Our Stories: An Interview with Amy Fisher

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brandham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brandham Historical Research at William-brandham.org and with me I have my very special guest, Amy Fisher, former member of William Brandham's message. Amy, it's good to have you on here and to share your story. We've chatted a bit, you know, via the Facebook chats and we, you know, tried to make this connect and I've had a couple weeks of just crazy busy but we finally are connected and good to have you on here. Maybe if you could start and just tell everybody

a little bit about yourself. My name is Amy Fisher. I live in a small town in Ohio. I'm 52 years old. I have a blended family, so we have four boys, six grand children, which keep us extremely busy.

So we have a pretty good life here of small town USA. Awesome. I've made many, many trips into small town, Ohio. My wife's families from Ohio, so we go up to Amish Country several.

Used to go several times a year now. It's about once a year but love it up there. So what brought you into the message? My parents, yeah. Give a little background. When I was extremely small, my parents did not, I'm the oldest of three girls. Was born in 71. My parents did not go to church.

I think it was around the time my sister, my youngest sister was born. They started going to a Baptist church and that's where we first started out in this process. Went to Baptist church.

We went to the Baptist school first and second grade. Everything seemed fine. My parents seemed normal. My dad and mom, they were Sunday school teachers. My dad drove a bus for the church. I was in the choir. They seemed to be very active. Mom did mission work.

From what I remember, everything seemed, you know, we had a normal couple of years. Then, I'm not sure what happened. Dad didn't like some of the teachings. So we started. He took us out of the Baptist Christian school there and put us into a Wesleyan private Christian school with a Wesleyan.

church and it was about that time um my father who worked for General Motors his best friend in the factory was a message believer and that's about the time he drew my dad into the religion and everything totally changed for us. I can only imagine that's also again a similar story my in-laws there some of them are Wesleyan and I could be wrong but I think that's it's my wife's story I'll let her tell it on her podcast but um something similar you know somebody met somebody at work and that's how it all you it's how it usually starts somebody says hey do you know do you know

there's a prophet and they don't tell you that not all of the prophecies were correct and all that just get get you hooked and then you get you get curious and you come into it so I'm guessing I'm guessing your father got curious and brought the whole family along with him into the message he did he he said that he always be in Baptist and in the way they believed he always told like there was something more there was something more and now that I'm older I'm thinking what more do you want than God's grace what what what do you need rules to live by what what do you

need what do you need so I remember when he started going to a small message church and um my mom soon followed him of course he was baptized right away and that's when we had to start wearing dresses and couldn't do this couldn't do that couldn't you know and um it's kind of hard because going to Wesleyan school they had their own rules you know they had to wear long sleeves and always had their hair up and just different rules and regulations and we were kind of always the oddball because here we had another side of regulations and we were just you know we didn't

belong to their church and they had their own group of people so I always felt like an outsider but all these years I I you know I learned the Bible I was I just I learned the Bible and I just kept it in my heart um when I was in high school we switched to a Pentecostal a Pentecostal school some things had happened at the Wesleyan school so when I was in about ninth grade we switched to a Pentecostal school which was a little bit better for me they weren't so rigid as the Wesleyan rules but still you know it was like all their women were the same skirt the

same hairstyle we bought the same purse and they all married each other and and it was just like I just felt like I'd never belonged anywhere we were just always the outsiders always the outsiders we went to such a small message church there was no one you know we didn't have many friends so yeah I can relate to all of that to some of the, I migrated with my family to various places around the country and some of the churches were just a house with a few people in it.

So I'm familiar with how that works. And I can't imagine, you know, having been a Baptist and then heard the gospel and the gospel in its simplicity. And like you said, wanting to learn more, the irony of this is you go to the message and you keep hearing that phrase, the gospel in its simplicity, but then they complicate it so much that nobody in it can really even understand what it is.

And if you ask somebody, what is the gospel, they never give you what the Bible says is the gospel. You know, the good news that Jesus came. And so what was that like for you being a person who reads the Bible, were you able to detect anything that you felt was abnormal about the doctrine while you were in it?

I noticed not, let me clarify this. Sometime in that period when we went to the Wesleyan church, my dad, it's friends started pastoring a church. So we went with them. So it was two families.

So for my entire life, most of my church was just our family and another family. This family had four children and they felt like, you know, me and my sister's did. Just, you know, here we are.

I started noticing things fairly young. There's a couple examples. One time we had some women come to our church. They just showed up one Sunday morning off the street and walked in and our pastor, they were wearing pants.

And right away our pastor started preaching out against, you know, women wearing pants are going to hell. And I thought in the women, you know, they immediately walked out of the church. They weren't there 10 minutes.

And I thought, how are they going to get saved? How are they going to know about Jesus if you condemn them for five minutes? You know them, you know, it was just, it was odd.

Fine. Yeah, you know, in my high school years, we lived in a small town that really didn't have a church. We, I drove as a teenager, I drove a long ways to go to the church in high school.

But I grew up, you know, reading the Bible and I felt sorry for the people that would be lost. And like you, how can they be saved unless you tell them? So I told several people about the gospel, about the actual gospel, because I was reading my Bible, but I also told them about William Branham because that's what we were supposed to do.

And I'll never forget when I moved back here. And I was at my grandfather's house, which he was the pastor of the Branham Tabernacle. And some sales lady came to the door. I can't remember what, what it was for, but I remember the whole family looking out and seeing her.

and clearly saying she has pants, she's not, we can't let her in this house. And I was just shocked, this is a pastor's home, and the thought hit me, even though I still was suppressing critical thought, I was thinking about the lady, if she was unsaved and he's a pastor trying to save her, why would he kick her out of her, why would he not let her in the house, right?

So that was one of the first few instances that I had of critical thought, but looking back, there's so many things like that, it was not a message to the lost and dying world, like most churches, it was a message to corral the people that you already had in your gates.

Right, right, and they do that with fear. And I think that's my main point of doing this with you is the fear and anxiety that crept into my life when my parents started in the message.

They taught me fear, straight up, fear. The world's ending soon, you're going to go to hell if you do this, if you don't straighten up at school, and it was just, by the time I was 15 or 16, I was having panic attacks.

And back in the 80s, they didn't know what it was. They talked it up that asthma, maybe, breathing problems, they really didn't know, they didn't have a name for it back then. It was just, it was a terrifying, overwhelming fear.

I sat in the pew with my kids when I was older, my two sons, they were very little. I clearly remember this, we were sitting in the pew and someone was preaching and the man says, you don't have a future.

The world's going to end, these kids here don't have a future. And I remember that was the last time I ever went to a message church. I walked out the door and says, I'm not going to raise my kids to feel like I feel there's no way I can do this.

Yeah, I remember many, many sermons on that theme. What's interesting is a lot of the preachers will preach that theme, but they won't outright tell you. You have no future. They'll just lead you to believe that you have no future.

So as a child, you're living in constant fear because you don't know when it's going to end. And am I going to be at school whenever it ends? Can I get reconnected with my parents?

That kind of thing. So back to the gospel discussion earlier. And in fact, I just had a call earlier today with a guy talking about this. The gospel that they give you is a gospel of fear, which is ironic because the word gospel just simply means the good news, the good news that Jesus came and you too can be free in Jesus.

But what they give you is something to hold you captivated by fear. And the thing that it does, the worst part of it for me is it gives you a, it takes away your outlook in life.

So as a child, There's no future. There's nothing to look forward to. Why do I care about this world that that kind of thought enters your head? Yes, yes, I remember when I married my first husband we moved to Texas and I lived in in fear of California had an earthquake I've had a panic attack and I just I would call my mom long distance, you know to make sure My parents weren't raptured yet. There were times. I would call their house at two o'clock in the morning and hang up the phone when they answer

Just to make sure I you know, I didn't miss the rapture. Everybody's still here and what it's what a terrible terrible Way to live. What a burden to put on children and young people to give them no hope and just straight fear The Bible tells us what 365 times to fear not We were never called that in church. I never heard that now In California, you know, Brandon's prophecy of California sinking. I Had to go out there on business and I went out there and Everywhere in California every day there are tremors. So you're out there and you're like, oh my gosh

Am I gonna live through this trip and? It it changes It's hard to conduct business while you're thinking this. I'll just say it like that It is it is and I I can remember one time I I went out there to see a friend in my dad. He would be like You know, I would rather your playing crash you died than you have to California fall off into the ocean and you'd be there and I'm thinking where are you getting this from?

What is your thought process? It's just the things I heard from preachers and and people in the church I just something just didn't sit right with me just didn't sit right with me My mom would always tell me you know like women with short hair They were going to hell before pants were going to hell and then I would as I got older I thought These women I saw other women that were so godly that had such godly homes and love their families and I Thought why do you think we're better than they are? I I didn't I thought the attitude in the message is terrible compared to the attitude to

A community church or such it was yeah, just didn't add up for me Yeah, and we we recently went out to Los Angeles on a just a weekend getaway my wife had never seen the West Coast so we went out there and You know the thought hit me while I was out there. I spent my whole life looking for California for Los Angeles to sink that was part of the prophecy But worse than that we wanted it to we you know When every time that there's a trimmer you're kind of hoping that it does so that it makes this prophecy come true

But you're never really thinking about the people that would suffer and die if that happened, and many of those people are Christian people. So we were out there, you know, looking around at some of the people you can see family, entire families, and they're really good people, right?

And the fact that we did, we cared so little about the people and cared more about the so-called prophecy, it made me realize that it wasn't even Christianity we were in. We were in something else.

Right, right, if it's true, we truly believed that it was going to fall off the ocean, and millions of people were going to live. Why wouldn't we be out there trying to convert them?

Well, that's not how it happened. Let's see here. I remember going to church camp. We had a fairly good-sized church camp for the message in Ohio. I don't know if you ever heard of it or the people that ran it.

My mom and dad were involved for a couple of years running the snack shack and the kitchen, and, oh, let me tell you, church camp can sit, especially for girls. Church camp consisted of church doing nothing and going to church for five or six hours, and that was our camp.

And I could see other kids, you know, as I got older, they would get a church camp and they would swim and ride horses and do archery. And I would be like, yeah, really, right?

Why can't we do this stuff? Why can't we do it? And I always question, I guess I question it at the word. My parents would tell you, you really had a problem with it at the wordy, because it just wasn't adnab for me.

It didn't make any sense to me. We would, you know, it would be nothing for our services at church camp to start at seven and go all night. And if you didn't stay all night, you were looked down upon.

But I just, I don't know, I don't know. I enjoy my sleep too much to do that. The funny part for me is I was never allowed to go to those things because my family looked down on the people running them.

So I really didn't get a chance to go. My grandfather, in fact, you can listen to him say it on the resignation speech on the website. But his words were, if you can get to the children, you can get to the parents.

And if you can get to the parents, you can get to their money. And that was, I can remember grandpa clearly saying things like this all the time. So they were so against all of these things for the youth.

But I never got to experience it. And, you know, I kind of, I wanted to, the funny, you'll laugh at this. The reason why I wanted to is because I read the bear and stain bears books.

And I would see all of the camping, the fun stuff they're doing with the canoes and the fishing. But I'm certain it was nothing like this. They're nothing. They're not happy. Um, and another thing is, you know, you couldn't find three families in the message to agree.

It was, it, that's probably why we never went to Jeffersonville or go to their church. We went one Easter when you're to experience it, went to the voice of God, but, you know, no one would ever agree. I think that's why my dad and his friend went out on their own to a church because they couldn't agree with two other people in the church we were. And I'm like, why can't we just all get along? This is not what Jesus wanted. If you listen to Paul, he, he preached against that. We should all come together and be blind. And that's the real problem for people like you and I who

have an analytical mind. If you're trying to think logically about this, there's no logic to it. And it doesn't make sense. And so you do internally, you're told to, you're, you're told to suppress all of your questions, but internally they're surfacing and it creates this big problem because now I've got questions and none of this makes sense. Why are these guys doing this?

But the, the fact that they force an opinion is the bigger problem because people have differences of opinion, but yet you're taught to suppress the questions and you're not trained how to interact with people who don't share your opinion. And so what it ends up with is people get very angry with one another whenever they don't have the same opinion. And the interesting part of all of this is when we left the message and we started going to other churches, we would find that, you know, one church's doctrine was completely different than the other one. That's why they're different

denominations. But even in the same church, you would find I would take the pastors and assistant pastors out to launch sometimes and just ask them questions and they would openly say, now I believe this. And for me, it was like a core fundamental Christian doctrine. But he's say, but the assistant pastor, he believes this other thing is the polar opposite. But they were taught properly that people can have differences of opinion. And what I, what I took, it took a long time for me to understand what we were taught is to look very, very deeply into the little things and make it such that the

little things mattered more than the big things. And so my focus was entirely in the wrong place. And through talking to these guys, I came to understand the little things that they're talking about that they have differences of opinion. They really didn't matter. For me, they were core Christianity, but for most Christians, they didn't matter at all. Right, right. It's like Serpent Seed. Some people believe it. Some people don't. I struggle with the book of Revelation.

I don't know much about it, but there comes a point where you have to focus on Jesus. Get saved. Follow his way. and it does these other things matter, we can debate doctrine forever. But as long as you are saved and you put Jesus, and you seek after God, He'll answer. Because when I started this process, I prayed, I said, God, if the message is true, show me, show me. If it's not true, show me, I just want to know. I just want to quill this in my heart once in a row. He showed me, he showed me

that it was false, it was a false way. I really, I got married young, of course, because I had, I wanted to get a college, always dreamed of going to Ohio State, of course, that's out for a girl.

I wasn't going to live at home my whole life, so I married the first guy that asked, was a horrible marriage, out of respect for my boys who loved their dad. I'd never really talk about it. We were married 10 years, then we divorced, which is just a terrible thing for message people. It was about that time I took my boys and left the church. The day we left, I've never heard from anyone from the church ever again, never. After going there, about my entire life, never heard from anybody again, kind of turned our backs on us. And then you're divorced, which is a double

indemnity. They just, you know, you're lower of a low. So I met my husband now and he, I started to tell on him, it's hard to tell people, hey, I was part of a call because it's, you know, it's just like cancer or whatever, but to know someone who's in a call, that's like, okay, so I tried to tell him a little bit about it. And he was a first person. He used to turn legalism with me. And he explained to me what legalism was. And it was like a light bulb went off in my head. I said, oh my God,

why didn't I ever teach that we were legalistic? Why didn't I never heard that term in the message? And that's what they are 100% legalistic. You know, the funny part about all of this is, so I believe the message hook line and sinker until 2011. It was, it wasn't until a trip to a revival in the South, believe it or not, that thing, thanks started just really bothering me.

And so on the trip, my wife was, I was, we shared driving. So I would drive part of the way and she would drive the next. And while she was driving, I was looking up just things that were bothering me on the phone, things that did not make sense. And lo and behold, I found one of the earliest versions of people who were critically examining the message. And sure enough, there were other people that saw the same problems as me. And I began to look at it and, oh my gosh, they're right. There's a problem here. There's a big problem here. And so we get to the revival

and it's the funniest thing. It was a church I grew up in parts of my life. in the south and it used to be a small mobile home. Everybody met in this mobile home, but they built this nice big fancy church and they had a room underneath.

You'd walk down the stairs under the sanctuary and had a room for the men who wanted to take their children out of the building if they were being unruly that he'd go down there and we had a young child.

So I'd never seen anything like this in a message church. Usually the women take the children. So I go down there and my gosh, man, they had this nice big leather recliner that I set in.

They had Legos over here for the boy. I was in the heaven on the screen on the wall. There was like a 50 inch screen of the platform so you could watch the preacher preaching and I'm sitting back here, you know, my hands proper, I'm, this is great.

I'm not going back up there, right? And. Thank you, Brian, and your kids to act up and trope, right? Well, we were only there for like two meetings, but anyway, this preacher came in and he started preaching on legalism.

And it was the first time I had really, I'd knew the term, but it never really clicked that that's what we were in. But he started just blasting the Brannum tabernacle because you know, there's different splinter groups of the message, right?

So he was in one that hated the tabernacle and the main sect of the message. He was saying things that it was offensive to me because I came from the Brannum tabernacle, which looking back, I look at this and I think, why does man do this?

You know, because half the crowd came from the tabernacle and he's just berating them, right? And then the irony is, as he's preaching against them, saying that they're so legalistic, then he starts into his preaching and preach his legalism.

So the whole thing, none of it made any sense. And I was just sitting there looking at this big screen TV and I thought, you know, this looks an awful lot like those televangelists where the whole thing is fake.

And that's when it really hit me all of this. These people have this, you know, a nice front, they look like they're Christian, they're playing Christian, but what they're doing isn't Christian and that's when it really hit me.

Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website William-Brannum.org.

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I really started struggling with this last year and I started doing some study and now the thing we have today that folks didn't have back in the 80s and 90s is the internet. So whatever you were told, you believed.

I started with there was a man out of Lima, Ohio, who was a message preacher and he left the message. And I read and I listened to his testimony and I thought I knew him from church keynote.

So I went and asked my dad, did you know, so and so, I left the message a couple years ago and my dad's reply was, well, he was always not right. He was kind of a womanizer and I'm like, no, I've never looked at me like, how dare you say no to me.

And I said, no. I said, I remember him from camp, he was a young man. I said, in the women, he was from an elite family and the women with the growth or daughters at him.

Of course, you know, they wanted their daughters to marry the elite people in the message. The bigger the name, the better the marriage. So and I really started questioning. So then I started digging like Florence Nightingales, was it her niece that supposedly got healed and I found out Florence and we never got married and her sister never had children.

And I'm like, is this a fake? I mean, is this this can't be right? This can't be right. So I went to our pastor, my pastor, I'm now with the going to church for a couple years and he's a great man and I said, I got a story for you and you're not going to believe this, but I think I grew up in a cult.

So I told him a little bit about it and he's like, Amy, this is one I have never heard of. So I said, he said, I'll get back with you. So he calls me the next day and he's like, I got some information on you.

So I started looking on the internet. That's when I found out that William Brannum and Jim Jones worked together. I was like, oh, this is bad, this is, this is, this is, this is very bad.

This is how close did we come from being a Jim Jones call how close? You know, I don't talk about it much because I can't prove this, but I've talked to many people who have escaped the message and one family was from an area close to here, a little bit north of where we live in Jeffersonville and they were in the message, I knew their whole family, I knew everyone of them and they told me that the only reason why they didn't go to Jones Town.

with Jones was because that their family had more money and they didn't want to go live like that, but they were so connected to the Brannum Tabernacle and what, apparently, what was left there.

And, you know, when they told me I didn't believe it, and I can't prove it, so, you know, I can only take their word at it. At that point in time, I only knew of one mission that William Brannum had with Jim Jones, where they went to the Kato Tabernacle basically they launched Jones's career.

I had not seen all the other information and come to find out later, you know, Jones was introduced by William Brannum's, one of William Brannum's primary publicists, Joseph Mats and Bozay, who he ran the Herald of Truth and they connected with each other and it looked like they were prepping Jim Jones to be a significant leader in this thing until an explosion happened Jones was sponsoring Brannum's meetings and not just that one, but other meetings and even other states.

So this was a big deal. And now after knowing that knowledge, I look back at what that person told me and I still can't prove it, but it's very plausible when you think through it.

And Jones isn't the only bad fruit that came out of this mass, this movement. You can go through history and you can find one after another after another. And the Bible says, by your fruits, you'll know them, by their fruits you'll know them, but none of the people are trained to examine the fruit and that's the real problem.

Right, right, it's terrible to think how close some of us could have come to be in part of that. It's scary. I tried to, I approached my mom and dad with my husband a couple months ago and I told them, I said, I've been searching.

I'm trying to get through this. I said, did you know about Florence Nightnove, Nice? There wasn't, you know, that was a picture of some woman from a concentration camp, Dodd, Rust or Soul, in Jim Jones and they were livid.

They said, you can't believe everything you hear on, on our C on the internet or here on TV. You just can't, people just make this stuff up. So you won't believe a million brain at them.

And I'm like, there's documents. There's photographs. There's, I want to recording yesterday about, I was watching one of your videos and I heard a recording, you know, of Jim Jones. I believe he was talking about brother, a brand-of-dying in a car wreck in Texas.

And it, I'm like, no, there's proof. Just, just look. And they, my family is so indoctrinated. Nope, no way, no way. We're right, you're wrong. And there's no in between. The problem is they've been trained so much to suppress the critical thinking.

But more. than that, they're trained to deflect it. So if you bring critical thought to them, they'll deflect it. And the easiest deflection is it's all lies. Don't believe any of it. So that's usually the position that they take. But inwardly, you know, whenever you engage people like this, if you can engage them and they don't bring their guards up. In other words, you're talking about things that things that you enjoy, things that you have connected with them in the past. And in a non-confrontational way, just talk about Florence Nightingale. You know, they already know this part, so you can't use

that example. But talk about Florence Nightingale and the actual history without a confrontation. And so what happens is the next time they hear that name and, you know, William Brannum claim that he healed Florence Nightingale, he later changed it to a daughter and then a granddaughter, I think.

And once all of that was proven fiction, some message, I'm not going to give his name, but some message pastor out there said, no, he got it wrong. It was the niece. And so that's why you had to look up the whether the sister had one, because they're just deflecting. They're actually producing more fiction to uphold the fiction. But if you, if you give them just enough so that next time they hear it, they can think through it, maybe they can break through and hopefully escape and escape this thing. I just, I want people to know that it's just not the message. I, in my town,

I live in now, there's a church of God that is a known cult in these people where I call him uniform. They all wear the same exact dress as either black or navy blue. It is so bad that they adopt children to get their numbers up. They don't try to recruit from the outside. They adopt children. This group was run out of Canada and they came down here to my town and build a great big church. And I've heard rumors can't prove anything of something's going on, but I know a girl I used to go to school with. She loved it a couple years ago and said it's definitely a cult.

And in, we have a lot of German Baptist omission, this area, and I don't know what it is with me. I have a big problem with people who have to wear what I call uniform. I don't get why everybody has to wear the same dress and in these rules and in regulations, you know, I see a lot of German Baptist, they won't drive trucks, but we'll drive tractors or we'll have all this equipment for work, but our wives can't have a washing machine. And I just want people to know this is not biblical. It is not in the Bible. God does not require this of you. He requires your heart.

And I just want people to, if someone then seem thought go to work. Yeah, I told you we we went up to Ohio several times a year and my wife is from Amish country. So she has a lot of Amish friends and it's legalism pure plain and simple. There's no question there. But I had never experienced Amish until I met my wife. And so we made a few trips and I got to meet the really nice people. I got to meet few of them. Oh, absolutely.

I had I had just got a new Dodge Durango and it had the big engine in at the big 360 or whatever. And when we made a trip up and our first stop was at one of these Amish homes and we pull off it's always a long gravel driveway. So it pull off on the gravel driveway and the closer I got to the house I feel the truck was like making a noise and it felt like it was shaking and I thought is that the gravel or is it the truck. And we pull up to the house and I turn it

off and the ground still shaken. And I'm like, what in the world is this? And I get out and the closer I walk to the house the more it's shaking. And so my wife and the kids they go inside, you know, everybody's greeting them, hi, how are you doing? My curiosity is not like that.

I can't just go in the house. I got to figure out what in the world is going on. So I start walking around the house and I see this cable coming up out of the ground with a U-joint going in the house and it was turning. So somewhere behind me and a barn or something was a massive diesel engine and it was turning a thing for multiple houses.

So I go inside, hi, how are you doing? I still got to figure out what this is. So I walk to the back of the house and there's a there's a almost handmade built washing machine because they're not allowed to have electricity in the house. But the men can run a diesel engine.

So this guy had figured out that if he can pump the diesel engine, turn something, he can turn a washing machine. And so he did. And so I go a little bit further and they said, well, it's hot outside. Would you like a drink? And I said, sure, and I'm thinking, I'm going to get hot water in this place. She goes up to her refrigerator, pulls it out, and hands me a ice-cold coke and I'm like, how did you do that? Oh, it's a it's a propane for refrigerator. And I go further, I go into the living room and I sit down, they've got a nice

recliner and everything and I'm sitting there and she says, oh, watch this, I got to show you something and she flips a switch on the side of the thing and it starts vibrating and gives me a massage, it's a massage chair that didn't even look like one. And I'm like, how'd you do that with no electricity and a pier over the corner is a car battery behind me. But the kicker for me was when it got, it started getting dark and I was bored out of my mind. There's nothing to do in this house.

They bring me some magazines and I'm kind of thumbing through them and as the Thun was going down, was getting dark in the room and the lady comes in the room and she says, what are you doing, reading in the dark and goes to the wall and flips a switch?

And I'm like, okay, I figured out the washing machine, I figured out the, how did you do that? And she says, oh, we have gas all throughout the house and when we flip it, it just ignites a little, they had every modern convenience that we have, but they're so legalistic that they could not, they, even though they're doing the same exact thing, they couldn't abide by the same rules.

And we were, we were still in the cult when all of this hit me, but that's, that's the point in which I realized that legalism makes you do things that don't make sense at all.

And there are the other German Baptist homage, this church of God, I mean, yeah, it's, it's funny, it's funny the things they do. They'll take, we call it pop and mama, they go in every Thursday night on their tractor, they go into the local restaurant to eat, but they won't drive a, they'll drive a tractor but they won't drive a car and it's just like, oh, you can just, yeah, I don't know why people feel like they have to live by these rules.

Now, I'm not saying it's okay to go out and live in any way you want, that's, that's between you and God. I believe God can fix people of things, some people might have a conviction of going to bars versus not going to restaurants that serve beer or women should have long hair or everybody, if you ask the Lord to lead you, he will lead you, he will tell you what you should do.

And that's, I guess I feel, I'm doing this for my grandchildren, I didn't want to speak about this because my family's still in the message, my mom and dad, both my sisters, but I see how they live in their lives on a mess, my, my family's lives are a mess, but as their theory is, as long as you believe in brother Brandon in this message, hey, it'll be okay, it's not okay and it's not good.

And I see other people in the message, and things aren't going right, and they lose their kids, they, they go off and, and do these other crazy things and they want to know why they're like, well, you know, we, we believe in the message and here's a little story for you.

My dad went to Amish country, him and his preacher buddy has been going to Amish country to preach in an Amish church or convert in the Amish now, I don't know. Maybe you'll run into him on your next trip, I don't know.

So my sister, she writes, text me and she says, hey, Amy, dad's preaching in its life. I'm like, we're at an Amish church and it's live, okay, whatever. And I'm like, I was out on grass on a Sunday, God forgive me, the ox was in the ditch, it had to be both.

So take a break. And I thought, I'll click on here just to see what dad's saying because my dad's pretty, he's pretty good preacher. I click on there. He was talking about me. So I listened and he was saying in the morning service, he got filled with the Lord and he was dancing around something he had never done before.

And he said, it's because of my oldest honor, Amy. She says she's a Christian and she goes to church, but she just doesn't believe this message. And I don't know what to do other than to give it to the Lord to show her the way. And I thought, he showed me the way he should pray.

Pray for the right thing dad. Don't pray for me to believe this or that or another pray for me to know the word. I want my dad's prayers. I want, you know, I want, I want my family to accept me and I know so many others out there feel the same way.

They're once they leave this message, they're cut off or they feel like a second citizen or the black sheep or the family. And it shouldn't be like that. It should be like that. I just want these these pastors and if anyone was to ever see this, know that we love you.

And we just want you to know the Lord. We know that he's not full of, you know, you do this, this and this. I'm going to strike you dead. I remember when I left my husband in our pastor told me, you know, I know your husband's bad to you. It divorces. Isn't the only thing we can turn him over to Satan.

And I don't even know even of the fear now. They Satan kills them or they could die or whatever. And I just looked at him like, I don't want my husband to die. I just want to be away from him. Just, you know, I don't, so then that fear grabbed your heart. You know, are they going to pray for me to die? Are they going to pray for it? You know, because I don't believe William Brian. Are they going to pray for God to strike me dead?

And it just doesn't, it's not right. It's not right. Now, placing a hex on somebody whenever they disagree is not not a Christian thing to do, you know, and that's, that's the point I was trying to make earlier.

If you have an analytical mind and you follow logic, well, to be a Christian means you follow Christ, which you do. And then whenever the people in the message see that you leave William Branham, they call you not, they consider you not a Christian.

And so the difference is to them, Christian means following William Branham. So in other words, it's Branhamite. It's not Christian. It's following Branham. And if you follow all of this pass out to its logical conclusion, it's a different religion than Christianity. It's not even Christianity. Otherwise, if you were to leave and follow Christ, they would celebrate your following of Christ, right?

She left, but she's following Christ. And that's the real problem. They, they're manipulating related to think it's Christianity, but they're in something entirely different. Right, right, right, absolutely. And last year when his son, Billy Paul, died, chirping crickets.

No one's ever mentioned it. No one's ever mentioned it. When I found out he'd passed away, I thought, I'm gonna test the waters. I'm gonna text my sister and see what she says. And I said, do you know that Billy Paul passed away?

She was, oh yeah, oh yeah. I'm like, does this change or a mode of thinking because you know, God was supposed to come back before Billy Paul was an old man and California's gonna fall off of the ocean.

And she says, oh no, oh no. And I'm like, has something changed that I didn't wasn't taught, were you taught something different? Did we not sit in the same queue? And she goes, no, she goes.

That prophecy was about shark swimming in the building and that happened back in the 70s and everybody knows that. And I'm like, no, I'm pretty sure. So you know, I get on the internet and I'm looking and I'm looking and I'm like, I don't see any proof this happened.

Well, so and so said, so and so as wives, cousins, brother of best friend, work there, back in, whenever it happened. And I'm like, if that happened, there would be in the 70s, there would be pictures of it.

Come on. It's like the whole, I don't know about your, your sect of the message, but ours was primarily based on the Lord was kind of act before Billy Paul was an old man.

Now that'll strike fear. And when you lay in bed at night, you're trying to figure out what's old. What's not 60? Okay, 65, 70's not old yet. You know, what's old in the Lord?

Because this man's getting up here in years. Then he dies and it's like nothing. And I'm like, no, it's not me. It is, it is your beliefs, it's, it's not mine. So then I knew that wasn't on the coffin.

I knew that this is not, this not only is this, not right, this is bad. This is a bad cult. I grew up in the main sect and then they were, they would hold these revival tours where Billy Paul would be the speaker.

And every minister who left those revivals, they came back and they preached for weeks on end about how he's our time marker. We know that the rapture's about to come because he is our time marker.

And you know, for those who aren't familiar with this, the prophecy was that Los Angeles would sink before Billy Paul, William Brantum's son, became an old man. And you know, whenever I heard this, I'm looking at a man who had gray hair who was in his, what was he, 60, 70's, I don't know.

He was already, yeah, he was already Pat. He was past the age that most people lived whenever the alleged prophecy happened. So he was already, you know, already well beyond an old man. And I've, When we went out to Los Angeles, I paid to go see that building.

It's kind of funny because the tickets for us to fly from Indiana to LA were cheaper than the cost from the LA airport to Uber to that building. This is a crazy world we live in, right?

But anyway, I went to the building and it's really interesting if you study the history of that because you never really think about this, but he's there at May's department store. He's standing in the elite shopping district of LA.

This is where the rich people go to shop. And he's claiming that he's so poor he doesn't have two pennies to scrape together. We didn't know at that time that he had millions of dollars, right?

Back then in the message, I thought this was just a poor man, but what's he doing there? Why is he in the elite district shopping there? Right. And the fact that he had the prophecy and, you know, I've got details of research on that.

It's not the only problem with it, but when we left the message and I realized that all of it was, all of it was false, all of this was fake. The thought hit me, you know, whenever he dies, it's not going to impact them because there are so many other problems with that story that they've shut off in their minds.

They're going to shut him off, too, and that's exactly what happened. I just, I couldn't believe it because our beliefs was so based around that, that it would happen in the spring and God would come back in the spring and it, Billy Paul, it would happen before he was an old man and I just don't know how they excused that away.

I just, I can't get over that one. I just can't get over it. Well, I'm glad that you were able to escape. I'm glad that you were able to find something a healthy church to go to and I'm sorry that you had to go through all of this.

You know, I went through it, too, but I'm sorry for everybody who goes through it because I feel somewhat responsible. My family helped create this mass, but thank you so much for coming on here and sharing your story.

If there's some advice that you could give to somebody who's still in it and questioning, you know, like you and I have the critical mind, what would you say to him? To a person who has a critical mind in this Colton is wrestling with the problems that are in it.

I would say to pray and ask Jesus to show you the way he will, he will lead you in the right path in that path might not be the same. It's different for everyone of us, but when you, I want people to know if something looks off, if you go into someone's house who they say they love Jesus and their Christian, you don't see a picture of Jesus, but Brother Brannum's on every table and on every wall in their house.

Something's not right. I have family, my boys are not Christians, they're not say they don't follow the word. I have You know, nieces and nephews who have married, who have never heard the message.

So the only thing they know about Jesus is what's preached about William Brannum, which makes them even more standoffish. So you need to, it's hard when it comes to family, it's hard when it comes to friends.

You just need to pray and ask God to allow you to get your food in the door and, you know, at family picnics and gatherings and birthdays where you can be a witness. Because you might be the only way they see Jesus is through your life.

And the whole question, well, why does she or he look like this? And these people are wrapped up in William Brannum, you know, if your first church experience is William Brannum, you're not going back.

I mean, I have a niece who's buried to an Air Force guy and he's been going to their church here and there and I'm thinking, how can I tell him? This is bad news, but you need the Lord.

That's what we have to focus on. We need to pray, we need to pray for the children because no child should be raised like this. No, men should grow up in fear with legalistic rules.

I agree. It's kind of ironic because whenever I was growing up, I looked at the Amish religion and the Amish people and I thought, well, they're not a cult because they don't have a central figure.

And in my head, I was smart enough to recognize that. I was smart enough to recognize that if you're following a central figure, that is a human, you're in a cult. And back then, I didn't realize the attributes of a destructive cult and, you know, the Amish is in a much different category in my mind than it was back then.

But even back when I was in the message, I realized that people who surrounded a human being and put him up on a pedestal and said, this is our leader, our precious brother. They all use precious brother. It's weird.

I knew that, but yet I did it with William Branham and I had disconnected it in my head. I look back and I think how did I not recognize that I was doing the same exact thing that I knew was a cult and I had separated the two in my head.

Right. Right. Exactly. Not exactly right, William. Well, this has been fun. Thank you so much for doing this. I'm glad that we connected. I'm glad we finally made it work. It's good to hear from you.

I will say this. Growing up, I almost wish my parents turned Amish because they have such a big community. I thought I'd have people to play with.

I have a nice big circle because they're so big. You know, their families are so big and yeah, no such luck there. Yeah, and I can tell you from experience they have really, really good food.

Yes, they do. Thank you so much for doing this. If you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web, you can find us at www.William-Branum.org.

For more information about William Brannum and the Healing Revivals, you can read Breacher Behind the White Hoods, a critical examination of William Brannum in his message, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.

www.William-Branum.org www.William-Branum.org