Bethel Church Suspends Sale of Passion Translation

Bethel Church finally hit pause on The Passion Translation. The Redding machine that spent years treating Brian Simmons’ paraphrase like fresh manna just announced it will stop selling the thing in its stores until it gets “additional clarity.”

Here is the full statement from Bethel’s leadership:

As a leadership team we have been in discussions regarding concerns around The Passion Translation. We understand reviews are underway by skilled organizations and recognize these will take some time. Until we have additional clarity, we are pausing the sale of The Passion Translation in our stores.

That is the whole thing. No admission that Simmons plagiarized. No admission that the “translation” invents wording the Greek and Hebrew never carried. No reckoning with Bill Johnson’s years of platforming. Just corporate fog dressed up as prudence.

How We Got Here

This did not fall out of the sky. Earlier this summer, Bethel quietly yanked The Passion Translation from its bookstore after the Minor Prophets exposé tore into Simmons. Screenshots showed the Bible section going empty. Then the product came back. A receptionist even told The Roys Report it was still for sale. Classic Bethel: flinch under pressure, then pretend nothing happened.

Now the official line is a “pause.” The timing is not subtle. YouVersion, the largest Bible app on the planet, said it was investigating TPT after a Change.org petition racked up more than 17,000 signatures demanding removal. Bible Gateway already dumped it years ago. The walls are closing in, and Bethel would rather freeze the SKU than defend the text.

The Endorsement Problem

Bethel is not a neutral retailer in this story. It is a co-signer. Bill Johnson called The Passion Translation “one of the greatest things to happen with Bible translation in my lifetime.” He cut promo material for it. He told people he barely goes a day without reading it. He said he reads it every night before bed. Bethel even sold its own special edition New Testament with a 16-page foreword from Johnson, faux leather for $50, real leather for $150. It sold out after the first service when they launched it.

When your senior leader treats a paraphrase like a revival relic, pulling it from the bookstore is not a minor inventory decision. It is an institutional retreat.

Johnson’s own defense of the project was always a trust fall. “I’m not a Hebrew or Greek guy,” he said. “I have to believe whoever is.” That is not discernment. That is celebrity outsourcing. And the “whoever” turned out to be Brian Simmons.

What the Exposé Actually Showed

The Minor Prophet’s investigation, amplified across the discernment world and pushed into wider coverage by figures like Mike Winger, documented a pattern.

Simmons has been accused of routine plagiarism, including language lifted from other paraphrases such as The Message. Texas pastor David Fish said he found hundreds of instances in Luke alone and published spreadsheets with example after example. Footnotes praised as mystical insight appear, in multiple cases, to track material from dubious sources rather than original-language work.

The original sales pitch was scholarship and heavenly download. The receipts look more like cut-and-paste spirituality with a proprietary brand. Simmons has not publicly answered the core allegations in any serious way. Broadstreet has stayed quiet. Bethel’s answer is to pause the register and wait for “skilled organizations” to finish reviewing what anyone with a concordance could already smell.

Pause Is Not Repentance

Do not confuse this with Bethel suddenly discovering the doctrine of Scripture.

If leadership believed TPT was a faithful rendering of the Word of God, they would defend it. If they believed Simmons was exposed as a fraud, they would renounce it. Instead, they chose the third way beloved by every compromised institution under heat: delay, reframe, and hope the news cycle moves.

“Additional clarity” is PR language. The clarity already exists. A church that discipled people on a text now too radioactive to sell is admitting, without admitting, that it catechized its audience on sand.

And notice what the statement does not do. It does not tell members to stop using TPT. It does not retract Johnson’s endorsements. It does not apologize to the people who bought the Bethel edition because their pastors made it feel anointed. It only stops taking money for it “until” the reviews land. Emphasis on until. The door is still cracked for a restoration tour if the temperature drops.

The Larger Rot

The Passion Translation thrived because the charismatic celebrity economy wanted a Bible that preached like their conferences. Emotional. Therapeutic. Heavy on vibe, light on restraint. Simmons gave them a product that felt prophetic and read like a devotional remix. Bethel did not merely stock it. Bethel baptized it with authority.

Bible Gateway cut ties. Petitions hit YouVersion. Scholars undercut the “rigorous review” myth. Now Bethel suspends sales. The sequence is not complicated. Pressure worked where theology never got a hearing.

Bethel wants credit for caution. Fine. Put the statement on the record. Then remember what it actually proves. But they still have not told you they were wrong to sell it.