The Bridal Paradigm - Behind IHOPKC's Controversial Teachings - Detangling IHOPKC

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org and with me I have my co-host and friend, Jed Hartley, son of a prophet and former member of International House of Prayer. Jed, you see me laughing every time I say that. I guess we're both laughing a little bit but the audience can laugh at me today because I barely have any voice. I woke up with this this morning and I'm a good advertisement for Ludens cough drops because I can keep

doing the podcast as long as I have these things by my side. My voice will last through the podcast even though I sound like this. But anyway, is that a paid paid partnership or is it? As much as I've mentioned these things I probably should ask them for a paid membership or partnership but no I just take them because this actually works and it does help you so but today we're talking about something fun. I was alone and I was reading the your agenda for today and I thought this is a good one for me to just be surprised when you

start talking. I know we're all going to talk about the fasting which I won't be surprised for that because that really was fundamental to latarine and quite honestly it was it was deceptive in the way that all of that played out but the other parts of it which I'll let you introduce I think would be it's gonna be shocking for me and I think for some of the listeners who weren't in the international house of prayer they're gonna be like what was that? Yeah I think that there's there's so much overlap with a lot of the teaching when with

between different latarine ministers and whatnot and so it's hard to it's hard to find things that are just unique to a specific individual but if I had to pinpoint something that was specific to IHOP KC that you don't see in other latarine churches and other NAR churches or or just even charismatic churches in general it's starting to become more of a thing because of Mike Bickle but one of the central teachings that we were taught at IHOP KC was the bridal what Mike Bickle called the bridal paradigm and this bridal paradigm influenced pain it basically a lot

of the whole ethos and environment of the community. It gave a very specific perspective on the antimes

and kind of what we were doing at IHOP. So for you, John, if you haven't really heard much about the bridal paradigm, which this wasn't, Mike Bickel didn't invent this. He pulled it from some of the Christian mystics and St. Teresa of Avala and some others who had spoken about it in the past.

Usually it was nuns who spoke about it, but just to give you kind of a brief overview of what the bridal paradigm is, it is weird, but it is a metaphor for the end times church.

For the end times church and for the return of Jesus. And so there are some different passages that fuel this concept of the bridal paradigm. But the central idea is that it paints the end times church as a bride who is waiting for the return of a groom to be married.

And the bride is preparing herself to be married to this king or this groom who is returning. And so the themes of it are consecration, saving yourself for the king. It is overtly sexual.

It plays on the Song of Solomon. So it uses a lot of like the actual sexual metaphors in the Bible.

It was very weird growing up in this community because as like a teenager,

I and some of the other teenage boys and girls who grew up in it, we are hypersexual ourselves. And so we're reading into a lot of sexual things that aren't sexual things. And we feel like we get in trouble for our minds being dirty, thinking this thing that isn't sexual is sexual.

And there was a lot of times where, especially at one thing conferences, there would be running jokes about, and do they realize how sexual some of this sounds? And nope, that was the point.

That was the point is that it was this sort of metaphor of a sexual relationship consecrating yourself, keeping yourself a virgin for when the groom returns.

A lot of people will probably even push back. Like if you were in IHOP and you heard me say that, the maintaining... your virginity for the return of the the groom. I guarantee there would be a lot of bristling.

If I even like told myself that 15 years ago, there would be like, oh, no, that's not what it's about. But that is just 100% what it was about. That's all of what the metaphor was. There's one of the central parables is the parable of the 10 versions, which I don't know if you're familiar with parable of the 10 versions. But it's in Matthew 25. And the parable is there's 10 versions who are waiting for the groom. And there's five foolish versions, virgins, and five prepared virgins.

And it's all about land. They all have lamps. And at some point during the night, the the bridegroom is going to return. And they have oil in their lamps. And at a certain point, that oil runs out and the light dies out. And so the ones who are prepared have extra oil with them. And the ones who are unprepared and who are foolish don't have enough oil to get through the night. And so I've really never understood the biblical past. Like it's not one of my favorite parables anyway. But that's just the the metaphor is is that the the groom is going to

return. We have to be prepared. We have to maintain oil in our lamps for when the groom returns. So it explicitly sets Jesus as this groom and the bride as this or sorry and the church as this bride. And we are waiting with this sort of longing anticipation for the return of our king for our groom so that we may be married to him. And we will save ourselves and we will suffer. Right?

There's this sort of longing expectation like we know that we will not be fulfilled and tell the groom returns. We know that there is a purpose and identity for us. There is a marriage for us.

There is a love that is just around the corner and we just have to wait. And if we aren't good enough, like if we aren't able to wait enough, if we aren't able to consecrate ourselves enough, if we aren't able to keep oil in our lamps, then we won't be prepared for when the the groom returns.

So it was explicitly about the end times too of just like Jesus is going to return and he's going to return in our lifetimes any second like we have talked about in several of the previous episodes that was a lot of the apocalyptic nature of IHOPKC is we truly believed that the Lord was going to return in our day and our time. But more so.

but then just returning, he was going to return and marry the bride of Christ. And there was that sort of longing and expectation and anguish for not being with him. So that was the metaphor there.

So man, I thought you were gonna bring something new. This is just Latter-Rain 101. We're talking about, yeah. In the message cult, we called it the, what do we call it, the foolish virgin doctrine.

And like you said, it does come somewhat from the Bible. If you read, what does it map you to 27, 25? I think it's 25. Talks about the parable of the foolish virgins, right?

But what Latter-Rain did was it tried to reuse that passage and that parable to insinuate that all non-cult churches were the quote unquote foolish virgins. And because they didn't join into the revival, they didn't have the quote oil in their lamps.

And so when Jesus returned, he was coming to return for his bride, which we also taught that it was us and we're to marry Jesus. Now I'm laughing only because I've studied it to end that most people will not study.

It's actually turned into somewhat of a common Christian doctrine. Whenever we began experiencing churches outside of the cult, I would constantly hear how we the Gentiles are the bride. And I was a little confused because I had thrown away all my cult doctrines and I had actually read the Bible, but you read all of the passages referring to the bride are usually referring to Jerusalem.

In fact, Ezekiel 16, I think, Jerusalem is declared to be the faithless bride, the mother of all harlots, all of the things that we applied to the Churches. Ezekiel 16 just really applies to the church, to Jerusalem.

So it did spread throughout mainstream Christianity to some extent, but the sexual part is what I started chuckling when you were talking. Brannum would teach the foolish, we call it the foolish virgin's doctrine, exactly what you're talking about.

But he would go into the most rampant sex openly talking about sex. And he was saying that the female human was designed for the sole purpose of sex to lure men into sex and that no other animal, not a dog, not a hog, no other animal could stoop as low as the human female.

And to top it off in 1965, he shows up to church and he says, and he's a little surprised that there are women in there. I think he expected it to be all men.

He said that we're in a mixed audience. I did bring some papers describing these sex acts, how women, during sex, he called it a wallide condition when during... Apparently, during the female orgasm, the eyes change, whatever it was he was talking about.

He brought actual papers to show the men after church, so they went to sex and beyond.

Well, that's fascinating. So I knew, I thought that there had been some overlap with Brannum and I knew that he had taught a bit about it. I didn't know how unique... Here I'm thinking the bridal paradigm is a unique thing to Mike Bickle and to this movement. Of course, it's just another re-packaged flattery thing. Of course, there's nothing new under the sun of the other Solomon passage that no one talks about. But yeah, so... Well, A, it just strikes me how incredibly misogynistic some of this rhetoric is. And I don't even understand... Because if you look at early penicostalism,

a lot of what separated penicostalism, in my perspective, in a good way from other denominations of Christianity, was that it actually gave a voice to people who didn't have a voice. You know, you had, in the early 1900s, you had the Zeus Street revival. Suddenly there are black men who otherwise couldn't have spoken in a lot of churches because of segregation. Suddenly, being given a voice, you had women who were given a voice to, you know, Amy Simple McPherson, we became this huge sort of mega church pastor. And because the idea of penicostalism, at least one

of the central ideas to me, was this idea that the Holy Spirit can speak through anybody and then it gives this sort of decentralized access to all individuals to be the sort of connection between God, that there doesn't have to be this very strict liturgy that you don't have to go through, you know, eight years to be... You get your degree in your seminary degree or something like that. You didn't have to be ordained by this specific church, which obviously all of that like decentralized lack of authority has led to a lot of the Wild West con artists becoming

these huge individuals without any sort of... checks and balances, but early on it gave women and minorities a voice to speak in the church. And to see how

misogynistic and just really afraid of women and afraid of sexuality and afraid of women's sexuality, but also it's not like it's just a threat. It's not this sort of puritanical. We're not going to talk about sex at all. There's this very sexual, they're preaching a sexual gospel while having deep rooted misogyny towards women and women's bodies. And that was definitely demonstrated with Mike himself because if you think about this bridal paradigm that he was doing, he was doing this whole setting this metaphor of there's the there's God and he is going to return and he is going to be like the groom who returns to his church. And the bride is going to be

prepared for him and it sets up the metaphor of you know the church being the bride and the and Jesus being the bridegroom. Well then he used that same sort of metaphor in his grooming of young women throughout, especially in the early days, I think that it probably continued. We have less testimonies from some of the younger women who have been involved with him in the last like 20 years, but for in the 80s and the 90s that was what Michael was doing to groom these young teenagers was that he was giving these prophetic words to them about how he and this woman,

there are several different women, but you know when he was speaking to a particular woman he would say that I you and I shall unite in the future that's the sort of like the one day we will be together there's there's a problem that I've been delayed the bridegroom has been delayed we can't be together right now the delay being he's married and has two children and is a leader of a church and it's horrible and and she's a teenager so of course they can't be together but one day that is going to be solved you know my wife is going to die in an earthquake and that

is going to open up the door for us to be united but until then you have to concentrate yourself for me you have to set yourself apart for me and this was this this is what he this is what he did he tried to groom women to set themselves apart from him every time those women then grew up and had to like reckon with the fact that this was a nasty relationship and they went and married other individuals. He had this very weird neuronic like anger towards the men that they married. It's just super creepy stuff. So he sets up this sort of pattern.

And I guess, I don't know, I guess now that I'm talking, I understand the misogyny of it because if you are, if you have so little respect for women that you are doing all of this to

destroying these young women's lives by trying to groom them and pray upon them, it makes sense that that predatory nature would spill into your into your gospel. So I guess I get it with Mike, but it still just seems so bleak. You know, whenever you talk through some of these things, it forces your mind to think about it as you speak. And so I think many of the people who were in these movements, if they were to just actually talk about what the minister said during Sunday service after church, if they were to repeat it, I think many of them just wake up and leave,

right? But more than that, if you go back and you study some of the histories and just talk about what you've read, people would just snap out of it because we have been taught this false mythology of where all of this came from. You mentioned Azusa Street Revival, for example.

I grew up hearing that phrase over and over, not just what the church I was in, but many of the other churches too, the Pentecostal churches, it's this mythological event that the written history matches not even close to what they've made it into. And you go back and so it was supposed to be, like you said, God giving the voice to the ministers and they were able to speak sermons without the doctrine of divinity degrees because God speaking, giving them their messages entirely.

We go back and you read it and they were so filled with spiritual ecstasy that they were actually preaching with just one or two words of an entire passage of the Bible and just totally cramming whatever it is they wanted to say about that word. To the extent there were people who actually claimed that God had given them the power to read their Bibles when they were illiterate and they would get up to preach and they couldn't read it at all. But what they were doing was just repeating words that they had heard. And so there were reporters there who weren't in the

spiritual ecstasy who were just writing what they saw. So they weren't caught up in the hype and they're like, this doesn't make any sense. What is this? And That kind of thing grew and grew until another aspect of the revival that not many people in the Pentecostal movement will admit.

There were a large number of women who left their husbands because their husbands was like, I'm not going into that nonsense. So they actually left their husbands and they were flirting with men on the streets and luring them into the revival.

And that's one of the things that grew and into this big thing, right? You can actually go read articles where they're doing this. And where it went from there, they created this authoritarian structure that did not really exist prior to this.

But they created the idea through British's realism that we the Gentiles are the bride and the bridegroom is coming. But more than that, we're setting up an authoritarian structure for the church. So God is the bride, Jesus is the bride to the church.

The church is headed by the minister. The minister is the spiritual husband of the congregations. Well this exploded into, I cannot remember the name, but on my website, there are churches where the quote unquote spiritual husbands were practicing all of the joys of the husband to the women in his church and recording it and filming it.

Which was slightly illegal in his country. So whenever you have something that is just so blatantly wrong in its foundation, you're going to end up with all kinds of nonsense. Well, so do you think that in some ways this bridal paradigm, which is probably not how it was just described before?

This idea of the metaphor of Jesus as the groom and the church as the bride and then having that sort of structure and authority placed upon the way that the church is, do you think that that was sort of a way to regain a sort of hierarchical structure?

Because you don't have a typical hierarchical structure in Pentecostal churches. And so if there's this sort of patriarchal structure that is instituted within these churches, it gives a measure of that structure back to the church, but it gives the male pastor or the male husband within a community.

Like gives him basically still authority over other individuals while maintaining this sort of wild west at anybody can talk to the Lord sort of method. You know, I've thought long and hard about that exact question.

Where did it come from and why? If you look back at the early... is the revival. It was so much out of control. Charles Fox Parham, who he had been, he wasn't able to take part in the revival because he was in some trouble for molesting a young man. I've covered that history pretty well. His partner, his student, William Joseph Seymour, spearheaded the revival. Within days, weeks, it grew so far out of his control that he actually wrote back and by letter to Charles Fox Parham and said, what do I do?

This is out of my control. These people are crazy. Basically, is what he said. And it was. There were occultists who were coming into this thing. I mean, people who had been practicing seances were coming into the Zeus Street revival and, oh, glory to God and glory to whatever say on their demon that they're bringing up to the extent that whenever somebody was to stand and even like praise God or seek for seeking further salvation, if they began to get a little bit out of line, they would actually kick them out forcibly and injure them. I've got newsroom articles of that on the website. My latest book, Christian Identity

to the NAR covers a lot of that history and has some of the quotes about that. But it did grow largely out of control during the revival, but then the revival spread and Pentecostalism just kind of dissipated. I think for me, where I'm leaning towards what brought all this about, it got to the point where by the late 40s, whenever this was reinventing itself into the latirane movement, people were largely more aware than they were back in the early 1900s. And so what would happen is people who did not have a full constraint over their

critical thinking would go ask questions or talk to the news media and it was turning into a big, a different kind of chaos. They were actually news media that were critical of the revivals and they were actually covering the revivals as they were happening and all of these alleged healings. One newspaper article said, I went all through tours in Canada.

I did not see one single person healed. They would come in their stretchers and their crutches and they would leave on the same stretchers and crutches. Now there were some people healed. Don't get me wrong. But the critical thinking would have taken over and so they had to control it. So they started setting up hierarchies where they could forcibly control the people is what it looks like to have happened. I don't know. I'm still forming an opinion, but it seems to be a combination of both if that makes any sense.

Yeah. I think that it's all, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. I've seen a lot of the same things that you're talking about and even just from reading a lot of the work.

that you've done about those the early Panacostal days. And it is that very decentralized chaos, wild west,

that's what when I try to tell orthodox Christian or individuals who did not grow up, especially if it was like international, if you go to England, there is definitely some of this going on not just in the United States, but describing what the Panacostal church is and what the charismatic church is, two individuals who are Catholic or have been in more structured liturgy or liturgical settings is very difficult because it just is, that's the only thing I could say is this wild west, just there's no real authority.

But then some authority did emerge from it. And it's hard to really, even like when you read books that are talking about the structure, the authority structure within the NAR now.

I think a lot of very interesting, very well-readed research individuals miss the mark a little bit because there is this big analysis of the NAR church, and the book was an excellent book. I'm forgetting what his name is right now, but he was looking at it from the perspective of the church that birthed some of the Trump movement and some of the right-wing Christian identity movement that has emerged recently.

And he identified like Lance Walnell as one of the movers behind the scene who is orchestrating a lot of this. And it was really funny because just as someone who grew up with my dad who was preaching and talking to these different individuals, I don't know about now.

I haven't seen it in the last five years or whatever, but Lance Walnell didn't know.

I don't know if I should be saying this, but no one respected Lance Walnell. He was just a dude who was saying stuff, who wanted to be at the front of everything. He wanted to have his name up there with other individuals.

And so it's not that he wasn't super well respected or anything like that, but he definitely wasn't leading or orchestrating the movement. I don't know if anybody really was, because I don't think that that's the type of movement that it is.

I don't think that there is a hierarchical authority. I think that you have all of these little kings of their kingdoms, and that's where I was getting at some of the misogyny of it, the patriarchy of it, is that some version of a misogynistic patriarchal gospel gives you, if you're a man, the freedom to be the king of your own little castle.

However small that might be, and that was how it was with my dad, and our household, that's how it was with Mike Bickle in the larger Aihop Kingdom, is that everyone was their kind of own authority, and you can see that with the way that these individuals butt heads, and it's the sort of, yeah, territorial, I have my territory.

You have your territory being behind the scenes and hearing some of the like, feuding that goes on behind these churches and realizing that it's a lot more superficial and a lot sillier than you think, like, it's not this, this, this organized structure, I, you know, that's how it seemed to me.

I don't have a complete understanding that I'm not, like, I haven't, I don't have my PhD in this, I have my experience in this, and, you know, there's, it comes from like a very anecdotal place, but I don't think that the, the Pentecostal community has ever really gotten away from that Wild West kind of anything goes.

It has been this sort of wrestling maybe individuals started putting more structure into it so that they could keep the magic tricks going, like, it became more stage productions than it became the organization of an actual church.

It was more, hey, how do we keep this moment I'm going? I think certainly every revival looks more like that, I mean, you tell me what you think of this, but you have these different revival movements and you have a bunch of different revivalists playing, they all play the sort of same tricks that each other are playing at the time.

Those tricks die out and they have to find new tricks and then another revival starts based off of a total different game plan. That's how it's always seemed to me. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism, transition through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation?

You can learn this and more on William Brandham Historical Research's website, William-Brandham.org. 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.

You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top.

And as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching. On behalf of William Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support.

I'm actually glad that you brought it up in the way that you did, because what I said before doesn't tell the whole story. And there isn't really a good way, it's such a complicated mess, there's not a good way to tell the story.

So recently, and this hit today, so when this podcast comes out, it will have been out for a few weeks. The City of Tucson published a series of articles exposing the Brannum cult. We talked about it briefly before, and interviewed cult headquarters and started talking about some of the very horrific things that have happened because of Brannum in the Laterane Movement, and the deaths involved.

So while interviewing cult headquarters, cult headquarters could very easily deny all of it. By simply saying, we don't have a structure that governs all of the splinter groups is essentially what they said. And they didn't use these exact words, but in their way of saying it, this is by design.

We do not want to have a simple central governing committee. Because if we do, then we hold responsibility for all of this mess that has been created. So what happens is each mess that rises up like International House of Prayer, they are their own entity.

Whenever they take the fall, they just go down while the rest of it stays intact. And it, you know, it is by design, but it's a, it's such a mess, man. Whenever I left the religion, I had been indoctrinated to think that was a good thing and not a bad thing.

It was a good thing to have independent churches. And then I started attending churches where there were some semblance of governance. And I started to understand, well, that's checks and balances. It keeps people from doing the things like we're talking about.

And it's not that they're, you know, in the Brannum cults, they referred to it like the Catholic Church and the Pope and they said, this hierarchy comes straight from Rome. It's from the pits of hell.

They would say things like this. But when you go to the mainstream Christian churches, it isn't really so much that they're trying to control the minister in his doctrinal, in his doctrines. compositions, it's more to the fact that if you join into the denomination, you should have a shared belief, otherwise you wouldn't be here in the first place.

But while you're here, do not do these things that can potentially be dangerous. That's really what it came down to. Totally. I'm actually working with individuals who have been involved with some of the Catholic Church and advocacy, because so I'm starting to work with some advocacy for victims of abuse in clergy settings.

There's been precedent for this in the Catholic Church, obviously, in the last 20, 30 years. There's been huge scandals with the Catholic Church and systemic abuse in there. There's been something like, I can't remember if it was hundreds of millions of dollars or maybe even billions of dollars of money paid out in lawsuits because of the abuse that was going on in these Catholic denominations.

It's interesting because I genuinely think that some of the charismatic individuals saw what was going on in the Catholic Church and maintain this sort of anonymity from having these different, like you said, splinter groups and different no direct accountability systems, because when it started unraveling for the Catholic Church, there were people to hold accountable for it, and there was money to be given out to the, you know, there was lawsuits to be had.

I have spoken with different lawyers about bringing suits against some of these individuals who were committing clergy abuse and whatnot. There's movement on it, but I guarantee you there would be a lot more movement if there was any authority structure, because they can just, like, IHOP KC can just dissolve and disappear and who are you going to hold accountable for it?

The assets are spread out and they've been, the assets have been given to other independent organizations that no longer have any ties to IHOP. Mike Pickle did this where he's structured IHOP so that there was, like, legitimately 20 different nonprofits that all were in the sort of IHOP umbrella, and they would switch assets to different organizations in order to skirt around financial transparency, and in this case, now, to avoid lawsuits taking things from them.

When I spoke up about my father, I found out that in 2015, there was a woman who was abused by my father that I didn't realize. about this, or maybe this is, sorry, sorry, this is 2017.

And she came forward and sent an email to IHOP leadership and to Mike Bickel. And Mike Bickel responded and was like, Bob Hartley is not a part of our organization. He's not, I have no authority over Bob Hartley.

Now, as a friend of my father and as really a kind of older brother figure, Mike Bickel could have spoken to my dad just as a human being and been like, because it was true he didn't actually have any authority over my father, but my father's ministry was launched through the international house prayer and through that entire community.

So Mike is like kind of washes his hands of it and says, this is not, this is not for me. I don't have anything to do with this. I had no idea about that too.

Like I didn't, I didn't realize that those emails I could send. My dad had told me some version of that story, but he had made it sound extremely different where he was the victim and this woman wasn't the victim and all this, you know, sad, crazy stuff.

So I had no idea. And then within this last year, I love that information has kind of come out and I realized too, someone had also spoken to leadership at Bethel in in Redding, California and the same thing.

Bethel was like, he's an independent minister. He's spoken here before, but he's not, he's not ours. We can't tell him what to do. When I then called Bethel leadership, I don't know if I've told you this story.

I think I have, but my dad was moved basically to Redding, California, after some of this abuse had been exposed and was realizing that he was abusing women, like pretty habitually abusing women and using prophecy to get women into like vulnerable positions to abuse them.

And some of them were coming forward to me because they couldn't come to either I hopper Bethel, no one seemed to take them seriously or care about it. So in order to bring accountability, once I started speaking up, some of these women ended up coming to me.

I hear their stories. They're obviously just heartbreaking stories. Obviously heartbreaking for me because this is my own father who's the perpetrator of this abuse. So I call up both I hop leadership and Bethel leadership.

I hop leadership does, they're having their whole scandal with Mike Pickle during this time and they're like, okay, we're gonna ban Bob Hartley from the premise and we're gonna speak out against them. So they kind of cut it off right away.

They don't have any problem. They're like, it kind of was good for them. And they're like, let's distract and throw the heat onto this guy. But Bethel doesn't, I'm talking to them. They, I, I gave all of the information to them.

I spoke to Bill Johnson specifically, sent him an email about it. We had it back fourth. And then like two days later, Bill Johnson invites my dad to a prophetic conference and like saves a seat for him.

Right after I spoke to him about, hey, my dad is not mentally well. He's abusing individuals. He's using prophecy to do this. And he's using the authority that you by just grafted into your guy's community.

So I give him all the game plan of it. I'm like, this is my own father. I'm not making this shit up. Like this, this is, I'm telling you this authentically. He seemed to even believe me.

And then two days later, he saves a seat for my father because Bethel's culture of honor. They don't, you know, want to dishonor the prophets or whatever. And so then I have to speak out of it publicly.

I kind of call, I start tweeting about it. And there's more sort of Bethel gets in kind of hot water. They call me up. And it's the same thing. It's like, hey, we can't tell your dad what to do.

We're just a church. Like, there's no authority and structure. And it's like, my dad wouldn't have a ministry if it wasn't for IHOP and if it wasn't for Bethel. So to hear from both of the leadership of those communities, be like, hey, we don't.

This isn't us. It's like, well, who the hell else is it? Like this is, it's not me. Like I, you know, he got this authority by growing in these church communities in these ministry communities.

Like that's how he has his authority. And yeah, you can't tell him what to do, but you can warn your community, hey, this individual is not safe. And like, don't go to house church meetings with him.

Don't go to these private gatherings, you know, it's gross. It's not, you know, you don't want to do that. It's bad look for you, bad look for them, you know, all of these things.

But it's the only way to properly deal with reality in that situation. And this is almost exactly verbatim the conversation that I had with them. And then eventually they did say, hey, okay, we're going to send out an email and warn our staff.

They never said anything publicly, but we're going to warn our staff or Bob Hartley is not going to be allowed on the premise anymore, which, you know, was a little bit of a relief to me just because it felt like, okay, I felt this weight of having to prevent future abuse from happening.

I don't have that full capacity to do that, but I need to at least do what I can. with it, but it went back to this system of zero accountability. And they were talking to me like, oh, I wish we could do something.

And it's like, you have established this system. You are the ones who invite in ministers without having any sort of accountability. You just have anybody come and give your platform to the latest magician who is doing their trick.

And as long as it boosts your numbers, then great. Like that you set up the system of accountability. Don't tell me there's nothing that you can do as if it is something beyond your control.

This is how the world has been set up. So yeah, so the Wild West of it all is clearly an intentional piece of the pie. It's clearly something that has been structured in order to avoid accountability.

Well, the same thing happened. I don't know if you've spoken about the Bethany Deaton scandal. Has anyone spoken to you about the Bethany Deaton scandal? Yeah, I think we brought it up in the podcast with Brantley.

Yeah, so I won't retell the full story at all then, but that was one of the biggest scandals in IHOP KC history. It's crazy that that's just one of the biggest scandals because it's a horrific scandal where a young woman dies in very mysterious circumstances.

It is ruled sort of a suicide, but someone comes forward and confesses to murdering her.

I'm just giving the bullet points just in case people hadn't seen this.

She is a part of the IHOP community, and then she's in a house church that's all IHOP students. There's a lot going on with that, and I don't wanna get wrapped up and telling the whole entire story, but the basic stuff is that she dies.

Someone comes forward and confesses to the murder. It turns out that IHOP leadership had gotten a hold of one of the individuals who was within her small group, had brought them in for a deliverance session that lasted something like 20 hours or 12.

I can't remember how long, but basically the whole day, they have this deliverance session, and he eventually confesses to the murder of this young woman, and turns out he probably almost certainly did not do it.

And he was just coerced into confessing to this murder. It is eventually ruled a suicide, but there's this big sort of mystery around... and what actually happened, even if it was suicide, you know, IHOP got involved by doing this investigation on their own and coercing and confession, and it just was an absolute, massive situation.

But despite them actually actively being involved, and actively getting an individual to confess, the way that IHOP talked about it was exactly how you had just talked about it previously of what Brandon had done, where it's like, oh, it's just all these splinter groups.

We don't have any accountability. Like they took the house church of all IHOP students and they pretended like that was something totally distinct and separate from their community, and was like, hey, there was just this crazy cult community within IHOP.

We're not a cult, that little house church was a cult. And in that cult, some bad things happened to this woman, but we don't have anything wrong with IHOP itself. Same thing happened when there was a couple, a young couple were fasting, and they had an infant,

and the mother was fasting, and the infant died of malnutrition, because it wasn't getting any nutrition from the mother, because she was fasting, and the mother and the father

end up going to prison for child neglect. But again, international house prayer, zero accountability. There's no like, hey, our system of fasting, which we were gonna talk about today, and I totally forgot about, but our system of fasting, we're not gonna ask any questions about how this might have causally affected this horrific situation.

We're not gonna have any accountability to this situation, because those people are crazy. They should have known better, right? And sometimes IHOP tracks the crazies, that's just how it is.

It's quite diabolical when it's done habitually, habitually, like when there's a consistent pattern of this, then it's like, oh, this is not just like something horrific happened, and you're trying to distance yourself from it, because you can't square those two things.

That's one thing, but when it's a continual pattern of it of causing these horrific events to happen, or being really involved in these really horrific atrocities, and then continually insulating yourself from any consequences of that, even just consequences and accountability within this.

system, even just taking responsibility to change and to update policies is absolutely well. You know, the real power of the new apostolic reformation is its networks. They've got all of these networks of these apostolic groups that they all band together.

And then the superstars within each network get to cross pollinate, cross pollinate. So they'll invite him over and here's superstar one. He's got our pulpit for this week, for this convention, this revival, whatever.

And then he goes home. But in the end, it starts looking like a really poorly written series by Tom Cruise. He's going to come. He's going to get disavowed. And then we're going to forget him until we bring him back the next time.

Then he'll get disavowed again. Then we'll forget him. Then he comes back again, you know, same, same plot as the movies. I do like the movies, but there's no plot to them. But what's really interesting, you mentioned fasting and we're going to have to talk about that probably in another podcast, but the core, the main sect of the Brannum movement, from which all of this originated has completely disavowed the fasting, which is really, really interesting if you think about it.

I have recordings of William Brannum, which is named Franklin Hall, the guy who invented the fasting that all of this came from. They're sharing the pulpit together and Franklin Hall is saying, what are we going to start with, William Brannum, a little money, and he starts laughing about it, the money they're raking in with his fasting doctrine.

And so this whole thing developed from fasting and it created problems way back in the early days of later reign. And so they were disavowing Franklin Hall and his fasting doctrine back in the 50s.

And then it can, it sort of continued. There were some splinter groups that still did it to the same levels. And then, you know, fast forward till today, it's almost completely disavowed, but there are many splinter groups that pop up that they suddenly realized, wait a minute, fasting was part of the core history of this whole mythology.

Let's try it and see what happens. And then they're surprised when it does the same thing that it did back then. And where is that shot come from? It makes sense why it's a critical part of the larger strategy because this sort of weakened and disconnected state from reality when you are, I don't know if you've ever, did you do many much fasting?

I did, but not for religious reasons. And I wanted to mention that whenever we, when we talked about doing this episode, I did the podcast sometime back and there was a comment made that fasting lowers your A1C.

And the way in which it was said, I got more emails about that than I did. of any of the doctrines that we talked about. They're like, no, it doesn't. I understood what they said.

I have diabetes, and I thought I had conquered it through fasting, and if you're fasting daily, I lost 45 pounds and 45 days. And during the course of this time, I was watching blood sugar numbers go down daily.

Well, when your blood sugar numbers go down daily, your A1C also does. It's a consequence of the fasting. So you can cut out carbs, and it's one of the things that you can bring diabetes into remission if you do it for a sustained period of time.

However, there are other complications as you know with fasting. So there are pros and cons. You have to balance it all out. In the end, where it comes out to is, when you're doing it because you want to do it, and you have a reason to do it, whether it's spiritual, or in my case, it was physical.

I really needed to lose the 45 pounds. So it was really good for me. I was in control, I had it, but it wasn't being, I wasn't being manipulated into doing it for the wrong reasons.

And there are people who for health, for the health sake, they shouldn't do it in the first place. They're not in a healthy state where they even could be doing it, and their doctors would recommend it against it.

You don't find any of these ministers that are promoting this fasting, hyper fasting doctrine, please go to your doctor first, and then do this thing. It's, let's do this, and you may die, but they don't tell you that you may die part.

Well, and there's different types of fasting, of course, too, with like, you know, when I, so it's interesting in California talking about fasting. If I was to talk about fasting to, you know, anybody on the street, their mind is probably gonna go to the, for health reasons, you spend, you know, one day you fast, or you fast for 18 hours, or something like that.

Or in other, you know, in like Islam, there's the, that you fast from sun up to sundown, you know, throughout the entire day.

But that wasn't the fasting that I was, apart of our fasting were these like, long stretches of times. Minimum was three days, you couldn't call it a fast if it was less than three days.

Sometimes it would be like, there's the day no fast, where you only eat fruits and vegetables. Sometimes there was, you know, there's different types of fasting, like there was a juice fast where you would, drink like naked juices, or whatnot, to keep some vitamins and minerals, but you're not putting anything in substance, because so you're having that continual hunger, which my dad tried to always, find a way around that like I remember one of the first fasts that I remember as like a kid.

I was eight or nine. I wasn't fasting, but I remember my dad was fasting and he was doing a juice fast and he got so hungry. He literally bought like a McDonald's cheeseburger and he put it in a smoothie and he turned like he tried to blend it and then drink it and which was of course disgusting and I very viscerally remember that his like burger juice smoothie and how disgusted I was by that. But anyway you know there's these these when I then got older and I was doing fast myself it was that sort of thing of three days just water seven days just water the most that I

ever did was 12 days just water which as a as a kid that's a really really long time. Some were doing these 21 days fast and I'll tell you if you are a secular individual and you do not believe in demons you do a 21 day fast or a 12 day fast you'll start believing in demons because and that's when I was like I get why fasting breaks the sort of mysticism breaks into this sort of mystical world because man you start seeing things you start hearing things or at least I did and I could I would feel this sort of like dizzy sometimes it would feel a little europhoric

sometimes it was just like anemia I mean it was just anemia and I just was gonna faint and I was like that close to feigning all these different times and and genuinely the most spiritual experience is having like that bowl of chicken noodle soup or whatever you do to end it like that that is the that's when God visits you is when you finally finally eat but it it's just when you're in that sort of weakened state you will believe things that you would have never believed before you know I am which I'm like why not why not just do ayahuasca why not just do why not just go for it

and do all of these things if it's about making your mind experience these supernatural things then there's a lot of other ways to do it you know um which I don't I'm not saying that people actually should do that I it's just it's it's silly to me that in certain like I hop communities that doing something like food deprivation for extended period of days is normalized as fine and that like we are basing our entire religion off of visions that individuals are having at the end of these experiences.

It's no different than basing your vision off of some ayahuasca experience that someone's having because it's just, they're not in their right mind. When the end, you know, it's really no different than whenever, if you're being manipulated into fasting for spiritual access, he's so that you can have these experiences.

It's no different than dropping acid. I mean, the same, it's the same in result and it's not at all, I know they preach it as this holy thing, it's not this holy thing if you're being manipulated to doing it.

That's really, really the problem. But we've got to talk more about that. I have much, much more to say about the fasting. So we'll talk about that next time. 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-Branham.org. For more about the dark side of the NAR, read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Soon. Automore.