Game of Thrones: From Pentecostalism to IHOPKC - Controlling the Narrative

Hello, 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 Bob Scott, former co-founder of Kansas City Fellowship, an author of three books. The latest is some say they blundered, breaking my decades of silence on Mike Bickle, the Kansas City prophets, and the International House of Prayer. Bob is good to be back and I'm a little bit excited for today's episode if you can't tell. We're deep diving into some of the history, which that's the part that really fascinates me. I want to learn more.

I've looked through all of the different stories that are out there, some of the different, you know, they've got these compiled histories of how the Kansas City prophets came to be and various websites and research sites, but nothing really goes back to the actual connections, because many of the people who are there just simply aren't telling the actual connections, which makes it very interesting to have you on the show because you were there as one of the co-founders of the Kansas City Fellowship. So today we're deep diving the influences and I guess the best way to sum this up is how the information was controlled. Well, it's good to be with you,

sort of. You're kind of like that friend you had when you were a kid that always gets you in trouble. It's like I love our conversations, but we were like over here, you know, in these areas, turning over these rocks trying to, you know, figure out what's underneath them, but I'm having fun with it. So yeah, it's really great to be here. You know, one thing, I think that's kind of important to some background that may be helpful for people. If you study history, the thing that's fascinating about it is it's relational. History moves across relationships,

and what I mean by that is you will always have a famous person at Abraham Lincoln or George Washington, right? But where they got to and how things happened, there's brother-in-laws, there's family, there's neighbors, right? There's a community of people and this stuff moves relationally. It's not like it just happens, right? It's hell.

You know what I mean? Everything in history moves by relationships. So, like in our case, you know, when we're unpacking and deconstructing things, the thing you wanna follow is the relationships. Yep, absolutely. Right, who knew who?

Who was in proximity of each other, right? Because almost everyone got where they got because of someone they knew. It's like my dad used to say to me all the time when I was growing up, it's not what you know, it's who you know.

Yeah. Well, and the whole thing of history, I mean, I'm fascinated with history anyway. I love history. I love digging into it. But the thing that fascinates me about religious history is that it's a whole different ballgame and I can't stop asking the question, why?

Because in any scenario, so you mentioned the founding fathers in Abraham Lincoln. So I'll use him as an example. Abraham Lincoln. So he's a great American president. You can find all of the good stuff about him, but you can also read and you can find the things that aren't so good about Abraham Lincoln because they're written in history.

And history's simply a collection of facts. But so in the podcast I'm doing with Jed and I'm not gonna give the exact story because I'm sure it's explosive and I'll let it explode in that podcast episode, not this one, you can go listen to it if you want, but we were talking about a Bible character and I have heard countless, sorry, not countless, but I've heard many sermons about this Bible character talking about his strong devotion to God even though he did this thing.

And the thing, if Abraham Lincoln were to have done it, he would be vilified, he would, probably would have been sent to a firing squad. You know, it's an awful, awful thing. But in the context of religion, because his name is in the Bible and because people, like you said, people are parroting.

Even the ministers, they're parroting. They don't know what to do whenever there's something that is a subject that's just a little bit uncomfortable for them and they always try to go outside of the text and they create this mythology of what, you know, the text says one thing and so they think, well, that can't be.

I don't want my audience to know that this guy in the Bible did this really, really horrific thing. So they invent this new story and maybe he did this and maybe he did this other thing.

Well, what they're doing, like we're gonna discuss in this podcast, they're controlling the narrative. They're trying to take the narrative, they're trying to make it say something that it doesn't. And everybody's saying, amen, hallelujah, praise God.

Yes, this guy did something horrific and they don't even, they're distracted. They don't think about the horrific things. They think about the narrative. Well, as a historian, I think we would both agree. There's a reason why the real...

Oh history isn't really written till 50 to 100 years after someone dies because almost everything that we are taught as history with the people still existing is propaganda. And it's even one of the things that religious scholars or historians have to deal with in the ancient world when you're reading ancient texts, right?

Because the people in power, right? There's only one percent of the ancient world could even read or write, right? So you had a small group of people that had the capacity to tell the story and write it down, but they belong to a certain group of people.

And they were the dominant force at the time. And so what you have to be very careful of when you're reading is who's telling the story and why? Right. You know what I mean?

Because there's always a hidden agenda. I mean, and where you get yourself into a lot of trouble, especially when you go back into the Old Testament, right? And you start saying, well, wait a minute, who's telling the story?

I think where this really gets interesting is when you get into the time of Jesus, right? Because there's this huge conflict between the Judeans and the Samaritans. Right. Right. What's at the root of that, right?

Well, if you listen to the Judeans, their self-righteous. Well, we had David. We had the temple. We have all, right? It's all about us. Yeah. But the Samaritans are pissed off. And the reason why they're pissed off is because at the very beginning of this whole story, as they're coming out of Egypt, and they cross the Jordan, they're being led by Joshua, right?

An Ephraimite. Well, who are the Ephraimites, right? They're the Ephraim and a minasser, the children of Joseph. Whose wife is an Egyptian. So you have two tribes that are multicultural. At the very beginning of this thing, right?

Who are not pure? Right. Except for here's where this gets interesting. They stand between these two mountains, they make this covenant with God, and then they establish the tabernacle, the holy place in Ephraim.

And they're the center. They're the Washington DC of this ancient culture.

Until David comes along, right? A David wants to make Jerusalem the capital. It's sort of like if we decided to move the capital today to Atlanta, right? It's like, okay, we're gonna change the capital of the United States to Atlanta.

Well, guess what? Everybody in DC and Maryland gets mad. Yeah. But why don't we know that? Because who's telling the story, the Judeans? So everything about the moving the temple and the establishment of it on the mountain and all of that, that's also positive and it's all God and it's all these things.

Well, it wasn't to the Ephraimites. And where you see this is what happens. David's, you know, he unites the tribes. Yeah. He has a son, Solomon, which is odd because Solomon's not even the first born.

So he shouldn't really be the king. How did Solomon become the king when he's not the first born, right? Then Solomon has a son, Ray Abom, who marries an Ammonite, right? And then ends up getting Alcock in Irrigant, right?

And he splits the kingdom. And the thing that was the offense, that David created, when David moved the tavernacle to Jerusalem, he created an offense that his grandson ended up triggering. Right. Right? So David created the seed for the very division of the nation.

To your point, right? David, this glorious guy, all this kind of stuff, right? But he's the guy that brought him together and created the offense that ended up dividing him later. Yeah. The same guy, right?

So now you get to the time of Jesus, well, you know, there's people that will realize there's a temple up there. Yeah. There's a whole mother priesthood up there. There's another Torah up there.

Like this isn't like, you know, all that you hear about is the temple, you know, Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. There's a whole other group of people up there, you know, a few miles away going, no, no, no, no, no, no.

David shouldn't have never moved the temple. There should have stayed here. Those people down there, you know, they're a pot, you know, they stole it from us. Right. You know, it's, you don't see that story in the Bible, right?

But that's the actual historical dynamics in play. In many ways, we're almost mimicking what Jed and I were getting into, but what has happened is ministers who don't understand the culture and quite frankly, they're a little bit uncomfortable preaching about what actually existed.

They're really uncomfortable about this. And so they try to water it down and make it really, really thin. But the Bible is much, much more complex and complicated to understand. You really do need to have, you know, like we have with American history, history when we learn about our founding fathers and all of the turmoil that they went through where you would never understand it without, without also understanding the English culture and what was going on in England.

and the politics, right? And this hit me in the face whenever, see, we were in an isolationist cult, much like I think Kansas City ended up to be, maybe not how they started, but we had this view of ourselves that we were superior to all the other Christians.

And the Bible, the mythology that was created surrounding the Bible was much the same. The children of Israel, the entire lineage of people were instructed to abhor idolatry and the gods of Bale, et cetera.

And so if one went astray, it's clearly written in the Bible. But what about the political scene? So David was friends, very close friends, with the King of Tire. And I've heard sermons about David and the King of Tire, and they dodge this, like it's the plague, man.

Tire was a full idolatrous port city. And Tire is one of the reasons why the Greek and the Roman gods are so similar, because as they're coming into the port of Tire, they're spreading from one location to another, all of the mythologies.

And it turned into this big blend of mythology. And it's all because this guy was an idolatry, and David was close friends. But back then, thank David is the King. You've also got another kingdom.

It really turns into the book, if you really understand it. It almost turns into a game of thrones, type of superhero. Yeah, yeah, you're right. Many ministers are very unwilling to admit that you have to understand the political nature of this and some of the political alliances weren't healthy alliances.

Well, something I've noticed, and I think most people would see this. But I've noticed that there's a white swath of humanity that needs to live in a world of absolutes, meaning that something's good or evil.

Right? And so they have to define things in these absolute terms. The idea that good and evil can exist in the same person in the same moment seems to be, I don't want to, this will sound kind of sending, but it's almost like there's an intellectual laziness.

People don't really want to take a situation and dissect it and see the good and evil happening at the same time, right? They just want to label it good, bad, right? It's like, so one of the things you see in Christendom, which is hard is you see a lot of statements that are huge and absolute and define good and bad.

Yet, as I wrote about in my book, the whole story from the beginning is the grace of God in broken clay vessels. Like... These are broken human beings that are filled with lust and arrogance and fear and living the human experience.

In the middle of all this brokenness, God somehow or another moves. But it's not a neat and tidy story, it's messy. It even gets more messier when you begin to then take the story, which is basically...

When I say cliff notes, I guess we're old enough. I do, but I'm not certain all the listeners do. For those of you that are younger, don't know what cliff notes were. When you were in university and you had an assignment and you didn't want to read the whole novel or the whole thing, you could go get what was called the cliff notes, which were all the highlights, right?

The key points in something and zip through it real fast, you know what I mean? And what people don't understand is the Bible is actually a cliff notes. Yes, exactly. Right. It's literally skipping over lots and lots of information.

That's out there. Right. But you got to go get it. Like you, if you're somebody who just wants to sit there and look at this one thing, you're going to get a very distorted view of what's really going on.

Because it's very multifaceted, there's way more things happening as we talked about last week, is there are all kinds of other pieces of literature out there that tell a very different perspective of the same event.

Yeah. Look at that from a different set of glasses, right? Yeah. I had somebody contact me and they had discovered on the cliff notes discussion and the Bible. They have discovered that you can type in a Bible name and Wikipedia.

And you can get much more about that book than you ever thought that you could ever know. Because it's doing that, it's bringing in cultures. Sometimes it gets in the specifics because much like if you watch a national geographic show and they're going into some ancient kingdom that isn't an Israelite kingdom.

So kingdom of, I don't know, some place in Iraq basically is a good example. They go in and they see the names of the warring nations, etc. And they'll give the name and they'll talk about it and they'll say, well, this region no longer exists.

But this is the peoples that we know today as and it'll give the country. And then sometimes they'll go so far as to say in the Bible the Israelites referred to them as this other name.

And so you've got to kind of connect just because it's called one name in the Bible doesn't mean that the entire world called it the same name. They had different names for different people, right?

So take it slow. The question is who's telling the story? Exactly. And again, right? And I think we all know that by now and our lives, we all kind of have learned our lessons like, well, where'd you get this from?

Like, we're still in this story, right? Well, who's telling the story in the Bible? It's two groups of people, priests and kings. It's the top 1%, right? It's the influencers if we want to use a modern term, right?

That's the people, right? Because they're the only group that actually knows how to read and write. So when they tell the story, they're telling a narrative to promote their point of view. Yeah, exactly.

Right? So not everybody was thrilled that Solomon was king. There was a huge palace fight behind the scenes. And I would love to have been a little fly on the wall. How does the woman that David has an affair with, how does her son become king?

He's like the illegitimate bastard son, right? This is like medieval times, right? Like, we hear all these stories. It's like the concubine son becomes the king, you know? And so I'm just saying, it's very salacious.

There's a whole lot going on in these stories behind the scenes, right? It literally is a game of thrones. Exactly. But nothing's changed, because even in the modern world, in modern Christendom, we still have the same situation.

Now, what's happened, which is kind of interesting, because I was talking about this surrounding a lot of the scandal that's going on around IHOP and Morningstar and Bethel and sort of the three pillars of the modern charismatic world right now, what's changed because of the internet is the little people now have a voice, right?

Nobody in the Bible who is the poor had a voice, you know what I mean? Their perspective is not talked about. Maybe if you get in through the prophetic writing, sometimes you'll see these prophetic voices that'll speak for them, but nobody that's down at the bottom of the pecking order is telling the story.

Right. Well, now in the modern world, that's shifted a little bit, right? So the power dynamics have changed rather dramatically. Yeah. And so now we have people who aren't on staff, who aren't, you know, one of the key people, right?

Being able to tell their story. Well, then what ends up having? We have a massive collision, right? I can see this right now in the IHOP world as I'm watching this, right? Because the people on staff that are trying to keep the institution live in the cash flowing, right? You know, they're all defensive about the past and Mike and all that kind of stuff, right?

But it's the little people who were abused, who got used by the system, who have a voice. Yeah, absolutely. Things, you know, I heard this minister say, actually, I've heard multiple ministers say this, but they want to believe they want to project this narrative that the Bible is pinned by God.

And, you know, that's fine. I don't have a problem with that. And that's, that's their opinion. But the way that it was transformed and came to be in my hands is a much different story than many of these ministers.

I think some of them know, but they don't want to admit it to their congregations because even so if I'm a big fan of studying the text criticism, and when average listener hears this, who doesn't understand what this is, it's not being critical of the Bible for the sake of being critical.

It's being critical for the sake of preserving. I'm a big fan of preserving history. And to your point, many people could not read or write. So whenever they were translating the Bible and reproducing the Bibles, you actually had situations where people who couldn't read, but knew how to draw the little symbols were reproducing the Bible.

And you ended up, I heard one estimate that said that there are more differences in the families of Bibles in the New Testament than there are words in the New Testament. And so if you think of it like this, if you begin to understand that there's a human element to what we hold in our hands and call our Bible today, it changed the narrative quite a bit from the way that they're trying to control it in these scenarios.

Take it a step further back to the point that you just made. We're hearing the narrative that was preserved for us, but back in the days in which these were written, you had multiple perspectives, and they were all talking about the same event.

Some of them are lost a time. Many of them, most of them are lost a time. We don't have their perspective. We have this one perspective. But fortunately, if you look outside of that culture, we do have perspectives from some of the other nations.

And whether good or bad, whether you like the nation or not in ancient world, it's ancient history. They preserved their history much like the Israelites preserved theirs. So we have the ability to study it.

And the point I'm building up to is it's a little bit scary now if you think about it. So I mentioned Wikipedia, you can go and you can learn more about the books than you ever thought you would.

Well, now bring AI into this. AI, not only is it cataloging the Bible and the studies of the Bible, it's also studying the, it's cataloging the other histories. So you can, you can ask the question that will compile this big, massive view.

of the entire culture doesn't always get it right, obviously, because it's an infancy. But there will come a time whenever we have more understanding and access to information than we've ever had, we're nearing it now.

And the ministers who are controlling the narrative, my question is, what happens whenever the people in their congregations now have more information than they're willing to let out from behind the pulpit, do the congregations stay and say, hey, man, that's a little bit weird what you're saying, or do they suddenly have a mass exodus because there's only so long you can control information from people who want the information.

Yeah, a couple points, one, this is going to sound absolutely sacrilegious, but the gospels frustrate me as a historian, and here's why. Jesus lived for 33 years. There's a huge story here. And when you read the gospels, you just get a few highlights.

It's the cliff note version of a life, right? That's written decades after he left the earth by someone who's deciding which of the things Jesus said are important to remember, right? In other words, somebody is making a decision that these are the most important things that I need to share.

But there's a whole lot of context that's missing as to these events and what's going on. So I read it because I just love some of Jesus's insight into things, but I'm frustrated because I want to know so much more.

There's so much more about all that. I think that's natural. Because a historian, whenever you see something, so if I were to sum up who is John Collins, and you try to do it in four small books like this, I'd be like, no, man, that's not even coming close to summing up who is John Collins.

Well now we're talking about Jesus Christ. So I don't think it's sacrilegious by no means. I think everybody wants to know more. The point that I'm driving at is that I have, I take a real issue with this.

There are ministers who recognize that people want to know more about Jesus and what they do is they go outside of the narrative and then create their own and control it. Because there's only so much in those gospels and the way they do it, I get really, really frustrated with this, they will try to apply it to situations in modern times to make it more appealing to the itching ears.

And some of the situations that he's describing has no relevance whatsoever to what's in the gospels. And so again, he's controlling the narrative. And I think that there will come a time when people just simply won't put up with this control.

I think we're already there. And I wrote about this a couple of months ago, only 20% of the American population even goes to church on Sunday morning, right? Wow. That's a dramatic, I mean, I'm talking about a 30 to 40% drop in my lifetime.

So what does that say? In other words, I think to your point, I think what's happened is that the internet especially, the access to information, right, at our fingertips, has caused a lot of people who are questioning to have access to more information, right?

So therefore, some of these leaders can't control the narrative, right? They've sort of lost control of this, and that's why you've seen a mass exit out of the religious world. And what you're seeing also is we don't have any more, what I call the superstar preachers, right?

Those, you know, the Billy Graham's, you know, the people, you know, the Pat Robertsons, even if you want to go there, but, you know, single guys that have such huge influence over the thinking of lots of people.

It's, everything's getting decentralized, which, interestingly for me, because this is a whole nother discussion that we could talk about, which probably isn't good for today, it's, you know, I tried to bring this up at my book, so much of our church models, and how we assume church should be, are very different from what Jesus was talking about.

Yes, right? And I said this to somebody the other day, I go, Jesus was not focused on church. No, he was focused on the kingdom of God, right? And so what happened, right? It's like something, something happened, and there's a whole historical reason which we can call into, because Peter and Paul are not on the same page, right?

Even in the early days of the church, they have two completely different worldviews about what's supposed to happen, and where this is going. Absolutely. Right? And what we have now is a result of the destruction of Jerusalem, right?

The epicenter of the Jewish church, Christian church, the reform, which was the reformed church, right? Because in Peter's mind, and Jesus' mind, he's reforming Judaism, he's putting the heart and soul back into it.

So he's reforming, nobody's thinking about another thing. Right. Right? Paul even says, we who are alive and remain when Christ returns. Paul is expecting... The thing to happen very soon, he's not expecting a whole church world to grow from this.

So there's a whole story here because we're over here now a couple of thousand years later. And here's what we think. This is the crazy thing. We all say, I go to a New Testament church.

What does this mean? Right. Really? Because nothing that you're doing is sort of in the Old Testament. Yeah. It's like, this is a whole nother thing over here, but it's so ingrained in us culturally, right?

This is what's so interesting about perspectives. It's our norm. It's our subculture. We don't challenge even those sort of fundamental default perspectives that were, you know, it is hard. People will not like hearing this.

But science and sociology have proven this over and over again. You did not develop your worldview on your own. Your perspective was handed down to you by a subculture, a family, peers, your religion, your socio-economic group, all of these things impact your perspective.

The reason where this gets fascinating for me, and absolutely boring, to be honest with you, is once you understand the subculture narratives, when I'm watching TV within 30 seconds, I already know where they're going with their argument or their statement, right?

I already know because we are all echoes, right, echo what we've been programmed with. I figured this out at Bible school. When I went to Bible school, I was told where to look, what to see, and how to interpret it.

And I saw exactly what I was told to see, and I understood it exactly how I was told that I should understand it. So the reason why disillusionment becomes so mission critical in our journeys, it's the one thing that breaks our grip, right, because what drives our worldviews are actually our need to be long.

We want to have friends, we want to be a part of a family, we want to be a part of a group, and the only way we can remain in that group is to have their same worldview, the minute that you deviate from that, you're labeled rebellious, and you get cast out, and nobody wants to deal with that.

So we all, our little echoes basically, so the only way that God, I think, can break our grip, you know, this emotional grip we have on our subculture worldviews is to bring disillusionment. That's what I've been dealing with in the eye-op world for the last year, is everybody's Oh my god, my whole world blew up.

This is horrible. And I'm like, no, I know it feels horrible, but I'm telling you on the other side of this, you are going to be something you never thought you could be. In fact, the very thing you thought you were doing by being an echo in this subculture, you're going to find your own voice and God's going to use you in what he created you to be. You're going to find real power now. 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, Steven 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. So there's another aspect to controlling the narrative that I also find extremely fascinating. As I mentioned earlier, it's like a game of thrones and the king, the winning king, the victors, the one who writes the history. So the history that we have is written by the victors obviously, and that's the way life works. It's always worked like this. So the Bible, when we open it up, we have the history from the victors. Sometimes, in cases where, you know, so Babylon invaded and they

took over Jerusalem wiped out their history, well, they weren't the victors, but they rose up again to victors. And then there's this weird thing. If you study this, it's also probably going to be considered sacrilegious, but you can see the influences that happened after the Babylonian invasion. And after the wise men were taken into Babylon, you can see this strange thread of influence that comes into what we have, not saying it's good, not saying it's bad, but it is an influence. And the narrative changes just a little bit, right? Well, fast forward in today's world.

So Christianity comes into America. We, the people who left England, they wanted to, the freedom to worship as they pleased. They came over, you had the Puritans, etc. And over time, it evolved into what became a very primitive form of American Christianity. And then there's this explosion that happened in the fort.

in 50s of 1940s and 1950s. One thread of this, Charles and I are going through this in our revival history series, but one thread of this that had significant influence on Americanized Christianity was the full gospel businessman. Not many people realize this, but the co-founder of the full gospel businessman lived, he's from like ten minutes from my house. His family to this day, there are family members from that family. It's I think it's the Argon bright family that are still believers of William Branham's message called. And all through the time, we actually walked through some of the names in the recent podcast we let out, but all through

time you can see key figures in this movement who are controlling the movement, controlling the narrative, and they are firm believers in William Branham's call to personality. Also combined by the other side of it, the Dima Shakerian side, was closely tied to the Kardashian family. So you can see the influence of the Branham cult of personality, which included Christian identity, different themes of Elijah manifestations, Elijah movements, Joe's army, this kind of thing. And on the other side, the light's glamour action business of the Kardashian family. Well, this merged and now the narrative changes a bit.

It's not that it's completely different, but it did shift a little bit. And here's where you enter into a business version of religion. And some of the problems that I see that we have today largely exist because it has turned, church has turned into a business. Somebody says it's a new testament church, and they start talking about what they have, the structure they have.

Maybe that's what they're calling it. That's the branding that this business has packaged for marketing, but it is a business. Well, I was telling people the other day, for those of us that were in ministry in the 1980s, there was a whole push towards church growth. So you'd go to these church growth things. And the reason was, is that your success as a minister was based on two things.

Your size, your congregation and size of your offering. And there was a packing order, right in the ministry circles, the guys that had the biggest congregation. So the biggest offerings were the guys at the top. It took me a while to figure it out, but everything we were being taught in terms of church growth was the same principles that were being taught by business consultants over here. They just took the language and Christianized it or churchized it. But it was all the same principles, right? It was all marketing, right? So to your point, that's exactly what came

into the church in the 1980s was a whole marketing approach to how to grow your church. Because church growth, right? That was the goal. Yeah, exactly. And of course, the my issue at the point was Wait a minute, this is like shifting chairs in the Titanic, right?

And the reason I said that was is church growth was based on who we could steal from someone else. Yeah. It wasn't about going into the highways and the byways and the ghettos and preaching the gospel so that people got saved and we had a whole churchful of new believers, right? That wasn't happening.

No, it's a new version of Game of Thrones. Exactly. The way my little brain was, it took me a while to figure it out and like, oh my god, this all we're doing here.

It all sounds so spiritual, we're paying all this money to go hear all this stuff. But to your point, it was like, oh, we're just learning how to be better at the Game of Thrones, right?

But that was the competition and I saw so many guys get chewed up and spit out by the system because they just couldn't attract the crowds and the money. And so they left, right?

That's why the burnout rate in the ministry is so high because of the value system so skewered. Yeah. It is a business model. Right. It's based on, you know, just like the P&L and you know, that's the plum line, right?

In the business world. Yeah. That's what got into the church. You know, what's your bottom line, man? I'm kind of offering you. And you'd go to these pastors conferences and that's how they would be.

I'm pulling in 20 grand every Sunday. It's so crazy. I used to sit there and go, you know what I mean? It just grossed me out. But that like was so normal. Right. You know, I feel bad for the guy sitting in the back.

His head was down. You know what I mean? God. Yeah. You know, we had, we had $1500. You know, it's funny because so the cult that I came from, the Brannemism, it would have died out.

It should have died out. If not for the full gospel businessman and they were sponsoring large, large sums of money into the, into the funds to grow. But again, what was the, the, the root of this full gospel?

Because as we were talking earlier, I didn't discover them until 1976. And I'm in South of St. Louis, right, in, in the rural area. And the, the word of faith, theology of Kenneth Hagen and Copeland and all that was just like a wildfire burning through.

And it always burns through the poor people. Yeah. Right. Right. It's the same thing I saw in Africa. I got all these people living in huts and don't even have electricity going into these stadiums being told that you're going to get rich.

You know, come to Jesus, you're going to get rich, right? So the whole full gospel thing when I discovered it was basically tied into that same worldview. It's all about the month. Right. Well, if you think in order within the full gospel thing was the same thing, who's got the most money?

Yeah. Well, if you think about the structure, what they've set up is it's actually brilliant. I wish I had a thought of it, but although it's a little bit evil of what considering what they did, but it is an investment scheme.

If you look at multi-level marketing, it's basically a multi-level marketing scheme, but nobody's really caught it yet because Charles was going through some of the numbers and I feel kind of stupid because I never really thought about it as deeply as he did until he mentioned it on the podcast, but these guys can go into some developing nation and start sending them 10 bucks a month for a church and watch that church grow into this big blossoming thing.

And then they start, they're continually sending back a percentage. Well, over time, as their church grows, the little $10 a month is a drop in the bucket to what they end up sending back.

So it's an investment scheme. And so you've got all of these businessmen that are being told that you want to invest for the body of Christ, right? Right. And so they've created this network where you can literally as a businessman, you can invest your funds and it grows into this monstrosity.

And so the million dollar question that I'm leading up to with this podcast is I'm interested to know the history was, was the full gospel businessmen's entity? Was it connected to the development of IHOP in any way?

Do you remember? Well, I tell you something that I just remembered. So I had more interaction with full gospel businessmen in the rural area of, you know, about an hour outside of St. Louis.

Wow. When we got to Kansas City, it sort of disappeared. But where this ties back to what you're talking about that I just remembered is one of the guys who, I'm going to use the phrase dark money, one of the dark money guys that still is funding Mike.

So roots are all in full gospel. Wow. Very corrupt business guy. And you and I've talked about the corruption that got into the ladder rain movement, what really went on behind the scenes, right?

I had some of those conversations with Paul King because it, it, I mean, it was the money just made people do crazy things. I mean, so much of it was based on money. And again, if you think about it, if you think just logically, what does penicostalism, ladder rain, what do they, what do they have in common?

This is a predominantly rural low income based. Society. Yes. These are the sawdust trail, right? These are the tents out in the rural areas. I mean, this is still going, what's crazy is, is if you're like me and you've been in and out of Africa, this is still going on now.

We got stadiums packed with poor people, right? And it's all about the money. It's really sad. I had a friend who got caught up in a multi-level marketing scheme and the guy barely had enough money to get food on his table for his kids.

That's how poor he was. And he started listening to some Bozo, who was selling the notion that you too can be smart enough to make more money. And he started buying the tapes. And you know, he's sending this guy his money.

Well, this guy's getting rich off of poor people. And I could not have been angrier to think that there are people who would do this. And again, it never really dawned on me. I never connected those two.

But when you think about how the full gospel businessmen operate, and I'm not saying they're all bad, there are probably some good people in it. But the structure of it is much like you're describing.

You start small. Rural is, it's like an open field for development, right? There's nobody out there. So you invest a little bit of money. You get somebody preaching and get them to give you 10% back or whatever is your, whatever's the quota.

I don't know what the quota is. Well, once that is established, it's an investment. And then that grows in blossoms. And you can look at some of the big, big entities. And you can find in some way, shape, or form, the full gospel businessmen is connected to it.

Bethel Church, massive mega church. As I'm going through their history, I'm finding the full gospel businessmen open chapters right there in the building. And how much is connected? I don't know. I can't say that the full gospel businessmen is bad by no means.

But you see it, and it just raises this question, what does it have to do with church? What does it have to do with Christianity? And what they're establishing to my point that I'm building up to is it is controlling the narrative.

And the narrative of Christianity has shifted to much like a business. And you can clearly see where this came from when you have an entity that is called full gospel businessmen. So who do you think is the most vulnerable to these marketing level schemes?

Usually the poor people, because they're the ones who are desperate for something. But we're talking about the church world. It's the guys in the ministry. And I can tell you this firsthand. I wrote about one of them in the book, but there's another one.

So Paul King had an assistant who's since passed away. So who is a good guy? Like he was a really good guy. But he got all of these guys in the ministry, all these other people to invest $100,000.

Some $200,000 in one of these schemes. And one of my friends. who I loved of this day, who was one of my colleagues on the Senior Council at KCF put in $100,000.

And later I asked him, I go, I don't get it. Like, why would you do that? And he said to me, because I'm trying to help poor people. And if I, you know, the fact that I could invest $100,000 and get $500,000, right, I could do so much for God.

And so one of the things I realized over time was guys in the ministry are with the most vulnerable to these schemes, right? Because then later what happens to Mike is he gets into this relationship with this guy who's telling him that there's all this magnetism, I think is what it was called, or down in Vanuatu that's sitting there but has gold in it.

And all they have to do is purify it, you know, and they get the gold out. Mike's going to become a billionaire, right? So not only does he invest hundreds of thousands of dollars, he sends his own son down there with his wife and kids, right?

To manage this thing. Well, the guy ends up in prison, you know, and, and, and, you know, for fraud. No, I mean, so, and, and of course this all went, is all hush, hush, right?

Because Mike's embarrassed about it. But it's that same thing. He was just a complete sucker for it. So that's where I, you know, so again, I want to be careful here because there are men that I know of who have gone to full gospel business meetings and were really touched.

Like, you know, they had lost their way and, and because of full gospel, they sort of got them their stuff together and they, you know, saved their marriages and that. So there were some good things there.

But there's this whole other side of it that's very dark. Yeah. Right? Because of greed. What all comes down to who is controlling the narrative? I believe that there are good people in all of these movements.

People, I've been accused of being against charismatic and I'm not, you know, you can believe what you want. I, I have my own personal opinions on many things and I'm open enough that my opinions may change as I learn more information.

That's just how I am. But there are good people in it. And sometimes when you are in a narrative that is being controlled by other people, sometimes it's being controlled by people who don't have good intentions.

Or this is the irony that I think it's difficult for people who escape to cult to understand. People themselves are as complex or maybe more complex than even the Bible that we talk about, which is complicated.

There are people with good intentions who can do things that are good while at the same time. The bad side and not bad inside of them sees the opportunity while doing good. I can also do this.

add thing at the same time. And so then how do you label this, right? It's neither good nor bad because it's both. And what do you do with this, right? There are people that are that complex.

And so how do you label that? And then all of the people that come into their narrative is they're controlling whatever it is they're doing. Well, they're looking only at the good, they're ignoring the bad, and then they get caught up and they're doing, you know, by default, they're doing the bad thing with them.

And all of this to say, it really depends on the narrative. And if you're letting somebody else control your narrative and you're not doing your due diligence, you're very much at risk. Yeah, well, I think, you know, Jesus dealt with it during his time, right?

Because the thing that he kept saying about religious leaders is your white wash, too. It's basically your smelly, rotting body on the inside, and yourself all nights, right? Jesus understood the dichotomy. And I think that's one of the hardest things that a lot of the eye hoppers and people have gone through is that to realize that what you thought was white and clean was actually dark and stinky, right?

There's another side of this. And religion has historically, for thousands of years, been very good at façades, right? I mean, we could go through the whole Catholic church and the dark ages and the orgies and the Vatican.

And I mean, it's so, right? It's like, you know, I said to somebody, I said, if I based my Christianity on the church, I would have been an atheist years ago. And the reason is, it's like you, I'm insanely curious.

So I dig and I dig and I research and I dig and the more you dig, the worse it gets. Because you see the most broken side of humanity hiding behind this religious façade.

And it's not any different now. So it's like there's this panic I'm seeing in the church world now is all these things are sort of coming out. And I'm like, you know, it hasn't phased me.

I've already been there. I was there 30 years ago, right? It's kind of like, well, sorry folks, you know, but you know, there's nothing new here and it hasn't changed for thousands of years.

Yeah. So it's like you're lit, you know, because what we're talking about, because you didn't do your due diligence, you didn't do your homework, you didn't do your research, you're believing the narrative. You're defaulting to somebody else's perspective, right?

They're paradise. You're lazy, you got lazy. That's part of it. You got lazy and the other thing was, You were driven by the same selfish ambition and greed. You wanted something You were being right. There is something inside of you that wasn't pure That's why you got sucked into this whole thing. You were looking for something You thought you were gonna get something out of this. That's why this is terrible But I would say the vast majority of people that go into the ministry go into it for the absolute wrong reason They're not going in to give you something. They're going in to get something. Yeah

Sad but true Right, and so therefore don't be surprised When things fall apart because what's underneath it isn't really pure, right? so again embrace the disillusionment Let God peel your fingers right off these false narratives You know these things that you've been handed and figured out for yourself and that's really why so I was using this analogy again the other day There are moments in time Where you have disruptions

Sometimes it can be a person's a disruptor sometimes it's a situation right now There's a purifier burning Because it's a it's just a disruptive force. It's burning right across the church world right now Everybody's freaking out because grass is burning. It's out of control houses are burning, right?

It's a it's it's it's a fire that's burning But why? Well, if you understand the creator you understand that he's all about renewal He's about rebirth He there's all these principles that are in the DNA of life and Fire actually is a very good thing because it burns off what's old and dead and creates space for something new So right now everyone else is in panic mode Right, they're all freaking out and they're heard and their disillusioned. I'm way past that what I'm looking for is what's What's coming here? Yeah, I know this dynamic. I know what's going on. There's something new. There's something fresh can happen

Where is it? Who is it? What's going on? Right? So my I'm already way past all that Look because I know this is the way right? No, what's a movie where they say this is the way That's the Mandalorian. Yes, the Mandalorian. There you go. This is the way right and this is the way This has always been the way. So it like don't be surprised, you know, so yes, lick your wounds pick yourself off the floor Do all that but just understand. There's something really good about to happen Then it's going to be pure, you know where this is to your point here, you know full gospel

a lot of these things, there's a dark side to this, right? But then there's a good side to it. So it's how do we dissect all this? Yeah, how do we discern all this, right?

So back to answering your question, I think full gospel businessmen was indirectly influential in Kansas City. Does that make sense? Yeah, that's pretty much how I would label it. Yeah, so yes, it influenced us, but because of its roots, right?

And the people involved and the connection with us, I don't, we weren't doing anything because it was full gospel. Yeah, but then later you look back and go, oh my God. Yes. Like, okay, like we're twins easier, you know, it's like, wait, it's so many things that, you know, and again, I mean, just back up a second here.

In March of 1983, we had a roly, polo little guy show up at our door, saying really weird stuff. We were two, I was 25, I think Mike was 27, right? And yes, we were desperate to do something for God.

But this guy shows up and he is so from another world. You know, I mean, it wasn't until, I want to say 87, 86, and 87, when, because I became disillusioned with what was going on there, I started to dig.

You know, that's where we, I discovered Harold's book. You know, I started talking, that's when I met Paul Cain, I started bugging him to death about, tell me stories, I was just drilling down.

I really wanted to understand what was behind all this. And that's when I began, that's the first time I began to realize, oh my gosh, we're just a different alliteration and we're the next chapter or whatever.

But our roots are really way back here in the 1930s. Yeah, right? And maybe even earlier than that, because Harold takes us all the way back to Azusa Street and to Pika Canzes and all of that, right?

And he kind of, you know, he kind of thinks that that's even the precursor to the William Random stuff. Yeah, you know, because you still had guys that are getting revelations and, you know, the Alexander Dowis of the world and, you know, the William Seymores and...

Well, in the end, it's a game of thrones and food. So my assessment, my summary of this podcast would be, in the game of thrones, Fogasva Businessmen would just be a political alliance. It's not directly related to the kingdom that was established, but they were a political...

alliance and kingdoms fall and kings and rise. And if you don't pay attention to the history, you'll make the same mistakes of the past. And so you'll have the same types of kingdom growing.

So I think what we see, like you said, the church world is burning right now. I think if people pay attention and they understand the reasons why things are happening, maybe new kingdoms will be established that aren't so bad. But all this to say, I think that the influences that we have on the mythologies that we create, sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad. But in the end, how valuable is a mythology? That's the ultimate question I think that people need to think through.

So this has been incredible fun. Thank you for doing this. Okay. I hope people will track with us here because we've kind of unpacking all this because I think for most people, they don't really know these stories. No, they don't. They don't really know the history and how things connect. But it's all relational. It's all somebody new somebody, right? And it gets, you know, you can connect the dots. And, you know, I think I've, I don't know if it's you guys or whatever, but I've seen these graphs, you know, or they, you're, you're, you know, or they connect the relationship. I mean, you can see it in terms of denominations.

You ever see that word? It's like all the break offs. And yeah, we have one on our website that kind of shows how laterane emerge from a costalism. But it's in the end, it's a game of thrones.

And it only tells like the Cliff Notes version of the Bible, the Bible of the other stories. It only tells one small story because within each kingdom, you have all of their influences. And there's just so much to tell, we could talk for five hours and not cover it.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But, you know, if anything, people just need to dig a little bit, you know, it's, I think if there's one thing we can learn, hairs don't take anything at face value.

Absolutely. Not even what I say because what I say maybe off tomorrow. We have a re-end, right? Yeah, exactly. Do your homework. Exactly. 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 Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR.

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