Tim Tebow exit triggers celebrity exodus from Life Surge

The celebrity headliners are leaving Life Surge. Days after Mother Jones and the investigative sports podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out published a months-long investigation into the Christian wealth seminar company, Tim Tebow "paused" his work with it, megachurch pastor Craig Groeschel and Boston Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla announced they were stepping back, and Magic Johnson, Candace Cameron Bure, Tony Dungy and a string of other names have quietly disappeared from promotional materials for upcoming events.

The investigation described how Life Surge fills arenas with thousands of attendees paying around $20 for one-day events mixing worship music, celebrity testimony and demonstrations of the company's proprietary stock-market and real-estate investment strategies. Attendees are invited to three-day "impact classes" costing about $97, where salespeople invoke Christian faith to sell SurgeU, investment education packages priced from $10,000 to $40,000. Some customers financed the packages through a third-party financing company contracted by Life Surge and ended up tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

"I am so devastated that Christians like Tim Tebow made me trust in something that has taken so much money from me," one customer wrote in a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission. "This is evil, especially because I'm disabled on a limited income." Karen Neal, 61, a former customer, calls her purchase a $15,000 mistake and says she wonders whether the Christian artists and speakers at the conferences know what is happening to some of the people entering the program.

Chief executive Jeremy Nosek declined to respond before the article's deadline, then wrote that the reporting had "demonstrated a pattern of selectively presenting information, distorting context, and misleading your audiences." Since publication, tips from former customers and employees have flooded in, shedding light on what Mother Jones describes as the company's complex web of financial interests, and in at least one case Life Surge has failed to pay its bills.

Tebow appeared at an SEC event a day after the investigation aired and told a reporter with an ESPN affiliate that he had been caught off guard by the findings, calling the allegations "extremely serious" and "something that we take very serious." The Christian investigative outlet the Roys Report notes that its reporters alerted Tebow's team to the allegations more than a year ago.

The lineup for upcoming Life Surge events is now sparse.