Jake Kail was 22 years old when he says he encountered his first demon.
In 2005, while his parents were having a Bible study upstairs at their home in Pittsburgh, he and his sister Liz were praying with a visitor downstairs. The man was depressed and concerned about his past dabblings with witchcraft and Ouija boards. As they prayed, Kail said, the young man’s voice changed and he started stuttering. So Kail placed a hand on the man’s head and called on Jesus’ name. Then the man’s arms curled up, Kail said, and he fell backward.
“I looked at my sister and she looked at me,” Kail said, “and we were like, Oh boy, this is the real thing.”
As they continued praying, the man went through cycles of what Kail believes were demons leaving the visitor’s body.
Kail wasn’t brought up this way. His parents found it odd when he previously first spoke of exploring “deliverance ministry.” His childhood church was cessationist and noncharismatic. No speaking in tongues. No healing miracles. That was old Bible stuff, not modern practice.
Now 43, Kail is a traveling minister for his own Jake Kail Ministries. He visits many churches in rural Pennsylvania around his home near Lancaster, but he also flies to larger congregations in California, Georgia, and New York.
He wants people to encounter God and grow in holiness, but he’s best known for deliverance—“setting captives free” from demonic oppression. Deliverance ministers believe someone can be oppressed by a demon, but not possessed. Kail is trying to normalize this work—without being too weird about it.
Most evangelical traditions believe demons are real, but they differ on what that means for Christian practice today. Some evangelical traditions, especially Reformed, are more wary of deliverance ministries and consider general worship and prayer a sufficient way to fight evil. Some argue that the Holy Spirit dwells in his people and completely protects them from demons.
But the charismatic tradition and Pentecostalism have increasing influence on US evangelicalism, especially in nondenominational contexts. Those traditions tend to believe it’s important to take demonic influence seriously. Since 2019, some Protestant ministers have joined the Vatican’s annual training on exorcism and deliverance.
Protestant deliverance ministers and exorcists’ methods may differ, as CT reported in 2019, but they share a “common enemy.”
“While most groups allow for the possibility that believers can be subjected to bondage, many reject that possibility and miss signs of demonization,” Anglican priest Benjamin McEntire told CT in 2019. “Demonization in Christians is highly controversial in evangelical circles, with strong opinions on both sides of the debate.”
Supernatural intrigue abounds outside church walls. Both novels and films are increasingly buoyed by the horror genre. Whether in crystals, energy therapies, psychic readings, tarot cards, or talking to the dead, “people are seeking answers and peace,” Kail said. “And the church is supposed to have an answer.”
Some Christians contend that the only answer should be sharing Christ and his finished work on the cross—that anything extra is unbiblical and distracting.
“What we are seeing today,” Rodgers Atwebembeire, a Reformed leader at the Africa Centre for Apologetics Research, wrote for The Gospel Coalition, “is people who—instead of running to Christ in repentance and seeking forgiveness of sin—are running to pastors and exorcists … for deliverance from personal sins and weaknesses that they should be bringing to the cross.”
Others have said that ministries fighting demons could mistake physical and mental illnesses requiring professional treatment as demonic influences.
Kail, who stepped down as lead pastor of Lancaster’s nondenominational Threshold Church in 2024, is trying to walk the line between theological perspectives. He agrees the gospel is central to the Christian mission. But the church is also called to set people free, he said.
Many people equate demons with possession, Kail added, but he deals with “influence.”
Kevin Eshleman, pastor of Ephrata Community Church, was a mentor for Kail while helping him plant Threshold. Eshleman believes his own congregation is growing increasingly aware of supernatural forces. He senses that many others are in the same boat.
Kail has three primary steps for discerning an evil influence, which he says are derived from Scripture but also resemble the concepts of charismatic leaders like John Wimber. The first step is recognizing a manifestation—some unusual change in behavior or speech. The second is recognizing other symptoms or “open doors,” like a personal history of addiction, pagan rituals, or even nightmares. The third is listening for any revelation from the Holy Spirit. In his case, that’s usually “an impression” he gets rather than a vision or voice from God. People also have to want deliverance to receive it.
“Not everything’s a demon,” Kail said. He doesn’t endorse speculation that demons are actually fallen angels. The Bible isn’t explicit about their origin, he said, but Scripture is clear that they exist, referring to them interchangeably as evil or unclean spirits. Among those named are the spirits of deception (1 Kings 22:22), despair (Isa. 61:3), and infirmity (Luke 13:11). Ephesians 4 also hints at a spirit of anger, Kail said, warning that festering anger will “give the devil a foothold” (vv. 26–27).
Eshleman, Kail’s former pastoral partner, says an evil spirit’s influence could be equated to “a place where you’ve believed a lie and come into agreement with the enemy.” Kail’s gift, he said, has been presenting deliverance from this kind of influence “as a normal experience in the Christian life.”
He’s done it so well that Eshleman once told Kail to remember the local church when he started getting invitations to join podcasts and be more of a nationwide healer, booking deliverance services a year in advance.
In 2021, Kail appeared on Sid Roth’s It’s Supernatural!, a televangelism show on Daystar and TBN. He’d written a book, Setting Captives Free, and saw it as an opportunity to share his personal journey. He wouldn’t fully endorse the show now, he said, because it “kind of sensationalizes the supernatural.”
Kail noticed that people started treating him differently after the show. At his first event in the Pittsburgh area, many guests shared with him that they showed up because they’d seen him on TV. He found his sudden fame “icky.” It brought more criticism, too: A few years ago, a stranger posted his picture on Facebook, declaring him a false teacher.
When Kail leads services, sometimes he has seen jarring physical reactions from congregants. In July 2024, he set up shop in a church basement to serve 70 young adults from The Well, a campus ministry at Millersville University. When he called out to confront a spirit of suicide, students across the room started shrieking, shaking, even vomiting, he said. His team dispersed to pray.
“Every once in a while, my wife is like, what in the world was that?” he said.
He’s also encountered a lack of visible spiritual activity. When he faced a stoic crowd at a Mennonite church one time, “I remember leaving thinking, Do these people hate me?”
Eshleman admits that dramatic encounters are rare at Gateway House of Prayer, an initiative of Ephrata Community Church, but a few times, he’s been alongside Kail when “you feel like something is talking back at you.” Still, he agrees that deliverance ministry’s darker media depictions turn away believers who could otherwise benefit from it. This is why Kail estimates that many of the most faithful deliverance ministers are unseen, preferring one-on-one time off-stage with people.
On the other hand, he’s seen, mostly in Pentecostal circles, what he considers unnecessary gestures of deliverance—screaming while holding a cross, pushing people to the ground, hitting them with Bibles. “What are you doing?” Kail said. “There’s nothing biblical or healthy about that.”
Wendi Floyd, who leads a deliverance and inner healing team at Journey Church in Jacksonville, told CT that encounters with evil forces are not dramatic about 90 percent of the time. Journey teaches that demonic forces can influence people in body and soul, but Floyd said the ministry basically amounts to quiet times of prayer and discussion, not “getting in a room and having to struggle.” She noted that Jesus didn’t wrestle with spirits; he simply told them to leave.
Journey’s small volunteer team confronts “oppression, not possession,” Floyd said, and they strike down common issues—anxiety, bitterness, depression, pride, rejection. They are guarded and protective of the ministry, she said, because of extreme misperceptions about what they do, mostly fueled by horror movies and TV shows: “It’s not scary. It’s not weird. It’s very beautiful.”
Kail has publicly distanced himself from some other celebrities in the space, whom he has accused of manipulation for the sake of clout. Many times, Kail said, those in need are battling not just spiritual forces but severe abuse or childhood trauma. No one should sell freedom to those people or put it on camera—taking advantage of their most vulnerable moments—he said.
He may court crowds of his own, but Kail still visits some house groups, mirroring the earliest days of his ministry, when deliverance was just a private offshoot of his pastoring. It used to be individuals who came calling, he said, but now it’s mostly pastors wanting deliverance for their congregations.
For years, he said, all this work was a “fringe” effort—controversial even in many charismatic spaces.
“You were almost looked at like a weird person,” he said. “Maybe I still am.”
