Inside Tim Tebow’s Favorite Wealth Seminar – Mother Jones

This story was produced in partnership with Pablo Torre Finds Out.

In a cavernous enviornment in suburban Atlanta one heat day final May, I arrived at 9:00 a.m. with 1000’s of others to see former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow—not taking part in soccer, however because the keynote speaker at a daylong occasion about religion and enterprise. By the time Tebow took the stage, a racially and generationally various group of 1000’s of Christians from metro Atlanta had been sitting within the chilly, darkish enviornment for eight hours, swaying to worship music, laughing at Christian comedians’ healthful jokes, and listening to tear-jerking testimonials of faith-transformed lives. It had been a protracted and packed day, however you wouldn’t have identified it from the gang’s rapt consideration as Tebow urged us to comply with “the plan that he has for you, the good works that he has in store for each and every one of you. And then when the king says go, would we just say yes?”

What precisely Tebow supposed the gang to say sure to wasn’t clear. But earlier within the day, a lot of them had mentioned sure to one thing far much less metaphysical: a three-day seminar of courses on inventory market and actual property investing, for the low worth of $97.

As athletes go, they don’t get rather more healthful than Tim Tebow. The 39-year-old retired NFL quarterback has had a legendary profession: In 2007, he grew to become the primary sophomore to win the distinguished Heisman Trophy; he then went on to steer the Denver Broncos and defeat the Pittsburgh Steelers within the playoffs, however missed the chance to become AFC champs in 2011 towards Tom Brady’s New England Patriots. Though the latter a part of his profession fizzled—after underperforming for the New York Jets he shifted sports activities and launched into a lackluster stint in minor league baseball whereas additionally internet hosting on ESPN—he remained within the highlight largely due to his religious Christian religion. So continuously did he drop to 1 knee on the sphere that the transfer grew to become often known as “Tebowing.” He made frequent appearances on Christian media shops, and in 2010 he starred together with his mom in an anti-abortion Super Bowl advert sponsored by the fitting wing religion advocacy group Focus on the Family.

Tebow’s piety is extra than simply praying for a landing—he has used his fame and wealth for good works all around the world. Through the Tim Tebow Foundation, based in 2010, he has helped orphans abroad, placed on occasions for special-needs youngsters, and labored to fight human trafficking. God “sent his son in the greatest love story rescue mission of all time because that’s how much he values people,” he mentioned an appearance on Fox & Friends final yr. “We get to care for people and we get to value them wherever they’re at, and that changes everything.”

In the previous few years, one expression of Tebow’s love for others has included common talking gigs at Life Surge, the corporate sponsoring the occasion I attended. For as little as $20, attendees get a full day of Christian movie star audio system, uplifting preaching, worship music, and recommendation they’re instructed will remodel their funds. Throughout the day, members of the viewers are provided alternatives to enroll in three days of “impact classes” for $97. Those who attend then have the prospect to enroll in “SurgeU”—a sequence of programs promising to “surge your resources and influence through real estate and trade—for Kingdom impact.” SurgeU doesn’t come low cost: Packages vary from about $10,000 to $40,000. Should you wish to enroll however lack the money, Life Surge connects you with a third-party lender.

Founded in 2020, Life Surge hosts about 30 one-day occasions a yr in places all around the nation. In 2025, in keeping with Life Surge, 117,000 individuals attended one-day occasions. The mannequin is clearly profitable, albeit not distinctive; many other companies provide motivational seminars resulting in dear monetary courses. What makes Life Surge stand out is its Christian messaging. The firm emphasizes the idea of “kingdom impact.” Basically, the extra money you make, the extra good works you are able to do, whether or not by tithing or Christian charity.

Key to this mannequin are the one-day occasions—and the large draw for these occasions is the star-studded speaker program. Tebow isn’t the one athlete who has spoken at Life Surge; the corporate has a formidable roster, together with all-time greats just like the NBA’s Magic Johnson, and the NFL’s Joe Montana. On the day I attended, different audio system included former ESPN host Sage Steele, comic Jeff Foxworthy, and Christian twin actual property influencers the Benham Brothers (whose HGTV present was canceled earlier than it even aired after David Benham’s homophobic remarks surfaced). Life Surge spokesperson Richard Lorenzen declined to reveal how a lot Life Surge pays its audio system, however Athlete Speakers, a audio system’ bureau, estimates that for the largest names—together with Tebow—charges could be as excessive as $100,000 per look. In 2024 and 2025, Tebow spoke at 10 Life Surge occasions per yr, and in 2026, he’s on observe to have spoken at 20 occasions by yr’s finish—placing his estimated potential complete earnings to this point within the neighborhood of $2-$4 million from Life Surge alone.  

Yet regardless of its movie star lineup, buyer suggestions about Life Surge is decidedly blended. On Google critiques, out of a potential 5 stars the corporate has 4.8, with happy clients gushing in regards to the inspiring audio system and useful monetary recommendation. “One of the best events I have been to,” wrote one. “Worship sessions were amazing. Had a life changing experience. Learned so much and the opportunities offered for continued learning was great. 10/10 Highly Recommend.” Another enthused, “This was an Awesome event for my life! I highly recommend going if you get the chance. Knowledge, worship, inspiration and guidance you can use today!”

But elsewhere—in Reddit threads, on a Life Surge Complaints FB group with 1,300 members, and in complaints to the Federal Trade Commission and the Better Business Bureau—a whole lot of attendees swap tales of high-pressure gross sales techniques infused with Christian messaging. “We believed that it would be a Christian-based day of like minded business people,” wrote an attendee in a grievance to the FTC from earlier this yr. “We did not expect a bait and switch and the pressure to purchase investing classes. We are very disappointed but also concerned by the amount of people bought into this.” Another grievance learn, “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.”

In a prolonged response (PDF) to our questions, Life Surge’s Richard Lorenzen mentioned the corporate “does not train its representatives to pressure customers into borrowing or taking on debt they cannot afford.” Indeed, all through the occasion that I attended, disclaimers periodically appeared on the screens behind the audio system, warning the gang that investing in Life Surge merchandise carried threat. “Any income or earnings shared examples are not intended to represent typical or guaranteed results for the average customer,” one mentioned. “Results vary widely, and you should assume that the average person may earn little to no money or could potentially lose money.” But these disclaimers had been arduous to learn from the place I used to be sitting, they usually appeared so briefly that it took me a number of tries to snap pictures of them with my cellphone.

Lorenzen additionally emphasised that the corporate “does not condone using a person’s religious faith, fear, or spiritual beliefs to pressure that individual into purchasing a product”—but I spoke to a few dozen Life Surge clients and present and former workers who felt uneasy in regards to the firm’s invoking Christianity of their promotion of funding programs. “I see many of these strong Christian artists and strong Christian people that are up there speaking at the Life Serve conferences,” Karen Neal, a 61-year-old former Life Surge buyer, instructed me. “And it’s like, do they know what’s happening to some of these people that are getting into this?”

A Life Surge worker I spoke with, who requested anonymity due to job safety issues, puzzled the identical factor: Why would Christian celebrities lend their model to the corporate in any respect? “You’ve heard all about the people who are losing thousands and thousands of dollars and just are being asked to cash in their 401Ks and piggyback credit cards in order to pay for these classes,” the worker mentioned. “It just doesn’t seem like something a good Christian motivational speaker or pastor would want to be a part of.”

Neither Tebow nor every other movie star speaker we reached out to responded to our request for remark, and Lorenzen added that Life Surge “does not ask its headline speakers to promote or endorse Impact Classes or advanced training programs.” Yet in a recording from a 2023 Life Surge occasion shared with Mother Jones, Tebow urged the gang to enroll in courses. “So I know that many of you today have probably signed up for classes, have probably signed up to take the next step,” he mentioned. “I want to encourage you to finish that, to follow through on that commitment, to finish strong.”

Karen Neal is removed from alone. In addition to the a whole lot of damaging critiques I learn on-line and within the FTC complaints, I spoke to seven Life Surge clients who mentioned they’d unhealthy experiences; their recollections mirrored the net critiques I had learn. One of them was Cathy Luebke, who in 2024 attended a Life Surge occasion along with her husband in Carmel, Indiana. There, she mentioned, the couple was inspired by a inventory market funding demonstration. “They brought people up, and it was this simple method,” Luebke recalled. It regarded “super easy, like anybody could do that. So, we kind of talked about it, and it was like, well, maybe it’d be a good idea.”

The couple determined to take the following step and signed up for the three-day occasion, held a couple of weeks later about an hour away. Luebke remembers the advisors urging attendees to purchase into the programs that weekend, saying they had been providing the most effective worth. She and her husband observed the gross sales pitch, however the Christian messages and the presence of reliable celebrities reassured them. “My husband and I are very strong Christians, so when you see a product like this, you’re like, ‘well, all right, it’s a hard sell, but, you know, they’re telling us all the good stuff,’” she instructed me. They determined to purchase a $20,000 bundle of funding programs. Then, after consulting with one of many in-house monetary counselors with whom they’d been paired on the three-day class, they borrowed roughly $40,000 on interest-free bank cards so they might manage to pay for to speculate—thus enabling them to place into apply the approach they might be studying. “Once you get into this stock trading,” Luebke remembers the advisors assuring her, “you can have this paid off in a year.”

After a number of weeks of hours-long programs, it was clear that the truth was way more time-consuming and complex than the straightforward demonstration on stage had prompt. “I don’t think I ever expected an easy button,” she instructed me, “but I never knew the learning curve would have been that hard.” The Luebkes made no cash within the inventory market. Instead, they ended up taking out a house fairness mortgage to repay the remaining $20,000 on bank cards whose rates of interest had soared to a variable price of about 29 % after the preliminary promotion had expired.

Neal’s recollections adopted the same arc. She recalled being inspired to make use of the fairness in her residence to pay for a $13,000 SurgeU actual property course bundle. “We did take out a line of credit on our house, and we are having to use it right now to pay back the freaking credit card that we got with them,” she mentioned. She and her husband by no means made any cash in actual property—partially as a result of they didn’t have the capital to purchase properties. She complained to the corporate that she discovered the programs complicated and hadn’t made any cash, and finally, she mentioned, Life Surge provided her a partial refund of about $5,000. Still, the entire endeavor, she instructed me, was “about a $15,000 mistake.” She takes a lot of the accountability for not researching this system beforehand. But she additionally feels that the gross sales stress disadvantaged her and her husband of the “opportunity to go home, really pray about this, and seek God’s wisdom. And they don’t give you that.”

The lack of time to deliberate was a recurring theme. One former attendee, who didn’t need her identify used, mentioned she remembered a Life Surge counselor telling her that the satan was answerable for her doubts about shopping for the funding programs. When requested about this, Lorenzen wrote that “suggesting that someone’s decision not to purchase a Life Surge program is attributable to the devil would be absolutely unacceptable and contrary to the company’s policies, guidelines, and training.”

The 5 present and former workers I spoke with confirmed the sample: Despite the corporate’s tips discouraging high-pressures gross sales and the usage of religion, Life Surge staffers typically oversold the convenience of this system and invoked Christianity to additional persuade attendees to purchase costly packages. “It gets people thinking, if they can do it with no experience, I can do it,” the worker mentioned. “I have this amount in my 401K at work, or I have this much in the bank. Why don’t I just sign up for these classes? And, you know, it’s for God’s kingdom.”

To perceive Life Surge, it’s useful to know in regards to the historical past of its founder, Joe Johnson. He’s a serial entrepreneur who has been operating variations on this enterprise for many years—and typically encountering some difficulties alongside the best way.

In the early 2000s, Johnson grew to become concerned within the management group of a motivational seminar firm referred to as Get Motivated which, like Life Surge, mixed Christian messaging, pricy inventory market and actual property funding programs, and movie star audio system, together with Rudy Giuliani, Colin Powell, and Laura Bush. In 2011, Johnson purchased the corporate with the assistance of a $12 million mortgage from a pupil, Amy Wolfe, who had enrolled within the seminars—whom he by no means repaid, in keeping with court docket paperwork (PDF). Meanwhile, in 2012, the Washington Speakers Bureau sued Get Motivated as a result of it had did not pay a few of its audio system—to the tune of a mixed $1.7 million. Get Motivated later struggled, Johnson defaulted on the mortgage, and the corporate folded. Lorenzen famous that Johnson and Wolfe have since reconciled, and that Life Surge “was developed years later by a much broader team, built around a distinctly Christian mission from the outset, and was not an evolution or rebrand of Get Motivated’s model.” Yet the codecs of the 2 firms are virtually equivalent: one-day motivational occasions, three-day funding programs, and coaching applications that may probably price tens of 1000’s of {dollars}.

Get Motivated was not the one one in every of Johnson’s initiatives that encountered authorized issues. In 2013, he based an organization referred to as Welfont Group, which final yr grew to become the goal of a Department of Justice lawsuit over its “abusive” practices. According to the grievance, the corporate recruited property house owners to promote actual property—a former assisted dwelling facility and an industrial web site, for instance. Welfont would then promote these properties to charities (together with one which Johnson based) at cut price sale costs. After soliciting inflated property value determinations—which, the DOJ alleges, routinely quoted Johnson’s personal advertising and marketing supplies verbatim—he discovered charities to buy the property on the low worth, which might allow property sellers to take a charitable deduction based mostly on the distinction between the discounted sale worth and the appraised worth. The lawsuit accuses Johnson of constructing “as many as 190 abusive bargain sale transactions” leading to tax losses of greater than $46 million.”

Lorenzen famous that Johnson denied the federal government’s allegations, sustaining that “neither Welfont nor Welfont’s clients are responsible for providing the necessary support, since Welfont’s clients were not the beneficiaries of any tax deductions.” Ultimately the DOJ provided Johnson a settlement with no financial damages or civil penalties and no admission of wrongdoing, although as a part of the settlement Johnson agreed to an injunction that prohibited him from making these cut price gross sales sooner or later.

Another necessary affect on Life Surge seems to have been an funding training firm referred to as Online Trading Academy, the place three high Life Surge executives—though not Johnson—beforehand labored. According to a 2020 complaint for permanent injunction filed towards Online Trading Academy by the Federal Trade Commission, the corporate “routinely claimed that consumers who purchase OTA training programs can quickly attain proficiency in OTA’s strategy and deploy it to earn substantial income, regardless of their background and prior experience.” The FTC required the corporate’s founder and different executives to pay between $5 and $9.7 million, and to supply debt forgiveness to greater than 31,000 customers who bought its coaching applications. The settlement additionally imposed a $362 million financial judgment, although a lot of it was suspended as a result of the defendants had been unable to pay.

One of Life Surge’s most seen former Online Trading Academy workers is Steven Champa, who leads the shows about SurgeU’s inventory market courses. From 2009-2020, Champa served because the chief income officer and proprietor of the Atlanta franchise of Online Training Academy, an entity that wasn’t concerned within the FTC grievance. Neither Champa nor Life Surge’s different Online Trading Academy alums had been named within the FTC grievance. Champa describes himself on LinkedIn as “Disruptor. Follower of Jesus. Life Surge Main Stage Presenter. Keynote Speaker. National Radio Show Host. Stock Options Expert. Sales Trainer. Business Credit Guru. Culture Specialist.”

In Atlanta, Champa, a assured man in late center age who wore a sports activities coat and spoke with a lightweight Boston accent, strode backwards and forwards throughout the stage, alternating between self-deprecating jokes and heartfelt testimony.  

After thanking God for “this amazing day, incredible worship, awesome presenters,” Champa described how, when he was 40 years previous and a penniless home framer, he discovered Jesus and discovered funding ideas from a man he met at church. But it wasn’t till he began tithing 10 % of his meager earnings that he struck it wealthy. “I go back to that date—that specific date when I threw that tithe check in the basket at church—and I can show you a timeline of financial miracles after financial miracles after financial miracles start happening in my life,” he mentioned. “I promise, it was amazing to live through!” God, he mentioned, was “giving us massive abundance and success, all because we honored him and we learned a skill that I never would have thought I could possibly learn. And I’m excited, because this morning…I’m able to equip you. I’m going to introduce you to how the markets work in a very simple way, so that you can start to utilize some of the additional resources for kingdom impact!”

Before imparting the following tips, although, Champa warned the gang in regards to the risks of 401Ks, which he mentioned solely lined the pockets of Wall Street fund managers. “The biggest lie that Wall Street has you convinced of is that you’re not smart enough to handle your own money,” he mentioned. “I want you to realize that learning to manage your own money is a skill set—that you can do it a few hours a month and not have to pay any of those fees to Wall Street. Keep all those fees in your own account and then utilize those resources for kingdom impact.”

But how? Champa solicited volunteers from the viewers to indicate simply how straightforward Life Surge’s inventory market methodology was. Gesturing to a line graph ticking up on the large display screen behind the volunteers, he defined that the road represented the worth of sure shares. When the road entered the realm labeled “demand zone,” they need to purchase; when it reached the “supply zone,” they need to promote. The demonstration moved shortly, taking the volunteers by a couple of small losses and bigger earnings. When it was over, Champa introduced that if it had been an actual buying and selling session, the volunteers would have made a web revenue of $61,841 on a $100,000 funding. “What do you think of that?” he requested the viewers. “Isn’t that awesome?” The crowd clapped and whooped. As a reward for his or her participation the volunteers would attend the three-day courses freed from cost.

For everybody else, Life Surge was providing a particular deal: $97 for the three-day session—which occurred to be the identical bundle and worth the gang had been saying sure to since that morning. “Life Surge put together a very special discounted tuition opportunity, but because it’s such limited venue size, if you want to take advantage of it, you need to do it now,” Champa mentioned. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to move!”

The crowd hummed. All round me, I might see individuals conferring with one another about whether or not to enroll. An enormous group from my part rushed to the sign-up tables en masse. Soon, there have been traces to buy the courses. 

Lorenzen emphasised that the corporate doesn’t declare that attendees of the one-day or three-day occasions will get wealthy. “Investing, whether in real estate or the stock market, is a skill set built over time, and Life Surge doesn’t claim otherwise,” he wrote. The occasions and affect courses “are intentionally built as a starting point: attendees leave with a range of investing strategies, taught by experienced investors, and a foundation to build on.”

The attendees on the occasion I attended appeared wanting to get began on that journey. Not solely did most of my part rush to the tables that the workers had arrange to enroll in the three-day programs, later within the day, after the presentation in regards to the Life Surge actual property programs—through which college students be taught abilities like the right way to discover low cost properties to promote to buyers—extra of them went to the tables.

By the time Tebow spoke on the finish of the day, virtually everybody in my part had signed up for the courses. As Tebow wrapped up his speech, the worship music swelled as if we had been attending a non secular service and the preacher was reaching the crescendo of his sermon. His cadence quickened, and he started to shout. “You might have no idea what he is doing, but if you were just willing to humble yourself, get in God’s word, and to say yes when he prompts you—just say yes!” he mentioned. “You have no idea what God will do.”

Read Life Surge’s full assertion here.