring Heaven to Earth” and a class on 7M given by Johnny Enlow, who hosted Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker on his podcast just before Parker wrote an opinion declaring frozen embryos are people with rights. Those lessons are available through a six-month subscription of $49 per month.
The ‘Apostolic and Prophetic network’
Individuals can also become members of the Healing Rooms Global Network, an “Apostolic and Prophetic network,” for $15.95 a month. For $149, they can get a yearlong membership and a free copy of “The Passion” translation of the Bible, which adds more zealous language to many biblical passages that doesn’t appear in the original text.
For example, British pastor Andrew Wilson points out that in a verse where the apostle “Paul simply says ‘Grace and peace to you,’ the [Passion] ‘translation’ reads, ‘We decree over your lives the blessings of divine grace and supernatural peace.’” “The Passion” is endorsed by dominionist pastors Lou Engle and Ché Ahn, who rallied Christian nationalist crowds the day before they perpetrated the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and by Pierce himself.
The ministry offers organizational monthly memberships to the network for $49.95 a month; yearly memberships cost $499 and include access to HRSOT.
Then there’s the bookstore: the Healing Rooms Liberty Bookstore sells the Cal Pierce Collection, a series of 33 books, book bundles and audio CDs with titles like “The Complete Man” ($12), “The Journey: Stories by Healing Room Directors” ($15) and “Apostolic Government” ($5). Most of Pierce’s books are available on Amazon and include Kindle versions for less than a dollar. The audio cassette of his 2016 account of establishing his ministry, “Preparing the Way: The Reopening of the John G. Lake Healing Rooms in Spokane Washington,” goes for $106.96 on Amazon.
The legacy of the five-fold ministry empire
Bethel — the church Pierce grew up in — has sparked the careers of some of the most prominent “warriors” in the spiritual battle being waged against secular U.S. society, including Feucht and conversion therapy pioneers Elizabeth Woning and Ken Williams. It has a record label called Bethel Music that brings in millions of dollars each year.
Senior Pastor Johnson told Christianity Today in 2016 that Bethel isn’t associated with a controversial charismatic movement called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), which the Christian encyclopedia website Got Questions defines as advancing “spiritual leaders and miracle-workers, the reception of ‘new’ revelations from God, an over-emphasis on spiritual warfare, and a pursuit of cultural and political control in society.”
But people who study the movement, including the Christian apologist Holly Pivec, have pointed out the church embraces many of NAR’s hallmarks, including the “five-fold ministry,” which emphasizes the role of apostles in church governance.
The apostle is traditionally thought to be one of the 12 original followers of Christ, but many churches that are part of the NAR believe modern apostles are called by God to plant ministries in new places that then spread out, much like the Healing Rooms, which is an offshoot of Bethel.
“There’s a movement that’s taking place … a new apostolic reformation taking place in this hour in our nation, and there’s a battle that takes place,” Pierce wrote in his book “Apostolic Government.”
A Christianity full of warmongering language
Language invoking battles and war is common among NAR-aligned ministries, which tend to believe they are waging a spiritual conflict against a world they think has been seized by demonic forces.
Shea’s focus on war on his current events podcast Patriot Radio is nearly an obsession, and the pastor — a former Army intelligence officer — once drafted specific battle plans to replace secular governments with Christian societies from the ashes of a civil war. He also drafted a sermon outline titled the “Biblical Basis for War,” which said if societies didn’t conform to a Christian remaking, the Christians must “kill all males.”
When he leased the property to Shea, Pierce said, he was aware of these controversies. But, he said, “My relationship is with a man who really loves the Lord and is not compromising.”
He mentioned a trip Shea took to Poland at the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when he absconded with 60 Ukrainian orphans, stoking fears of child trafficking. Pierce said Shea was just trying to save orphans from a horrific war.
Trafficking “is not what happened,” Pierce said. “I know the truth.”
Pierce has dedicated the Healing Rooms to the five-fold ministry, which is based on the Bible verse Ephesians 4:11, and contends that the church is supposed to have five active positions: apostle, prophet, pastor, teacher and evangelist. Church members each have a “gifting,” or a calling, to occupy one of these positions.
This model has implications for the government of the United States. “Apostolic Government” asserts that the idea of the separation of church and state misunderstands the establishment clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution and that “our forefathers wanted the democratic society to be ruled by a theocratic God.”
Transforming the American church
Melding that premise with the idea of the five-fold ministry, Pierce describes the structure of the Healing Rooms as a radical reshaping of the denominational American church. Pastors are not supposed to convey the word of God to people who sit in the pew and passively receive it; the five offices are supposed to train a flock to inseminate society with Christianity.
“It’s to equip the saints for an activation out of the pew, onto the street,” Pierce writes in “Apostolic Government.”
Pierce said leaders should try to help their followers.
“I don’t look at where people are,” Pierce told RANGE. “I look at where people can be, and I don’t criticize people. I edify people because everybody can get criticized. Anybody can be told what they’re doing wrong. Most people already know that, but I just want to help people to be who they are.”
He likened the five-fold ministry to a five-fingered hand. The thumb represents the apostle, who can touch the other four fingers.
Slowing down and needing his own retreat
But he is winding down. Pierce will turn 80 next month and said the Spokane location of the Healing Rooms will downsize so that it won’t be so unwieldy to run.
“It’s time to slow down a little bit,” Pierce said. “Part of this is getting everything down to where we’re not doing as big an operation as we have here.”
The Healing Rooms will continue trying to heal people through prayer all over the world, but Pierce said he will eventually fully retire to the Nine Mile Falls property and does not plan to appeal the state’s decision.
What Pierce told RANGE and Washington tax collectors was intended as a religious retreat — one that deserved to be exempted from societal dues any other homeowner would have paid — will likely just end up as a retirement home for an apostle at the end of his career.
This story was republished from RANGE Media, a worker-owned newsroom in Spokane. To learn more about their civic engagement work and accountability reporting, click here.
