It’s Sunday afternoon in the summer of 2022. I’m at Elysian Park in Los Angeles, three miles from Downtown and within earshot of Dodger Stadium. It’s a typically warm and sunny day, and this section of the park is busy with competing birthday parties, families having a cookout, and teenagers brazenly hitting dab pens. In the midst of all this activity, another small gathering, of about 35 people, has formed a loose semicircle around a woman dressed in black pants, a black shirt, and a fashionable blue kimono-style cardigan. A man walks the perimeter, filming the proceedings with a handheld video camera. Another camera, positioned nearby on a tripod, is also recording. The woman is white and in her early 30s, with long, dark brown hair and a wide, toothy smile. She speaks assertively but soothingly into a wireless microphone, her voice amplified by two portable speakers.
At first glance, you might think Apostle Kathryn Krick is leading team-building exercises or hosting an outdoor seminar on real estate investing. But look closer and you’ll see two people passed out on the ground, each covered with a light blanket; one person on his knees, weeping and convulsing; and two dozen others with their arms raised to the sky. Krick addresses a middle-aged Latina woman standing directly in front of her. “I cancel every demonic covenant, every spirit of witchcraft,” Krick declares. “I detach you from all you have renounced—now, in Jesus’s name.”
This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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The middle-aged woman shakes once, as though jolted with an electric current. While holding her hand a few inches from the woman’s head, Krick continues: “I break all generational curses. I speak complete freedom, in Jesus’s name. I command every spirit attached—all must go, on the count of three. One, two, three.”
The woman trembles, hesitates, then falls backward into the waiting arms of a male volunteer, who safely lowers her to a seated position on the ground, where she quietly sobs.
“Thank you, Jesus,” Krick says to applause from the crowd. “Thank you, Jesus.”
This is my first time seeing Krick in person, and I’m underwhelmed by the turnout. As someone who has for years studied and reported on faith in America, including new and nontraditional religious movements, I was interested in learning about Krick and her ministry. I’d heard about her online a month or so earlier, and her social media presence made it seem as though a massive modern-day Pentecostal revival was happening here in Los Angeles. But an audience of 35 is not a revival; it’s a picnic.
I return home and put the self-described apostle out of my mind for the next two years, until I learn that, in the intervening time, Krick has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers around the world, with nearly a million followers on social media and more than 900,000 YouTube subscribers. She now travels the globe regularly, filling large venues in such far-off and disparate places as Berlin, Dubai, Prague, and Cape Town, where she purportedly heals the sick and the lame, casts out demons, breaks generational curses, and even takes care of your pesky seasonal allergies—all of it live streamed to thousands of viewers on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.
So this past summer, about two years after that day at Elysian Park, I decide to reinvestigate. I drive to downtown Los Angeles, to the historic Belasco Theater, where Krick will be ministering to over 300 people, many of whom have traveled hundreds of miles, hoping—praying—that this young, charismatic woman will set them free from demonic possession.
Kathryn Krick was born on New Year’s Day 1991, in Andes, a small, scenic town in upstate New York. After graduating from Ithaca College in 2013—with a major in communication management and design—Krick leased a car and drove across the country to L.A., where she, like so many starry-eyed souls before her, dreamed of becoming an actor.
She landed a few commercials as well as a brief part on the reality TV dating show Love at First Kiss, but she eventually gave that up and went on to pursue her other passion: writing and recording Christian EDM under the name Kat Krick. In 2015, she released her first single, “Perfect Love,” a mash-up of club music and what you might hear during a praise and worship service at a church for progressive millennials. She believed that music was her calling, that it was God’s will for her to find success in EDM, but in the meantime, she worked as a waiter and a nanny and sometimes drove for Lyft, barely scraping by.
Her life changed in September 2016 at a Healing, Anointing, and Impartation conference in Los Angeles, led by a Christian holy man visiting from Tanzania, GeorDavie Moses Kasambale. GeorDavie, as he’s known, is a popular minister, entrepreneur, and self-styled prophet who founded his own church, travels in luxury, controls an impressive media empire back home in Tanzania, and seemingly has the power to deliver people from demons with a simple wave of his hand and a commanding voice. He was looking to expand his ministry in the United States, and he offered a prophecy, proclaiming that a massive spiritual revival was imminent. “Revival is now for America,” he declared. “It will begin in L.A., it will spread across the U.S., and it will spread across the whole world.”
GeorDavie singled out Krick, pulled her aside, and delivered a special message just for her. “This prophet ended up prophesying to me that I was actually called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ,” she later recalled, “and I was called to reach the nations, and God was going to do many miracles through me.”
Krick was reluctant at first. She was nervous about public speaking, she’d never led a ministry, and she was still holding out hope that she’d make it as an EDM singer. But Krick believed that God was speaking through this dapper, mustachioed spiritual leader from East Africa, and she wasn’t one to disobey a direct command from God. Twenty-five years old and a newly christened apostle of Jesus Christ, Kathryn Krick went to work.
Though today she can draw an audience of thousands, with many hundreds more claiming to have been “delivered” (cured of mental illnesses and physical ailments) by merely watching her live streams on TikTok and Instagram, Krick’s first few years as an apostle were discouraging. Calling her new endeavor Advanced Anointing Church, she held her first service on Sunday, June 18, 2017, at a scenic overlook on Mulholland Drive, ministering to just two supportive friends. Following services were similarly ill-attended, with Krick preaching and playing worship songs on an acoustic guitar to a handful of people. She wasn’t yet seeing any miracles or deliverances, and she was struggling with self-doubt.
Nine months after her first service, Krick and four other young women traveled from L.A. to Tanzania to visit the home church of the man they called their spiritual father. As the women stood onstage—before a large audience of supporters and multiple video cameras—Krick beseeched GeorDavie to give her and her companions the power to perform miracles and “to be used to reach all of the people of Los Angeles.” GeorDavie magnanimously granted Krick’s appeal, releasing to her a special “impartation of anointing” by dripping oil on her head. This, apparently, did the trick. “As I flew back to Los Angeles on the 23-hour plane ride, I immediately knew I was different,” she writes in her 2023 book, The Secret of the Anointing.
Miracles aside, attendance at Krick’s revivals remained stubbornly low, with fewer than a dozen visitors showing up each Sunday. Some days, only one or two people came. Some days, no one did. Hoping to reach a larger audience, Krick said that God had spoken to her, directing her to create succinct, one-minute clips focusing on the moment when a person “manifested” (showed signs of demonic possession—e.g., shrieking, grimacing, contorting) and to blast these videos across social media. This gained her a few new followers, but nothing to shout hosanna over.
The arrival of COVID-19 didn’t improve matters. No longer able to congregate indoors, Krick’s church turned to local parks to hold services, which Krick would film, sharing the videos on Facebook and YouTube. She rebranded Advanced Anointing as 5F (or Five-Fold) Church, named for the five ministerial roles—apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers—that Jesus assigned to his followers in Ephesians 4:11. She called the services Revival in the Park, and for the next two and a half years, Krick and her small congregation would meet on Sundays at various public parks in Los Angeles. But still she struggled to gain new followers, and her videos failed to attract more than a small number of views on social media.
But then God spoke again, telling Krick to put together a highlight reel of her most powerful manifestations of the year—a greatest-hits video—and she uploaded it to TikTok on December 30, 2020. By January 1, Krick’s 30th birthday, she was shocked to discover that the video had one million views, with thousands of comments from people testifying that they’d experienced miracles simply by watching on their phones. Her TikTok and Instagram followers skyrocketed into the thousands, and their numbers continued to grow daily. “It was like God just decided to open up the floodgates all of a sudden,” she remembered.
Kathryn Krick—the TikTok apostle of Los Angeles—had arrived.
The City of Angels has, of course, seen more than its fair share of apostles, prophets, spiritualists, and gurus. It has long been a magnet for all sorts of fringe and unconventional spiritual sects, and it has been particularly hospitable to the faith movement known as Pentecostalism. Emerging in 1906, during the Azusa Street Revival in downtown L.A., Pentecostalism grew into a popular mass movement in the 1920s with celebrity evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson and her Echo Park megachurch, Angelus Temple, and surged again in the 1960s and ’70s with Kathryn Kuhlman, who would pack the 7,000-seat Shrine Auditorium for her monthly “healing and miracle services.”
Though many of its practitioners don’t refer to themselves as such, Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing faith movement in the world, according to a Pulitzer Center–backed project called the Atlas of Pentecostalism. It’s not difficult to understand Pentecostalism’s appeal, especially in underprivileged and disenfranchised communities. As healthcare remains unaffordable for many individuals, the promise of being instantly healed by someone simply laying her hands on you and freeing you from your ailments—whether physical or mental—is seductive. As Elle Hardy, author of Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over the World, explains, many people around the globe with mental health problems or chronic physical health conditions are “turning to these ministries out of desperation.”
“There’s no state-run healthcare in many developing nations,” Hardy tells me over the phone, “so faith healing is the only option.”
Pentecostalism has become so effective in recruiting new adherents in large part because its apostles and ministers have embraced modern technology. McPherson and Kuhlman understood the combined power of spectacle and mass media, as have many of the charismatic televangelists who have followed, from Kenneth Copeland to Benny Hinn to Joel Osteen. And just as those painted, powdered, and plasticized evangelists once used radio and television to recruit and teach (and, yes, solicit money), today’s younger evangelists are now on social media, where there is even less accountability and much more risk of causing great harm.
I visit 5F Church’s in-person revival at the Belasco over two Sundays in August. Krick’s performance has come a long way since the park revivals. She now has stage lighting, audio engineers, a four-piece band and two singers, and a team of professional camera operators, who follow her movements across the stage. With hundreds of people jumping up and down, waving their hands, shouting, and occasionally passing out in the aisle, it feels more like a rock concert than a church service (complete with merch tables in the lobby). But Krick is an unlikely rock star. With her cornflower-blue eyes, her practiced but no less pleasant smile, and her infectious enthusiasm, Krick also doesn’t fit the stereotype of a prophetic minister and faith healer. Fellow online evangelist and influencer Shawn Bolz, a supporter of Krick’s, enthuses, “If you want to get deliverance, you might as well get one of the Disney princesses to do it.”
I meet several participants who have traveled great distances to attend this Sunday revival: an older white couple from San Francisco, a Latino family from Texas, a single Korean woman from Florida. Two older Black women, dressed in colorful African dresses and dragging suitcases behind them, present Krick with photos of two young men and what looks to be citizenship paperwork; they bow to Krick, weeping, apparently pleading with the apostle to ask Jesus to put in a good word for their sons at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
I recognize a young white man from many of Krick’s videos, where he could often be seen screaming, contorting, or passed out on the ground—what others might recognize as psychotic episodes but is explained by the faithful as manifesting. Austin Ring tells me he’s had a long history of suffering from mercury poisoning, mold toxicity, heavy metal toxicity, memory loss, paranoia, schizophrenia, and myriad other infections and diseases. He’s seen various specialists, and none were of any help. Ring discovered Krick on social media and, in early January 2022, drove 40 minutes to her park revival.
“I went and surrendered everything,” he tells me. “I received the baptism of the holy spirit, and ever since then I’ve been on fire, fully surrendered, fully committed to this ministry, to Apostle Kathryn, to serving here.”
Krick and I speak on the phone a short time later. I ask her how she knows when or if her healing—the anointing—has worked: How does she know when the demonic spirit has been cast out and the person in front of her (or watching online at home) has been set free?
“I don’t really operate like, ‘Oh, I hope this works,’ ” Krick tells me. “I don’t see it that way. I have the faith and the knowing that God is here, that God is with me, God is moving upon the prayers absolutely, and God’s not letting down his people. When they come with faith, he won’t let them down.”
God may or may not be with Krick, but she has plenty of detractors online who are committed to exposing her as a fraud and a false prophet. Commenters have called her “Jezebel,” an “agent of hell,” “whore of Babylon,” “cult leader Barbie,” and other impassioned, often misogynistic, epithets. The vast majority of these critics are Christian men, whose chief complaint is with female preachers. Others have taken issue with the fact that Krick requests financial donations for her church, as though every other church, or, for that matter, every performer, entertainer, doctor, hairstylist, auto mechanic, plumber—literally every profession in the modern world—does not ask for money.
Curiously, none of these online critics seem to object to what is arguably the most concerning aspect of Krick’s ministry: that she claims to heal people (in Jesus’s name) of serious conditions like cancer, HIV, breathing difficulties, depression, suicidal ideation, and drug and alcohol addiction; neurological disorders like autism; and personal hardships like poverty and insomnia. When faith healing replaces medical treatment and therapy, there is a great potential for disaster. It’s far too easy to blame recurrences and relapses on an individual’s “lack of faith.” And like her fellow online influencers and would-be healers, Krick stands to face few or no consequences if and when greater harm comes to a person she has “set free.”
I later speak with Melissa Archer, one of the women who joined Krick in Tanzania in 2018. A former television actor who’d starred in One Life to Live and Days of Our Lives, Archer left GeorDavie’s ministry soon after returning home to L.A. “When you start telling people that they’re healed from something and then they’re not, and they get sick and hurt themselves or others, that’s very dangerous,” Archer says.
While Krick boasts close to two million (and counting) followers in Los Angeles and online, across multiple continents, she is still as eager and ambitious as the young woman who drove across the country to L.A. a dozen years ago willing to take any role in her search for fame and success. As Apostle Kathryn Krick—worker of miracles, servant of Jesus Christ, called to reach the nations through TikTok and YouTube—she has unexpectedly found the role of a lifetime, a powerful position that she never could have anticipated. But with this great power, of course, comes great responsibility, and it remains uncertain what continues to motivate Krick—her responsibility toward others who come to her in need or her personal ambition.
That day on the phone, Krick is gearing up to minister to her largest audience to date, at a 20,000-capacity arena in Manila, Philippines. I ask her what she sees for the future of her church, how large she envisions her ministry growing.
“I see several, several more people being reached and coming with hunger to come and receive healing and deliverance,” Krick tells me with her typical enthusiasm. “Many, many, many, many, many, many, many more people.”
But first, they’ll have to like, follow, or subscribe.•
Santi Elijah Holley is an award-winning journalist and the author of An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created. He is a regular contributor to Alta Journal.
