IN-DEPTH |
Kristina Dines is the central character in what some call a miracle story.
Dines, 46, says three of her previously amputated toes miraculously grew back March 14 at a prayer service at the James River Church Joplin campus.
Dines also is a complicated character in this narrative. She not only is a victim of domestic violence who was shot and almost killed by her estranged husband in 2015, but she also has a criminal history of her own, having been released from federal custody only two months prior to her reported healing.
Dines had agreed on Nov. 27 to be interviewed for this story, but subsequently broke off communication with the Springfield Daily Citizen.
The Rev. John Lindell, pastor of the James River Church, did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Dines apparently has given only one interview since March. It was to Heaven Bent, a podcast, with host Tara Jean Stevens. It was posted May 6.
In that interview, Dines reiterated her belief that what happened to her was a miracle and that even if she provided photographic proof doubters would only say the photos were fake.
Lindell has said nothing since March to indicate he has changed his belief that what happened to Dines was, indeed, a miracle.
Lindell and his wife, Debbie, have co-pastored the Ozark church for 32 years.
What the pastor said about raising the dead
In fact, since March 14 Lindell has leaped beyond the reported miracle of Dines’ toes into assurances that some members of his church soon will be raising people from the dead. He told congregants March 28 (at 32:55 in the video.)
“I’m not saying everybody who dies is going to be resurrected, I’m just simply saying some of you are going to be in situations where somebody is going to be dead and you’re going to put your hand on them and maybe you’re only going to say ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,’ and they’re going to come back to life. I believe that’s going to happen many times. But if you don’t think it’s possible, you won’t even think of praying it.”
What Pastor Lindell says carries great weight. He is one of the most influential pastors within the Assemblies of God, not only because of James River’s weekly Sunday attendance of about 19,000 but also because of his church’s proximity to the Assemblies of God national headquarters in Springfield.
Dines agreed to interview, then changed mind
The revelation of a purported supernatural healing in the Ozarks has prompted even Christians who yearn to believe in the miraculous to call for greater clarity in exactly what happened to Dines and her toes.
One man, who has said he once attended James River Church and some of his family members still do, created the website Shoe Me The Toes. He also has a Facebook page with the same name.
He is not quoted in this story because he would only speak without identifying himself.
On social media, the pushback against Dines’ reported miracle has been substantial, with readers often asking why God would replace Dines’ amputated toes but not cure children with deadly cancers.
Why does it seem, they ask, that all the wondrous and supernatural works of God that supposedly happen at churches and prayer meetings are never clear and provable?
We are nine months past Dines’ reported healing, into the season of Christmas and New Year’s, and little more is known about Dines and her toes than what we knew in March.
First, were we told the truth?
Have the toes continued to grow?
Have they maintained their growth?
Has Dines’ life substantially changed?
A victim of domestic abuse with involvement in a meth ring
The same man who shot and almost killed Dines in 2015 in that same attack killed Dines’ female partner, Carissa Gerard, who had moved into the house after Dines’ husband, the shooter, had moved out.
A Joplin jury in September 2021 found Stephen Thompson guilty of murdering Gerard and shooting Dines.
In May 2022, Dines had pleaded guilty to being involved in a methamphetamine ring in Jasper and Newton counties — and elsewhere — beginning in August 2016 and continuing to March 2017. She was charged as “Kristina Thompson.”
One motion filed in that criminal case in November 2021 by her attorney, Erica Mynarich, states that Dines “has several medical issues. She is on several medications and relies on a walker for ambulation.” (Highlighted in italics for emphasis.)
Add that question to the list: Does Dines still need a walker after her reported healing?
A former nurse from an affluent family
In the podcast, Dines said the reason she first went to James River Church was in an effort to persuade the federal judge in her case to release her from a halfway house. She said she felt welcomed when she went to James River and continued to attend.
Dines has a history of drug use. In March 2015, prior to the shooting, the Missouri Department of Social Services took custody of Dines’ and her husband’s 1-year-old child because of their methamphetamine use, according to news stories in the Joplin Globe.
Over the years, Dines has been charged with DWI, possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia, according to online court records.
She has experienced multiple tragedies, including a 14-year-old son who took his own life in December 2021, as well as the murder of Gerard.
Kristina Dines has been married more than once and has been known as “Kristina Bowers,” “Kristina Murdock” and “Kristina Thompson.” Dines is her maiden name.
She grew up in an affluent home. Her father, James Dines, retired in 1991. He was corporate vice president and officer of EaglePicher Technologies. His 2011 obituary states he “provided guidance in the establishment of the Laser Center of Excellence at Oklahoma State University.”
He also served on the board of directors of Freeman Hospital and was a council member and an elder at Immanuel Lutheran Church. He was commissioned as a member of the Missouri Corporation for Science and Technology by Gov. John Ashcroft.
At one point in her life, Dines was a registered nurse. Online records show her nursing license expired in 2009.
Dines said in the May podcast she will never get her license back because of her “indictment,” an apparent reference to her federal conviction for her involvement in a methamphetamine ring.
Dines has three siblings, according to her father’s obituary. The Daily Citizen reached out to them but did not hear back from any of them prior to publication of this story.
Awoke from coma and three toes were gone
In that Heaven Bent podcast, Dines stood squarely behind her belief that three of her toes miraculously regrew over a span of 30 minutes at the James River Joplin campus.
She said the toes had been amputated years earlier while she was in a coma after she was shot.
It has never been fully explained why the toes were amputated. They were not shot off during the attack. Dines was shot in the stomach, not the foot. Her husband shot her twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. She has said 200 pellets remain in her body. It’s possible the toes were amputated due to kidney problems during the coma.
When she awoke from the coma, Dines said on the podcast, the three spaces where the toes had been looked like “dried raisins.”
The gap between big toe and little toe, she said, made her foot look like a “Hang Ten” hand sign.
No precedent for full regrowth of human toes
The full regeneration of human adult toes or fingers has no medical precedent, according to a 2011 story from the Stanford Medicine News Center.
That story states:
“Although it’s not well-known, mice and even some humans can re-grow finger or toe tips that have been lost in accidents. But, unlike salamanders or newts, their ability is limited to the repair of relatively minor damage.
“’While lower vertebrates can regenerate an entire limb within a matter of weeks, mice and humans have maintained only a vestige of this ability,’” said Yuval Rinkevich, a postdoctoral scholar who was one of the authors of a study of the subject.
“The re-growth of amputated digit tips — a few millimeters in mice and up to the first joint in humans — is the only documented case of limb regeneration in mammals.”
Dines was careful in that podcast interview in how she described the reported miracle. She never said her toes “fully” or “completely” regrew. She simply said they were larger than they were before.
Since the amputation in 2015, Dines said she had worn a prosthetic device on her right foot. In her podcast interview with Stevens, Dines said that later that same day of the interview she was was going to a doctor to see if she needed a new prosthetic because those three toes were now bigger.
Did she, in fact, need a larger prosthetic?
We don’t know.
She went to prayer service not even thinking about her toes
Oddly enough, Dines said in that interview she went to the prayer service her toes were not her major health concern.
“Just like when I was shot, the toes are the last of my concerns, right?” she said. “The toes were the last of the doctor’s concern. I didn’t even think about my toes. So I go to this lady. She starts praying for my stomach. She says to me, right before the service, ‘I really feel that something amazing is going to happen to you.'”
The person leading the service was the Rev. Bill Johnson, senior leader of Bethel Church in Redding, California. He had been invited by Lindell to the Ozarks for what James River calls its Week of Power.
Lindell would say later there were “a thousand miracles during the Week of Power.”
Johnson and his church made headlines in 2019 after unsuccessfully attempting to “resurrect” a deceased 2-year-old girl. The church in California has its own School of Supernatural Ministry, which trains people to heal in the name of Jesus Christ. The school offers a certificate.
Johnson was not with Dines in Joplin. His service was livestreamed — presumably from the church’s main campus in Ozark.
It should be noted that neither Johnson nor Lindell call what happened to Dines a “miracle.” Instead, they use the phrase “creative miracle,” which is defined by many as a healing that involves the sudden appearance of something that previously did not exist, for example like in the New Testament book of John when Jesus gave a man, who was blind from birth, his sight.
Technically, Johnson would say, Dines’ three toes were not “healed,” because they did not exist prior to the miracle.
Johnson has said, for example, that he knows of a creative miracle in which a person was prayed for and a kidney miraculously grew into existence.
Do you want new toes? ‘I’m like — sure!’
This is how Dines describes what happened during what she believes was a miracle. It’s described in the May podcast.
Johnson spoke three nights during the Week of Power. Dines was at the Joplin campus the first night and returned the second night.
“There was a lady right before the service,” Dines said. “I went to her. I have a huge abdominal hernia. From the shooting. Remember, I was gut shot.
“I ended up with like 23 surgeries. My stomach was blown open 12 by 13 inches. They don’t know how I survived.”
On the night of the reported healing, Dines recounts:
“This girl runs into me and she goes, ‘I’ve got an extra seat. Right in the front. Do you want to sit by me?’ I was like sure, because I’m really new at making friends and she was around my age.
“So I go sit right in the front. Never have I sat in the front. I’m not a front-row type of gal. How cool! Because it’s Bill Johnson there.
“I go sit in the front and he (Johnson, via livestream) says there’s somebody with like broken bones in the toes, right?
“He says, ‘you have a problem with your foot. With the bones in the foot.'”
Dines said she mentioned to the woman sitting next to her that she’s missing three toes. In a way, she said, it struck her funny that Johnson was talking about missing bones in the foot while her problem was three missing toes.
The woman next to Dines reportedly asked her: Do you want new toes?
“I’m like, ‘sure.'”
“She just grabbed my hands and started praying. I guess we were kind of loud about it. I thought it was funny. I find comedy in things. Irony in it.
“I just started laughing boisterously. I’m sure that made people pay attention. So then they are listening. As she’s praying over me it makes someone else pray over me.
“And somebody tells somebody else what they’re praying for. All of a sudden this woman who is there with her, I think, her daughter, who’s in a wheelchair. She comes down from several aisles.”
“And she says that she had a dream about my foot. She didn’t know it was my foot. She had a dream about a foot that was going to be healed.”
‘It was beautiful. It was amazing. It was love.’
“At that point, someone took my shoe off. My sock off. They anointed my foot with oil. I could not see my foot for a while because hands were all over my foot.
“First, I was really glad I had taken a shower. Second, I have never experienced anything like that. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. It was beautiful. It was amazing. It was love.
“The next thing I know, the numbness. When you have an amputation, you’re numb. … That’s how it feels all the time. Well, that feeling went away. I just know that. Because I couldn’t see my foot. They were rubbing my foot. Anointing it with oil.
“Like I said, there were people over my foot. And then when they started moving away from my foot, as they moved away. The toe next to my pinky toe was definitely, definitely longer. And I was like, ‘What?’
“And I thought I was seeing things. Remember, I’m a registered nurse.
“So what I’m saying is that I have the education. I was a nurse for 10 years.
“… The toe next to my pinky toe is longer now than it was. Than my pinky toe. It is longer. The third toe is even with the fourth toe, which is longer than my pinky toe.
“I can bend them. There is the start of a nailbed on the fourth toe.”
Lindell says there is proof, but his bigger concern as pastor are his vulnerable sheep
Lindell has said he has proof of the miracle but will not provide it.
He told congregants the following in a video, which can be found on the Show Me the Toes website (at the bottom of the page.)
“What I want to assure you of is, it’s real. It’s real. It’s real. It’s real. It’s real.
“… It is a legitimate miracle. We can provide the kind of proof that would be necessary. People have asked, ‘Have you seen pictures of the toes?’ I have. I have seen the picture of the toes.”
But Lindell said he’s not interested in offering proof. In that same video, he explains:
“People are saying, ‘Well, if it’s genuine why aren’t you doing anything to publicize it?’ There’s a couple of reasons I want to say to you.
“First of all, I’m less interested in proving to people what I know God did than I am in protecting sheep who are vulnerable. I’m going to protect sheep, first.
“My first concern is for (Dines).
“So, if that bothers you, I’m sorry, but if you’re in trouble, my concern is for you, too.”
Dines, in talking to Stevens on the Heaven Bent podcast, said she does not believe “before” and “after” photos would convince doubters.
“If I were to take pictures of my foot, it wouldn’t matter. They would say it was made up. They would say it was Photoshopped. For me to go to a doctor. Why should I have to do that?
“… Why should I take my time out of my day when I’m just enjoying what happened to me? I’m relishing in what happened to me. I’m building my relationship with my God, my Jesus Christ. I’m enjoying my church. I am getting better from what I have went through. I don’t need to do these things for anyone else but for myself.”
