Anti-LGBTQ+ pastor Mike Bickle accused of “sexual immorality” by many women

Mike Bickle — the 68-year-old anti-LGBTQ+ founder of the charismatic evangelical megachurch, the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Missouri (IHOPKC) — will be stepping away from his pastoral duties after being accused of “sexual immorality” by multiple women despite being married.

The church’s leaders said that Bickle wouldn’t appear on the church’s platforms, engage on social media, or participate in the church’s 24-hour prayer room until they investigated the allegations against him. The leaders said Bickle’s alleged misconduct “[fell] short of biblical standards for leaders in the church,” accused him of using spiritual authority to manipulate victims, and said that Bickle refused to meet with them and then tried to “intimidate, isolate, manipulate and discredit” his victims, according to Christianity Today.

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“Without going into details to protect the privacy of the victims’ identities, we have found these allegations of clergy sexual abuse by Mike Bickle to be credible and long-standing,” the church’s leadership team announced via Facebook last Sunday. “The credibility of these allegations is not based on any one experience or any one victim, but on the collective and corroborating testimony of the experiences of several victims.”

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“When these allegations were brought to our attention, we were shocked,” church leaders added. “We could never have imagined that inappropriate conduct with women as something we would ever need to be concerned about. The allegations seemed out of character to the man we thought we knew, but they were so serious we could not ignore them.”

Bickle seemed to make veiled references to his accusers during a sermon he delivered last Sunday. During the sermon, he said, “Satan’s most effective weapon in the end times is accusation,” adding, “whispered innuendoes into hostile accusations that destroy lives and relationships,” The Roys Report wrote.

“The church is approaching the most glorious and challenging hour in history with the dragon, the black horse, breathing on many to accuse and betray each other,” Bickle reportedly told his congregants. Church leadership asked Bickle and other pastors to refrain from using such language “as a way of minimizing the pain of those affected.”

The church leaders reportedly told its staff, “Our primary concern is for those who are suffering pain and trauma, our spiritual family, Mike and Diane, as well as the Bickle family.”

In the past, Bickle has warned that Oprah Winfrey is the harbinger of the antichrist and that marriage equality would result in the banning of marriage in some parts of the world. He has said that the “gay marriage agenda” is “rooted in the depths of Hell” and that gays and lesbians must “declare war” against their sexual orientation or will face “flaming missiles of the Evil One.”

He also warned that gays and lesbians, along with heterosexuals who have sex before marriage, who “give up and give in” will ultimately begin “denying the faith,” which “opens the door to the demonic realm to touch them.”