dpThis story was produced in partnership with Pablo Torre Finds Out.
In a cavernous arena in suburban Atlanta one warm day last May, I arrived at 9:00 a.m. with thousands of others to see former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow—not playing football, but as the keynote speaker at a daylong event about faith and business. By the time Tebow took the stage, a racially and generationally diverse group of thousands of Christians from metro Atlanta had been sitting in the chilly, dark arena for eight hours, swaying to worship music, laughing at Christian comedians’ wholesome jokes, and listening to tear-jerking testimonials of faith-transformed lives. It had been a long and packed day, but you wouldn’t have known it from the crowd’s rapt attention as Tebow urged us to follow “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 exactly Tebow intended the crowd to say yes to wasn’t clear. But earlier in the day, many of them had said yes to something far less metaphysical: a three-day seminar of classes on stock market and real estate investing, for the low price of $97.
As athletes go, they don’t get much more wholesome than Tim Tebow. The 39-year-old retired NFL quarterback has had a legendary career: In 2007, he became the first sophomore to win the prestigious Heisman Trophy; he then went on to lead the Denver Broncos and defeat the Pittsburgh Steelers in the playoffs, but missed the opportunity to become AFC champs in 2011 against Tom Brady’s New England Patriots. Though the latter part of his career fizzled—after underperforming for the New York Jets he shifted sports and embarked on a lackluster stint in minor league baseball while also hosting on ESPN—he remained in the spotlight largely because of his devout Christian faith. So frequently did he drop to one knee on the field that the move became known as “Tebowing.” He made frequent appearances on Christian media outlets, and in 2010 he starred with his mother in an anti-abortion Super Bowl ad sponsored by the right wing faith advocacy group Focus on the Family.
Tebow’s piety is more than just praying for a touchdown—he has used his fame and wealth for good works all over the world. Through the Tim Tebow Foundation, founded in 2010, he has helped orphans overseas, put on events for special-needs children, and worked to combat 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 said an appearance on Fox & Friends last year. “We get to care for people and we get to value them wherever they’re at, and that changes everything.”
In the last few years, one expression of Tebow’s love for others has included regular speaking gigs at Life Surge, the company sponsoring the event I attended. For as little as $20, attendees get a full day of Christian celebrity speakers, uplifting preaching, worship music, and advice they are told will transform their finances. Throughout the day, members of the audience are offered opportunities to enroll in three days of “impact classes” for $97. Those who attend then have the chance to enroll in “SurgeU”—a series of courses promising to “surge your resources and influence through real estate and trade—for Kingdom impact.” SurgeU doesn’t come cheap: Packages range from about $10,000 to $40,000. Should you want to enroll but lack the cash, Life Surge connects you with a third-party lender.
Founded in 2020, Life Surge hosts about 30 one-day events a year in locations all over the country. In 2025, according to Life Surge, 117,000 people attended one-day events. The model is clearly successful, albeit not unique; many other companies offer motivational seminars leading to pricey financial classes. What makes Life Surge stand out is its Christian messaging. The company emphasizes the concept of “kingdom impact.” Basically, the more money you make, the more good works you can do, whether through tithing or Christian charity.
The company emphasizes the concept of “kingdom impact.” Basically, the more money you make, the more good works you can do, whether through tithing or Christian charity.
Key to this model are the one-day events—and the big draw for those events is the star-studded speaker program. Tebow isn’t the only athlete who has spoken at Life Surge; the company has an impressive roster, including all-time greats like the NBA’s Magic Johnson, and the NFL’s Joe Montana. On the day I attended, other speakers included former ESPN host Sage Steele, comedian Jeff Foxworthy, and Christian twin real estate influencers the Benham Brothers (whose HGTV show was canceled before it even aired after David Benham’s homophobic remarks surfaced). Life Surge spokesperson Richard Lorenzen declined to disclose how much Life Surge pays its speakers, but Athlete Speakers, a speakers’ bureau, estimates that for the biggest names—including Tebow—fees can be as high as $100,000 per appearance. In 2024 and 2025, Tebow spoke at 10 Life Surge events per year, and in 2026, he’s on track to have spoken at 20 events by year’s end—putting his estimated potential total earnings so far in the neighborhood of $2-$4 million from Life Surge alone.
Yet despite its celebrity lineup, customer feedback about Life Surge is decidedly mixed. On Google reviews, out of a possible 5 stars the company has 4.8, with satisfied customers gushing about the inspiring speakers and helpful financial advice. “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!”
“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—hundreds of attendees swap stories of high-pressure sales tactics infused with Christian messaging. “We believed that it would be a Christian-based day of like minded business people,” wrote an attendee in a complaint to the FTC from earlier this year. “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 complaint read, “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 lengthy response (PDF) to our questions, Life Surge’s Richard Lorenzen said the company “does not train its representatives to pressure customers into borrowing or taking on debt they cannot afford.” Indeed, throughout the event that I attended, disclaimers periodically appeared on the screens behind the speakers, warning the crowd that investing in Life Surge products carried risk. “Any income or earnings shared examples are not intended to represent typical or guaranteed results for the average customer,” one said. “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 were hard to read from where I was sitting, and they appeared so briefly that it took me several tries to snap photos of them with my phone.
Lorenzen also emphasized that the company “does not condone using a person’s religious faith, fear, or spiritual beliefs to pressure that individual into purchasing a product”—yet I spoke to about a dozen Life Surge customers and current and former employees who felt uneasy about the company’s invoking Christianity in their promotion of investment courses. “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 customer, told me. “And it’s like, do they know what’s happening to some of these people that are getting into this?”
A Life Surge employee I spoke with, who requested anonymity because of job security concerns, wondered the same thing: Why would Christian celebrities lend their brand to the company at all? “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 employee said. “It just doesn’t seem like something a good Christian motivational speaker or pastor would want to be a part of.”
Neither Tebow nor any other celebrity speaker we reached out to responded to our request for comment, 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 event shared with Mother Jones, Tebow urged the crowd to sign up for classes. “So I know that many of you today have probably signed up for classes, have probably signed up to take the next step,” he said. “I want to encourage you to finish that, to follow through on that commitment, to finish strong.”
Karen Neal is far from alone. In addition to the hundreds of negative reviews I read online and in the FTC complaints, I spoke to seven Life Surge customers who said they had bad experiences; their recollections mirrored the online reviews I had read. One of them was Cathy Luebke, who in 2024 attended a Life Surge event with her husband in Carmel, Indiana. There, she said, the couple was encouraged by a stock market investment demonstration. “They brought people up, and it was this simple method,” Luebke recalled. It looked “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 decided to take the next step and signed up for the three-day event, held a few weeks later about an hour away. Luebke remembers the counselors urging attendees to buy into the courses that weekend, saying they were offering the best price. She and her husband noticed the sales pitch, but the Christian messages and the presence of trustworthy 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 told me. They decided to buy a $20,000 package of investment courses. Then, after consulting with one of the in-house financial counselors with whom they had been paired at the three-day class, they borrowed roughly $40,000 on interest-free credit cards so they would have enough money to invest—thus enabling them to put into practice the technique they would be learning. “Once you get into this stock trading,” Luebke remembers the counselors assuring her, “you can have this paid off in a year.”
“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.’”
After several weeks of hours-long courses, it was clear that the reality was far more time-consuming and complicated than the simple demonstration on stage had suggested. “I don’t think I ever expected an easy button,” she told me, “but I never knew the learning curve would have been that hard.” The Luebkes made no money in the stock market. Instead, they ended up taking out a home equity loan to pay off the remaining $20,000 on credit cards whose interest rates had soared to a variable rate of about 29 percent after the initial promotion had expired.
Neal’s recollections followed a similar arc. She recalled being encouraged to use the equity in her home to pay for a $13,000 SurgeU real estate course package. “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 said. She and her husband never made any money in real estate—in part because they didn’t have the capital to buy properties. She complained to the company that she found the courses confusing and hadn’t made any money, and eventually, she said, Life Surge offered her a partial refund of about $5,000. Still, the whole endeavor, she told me, was “about a $15,000 mistake.” She takes most of the responsibility for not researching the program beforehand. But she also feels that the sales pressure deprived 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 want her name used, said she remembered a Life Surge counselor telling her that the devil was responsible for her doubts about buying the investment courses. When asked 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 five current and former employees I spoke with confirmed the pattern: Despite the company’s guidelines discouraging high-pressures sales and the use of faith, Life Surge staffers sometimes oversold the ease of the program and invoked Christianity to further persuade attendees to buy expensive packages. “It gets people thinking, if they can do it with no experience, I can do it,” the employee said. “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 understand Life Surge, it’s helpful to know about the history of its founder, Joe Johnson. He’s a serial entrepreneur who has been running variations on this business for decades—and sometimes encountering some difficulties along the way.
In the early 2000s, Johnson became involved in the leadership team of a motivational seminar company called Get Motivated which, like Life Surge, combined Christian messaging, pricy stock market and real estate investment courses, and celebrity speakers, including Rudy Giuliani, Colin Powell, and Laura Bush. In 2011, Johnson bought the company with the help of a $12 million loan from a student, Amy Wolfe, who had enrolled in the seminars—whom he never repaid, according to court documents (PDF). Meanwhile, in 2012, the Washington Speakers Bureau sued Get Motivated because it had failed to pay some of its speakers—to the tune of a combined $1.7 million. Get Motivated later struggled, Johnson defaulted on the loan, and the company folded. Lorenzen noted 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 formats of the two companies are almost identical: one-day motivational events, three-day investment courses, and training programs that can potentially cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Get Motivated was not the only one of Johnson’s projects that encountered legal problems. In 2013, he founded a company called Welfont Group, which last year became the target of a Department of Justice lawsuit over its “abusive” practices. According to the complaint, the company recruited property owners to sell real estate—a former assisted living facility and an industrial site, for example. Welfont would then sell these properties to charities (including one that Johnson founded) at bargain sale prices. After soliciting inflated property appraisals—which, the DOJ alleges, routinely quoted Johnson’s own marketing materials verbatim—he found charities to purchase the property at the low price, which would enable property sellers to take a charitable deduction based on the difference between the discounted sale price and the appraised value. The lawsuit accuses Johnson of making “as many as 190 abusive bargain sale transactions” resulting in tax losses of more than $46 million.”
Lorenzen noted that Johnson denied the government’s allegations, maintaining 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 offered Johnson a settlement with no monetary damages or civil penalties and no admission of wrongdoing, though as part of the settlement Johnson agreed to an injunction that prohibited him from making these bargain sales in the future.
Another important influence on Life Surge appears to have been an investment education company called Online Trading Academy, where three top Life Surge executives—although not Johnson—previously worked. According to a 2020 complaint for permanent injunction filed against Online Trading Academy by the Federal Trade Commission, the company “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 company’s founder and other executives to pay between $5 and $9.7 million, and to offer debt forgiveness to more than 31,000 consumers who purchased its training programs. The settlement also imposed a $362 million monetary judgment, though much of it was suspended because the defendants were unable to pay.
One of Life Surge’s most visible former Online Trading Academy employees is Steven Champa, who leads the presentations about SurgeU’s stock market classes. From 2009-2020, Champa served as the chief revenue officer and owner of the Atlanta franchise of Online Training Academy, an entity that wasn’t involved in the FTC complaint. Neither Champa nor Life Surge’s other Online Trading Academy alums were named in the FTC complaint. 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 confident man in late middle age who wore a sports coat and spoke with a light Boston accent, strode back and forth across 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 old and a penniless house framer, he found Jesus and learned investment tips from a guy he met at church. But it wasn’t until he started tithing 10 percent of his meager income that he struck it rich. “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 said. “I promise, it was amazing to live through!” God, he said, 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!”
“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.”
Before imparting these tips, though, Champa warned the crowd about the dangers of 401Ks, which he said only 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 said. “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 audience to show just how easy Life Surge’s stock market method was. Gesturing to a line graph ticking up on the big screen behind the volunteers, he explained that the line represented the value of certain stocks. When the line entered the area labeled “demand zone,” they should buy; when it reached the “supply zone,” they should sell. The demonstration moved quickly, taking the volunteers through a few small losses and larger profits. When it was over, Champa announced that if it had been a real trading session, the volunteers would have made a net profit of $61,841 on a $100,000 investment. “What do you think of that?” he asked the audience. “Isn’t that awesome?” The crowd clapped and whooped. As a reward for their participation the volunteers would attend the three-day classes free of charge.
For everyone else, Life Surge was offering a special deal: $97 for the three-day session—which happened to be the same package and price the crowd had been saying yes 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 said. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to move!”
The crowd hummed. All around me, I could see people conferring with each other about whether to sign up. A big group from my section rushed to the sign-up tables en masse. Soon, there were lines to purchase the classes.
Lorenzen emphasized that the company doesn’t claim that attendees of the one-day or three-day events will get rich. “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 events and impact classes “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.”
“Investing, whether in real estate or the stock market, is a skill set built over time, and Life Surge doesn’t claim otherwise.”
The attendees at the event I attended seemed eager to get started on that journey. Not only did most of my section rush to the tables that the staff had set up to sign up for the three-day courses, later in the day, after the presentation about the Life Surge real estate courses—in which students learn skills like how to find cheap properties to sell to investors—more of them went to the tables.
By the time Tebow spoke at the end of the day, almost everyone in my section had signed up for the classes. As Tebow wrapped up his speech, the worship music swelled as if we were attending a religious service and the preacher was reaching the crescendo of his sermon. His cadence quickened, and he began 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 said. “You have no idea what God will do.”
Read Life Surge’s full statement here.
