“I think the allegations are extremely serious and it’s something that we take very serious,” Tebow told ESPN, according to Mother Jones. “We are having our team do an investigation but also pausing our relationship until we can learn more about the facts.”
Life.Church pastor Craig Groeschel and Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla have since followed Tebow in cutting ties, according to Religion News Service.
How the sales funnel worked
Life Surge events are marketed as one-day Christian conferences — about $20 gets attendees a day of celebrity speakers, worship music and financial inspiration. But according to Mother Jones reporter Kiera Butler, who attended a Life Surge event in suburban Atlanta, the day is structured as an extended sales pipeline.
Attendees are offered a three-day “impact class” on stock market and real estate investing for $97. Those who take that class are then pitched a more expensive program called SurgeU — investment courses that range from roughly $10,000 to $40,000, according to the Mother Jones investigation. A third-party lender was available on-site for those who couldn’t pay upfront.
The investigation found that current and former Life Surge employees confirmed the pattern: staffers sometimes oversold the ease of the program and invoked Christian messaging to persuade attendees to buy expensive packages. One former attendee told Mother Jones that a Life Surge counselor told her “the devil was responsible for her doubts about buying the courses.”
Attendees who spoke to Mother Jones described taking out home equity loans and high-interest credit cards to pay for the courses after sales staff encouraged them to borrow. One couple paid $20,000 for courses, borrowed another $40,000 on credit cards, made no money in the stock market and ultimately took out a home equity loan to pay off credit card debt that had ballooned to a 29% variable interest rate.
“Once you get into this stock trading,” Luebke recalled the counselors telling her, “you can have this paid off in a year.”
“When I left, I felt like they were using the name of the Lord to draw people in for financial gain, and I just think that’s wrong,” attendee Kevin Young told KOCO. “I honestly couldn’t help but leave thinking, ‘man, I’ve been duped.’”
