For years, in city after city, Christy Gafford would invite Christians to come pray and worship with Sean Feucht.
“It’s time to take back this ground for the Kingdom!” she wrote on Facebook as Feucht toured state capitols in 2023 and 2024. She shared a picture of demonstrators waving flags on the capitol lawn in Salem, Oregon, and a clip of praise dancers twirling in the rotunda of the Austin, Texas, statehouse.
Gafford said she saw God on the move through Feucht and his ministry. She served for eight years leading a local chapter of Feucht’s Burn 24-7 prayer movement, eventually becoming a national director and communications director for the organization.
But this week, Gafford and four other former leaders denounced Feucht, saying they can “no longer encourage anyone to partner with him in any ministry capacity” and calling for him to be “removed from positions of leadership and financial stewardship.”
The former leaders published a report Sunday listing allegations of mismanagement and claiming that the preacher and right-wing protester avoided accountability as his ministries’ annual revenue shot up into the millions.
Feucht—a former Bethel Church worship leader whose Let Us Worship events took off during the COVID-19 pandemic—has founded multiple organizations over the years, including Sean Feucht Ministries, Burn 24-7, Let Us Worship, Light a Candle, Hold the Line, and Camp Elah.
The long-haired musician unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a Republican in California in 2020 and has made conservative politics a prominent part of his ministry brand, repeatedly leading worship at the White House under President Donald Trump. Most recently, Feucht has been drawing crowds for pop-up “worship protests” in Boston and Philadelphia.
On the website truthandfreedomstories.com, the former employees shared details from financial records and firsthand accounts of mismanagement. They describe Feucht bringing in people in with his sense of evangelistic mission but underpaying staff, overstating attendance at his events, diverting donations, and failing to properly disclose spending.
Feucht has not publicly responded to the report and did not yet reply to CT’s request for comment.
As noted last year by MinistryWatch, Sean Feucht Ministries’ revenue jumped from $283,526 to $5.3 million between 2019 and 2020 as Feucht’s worship protests gained traction around the US. But because Feucht petitioned the IRS to classify Sean Feucht Ministries and Let Us Worship as churches, the organizations have not released income and expense reports since.
“The form 990 is an essential document that allows donors to evaluate the effectiveness of a ministry,” said Warren Cole Smith, president of MinistryWatch. “We have no idea how much Sean Feucht is making. It’s no surprise that we’re seeing former employees come forward with concerns.”
The former leaders accused Feucht of failing to track expenses or keep receipts, using ministry cards for personal expenses at times, and not reporting income from merchandise sales.
Richie Booth, who worked as a volunteer providing administrative support for Burn 24-7, Light a Candle, and Let Us Worship, claimed that workers were underpaid or not paid at all, blocked from viewing credit card statements, and treated as staff but not reported in tax filings.
A form 990 filed in 2020 for Sean Feucht Ministries, prior to the reclassification, lists Feucht as the only paid employee along with 36 independent contractors, though the whistleblowers said that several worked over 40 hours a week.
The whistleblowers’ site documents ten properties that Feucht personally owns in California, Montana, and Pennsylvania and millions of dollars worth of properties classified as tax-exempt parsonages owned by his ministries in California and Washington, DC.
Smith previously told The Roys Report that despite having over $5 million in revenue in 2020, Feucht’s ministry “spent only about $1.1 million on ministry expenses. That means the ministry’s assets ballooned to more than $4.5 million. There is nothing wrong with growth, but it seems reasonable to expect that a ministry with more than $4 million in cash should be spending more money on the ministry it has promised to do.”
Burn 24-7 has a three-member global board (which includes Feucht) and a four-member global leadership team. The organization accepts online donations on a landing page that assures donors “100% of profits go directly to our work around the world.”
The donation webpage for Sean Feucht Ministries says that donations “will be immediately invested back into the various needs of the ministry as we continue the mandate God has given us.” The site accepts donations of cash, cryptocurrency, or stocks.
Feucht’s humanitarian organization Light a Candle—which shares a P.O. box in Redding, California, with Sean Feucht Ministries—continues to post financial reports on its website. Its most recent 990 shows $1.1 million in revenue in 2022. The form lists Feucht as one of four trustees, with a salary of $48,000, but does not disclose any compensation from related organizations. It also indicates that Light a Candle has no volunteers, which the whistleblowers say is false.
Gafford, who worked for Burn 24-7 from 2016 to 2024, said Feucht would take the stage at events but didn’t engage behind the scenes.
“I have overlooked the gross negligence of the leadership, I have excused Sean for being apostolic or [director Adam Miller] for being at capacity and just simply taken on more responsibility myself,” Gafford wrote in her testimony. “Yet now I see things somewhat differently and know the deep impact that leadership has on someone.”
She wrote that Mike Bickle’s downfall at the International House of Prayer (IHOP) in Kansas City caused her to reexamine the culture of her own organization. Gafford lost her position last year over communication around Burn 24-7 UK’s decision to part ways with the global movement.
Another former Burn 24-7 leader and cosigner of the report, Liam Bernhard, alleges that Feucht called him “communist,” “fascist,” and “woke” when he asked questions about the organization’s financial practices.
For Feucht, his ministry platform has high stakes. He positions his worship events as a weapon or force to counter darkness in society, an idea that reflects his background at the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry, said Emily Snider Andrews, assistant professor of music and worship at Samford University.
“Bethel will use words like invading or infiltrating to describe their mission,” said Snider Andrews. “And worship becomes the means to carry out revival in our world.”
Peter and Amanda Hartzell, former directors whose leadership dates back to the early years of Burn 24-7 at Oral Roberts University, joined the ministry because of the urgent sense of mission and significance Feucht presented. They left in 2010.
“The stories coming out more recently reflect the same stuff we saw when we were working with him,” like people with full-time jobs working nearly full-time for the ministry as well, said Peter Hartzell. Only now, “the organization has more resources.”
Snider Andrews said that cult of personality is not unique to Bethel, IHOP, or charismatic Christianity, but she does see a connection between Bethel’s structure and an emerging “spiritual economy” that allows entrepreneurial evangelists like Feucht to gain prominence. “The people at the top of this spiritual economy are true ‘worship influencers,’” she said. “There is a way to look at this as selling worship.”
Feucht has continued to hold worship events and post dozens of times on social media since the former employees’ report released on Sunday.
On Monday, he wrote, “The spirit of offense is entangling an entire generation in a perpetual cycle where victimhood becomes the highest virtue … Life is too short to live in constant offense. It makes you barren, mean and grumpy.”
His next Let Us Worship events take place this weekend in Los Angeles and Colorado.
