Our Stories: Escaping IHOP - An Interview With Jessica Wehrle

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brannum Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannum Historical Research at William-Branum.org and with me I have my very special guest, Jessica Whirly. And today we're talking about all things I hop and NAR and charismatic and what it means to be spirit-filled while suddenly discovering that there's a whole mess out there and what is this mess? And so Jessica and I we got to talking via email and Jessica would be good maybe if you just take a moment and tell everybody about

yourself and how you got connected to this weird world that I've been researching. I've been really enjoying your videos on YouTube. I've been watching them as I try to start detangling myself from all of the craziness that was mixed up inside of IHOP. My background is I started at a house of prayer in Chicago when I was just 17 years old and that house of prayer was just starting the year was 2001. So very shortly after Mike Bickel's house of prayer started. Today I am you know in my 40s and have five kids and living

far away from all that and I left I left the house of prayer worlds all the way back in 2008 or not the world. I left that particular house of prayer in about 2008. So my window and involvement was not super brief but man I was all in I was I was staff for at least 20 hours a week almost that entire time and even the hours that I didn't need to be there it was just such a home for me that I loved it I was there all the time. And it's mentally taxing right to be so

engaged all the time while you're while you're there you're thinking about the church and then when you leave you're thinking about the church and it's constantly there this sense of urgency we've talked about this in a few different podcasts to give you the sense of urgency and it just sticks with you and what was it like at whenever you made the transition away a lot of people feel this strange emptiness whenever they get disconnected from from the urgency. Did you experience this?

Word, urgency, all I can think of is their catchphrase, the urgency of the hour. Have you heard that? I haven't. The urgency of the hour that was an often repeated phrase. Cory Russell would talk about it, which I still like Cory Russell.

All kinds of, we need to be here. We need to be crying out for the return of the Lord. The spirit and the bride say, come, you know, we need to build his house.

Lots of conversations about Nehemiah building the wall. A lot of inserting ourselves into the scriptural narrative from history and applying it to right now. But yeah, so leaving the prayer movement and then just kind of being a normal person was weird.

It was really strange to come out of that. And then I just, I, I, I, the elitism stuck with me. I'm a forerunner. That was another big word. I'm, I'm a forerunner. I'm to carry this message wherever I go.

I just felt like I was more different and special. Nothing I thought I was a better person, but that I had this secret knowledge, this higher revelation. And if only you knew what I knew.

It's very odd to me tracking the history of this movement from splinter group to splinter group into the, you know, ihop, the NAR. They always use that catch phrase of the hour. And they can say whatever they want before of the hour, because if they say of the hour, it's urgent, right?

You have to be mixed in with this. And the thing that all of these groups seem to have in common is they want to put on to your shoulders, you being the rank and file members of the cult.

The sense of urgency that it's your job to make sure that you build yourself up to a level of hype that Jesus comes back. And so you're, you're staying in this hype forever. And it's exhausting from what people are telling me.

I was in a similar hype, but it was the hype for destruction because the, the letter of reign movement was seeking for a destruction of the United States. So we were, we had a hype for destruction.

And then, you know, that's no fun. So as it went into Keres Mania, it was more of a, let's, let's work ourselves up because Jesus is gonna come back if we can work ourselves up.

That absolutely did happen. Yeah, so tell us a little bit more about the early experiences you had. So you were in one of the original houses of prayer. What, what was that like? You said you spent 20 hours ish in there.

What were some of the things that you did when you were a part of that movement? Yeah, so we were the first internship that opened the house of prayer. My, what had happened was my, youth pastor went away to Kansas City, gotta download a commonly used term, not like he plugged himself into a computer, but a download from heaven like this, new fresh commission that he got from Kansas City to build God's house, to build a house a prayer, and where he lived, which was Chicago.

So he brought the fresh vision back to the church, our original pastor stepped back and retired, and this guy became the full-on pastor and then started a house a prayer to the side of our church.

And where I was at when it started, was I was a 17 year old girl that had been homeschooled her whole life and a Christian bubble her whole life, was I was attending church in the womb, so I was always in it, and I had just attended my first semester of a secular college.

And that was a very confusing experience for me because now I'm not in that, yes, bubble of all of this is correct, I get people making fun of me, people making fun of Christian beliefs constantly, and I was in a typical struggle in college where you're trying to figure out who am I really, that was my parents' thing isn't my thing, I don't know.

So when our youth put her pastor, turn pastors that this is the house a prayer, we're starting it, call, we're calling forth interns to staff this place. I thought, well, if I'm gonna try it, and maybe I will find out that it's not for me, that like, well, I gave it, I gave it 20 hours a week, and I'm just not a Christian, or oh my gosh, yes, this is definitely me.

So that is my entrance into house a prayer world. And it was, like I said, totally, totally foreign concept of the bridal paradigm was all very new to me. In that last year, he'd started talking about it at a church, but the bridal paradigm was pretty new, and should I explain that?

Yeah, that would be good. There's all different ways that the Bible uses to explain God's love for us as humans, and it's so different that it requires a lot of different relationships to say, it's kinda like this, it's kinda like this, it's kinda like that, like a father, child relationship, king, servant, he's the judge, he's also a bridegroom, it's mentioned a couple times in the scripture, he's a bridegroom and us as the body of Christ were the bride.

Well, we got, billion to studying that scandalous book, Song of Songs, and using it as a Bible study tool to understand God's love for us that way. And it wasn't just like, corporately, as a body of Christ, we are the bride, and he's the bridegroom.

It was also, you know, in our individualistic society, as Americans, I'm the bride of Christ. And he's my bridegroom, and there was lots of bridal imagery there. There was always a disclaimer at the beginning of the Song of Song in glass, because the first verses are, kiss me with the kisses of your mouth.

They said, stop, we're not going to imagine kissing Jesus, okay, that's weird. And I'm like, whew, because that's not cool for me, that's you. So they really sold us on the metaphor, like this is all metaphorical, obviously, because if anyone's ever read the Song of Solomon, it's very, very strange image, really.

Am I supposed to be flattered, that you said I have an ivory tower neck, and I've got goats on me, like I'm not really sure, it's really different. So they would go into, like, the love first mentions of, like, the first time, this is what it meant.

So we're going to apply that here, and it was really interesting, you know, I, the biggest takeaway for me that was good was that God doesn't just love me. He likes me. He enjoys me, that I am an enjoyed creation of God.

And I think that's, I still think that's great. It transformed my relationship with God to be that of a fearful of judgment, all the time to, I'm delighted in. And so that's, that's good, right?

It was just, it was just a lot. There's all different ways to experience God's love, or to understand God's love. And that was definitely the hyper focus of that movement. Yeah, you just basically described every church that I've been to since a small child in the Brannum cults.

They all often did this bride and bridegroom thing because under the framework of British Israelism, you were to believe that the United States and Canada was one of the lost, you know, tribes of Israel, and that the all of the bride passages that you read from the Old Testament was applicable to us as the 20th, 21st century Christians, right?

And I'll never forget, so they didn't tell us this British Israel thing. I had no idea until I began researching that this was a thing. And I just remember, I came across reading Ezekiel 16 and it was talking about God's faithless bride, Jerusalem.

And I'm scratching my head, wait a minute, Jerusalem. And I started looking at it. every passage that I could find, obviously in the Old Testament, it's all applicable to the children of Israel. And then you get into the New Testament and book of Hebrews, etc.

There's a clear transition where it's talking about the bride being Jerusalem and then now there's a New Covenant and there's this clear separation, right? And when that first hit me, I was like, this can't be right.

I ended up reading my Bible over and over and over trying to just piece together and understand what all of this meant because we were taught that there was this coming destruction, like I said, and we were part of the bride, the elite Christians.

And then outside of this group of elite Christians were the, they had different names for them, but the worst of which was cannon fodder Christians, the ones that, the ones that were to be sent to the enemies to be destroyed is basically what this meant.

So we as the elite were the good guys were the, were the bride that got loved and they're the non-bride that are going to be destroyed. How very convenient. Yeah, it was, it was a mess.

So I recently, in fact, was just yesterday, I had a podcast recording which will come out later, maybe before this one, of a lady who also went into some similar challenges when she got into the education system and she had to try to reconcile now that she's in, I think you called it the real world, but she used the phrase and not in this, I think she said not in the same hype or the same level of excitement of the message that she was in.

You, you start to realize that there, there are two separate worlds that exist and you're trying to reconcile, how does this work, how, how is this possible and you begin to critically think and some of the things that you critically think about are, you know, it really can't apply to the cult and so there's this big separation between now you're seeing that there's reality and then there's this fictional part that you were, this fictional story that you were part of.

What was that like whenever that began to hit you? The critical thinking aspect is such a big piece, realize primarily young people were being called to this movement, from Mike Pickles in Kansas City to houses of prayer all over it was this vision they had of all these young people coming in and now we know Mike Pickle was doing that because he loved the ladies, the younger ladies, right?

We, us younger people and other, another reason is our critical thinking isn't at peak. When you're 19 years old, 22 years old, we're still so malleable. I, you said, you know, while you were already grown kind of, I was kind of a grown up in the sense that I was physically matured, but I was still extremely malleable, extremely impressionable.

And a lot of my identity was formed in this bubble, in this movement. There's good parts and there's bad parts. And as I've grown, I feel like when I hit 30 something clicked and I've been out of that for a while and as continued, I just feel like I mean we continue to mature as we age, but my critical thinking continues to turn on.

One of the things that flipped it, believe it or not, was right before the 2020 election. And I would be tuning in to all these prophetic people on YouTube to see what they said about the election because I still liked them at that point. And everybody was prophesying that Trump was going to win and he didn't. And then they kept prophesying, well he's going to get back in office and then this is going to happen and this is going to happen. And it just wasn't.

And it became so clear to me that holy smokes these people are nuts and they're thinking they're hearing from God and they're not. It was just a big wake up call. And I think I'm not the only person. There's plenty of other people in my circles that just went, no, no, it also became very clear to me. This whole spiritualizing that political is, we just need to keep them separated, right? That's them. Yeah. We got to keep them. That's not like Jesus's kingdom is not about politics. And that's the first time that's how they screwed up is they were expecting Jesus to

overthrow Caesar. And he's like, that's not actually what I'm doing guys. And unfortunately we're in that same mess again. Anyway, so my critical thinking got turned on more so starting there. And now I'm just looking back as things have continued to happen. I'm looking back and starting to pull things apart. There's one element, one or two elements that I would hear in our movement that gave me, gave me pause. One of them was the whole Joel's army teaching because it was ripped screaming out of context. I mean, it just, it wasn't what if you, if you're going to look at that

book in historical context and all the things that they're trying to say, they're not saying that we're going to be this big army of young people and believer spirit filled that are going to take over.

Like that's just not, not it was about judgment. It wasn't about, yeah. And so I noticed that, my parents noticed that my parents were part of it. And a little bit of my critical thinking would be activated every time my parents would go. That's actually not they have luckily accurate at all. And this is a little weird. And then I didn't really want to listen to them, but I couldn't help see it too.

So there are little bits and I just you just have that mentality of well, you know what? You know take the meat eat the meat, spit out the bones. It's all right. Like no one's gonna get it a hundred percent So I'll just kept trudging on yeah It's so weird to me to think that this religion and all of its blender groups and in its history have such strong ties to the politics because Like you just said the church is no place for this man. If you want to vote go talk, you know Go to a public rally for voting don't go to church

But we see over and over and over and over again In my history I've been going back as you probably have seen I went back to study the clan history because William Brannum was Associated with high-ranking officials not just one but multiple from the clan and And they tried the same exact thing in the 20s the clan tried to take over Washington through the state of Indiana and They actually started putting proxies in place in Indianapolis government and we're going to put the governor in and when he didn't make it Then there's this big outcry the voting systems flawed. There's fake ballots all of this stuff

And it keeps repeating you you can see in the 60s the same exact thing whenever Kennedy was About to be elected. They had this big outcry and all the Christians banded together who were in part of this movement and Same exact thing the voting's rig Can you get elected because the voting's rigged and it just happens over and over and over and over again and The Joel's army believe it or not was tied to that racism. It was tied to the Christian identity movement and I I'll never forget the first time I took a step back to just look at

Manifested sons of God Joel's army what it meant and I go back in a read Joel 2 and The army that it's referring to was an army of a plague that God had sent because the children of Israel weren't being very good And so this plague of locusts and caterpillars and everything and then God said now you've changed your ways Now I'm going to take you out of the plague and Right to stop and think that these guys did not even take the time to read and understand what Joel's prophecy meant It just blows your mind

It does it just made it I keep saying to myself where were the adults? What why did we turn off our critical thinking skills?

So often and it's I think it's the emotionalism Is that we were always whipping ourselves up to a frenzy because it it felt good, you know It feels good to be overly emotional and when you're that age when these young these younger people I mean, that's where we're strongest Our emotions and we can get real passionate and it's inspiring for the older generation to see the younger people, you know, crying out to God for revival.

It's inspiring for them to see us do that. And we enjoyed it. Once you get into that flow and you kind of break past the fear of man, you know, you're afraid like, what are they going to think about me?

Who's that thing? Or what is this person going to think about me? And you're in a group where everyone thinks it's great. It's a little easier to just kind of jump in 100%. I remember watching a young man dancing in the prayer room.

And there wasn't a ton of people there. He was the only other young person in the room. And he was just 100% in worshiping Jesus. And it wasn't a girly dance. It was a manly dance and it looked good on him.

And it just made me go, you know what? I want that. I think I want to, I think I want to just let go that way. And really just be physically worshiping the Lord, not just this quiet in place.

And so that a lot, a lot of that, a lot of that intense dancing and wildness is really what marked our IHOP experience in Chicago. Not so much in Kansas City. I heard that they kept the dancers in a little box.

They didn't like that. They liked things more. Some more like go-go dancers. Not go-go dancers, no, no. But people with like the prophetic flags and the scars and, you know, special outfits, which have always cracked me up.

I'm sorry, I never thought that was cool, but that's OK. OK, all right. The control that I think one of the big differences between Kansas City IHOP and our Chicago House of Prayer was initially is that we had a lot more freedom.

Mike Bickle was a very type A personality. And if you look at his sermon notes, everything is, you know, part one, section A, section B, right? And that his blueprint, his personality was all over that, that particular House of Prayer, with how structured everything is, how people are singing all these passionate, beautiful songs.

But if you see the video of the live stream, like they're hardly moving, everyone's got these big headphones on, and they're very stiffly just kind of like stuck there. And that was always a little bit strange to me, where we had a lot more freedom, at least in the beginning, of our House of Prayer.

And we had our own Chicago flavor that way. Chicago's famous for their musicians. We had some really good ones. We had some really great musicians, some really amazing talented singers, and prophetic singers, which another way to put that for those of you that aren't in our stream is, they're really good at improving.

off. Okay, so this is really good. We're just like, okay, what's the topic? We're going to same sound 23 and go. And then someone's playing chords in the background. And it's like, what is my shepherd? And you just start going and just singing it. And it's still like really fun for me. I still really enjoyed it. Yeah, it sounds great.

It's just great. And it's actually still my favorite way to talk to God is to sit at the piano, open the Bible, and sing God's truth over my own heart. And they would call us singing theologians. He would say, it's here at the house of prayer, we're going to prayer songs, and we're going to sing our prayers. And that focus on connecting to God by singing the word is, again, like that's not a bad thing. And with, I'm really glad, honestly, this Mike Bickle is a dirtbag revelation, came out in pieces, and gradually we're finding out how the depths of his

depravity and for how far that came out in pieces, because we just wouldn't have believed it. It was already hard enough to believe that there was a sexual indiscretion. Just that. That was hard to believe. And this is coming on the heels. We're, we're being wrapped by the October 7th step in Israel and being upset about that. And then a few weeks later, oh, Mike Bickle's stepping down. They're doing some kind of an investigation. I don't know. Half of us are like, I don't know if he did it or not. Let's just see. And you know, nobody's perfect. And we'll just

wait to see. But it was, that was unsettling. Then the Jane Doe started coming forward and reading the story. Oh my gosh, she was in Paris with her and she woke up in a bed somewhere.

What the heck? And we're starting to understand, you know, and she was, she was lying to them and saying, you're going to be in my chariot. And we are going to come back with Jesus together in this chariot. And it just became more and more clear how completely bad crap bonkers he is.

And all of it is. And I'm like, wow, I, hmm, this is, as an adult, this is hitting even more strange. Then when the emails of Mike Bickle's email started to release, that his communications with Jane Doe's husband, Jack Deere, the level of manipulation, narcissism, grandiose delusions, every spiritual abuse tactic in the book, he was full display showing these in the emails and reading this as an adult. There's my critical thinking kicking on again.

Where were the adults? Who? Who? Who is letting this maniac run things? Where are the checks and balances here? I don't care how gifted and anointed he is. He's trash. He's a trash human.

And he was like this? This is what gets me. He was like this from the beginning. He was like this once we found out that it was a 15 year old babysitter in the 80s.

What, I mean, I might've got my facts wrong here or there. I'm just saying, like, way back there before he started the house a prayer, it was a teenage girl. That, that's then finally on the coffin for me.

It's like, no, you've always been horrible. There wasn't just, oh, you had an indiscretion here in there, just like any of us can stumble in any way, whatever, I'm not going to judge you.

No, now I'm judging you, dude. I'm judging you as a wolf, as a wolf in sheep's clothing that we all trusted and somehow you manipulated all of us. And that's what started this whole process of going back in time, this formational period of my life and trying to extract the, whatever was specifically Mike and not the peer word of God, whatever was specifically the culture that he created and not just simple gospel and trying to separate it out from my personal theology and who I am.

Like, for crying out loud, this guy's dreams and visions that he had, they were, it's all part of the formation of who I have become. It's really disturbing, it's really hard. It is disturbing, you know, I didn't escape anything similar with regards to the sexual allegations.

My grandfather wasn't like that, but the cult structures, it is so similar to watch every single one of them as they progress because like you describe going after the children, that's a common theme among every single splinter group that we've examined, you go after the young, because if you can warp their minds when they're young, what happens, it's not just that you hook them, it's that they don't really progress in their critical thinking.

And some of them don't progress in just, you know, normal thinking, people in our support groups, after they have started to deprogram, they've noticed that they act very childish compared to other adults because they've been locked and trapped in the state of child mind, basically, and outside adults who never experienced this, especially the Michael thing, if a normal human being who's never experienced a cult comes in contact with a person that is saying things like, I'm going to ride the chariot with you back from heaven, they're going to immediately just say, this guy's a fruit

cake, but while you're in this, why are in this state of mind. You know, you can't think as an adult. So the question, where are the adults? The problem is many of the adults have also been suppressed and they have a child like mind because their authentic self has been completely isolated and they've not really developed a sense of security in having a critical thought.

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On behalf of William-Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. Another aspect of what was wrong with a house of prayer culture in the praying on of young people is that they didn't ever encourage us to go to college, get a work history, things that you need to do to become a healthy adult. Anything that wasn't directly house of prayer focused was not outright discouraged, but just never talked about. And it was all about building this man's vision of a house of prayer. And that tells you he wasn't really a good shepherd,

like he wasn't really a good leader because it wasn't about his sheep. It wasn't about that people under his spiritual care. It was about the vision. So that's another thing that my parents had noticed that there was never any encouragement of personal development outside of what would fill their, the leader's goals and dreams.

Yeah, that's definitely true. I've noticed that whenever I was in it and I actually had a problem with this. It was one of the few, there were just a handful of things that I had somewhat of a critical thought and an issue with. And that was the fact that you rank and file members, the elders did not want them to become elders. They did not want them to rise in the ranks because if they can keep them.

under their control, their sheeple instead of the, you know, instead of the elder ship and the pyramid structure of a cult. And while I'm reading the Bible, I'm seeing that Jesus creates disciples and the disciples go create more disciples and those disciples create more disciples and it's a way that a religion spreads. And the thought that really struck me was that if this was a, of the hour message, you know, whatever they call these, these things in the groups, if this is the thing for the hour, why would you not want it to spread virally and have people become leaders and make leaders create more

leaders, create more leaders until this becomes a movement that does usher in the return of Christ, if that's, you know, if that was biblical, it is not biblical, you know, Christ comes when He chooses, according to the Bible. But if that were the true intent, if these men truly intended that, they would lead by being leaders. And the critical thought that hit me is that none of these men who are in leadership are true leaders. If you look at the history of just great leaders in the world, they lead by example so that other people become leaders as well, there's not a single person I can think of in the entire

movement that is like that. I'm not a hundred percent there right now because I feel like I still know some good examples. I still feel like I know some good men that are good leaders within it. But at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if horrible things come out. A funny way to say my new strategy for when I can look up to somebody is not till they've been dead for a couple decades. And then I can say, yeah, no, I can't, no, I see the fruit of their life. No, it gave it time for any bad stories to come out of the closet of,

oh, well, actually, they were really doing this. Once they've been dead for a while, then you can say, yeah, they were actually really good leader in a good person. So it's hard. And that's very common among the people in the support groups. The problem is whenever somebody has betrayed your trust, you have a real problem trusting. And one of the really negative consequences of these types of movement, people who are in a church situation and they realize that the leadership in the church can't be trusted, well, then after they escape, well, what church can you trust the leader? Because I went through this. I thought he

was a good leader and look what happened. And it goes back to the statement that I had on leadership. When leadership is structured such that everyone becomes a leader, you have not just one single person who's the ultimate authority on doctrine and scripture. There's a balance of power.

And when you have a cult framework wherein there is a central figure and then there's a hierarchy of leaders under him, they're looking up, they're not looking down to make new leaders in most cases.

Now they will, like the carrot on the string example, they will lead you to think that you can become a leader. And that's the thought, you know, as I was processing that, it really hit me that there's just really not a good structure within these cults to create leaders.

And so I was in the cult when it hit me and I'm like, well, what do you do with that? I can't just, my grandfather was the head of our church and there were numerous sects of, you know, the branimism.

I can't go to all these people and say, hey, you guys aren't creating leaders, this is like a pyramid and the guy at the top wins. But I was stuck in that world, right?

And I never really, what's odd is I never really thought of as a cult until after I escaped. And start piecing that together. But so what was it like for you after you went through those stages and then suddenly came to terms with the fact that, okay, the leadership here has a serious problem and now we see all these allegations.

And I think you said you may have even been in contact with one of the Jane Does. What was it like in the moments after that whenever you're coming to terms with the fact that this wasn't a movement that was really of God?

What was it? It just feels very, very confusing to have that foundation that you thought was sperm under your feet, just everything being called into question. It's all just disintegrating underneath you. And the world are meant, the confusion, the lost feeling.

Right now it feels like I'm cleaning out a very chaotic garage, my soul, my belief system. And I'm dragging everything out under the driveway and examining it and going, where did this come from?

Do I really need this? And you're just pitching it all the dumpster. And right now I got a hole like three or four things in the garage that I'm keeping. And I don't know.

It's very, it can be very, very disorienting. But another element of this, it's not just, I hop. It's also the charismatic movement. And that was starting to unravel with, for me, with watching all these YouTube profits be so deeply wrong about Trump.

I also started watching, allowing myself to watch some charismatic, critical channels. Three or four of those. And the YouTube profits that I thought were the bees knees. And it was so scary and hard for me to even just push play on that because I just...

view them as so negative and grouchy and sure they are. But there is there's truth in it. And again, just like picking through and being brave enough to like, okay, just because I'm listening to something spiritual doesn't mean I get to turn my brain off. I got to keep my critical thought on.

I can listen to this and see what they have to say. Well, I'm coming to find out that a lot of the people that were huge are engaging in just straight up false prophecy, false personal prophecy, looking people up on Facebook. I had a of the conference looking through that the email list of people that had the names and you know, the registration of people that had registered for the conference. And then calling, calling out, I see somebody, I see this number and they call of their address. Oh, man, it was and everyone's so excited and crying like, oh, they knew my

address, they knew they knew all this thing. So it has to be God speaking to me right now in this extreme excitement that God is speaking to you through this man. And a lot of times he just then would just give you a Bible verse. I mean, it wasn't anything super life-shape life-changing usually. It was, yeah, God sees you and he's going to do a new thing and it was just some amorphous positivity and they left really excited that they heard from God. And that's, it's just really sad to me. It's really sad that there's so much lying going on because I do believe that prophetic

gifting is something that is available to believers. It's just really often abused by those who are looking for a platform for themselves because they got to keep that excitement going. So they went, I'm not hearing anything from God right now. So I'm going to employ this method and I'm not going to feel bad about it because I was just giving them a scripture verse and you know, it's fine. Like, I mean, this is me kind of piecing together how they're rationalizing this and it, it's everywhere.

I don't know that I want to name names, but like it's all these big names that we all thought, we meaning my community, we're awesome and a lot of them are just speaking and really sad and really, really discreet. I just kind of comfort myself like, what do I know is true? What do I know is true that I've experienced where God has warned me about something and I ended up being right. Now, did I go and tell everybody, God speaking to me and I'm a prophet? No, that's weird stuff. You know, I could just just know like, hey, like the the Bible says his sheep here

is voice and it's just it's just some leaning and guiding instruction for my life and it's great. I enjoy that relationship with God myself, but I'm not going to go look for it from some other person because that's how you get messed up. And usually the people who are most excited when they call out their address are the same people who are on the mailing lists because they're subscribed to the mailing list and you write the word of knowledge or whatever they call this this thing that they give the people. They try to set themselves up as a mediator

between God and man and you can go directly to the Bible to get most of these things, these prophetic words that they give you and sometimes it's a prophetic comfort. Well, you can get the same thing if you just read a few Bible passages, right? Why not go to the author? And they want to set themselves up in that pyramid hierarchy. You have to get to the top, you know, pass the cult leader to Jesus. You have to go through the chain. And I just, I really have a problem with men who do this because they have to know that this is wrong. If they're reading the same Bible, I'm reading

they know that this is wrong. It's the cult of personality is such a, is such a big part of of why it's wrong. And I noticed that a lot with the leader of our house of prayer with such charismatic individual. And I don't mean spiritually. Well, he was. I mean, that charisma, he, everybody just loved him. Two pieces. And I felt super loved by him. He would come to me and go, just like, I hear my favorite. And I just, and I knew that I wasn't his favorite favorite because he loves everybody. But I felt so loved. And everybody felt so loved by him. And, and when he would

speak and be passionate about about this, these things that he's hearing from the Lord, I mean, you would think that you're feeling this tangible fear of the Lord, like, oh my gosh, this is, this is terrifying. We need to repent. We need to cry out to the Lord.

It was, it was just, it was very emotionally intense. What they were, were with what this, this main leader was, was passing down to us. And towards the end of our, the life of our house of prayer, because it's been closed for a long time now, it really ultimately closed because he left.

He, it just became a lot. He was going through a lot of things personally. And he decided, he just needed to take a break and he moved to Kansas City. Believe it or not.

And he wanted, he wanted to be mentored by Mike Bickle. He wanted to be spiritually fathered by him. And, shocker, he was too busy. Mike Bickle was too busy for my leader. Yeah. You know what? He wasn't a cute girl. So,

so he had his fall of like getting fed by these beautiful women, bringing him things to his office and then shutting the door. So, you know, none of us are surprised now that he wasn't going to mentor him. And, you know, and because everybody was, was still so like, man, we got to follow this is our leader.

A lot of people moved to Kansas City with him. So our very tight and amazing community that we had in Chicago has nothing like it in Kansas City. In fact, that's where community goes to die.

People don't hang out with each other. They're way too busy building Mike's movement. Community was super hard to find in Kansas City from what I've heard and experienced for a couple of months when I was there.

But Chicago had this amazing vibrant community and we were all hanging out. My girl's apartment was the party palace. All the young people come to my house. You'd make a bunch of food, do a worship night in my living room.

It was wonderful. It was really fun. That all started to change toward the end of our house a prayer because our leader was also very type A. Our leader was also very type A.

And he felt like things were kind of getting out of control in our prayer room. All the free spirited people, we weren't really sounding like Kansas City anymore. This thing that Mike Bickle had passed on, it just what we weren't, we weren't Mike Bickle enough.

We weren't doing harp and bowl properly. And now when I say harp and bowl, I mean the model. I mean the way that we did worship. That was so different than any other place.

Have you heard of this term before? Have you heard of harp and bowl? No. Okay, it's based off of Revelation five, verse eight, the story about a lamb taking the school and the elders have a harp and they have this bowl of incense.

And this was a lot of the backstreet, not the backstreet, it was a lot of the theology of our prayer room is that the harp represents the music and the bowl of incense is the prayer.

And this is the marriage of prayer and worship together. We're gonna, like I said, sing our prayers, prayer songs. And there's a very specific way we're going to sustain day and night prayer and worship.

We're doing these two things at the same time and leading an entire room into this corporate experience. And so, I mean, there's whole manuals. I printed them out of exactly the order that we do things in.

And we'll be started off, you know, getting a gist of it and then we just kind of flew off and did our own thing, ultimately. And even our teams, our whole teams of us would go to different new house of prayer startups like our Chicago team went to Fort Wayne and we trained them all their team, how to do harp and bowl perfectly.

And yeah, so at the end, our pastor, director, person said, you know, we need to tighten up, we need to get better. Pick. one very type A personality, young person, to go to Kansas City, get trained, and then come back and retrain all of us to tighten the ship, okay. And that killed our prayer room. It really, it quenched the spirit, okay. It killed it because we were trying to hard to be perfect. We were trying too hard to fit into Mike Bickel's box. And to be successful in whoever's eyes, I don't house weird. It's less weird though than whenever

I thought you were saying harp and bull, like the animal, because if there was a bull in your imagery, I was going to be like, you know, this sounds like a different religion altogether. So you have come a long way and you've, you know, your story is, I'm sure your story is going to continue as you continue to deprogram from all of this. What would you say to your former self who was in this years ago if you could go back and give yourself some advice? Read the words of Jesus and what he says about prayer, honey. It says,

hmm, don't keep mumbling on the Spain repetition, like the pagans do, harp and bull has a lot of repetition. Sing the chorus six times, change the chords underneath it, and then sing it six more times. I mean, there's very specific things. Prayer is supposed to be a secret thing. Go to your room, shut the door, what your father sees in secret, and we're worried you openly. So it's fasting. We're always on corporate fasts and talking about our fasting.

We're always, and corporate prayer is okay, right? But, um, and it's good. It was just a hyperfocus. I would go back and tell myself, you know, this, this isn't really lighting up with the big picture of Christianity, of what it is. Are you feeding the poor, taking care of widows and orphans? Are you concerning yourself with the least of these, or are you hyperfocus on these really popular, cool people, these big personalities? And the second commandment is just as important as the first, right? And let me fulfill that. Those blanks in for, for people here, we, we taught at that, or they taught at the house of prayer that

the second commandment flows out of the first. So love the Lord, your God, your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. So they're like, yeah, yeah, you'll love people eventually, but you got to get loving God first, right? So the vertical more important than the horizontal. I would say that there's some...

Quite a bit of wisdom found in the the Catholic way of doing things is In order to love God let's serve the poor and order to love God. Let's let's do our service and in keep the horizontal Right and that that choice we're making is a way to love God um, I Could have used I could have used so much more balance there Yeah, I remember all when saying that she had the same thought. Why can't we do both? Why do we have to just take the first command?

I want to be a I can't remember her exact words but something about I want to be a second commandment Christian too at the same time and Why are we so hyper focused on this like when little thing and that's that's how people get off And that's what that's what I'm I'm seeing big picture stepping back into an adult any group that hyper focuses on one aspect of Christianity Just goes off the deep end and it becomes a cult And so we're gonna major on the majors and minor on the minors What are the major big takeaways?

Keep everything in balance if you're all about prayer then what the heck else is happening with all the other stuff It got said for us to do to be good people to reflect him Yeah, and I just I go back when she said that I was thinking you know what Jesus said the greatest two commandments Is love God and love your neighbors yourself in the same sentence So how can you even try to separate those and not be arguing directly with Jesus and I didn't say that to all one but I wish I had so now I'm getting the opportunity to say it with you

One time that works out, you know Exactly Well, thank you so much for doing this. I'm sure that there's a lot of people that are gonna be encouraged by what you had to say today and Thank you for sharing what you have with the others. No problem. Thank you so much for asking me. That was fun Absolutely Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information you can check us out on the web You can find us at William-Pranum.org For an overview of the historical research of William Branum in the healing revivals

Read preacher behind the white hoods a critical examination of William Branum in his message Available on Amazon Kindle and Audible

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