In this Red Flag Report, we will cover the many red flags of spiritual abuse, exploitation, coercive control, and other harmful, cult-like behaviors and practices at CoastLife Church in Venice, Florida. If you haven’t already, please read the Check for this church as well.
1. Affiliation with ARC & Kevin Gerald of Champions Centre
The first red flag worth noting for CoastLife church is their affiliation with Kevin Gerald and ARC. ARC (Association of Relational Churches) has a reputation for supporting pastors caught up in sexual scandals, abusive behavior, and other misconduct. We’ve covered the problems with ARC and their mishandling of pastor misconduct multiple times. For a recent example, read this post on former ARC pastor Micahn Carter, who continues to be allowed to teach in ARC churches nationwide despite allegations of rape by a woman he pastored at Together Church in Yakima, Washington.
For more information on ARC and the many reasons we consider them to be a red flag, check out these other sources:
As far as Kevin Gerald goes, he is a church planter for ARC and the lead pastor of Champions Centre in Yakima, Washington with multiple other locations in the state. Kevin Gerald took ownership and the senior pastor position at Together Church, which was absorbed into Champions Centre after Micahn Carter resigned. Kevin Gerald is also on the Board that determines Steven Furtick's salary.
While CoastLife no longer appears on the ARC Church Map on their website, I called ARC and asked them if CoastLife Church is still an ARC Church. They confirmed they are still an ARC Church Partner, but the woman I spoke to was unsure of why they weren’t showing up on their map. She speculated it might be for financial reasons, but couldn’t confirm either way.
We have documentation from former members of the church which include notes from ARC courses and training that CoastLife Church members and leaders attend, such as the Freedom group. There’s also public documentation that mentions Kevin Gerald in a meeting with CoastLife Church’s Board of Directors. You can read it for yourself in the last few pages of the church Bylaws and Articles of Incorporation, linked below.
2. Financial Exploitation, Tithing/Compelled Giving, & No Transparency
Another red flag at CoastLife Church, and the most obvious one, is regarding finances. Financially exploitative behaviors and teachings, a lack of financial transparency, and false teachings of tithing and compelled giving to the congregation are all included in this red flag.
Financial Exploitation, Tithing, & Compelled Giving
CoastLife Church pressures, compels, and even mandates financial giving frequently and in multiple ways. They compel and pressure giving through sermons, through their membership agreement and courses, through their building fund initiatives, social media posts, and other fundraising events and activities all throughout the year.
This focus on money not only shows the church’s service to money and their abuse of Scripture in order to achieve that service, but it also displays red flags of financial exploitation. The church appears to use its position as a spiritual authority to get more money in the name of Jesus, making no exceptions, not even for the very poor.
CoastLife Church frequently teaches on money both in sermon series that last for multiple weeks at a time and standalone sermons. One particular sermon I recently listened to was called The Genius of Generosity, which was part of their Summer Reading List sermon series. It was taught by Dana Stoddard, who sits on the church’s Board of Directors.
Chip Ingram wrote the Genius of Generosity, and I wonder if the church got paid to advertise the books they’re recommending to their congregation. It would certainly be another red flag of financial exploitation and money serving. But since we don’t know the answer to this, let’s get to the sermon, or what I’d much rather like to call a book promotion.
In this book promo speech, Dana Stoddard makes several false claims about the Bible’s teachings on money using Chip Ingram’s book.
“...It’s okay to talk about money in the church. In fact, money is throughout the Bible, which means that God wants to have a conversation about it, and so we’re going to honor His Word, and we’re going to actually talk about it…”
This is a variation of the common lie being propagated in local Christian churches that Jesus loved to talk about money, or that money was His favorite topic of teaching/discussion. Not only is this untrue because Jesus’ favorite topics were obviously things like salvation, the Kingdom of Heaven, faith, love, Hell, and the coming destruction, but it’s also a lie because it is a manipulation of the facts about the Bible for dishonest gain. Money is used and mentioned frequently throughout the Bible and sometimes used in Jesus’ parables as well. This doesn’t make it the actual focus of the message itself.
For example, in Matthew 13:44, Jesus uses treasure hidden in a field as an analogy for the Kingdom of heaven. The Kingdom of heaven isn’t literally treasure hidden in a field which a man finds and then sells all he has to buy the land so he can have it. By Ms. Stoddard’s standard, this parable of Jesus is about treasure because that’s the literal word used in the message, but it’s obviously about the Kingdom of Heaven.
In Matthew 13:33, just a few verses prior, Jesus uses leaven in bread, instead of treasure, to describe the Kingdom of Heaven. Once again, Jesus is making an analogy. And once again, if we’re to interpret this according to CoastLife Church’s understanding of Jesus’ teachings, we ought to believe Jesus’ message here is about bread, but it’s not. It’s about the Kingdom of Heaven.
Whenever money actually seems to be the focus of Jesus’ teaching, it’s usually because He’s rebuking the Pharisees and those who exploit God’s people for dishonest financial gain. I believe He would rebuke CoastLife Church for being dishonest about God’s teachings on money in this sermon, and in the many other ways they are financially exploitative.
Dana Stoddard speaks on generosity under the presupposition that when we speak of generosity, we’re only talking about money. She talks about how she lies to Girl Scouts at the grocery store when she’s too broke to buy cookies because she doesn’t want them to know she’s broke. This precedes her following statement:
“...But when you’re broke the last thing you’re thinking about is giving what little you have away. You’re thinking about other things, like how am I going to pay my bills, how am I going to buy food? I mean generosity is not for me. That’s for people with money…”
Actually, under the Mosaic Law, the poor didn’t pay the tithe, because they literally couldn’t afford the strict requirements established by God for the tithe. In fact, rather than being required to tithe, part of the tithe was used to support the poor and the needy. In the New Testament, Jesus frequently spoke on helping the poor and the needy, not the wealthy and greedy. Yet CoastLife seems to want us to believe that it is they, a mega-church with millions of dollars in property, that the poor should support, and not the other way around. (Deut. 14:28-29; read this article on tithing, too)
Jesus didn’t tithe, nor did His parents because they were poor carpenters. They didn’t have the means to tithe, and when the Pharisees and the teachers of the law began exploiting the poor, such as widows, Jesus was clear on what He thought about that. (Mark 12:38-44; Matt. 7:15-20)
“...We all have the ability to be generous. How so? Because you can have little yet, you can still have joy…”
This statement makes me think of the widow’s offering, which has been used and manipulated by churches like CoastLife for years to financially exploit the poor. If we read Mark 12:38-44 in context, however, we see that Jesus wasn’t happy about the widow’s sacrificial giving. He was actually angry with the teachers of the law that exploited and devoured the poor. He even promised them condemnation for “devouring widow’s houses”.
Besides all of this, why is it that the local church can’t have “little” while still having joy? Why do local church leaders need millions of dollars for their 40,000 square foot buildings and everything that goes into them, but the people that make up the Body of Christ, the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, His Church, needs so little? How is the church’s new building fund more important than me, an individual Christian that makes up part of the Church Body, having the funds to feed my three children? This statement by Stoddard of CoastLife Church is hypocritical and exploitative.
I only made it fifteen minutes into this sermon and already Dana Stoddard has made it through all the same steps every financially exploitative church walks through in order to guilt, shame, and pressure even the poorest Christians into giving more money for what they call God’s purposes, but are really just pastor salaries, expensive buildings, and facilities. Things none of the New Testament churches or teachers had or wanted, including Jesus.
Creating “God’s Kingdom on Earth”… with Millions of Dollars
Beyond talking about “God’s purposes” in their money-centric sermons, if you looked at the images above, CoastLife also has a building fundraiser they’re calling “God’s Kingdom on Earth.”
This building fundraiser claims to be for God’s purposes, of course, but nowhere in the New Testament do we see Christian churches collecting money for a brick-and-mortar church building. Christian giving all throughout the New Testament was for supporting the poor and the persecuted. Period. Not buildings or other unnecessary materialistic endeavors.
The early Christian Church gave for severely persecuted and suffering Christians and those in need, not wealthy religious empires looking to build another temple. They did church in houses, caves, and in the wilderness. The modern local Christian Church wants you to believe they need tons of money to carry out God’s purposes, to establish God’s Kingdom on Earth, and to build His house, but they don’t.
The Kingdom of God on Earth is not a physical, material place, but lives spiritually within Christian believers themselves. It is believers that make up the Kingdom, and our bodies that make up His house, not physical buildings. To say that they are building God’s Kingdom on Earth by purchasing a bowling alley and spending millions of dollars to make it a “church” is not only unbiblical, but another example of financial exploitation and spiritual abuse. (Luke 17:20-21; John 18:36; John 3:3-5; 1 Cor. 15:50; John 14:20; Rom. 8:9; Gal. 2:20; 1 Cor. 6:19-20; 1 Cor. 3:16)
Special Treatment for Big Donors
Another red flag of financial exploitation and therefore spiritual abuse at CoastLife is their Legacy Parties, where they invite people to give a “legacy offering” for the church’s physical and material expansion. In an apparent effort to pressure even more giving, these donors get to be part of a special party at the church, complete with food and entertainment.
"My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. For if a man wearing a gold ring and fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, and if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, “You sit here in a good place,” while you say to the poor man, “You stand over there,” or, “Sit down at my feet,” have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brothers, has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him?"
James 2:1-26
No Financial Transparency or Accountability
CoastLife Church, as far as I can tell, is also not financially transparent. While they do offer a “financial report” on their website, this report is vague and provides nothing in the way of meaningful financial information.
To learn more about how to check your church for financial transparency, read our post on this topic. For a brief rundown of how this report is anything but transparent, and may actually be misleading in some ways, consider the following issues:
Budget vs Actual: In the section that appears to describe how the church distributed its funds in 2021, it entitles the report as a “Budget.” But a budget is simply a plan of how someone, or some organization plans to spend their money. It doesn’t describe how funds were actually spent. If CoastLife Church intentionally used the word “budget” in accordance with the word’s true meaning here, this is not how their funds were actually distributed, but only how they planned to spend it. If this is the case, they may have spent their funds in a wildly different manner than what they claim in this report.
The third page of this vague, incomplete, and confusing financial report lists specifics regarding what each category of the budget is used for, but this raises even more questions. For example, why are “Events” covered by both Operations and Facilities? Many of the specifics under each category of the budget sound so similar that I wonder why. How are “other day-to-day operational needs” different from “facilities expenses for Sunday services and special events” and why are they under two different categories of the budget? How are “all expenses related to property loans” different from “contributions and donations made to church plants,” or “funds used for launching future CoastLife Locations”?
While I can’t speculate how much money Pastors Jason or Heidi Warman are taking as a salary from CoastLife Church, or anyone else that could be receiving a salary from the church, this report isn’t specific at all regarding how much money is spent on salaries alone. This further shows how lacking in financial transparency they are. Donors have a right to know how much of their donation is going toward salaries and how much those salaries are, but most churches, including CoastLife Church, never share this information.
3. Labor Exploitation | Selling Sanctification & The Funnel of Slavery
The third red flag we’re looking at for CoastLife Church is regarding other forms of exploitation commonly practiced by spiritually abusive churches. Labor exploitation within a church environment, or what I call the Funnel of Slavery, is when a church abuses Scripture and uses its self-appointed spiritual authority to exploit your time, energy, resources, and spiritual gifts. Essentially, what this does is turn a church into a slave labor camp, where everyone is coerced, shamed, and manipulated into providing free labor in the name of Jesus.
Abusive churches and cults make free labor to the church leaders and their building a condition of your sanctification and your walk with Christ in order to force your hand to the plow, sometimes even literally telling you: 'if you really love Jesus, you’ll give the local church your time, talents, and treasures.' Not only are you obligated to pay a re-defined and re-established unbiblical form of tithing, but you are also obligated to provide your “time” and “talents” to the church as if the local church leaders are God Himself, and your service to God belongs within the four walls of their building.
Something many abusive and exploitative churches do today is insist if not outright demand that new members or attendees become workers for the church in some capacity. CoastLife clearly does this. Creating “Next Steps” programs or a “Growth Track” like CoastLife Church and many other churches, especially ARC churches, is a sign that labor exploitation is taking place.
In the Funnel of Slavery, one small step at a time, the church gradually pulls you deeper and deeper into servitude to the local church, either paid (rarely), severely underpaid (more common), or entirely unpaid (typical). You could be working at the soup kitchen every week, volunteering at the homeless shelter or Goodwill, taking care of your family, taking care of someone else’s family, working a full-time job, going to church every Sunday, and attending a Small Group or Bible Study. If you’re not doing something for the church specifically, it’s not enough.
CoastLife Church’s Growth Track at Coastlifeplus.com displays the Funnel of Slavery perfectly. Once you walk through their “front door,” you are expected to participate in serving the church in some way, as well as give to them financially. After that, and as you continue in your “walk,” they expect even more from you as a “leader”. And deeper into the funnel you go. None of this has anything to do with your relationship with Christ or even what the Bible teaches about Christian living, but spiritually abusive churches will repeatedly tell you that it does in order to more easily control you.
CoastLife Church uses fluffy phrases and words that tickle our ears like being “better together”, having “abundant life in Christ,” and growing as a leader and follower of Jesus, but ignore the fact that you can do these things without signing up to direct traffic, sell coffee, usher people to their seats, or clean toilets. You can serve the Church (capital C) without becoming a free employee for a local church building. Your growth, leadership, and walk with Christ doesn’t depend on any of it. To suggest otherwise is simply spiritual abuse and exploitation.
I took the Coastlife+ Front Door course. It would take me a novel to cover every red flag I noticed throughout the course. Not only does it further display red flags of financial abuse, but it also walks us through a Funnel of Slavery that wreaks of labor exploitation, and last but not least, a plethora of signs that this church also practices coercive and authoritarian control, which is our next red flag.
4. Culture Over Christ & Authoritarian Control
If I could define what I believe a harmful religious “cult” is, it would be this:
A cult is a church, group, or organization that has adopted an idolized culture which consists of coercive control, deception, and abuse.
Their doctrine might be technically orthodox, the governance model could be Biblical, and everything can look, feel, and seem “Christian” at face value, but if there is an idolized culture that is controlling, deceptive, and abusive, your church may have strayed from Christ through its lack of love and liberty in Christ toward something man-made, money-serving, and control-driven.
If Christ and His Gospel are not at the center, it is or will eventually become what I believe to be a cult by idolizing the culture of the church above Christ and practicing various forms of control, deception, and abuse, which are antithetical to Christ’s nature and Christ’s Law of love for God and others.
Idolizing Culture
At CoastLife Church, the culture of the church appears to be everything. This is displayed frequently in the CoastLife+ Front Door course. In one of their 9 Standards of Service in the CoastLife+ Front Door course, a CoastLife spokesperson states in Standard 8 - Set the Tone:
“...when we walk into a room, as leaders and as team members, we don’t just take the temperature, but we walk in and we set the temperature in the room. And so if you’re walking into an atmosphere that doesn’t carry our culture, as team members and as leaders, we have the responsibility and authority to shift the atmosphere and make it a CoastLife culture that’s fun, that’s exciting, and that expresses life…”
Note the words this person uses to describe the culture of CoastLife church, which are “fun,” “exciting,” and “expresses life.” So… where is Christ in this culture?
While Jesus seems to be given lip service as being “everything” at CoastLife Church, their culture and vision aren’t really “all about Jesus”, or even His Gospel. It’s about having “abundant life” in Jesus, and the way CoastLife Church believes we have an abundant life in Jesus is by serving and submitting to the church. They take our sanctification process and make it a work of the church, rather than God.
Pastor Jason Warman makes these statements in the last segment of Step 3 of the CoastLife+ Front Door course:
“... Salvation is a personal thing, but it’s for a corporate calling…”
“... We’re saved to serve…”
“... Salvation is your qualification to serve in the Kingdom of God…”
“... You’re never closer to the heart of God than when you do a work for God. You’re never closer to the heart of God than when you’re serving in the house of God…”
Control & More Exploitation
Churches that want to maintain authoritarian control over their congregants and establish a Funnel of Slavery (labor exploitation) have many methods of accomplishing this. One is by establishing that your faith in Jesus Christ and your belief in His Gospel is not enough. Being filled with God’s Holy Spirit and having direct access to God is not enough. You need more. You need the church.
When I put it so bluntly, you can see the problem clearly and reject it. Wolves are skilled at making unbiblical and anti-Christian ideas sound reasonable and fair, if not amazing and exciting. The smooth talking is so subtle it's difficult to discern the truth from lies, especially when they mix them together. As soon as you feel you’re being pressured or coerced into doing something you wouldn’t normally do, or you’re hearing a lot of catchphrases, slogans, and “cool” philosophies, pay close attention to what is being said and examine it carefully.
With CoastLife Church, Jesus alone isn’t enough. You need to have “abundant life” in Jesus, and you need the church to show you what that is and how to get it. According to them, you get it by serving their church, which by the way, is not the “house of God.” You are the house of God. Not a building. And you are sanctified and edified by the Holy Spirit. According to the Bible God sanctifies us, and no one else can do it. (1 Cor. 3)
Yes, we can be sanctified as a body of believers together, but it is not other believers that sanctify us, but God Himself. When we idolize the corporate or community aspect of our faith, which is a privilege and not a necessity, we’re veering into cult territory by idolizing a community and its culture above Christ. This is what CoastLife Church and many other churches today are doing.
South Mountain Community Church in Utah can tell you how to be “fully devoted and fully delighted” in Jesus Christ and Real Life Ministries in North Idaho can show you how to take “the disciple’s journey” in Jesus Christ, because to these churches, your faith in Jesus isn’t enough, Jesus alone isn’t enough, and the Holy Spirit that works within you isn’t enough. God isn’t enough. The Bible isn’t enough. If they want you to serve the church, pay for the church, and support the church, they have to make the church more important than it really is.
The church needs to be more relevant and authoritative in your life in order to control and exploit you, so they create these slogans, catchphrases, visions, missions, and cultures that always include taking authority and value away from Christ, His Gospel, and God’s word, and giving it to themselves. They turn the process of spiritual growth and maturity into a product to be sold and gained by serving and paying the church. Rather than selling justification the way the Catholic Church did, they’re selling sanctification. It’s exploitative, controlling, deceptive, idolatrous, and ultimately, spiritually abusive.
Authoritarian Control Through Memberships & Sin Discipline
Another way in which CoastLife Church appears to practice authoritarian control is by having official memberships and a sin discipline policy. I’ve found this to be the most common way in which controlling and authoritative churches enact their cult-like spiritual abuse on their congregants.
While church leaders might lead us to believe a sin discipline policy is a good thing because it protects church members from abuse, the most common usage of such policies is to punish and coercively control church members for failing to submit to the authoritarian rule of the church’s leaders. In these types of churches, any attempt to hold church leaders accountable to a sin discipline policy for abuse is snuffed out, and the abuse victim could be excommunicated for gossip and slander for even talking about it.
As for official memberships, these legally binding contracts are usually completely one-sided in favor of the church’s leadership, exploitative, authoritarian, and unbiblical. They will typically give an ungodly amount of authority and control to church leaders over the lives and spiritual walks of church members, which is spiritually abusive, and a very risky thing to submit yourself to.
It is this church checker’s opinion that official church memberships are dangerous to the Body of Christ, and unless you have a trusted lawyer read yours, you should consider very carefully whether or not you would ever sign one. As soon as you disagree with your church leaders on anything they deem important, and if you’re not a drone you definitely will, then you will be at the mercy of that membership contract, not just as a member of the church, but legally as well.
5. Information Control & Stonewalling
For this red flag, check out the “I” in Dr. Steve Hassan’s BITE Model. Steve Hassan is a cult expert and former member of the Moonie cult, or what many people know as the Unification Church.
In Hassan’s BITE Model, which describes the many ways a cult will enact authoritarian control on its members, the “I” is for Information Control. One example of how a cult might practice Information Control according to Hassan’s model is by deliberately withholding information. This is a behavior I’ve observed multiple times from CoastLife Church.
As noted in the Church Check, we have very little information on Jason and Heidi Warman. We don’t know the name of the Bible College Jason attended before becoming a pastor, or the names of churches he served in before becoming pastor of CoastLife Church. I believe the church may be deliberately withholding this information because while Jason mentions both being a part of other churches and going to Bible College in this interview, he doesn’t name either of them.
Additionally, Jason Warman frequently mentions his “mentor,” both in sermons and in the interview linked in the previous paragraph. But just like with the Bible College he attended and the churches he’s served in before, he also doesn’t mention the name of his mentor. I believe that’s because his mentor is very likely Kevin Gerald (See the first red flag).
Last, I’ve emailed Pastor Jason multiple times over the past year to ask questions about the church. He has ignored all of them. The CoastLife Facebook Page also refrains from answering questions. Even easy ones.
This tactic of stonewalling, which is refusing to answer questions or even engage with someone at all, is a deliberate withholding of information as well.
In conclusion, and as we stated in our Final Rating of their Church Check, we do not recommend Coastlife Church. The red flags of financial exploitation, labor exploitation, the affiliation with ARC and Kevin Gerald, the information control, the stonewalling, and the many other red flags of cult-like practices and behaviors add up. In the end, we do not recommend CoastLife Church.