Detangling IHOPKC - Crossroads of John Wimber and Bob Jones

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brannem Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannem Historical Research at William-Branem.org and with me I have my co-host and friend, Brantley Smith, former member of the International House of Prayer. And together we're here detangling IHOPKC and the new Apostolic Reformation. I just love that word detangling. It's not a word that I use very often and when you mentioned it and you know spun off this series it's perfect man. We're detangling this mess and what I have learned is

from this mess there are several other messes that have happened that are connected to it both forward in history and backward in history and now I'm trying to detangle some of those so I can better understand what is this mess called International House of Prayer. I think that's what's been so fun about it is our world's coming together and you've done a whole lot of past research with Brannem and stuff of the past and I've been knee deep and all the current stuff that's been popping off and trying to work in advocacy spaces and stuff

and so the everywhere you look man it's like every door you open there's a mess somewhere and it seems like it ties back to if it's not Brannem it's Brannem adjacent or somebody who was around Brannem or these guys man it's just deep it's deep it is deep and the part that's very difficult for me I see the scoundrels and there's a lot of scoundrels mixed in this mess are these really good people who have good hearts and they really they're there because they want to get closer to God a lot of them and they get caught up into it

don't realize it so it's also hard to detangle from me trying to understand which people had bad intent and which people joined into it and then got so wrapped up that they transitioned into having bad intent versus some people who just simply were not you know they were good people there are a lot of good people yeah it's it never gets easier it seems to detangle that you you have the ones like Mike and Paul Kane and Bob that we now know are Predators which is like a totally different category And some of these people, I think some,

some of these leaders may have been misguided influenced by other leaders made mistakes. We've seen it in the IHOP circles all year in that the advocacy group is what they call themselves, the AG, who's the group of former leaders that brought the allegations against Mike to IHOP leadership, current IHOP leadership.

All those guys were a part of the system for decades. Alan Hood was the assistant associate director for nearly 20 years, ran the Bible college and Dwayne Roberts was there for decades, he's different leaders.

And I think most of those guys are trying to do the best they can. I think they're kind of like us, but had a little bit more power in these circles and probably responsible, you know, need to take responsibility for harm and stuff that was committed.

But I don't think that they are the level that Brannum and Bickle and all these guys are on. I know you've ventured recently into the whimber territory and people have opinions about that. That was a can of worms.

And I think in Wimbers, Wimbers a tough character because Wimber was, I think, and I'm not well educated,

I'm not a Wimber expert by any means, but I hear stories from my friends, I heard stories about him at IHOP and Wimber was very revolutionary specifically in helping eliminate that clergy laity divide that existed.

And I think that gave a whole lot of hope for people that being a Christian and as Wimber said, doing the stuff wasn't just for the pastors and the preachers and the people in the pulpit, which was what we saw with the healing revivals and stuff, right?

You get the guy running around and, you know, doing a side show thing. And with Wimber, he was trying to get the people involved and I think he had a total different kind of essence about him.

And he made some mistakes in what I respect about Wimber and specifically like one of the things that come to my mind is platforming the profits, you know, and Mike and the tours that happened in the UK and all that kind of stuff.

But then multiple times in Wimber's life, you see Wimber renounce and apologize for that stuff and condemn it. Even, you know, this past week, I learned that he wrote a letter in response to see Peter Wagner and the NAR and how, you know, the strong feelings he had about that, even though that his some of his ideology has contributed as some of his theological influences probably contributed to the NAR circles.

It seems like from at this point in time, it seems like John was a good guy and people have fond memories of him and I've never had anybody have anything bad to say. except about these public mistakes and yeah and I'm sure we'll talk about him a little bit later too if with our topic we're going to be talking about today so yeah I'm hoping we actually eventually get to do a whole episode because I'm fascinated by the whole whimper thing and you know I want to give a little bit of grace to the people who are like you mentioned the advocacy group there's a lot

of people who I myself was in similar situations I probably you know I wasn't so highly influential as they may have been but when you leave there's there's this point in time in which you're trying to detangle what happened to you and there are different categories of people some people were connected to the upper tiers of a cult and that's just the way a cult hierarchy works I was in the upper tiers and then they're the rank rank and fall members right so even though I wasn't an influencer I had the potential to be one of those so I understand a little bit of

where they're coming from and when I first left there's this there's a problem that exists when you're in a cult they teach you a very black or white right or wrong us or the world us versus them mentality and there's no there's no gray areas and there's no room for gray areas and this is especially the case when there's a conflict of opinion especially if it's a doctrinal opinion and that's why that's one of the main reasons why my website and the podcast I sort of I try as much as possible to separate the doctrine from the history although there are cases where you have

to have there's a historical intersection where a doctrine makes a historical change and so for me that's my fascination with Wemba it's not that you know I'm not anti-Wemba right he's probably like you said he's probably a great guy he's a musician so I would have connected with him immediately right I've got nothing for him or against him is what I'm trying to say but whenever I left the brand I'm called I became hypersensitive to people who were against we called it Wemba had a different word for but we called it cold formal religion which meant basically in Brannum's

fake Kentucky hillbilly way of saying it he was saying that you're not doing the stuff he the platform was almost the same we want to have signs and wonders and miracles and whenever you look at it from that aspect it it wasn't a clone but there were many similarities is what I'm trying to say and it's in the variance between the similarities and what other Christians believe and I realize the other Christians you know you can get out to extremes the other direction too but it's in that that variance where the intersection and history is and that's why

That's really why I did it. Honestly, my intent was just to do one video and move on. And one research page that is in the process of being developed. But I got so many emails and a phone call, I got like one guy that texted me, bombarded me with text until I was like ready to just block him from the phone.

Because there's so much misunderstanding of the intersection point in history. So I realized I didn't communicate the page, I didn't express the thought well. So I realized I've got to build it out further and that led to some more research.

But all this to say, whenever you leave a cult, there is that strong opposition to anybody who doesn't share the same opinions on you. And if that opinion lies in doctrine, if you're in a cult, then it's good versus evil.

And so incidentally, I've become the bad guy and this is one of, I don't know how many hundreds of different cults I've got on my website now. It happens almost every single time I publish a cult leader, which that was probably the most surprising thing to me because I didn't, based off of everything that I had read of November, I didn't picture it to be in that level of a personality group.

And that's really what surprised me and made me go further. But I believe that there are a lot of people who, once they get past the point where they're in the black or white realm, I believe many of those people will help me flesh out the details in that page.

But I can't do it while they're wrapped up in it so tightly, if you know what I mean. Yeah. I think the cult word definitely gets scary for people. And I think I understand where you're coming from.

I don't know if everybody else did with the cult of personality. I think the cult of like I hop and randomism is very different because of the abuse and stuff that went on. And we don't know that necessarily about the vineyard, but that there's just an allegiance to a figurehead, rightly or wrongly, it's not really, it's kind of neutral.

And it's in my mind. It's like the cult of Justin Bieber, right? It doesn't have to be necessarily a destructive cult. It's not a Jim Jones group. And I think. Swifty. Yes, Swifty. Well, that may be destructive, honestly.

No. We won't go there. Oh, I don't know about her. But yeah, you're right. Maybe that's the hang up for me. That's not a dirty word. You've got the cult following of Jesus Christ in the early days.

That was, I think I had a conversation recently, which I shared with you, but the word is basically the same as culture and men create cultures. And that's really where it came from. People like Jim Jones, who was connected to Brannum, created this negative view of the word that Colt is a dangerous thing, but that's just the extremist version of a cult.

Yeah, for sure. And I think that the other piece of context that I just want to verbalize just so people know that aware of it is I realize the Wimbers stuff touches in a sensitive spot because there's active stuff going on in those circles right now with Wimbers old church, the what's now known as dwelling place Anaheim was old vineyard Anaheim. I'm not an expert on the timeline or the narrative there, but the leader came in and pretty much removed them from the vineyard. And I reckon took all the assets with them, including a lot of Wimbers' IP,

if you will, a lot of his recordings and tapes and things like that that they refused to release to the family. And there's also been allegations of spiritual abuse from that leader. And there's recordings all over Twitter that you can hear the guy Alan Scott of meetings, because I guess the guy recorded all of his meetings and never guessed that that would come back to bite him in the butt, but says some very abusive and harmful things to people, to his staff and to different volunteers and stuff. And I want to be sensitive to that. And even with my own

experience, and I really don't like deep down I don't think Wimber we're going to find out someday that Wimber was a bad guy, but I will say, you know, two years ago, I was sitting having a conversation with a friend and I never thought Mike would be a bad guy. I didn't.

I could see, I could call IHOP a cult at that point and I could see the harm that was happening to my friends' lives as they were a part of it and after they left. And it took, you know, the whole world blowing up this past October and the allegations going public for me to be able to go, my gosh, Mike was an awful guy. And so, you know, all of us are on journeys of detangling in it's a process. I mean, you, if you think of, I don't know if you ever had like a big ball of yarn

or something that's all in knots and you're trying to get it apart, one of the most frustrating things, the worst or little gold chain necklaces. I don't know if you've ever got one of those. And they get in those knots, man, it's so hard to get them apart. And as you pull one piece loose and another thing comes loose and it's easier to see how this thing connects to this part and that you can pull it through here. And as you're doing that work, I think, you know, some of these things become clearer. And I think you hit on about gray stuff. I think losing our boxes

of things have to be either good or bad, but they can't be both. And I think a lot of that exists in these spaces. I think there's a lot. I mean, I'm sure we could do a whole episode. And we would probably love talking about the music of these movements and stuff, but the vineyard stuff, the vineyard had huge influence with their music. And there's one of their songs that I got in my current rotation on Sundays. If you don't know, I've lead worship at a church on Sundays. But that song is just scripture.

is what it is. It's straight. It's the Lord's gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love. And so it's not anything, you know, super ethereal. And some of that stuff's just so there was probably some bad stuff they put out, but there's also some good stuff. And it is what it is. It's it's it's body of work. And it had its pros, it's had its cons. And we get to figure out what we do with it, you know?

Well, just to give you some comfort, even if I were to and I don't I'm like you, I don't think that we're going to find any what people what people are afraid of is they think that I'm going to be publishing dirt on Wembre. I don't think I'll ever find anything like their thinking that I'm I'm headed. There he appears to be a good guy. I just can't say that he is or isn't. I don't know him. But even if I were to find this and you were to not believe me, I'm the platform that I've created isn't one where everybody has

to share my opinion. Charles and I disagree on several things. And we did, I don't know how many podcasts we've done so far. But I like I like the healthy discussion. In fact, if you I would actually appreciate it if you had a hard core opinion so you could convince me of it. But because neither one of us really have any hard I've got no agenda opinion. So I don't think we'll ever but heads over it is the funny part. But all of that said, you know, it's the purpose is to learn and we learn from each other where

it where it gets really problematic. And you've you've probably seen it. I've I don't pay attention to a lot of it. I really just simply don't have time. But somebody shared some statements and podcasts and some of the comments. But when it turns to insulting and you know, denigrating like like denigrating my research and things like that. That's not the way to convince me that your opinion is right. Your opinion may be right. But that's not helpful. That doesn't really doesn't do anything for me. Well, instead that matches the pattern of what happens with a destructive cult. And I will use the word destructive

there. Not saying they are. But that's the pattern that I see every time I publish. Yeah, every time I publish critical information, the insults start flying. And then I realize, okay, there's something wrong here. So eventually, like I said, the page will be fleshed out further. I have had several people review the content that's there. And I think I did have one. I had one reference that was incorrect. I put I paced it the wrong one. But other than that, the page has been reviewed. There is the matter of difference of opinion and theology.

And I think that's where most of the issue lies. And even that will probably be fleshed out because my goal honestly isn't to have theology in it. I just need the historical intersection point of how the theology transitioned. And that's really that's the purpose of the page.

news. I received communication back from Regent and I'm going to get to look at the Wimber special collection. So I have my schedule a day. So I'm excited to look at that because Regent has like 900 and some documents, I think on Wimber. But a lot of them are personal correspondence letters and stuff that he wrote between leaders. Like I don't know if you're familiar with Randy Clark. He was kind of in the Toronto stuff and such. And there's letters between them and people in Kansas City. And so I think it I think it'll be interesting

just to be able to get a personal glimpse into the conversations he was having with these other leaders to be good. Yeah, Charles and I just did a full podcast episode on deliverance training and somebody asked somebody asked what it was. I got my hands on the instruction manual of how to train people to become Hogwarts wizards. And honestly, you know, we skim some of the main, some of the weird topics. But if you read through this, this is, I have read Harry Potter. I've read, you know, Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, this kind of stuff.

This is on par with that. And it's not. Well, I think what if people were to see this and the miss Oh, that's from Randy Clark. That's from Randy Clark. Yeah. If people were to see this Randy Clark ministry training manual, it would demystify all of these people with the so-called title of deliverance ministers. And I got backlash from it. You're against deliverance, you're against exorcisms and this kind of, I don't know what all they said, but it's not that.

But when I see something like this that is pure and utter nonsense, I'm going to call it out because this is pure and utter nonsense. Okay, let's take a look at that. We had stuff like that. We had a, they turned IHOPU during the IHOPU student awakening into a deliverance model where it was an acronym. I think it was interview was the first one. I can't remember all the other ones, but it was, and you walk it out. That was the you is now you have to walk out your deliverance, you know, in faith. I think I held up. We had a copy of the IHOP version too. So I

think I used it in Charles and I published that a couple weeks back. It's the Lord's Genrester's exposed. But anyway, talking about Wimber. So unfortunately, even with all the chaos of the Wimber controversy that's happening right now, there is another intersection point that we're getting into.

And this one's interesting. It's, I'll preface by, there's no way I believe that Wimber is involved or even similar to this, but he was contacted because of the situation, which we'll get into that. But we're going to try to detangle Bob Jones. And I think this is going to turn into a recurring theme because Bob Jones appears to be this black box that nobody has found.

where he came from, how he emerged. All of the details that created the Bob Jones that was able to connect to Mike Bickle, the mystery that's there fascinates me because I have seen other sinister characters and you can find them on my research page.

Whenever somebody just comes out of the blue like that and suddenly they've gotten power, it's because that there are connections that aren't religious that make that power. And I wanna find what those are.

Hopefully some people will come forward and give me some bread crumbs so I can follow the clues. I hope so too. And that's what makes me nervous and jumping into some of this stuff too, is I think we talked about this last time is there's just not a whole lot of published information on these guys.

And so I'm sure if you're listening to this two, three years from now you probably know a lot more and path of stuff we say is probably gonna be inaccurate but we gotta start somewhere with these conversations and figuring it out.

And so if any of you all have any information on these guys as we're talking about please share links and whatever, either email us or put it in YouTube comments, something like that to help us paint a picture.

I don't know if you heard about it or not. There was a former leader from Metro which was the church that predated IHOP who released a book this past week that detailed some of his interactions with these profits.

And it's the first thing that I've seen that's come from a semi-critical perspective, I think in my opinion he was probably a little too gracious to him in some areas and came just some conclusions that I would probably differ on.

But here in those anecdotal stories were very interesting and honestly brought up some possible contradictions and some storylines as well like with the prophetic history and stuff as I was looking through some of the resources today from Mike's telling of the prophetic history and comparing it to what this gentleman's name's Bob Scott and the book called Some Set It Blunder or it's what it's called.

There's some similar dates of Bob almost having a near death experience I think in 70 that Mike tells about.

It just seems bizarre, just even describe it. Talks about him. I'm scared to say it because of the YouTube sensors but he said he had blood coming out of his mouth like a geyser I think is the way that he described it had this near death kind of experience.

But then Bob Scott talks about in 76, Bob Jones working on a cabin that him and his wife were trying to build in the Ozarks and he gets struck by lightning. And that's whenever Bob Scott says that Bob.

his special unique abilities, but, you know, a lot of that's, I think he called it, acquires a Svotsandrome is what Bob called it, which I would beg to differ, but, yeah.

Well, for me, I read, I read many of the things that are published, both critical and non-critical of Bob and what I was looking for specifically were the early years before he became a minister.

I want to know about that. And you just simply don't find it. The only thing you find are Bob Jones's own words, which may or may not be trustworthy. I usually take the approach that they're usually not with these guys, but he's talking about Barroom Brawls and alcohol and basically he's describing the bar scene and the thing that caught my eye was really this because when I discovered that Brannum and his father were working with the liquor ring that were supplying the Chicago mob, I started noticing this pattern of many people after 1933 that were getting into the revival scene

to hide from their criminal past as mob, as I used the word mobsters, but basically they were just transporting liquor and this kind of thing. Yeah. And the names are just astounding. Like, you've got Kenneth Hagen's brother claim that he was running with Bonnie and Clyde. I mean, I've got newspaper. I've got a page on my website. You can go look him up, but he's naming big time gangsters. He's not naming the small ones. And he was a converted gangster. And Brannum mentions that he had converted gangsters in his following him around in his meetings. And you know, once you

really take a step back, I watch this documentary, these people were like the Tom Cruise of their hero. When they were able to get you alcohol, when you couldn't buy alcohol, they were heroes, man, to the people who wanted alcohol. But when prohibition ended and you could just go by liquor in the store, nobody cared about these guys. There were nothing more, but petty criminals, right?

So they had to go into hiding and I was watching a documentary on all the various ways that they hid. And it's just, it's fascinating. The revival scene is the one that's most fascinating because they're hiding in plain sight. And I don't think the documentary covered that a whole lot.

But I can look back through some of the characters that have identified in my research. There is a, there is this weird connection. What I don't know is Bob in the connection. I don't know. There's no way to know. But here he is. When he, like you mentioned, when he's talking about his supernatural experiences, there's so many that match the pattern of what Brannum used for his own stage persona. So I'm wondering, were they connected or did he just copy it? What's the connection there? Right, right. And the stories that we were told very similar things, if memory

serves me right. And I think Bob Scott was saying similar stuff in his book. of that, that Bob was a bootleger running around and supposedly had some kind of breakdown, a nervous breakdown. I think's what they called it and where he encountered God with air quotes. And ended up joining the Marine Corps is what the story is, but I never heard the Marine Corps part talked about at IHOP. I mean, you see Bob here, Bob speak. And Marine is not the first thing that comes to mind. No offense to our people who protect our country on a day and day out basis. But I noticed that. That's one of the first

thing I noticed. I watched the videos and I heard, you know, I heard the Marine story. I know Marines. There's a way, after you're a Marine, there's a way that you hold yourself, conduct yourself. You are trained to be a Marine. Yeah, I do not see it, man. You can tell I work to pass through to the Marines and then nothing like that, nothing like that. There's no, maybe he was a Marine dishwasher and he had some, I don't know, but even that, though, you got to go through the training and you hold yourself differently than he did. Have

you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transition 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. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen McCummery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book. You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute

button at the top. And as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching. On behalf of William-Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. People have some very interesting descriptors. I mean, he was an Arkansas hillbilly. I mean, that's that two Bob was. And I say that being somebody who grew up in Appalachia, myself and the mountains. And I'm probably a hillbilly too.

And so you get me around the right people. And I start breaking into the country accent as well. But it doesn't give the impression of well-educated. And what have pieced together after that is that Bob, he moved to Kansas City. I guess after he left the military, he's a story that's told.

And kind of bounced around churches in the area after his lightning strike or whatever origin story we're going to find out someday to be true is, or if we ever do, is that's whenever his special giftings started appearing to where he started getting these revelations and dreams and all this kind of stuff.

And from what I've seen is that he ran around all these churches in Kansas City and they thought he was crazy and ran him off. And somehow he shows up like store step and is utilized, I guess we'll say.

Yeah, and that whole story too, like if you take a step back, if you were never in this and you just critically examine the series of events that has given in this history, it's not a series of events that's plausible.

Like, you know, some guys not just gonna come out on the street, come out of the street and meet you in an office and oh my gosh, you're the prophet that's gonna start our movements and you talk like a hillbilly, you know, that's just not the way things happen.

There was a connection there prior to that. No one will learn what that is as well. My suspicion is, and the way that I work is, I find something that has happened, which I call the fruit of the ministry or whatever, and then I trace it backwards in time, but usually you go back so far in these guys, almost every one of them, they lie about their past so that you can't go back to the origin and you have to detangle their web of connections and understand the origin.

The fact that he was connected to Paul Cain likely tells me that there must have been some sort of a collaboration with those two figures probably before they met Mike Bickle. That's my hunch, and so I work on the hunch and a lot of times the hunch comes out to be incorrect.

So I'll preface, if you're listening to the podcast, don't put me on that, that may not be what happened, but that's the working hunch theory that I'm heading towards. It's a very interesting connection because, especially with the stuff that we've learned in the past year, because we find out whenever Mike leaves St. Louis with what we know now was, whenever he was abusing Tammy Woods, who was a minor, who was our babysitter, and then all of a sudden, after that's gone on for a couple of years of Mike abusing this girl, now all of a sudden,

he's getting a prophetic word to move to Kansas City. So it almost makes me wonder, and all that's conjecture is, was Mike about to get caught at that time and realized he had to cut his losses and run.

But the figure that stepped in there that's connected to that story, and I'd love to chat about the whole Bob Jones meeting, about the lore of meeting Bob Jones, whether it's true or not, I don't know, but the figure Augustine Alcala, which I hadn't no idea was, he was a child preacher at one point, which I'm sure we could dig into him at some point.

But the story goes, is that Augustine gave Mike this word and told him four things in those four things. things I'm trying to remember exactly what all they were, but it was about that it would be a young adult movement in Kansas City, and they talked about a false profit being in the midst, and told him that a great controversy would rise against him.

And that's the one that makes my red flags go off, like right away, now that we know what we know now and know that Mike was abusing Tammy,

is what kind of controversy was he trying to get ahead of? And so, and I realized that that's the pattern that a lot of these guys work off of is, you know, if we prophesy it now, and it doesn't come out till 2023, you know, we'll get to spew all the black course nonsense and stuff that Mike did back in October, but then what ends up happening, after Mike gets that word in saying Lewis Loan behold, a little bit after showing up in Kansas City, Bob walks into his office, and he always told it in such a,

he always told it in such a, Mike would always tell these stories in ways that made it very humanizing, I guess, in the sense that Mike betrayed himself in the story of meeting Bob, of thinking Bob was insane.

He was like, who is this crazy guy walking into my office and he would talk about the big winter coat that he had on in the middle of April, something like that, and he had a big old winter jacket on, and he would tell the story about Bob looked at him and told him, you know, those four things again, Bob looked at him and told him those same four things, and he expounded on some, and about how it was going to be a youth movement, told Mike he was going to be a youth pastor, which is odd things to tell a predator,

if you're actually communicating with God that God's telling you that this predator is a youth pastor, but that's a conversation, I guess, for a different day, but he gives this weird cryptic kind of message to Mike of like, on the first day of spring with the snow melt, you'll set it at the communion table and accept me or accept me as your own, something along those lines, and it's this whole lore that's established, and it brings in these other players, and lo and behold, they end up at Mike's house, I guess, one night, and art cats, I think,

was one of the figures that's mentioned in the story, and art wasn't talked a whole lot about when I was at IHOP, except he had some books that were talked about some, and I'm not sure how art connects to the larger movement.

I think he might have been Jewish, maybe, or it was, but they're sitting around the table, and I guess Bob tells Mike a secret that only he could have known, which had to do something with a Neil Diamond song that about taking care of his brother that Mike had told his dad on his deathbed, and nobody else knew about it, about him being his brother's keeper, making sure he took care of Pat after his dad Bob died, and so he would blow it up as this big story, his wife didn't even know about it, nobody else knew.

and Bob told me the secrets in my heart, and then all of a sudden, Bob's like, well, why are we here, gentlemen? And they look outside and the snow's melting. It's the first day of spring, and they're accepting him.

And it's like this whole crazy story, but without like those, as I was looking back at it today, I think about those sensational aspects. And it's those big, a calm fishing stories. Exaggerated stories, those big fishing stories that make, that make it more believable at times, whenever you're hearing that and you're in those environments.

It makes you have those thoughts of nobody could have made this happen, this had to be God.

And then you find out they've been fudging stuff and it slowly starts pulling at the threads. I'll probably get emails about this comment I'm about to make you don't believe in modern day prophets and all this stuff, but there's a problem.

And here in Indiana, in my research, I discovered this spiritualist camp, and it was called Camp Chesterfield. It's one of the most, one of the three largest, I think, in the nation back in the day.

And I found Brannum and his mentor had actually been there. It's kind of a funny story. But everything that they did was fake, but all the people believed it. And when you had two or three spiritualists who were claiming to do a thing, and then one of the other ones can say yes, and I was there, I watched it.

When they're affirming each other, the audience sees it as more plausible. And so they convinced the masses that they, they had like a floating piano that would play itself and it was on string, a weird kind of stuff, right?

So Brannum went there. I've got evidence that he was there. And then I started noticing the patterns with him and some of the other CD characters. I can't say that they're all had ill intent, but some of them I can definitely say did.

Those people would affirm each other's prophecies and they would say things like that. And he didn't even know what I said on my deathbed to my mother, whatever on my mother's deathbed to me.

They can make up whatever they want as a stage act. And if they're affirming each other, the people believe it. But that's not enough really for me to draw the line between, okay, these guys are frauds.

Where I do is whenever I see those same people who are affirming each other with specific granular details. But then they get up and they prophesy with something so generic that it's almost like, you've probably seen these comedy movies, where some guy is given this generic prophecy that really means anything.

And the guy is, the people who are acting in the show, show they keep stumbling upon situations and they say, is this it? Is this it? And that's not it. And I go to the next one.

John, I really feel like the Lord's taking you to new places. Exactly. Or you're, you're going to me a false profit. You're in a movement filled with profits. Of course, you're going to be the one that the one that gets me is one day the world will come against us. You just watch. Well, and one day they're there's going to be a mass leaving people are going to leave this thing. They love that one because that corals the people.

So you've got these men who are affirming each other as profits. And they're giving granular detail profits, prophecies to each other, but then generic ones to the people. And then you realize that is a stage act. When I saw this was going on with Bob Jones, Paul Kay and Mike Bickel. And then I realized, wait a minute, the Kansas City profits. This is a group of men who are affirming each other. And then they're giving generic prophecies.

Yeah, it's it's real interesting. We've had one guy in the community who's done a lot of work in highlighting the revisions that happen over the years. Oh, yeah. And showing how those prophecies evolve. One of the big ones in which this one's not connected to Bob a whole lot, but is the blueprint prophecy is one of the ones that's talked about. And from best, we can tell it's had at least three iterations. And we don't even know if the first iteration we had was actually the original iteration that the store, the Lord goes, it was

some kind of random letter meld to Mike from some guy as a prophetic word. And then that was used in a sense to try to do a hostile takeover in of Kansas City churches is what ended up happening with that. And it just kind of evolves over time.

And we were still talking about it at the, I'm trying to think what it was, probably the 10 year anniversary, I think is probably the first time I heard about it in 2009. When I was at I hop and so I remember us going around, like running around because I think at that point, they handed out a version of the prophecy because Mike printed out everything on notes. And they handed out a version of it, but like our leader friends that we knew would be like, yeah, that's not the full thing like Mike has the full thing he's not sharing the

full thing. And they would they would get little like teasers, I guess from Mike or something or for somebody close to Mike, you know, it kind of turned into like this gossip thing of like oh, there's this part of the prophecy, it might lift out.

That's going to be really big when that happens kind of stuff. And it's just really interesting how that stuff, how that stuff evolves. But I'm hung up on reading because I read that book this week. But one of the one of those stories that got passed around a lot and this isn't connected to Bob at all.

But you know, my enjoy this I will is we got told the story about this island of gold in this leader who is kind of a I would say he was a senior but he was a director of a ministry at IHOP.

He would tell us a story about this island of gold that Mike had and how it was gonna fund the prayer movement. And there was billions of dollars of gold on this island, this person kind of helped him connect to it.

And whenever I read that book this week, I found out it was a Ponzi scheme and Mike lost tons of money and donors had to come in and pretty much bail out the debt is what it was.

And I was like, I feel so vindicated. I got so excited about that island of gold. And then to find out that it was a Ponzi scheme that Mike fell for, fell really good.

And there's so many, if you go back to my website and you see all the trails of research, there's so many instances of that. Charles Fox Parham, the founder of Pentecostalism, he got duped into thinking that this elixir could turn ordinary rocks into gold and he was a stakeholder.

He was like going to sell this to the world, right? And this is the guy that literally popularized speaking in tongues. So it's odd that the people who are, there's a lot of controversy about Parham too.

I put him in the category as somebody who is a fraudster and I know I'll get backlash for that, but have you seen this paper of the, I don't know what you call it, I guess you call it writing in tongues.

The speaking in tongues before that emerged, there was writing in tongues. And I swear, if you look at this thing, it's gibberish. The literal gibberish, they said it was Chinese, but I know I've got a Chinese type set.

I know that that's not Chinese. One little corner of it kind of looks like a tick-tock toe game, man. That's where that came from in your flying pyramid episode. That's where that came from now.

Actually, in the flying pyramid episode, that was an actual perfectly drawn replica of it. I actually superimposed it and I drew the little lines. What you saw in that cartoon was what they were claiming was speaking in tongues, writing in tongues.

Writing in tongues, that's great, that's great. So we've had way too much fun. I don't think we've even got to the subject matter yet. We're talking about Bob Jones and the intersection point between him and Wimber, which is, for me, even that's fascinating and I don't yet have that on the website, I'm still, I wanna flesh all of the details of that so that I better understand it before I do it.

But maybe you can summarize it a little bit. We've already said that it's known that Bob and Paul and Mike and these guys are predators, but Wimber was actually involved in Bob Jones's discipline.

So this was still whenever they were a part of the vineyard and he had platform them Wimber had. And so he actually came out and this is one of the reasons to think why Wimber is revered by a lot of people who are trying to stay in the charismatic movement and find life in the charismatic movement is...

is he probably responded really well. And even whenever we were looking at the mic stuff back in October, the way that Wimber responded, we were looking at that and going, IHOP, can't you respond this way?

Like Wimber showed you how? Like can't you be this clear about it? And it's fun. I pulled up the document in front of me, just scrolling through it. But what's fun about it is Wimber actually lays out a full timeline, like a transparent timeline to people, as how this information came to light about Bob's abuse.

What the abuse was, I wouldn't say it's alleged, I guess at this point, because it was confirmed, but is that he had abused two women. And one of them was a minor. It was a mother and a daughter.

If I remember the story right, and it's unclear whether Wimber knew that one of the women were a minor. And so because that's not addressed in his statement, and we know how those circles of information go and how they protect one another.

And it seems to be that Bob admitted the stuff to Paul Cain first of all people. And then he went from Paul to Mike to Mike to Wimber, and all that's laid out. But Wimber comes firmly against Bob for the abuse and lays out a plan for the people.

And lays out, I mean, it's a bullet-pointed document of the public statements of the restraints that are going to be placed on Bob. And so I think it was a very good document, but I think, which you can correct me if you know, I don't feel like that.

I don't think that Bob fully submitted himself to everything that happened there. And even whenever I was at IHOT, Bob was very distanced from. Like we still talked about Bob in the prophetic history, didn't talk about Paul a ton.

And I think that was probably because Paul was running around the base, and we didn't know it. But Bob was spoken of, and he had gone to Morningstar of all places, and that's kind of where he was based out of at that point.

But all of that was very hush, hush, his abuse that he had committed. And that's the big public one that we know about. And as we have learned with these characters, it's usually not just a one-time situation at all.

Yeah. And I stick with mostly the critical, because I think I've mentioned this to you. I look at the world as this balance scale, and a lot of the cults have so heavily weighted depositive and hid the negative that people don't really see it.

So I try to balance the scale. And I'm publishing a lot of critical information that they just simply don't publish. But it... this particular case, I give some positive on Wemba because the transparency, assuming that he gave all of the details, which I've got really no reason to believe he didn't, it was a very transparent way of, you know, issuing the discipline, and that's the way it should be. If you have a predator in your midst, you should be transparent about it. So I would commend them for that. There is this rural, this real gray area where these guys all have

dirt on each other. And I've seen it in weird situations in the Brannum cult and some of the spin-offs where a person will do this sort of thing because they're about to be exposed themselves, because somebody else has dirt on them. I don't see any dirt yet on Wemba, so I can't say that that's the case with him. If it were Paul Cain doing it, absolutely, man. That was a mess, but you know what I'm saying? So in this particular case, Wemba's hands look really clean and really transparent, which that's the way if I hop

had been transparent, I don't think it would have developed into the mess that it became. Right. I agree 100%. It was what was really interesting too, that I've had friends pull out in conversations as we've discussed these documents before that where Wemba released this stuff is the pastoral care that was even deployed afterwards. Like that's just stuff you don't see, that their elders were going to home groups, to small groups, to make sure that people were okay because they realized that even though it was Bob abusing someone else, that that was going to have impacts on the rest of the community just based on Bob's position

and power. And I think that that's something that a lot of people could learn from. I did appreciate too that Wemba made it very clear when he addressed him in Kansas City about it was that his goal was not the restoration of Bob's ministry, but he made it clear that the restoration was his walk with Christ and that he had no big intentions for that, which is very different than what we hear from Rick Joyner. Restoration Rick from other parties that be, you know, and that's the thing. I also, I understand humans have human problems and many of those problems

are psychological problems, you have mental health issues. Even the situation with Bob Jones, what he did was absolutely horrific and it's so bad that if I say it, YouTube will censor this video so I can't even say what he did, but the information's out there, you can go see it.

But even that, you know, I don't understand his psyche, I don't know what problems he had, I don't know his past because his past is a black box. He may have had some issues that caused it and if we're in Christianity God can forgive you of this. And there is that grace, but he doesn't forgive you to put you in a position where you can do it again. And more than that, think of the victims. If a victim were to see somebody restored into that position, they're never going to trust them. And they're going to tell everybody,

you know, don't trust this guy. This guy did this thing to me. And it happens all the time. So why are they restoring the people in these positions? And I've seen, I'm not going to name names, but I've seen some of the current issues. And one situation was, well, it was just a text message, well, no, man, that's how it begins, just because you got caught in the beginning. No, that's not the way this works. So this is not a person who's fit for ministry. Yeah, all of those situations, it's not that they just sexually abuse one day. It's been big conversations we've been having in

that advocacy space is because we're recording this on September 18th is what today is. And last week, it was announced that they were doing an investigation in the IHOP now. And some of the pain points for us is that they were, they've specifically focused on sexual abuse, which gives a great outlet for those who have been sexually abused to be able to tell their stories and tell what happened to them and to have it recorded and documented. And then a published report happened that exposes what these leaders did, what these leaders covered up. But sexual

abuse is what happens down the line. Almost all of it, it seems, starts with spiritual abuse, even in the situation that you're referencing with the texts that were published. You see, it starts out with a prophetic word of, I felt like the Lord was saying this about you.

And I think that, you know, we need to be very weary of the power that we allow people to have in our lives. And I think that's one of the big, you know, post cult conversations. And in one of our tendencies, like even I'm speaking for myself, after I lift IHOP is to find another figurehead to latch to. I need somebody else to tell me what to do. I need somebody else to tell me how to live my life. What's my purpose now? I need somebody to tell me these things. And then you have somebody like Bob in his situation from what's been told to me and the abuse of the mom

and the daughter. It was a situation where he was prophesying over them. It wasn't like they got a hotel room to shack up with two women or anything like that at all. Like he brings these vulnerable women into a room and prophesies over them. And the sexually abuses them. Like, and does it under the mystique of ministry? That's appalling. And those are the things that I think need more clarity and more articulation.

in the public square is around these things of spiritual abuse. And it's so hard because spiritual abuse isn't a crime. It's not something you can be convicted of. It's not even, I think it's probably hard to like have a civil suit of some of those abusive things.

And so it's such a great area, but we see the pattern happen time and time again. You know, you hear the language of grooming and then that's how it starts to start to that spiritual abuse.

It can either be a thing of power over someone. And it also happens to where they tear people down over time. And that opens them up to being abused. And it's just, it's all sickening.

And I think so many times it feels dystopian that we're even like having to have these conversations, you know, you would think about a Christian religion, man. It's not that what world is this the subject matter for a Christian religion?

For me, it's, you know, it's deeper than that. One of the problems is because what happened at IHOP was so bad and I'm not railing on the guy with a text messages, it's just, it happens to be that that's the best example.

So here's this example that seems trivial because it wasn't this explosive horrendous event, right? But the similarities between the two is that it is abuse of power. And if people could realize that it doesn't, although it's bad, it doesn't matter if it's a, you know, a sexual issue or if it's a spiritual abuse or emotional abuse, that kind of thing.

If you understand that the framework that enables that are enabling people to have abuse of power, if you can understand that that framework exists and they're feeding on it and they're abusing that power, it doesn't matter if it's, you know, somebody could just go have a casual conversation and it didn't go anywhere, but if they're abusing their power when they do it, that's not a person who should be in leadership.

And that's a lot of what I hear from my friend who have been Vineyard adjacent that was very different with Wimber is that Wimber was very mindful. And I think while you have a lot of people who have a lot of affection for Wimber is that Wimber was very mindful of those impacts on people.

Whenever they would train people, regardless of how you feel about prophecy and such, but whenever he would train people to do ministry times and prophecy, a big part of that process was consent before it happened.

And so he would get them to ask them, is it okay that I pray for you? Is it okay that I prophesy over you? And they trained people that they could say no if they didn't wanna be.

And that levels that playing field and depending on where you follow the opinion on that, that might be trying to fix a broken thing. to begin with, but I appreciate Wimbler's care for that kind of stuff, and I'm sure those corrections and things happen from him seeing what these hoodlums were doing. Bob and Paul and all these guys. I hope that he didn't know about Mike, and I hope that he didn't know about some of these things, but after a while, man, it's just you see so many cover for others, and it makes you lose hope is what it makes you do, and it makes it hard to

hope again. I'm hard to have faith in leaders, but we're all on the journey, you know, all on the journey, all detangling, trying to figure it out, and just going to be kind to ourselves.

Yeah, and it is a mess to detangle, you know, it's that's why I say, you know, I've got nothing against Wimbler or, you know, pro or con. In fact, there's a lot of people on my website who did some very, very bad things that the things that they did were bad, but the human, I separate the human from the thing. It's not, it's a human problem, and, you know, there are people who could find things about me that they don't like, and if you talk through them, you know, if you have a difference of opinion, you talk through it a lot of times, you can come to an understanding,

and I think that's the of all of the things that I've gotten right, and I've got a lot of things wrong. One of the things I've gotten right is I enjoy bringing people on with differences of opinion because you can learn from everyone, and if you don't bring them in with an insulting tone and try to scorn them because their opinion is different from yours, well then both people can learn something, and everybody can grow and become better. So hopefully that's what this show is doing for other people, and I'm trying to get there. Hopefully you feel the same. Yeah, I mean,

we're all in process, and we all, you know, it doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen overnight to where you can have conversations with people you disagree with. I think it takes time, but it's worth doing. Like that's been, that's been one of the most helpful things in my journey, is talking to people who don't think like me, who don't believe like me, who don't look like me,

that I think it helps us become better people. 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-Branum.org.

For more about the dark side of the NAR, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Soon, Audible.