a modern Church has taken over a small California city [View all]

[Demovictory9]

How Redding, California, became an unlikely epicenter of modern Christian culture
By Vanessa Rancano, KQED | June 18, 2019 | CALIFORNIA DREAM

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In the two decades since the School of Supernatural Ministry’s founding, more than 10,000 people from around the world have made the same pilgrimage, turning Redding into an unlikely global epicenter of Christian culture.

Today, walking around this former logging town of 90,000 residents, you can meet people from a dozen countries in a day. This year, the school graduated 2,500 students, representing more than 70 countries; the youngest was 18, the oldest 85.

It was founded by a fifth-generation pastor, Bill Johnson, who heads up local Bethel Church, and started with a few dozen local students. Today the school enrolls more international vocational students than any other school in the country, by far, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data. In 2017, Bethel had 1,792 international students enrolled. The institution with the next highest enrollment was Dean International, a flight-training school in Florida, with 888 international vocational students.
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But some Redding residents don’t want to be part of the experiment.

“Redding is their test case of turning a city that is a democracy into a theocracy,” says Laura Hammans, a member of Investigating Bethel, a Facebook group with more than 1,000 members.

Hammans is one of a dozen members of the group meeting at a Redding park one afternoon. Another member, Donna Zibull, is passing out stickers that say, “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.”

“We’ve handed them out freely because we want to get the message out there,” Zibull says. “Some people are afraid to put them on their car.”

Afraid, she says, because the church’s influence feels like it runs through the core of the city. Redding’s mayor, Julie Winter, is a Bethel elder; Bethel paid the salaries of several police officers when the city couldn’t afford to; a Bethel-connected nonprofit took over management of the city’s civic auditorium and now holds Supernatural School classes there; Bethel’s influence was central to getting a direct flight from LAX to Redding approved last year; and there’s a $150 million Bethel expansion underway that will triple the church’s capacity and allow the school to grow by 1,000 students.

https://calmatters.org/articles/bethel-church-redding-california-modern-christian-culture/