Scott Bottoms is a Colorado Springs Assemblies of God pastor and Republican politician. Current and archived Church at Briargate staff pages list him as lead pastor and say he and Linda Bottoms have pastored the church since June 2012. Official Colorado records list him as the House District 15 representative for El Paso County, and NACL's current leadership page lists Rep. Scott Bottoms, Chair for Colorado. TRACER records identify two Bottoms candidate committees: SCOTT BOTTOMS FOR HD15 and SCOTT BOTTOMS FOR GOVERNOR.
¶ Confidence handling
- High confidence means official, organization-controlled, filing-derived, or recovered-document evidence directly supports the claim.
- Medium confidence means a public institutional biography or filing-access layer supports the claim but exact chronology, title, or underlying record still needs verification.
- Low confidence means the claim remains a speaker-profile or secondary-reporting lead without direct primary confirmation in the repo.
- High confidence: Church at Briargate staff pages say Bottoms earned a BA from Southwestern Assemblies of God University, an MA from Denver Seminary, and a DM from Assemblies of God Theological Seminary in 2011.
- High confidence: Nelson University's alumni profile says Bottoms began attending SAGU in 1989, left in 1990 to serve as a youth pastor, returned in 2000 as an online student, and graduated with a BA in Church Ministry.
- Medium confidence: Public profiles describe Bottoms as a U.S. Navy veteran. The repo still lacks primary service records, exact dates, rank, role, duty stations, or discharge documentation.
- Low confidence for chronology: A speaker profile says he served eight years in the Navy; that exact duration remains attributed to the speaker profile.
- Caution: Public bios create an unresolved geography detail. A House Republican profile describes Bottoms as a Colorado native, while the Nelson profile says he was raised in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
¶ Ministry and pastoral work
- High confidence: Church at Briargate's current and archived staff pages list
DR. SCOTT BOTTOMS as LEAD PASTOR and say he and Linda Bottoms have pastored the church since June 2012.
- High confidence: Current staff-page family-role overlap is documented neutrally. Linda Bottoms is listed as executive pastor and Rocky Mountain Ministry Network Women's Ministry Director; Emily Bottoms is listed as Kids Pastor.
- High confidence: The current church sermons page links live streaming, Sunday and Wednesday Vimeo archives, and an Alitu podcast page. Alitu and Vimeo metadata show active 2026 sermon-media channels.
- Medium confidence: Archived Sounder pages preserve older Church at Briargate podcast metadata, including a September 2022 page showing 163 episodes by Dr Scott T. Bottoms, but the Sounder audio files were not recovered.
- Medium confidence: A ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer record for
Journey Church At Strasburg lists % REV SCOTT BOTTOMS in the care-of field, supporting a direct Strasburg association but not exact title or tenure.
- Low confidence: The speaker profile's prior
Strasburg and Rocky Ford ministry sequence still needs direct church or denominational records, especially for Rocky Ford.
- High confidence: Bottoms won Colorado House District 15 in 2022. The official Colorado abstract shows
Scott T. Bottoms (REP) with 17,708 votes against Alvin Sexton and John Kaufman.
- High confidence: Bottoms won reelection in 2024. The official 2024 abstract shows
Scott Bottoms (REP) with 26,519 votes against Jeff K. Livingston.
- High confidence: The reviewed Colorado General Assembly page lists Bottoms on
Appropriations and State, Civic, Military, & Veterans Affairs.
- High confidence: The reviewed official page listed five sponsored 2026 House bills: abortion-clinic regulation, sex-altering interventions for minors, female sports, child trafficking penalties, and unauthorized use of personally identifying features. The page showed all five with
Postpone Indefinitely actions.
- High confidence: TRACER records show he registered
SCOTT BOTTOMS FOR GOVERNOR in January 2025 for the 2026 gubernatorial cycle.
¶ Organizational affiliations and roles
- Church at Briargate: high confidence for current lead pastor role and June 2012 tenure start.
- Assemblies of God: high confidence for denominational context and ministerial credential claims from church and House Republican pages; low confidence for the speaker-profile claim of an Assemblies of God executive-board role.
- National Association of Christian Lawmakers: high confidence for current Colorado chair listing on the NACL leadership page.
- Nelson University / SAGU: high confidence for alumni-council role with Linda Bottoms and occasional SAGU teaching as stated in Nelson's official alumni profile; low confidence for any broader Nelson University executive-board claim until a board roster or filing is recovered.
- Strong Cross: medium-high confidence for a formal Strong Cross-related board role because ProPublica full-text filing search and Charity Navigator public data connect
Scott Bottoms to Strong Christian Cross, EIN 20-1470772. Exact title, years, and name relationship among Strong Cross Ministries, Strong Christian Cross, and Strong Cross Ranch remain unresolved.
- Sarah's Home: low confidence. ProPublica resolves
Sarahs Home Corporation, EIN 45-3449348, but this pass found no Scott Bottoms hit in the reviewed ProPublica organization payload or full-text search.
- Journey Church at Strasburg: medium confidence for direct association via ProPublica care-of field; exact pastoral role and dates remain unresolved.
¶ Public positions and legislative activity
The current campaign site frames Bottoms's 2026 gubernatorial campaign around law and order, school choice, meritocracy, fiscal responsibility, limited government, parental authority, transparency, energy policy, anti-ESG language, Medicaid auditing, and AI / technology policy. This is campaign self-presentation and should be separated from official legislative records.
The official 2026 bill list gives a more concrete legislative record. Bottoms sponsored or co-sponsored bills concerning abortion clinics, sex-altering interventions for minors, female sports, human trafficking penalties for minors, and unauthorized use of personally identifying features.
A later comparison of the current NACL model-law page with Bottoms's official Colorado bill record found the strongest overlap in abortion / unborn-child personhood bills and minors / gender-transition intervention bills. Human-trafficking, medication-abortion, and synthetic / deepfake depiction bills have weaker topical overlap. That pass did not find evidence that NACL directly drafted, transmitted, or coordinated a Bottoms bill.
¶ NACL and network context
NACL is the direct national Christian-lawmakers relationship that is currently well supported in the repo. The current NACL page lists Bottoms as Colorado chair; this is stronger than a general thematic relationship because it is an organization-facing role listing. This pass does not expand that into a broad NACL network map. Wider NACL adviser and partner relationships belong in existing NACL / graph-inventory pages, not in this person page unless they directly illuminate Bottoms's activity.
The retained NACL membership materials add a pledge layer to that role. NACL's current Become A Member page links an elected-official pledge form and states that elected-official members must sign and return it. The elected-official pledge includes agreement with NACL's mission, statement of faith, and beliefs; anti-abortion support as evidenced by legislation, actions, and votes; one-man / one-woman marriage language as evidenced by lifestyle, choices, and legislation supported; dues / contribution language; and support for Christian leaders in elected office. Because the repo has not recovered a signed Bottoms pledge, this should be written as a strong role-based inference rather than direct proof that a specific signed document exists.
The bill-comparison pass supports a narrower policy-proximity finding: Bottoms's legislative record aligns most closely with current NACL model-law lanes on unborn-child protection / personhood and minors / gender-transition interventions. It should not be converted into a direct model-law provenance edge without drafting records, sponsor statements, testimony, NACL internal packets, or side-by-side text evidence.
¶ Controversies and disputed claims
- Pastor / church-facing statements: medium confidence for the existence of reported controversy items, low confidence for exact quotation until primary media is recovered. Current and archived Church at Briargate media pages confirm sermon channels and older episode metadata, but did not recover the specific 2017-2022 media underlying retained Colorado Times Recorder summaries.
- Candidate-period activity: medium confidence. Retained reporting ties his 2022 campaign emergence to church-facing rhetoric around abortion, public schools, demons, transgender people, and furries; TRACER establishes the campaign timing but not sermon contents.
- Legislator-period actions: high confidence for official bill sponsorship, medium confidence for controversy interpretation where it relies on reporting or hearing summaries.
- Campaign-finance compliance: high confidence for complaint existence and the allegations stated in the recovered ED2026-01 attachment; no finding of final violation is established by the recovered notice.
Official TRACER records identify:
| Committee |
Committee ID |
Office / cycle |
Status |
SCOTT BOTTOMS FOR HD15 |
20225042386 |
Colorado House District 15, 2022 / 2024 / termination period |
Terminated 2025-02-10 |
SCOTT BOTTOMS FOR GOVERNOR |
20255047962 |
Governor, 2026 state candidate 4-year cycle |
Active on reviewed page |
Official bulk-data totals from this pass:
| Committee |
Monetary contributions |
Non-monetary contributions |
Monetary expenditures |
Non-monetary expenditures |
Loans received |
SCOTT BOTTOMS FOR HD15 |
$22,045.97 |
$2,662.39 |
$22,045.97 |
$1,427.80 |
$0.00 |
SCOTT BOTTOMS FOR GOVERNOR |
$110,416.78 |
$6,121.77 |
$122,172.20 |
$4,073.77 |
$15,000.00 |
Notable finance items:
- HD15 made a
$4,899.87 expenditure to SCOTT BOTTOMS FOR GOVERNOR on 2025-02-06, explained as rolling over unexpended funds to the new committee.
- The governor committee records two candidate loans from Scott Bottoms:
$10,000 dated 2025-10-31 and $5,000 dated 2025-12-29.
- The recovered February 12, 2025 TRACER document image preserves a voluntary-spending-limit withdrawal email from Bottoms.
- The recovered December 19, 2025 personal financial disclosure lists Church at Briargate income, public-source income categories, life-insurance assets, real property held by Scott and Linda Bottoms, and several liabilities. The extracted text did not show an affirmative outside offices / directorships / fiduciary relationships entry.
- The recovered ED2026-01 attachment alleges over-limit contributions and cash / disclosure deficiencies in 2025 RCE filings, with a January 26, 2026 cure deadline.
- Largest governor payees include
MARBLE CAKE MEDIA LLC, COREY GIBSON, MKT GENIUS, DANTE, MULTITUDE MEDIA, and Scott Bottoms himself.
- The governor candidate page notes that balances for the election cycle were manually adjusted. Bulk transaction totals reconcile to visible totals, but beginning balance / carry-forward mechanics still need deeper report-image review.
Current TRACER bulk data shows SCOTT BOTTOMS FOR GOVERNOR paid GIBSON, COREY six itemized monetary expenditures totaling $12,750.00 for Consultant & Professional Services between 2025-03-31 and 2025-12-08. The rows were paid by check, identify Selah, Washington as the payee city/state, and provide no description beyond the expenditure category.
The same bounded TRACER slice shows two small contributions from Gibson to the governor committee totaling $11.45. This is real but low-materiality compared with the vendor payments.
OpenFEC identifies Corey Gibson as a 2022 Republican U.S. House candidate in Washington District 4 with principal committee SEND COREY 2022. Washington PDC open data separately shows Corey Gibson Consulting, LLC rows for Misipati Semi Bird's 2024 Washington governor campaign, including communications-director and consulting descriptions. This supports a political communications / consulting context for Gibson. A later Facebook source cluster adds Bottoms-specific role evidence: a Corey Lee Gibson post says Gibson was chairing the Human Innovation and A.I. Technology Policy Committee for Scott Bottoms. That upgrades the role evidence from third-party-profile-only to direct Facebook-source evidence for a campaign policy role, while still leaving the paid contract, exact deliverables, and Director of Communications title unresolved.
Gibson's public identity adds a compatibility issue with Bottoms's NACL role but not a proven pledge violation. Fox News Digital's 2022 profile supports Gibson's public identification as a gay man. A user-supplied Corey Lee Gibson Facebook profile screenshot later shows the profile's personal details as Married to Víctor Ospina Carvajal, Since November 11, 2023, and Male. That supports a Facebook-profile-backed same-sex spouse finding, though no civil marriage record was recovered. Keep the finding at the level of a stronger ideological / vetting tension between a NACL pledge-bound elected official and a paid campaign vendor whose public profile presents a same-sex spouse relationship; do not treat it as a proven NACL pledge violation without a signed Bottoms pledge and NACL rule or enforcement interpretation.
¶ Unresolved areas and caution flags
- Exact birth chronology and the Colorado-native / Dallas-Fort Worth upbringing tension remain unresolved.
- Navy service chronology needs primary or official military documentation.
- Prior ministry dates in Strasburg and Rocky Ford remain unresolved.
- Strong Cross role is now better supported, but exact title, date range, and organization-name mapping need direct filings or organizational records.
- Board-role claims for Assemblies of God, Nelson University, and Sarah's Home remain unverified beyond narrower findings noted above.
- Several controversy items rely on secondary reporting summaries of sermons or hearings. Current/archived church media recovery did not yet produce the specific underlying sermons.
- ED2026-01 should be refreshed later for cure response, amendments, dismissal, settlement, or enforcement outcome.
- A signed Bottoms NACL pledge form, state-chair appointment record, dues record, or membership ledger remains unrecovered.
- NACL rules or internal interpretations on whether member campaigns may hire vendors or consultants whose personal lives conflict with the pledge language remain unrecovered.
- Corey Gibson's Facebook profile screenshot supports the spouse finding at profile-evidence level, but no civil marriage record was recovered.
- Scott Bottoms official biography, legislative, election, and campaign source cluster
- Scott Bottoms ministry, Church at Briargate, and speaker-bio source cluster
- Scott Bottoms archived Church at Briargate staff and sermon media source cluster
- Journey Church at Strasburg ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer API capture
- Scott Bottoms Nelson, Strong Cross, and board-role verification source cluster
- Scott Bottoms TRACER campaign-finance source capture
- Home | Christian Lawmakers - leadership and history
- Is a Right-Wing-Pastor Turned-Legislator the GOP’s State House Leader, As He Claims to Be?
- Colorado Pastor Turned Legislator Has Promoted Christian Nationalism From The Pulpit For Years
- Colorado Rep. Scott Bottoms Rejects Science of Evolution
- Scott Bottoms for Governor / Corey Gibson TRACER transaction slice
- Corey Gibson WA-04 2022 OpenFEC record
- Washington PDC Corey Gibson Consulting rows for Semi Bird 2024
- NACL model laws and Scott Bottoms bill comparison source pass
- NACL membership pledge PDFs
- Corey Gibson public identity and marital-status source check
- NPI Registry Jamie Kendrick source capture for Corey Gibson marital-status check
- Corey Gibson Facebook profile, Victor Ospina, and Scott Bottoms AI-policy post source cluster