Bethel Leaders Network (formerly Global Legacy)

Heritage

Bethel Church in Redding, California — led since 1996 by Bill Johnson — became one of the most influential congregations in the charismatic world through its worship label Bethel Music, its School of Supernatural Ministry, and its teaching on healing and revival culture. Through the 2000s its relational web of aligned leaders grew under the name Global Legacy, and in 2021 it was renamed the Bethel Leaders Network. It connects pastors, leaders and congregations who draw on Bethel's teaching and culture, explicitly without governing them.

Theological family

Charismatic renewal theology in Bethel's key: God's goodness as the controlling doctrine, healing and the miraculous as normal Christianity, revival as a sustainable culture rather than an event. Trinitarian and evangelical in its confession; its distinctive emphases are debated among other evangelicals, which is noted here without adjudication.

Who decides what

A relational network: membership connects leaders and churches to coaching, events and one another. Bethel exercises no juridical authority over network churches, and the network is not a denomination by anyone's account.

What a first-time visitor would find

In churches shaped by this stream, expect extended, unhurried sung worship in the Bethel Music idiom, expectation of prophetic words and prayer for healing, and a culture that talks about the presence of God as the point of the meeting.

What it has always cared about

Worship as encounter; healing ministry taught to everyone; honor as a leadership culture; equipping revivalists — the school's stated aim — rather than maintaining an organization.

Its gift to the wider church

Through Bethel Music this stream has written a large share of the songs evangelical America now sings, across traditions that share none of its theology — and it has re-normalized expectation of healing prayer in many ordinary congregations.

Commonly confused with

With Vineyard, a related but distinct movement (Bill Johnson's roots pass near it, and Bethel left the Assemblies of God in 2006); and with a denomination headquartered in Redding, which does not exist — the network relates, it does not govern.

Range of views inside it

Network participants range from fully Bethel-patterned congregations to pastors who draw selectively on its resources; the network imposes no uniformity.

Moments this body was part of

• 2006–2021 — Global Legacy becomes the Bethel Leaders Network

  Bethel Church in Redding, California — an Assemblies of God congregation until it became independent in 2006 — grew a worldwide relational web of leaders and congregations through its Global Legacy network, renamed the Bethel Leaders Network in 2021. Alongside it, Bethel Music's songs entered the weekly worship of congregations across nearly every Protestant tradition.

  Whatever a tradition makes of Bethel's distinctives, on any given Sunday its songs are sung in thousands of churches that share nothing else with Redding — worship as the era's common currency.