A Baton Rouge Megachurch Leadership Program Accused of Abuse and Being “Cult-Like”

July 1, 2021

A megachurch in Baton Rouge, Louisiana has been accused of some terrible things—something far worse than a run-of-the-mill preacher scandal.

Former participants of Bethany Church’s leadership training program, which ran from 2005-2013, have spoken out about cult-like practices and physical and mental abuse they endured while enrolled in the program.

The name of the program was 220i. The “220” came from Galatians 2:20.

“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” — Galations 2:20 NIV

The lower case “i” was meant to represent an intern who was not worthy of an uppercase “I.” The aim was to strip away the identity so that only Jesus remained. That’s pretty grim stuff right from jump street. It gets worse.

Let’s dive in.

The interns were forced to live in conditions that were suboptimal at best, dangerous and unhealthy at the worst:

From NBC news:

“I lived in a four-bedroom house with 21 girls,” Claire said. “We only had two bathrooms. We only had one kitchen, one laundry room. The house’s A/C was broken during the summer, and they never fixed it. We were constantly sick because of the close quarters and how old and moldy the house was.”

“There was next to no privacy, and they were monitored by ‘housemoms’ only slightly older than them ‘who would punish us for minor ‘infractions,’ like talking to a boy, by making us scrub floors and do other menial labor,” Claire said.

Things were no better for the male interns, especially the Black male interns, who were relegated to the filthiest rooms in the dorms the church used, the interns said.

“They basically separated all of the Black male interns onto one floor and everybody else was on a different floor,” Laurel said.

Interns were made to perform physical labor, the only purpose seeming to be to break them down.

“By day, the 220i interns took part in “boot camp” where they had to perform calisthenics, run and sometimes dig trenches in the stifling heat for hours in a field… One intern described the conditions as a type of “hazing.”

If the program leaders suspected an intern of being LGBTQ+, he or she would be subjected to further abuse.

“Laurel, who is now openly gay, said male interns who were thought to be homosexual were targeted for torment. He recalled one day in particular when the interns were ordered into a pool and made to tread water for hours as part of a workout. Some of the program’s leaders zeroed in on a teenager who had displayed ‘less traditionally viewed masculine behaviors.’

“They would be calling him f—– and they were spraying water from a hose into his mouth while he was trying to tread water,” Laurel said. The former interns also said Joel Stockstill and his aides openly used the “N-word” and belittled the Black interns as “thugs.”

Perhaps the most shocking part of this whole thing was the “fight nights.”

“There were two different fight nights,” said Danielle Ferguson, 31, who took part in the program from 2007 to 2008. “One of them was for the guys. And they really pumped it up. I mean, this is like the thing to do whether you wanted to fight or not.”

“The bouts often ended with one of the combatants badly beaten and bloodied,” Laurel said.

“A lot of the time they would pit somebody who was like really small against somebody that was really big,” Laurel said. “Just like a hypertoxic view of masculinity being important and a vital part of Christianity.”

The female interns were also forced to fight, said Ferguson, who recalled how one night they were taken to a hill on the nearby Louisiana State University campus and told to form a line.

“And they had the guys and the girls just fight. It didn’t matter,” she said. “There were no rules.”

Besides the physical abuse there was a huge amount of mental abuse. One claim is that the program participants were forced to take part in 24-hour prayer marathons for Amy Stockstill, wife of program leader Joel Stockstill, to implore God to heal her cancer. When Amy Stockstill passed, the interns were told it was their fault and that they didn’t have enough faith.

Female interns would have their clothing policed and their BMIs taken. If a leader thought one of the ladies was overweight, she’d be shamed and put on a restricted diet.

To top it all off, there was some good old-fashioned financial abuse as well:

The interns said they were also pressured by program leadership into pitching in to buy “extravagant gifts” for Joel and Amie Stockstill [Joel’s second wife] on their birthdays, like a $500 gift card to Anthropologie for her or courtside seats to a Los Angeles Lakers game for him.

“Each year, there was some new thing for us to buy for them. All the while Joel and his wife both drove Escalades, owned a penthouse in West Palm Beach and were flaunting designer clothing,” Claire said.

Bethany Church has denied some of the more serious allegations—the claims of racism, singling out LGBTQ+ interns, and the fight nights.

Current head pastor Jonathan Stockstill, brother of program leader Joel Stockstill, posted an apology on Facebook about the program. Some former participants of 220i have criticized the apology as being weak and insincere, and I agree with them. Stockstill makes use of tired and cliched church lingo that we’ve all heard before:

“It’s obvious to me now and to the current leadership of Bethany Church that we significantly missed the mark in that program in many ways.”

Also, this reads to me as if Stockstill is slyly trying to pass a bit of the blame to some former leadership. No. Jonathan Stockstill was the head pastor of Bethany church while the 220i program was running. According to the article, a lot of what took place occurred in the backyard of his family home. Jonathan Stockstill knew exactly what was going on in the program.

Underneath the weak-ass apology were hundreds of comments offering forgiveness and praise, including from some who said they went through the program and indeed found it to be tortuous, yet still thanked Stockstill for giving them the opportunity to be “broken before God.” Reading these comments truly made me sad.

I have a sickening feeling that Bethany Church’s 220i won’t be the last cult-like leadership development program we’ll be hearing about. As I said here, churches and pastors love to share ideas. Something tells me the brothers Stockstill were a little too proud of their program at the time and may have passed along the blueprint to some of their megachurch buddies. This is pure speculation on my part and I sincerely hope I’m wrong, but at this point, there seems to be no end to the damage that some of these churches are willing to inflict.