Detangling IHOPKC: Overcoming Trauma from the "Prophetic" History

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, Jed Hartley, son of a prophet and former member of the International House of Prayer. Jed, I don't think I'll get used to the son of a prophet, but we have to say it, you know. I'm still getting used to living it, so. Yeah, no. But it fits right in with our topic today. I, you had asked that we record this one next, and I started looking through it, and it

brought back so many memories because prophecy in these movements is like the part of gold under the rainbow, if you know what I'm saying. They, instead of looking for the basics of Christianity, they really want to focus on the prophecies because it's mysterious and spooky and somewhat controlling and effective and controlling, and so all of the people are more looking towards what is the future hold from these quote unquote seers, and it really took me a long time to realize that that is the biblical definition of a fortune teller, not a prophet, and if the fortune tellers were the bad guys, the prophets were

the good guys, and so all of that was just bringing back all of these memories, but as we get into this, it's, you know, it's crazy that this is IHOPs past, you know, it's part of what built the IHOP KC platform, and when I left the Brannem movement, I thought, well, this died out in 1965, the Brannemites kind of turned into a destructive cult. I thought nobody would fall for such schemes again, and lo and behold, here's IHOP KC falling for the same schemes again. You mean specifically with just the use of the prophecies or just the

specific same type of prophecies? To be honest, I was referring to the strategy because it's not a Christian strategy whenever you think of the Christian Church, they're basic Christian fundamentals, but these guys have created a strategy of diverting the focus and attention of the people to the prophecies, and then, as you know, many of these prophecies never come to pass. Well, then they deflect to other prophecies, and then those do not come to pass, or they rewrite them, their history to make them seem like they It came to pass, but it's the same thing again and again and again.

It shouldn't keep working. It shouldn't keep being this thing that, like it feels, it makes sense in the 1930s, 40s, when you have isolation where communities don't talk with one another where there's not good records of stuff, but in the technology day and age where we can pull all of these things up and there's recordings and stuff.

It seems that, you know, it's the whole fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, sort of thing. It's like, it makes sense why a lot of people get sucked into it.

For me, it's more difficult to realize why people stay in it and once you realize that these prophecies aren't real. I know that that's, it is difficult and I think that that's what's crazy even right now, what we're dealing with at IHOP KC is you have, all of the information has been coming out, all of the previous prophecies, I mean, Mike Bickel and a lot of the IHOP KC speakers and individuals, leaders recorded everything that they ever did.

So you can go back to the 1983 prophetic message day, Mike Bickel shared with Bob Jones and you can listen and say you can kind of take that and measure it up against what has happened in real life and it's pretty easy to be like, okay, well this was just off, you know, there's no, you promised these particular things were going to happen and they either didn't happen at all or it's really loose how they're connected.

And so it is, it is pretty surprising to me that it continues to sustain itself. I totally understand for the people who were first grafted into that community, it's really hard when you, it's kind of like love bombing or, or you know, it's like talking to someone who the first time they fall in love with someone and there's this individual who's just speaking them up and you try, you try to tell your little sister or your daughter or whoever that, no, this isn't real, they're just telling you all of these things to win you over but it's not, there isn't substance behind it, it's hard to tell someone who's

just like, bright eyed fallen in love for the first time and, but yeah, then, then after a while when it is clear that there was not substance to that stuff, then it becomes upon the individual to take the responsibility.

to, you know, to get out of there, those situations, harder said than done, but, you know, it is hard. And in many ways, it's like peeling an onion. You realize that the outer skin is incorrect. So you peel it off. Well, then the layer that's underneath is also incorrect. And you peel it off, well, there's something inside of every single human being that they don't want to accept that every single bit of it was false. And so they'll try to, in the form of an onion, they'll try to hold the inner core together, not realizing that the core is

incorrect. And there was just layers upon layers upon layers of indoctrination to get to the level that you experienced that I experienced. And it's really difficult to tell somebody that the inner core is incorrect whenever everybody's just looking at the surface. The example in the Brannum cults, Brannum's most famous prophecy that failed was the 1977 end of the world.

We're obviously still alive. It's, you know, 2024. But the way in which the cult was manipulated is when it failed, leading up to the point of its failure, everybody in the cult believed the year was coming. They were selling all their possessions.

Some were moving to different countries, even because of the weirdness. But everybody believed it because it was a prophecy. Well, when it failed, then the leaders of the movement began teaching and indoctrinating the people that instead of a prophecy, it was a prediction by a prophet. And therefore, there was this fine line in the sand between a false prophecy and a false prediction, which, you know, to somebody on the outside, they look at that and scratch your heads and think, well, if you've got a prophet who's claiming that his fortune telling is prophecies. And one of the fortune tellings is a prediction,

how is that different from a prophecy? And so if anybody outside looking in, you can't even explain it to the people who are on the inside. But I defended it left and right, even if in as a, you know, as a high school teenager, I'm trying to explain why the world did not end in 1977 to some people.

Same thing with IHOP, you look at some of the prophecies that you have listed here. And, you know, they're obviously failed prophecies, but the way that people are indoctrinated, they can't look deeper than the surface to understand until after they escape. And then they're like, well, what just happened to me?

Yeah, 100% and I think that that idea, the analogy of the onion and the layers where some will just go one layer deep or two layer deep or none at all, because in some senses, if you think about it, the strategy of some of these cult leaders, they're, you know, they're not adopting a totally new religion.

Um, it's not, you know, teaching people a new God and it's all their own thing. It's layered on top of Christianity and so because it's layered on top of Christianity, there's this fear when you are a follower of this prophet that if you remove certain layers, you're eventually going to get down to the point where you're going to lose your faith entirely and that's terrified, you know, that people, people don't want to lose their faith, they don't want to lose their faith in God or Jesus and so there's that sort of mentality, I had it myself, there was always, if I question Mike, if I question

my dad, then where do I stop questioning? Where do I stop cutting back the layers to the point of like, do I even believe in God anymore? And I think that for some people that keeps them from cutting through the first top layers that are clearly false, right? And because there's just, I don't, I don't want to stop. I, or I'm worried that I won't stop at once. I start going and I need that core foundation. If I don't have God, then who do I have? If I don't have Jesus, then what am I? You know, if I don't even have, you know, this charismatic version

of Jesus and it builds back up. And I've recognized even in my speaking out against my father and Mike and others, you know, a lot of the things on the surface level that I'm saying are like pretty undeniable, especially with Mike and my dad of just like, hey, this, this was what was going on. These were the false prophecies that were going on. And this was the abuse that was going on. And it's really not a matter of opinion, you know, it's not one person's faith or other like, that is what happens, whether or not you recognize that, we'll see. But

you've seen these people who can't even recognize this first bit because if they cut there, who knows where they will stop. And then also there's this uncomfortable ability of

if I go two more layers than everyone else does, it's really difficult to know when to stop. Like, there's a lot of people who are like, okay, Mike, we're realizing Mike was not who he said he was. And so there's that removing of like, okay, well, there is Mike who is a little bit sinister.

But the rest of the ihop prophecy, the rest of the world, that we keep intact and are only going to be able to go so far. And it's frankly, it's just, you know, I totally understand it. You want to preserve your, this is a lot of what people rely on for their understanding of themselves, for their understanding of the world, for, you know, how they were as their family, how they were, you know, based their marriage for all of these different things. And if you have spent, it's kind of become that sort of cornerstone set of beliefs

that if you remove that cornerstone, everything comes crashing down. And so it makes sense why people aren't able to like cut through the layers. I would hope that listening to this, listening to either this podcast series or just any of the people speaking out, I would hope that people would

have the courage and to start removing it layer by layer. And recognizing, like you said, once you get out, there's a lot of the thing that I've seen with people is that as soon as they step out, they're like, oh, I'm fine. My relationship is fine. My children, like I can still relate to my children, like my, my, my mother is a good example of like, I remember when she stepped out, same with my sisters and even, you know, my, my parents separated. And there was a really kind of tumultuous time for a couple of years. And then it was like, oh, this is easy now. I can relate

with my children actually closer now that this, this layer of the IHOP world wasn't actually helping me in my family. It was actually hindering me in a lot of ways. And so even my relationship with my, my mother, like over the last five, six years, I have been able to become way closer to my mom once we stepped out of this world for a variety of reasons. And so I think if people get scared that their whole life is going to fall apart if they remove these particular layers, but I've largely seen that it is good. It might be hard for a little, like there's always a little bit of a

shaking kind of reckoning time. But yeah, because these, these prophetic rompses aren't true, removing them from your worldview is, is only going to serve to help you in the future. Yeah. It's also complicated. You know, there are a lot of good Christian, men and women, ministers, evangelists who really, truly want to help people who are escaping the cults.

So their heart is in the right place. But as you know, it's very complicated to understand a cult, what's even far more complicated to understand the mindset of somebody who has been indoctrinated in a cult, because each individual is unique. There are no two stories that are exactly the same. One of the problems that I've noticed, and this is my opinion. I'm no minister, pastor, evangelist. I never want to be, but what I have seen when people who are on the outside looking in and they see a cult member and they want to help them, they, the only thing that they can

equate what has happened to them is in their understanding of Christianity versus atheism. So, whenever they see a person who is escaping the cult, their first reaction is, oh my gosh, they're escaping the cult. Let's not let them become atheists. So therefore, let them hold, hold on to these core, what they consider to be the core values of Christianity, but what they don't understand, the indoctrination has replaced what they believe to be the core, what they different core. And so, we were joking before the podcast, and this simple it relates, but for me, it's as if we were, we were given Stephen King's book It, and we were,

somebody replaced the word Pennywise with Jesus all through the book. It's no different in a cult, because they have given a different personality to God, they've given a different story to Christianity, they've given us a different set of values, morals, everything about the religion is different, and then, ironically, it actually matches Pennywise in many ways, if you think about it, but because they have replaced these different attributes and just give it a stamp called Jesus, people try to cling to whatever is that they believe was Jesus, and it's not. It's a different God entirely. And so, I know I'll get hate mill for saying this, but in my opinion, you really have

to take yourself all the way down to the bottom layer, you have to literally become an atheist if you want to be fully free from a cult, because you have to wipe your slate entirely clean, and then start over, and build from the ground up, what is the core values of Christianity, what do Christians believe? I tried to fight that process for years, and literally it drove me mad, because I was clinging to that last little thing. This all can't be false, it's what was going through my head. It's trying to cling to it, and I realize at the end, you know, everything that I

build on a false foundation will also be false. There is no way it can be true. So, I just started from square one, who is Jesus? What is Jesus? What do Christians believe? If I, in fact, I took this mindset, pretend I was born in a different country to a different set of parents who had never heard the name Jesus, what I still believe it. So, then I started going through the core values like this, and I started building the personality of who I am, and I don't see... There's an urgency that the cult teaches, and that's why, even in the mainstream churches, they teach that same urgency,

in many cases. That's why... people want to cling to it because there's this urgency. Oh my gosh, I don't have time for this. The world is going to end, but I'm in no hurry, man.

If it takes me the whole rest of my life to rebuild my foundation, in my stack of foundation, I'm probably right here, just building it back up. And I'm in no hurry. I'm right with you, where you really do have to cut down to the core.

Whatever that core is, before you start building back up, like for me, I remember there was a moment a long time ago where I was talking to a good friend of mine who was very worried that I would become an atheist or become a Buddhist or not a Christian, lose my faith entirely, which, to some extent, is true.

But when I was sort of in that deconstruction place, I remember going through and recognizing exactly what you were saying of like, OK, well, I don't really know who God is because the people who used God's name and taught me about the nature of God were clearly, like, I'm not interested, first of all, in worshiping that God anymore, because I've seen the fruit of that God.

So they were using the name of Jesus and using the Bible, but was it actually that it was clearly constructed in their own image, like the God that I was taught was not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

It was the God of Bob Jones, Mike Pickle, and Bob Hartley. And it was clearly constructed in those men's image and reflected back very positively on them and not on anyone else. And so there was that moment where I remember having to be like, I got to break it all down.

And basically, I got to the point of being like, OK, but I know that these men don't have a trademark on beauty, truth, and goodness, kindness. And that was sort of my foundation of like, OK, well, there were still a whole lot of things that I experienced throughout my life that I could say was beautiful, was true, and was good.

And even though I was terrified because there's that sort of urgency thing of like, if I don't know, if my allegiance isn't to Jesus at the time when I die, then I might go to hell and be tortured for eternity.

And I basically was just like, look, if I believe in a God, I want to believe in a God who cares about goodness, truth, and... beauty. And if I'm pursuing those things and trying to find my foundation, like if that's my core foundation, if that's my bedrock of do what is kind, what is true, what is just that.

I believe that a God is going to like accept and appreciate that, you know, and I don't know if I really want to worship a God who doesn't accept those things. And so I'm finding that as like my core like character foundation and then being able to build back up, I think is the, for me, that's the way it had to be with me. Like I had to cut everything in my life. All of my religious understanding, all of my understanding of who God was, I had to cut down to the core. I don't know

if every single individual has to do that to get extricated from this sort of cult communities, but for people who grew up in it, I think that that's often, often the case, because you kind of have to just start at square one. And interestingly, I had this conversation not long ago with another guy. When you're in these destructive Christian cults, they teach you incorrectly what the other people that aren't cult members are. And so in our minds, we actually categorized the agnostics with the atheists. You either believe you don't. It's on or it's off.

And there's no variations in between. When you leave the cult and you start deconstructing, you're actually becoming agnostic, you're not becoming atheist. But I even used the word atheist previously because that's what we were taught. That's how we were indoctrinated. But you're no different than the believers who were in Berea. They were agnostics, right? They sought it out for themselves. They studied it and they found it to be true. They said, it may be true. It may not.

And so we examined it and we found what we believed. Well, that's what a person who leaves a cult has to do. You have to get to that point. And there comes a point where I use the word atheist when I talk about deconstruction because you're deconstructing a false god and you're becoming an atheist to that false god. And in my opinion, you've never heard the God of the Bible when you're in these cults because they teach you different personalities. This is a, like you just mentioned, this is a narcissistic God. And if God looks like this, I'm not sure I want to serve that God. You know what I'm

saying? So you have to become an atheist to that one. But then you have to understand, well, okay, what is real? And you have to start from square one. So that's that's my process. And again, it's my opinion. There are many other people who disagree with that. But I think for me, I don't think there was another way. Yeah. And I think that part of the problem too is that

I'm not saying I'm right in my process. I'm not saying you're right in your process either. I definitely resonate with what you or saying, though, I think what's really difficult is there isn't a whole lot of freedom for like the conversation that I am having with you right now would not be a conversation that I could have with about 90% of the people that I grew up with because it's just too scary.

There are agnostic atheists, they don't care, you know, backslidden believer, even if I just became a universalist Christian, Christian, you know, having certainty in these few certain things was a requirement for even just conversation and relationship and to even get to the place where it's like, okay, you are going to hold true with these certain things, but is it okay if I don't hold true to those things? Like if I don't have that conviction anymore, I have to, I have to deconstruct, I have to take all of these things out and my deconstruction is somehow threatening to

other individuals way of living and I think that's just really, really sad and makes it these communities just so terribly insular and isolating where if you step out, if you deconstruct from a few of these core beliefs, you're suddenly isolated from the community. I had a very important figure in my life who was a life-long friend with my father and my family when I spoke up about my dad just six, eight months ago and it was very intense because I was really the reason I was having to come forward about my dad was some pretty intense reasons that I

haven't fully gotten into on this podcast, but it's just a very intense situation where I was trying to warn people that like, hey, this is, he not only was my father like using prophecy, but he was doing it abusively and was taking advantage of people and even presently it was a present situation and so I was kind of sounding alarm about it and I had this life-long family friend who started speaking very ill of me that it was backslidden was the term that he was telling individuals and I never confronted me about it and he had never spoken to me about what my faith

was about the questions that I had had and it felt like a real betrayal because I was really trying to do something And for the benefit of the community that I grew up in, like, I wasn't sounding the alarm about my dad so that I could tell the, you know, atheists and the liberals, you know, reason why to hate the Christian community that I grew up in or anything like that.

To some extent, I do think that there's conversations that need to be had that is universal and not just to the sort of Pentecostal world, but I was really trying to speak up because I was worried about the impact that it was continuing to have on the Pentecostal community and the loved ones, the people at Bethel and IHOP that I knew and cared about and wanted to see, you know, people not continue to be deceived and take an advantage of and to then have someone who was a close family friend, like, speak out against me and my identity was really hard.

And it makes sense when people do it, but it's just, it's, it's a really sad state of the world that I grew up in and that you grew up in too. I'm sure too.

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So let's get into the prophecies. We've, we've talked all of the reasons why the prophecies are destructive to you and the aftermath of having said destruction in your head. And I agree with everything that you've said so far, it is so very difficult.

Because what I learned the hard way is that whenever you speak out, initially, there's this thought in your head like I'm helping the people, they can obviously see that there's something wrong here if I explain it to them.

And they will think logically and they will be understanding of what I'm saying. And then they too can be free. I remember that feeling, but what I learned was, whenever somebody is in the cult mindset, there is no separation between their personality and the critical information of the cult. So whenever you give them critical information, you're in fact insulting their personality. They've taken the cult identity and that cult identity is being insulted. So I learned this very quickly and ironically because of this podcast, one of the ways in which I learned this was whenever I started talking about the prophecies that

did not come to past and how over time these prophecies had to change, evolve, become rewritten, become understood in different ways. Each time I was explaining this to a person who is indoctrinated in the cult, it was taken as a direct offense to them, to their person, even though it wasn't, you know, it wasn't against their person. And the response, the program indoctrinated response is to insult you back. So then there's this heated exchange between both sides and I wish I had it to do over because I wish I knew now what I knew then what I knew now

because it's not that they're angry at you or insulting you. That's just the way that their mind has been programmed and there are ways to avoid this. So maybe if we could get into the prophecies, we could talk through some of that. Yeah, totally. I think that that's a very insightful statement to, yeah, when you attack these core beliefs, people feel like you're attacking them themselves. But yeah, when growing up, there was many core prophecies that I believed in. There's a lot of, there's a lot of core prophecies. If you went to IHOP KC from anywhere, you know, even

before it came about and you were a part of the Kansas City Fellowship community before IHOP began, there are dozens of different prophecies that might have stuck with you. I don't think that if you talk to any individual from that community, they're going to make their list of like the top 5, 10 prophecies and it's going to be different from the person who is, you know, beside them. So I'm just talking about the ones that were important to me. And I mentioned this last, I believe in our last episode. But the biggest one and the most significant one for me when I was young was a prophecy

about Pat Bickel, the brother of Mike Bickel, being healed and to tell that story super quickly because I believe it's been discussed on, if not by me, by others on your episodes before. But

Mike Bickel had a little brother named Pat who very early on, I think he was in high school. um, he was in an accident during a football game, um, where he was paralyzed, basically, from the neck down.

And this was a very key moment in Mike Bickle and the early sort of Kansas City Fellowship, um, or would later become a big moment in the Kansas City Fellowship community because Bob Jones then came years later and gave prophecies that were interpreted as, um, Pat Bickle, um, will walk again, and, um, not getting into the super details of the prophecy, but there was, it was the white horse prophecy that, um, Mike Bickle spoke about, uh, spoke about a lot.

Um, but the idea is that this healing was going to signify all of the other prophecies. So it was kind of that they have been talking very generally. You give very generic prophecies about revival is going to come.

Jesus is going to be, uh, sweeping the nation and these sort of like, these great things are going to happen in there just around the corner or these terrible things are going to happen.

There's going to be wars and rumors of wars and there's going to be all sorts of different terrifying and times stuff, uh, but those you can speak about very generically. And when you give prophecies about those sort of issues, it's easy five years down the road to say that they happened because there's always wars and there's always, you know, revivals to some extent of, you know, more people becoming Christians and so the linchpin prophecies are these specific ones.

These ones that are like, okay, to signal, signal that the rest of this thing, the rest of the promises are going to come about, um, let's latch on to this specific prophecy about Pat Bickle.

And so I remember being a young kid, not really understanding much about the world. Like I was just, these were just all stories. They wasn't doctrines to me. It wasn't, um, clear what I should believe or what I shouldn't believe.

What is mostly true and what is entirely true, what is core doctrine and what is kind of secondary doctrine, it was just these are all the stories that I'm being told. And the most impactful story for me as a young child was this idea that Pat Bickle was going to get up.

He was going to walk and be healed, um, that of course never happens. I think it was 2007, Pat Bickle passed away and I was, I was a teenager by that time when Pat Bickle died.

passed away. And I remember that being sort of the first really big red flag of being like, I internalized it. I was like, oh, I must have not understood the prophecy. I kind of felt embarrassed. Like everyone was talking about it when Pat Pickle died. Like, oh, well, he's going to walk again in heaven. And I was like, oh, I thought they meant he was going to, like, I was going to see him walk again in real life, which is 100% what the actual prophecies I have now since gone back and looked at it and talked with other people. And I was completely gaslighting my own

self to be like, I was the problem in that situation. Because it just didn't, it didn't compute to me that we had all promised this or we had all believed this thing. And then like, I just couldn't

couldn't come to terms with why it didn't happen. And like, there's plenty of faith within the community. It wasn't a lack of faith. So that was one of the first ones. One of the other core promises that was spoken of over IHOP was the chiefs winning the Super Bowl. Have you, have you heard about this, John? I have. And ironically, I'm a chiefs fan. So I wish that prophecy would have came true back whenever it did. I became a chiefs fan back whenever Joe Montana was the quarterback.

So I'm going to chiefs fan before it was cool to be a chiefs fan. But yeah, I have studied the prophecy. It was a really interesting thing because the early Kansas City fellowship community had a lot of ties to the organization of the Kansas City chiefs. Like for instance, my dad was the chaplain for the Kansas City chiefs for like a year or two. And then later he was the chaplain for the Kansas City chiefs cheerleaders, which most people didn't realize that was a job. I don't think it is a job anymore, but it was. And so when I was like 10 to 15 years old, we would go to

Kansas City chiefs games and we would go like on the field. And before the game, we would have these little Bible studies with the Kansas City chief cheerleaders. And I remember this so vividly because they all were very concerned about their dogs. Like I would write down the prayer requests. We would have like a Bible study and they would have prayer and like half, I remember being like 10 and being like half of the prayer requests are about these women's dogs. And it was just a funny moment. But then I got to go on the field and I absolutely

They loved watching football and stuff. And so that was also sort of visceral to me of, all the Kansas City Chiefs are gonna win the Super Bowl. And back then, they were terrible, you know.

They just were never good growing up. There was like two or three year period where we thought, oh, maybe they might be good, but you know, never won much. And so Bob Jones prophesied that this was gonna be another signal, like just like Pat Pickle being healed.

It was gonna signify the moment in which revival was gonna come to the city itself, to Kansas City itself.

And it just never happened. And then of course, a few years ago, about five, six years ago, the Chiefs actually do win the Super Bowl. And right after that, immediately after that, there is not revival, there's COVID hits, like immediately after the Chiefs win the Super Bowl.

Yeah, so had the prophecy been about a plague or something like that, then you'd be like, oh, maybe, but no. And you know what's funny too, is again, same thing. I remember posting after the Chiefs win the Super Bowl and being like, kind of just not even taking a dig at Bob Jones, but just kind of being like, wasn't there a revival supposed to happen here?

You know, and again, a defender of the sort of I have prophecies was like, no, it was never about that. It never had anything to do with the Chiefs win. It's Super Bowl. And I didn't argue with him because I was like, I don't really care, you know, and kind of moved on.

But it was really eerie because it just showed that sort of gas sliding nature of like, no, that 100% was what it was about. I was a kid, I believed in that. And then it happened, you know, the Chiefs win the Super Bowl, revival was supposed to happen.

And then someone's like, no, no, no, you just must have heard it wrong. And it's like, I never heard it wrong. And then even within the last few years, I've gone back and researched it.

And of course, that was absolutely what the prophecy was. And not only that, it wasn't the only time Bob Jones used that same prophetic promise. He also gave it to Rick Joyner about the Carolina Panthers that the Carolina Panthers would win the Super Bowl.

And the revival would come to Carolina right after. I mean, it's just the same thing. And there's an article online where Rick Joyner talks about it. And it's all the exact same prophecy, just copy and pasted to a different city.

And one, it's silly because the Carolina Panthers are terrible. And so... You know, they're not winning the Super Bowl at all, but maybe they will in 10 years or whatever. I'm not sure. We'll give them 50.

But the whole irony of it is just like, people can look into all of these things. It's pretty, Bob Jones spoke prophetically about the Chief's winning the Super Bowl. It was a good prophecy to give to a bunch of Chief's fans because it got at one of their core passions, which was football.

And it made, it kind of married the two things, and it got people excited. You know, if you've seen the comments on some of the videos that I have, I often make the comment that it's just a recreation of Brandemism.

And it's an extension of Brandemism. And it applies to a lot of the figures that I have on my research site. And there's a lot of backlash because people get so focused on the doctrine that they are not even looking at the underlying strategy.

The strategy is the same, even though the doctrine is different. That's one of the reasons why I purposefully just put all of the theology to the side. I just want to see what makes this thing tick.

How is it working? Yeah. And one of the things that I found is that there are three very, very powerful things for a cult leader to use in indoctrinating and capturing people. One of them is fear, which we've talked about left and right, because that's what the cult were built on.

But the other one is hope. The hope is very powerful, and along with hope comes anticipation. If they're anticipating something that they're hopeful for, that's even extremely more powerful. The irony is, back in the days of the post-World War II healing revivals, people were anticipating a Third World War, and their only hope was to escape Earth before the war happened.

They were actually looking at a Doomsday as being a hopeful thing. They were actually looking forward to a Doomsday, which is weird if you think about it. But that was their hope, and that's why you had all these Doomsday prophets spring up, etc.

But I began examining these two prophecies that you're talking about. I'm just shocked at how similar they are to the situations that I escaped. Whenever I left the random cult, and I talked to people very close to me, and I explained, I'm leaving the cult, I no longer believe this stuff, but I still am a Christian, I still believe Christianity.

They didn't care. They did not care in the slightest about Christianity, and in fact, they never asked a question about my faith. Instead, they said, well, what about the healings? What about the prophecies?

Because that's to them. They've been indoctrinated to think that That's up here, and Jesus is down here, which is backwards, really, and my mother specifically said, well, what about Donnie Morton's healing? Which is very, very much like Pat Bickel's healing.

Because all of my life, I believe that Donnie Morton was healed. I was told he was healed. It was one of the most famous prophecies of the early years of William Brannum. He was so famous that it made the front page of Reader's Digest, and there's a huge story about the journey, I think it's called the miracle of Donnie Morton, and he used that because of the hope, the anticipation for his healing, widespread appeal for this, because here's a father who's made international news, international news.

He was from Canada to come for his boy to be healed. Here I am, I left the Colton in 2012, so here I am decades later, and we were talking Brannum's been dead for 50 years, right?

People were still using this prophecy as a fishing hook to lure me back. I'd never even thought about it, so I go look up all of the history just like you did with Pat Bickel.

The prophecy was made that he would be healed. The boy died of the same exact disease that he was, quote unquote, healed from, and he died within weeks, I mean, it wasn't very long after.

And then Brannum went and re, he still used that as part of his, quote unquote, prophetic history, but he twisted it to claim that the boy was healed of that disease, but he died of something else.

And so apparently in my past, there was a group of cult believers who believed that, well, he did heal, but he was only healed for just a week. What's the purpose in healing you if you're going to die of something else?

What value is that? But it was not much of a testimony, yeah, not much at all, but it was their way of reconciling a failed prophecy. Well, over time, it became even worse. The cult just completely erased from their mental perception of this quote unquote prophecy, the entire history of him dying.

So nobody in the cult was even aware when I left that he had actually died. And if you go to my website, you can pull up the page and we've even got letters from the family just, they're angry that their father wasted all of this time and energy with this false prophet, because the son never got healed, it messed up their lives.

I mean, it's a bad thing, right? But it's very much like Pat Bickel, right? It was a failed prophecy, but the cult mentality just absorbs the failure and then rewrites it into something else.

Yeah, 100%. That's exactly the rewriting. It doesn't even always have to be done by the prophet. It can be done. But Branum clearly did a lot of that. where he would retell stories. And the stories by the fifth time he told it, it wasn't even sort of close to true.

And that's 100% the same with my father and with Mike. But really these men didn't have to do that because they tell the story and then if there's elements that are wrong or don't fit quite right, people will retell the stories and help them adapt it into something that is a genuine testimony.

So exactly like Don or Donnie Morton. I mean, the idea that he was healed and then died a week later. That's just unbelievable. The fact that that can become one of the core testimonies of someone's faith healing ability is

reveals a lot about the world. The other thing that I was looking at with the football prophecy, honestly, I'll admit, I looked at that mostly because I'm a chief's fan and you know, it just fascinates me that people do this, but the other thing that hit me and again, it goes back to the strategy.

None of these prophecies that you're mentioning, none of them that I grew up with, none of them had a single bit to do with anything about my salvation. In Brannanism, you had weird things like egg cars would be shaped like an egg and don't eat eggs and you know, what does that have to do with your salvation?

It's ridiculous stuff when you think about it. And I went through every single prophecy that there is, one could be, there's one that could be potentially considered to be a salvation issue, but the rest of them aren't.

The rest of them are literally fortune telling. It's saying, look, I can see this thing in the future. See, I'm right, and what it turns into a lot of these ministers though, they'll claim prophecy on something that is so incredibly vague that they got a 50-50 chance.

So if you run around spouting out quote unquote prophecies of things that are gonna happen in the future and if you get some of them right, then you can say, look, I'm a prophet.

I said this thing, right? It's the same way with a Super Bowl. I mean, you got a 50-50 chance. William Brannan had a prophecy that a female will be president one day. Well, you got a 50-50 chance with every single election, man.

Yeah. It's nothing new, but you should see the uproar that's happening right now with Kamala Harris running. It's like, they're all ablaze. Oh, this prophecy's been fulfilled. Well, when Brannan got that one, he claimed that Kennedy was the fulfillment of the female president.

So that part of my exodus was like, no, wait a minute, it's supposed to be a female. How did he change it to Kennedy? And I specifically asked my grandfather this, why did it change from a girl to a guy?

and you know, back then I was thinking he was a prophet and it was real, but I'm realizing, no, he's going around and he's giving vague prophecies that have 50, 50 chance of coming true.

If they come true, he claims prophecy on it. If they don't, his method, and I may be the same in I hop, I don't know, but his method was to say, well, I was just, that was my prediction. I wasn't prophesying. It was a prediction. Right. But if you're a prophet and you comes from divinely inspired from God, no matter what you say, it has to be a prophecy. So they were twisting words like that. And I realized that the whole thing was just fake. There's different types of prophecies and different intentions with the prophecies and you're 100% bright by analyzing,

not that, not the specific prophecies, but the reasons behind it. And that's how you tie these people together, like whether or not the sort of laterane teaching of IHOPKC perfectly mirrors the laterane teaching of random, the intentions are so similar because they

is it used to, like you said, invoke fear to capture hearts, but there's also just the magic trick prophecies where it's about the spectacle, it's about predicting something and then using those accurate predictions to then reaffirm your sort of divine connection. This is 100% what my dad was all about and still is all about is using these predictions and it would be really funny because he would do it all the time with football game scores. He would be like, I had a dream that it was going to be 35, 17, and I probably, this is not,

I'm not exaggerating, I have probably won about like $5,000 off of my dad through the course because every time he would do that, I would bet him $100 that I could predict closer, and it was kind of like a, it was just for fun between us and whether he paid me for all of those, I don't know, I definitely did win a decent amount of money off of him because he would just make these wild predictions and I would be like, no, I think it's going to be this and stuff.

And in our relationship and in kind of conversational, it wasn't as intense, like he would make these predictions and people would be like, oh, Bob's just having fun. But then when he got things right or close to right, it would then become prophecy and then he would use it and he would talk, he would have told these different stories of how this...

that he got right and that it signified something. And it was like, well, it wasn't serious when you said it and then the only ones that you're taking seriously are the ones that you got right or you got close to right or sometimes he wouldn't even get it right and he would just retell the story as if he got it right.

And it became this sort of clear pattern of just trying to build up the magician persona and the way that Bob Jones excused these behaviors.

According to my dad and according to Bob Jones, like Bob Jones said that if you're 10% accurate as a profit, you're doing something right. That most profits are only 10% accurate. And I remember my dad telling me that and me being a young kid and like being like, oh, okay, giving a lot of grace for the profits.

And then it's like, well, if you're only 10% correct, stop saying these things. Then like what's the point? It doesn't help at all. And I think if that's where kind of one of the big points of this conversation about the prophetic promises is that they're so inaccurate and deceptive, they're fundamentally destructive to the people who believe them, right?

If you believe in all of these prophecies and let's say Bob Jones is right that it's only 10% correct, would I, I don't even think it's 10%, but let's say only 10% of the prophecies are correct.

Then it is better for you to not believe a single one of them because if you do believe them, nine out of 10 are gonna be wrong and you are going to live your life based off of these prophecies, thinking that they come from the Lord and that's fundamentally going to be destructive to you.

There's one that I wanted to also talk about today was the, because one of the most significant ones was right when I was leaving high school in 2010, which this one, I don't think that, I don't know how many people were affected by this one, but I know that I was deeply affected by it.

There's a really weird, IHOP in 2010 was just a weird place. There was the awakening during that time. I don't know if you've talked about maybe in later episodes, we could talk about the awakening because there was this sort of mini revival that hit

the IHOP KC world where we were having meetings almost every single night and there was all these sort of manifestations of the Holy Spirit people were falling over and there was testimonies of healing and dreams and prophecies and all that sort of stuff.

It was very exciting time for me. when I was, when I was in, you know, believed in it. Now I realized that it was a pretty destructive time, but that's a whole different topic.

But it was just in general, it was a very like, tumultuous sort of time of my life and IHOP KC's kind of life, there was a lot going on, and there was this huge prophecy that Terry Bennett gave to Mike Bickel, which I don't know if you know who Terry Bennett is, he's really not a big figure in the IHOP KC world.

A lot of times Mike would latch on to some of these like smaller prophets, so prophets would come in, travel and give a prophetic word, and it was kind of up to Mike's discretion whether or not he would take it.

I don't think that Mike gave many grand prophecies after like the 80s, 90s, like once IHOP began, Mike wasn't really actively involved in giving some of these larger prophecies. He was mainly kind of a leader figure who would then bring in others to give prophetic words, whether that's Chris Reed, whether that was Terry Bennett.

So anyway, Terry Bennett comes in and they have this meeting, and it's never really spoken of from the pulpit IHOP in full detail. It's just talked about, hey, there's gonna be, in the next five years, there's gonna be these big trials and tribulations and that there's gonna be this great shaking, and for me, it's sort of signified, we've been talking about the end of times, we've been talking about the tribulation, it's gonna happen.

Like next five, 10 years, there was always this sort of, we don't know when it's gonna happen, we know it's gonna happen in the generation, but no one knows the date or the hour, but this was sort of the signifier where it was like, okay, now it's right around the corner.

And I remember kind of being half in and half out. Half of me was like, yeah, okay, this makes sense, that things are starting to reach a fever pitch. This is the time in which the Lord is gonna return.

And then half of me was already starting to be like, I think that this is kind of not true. I think that kind of all of this is not true. And I was 18, right on that sort of beginning to ask questions myself and immediately after this, I went to Y-WAM and did some missions work and stuff.

But in my head, this was sort of like a very important moment.

And I remember getting a hold of the specific Terry Bennett prophecy. And it's not general. It's very, very specific. He talks about the angel Gabriel came to him and gave him this message in 2001 and now he was saying that it was going to begin in this season.

The dates were like very specific. It was going to be basically 2015 was when it was supposed to culminate. There were going to be solar flares that shut down 90% of all communications. There was going to be earthquakes that were going to hit the east coast, not the west coast that were going to destroy half of America. This is just verbatim. I continued to see effects. The sun did a weird thing. It was like a solar flare. The magnetism of the earth was increased. The tilt of the earth was altered so that time itself changed all over the earth. And then I continued to see the

effects of that was the satellites were both blinded and some of them were yanked out right of the sky. He got blinded the communications of the earth, cell phones, all types of things, military hardware, commercial hardware. People were blinded. GPS was useless. The magnetic north itself altered which affected all forms of travel especially by sea and by land. And it keeps going. I bring this all up to be like this was what was being said. Now if you find the ways that Terry Bennett or others or Mike even talks about this message. There is zero

accountability for this prophetic work. Like absolute 2015 came and went. None of these things obviously happened. The earth didn't tilt right. The time has not been fundamentally altered on earth. There was not a solar flare that blinded all of military and commercial hardware. These were all very specific promises. These were things that I believed or have believed. Like I have believed they were true and then half was like I don't know. This is pretty crazy.

And there's just zero accountability for the fact that this was the prophecy that was being spread and it was kind of done in a very secretive way amongst the IHOP. Like it was talked very generally from the stage. It was very we think that these things are going to happen. We have this you know Gabriel came and I don't even know if he from the stage ever talked about the angel Gabriel in this. But this was sort of the motivation behind a lot of the prophecy that was happening in 2010. And behind the scenes everybody was kind of talking about this and this was the

specific. details that were given. And it's just so false and so shallow, so completely devoid of any truth, any reason, and it's just fodder to scare and control individuals. And it sucks because it happened to me. Like I was scared and I was controlled. I didn't go to like a regular college. I went to Wyoming and I, you know, I'm fine with the way that I've lived my life and everything like that. But it does feel like the shape of my life was fundamentally altered by prophetic promises like this. And there is absolutely zero accountability for any of it.

You know, whenever I left the cult, one of the things that I did to help rebuild my foundation, I just read the Bible over and over and over. I lost count of the times, 10 to 15 times. Cover to cover. Just kept doing it. And it's interesting when you do this because number one, a majority of Christians in the United States and abroad have never read the Bible, which is mind-boggling if you think about it. This is the book of your faith and you're not going to read it. I don't understand it.

But the other thing is you start to read voices, meanings, topics, and themes. So such that after you've read it a while, you can read a letter and you can almost read the personality of the person writing the letter. And you can recognize the personalities as they as the same author writes different letters and so on and so forth. But the interesting thing is it wipes out of your head some of the nonsense that was programmed in your head. The biggest thing for me was that we were taught incorrectly what a prophet was. And the irony is uncanny because you have

prophets like these false prophets who like false prophets. And that appears to be a theme all throughout the movement. They just love false prophets because these are guys saying things like we get it right 10% of the time. So if you get two people who are saying this, both claiming to be God's prophet, you're like, oh, well, that must be right because he said 10%. But I was reading in Deuteronomy, it describes a prophet of God, Deuteronomy 18. It says, how will we know that it's a word that the Lord has not spoken? When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord and that word does not

come past or true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously. And it's like you read the stuff, man, and it's just like common sense. But it hits you like a brick in the head because you're like, man, that's common sense. And how did I miss that? And the thought went from my head is like, you know, after you read and you understand what a prophet is, a prophet is a mouthpiece for God. So God is speaking and God knows everything. It would be like me speaking through

you, and me telling the world across the internet through your mouth that I'm wearing a blue shirt. Well, I know I'm wearing a blue shirt, so it's going to be true when you speak it, because I'm speaking through you.

But if you were to speak presumptuously, you could guess, well, it might be yellow, it might be red, you're speaking presumptuously, that's what these guys are doing, and they're claiming it's prophecy. So out of the colors, you've got, you know, the basic core colors, you've got, what, 10-15 chances of getting it right, well, these guys learned that 10-15% chance is not good enough.

Let's go 50-50. Let's bet on the Super Bowl. They're either going to win or they're going to lose, you know, it's, it's so ironic when you think about how, how they manipulate the heads, and yet at the same time, in many cases, I'm noticing that they get so caught up in the doctrine that they themselves start believing it.

And the irony is that they're manipulating their own heads, which is another topic for another day, but anyway, thanks for doing this, there's, there's much more to get into. Maybe we could split this and talk again about the rest of them.

Sounds good. Awesome. 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 New Apostolic Reformation, read Weaponize Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Soon, Audible.