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Donor sues Sean Feucht, says $250,000 for TPUSA-funded tour was misused
A donor is suing worship pastor Sean Feucht, claiming Feucht spent his money on personal real estate rather than the concert tour it was intended for.
By Aaron Hedge | FāVS News Reporter
Note:
The worship pastor Sean Feucht embarked on a massive, 50-Capitol concert tour in 2023 funded by TPUSA Faith. But he secretly solicited funds from other places and got sued. That concert tour was conceived of in Spokane.
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.
Gavan Spies of Airway Heights sat down in a Spokane-area coffee shop with Sean Feucht to pitch an idea in late 2022 or early 2023. His good friend and fellow advocate against against queer rights and liberal values was all ears, Spies told FāVS in 2023.
Spies wanted Feucht to embark on an audacious worship concert tour that would hit every single state Capitol campus in the U.S. to take political power from lawmakers and give it to Jesus. At each stop, sinners could repent and be baptized, and Christians could call Jesus into the halls of power, vanquishing any evil spirits present and returning control of government to their Christian God.
Spies had a line on funding through Turning Point USA Faith, the religious arm of TPUSA and Spies’ employer, and, as a connected member of state Christian nationalist circles, politicians like state GOP chair Jim Walsh ran in, had an avenue into halls of power. Feucht, who’d gained notoriety for staging illegal worship protests during COVID, brought the organizing cred.
Feucht was into it: What would become the “Kingdom to the Capitol” tour would, presumably, expand God’s Kingdom on Earth. Former congressional candidate and self-proclaimed Christian nationalist Feucht, got to work quickly after his coffee with Spies, planning stops in Washington, D.C.; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Topeka, Kansas. In just a few months, the tour would wend through the Pacific Northwest, Spies’ turf, hitting Olympia, Salem, Oregon, and Boise, Idaho.
“Kingdom to the Capitol” was a reference to the Christian utopia — ruled by biblical edicts against homosexuality and other religions — Feucht, Spies and their Christian nationalist followers wanted to establish in the U.S. But because it would be expensive, Spies’ TPUSA funding connection stipulated that it was to be a TPUSA event, not one branded after Feucht’s many “movements.”
But Feucht, whose lucrative ministry empire needed publicity, had other ideas. In advance of the tour, he solicited donor dollars from folks like Christian business titan Steve Bray, a Southern California power industry mogul. Bray gave Feucht $250,000 to support the tour. A newly amended lawsuit — part of monthslong litigation accusing Feucht lying about needing money for the Kingdom Tour — says Bray thinks he was duped: that Feucht spent his money on ways to promote his own ministry instead of using those dollars to rescue politics for Christianity.
The suit is the latest development in a years-long saga involving the worship pastor, his ambitious and lucrative Christian nationalist organizing and the Inland Northwest. It highlights how Feucht — a litigious personality who has sued the City of Spokane for millions of dollars over a dispute about another of his concerts — uses local organizing hubs to advance his agenda. And it shows how the Spokane area is a wellspring for Christian nationalist organizing efforts.
Kingdom to the Capitalist
As Feucht, who did not respond to a request for comment, brought the good word to the cities on the Tour via his poppy Christian lyrics, he also brought in piles of cash, a testament to the fundraising behemoth his nonprofit, Sean Feucht Ministries, had become.
Sean Feucht Ministries has always been dependent on ostentatious fundraising tactics — book and merch sales FāVS has documented and daily solicitations from followers.
Bray’s lawsuit contends that the ministry’s fortune has, at least in part, also been garnered under false pretenses.
Soliciting donations for the tour was, to begin with, explicitly against the rules of the Feucht agreement with TPUSA Faith. “They didn’t wanna pay for the Sean Feucht show,” said Jon Root, who was then Spies’ fellow strategic director with TPUSA Faith.
Bray has sued Feucht in federal court to recoup his money because he doesn’t believe it was spent on the concert tour — which, unaware of the agreement between Feucht and TPUSA, is what he understood he was funding. Bray had noticed Feucht as a rising star in the Christian ministry, so he invited Feucht to speak to his corporate board.
On March 6, 2023, the board sat for a presentation from Feucht, who said he needed a quarter of a million dollars to finance the already-financed Kingdom tour. He did not tell the board his tour was already paid for, as Root and the lawsuit detailed.
“At the time of the solicitation, Feucht knew that TPUSA had agreed to fund the Tour entirely and that [he] did not need Plaintiff’s or any other person’s contribution to fund the Tour expenses,” the lawsuit says.
The gift of grift
Feucht’s ministry has always been trying to get more money. During the Kingdom Tour, there was hardly a day when the effort would not send multiple requests for donations to people who’d signed up to receive them. The line for merch at the Olympia stop took 15 minutes to get through, as fans clamored to buy copies of Feucht’s multiple books, T-shirts and worship albums.
In the meantime, Feucht was traveling around the world doing music videos on remote mountaintops in Iran and over cities in Iraq and later in farmers’ fields in Canada. Around the same time he solicited his donation from Bray’s board, Feucht posted videos to YouTube and other social media platforms bragging about a fancy concert tour bus that he had wrapped in the banner of the Kingdom Tour.
“This is our brand new bus,” Feucht beams into the camera, as he takes the viewer on the tour of the bus most viewers would never go inside of. “Look at this, guys; this is amazing! This is where we’re gonna sleep tonight; we got 12 beds, a huge chill area in the back. This is where we’re going to take America back for Jesus.”
On top of this, Feucht was amassing a $7 million real-estate empire that currently spans California, Texas, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.
In July, 2025, Bray learned from former TPUSA Faith employees, including Root and other concert and TPUSA employees Richie Booth, James Dumont, Jay Koopman and Lia Fischer, that TPUSA had committed full funding to the Kingdom tour.
“I gave because Sean told me — and I believed him — that my money was needed to fund the Kingdom to the Capital Tour,” Bray wrote to FāVS. “Learning that TPUSA had already agreed to fund the whole tour, it raised serious questions for me about why my donation was requested and how it was used.”
TPUSA did not respond to a request for comment.
Bray filed an initial lawsuit in federal court in March 2026. In September, the judge said Bray didn’t have enough evidence to prove his claims and sent him back to the drawing board.
Feucht, on social media, falsely claimed he’d been vindicated, even though the judge left room for Bray to refile the suit with more evidence.
“PRAISE THE LORD! 🙏🏽🔥,” Feucht tweeted, comparing Bray, a fellow Christian evangelist, to leftist organizing groups. “We’ve seen intense opposition to the Let Us Worship movement. Antifa has hurled rocks at us, satanists have doused us in pig’s blood, and multiple left-wing politicians have threatened us with arrest. And most recently a well funded few waged a lawfare war against us. The lawsuits were picked up by all sorts of news outlets, with a story framed around smearing us. Here’s the update on the lawsuit — on Thursday, a federal court in California DISMISSED all four claims against Sean Feucht Ministries and Let Us Worship.”
Bray refiled the suit with more detailed information on Sept. 30.
‘The money gets to ‘em’
Bray’s faith in Feucht’s organizing abilities came from the rock star’s fight against COVID restrictions.
In 2020, the rising Christian rock star, who’d previously run to represent California’s 3rd Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, had staged a defiant worship concert on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Between 300 and 400 people gathered to worship. But the event had a distinctly political valence: to flout Governor Gavin Newsom’s edict against mass gatherings at a time when COVID-19 was killing more than one thousand people every day. Afterward, Feucht deftly spun that spontaneous gathering into an ongoing concert tour titled “Let Us Worship.”
Through this effort, Sean Feucht Ministries had grown from 2020 to 2021 from less than a half a million dollar, operation to a $5 million worship juggernaut.
Spies wasn’t wrong about Feucht’s ability to bring people in. But donating businessman Bray eventually realized that Feucht, with his burgeoning wealth, might be in the throes of celebrity “glory” and “money.”
“The money gets to ‘em,” Bray told The Roys Report.
Redemption?
Bray is dedicated to the mission of expanding God’s kingdom on earth — ostensibly the same mission Feucht is working to promote.
But he has different standards for accountability than many of his comrades in the same mission, many of whom believe the government has no right to look into church finances. U.S. tax code allows religious nonprofits that incorporate as churches not to file the normal 990 tax form required by nonprofits. Bray thinks it should be different, not only because churches are powerful and must be transparent but because he thinks forced disclosure would be healthy for the body of Christ.
“When people give in faith, they deserve honesty about how their money is used,” Bray said in an email. “Transparency honors donors, protects the church, and builds trust.”
Despite repeated run-ins with Christian grifters, including not only Feucht but others who he thinks misspent church money (he specifically mentioned the split of Anaheim Vineyard Church), Bray keeps hope that Feucht can be redeemed. On The Roys Report, Bray said the temptations of celebrity and money are inherent to the vast industry that spreads the gospel, but he is optimistic that Feucht might change his ways.
“I believe redemption is possible for all of us, including Sean,” Bray wrote in an email response to questions for this story. “I hope for truth, repentance, and restoration. Forgiveness and accountability can go hand in hand.”
Spies is no longer affiliated with TPUSA and hasn’t returned phone calls from this reporter in three years. He now works as a groundskeeper and campus manager for the year-old branch of the Seattle megachurch The Pursuit, which has many of the same hallmarks that define Feucht’s ministries. Its pastor Russell Johnson has a similar flair for spectacle, which you can read about in depth in FāVS here and in The Spokesman-Review here.
Even if Spies is no longer onboard with Sean Feucht, he has joined Feucht in the conservative response to the Sept. 10, 2025, assassination of his former boss, Charlie Kirk. After Kirk was killed, Feucht remembered him during yet another concert tour in partnership with the co-founder of TPUSA Faith, Rob McCoy. Spies, for his part, tried to inspire people gathered in front of the Riverfront Park clocktower to fight — “nonviolently,” he qualified — against the left.
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