Our Stories: Garrett Richardson - Faith Assembly - Hobart Freeman

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 very special guest, Garrett Richardson, former member of Faith Assembly satellite group in Grand Rapids. Garrett, it's so good to have you on today, share your story about Hobart Freeman and the Faith Assembly cult.

As you know, we've had so many people contact us and some who have now shared their story about Faith Assembly and they all share very similar stories no matter which satellite group they're in and it's just fascinating to me to hear them because in the message cult of William Brannem, we had the main sect and all of its splinter groups but they did very quite a bit if you really think about the the internal structure but what I'm hearing from the Faith Assembly cult is that at least until the group imploded it became very like like tentacles of the same group in

different various places and I'm very interested to hear your story about the satellite group that was in Grand Rapids. Well, I'm not sure how far back to go other than I guess I should start with when I got saved. I was 24 years old and became a Christian. I later found that to be during the the big Jesus revolution I guess and but my wife got saved. We had been going through some trouble.

She got saved and and then a guy started where I work who actually attended the Faith Assembly satellite group so he would talk about Jesus all day to me and then I would go home and my wife would talk about Jesus all night and they both kept telling me I needed to be saved and I knew that so I became a Christian and we tried to find a church. We were on fire. I mean we just all we wanted to do is hear more and more about Jesus. So we tried all the denominational churches, her parents church, my parents church all around the area and everybody all they wanted to talk

about was their parking lot funds and you know their programs and finally I decided to try to sort it out. the church with the guy at work, and I went to the little storefront church one evening, and I was really shocked when I went in there to see people just dressed in mumos and shorts and flip-flops and plain tambourines and drums trumpet, you name it, it was in there, and it was a very small building, there was maybe 50 of us in there, and they were jumping up and down and shouting, and I was kind of put off at first by the whole thing, but then when

the teacher showed up about an hour after all the praise and worship, and he taught on the sermon on the mount, and it was very literal, and I mean literal, turn the other cheek, meant actually turn the other cheek, and give a mere cloak as well as your coat, actually meant to do that, and I was amazed that somebody was actually preaching the word and taking it literally, not trying to dispensationalize it or, you know, denominationalize it is what we would say, and I went home and I told my wife, oh, one thing happened that night, my very first night in the

meeting, one of the older guys there got ahold of me and told me I needed to be baptized in the Holy Spirit, so they laid hands on me, and coached me into speaking in tongues because they said that you don't have the baptism in the Holy Spirit unless you speak in tongues, and it was, it was quite an experience, it was embarrassing, but when I went away, it was still the message on the sermon on the mount that I was so taken by, and I went and told my wife that she needed to hear this, my wife was pregnant with our second child at the time, and I finally talked her into coming,

and like on the first or second night of the teaching, they tried to talk her into having her baby at home, and she said that's not going to happen, so it was slow going at first, but I was just so convinced that the things that they were saying were genuine, and it was so

exciting that we continued to go, and we did have that baby in the hospital, by the way. One of the things that you mentioned was that it was embarrassing, and A lot of people haven't really processed that yet after leaving these kind of groups.

But when you first get around them, whereas if you went to a normal church, they make you feel welcome and they invite you and they teach you in the things that they believe in these cult groups.

What I've noticed is that there is a form of embarrassment that happens. And I don't know that they're trained to do this, but it's almost as though the embarrassment is part of the strategy that makes a person indoctrinated because you get shaken off guard whenever this happens.

And people notice whenever that happens when you get shaken off guard and they mistakenly see that as the spirit or whatever the movement calls it. But you get shaken enough, you join the group and like you said, you weren't there for that part, you were there for the Sermon on the Mount part.

And so there's this interest that connects you. And then those who take part in that embarrassment, they see that as a sign from God that they've now made a conversion. I also believe that those embarrassment made me feel like they were so much more spiritually intelligent than I was.

And I wanted what they had, I wanted to, because I had a banjo at the time and I decided I was never going to learn how to play it. So I asked one of the musicians, I said, you wouldn't happen to know someone that wants to buy a banjo, would you?

And he said, no, I wouldn't watch your confession. And that's when I started to realize that all this positive thinking and confession, I was not just embarrassed by that, but I was a little put off and I could sense a pride really coming from them when they did things like that.

Yeah, that's odd and that brings back memories of myself. I grew up in different brand of organizations and brand of churches from coast to coast. And some parts of the country, they were into the bluegrass style gospel music and you'd go to church on Sunday and you'd hear people playing anything from banjos, to dobro's, to who knows what.

But then when I came back to Jeffersonville, there were strict rules against stringed instruments. And that's how they phrased it. Stringed instruments, brother, brand, them did not like those. And I'm scratching my head as a musician.

And I'm thinking, well, you got a piano in the church, man. That is a stringed instrument. What are you guys thinking? So I never will forget, I've got a banjo now and I wish I could play it better than I can.

But I remember clearly when I moved here, there were people that did exactly that style of, it's almost like, right. just indignation type of embarrassment. They want you to know that they know that you're in the wrong and they want to tell you about it.

Instead of convincing you of their opinion, they want to tell you that it's wrong and condemn you. So for me, it was like, you know, it was much, much worse when I moved to Jeffersonville, but it was like a gospel of condemnation.

Yes, in this building that we attended for the first, it seems like we were there for a year or two.

My wife and I called it the Union Street Pocoband because it sounded like a Pocoband with the drums and the guitars and the tambourines and all that and it had that bounce to it.

It was fun, I will say that, but during that time is when I got a lot of those little jabs from people about what we were wearing, some of our language that didn't quite fit the lingo that they used and I later discovered that Colts pretty much have their own language,

little key phrases that would be repeated all the time. And just words like blessing or editing,

or the blood of Jesus and all of these things, they could have had their own little dictionary of terms and phrases that they used. And I would get straightened out on a regular basis, but still the message kept me coming back.

And then when I became comfortable with the message and started to conform, I guess, I was way more comfortable and everybody just seemed to love each other. And they were concerned about each other and I hadn't experienced any of these kinds of things in a regular church.

I was raised a Methodist and when I was 18, I ran screaming from that and I did everything wrong that I could find and which, like I said, led me to getting saved in the first place.

But everything they started to say about denominations, I would just go, yeah, that's right. Because I was there, I remember how they would,

some of them even would say tongues were of the devil. And we were told that that was borderline blast for me of the Holy Spirit and you can't be forgiven for that.

That's what we were told. Very similar to what we were told. And the loaded language is something that just fascinates me because every once in a while, I'll be talking to somebody on one of these podcasts and something will come out that was programmed in my head as loaded language and I can tell by their face when they hear it.

They're like, what did he just say that didn't really make any sense? And then on the opposite hand, if somebody I'm talking to is in a different group or even a splinter group of the same movement I was from, their loaded language was just slightly different.

So they'll say things and I'm scratching my head trying to figure out, I know that word means a thing that I know exactly what the word means, but they're using it in a different context than what I recognize.

And they don't realize it, I don't realize it, you know, it's almost as if they're speaking Swahili and I'm speaking English. But that's one of the things that all of these destructive cults have in common.

And the fascinating part for me, from just a psychology aspect, it has become cultural. It's not like it was any form of deception to create the loaded language. But because the group think everybody's thinking and talking and acting the same way, rather than say a long paragraph of words, they can sum it up in one phrase and then it becomes common language among them.

And it makes me think of the broader picture of how just languages themselves evolved over time, but they're evolving in the small cult group. Yeah, the way we spoke was one thing, but the things that they were talking about was kind of foreign to me also.

I mean, with all of the new things that I was not ever subjected to, baptism and the Holy Spirit divine healing, you know, things that were just way over my head at the time.

So a lot of the times I just kept my mouth shut and learned. And I remember I got in in 1979 and some of the guys wanted to take a trip to down to faith assembly.

And I went with them and they drove us by the glory barn. And I felt like I was, I felt like I was seeing the Parthenon. Oh, here's this structure with this great big glory barn painted on the side of it.

And we just kind of drove by on our way and everybody's pointing and talking about, you know, how the building used to rock when they would get to praise the Lord in there. They would dance, but it was more of a jig, I guess, to jump it up and down.

And once in a while you'd see somebody take off around the room, but I mean, and that was all very forum to me. You know, it's interesting in the brand of tabernacle, it was the opposite.

The music was so dry. I grew up, like I said, you know, other churches where people liked music and they had all kinds of instruments. And in the brand of tabernacle, I can remember I had just moved there from a place that had really, really good music. And I moved there and some guy got excited whenever they were singing off fly away and he started clapping his hands and he was wanting him to go faster and in the cult rules of that building, you weren't allowed to clap your hands. It wasn't like it was a thing that they verbalized but they took a fence if you did it. And so the song

leader looks straight at the guy who's clapping his hands and said, okay, let's slow this down now. And he started singing it at least five times slower than that song should ever be song. And I was like, what in the world are they doing? And then I realized later, well, they've got this new rule and they're not even telling the guy that he's violating the rules. And I didn't know. So I was half violating the rules. I was clapping my hands.

But we felt exactly like you described the Parthenon. This was Mecca for us when we came to Jeffersonville, the church had a special place. And then when I moved here, it was even further that way. I would take pride in the building and I would tell people that's the building where I went. And in hindsight, I look back at some of the way, some of the things that people said whenever I said that. And I realized that they knew something was off about the place. But I was taking pride in it. So I didn't notice it.

Well, the music obviously was way different than it was for you because the faster the better for us. And they would change songs together so much that you couldn't catch your breath. And this went on for an hour. And then every once in a while, they'd take a break and somebody would prophesy or have a tongues and interpretation or something like that.

But the music was, it was like everything. It was very, very lively. And then one day they said, we can't sing amazing grace anymore. And they actually taught from the pulpit why we weren't allowed to sing amazing grace was because it said, who saved a wretch like me. And we aren't wretches. So that was a negative confession and they banned the song.

And that's when I noticed things started changing as far as it was such a warm and wonderful lively group. And then they banned that song. And eventually it came out from the pulpit that it was the homosexual culture of California that developed the running shoe. And we couldn't wear running shoes anymore. And at that time, there was a running shoe explosion. And that's all you could buy it to store. So it was a little more difficult to find shoes. Then the same thing happened with bomber jackets and some other stuff. By this time now, they

taught on head coverings. The women had to wear, well, anything that pertained to a woman and not a man that was for sure. There was no pants and there were head coverings. Then piercings kind of went by the wayside. I remember them saying this is not a religion of don'ts.

This is a religion of do's and they never used the term religion either. I have to say it was always some other spiritual term because I heard somebody say one time about religion and he said something about most religious people don't know Jesus. I heard a lot of comments over those years. I heard similar things too. I think everybody who came on has mentioned some way shape or form in which the groups made an us versus them between you and other Christians. I can remember that feeling after I left what it was like just being around

the people that we had so strongly condemned and realizing, wait a minute, these are good people too. They are trying their best to serve Jesus. They obviously didn't believe like I did after I had first left but I came to realize that many of the things that I said about them weren't quite true. My wife got pregnant again and this time it was planned that we were going to have the baby at home. I believe by this time we were getting more and more teachings about healing and my wife through her glasses away. I started

believing for my teeth which were in terrible shape and then we went ahead and had the baby at home and we had a midwife from the church that came and helped. It was quite an experience.

I have to say as we moved along we ended up having four of our children at home and the last one was just my wife and I alone. During that time the song leader at the church, I don't know how much detail I should give because I don't want to offend anybody so I certainly won't use name but his wife had a baby and they went to have that baby at home and it got stuck in the birth canal and was still born and before they were able to get the baby out or everybody ran, they left her and left him to deal with the police and the corner and

she was paralyzed from the waist down and so the church decided that there was either a lack of faith or there was sin in their life and they took him out from that position of being the song leader and they knew that I could sing because I had gotten up and shared one song and I'm a singer from some way way back and they put me in the position as song leader and I couldn't even play a guitar at the time but I learned very quickly and and I became the song leader I'm thinking that was three maybe years in when that happened.

I can't even imagine I've been thinking through some of the testimonies people have given me out of faith assembly and it's just horrifying to think that people were suffering to that extent and then on top of the normal suffering that they have you know the paralysis etc now they've got the spiritual rejection because of the series of unfortunate events that happened to them so above and beyond the physical pains that they're dealing with they also have the mental anguish that goes with it I can't even imagine what that was like how did people how did people

cope with this I'm not sure what kind of recovery it took for like her mentally physically she wasn't even able to walk they had to bring her into the to the meetings in a chair a stuffed chair they wouldn't use a wheelchair and they carried her in in a chair and she would sit way in the back but I know from later on that it pretty much ended their marriage but it wasn't for quite a while yet

by this time the the ministry was you know preaching divine healing all the way and we all want it to be a part of the message we were zealous to you know to to show that we had faith and and everybody was on board with the message so it wasn't until later much later that Hobart Freeman came out and started saying that dot were of the devil, and if you go to the arm of the flesh, that you could lose your salvation.

And people will say, well, he never said that, but he certainly did. And it wasn't just implied. I mean, I can recall him coming right out and saying that doctors were butchers, and if you go to those butchers, then you're going to get what you deserve.

So we were on his mailing list, and somebody else's mailing list, and then we were sitting under that are teaching here in Grand Rapids two times a week. And very early, the teacher that I first heard preaching on the sermon on the Mount died of kidney failure, I later found out. When somebody would die, it's like they fell off the face of the map, and they were very tight-lipped about what happened to them. They just disappeared, and eventually you would get somebody to cloak their gossip and some kind of spiritual context, and you would find out what really happened.

Because there were a lot of gossip in that church. People are people. And we found out that he died with a kidney failure, but he went to the doctor first when it happened, and then he was pulled out of the teaching. He couldn't be a five-fold minister because he went to the doctor. So he disappeared, and then later we got word that he actually died because he recanted, asked for forgiveness, and then didn't go back to the doctor, and that's when he died. And then that seemed to happen quite a few times. And you know, the question would always

come up. There was only the two answers. Either they had a lack of faith, or they had sin in their life. And I would always hear the quote from Smith Wigglesworth. You'd hear this all the time, faith that vizzles out at the finish had a flaw in it from the first. They would quote it so often that I actually wrote it in the first leaf of my Bible, because it's what we live by, and it was like just a constant barrage of this teaching repeatedly, two times a week plus the tapes, which I listened to, at least four hours of teaching on headphones while I was at work every day.

I had to wear headphones to run my machine anyway, so I piped all that through the headphones.

And it just became like it's brainwashing and they would admit that in the teaching they admitted that of course you're being brainwashed. It's the washing of your mind by the water of the word and they were so proud of it.

It's so hard to believe. You know, I'm a science fiction fan. I've mentioned a few times and there's a recurring theme in both horror and science fiction where there's a town. Everybody is so closely tied together.

They're all overly friendly. More than the usual town and some stranger arrives and they, you know, he starts to see what's happening and then suddenly one person disappears and the whole town just doesn't realize that this person is gone.

It's like he never existed. But the new guy or a new family or whatever, they remember the person where this person go. And I have to believe that the authors of those stories have experienced in some way shape or form the way a cult works because that's the way it is.

What you're describing, you know, they forgot about the person or like you said, they, you know, find out he goes to the doctor and he's being chastised. That's the reason why all of this happened to him.

Well, in the stories from the science fiction, the same kind of thing, they stumble upon something that the person did and that was, they look at that as the root cause rather than, well, hey, what happened where this person disappeared to?

And it's fascinating to me to think that the minds can do that. I had friends who left the message whenever I was in it and I'm not like that. I'm more of a people person.

So I would always like walk both sides of the fence and in hindsight, I'm certain that they look bad at me for this too, but I liked people. I love all people and I can't imagine a group taking that away from me, but there are people who get so, like you said, brainwashed.

They're people that, they're, their minds get so fully purged of the human nature that they take on the cult identity to the extent that they will cut off their friends. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new Apostolic Reformation?

You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book.

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Being friendly was still in my vocabulary. As a song leader, I got no special treatment from the five-fold ministers. I never received a phone call from many of them. None of them ever took me out to dinner or any such a thing as that.

I never had any contact, really. Even the teacher that came to teach it at Grand Rapids, to me looking back on it, he was actually kind of rude. But the people there tend to believe that I was something a little higher on the food chain.

So my wife and I did a lot of entertaining. We had people over at the house that we would pray and sing and have big dinners. That kind of fellowship kind of knit the group together.

We did it a lot. At one time I rented a whole roller skating ring. I had to rent the whole thing because I couldn't have them running it and playing their music. So I could control the situation by renting the whole place.

That was just one of the things we did. We did a lot of things like that. And then sometimes later I would hear through the grapevine that the teacher didn't agree with what we were doing.

And it was a little bit, it smacked of warbliness or whatever title they wanted to put on it. But like I said, I got no special treatment being a songleader for the last five or six years that I was there.

So I'm fascinated with being a songleader and being close to the leadership. I don't know if it was the same way in Hobart Freeman's group, but in the Brannum Tabernacle and many of the satellite groups, there were tears of cult elite, cult royalty, and once you got into the musicians' tier, it was more than other churches, it's just a musician or I guess now they have music ministers, they call it.

They're just solely focused upon leading the music and the worship. But in the cult groups, it's like a hierarchy and so you have elevated status. What was it like for you being a songleader?

Did you feel the status? Did you feel like you had a rank higher than other people? Not at all. In fact, we were taught, maybe that happened in other groups and even at the faith assembly.

I mean, I know the song leader at the faith assembly was a very humble, very nice guy. But I didn't feel that it elevated me in any way because I heard the tapes on humility or one thing, and I didn't get, like I said, I didn't get treated with any special treatment from the fivefold ministers, and we would have, after our first teacher died, we would have our regular teacher on Tuesday night, and then they did a rotation of fivefold ministers on Friday night every week, and we never knew who was going to show up on Friday.

So I couldn't count how many different teachers we received from the faith assembly body on a Friday night. Nobody would come on Sunday because they all wanted to be there for Dr. Freeman's Sunday service.

So we had church on Tuesdays and Fridays, and at times I would sing for at least an hour. I would keep things going, and sometimes the teacher driving up to Grand Rapids from Indiana, we'd get stuck in traffic, and we'd have to sing for an hour and a half.

Nobody ever seemed to really mind. But for us having little children in the assembly, we had to keep them sitting in the chairs with us, and they had to be quiet the whole time.

They could sing and clap their hands and dance with us when we were praising, but when the teacher was preaching, and that would be an hour minimum, and sometimes too, if they were really long-winded, and our children would have to sit there quiet.

It's one of my deepest regrets that I disciplined my children if they weren't perfectly quiet. We would go to restaurants, and I would take all seven of my children, and people would come up to us constantly and say, I can't believe how good your children are.

And it was a source of pride for us, but looking back on it, I hate to admit this. They were, we beat them in this submission. It was the teaching believed in corporate punishments, spare the rod, spoil the child, beat the child with the rod, and he will not die.

There was all this teaching about that, and we did. I don't know there, when we were in a restaurant one time, a guy came up to me and asked me if all those children were ours together, or if we were a blended family.

And I said, no, there are us. And he goes, all single birth, and I go, yeah. And he turned to the guy next to him. And he goes, you win. And he said, I bet that guy that that was a blended family.

And he paid for our whole dinner. That was the deal that they made with each other in. Well, that was one of the funniest things that ever happened. I remember the same exact thing.

The children, man, they were just, I'm embarrassed as a parent to think that I was in that same mindset, but I was. We all were. And I can remember, I think recently, I think it just came out that I was talking about this to somebody else.

When you walk in the Brannum Tabernacle, the first thing you heard, if you came in late, was the bathroom off to the right was the ladies room. And you could hear some kid being beaten half to death in there screaming, no, stop it, don't do this to me.

Because if they didn't sit still very long, they were punished, like you said. And I've got family members, not gonna mention names, but whenever you went over to their house, their house was immaculate.

And the lady would literally lay down a blanket and the children, who normal kids throw toys everywhere, well, the children would not bring a toy off of the edge of the blanket because they were beaten that deeply into submission.

And like you said, they prided themselves in it. They were happy that they abused the children like this. And I look back and I just, I can't believe it. We did this, but the long services was probably the most abuse because no kid's gonna sit still for two hours.

I remember in one service, it got so long the adults were getting uncomfortable. And one guy stood up and raised his hand and started pointing at his watch like this at the end of the service.

And you can see the preacher's face just in state has shocked that this guy did this and he ended his service. But I wanna say it was like 3 p.m. It was a long, long service.

And I was starving as a kid, but I sat through it and half the kids got beat because of this long service. Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of the children's suffering was how we treated them.

I mean, we loved our children and we let them know that too. But the discipline was over the top. But we also put them into public school. And then they were left in the school system to take a stand with their teachers because they couldn't celebrate any holidays.

And they usually would take our kids and put them with the Jehovah's Witnesses in the library or they would have to sit in a chair out in the hallway while all the other kids had their little holiday parties.

There was artwork he couldn't do. There was music he couldn't listen to when they would show movies. He couldn't be a part of that any of my kids. It's a good thing that we got out before all of my kids were in school. I think I had three in the public school system while we were still in there.

Teachers hated us. I remember having a lot of difficulty with my oldest boy's teacher as a result of him not being able to part. I could tell that she totally disagreed with us. That was a whole other sense of punishment for our children making them take that stand out there.

Even though I'm sure they didn't want to, they couldn't play with the same toys. I later found out that my oldest boy had a stretch arm strewn in his desk at school. Anyways, I thought we were all walking in the light, all following the message and all making our children do the same.

It wasn't until we were in for over eight years just over. It wasn't until I got out that I started hearing some of the other stories. I found out that not everybody was both feet in all gung-ho like we were. It shocked me.

The people in my tight group were believing for their eyes and their teeth and their families and having babies at home. Later I found out there were other people in the meeting that weren't really living it or even making their kids live it.

That's when after we got out that I first heard about somebody whose kid died and they put them in the trunk of their car. I guess that happened down in Indiana and they were believing that the Lord was going to raise them up.

I mean shocking stories like that. Those kinds of things we never heard until we got out. The little girl who had a tumor that grew over her eye and it grew so big that it came down and covered her face and she suffocated.

So much of it was unnecessary but yet while we were walking in it we were absolutely convinced that they were going to receive their manifestation. They prayed for it. They asked God for it so they had already received it and then there was nothing to do but wait for the manifestation.

You would see it all over the place. with different ailments that was obvious that they were believing from them, had a good friend of here, a woman who came in to our assembly and dumped her thyroid medication in her blood pressure and medicine.

And she was in her 60s and I don't think she lasted a month, had a massive stroke and died, and her family was irate about the whole thing. We would have counseled her to sit under the message a little bit longer before you do that, but she was so convinced that, you know, and I knew others that threw away their medication and died.

And we were always left with, you know, in the world everybody says, why does God allow bad things to happen to good people? That's the thing they're all messed up about. And for us, it was the white of this person who was seemingly walking this message, die, and we were only left with the two other than Hobart Freeman.

We were only left with those two alternatives that there was sin in their life or they didn't have enough faith. However, when Hobart Freeman died, it was God took him away like Elijah because we were focusing on the man instead of the mission.

And we continued to go for two or three years, I think, after Hobart Freeman died. That's how long the momentum kept us going until my wife decided to put her glasses back on. And that was, that was an eye opener.

I don't know. She listened to a tape by one of the five fold ministers about what is a cult. And it was so ironic that she came away from that realizing that we were in a cult.

And it was their tape that opened her eyes to that. And I was the song leader, so it was a little awkward for me because she put her glasses back on and I was willing to accept that she was having a crisis of faith.

But that's when I've heard from the five fold ministers. They never spoke to me really until then. And he, our teacher pulled me aside and said he didn't want my wife speaking to anybody else in the church.

He said he didn't care she wanted to share chili recipes, but she is looked up to and He doesn't want her teaching the younger women in the assembly. Obviously, he said she's lost the faith.

And he told me that I needed to get my house in a murder. But they didn't pull me out of the position. I was still the songleader, and my wife was wearing her glasses, no.

And it was an eye opener, because in my little speech, when I left there, I got up in front of the assembly and gave a speech pretty much about why we were leaving. And in it, I said, when my wife put her glasses back on, we were confronted with the same, unloving, uncaring, rude behavior that we showed other people when they didn't agree with us.

And I realized how rude and arrogant we were with this message. That's a hard realization to come to you. I remember when that hit me after leaving. I went back mentally. I took note of everybody that I could remember who I encountered.

Many people who were trying, I think, to get me out of this cult that I was in. And some of the things that they were saying were probably true. But because of my pride, I was thinking they were sinners going to hell trying to lure me into Satan's that was one of our loaded languages, Satan's Eden.

And so we looked down upon people so badly. And once I left, I started reading the Bible over and over and over, I read it, I lost count of the times. But cover to cover, I kept reading it.

And I started noticing that the sin of pride is one of the most frequently mentioned sins in the New Testament. And I got to thinking about the way that I had treated other people, thinking that I was a better Christian than them.

In fact, thinking they were non-Christian. And then the deeper thought hit me, what does it mean to be Christian? What, whenever you use that word, what does it mean? And for me, it was, I was Christian because I believed in Christ and because I followed William Branham as my prophet.

And I realized that that triad doesn't exist in the Bible. You know, there are many passages that say there's only, there is no mediator between God and man. You go directly to God. And then I started thinking about all of the other cult groups and trying to determine what's different about this other group compared to what we had.

I remember thinking clearly they're a cult because they followed this man. And I was doing the same exact thing that they were doing and didn't even really pay attention to it. I was so caught up in it.

So I know exactly what you're saying. And it's hard to put that into words that somebody who has never experienced can even fathom. It was pretty harsh when we got out that the people that I worked with, denominational people, came to me and said, we always knew you were wrong.

When I admitted that it was a cult in front of one guy, he said, stop saying that. It makes you sound stupid. And I realized that people didn't understand the pull. It was very difficult to explain why you would do something that this man said.

And we did it willingly. I did it. I was overjoyed to comply when Hobart Freeman said, no more minor music. Or he said, no more hunting. We could hardly wait for the next month's tapes, because it was always some new and different, deeper, and that was it.

It was deeper life in the spirit. And he always had some new revelation for us. And we felt really blessed by that. As it progressed, like I said, he started to say that doctors were butchers of the devil.

And then he started banning this, that, and the other thing. And I can't explain that. I mean, maybe now I could. I did a little bit of work with the call to awareness network when we got out.

And we traveled around, mostly to Lutheran churches, and spoke to their youth groups about how to recognize and avoid getting into a cult. But I shouldn't have been doing that because I can speak maybe for both my wife and I, that we were very damaged.

And we walked away without getting any counseling. And there we were trying to guide the use of America into avoiding cults. And it just eventually became too much for us. The fear that God was going to strike us dead or our children.

I mean, the first year out, we had two broken arms. I had a tumor removed from my skull. We had a baby in the hospital. And I mean, this is the first year out.

And we were absolutely convinced that God was going to kill us for leaving this message. We didn't want to leave the Lord. We wanted to get out from underneath that message, which we found out was.

wrong. And again, I don't know about naming names, but one of the big helps that helped us to see this was after my wife put her glasses on, we found a book at the Christian bookstore called The Health and Wealth Gospel. And there was a chapter on faith assembly in there.

And I know I wasn't supposed to, but I looked at it. And I just remember a really cold feeling coming up my throat. And I felt like I had devoted my entire life to this thing.

And I thought, I never even entertained the possibility that we were actually wrong. And then it started to come on me that, yes, we could have been wrong. And we went down to Indiana and met with an ex assistant pastor and talked to him at great length. He didn't want to talk to us at first. But I took my whole family down there and he was very, very good to us. We spent the whole afternoon discussing it. And then I came back from that meeting.

And I wrote up a little speech and got up in front of the assembly on a Friday night. Instead of taking my guitar, I just brought my little piece of paper and I read this speech to the entire group about, I said, we had some questions about this message. And I said that the way we were, the reaction that we got from asking a question was very unloving and people were so threatened by it that it just helped me to realize that it was wrong.

I said, we didn't have questions about minor things like, why don't we have a Sunday school for our children or why don't they have speakers in the room where the ladies go to nurse. It wasn't that. I said, we had questions that went to the core of the message.

And I said, I can't in good conscience stay here anymore. And most everybody tried to pray in tongues over what I was saying loudly. And a couple of them jumped up and said, wait a minute, we should pray about this. And I said, don't you think I've already prayed about this? And 11 of us got up and walked out that night. And honestly, that was the beginning of the end for the assembly. I don't think it went on much longer. If they lasted a year, I would be surprised. And the entire thing started to fall apart around that time, even down in Indiana. So I have to believe that God was in that.

I tried to find another church. I didn't want to give up on Jesus. And after about 15 churches,

I discovered that it was too hard for me to find another church because I had the book every wind of doctrine that Hobart Freeman wrote. And I knew everything that was wrong with everybody else except us. And it was impossible to sit under another, any denomination, even an undenominational church. That was a denomination in itself to us. And we ended up, even after the cold awareness network, we crashed and burned and went right back into where we were. It's like we picked up where we were in our 20s. Only now, we're in our late 30s. And I went back to drugs and alcohol

and we ended up divorcing my wife and I. But God was still with us. It's an odd story, but we were apart for a year. And we got back together. And after six years, we remarried. So I'm still with the wife of my youth. But we went through some very, very hard times there. I don't advise anybody to walk away from a call and not go get some kind of counseling.

There's depths to that that you just don't know what you're in for

when you do something like that. I experienced all the stages of grief, anger, sadness,

this, I think there's like six different stages of grief. And I went through all of them and then went through all of them again. And it took us about 20 years before we got back into a church. Well, it's so good that you did get back together. And you know, I think a lot of people who join a cult later in life, they experienced to some extent what you said. It's as though their life was sucked away from them for a period of time and then they re-enter right where they left off. And you know, even the age, no matter what age you got pulled out, I've seen

people who got sucked into a cult as a teenager and they tell me that when they came back in to the real world, the quote unquote normal world, they said that they entered back in and they still had even to some extent the mindset of the adolescent or teenager that they were.

whenever they adjoined. So anyway, it sounds like you made it through okay. You got back with your wife and things look good from the other side. So thank you so much for sharing the story with us. Well, thank you for asking for it. Oh, by the way, I would like you to know that what you and Chinom have spoken of has been a great deal of help in healing some of the things that I didn't realize were still up there in my head. Well, good. I'm so glad that we were able to help in some way.

So 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, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, Available on Amazon, Kindle, and Soon, Audible.