Last month, in collaboration with the investigative sports podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, Mother Jones published a months-long investigation into Life Surge, the Christian wealth seminar company that has attracted large crowds with celebrity speakers including college football legend Tim Tebow, NBA icon Magic Johnson, and Red Sox great David Ortiz. We detailed how the company attracts crowds of thousands who pay around $20 to attend its one-day events, which mix a star-studded lineup with worship music, tearful and heartfelt Christian testimony, and demonstrations of the company’s proprietary stock-market and real-estate investment strategies. Attendees are given the opportunity to sign up for three-day “impact classes,” where, they are told, they will learn more investment tips—so that they can improve their own finances as well as make a Christian “kingdom impact.” At those classes, which now cost about $97, former attendees reported salespeople invoking Christian faith to sell them a program called SurgeU, investment education packages ranging from $10,000-$40,000.
After paying for the SurgeU classes through a third-party financing company contracted by Life Surge, some attendees have reported ending up tens of thousands of dollars in debt. As one dissatisfied customer wrote in a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission, “I am so devastated that Christians like Tim Tebow made me trust in something that has taken so much money from me. This is evil, especially because I’m disabled on a limited income.” Karen Neal, a 61-year-old former Life Surge customer, told me that for her, buying into the SurgeU classes was a $15,000 mistake. “I see many of these strong Christian artists and strong Christian people that are up there speaking at the Life Serve conferences,” she said. “And it’s like, do they know what’s happening to some of these people that are getting into this?”
Our investigation appears to have touched a nerve: In the days following the release of the Mother Jones story and the Pablo Torre Finds Out episode, there was a mass exodus of celebrities from upcoming Life Surge events. Tips from former Life Surge customers and employees flooded in and shed new light on the company’s complex web of financial interests—and in at least one case, its failure to pay its bills.
Life Surge CEO Jeremy Nosek declined to respond to our request for comment for this piece before our deadline, but he expressed frustration with our previous investigation. “Your reporting, along with that of Pablo Torre Finds Out, has demonstrated a pattern of selectively presenting information, distorting context, and misleading your audiences,” he wrote. “We have little confidence that our responses will be represented fairly or accurately.”
The day after our investigation came out, college football legend Tim Tebow “paused” his work with Life Surge. In the days that followed, two more speakers—megachurch pastor Craig Groeschel and Boston Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla—made similar announcements. The lineup for upcoming events is sparse; speakers whose names have quietly disappeared from promotional materials for future gatherings include Magic Johnson, motivational speakers Nick Vujicic and Ed Mylett, actress Candace Cameron Bure, Christian musicians Natalie Grant and Maverick City Music, and retired NFL coach Tony Dungy, among others.
One question that remains is how much those celebrities knew about Life Surge before signing on as speakers. During an appearance at an SEC event a day after our investigation aired, Tebow told a reporter with an ESPN affiliate that he had been caught off guard by the findings—even though the Christian investigative outlet Roys Report has noted that its reporters had alerted Tebow’s team to the allegations more than a year ago. “I think the allegations are extremely serious and it’s something that we take very serious,” he said. “For us we are having our team do an investigation but also pausing our relationship until we can learn more about the facts to be able to understand more.”
“They know that they are being hired for a Christian event that has a business focus, and they might know about the first classes. But they do not know what goes on after that.”
According to a former employee who worked closely with the Life Surge executive team and contacted us after our investigation, the speakers were briefed about the three-day impact classes but not the pricier SurgeU packages. “They know that they are being hired for a Christian event that has a business focus, and they might know about the first classes,” he said. “But they do not know what goes on after that.” Indeed, a document purporting to be a talent agreement template, which was shared with us by a former Life Surge vendor, includes a requirement that speakers participate in an “impact class student reception.” Life Surge declined to elaborate on what exactly that reception entailed, but in his original statement to Mother Jones and Pablo Torre Finds Out, Life Surge CEO Jeremy Nosek maintained that “Life Surge does not ask its headline speakers to promote or endorse Impact Classes or advanced training programs.”
Customers aren’t the only ones complaining about Life Surge. A former third-party vendor told Mother Jones and Pablo Torre Finds Out that the company didn’t honor its financial commitments to him. In 2024, Life Surge entered into an agreement with a Georgia-based transaction-processing company called Court Compass. This vendor would run credit-card transactions at the one-day events—a tall order, given the sheer volume and speed of transactions. Charge volume data from one day in May 2024, for example, showed 567 successful charges for impact classes, with more than three-quarters of those transactions occurring during a single 30-minute window between speakers.
Those figures come from documents received from Life Surge and shared with us by Court Compass founder and chief operating officer Brad Logan, who detailed a troubling pattern of broken promises in his dealings with Life Surge over the course of ten months during 2024 and 2025. Logan’s initial agreement was for a monthly flat fee of $85,000 for transactions at the star-studded one-day events, but Life Surge executives subsequently offered Court Compass a 3 percent cut to process transactions for three-day Impact Classes, touting potential profits for Logan of $75,000 and $60,000 a month for the real estate and stock market classes, respectively.
But as Logan quickly discovered, the Life Surge contract turned out not to be as lucrative as he had hoped—for the simple reason that the company seemed to struggle to pay him. Logan’s records show a transaction failure due to non-sufficient funds in the bank account that Life Surge had provided for electronic payments. Logan followed up with the company repeatedly about their growing debt to him, but he remembers the company pushing back. “One of their pressure techniques when they’re dealing with their merchant partners—they use, ‘Oh, give us a break,’” he recalled. “‘Give us a better price. We’re a Christian organization. We don’t have as much funds as other organizations.’”
By mid-2025, months after Logan had stopped working with Life Surge in February, Life Surge still hadn’t paid Court Compass anywhere near what the agreement had promised. In fact, Logan said, the company hadn’t even reimbursed him for the wireless credit card terminals they had asked him to purchase for use at one-day events in Atlanta and Dallas, as well as at a three-day impact class in Atlanta.
“One of their pressure techniques when they’re dealing with their merchant partners—they use, ‘Oh, give us a break. Give us a better price. We’re a Christian organization. We don’t have as much funds as other organizations.’”
When Court Compass finally terminated its relationship with Life Surge, Logan estimates that his business was out approximately $90,000—a significant loss for a business that was bringing in about $1.2 million a year in net revenues at the time according to documents provided by Logan. In total, over the course of the ten months of the contract, Logan estimates that Life Surge paid him between $8,000 and $9,000 a month—a fraction of what he had been promised. Logan remembers feeling frustrated and perplexed—because as part of the vetting process for his contract with them, his own risk assessors had required Life Surge executives to share information about earnings and financial assets. “You’ve got money pouring out your ears,” Logan recalls thinking. “Dude, I’ve got your tax returns, I’ve got your corporate financial statement.”
Logan shared those tax returns and financial statements with us, and they paint a picture of a company that, between 2021 and early 2024, was both growing quickly and spending liberally. Internal consolidated financial statements and tax filings reveal Life Surge’s revenue exploded from $1.97 million in 2021 to $16.6 million in 2022 to $47.4 million in 2023. Then, in the first quarter of 2024 alone the company made $18.2 million—putting Life Surge on track for $72.8 million in 2024. Despite the massive revenue, Life Surge reported thin bottom-line margins—a net profit of just $919,042 in that first quarter of 2024, for example—due in part to heavy overhead expenses, which were not broken down further in the documents.
Interestingly, ticket sales for the one-day celebrity-led events accounted for a relatively small share of the company’s revenue—just 8.4 percent in 2022 and 9.2 percent in 2023. Yet the company appeared to be spending lavishly on these events: $6.8 million in marketing and $4.4 million in event costs in 2023—as well as $5.3 million in talent costs, which, presumably, included compensation for the celebrity speakers.
Most of the revenue for Life Surge’s comes from purchases made at the three-day Impact Classes—where students have the option to purchase SurgeU stock-trading and real estate education packages ranging from $10,000-$40,000. Sales made at the Impact Classes generated 81.5 percent of the total revenue in 2023 ($38.7 million) and never dipped below 78 precent of overall revenue between 2021 and the first quarter of 2024.
Put simply, Life Surge was spending heavily on its one-day events—but the lion’s share of the revenue came from the three-day events. That pattern makes sense given another noteworthy finding from the financial documents shared with us: The expenses for one-day events are listed under the line item “Cost of Lead Gen (Life Surge)”—“Lead Gen” is presumably shorthand for lead generation, or the identification of potential customers. The three-day impact classes, meanwhile, were categorized under “Cost of Sales (Impact Classes),” suggesting that the company sees these sessions as sales funnels for high-ticket education packages. In other words, even though the most money was spent on the single day events, that was more than offset by the revenue generated from sales during the three-day Impact Classes.
As high-profile speakers continue to drop out of the company’s one-day events, the crowds seem to be shrinking, as well. Sources on the ground told us that fewer than 1,500 people attended October events in Hartford, Connecticut, and Charlotte, North Carolina—smaller than the usual crowds of 3,000-4,000. According to recordings obtained by journalist Lauren Windsor, at an event in Charlotte, Life Surge president Shawn Marcell suggested to the audience that “media” reports about Life Surge’s ethically questionable practices were untrue. “Anybody notice over the last two weeks there’s been a little bit more conversation about it?” he said. “Raise your hand if you know what I’m talking about. Okay, several of you. And you listen, I want us to all just acknowledge that the media never lies.” The crowd laughed appreciatively.
“We have always known that standing at the intersection of faith and finance makes us a lightning rod, and we are at peace with that,” it reads. “The judgment we care about most is not the media’s. It is standing before God one day and hearing, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’ “
The company was more circumspect in a statement on its website issued shortly after our investigation came out. “We have always known that standing at the intersection of faith and finance makes us a lightning rod, and we are at peace with that,” it reads. “The judgment we care about most is not the media’s. It is standing before God one day and hearing, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’ That is the standard, and it is higher than any regulation.” The statement goes on to promise “a series of videos addressing the allegations and how Life Surge operates: our business model, our education and what it is worth, why we believe faith belongs in finance, how we sell and how we train the people who do it, how we approach compliance, our people and our culture, and how ministry lives inside this business.”
At the time of publication of this article, those videos had not yet appeared.