Break the Spell

Jenny Weaver was born to heroin-addicted parents and spent her first days in withdrawal. What she lost after that she lost in order: her childhood to a congregation that taught her to mistake control for the presence of God, her adolescence to the occult she entered at fifteen looking for the healing and authority that church had not given her, and her early twenties to nine years of addiction, homelessness, and a criminal life she has described publicly without editing out the parts that make her look worse. She was seventeen and sleeping outdoors in Sarasota, Florida. She was arrested in a motel room, and she counts that raid as the answer to the only prayer she had left.

She has spent every year since giving that history away rather than protecting it. She and her husband lead a Spirit-filled revival center in Tampa, Florida, and she leads a mentorship community of more than sixteen thousand women, most of whom came to her carrying some version of what she carried. She has written more than ten books and has told the same story on national television more than once, each time handing over details that would end a career in most other professions.

The cost of this particular book is different from the cost of the others. Her earlier work asked readers to look at the culture. This one asks them to look at the room they worship in, and it names the practices and the pitches by which a ministry becomes a cage. She has been in that cage. She is, at this point, the only person positioned to describe both the inside of the occult and the inside of a church that functions like one, and she wrote thirty days of Scripture and prayer rather than an exposé, because the point was never to be proven right. It was to get people out.