Editor’s Note: For transparency, it’s noteworthy that I am friends with Pastor Locke, having worked with him on a couple of projects and interviewed him on my show. Simultaneously, I am vehemently opposed to the prosperity “gospel” that both Copeland and Osteen promote. But truth is truth and news is news. If Locke made false accusations, then it needs to be reported as such. Here’s the story…
Four years after thundering from his pulpit that two of America’s most prominent televangelists were pedophiles and sex traffickers, Pastor Greg Locke has admitted he had no evidence. The fiery Tennessee preacher, known for his bold confrontations with what he once called demonic influences in the modern church, now says he was used as an amplifier for unverified stories that unraveled under scrutiny.
This reversal raises sobering questions about the cost of unchecked zeal in an era where accusations travel faster than facts. In a statement released this week on Facebook, Locke acknowledged that claims shared with him and his wife never belonged to him. No documents, no photos, nothing in his possession—just secondhand accounts that shifted and collapsed when pressed for verification.
Locke’s original outburst came during a message on “Exposing Witchcraft in the Church.” He did not hold back. Copeland, he declared, was a “low-down, sorry, sex-trafficking rapist.” Osteen, he insisted, harbored interests in boys. These were not whispers but declarations broadcast to over two million followers, complete with talk of a “dead man’s switch” to protect the truth if harm came his way.
Yet time and investigation told a different story. What began as urgent conviction dissolved into shifting narratives and broken commitments. Locke now frames the episode as a lesson in humility, pointing to his own history of sharp criticism—most notably a book against Benny Hinn written over two decades ago—followed by later reconciliation.
This episode exposes a deeper tension within American Christianity. Bold voices who rail against prosperity gospel excesses can sometimes mirror the very spectacle they decry when they bypass the careful discernment Scripture demands. The church has suffered enough from scandal and cover-up. False accusations only compound the damage, eroding trust and distracting from genuine gospel work.
Prosperity preachers like Copeland and Osteen have long invited scrutiny over their teachings on wealth, jets, and mansions. Faithful believers rightly question doctrines that twist God’s Word into guarantees of earthly riches. But the answer is not reckless broadsides lacking evidence. It is patient, biblical exposition that tests all things and holds fast to what is good.
Locke’s admission, however belated, models a necessary course correction. He has stood before his congregation before, repenting for speaking where he should have verified. That pattern of accountability, however imperfect, stands in contrast to those who double down when challenged.
Christians are called to speak truth, but never at the expense of truth itself. As the apostle James warned, the tongue is a fire that can set entire forests ablaze. What begins as righteous indignation can quickly become gossip amplified by platforms and personal reputation.
Locke’s journey—from fierce critic of Hinn to public friend, from explosive claims to public retraction—reminds us that growth in grace often requires swallowing pride. The church needs watchmen who cry out against error, but those watchmen must first ensure their own hands are clean and their facts are straight.
In the end, this retraction should prompt every Christian leader and online voice to pause before hitting “post” or stepping to the microphone. The world watches how we handle sin, accusation, and repentance. Let us handle them as those who will give account to the One who judges righteously.
“But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew 6:15)
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.