Franchise Faith: The Hidden Agenda Behind Global Church Plants

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 false prophet and former member of the International House of Prayer. You can see I'm laughing, right? This false prophet, we got so much feedback because we sarcastically use the word prophets, son of a prophet. And what's funny is, so I left a cult. I had a cult mindset. I had this mindset where you viciously

attacked anything that you disagreed with. That was your strong point, man. And I was thinking about that recently. I mentioned this in another podcast, but my mother-in-law just passed, which is very, very traumatic for us because when my parents cut me off, my mother-in-law became my mother. She was the rock that held us all together, right? So I get to meet all of these people that I haven't seen since, gosh, when was the January 1st, 2012? I think it was when we left the cult. So many people I've not seen in years and suddenly as I'm walking up to

see these people and they're all in the funeral home, many of them have not spoken to me for that long. There are a couple that are nice and they're, you know, a couple of more. But in the back of your head, you're thinking, oh my gosh, they're going to speak negatively about this that or the other. That's what goes through your head. And I suddenly stopped and realized, wait a minute, I've been out of this thing for that long. And that was the first thought that hit me.

I've not had to have that feeling since I left the cult. And I got to thinking back to some of the people in the support groups, you know, when you leave, the first thing is you're going to, everybody's going to just give all this backlash against you. They're very worried about what people say and think. And that's the nature of a cult. That's how a cult works. One person told me, when I left, it was the most in this is the most freedom he had had. He said, when had such a negative outlook on life and so much negative energy flowed from person to

person. And that's all of these thoughts are rushing through my head as I'm, you know, crying my heart out because we lost our mother. But anyway, we got through that. We tried to record a couple times. I don't think we've skipped a beat, you know, in what's been released.

However, we tried a few times and power outlets, et cetera, has pushed this back. And finally, we're getting to talk about all kinds of weird conspiracy theory and church growth. And I'll never forget whenever I was in that movement that I just described. We also, we didn't have a concept of church growth. Church growth meant basically, you left off the birth control pill. If your church grew, it's because it grew from the inside, buddy. And everyone's in a while, we would, you know, try to recruit people I did often. I would be at work and I would talk to somebody,

hey, did you know God sent a prophet? And they would look at me like, hey, did you know you are a freak? That's how it works, right? And so, after so many times of being labeled a freak, you just don't have outreach. But what's interesting is each, the, the brand-of-group had many different splinter groups, many different sects. And each one had their own weird, I don't know what you call it, like branding. Under the whole umbrella, it's like this big franchise, but you had each individual branding and each one just operated a little bit differently. And to be

all open and honest, as I've been way too open here in the intro, once I started going to mainstream churches, it still feels a little bit odd to me. And I think it probably always will because you've got, you go to this church and you've got this type of branding, you go to this other church, you've got this other type of branding. And yet they all are under the umbrella of Christianity, but they all want to be different. And so, I'm having to learn and adjust, okay, in the cult, they wanted to be different and they got to the level where they isolated themselves. We don't want

outreach. In mainstream churches, they want to be different and they want to have church growth in their difference. And then, enter into the New Apostolic Reformation, you have C. Peter Wagner, who's in this whole movement that's called the church growth movement. And then it has its own branding. And so, as you try to wait through all of that and navigate through, okay, what is Christianity?

After a while, you suddenly stop to realize that none of that makes any sense. None of that to me is Christianity. Christianity is, okay, every franchise, every church, every branding, we're all going to get along with each other. And we're just, we're not going to have doctrines that separate us.

Let's just go back. What does the Bible say? That for me would be Christianity, but I wanted to hear your opinion and talk through church branding, franchises, conspiracy theories on why all this exists. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't think so.

So we started talking about this topic. And then as you alluded to, we had started recording and then all of your power went out. And so we're having to re-record. And but it's been kind of nice because I've thought about the topic more than I probably would have in that first instance where we were recording.

And I don't think that I've really thought about how much churches, specifically, these NAR churches, so Bethel, IHOP, and YWAM, those are the three that I'll be talking about today, specifically, I would say more YWAM and the International House prayer.

I didn't realize how many churches or communities or network locations these organizations have. With YWAM, it's a little bit more of the point. They want to spread out, and they want to have all of these different places.

International House prayer, I never thought that that was explicitly part of the mission, but it clearly is because I was looking at one website had over 700 different House of Prayer networks that have branched off of the International House of Prayer.

And with YWAM, there's something like over 1,500 locations worldwide of YWAM. And in fact, I think that there's probably a lot more than this because there's a lot of these YWAM outreach locations and YWAM branding that's out there that isn't official YWAM.

And I think that we've been talking about these churches as if they are local sort of specific communities. And that's even the way that I think of it. I hopped was in Kansas City.

Bethel is in Reading. YWAM, my YWAM was in Kona, Hawaii. But it really is. These are global church movements, and they are popping up all around. And I think that I had mentioned this one time to you before.

But I jokingly in our conversations, I was like, they're cult franchises where it's a McDonald's pops up. And then it's like, well, we want McDonald's everywhere. And so we just give the branding and give the sort of play book to this individual who will own it separately.

And then they start their own McDonald's organization, but building and they lease property. And so they own it. And so it's like this sort of dispersed ownership method of franchising where you can have people all across the globe that are.

popping up and you don't have to have a specific strategy for where you're gonna go. It kind of has a lot of this sort of grassroots movement to it and I had joked about these cults being like cult franchises and the more and more, I've thought about it and we've talked about it.

I think that's a pretty astute way to describe some of this stuff, especially like I hop in Y-WAM where in our Y-WAM episode, we talked about, I granted that there's a lot of differences of what Y-WAM looks like if you go to base to base.

One base might be totally fine, like have probably some problematic teachings and lateral range influence teachings here and there, but largely has good accountability structures, has some levels of multiculturalism isn't like getting into Christian nationalism.

There's, it could be a totally, especially like I know a lot of Y-WAM organizations were involved with helping the poor or helping with food banks and really bringing good to the community and the community outside of the organization itself might really appreciate that Y-WAM base.

But then you go to a different base and it could be totally small and cloistered and very intense and religious and culty where they're based off of the one prophet who is leading the sort of sub-cult out there in Y-WAM and I know for a fact that this is actually the case, like there are many, many different smaller Y-WAMs or even larger Y-WAM or groups or churches, I don't really know what to call them because they're not really churches, that's the other thing too.

It's not like they're just, it's not like they've, it's not like your Methodist church where it's a Sunday Methodist church where people come and they're involved in the community in a very specific and known way, they are like outreach locations and it's hard to kind of really put your thumb on what it is because what it is looks very different depending on each community.

And so yeah, I think that, I think that this is, and I think that this is something about the latter reign specifically is that it gives people and pastors

or apostles or prophets, say if you consider yourself an apostle or prophet, you had a dream, whether it's genuinely like you believe it to be inspired or whether you are being malicious from the beginning or whatnot.

If there's an individual who has had, how to dream and has this sort of vision and is excited for their own ambitious zealous, you know, re-softly religious sort of experience. Like the, oh, oh, I'm blanking on it.

The people's temple, James Jones, I mean, he had, he started in the sort of Pentecostal world and this is kind of in the latter reign movement with Branum and everything like that. And I'm sure he was attracted to some of the spiritualism and the ideas of like profits and being able to speak and have a group of people believe that your words have been God ordained.

And the latter-day movement provides the sort of infrastructure so that people can have their own prophetic revelations and they can have their sort of boundaries of their community, like we've talked many different times about how those boundaries shift and throughout the years.

And it could be no stringed instruments in your band or it could be, you know, various different things of political, it could be more like the dominionism stuff. This is how the Lord is going to branch out into the political movement.

This is how God's going to capture families back. You know, there could be different pictures of what that looks like. And it really just provides a sort of cult figure

or cult personalities to create their own small cult communities but have it within the infrastructure of a larger sort of, I don't want to say ordained because it's not ordained, but a more respectable organization.

A lot of people know what Y-Wam is and a lot of people have heard it before. And Lauren Cunningham was friends with Billy Graham and there's the sort of conventions that surround it. And before the scandal with the International House Prayer, International House Prayer was respected in many communities because it was, you know, based off of intercessors and Mike Bickel was a well respected member of the sort of evangelical community and people who were kind of seen it from afar probably didn't see the more culty vibes of the International House Prayer.

And so we've talked about the organizations, the specific organizations in detail, like the specific centers of the organization, specifically about the like International House Prayer, we've talked about IHOP KC, but I think that it's really important to start looking like what are all of these communities and how are they popping up that are building these

n times per movement many cults and what is the accountability and structure for that? It's just also fascinating and confusing to me at the same time. So as you know I'm a big fan of history. I'm also not many people know this because I have the millennium falcon on my wall behind me. I'm also a huge western fan. I've read every one of the Louis Lemore books and one of my favorite pastimes to sit and watch old black and white westerns. I love them.

And in that era, in history, as the United States was expanding across all of the unclaimed territories, whenever a city was formed, one of the first things that they put in was a church and the church, believe it or not, the minister had as maybe not the quite quite the same level, but they had almost the same authority as the sheriff did before a sheriff was assigned to a city because he could tell people you know what's this is right, this is wrong. He was dictating the law but in some cases whenever you had somebody who was you know narcissistic, their example is in

history of literally men who owned the town, who were ministers. So you went from this history and in the United States where these guys were owning the towns and in some cases they were above the law because they could tell the law that what you're doing is wrong and God's going to punish you sheriff. That's that's how weird this is. Fast forward to today's world. So in the cult that we left in the same city that we live in and we live right across the river from Louisville, Kentucky, it's it's like 10 minutes from my house to get to Kentucky. So in this area, I can count one,

two, three, four, five, six, seven cult churches, which is crazy, right? Yeah, yeah. Now the main the one that my grandfather led for 50 years, we had people who traveled to that church who might drive two and a half hours. Yeah, it's crazy. They would drive all this way because not because they did not have a church in their own city two and a half hours away. That was a Christian church but because they are part of this elite group they have to be here. What happens is the elite members of the elite groups can't get along with each other and they say, well, my doctrine is better

than your doctrine. And they break off and they create, we're talking franchises. They create these separate groups and then they suck members out of it. And so it's like if you really think about it, it's the opposite of church growth. It's church dissolve. Splinter, right? Yeah.

mentoring and dissolving and because there is no real outreach only by repopulation, they have to make sure they get a male and a female whenever they get somebody out of one of these churches or they just implode. It's kind of weird. So I left all of this mess and I'm not going to name the denomination but I went to another denomination of faith and that was all my experience. I only knew this and I heard them talking about planting a church and I was like okay and he the minister had explained to me that my cult church mindset was

incorrect and we should not be isolationists, everybody who's if you're Methodist, Baptist, no matter what you are, if you're a Christian you believe Christ, we just have differences in doctrines. So he's explaining all this to me and then they say we're planting a church and my first question was is there no church there already? Oh there's like 10 but we don't have our specific denomination. I'm scratching my head thinking wait a minute how does that work and yeah but then take it a step further. So in the cult churches that we went to one of the most

common theme is you preach against something it's not that you preach for Jesus for Christ you preach against something and they would often preach about preach against the other churches especially denominations but in this weird conglomeration of splinter groups they would even preach against their own ministers, their own kind. So we left this and I go to a mainstream church to what I thought was a healthy church and then I hear a sermon preaching about a church that's literally like three blocks down the road and they're preaching about the sign that's on the front of the lawn and so you clearly know who they're preaching against and it was the

same denomination of faith and so of course. How does this work? So this was the first time it really hit me. Some of my experiences I'm starting to realize that even in the mainstream churches some of them have a unhealthy nature to them and that was you don't preach like you don't teach your people to preach against other people in your same denomination of faith but then apply that to broader Christianity. So spreading of Y-Wam like you said if Y-Wam comes into an area and hey we're all going to work together as Christians now maybe there are no Christians I don't know but

I have heard of organizations like this maybe not Y-Wam going into a place where there are already there's already a big Christian presence right yeah and I'm applying everything that I just said to that how does that make sense if you're sending missionaries in and there's already missionaries there well what is your purpose it's like I love your example it's Like, there's already a McDonald's in this town, man.

We don't need a burger king. Right, right. Well, and I think that, you know, I don't wanna keep stretching the McDonald's franchise, you know, metaphor, but just in one last sense, I do think that it's in that.

Like, let's say, you know, someone who's run in the McDonald's franchise is like, we need to feed all of America. And it's like, well, no, there are restaurants and there's places all over the United States.

Like, you don't need McDonald's to be the thing that feeds them. Like, the only way that you get fed is not through this like, one chain restaurant, but that's the mentality that is similarly.

Like, and we'll, and say that you, you know, you then put McDonald's in this small town area. Well, what does it do? It drives out and it makes like the restaurants that are there, the mom and pop places, like it drives them out.

Like, small town suburban America is all franchises now. It's all of these like franchise restaurants because all the small restaurants have been pushed out because of these franchises that can come in and cut costs and do it cheaper and more unhealthy, you quite literally, and not to, you know, get my, that's a whole different political issue and then, and so, but I think it's a good metaphor of like, there is this sort of ladder rain doctrine that is very, we've talked about it being like, sort of like that unhealthy food in the past.

We've used that metaphor in the past because it's like, it's, it, it, it satiates only for a second. It's very like alluring. It tastes good for a minute, but then it burns people out and a lot of these, the, the eye hops, the y-wims of the world there, I mean, they're built around bringing people in and then spitting them out and then bringing new people in because it's just not sustainable.

You can't have this sort of healthy, long-term sustainable growth and because it's so radical. And I mean, especially with, when you have in the 80s and 90s your prophesying about the end times that's gonna happen in 2015, you know, you have to have a whole new base of people that you're turning through by 2015 because everybody who was in there in the 80s and 90s is gonna be like, we've already heard this shit.

This is the same prophecy, different, you know, it's the same story just blooped with like different dates and which is a whole new thing. Like it is so funny when I like first started criticizing the international house prior more publicly.

in 2003 or 24, just a couple of years ago, there were definitely people who were like, who is this guy? What's his, and how are the heartlies involved with the international house prayer? And it was just like, who are you?

And you are not to say that we were like huge or are particularly big deal, directly family was, but it just was like, we were a part of that 90s, early 2000s community that helped build it.

And like, I know, like I grew up there, and I know all of the people, all of the leaders, that Alan Hood's them, obviously Mike Bickle, but like all of the secondary, the Stewart Greaves, and the Greaves family, like that I grew up with all of them.

But there was this sort of sense and when the scandal was coming out, there was some of the old guard, new guard sort of, those who had been there, been burnt out by IHOP and had left.

And then we're coming back to like, criticize how it's like that. And there's been a lot of people who are like, well, if you're not a part of IHOP, you have no place to criticize it.

And it was like, no, we were a part of it. That's why we are criticizing, because we've been through this process. We were, we got burned or abused in more extreme, like burned is probably an understatement for a lot of the experiences that people have had.

But anyway, so all that to say is that it is this sort of like burns bright and quick and burns out the people who are used with it. And what this does is that the first thing, the first like red flag for these cult communities is local church congregations.

And I can find, you can find this with Bethel, you can find this with Y-WAM, you can find this with IHOP. But every time, even an iteration of these, so even not just the like main Y-WAM base, but several Y-WAM bases, every time they started getting big, there's an outcry from local pastors, local Christian pastors in those communities.

Those are the first people who raised the red flag of like, ooh, this is, this is not good. It's because they're the first ones who see the, the IHOP or this lateral rain, you know, church pops up, brings a bunch of people in, does it quickly without like thinking about disrupting the sort of local community, doesn't think about the community that they're a ministry to, because why would you?

It's about the end times. It's about this much greater vision. Who cares about the local politics of Joplin, Missouri, or wherever you are? And I don't mean politics in like a, capital-people politics. I mean politics and just like the ethos of the populous, like that what is going on with the people who cares about the food banks or the different things that are already being established or the Methodist Church that has been there since, you know, 1910 who has established like a great connection with the local community and whatnot.

Who cares if you're disrupting that because it's all for the greater good of God and the glory of God and it's much more radical and it's impatient. You know, it's a very impatient doctrine. It's a very the the Lord is coming at any given moment and we have to be ready. I remember one of the teachings at Y-Wam that I remember hearing. I forget who might have been Andy Bird who said this or I can't remember who it was but one of the teachings at Y-Wam and I may have given this metaphor before on the podcast but they gave the metaphor of like if you were in a burning building

and you're in an apartment complex and you realized that your apartment the complex was on fire. When you were leaving, would you like quietly knock on doors and and like slip notes under your neighbor's doors to like warn them of the fire? No, you would break down the door and you would drag them out if they didn't see the fire who cares. You're saving their lives.

And I think that that is such a good example of what people in the Latter-Rain Movement think that they are doing. They think that they're going and breaking down doors and they're doing it because there's a fire in the building but largely the fires in the building are entirely manufactured.

There are prophecies that are not real. They are healing movements that are not real. They are political strife. That's not real. You know, there's a lot of manufactured political like, you know, these immigrants are coming to kill you and you know, eat your children and all like there's a lot of like fear mongering and miracle mongering. I don't know if that's a word but I'm going to start using it. And so going back to the point that I was making is it's these local churches, pastors are political churches and I can show you some of the receipts on this.

Even Ernie Groen who called out Mike Bickel back in the 1990s did it because they saw this sort of like you're disrupting the ecosystem. You're disrupting this local community. And like you said, they're are already churches there. Like you don't have to go plant churches in Kansas City, Missouri, everybody there is already Christian. You know, unless your goal is not to evangelize, but it's to radicalize. 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. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon, and others, with links to the paper, audio, and digital versions of each book.

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-Brandham Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. I'm so glad you brought that up in the way that you did.

So whenever I take a step back and I look at all of this, one of the things that I've realized is that the cult influence, the cult influence goes far beyond the cults. And you start to see it even in mainstream, but in the cults, one of the things that they do is they want to shift the gospel, basically flip it upside down, where the gospel becomes a gospel of, I'm going to correct you. And so even their sermon structures are preaching against something, like I said, when you're in these groups. And you can almost, you can name any,

in the New Apostolic Reformation, name something and then go listen to about 10 or their sermons. You're going to find that they're preaching at something rather than preaching to help change things. Well, that mentality, I think, is the underlying problem of all of this. Because if you are, no matter what denomination you are in, I understand the differences between the denominations.

I know I probably over exaggerated that, but people have things that are very important to them. And so they want to focus on that because that's their level of importance. Methodists, for example, one of their primary missions is to help feed people. It's their methods, right? They want to be known by their methods. And I have no problem with this. So my wife was, even, we, for a while, attending the Methodist Church. Even before this, my wife was helping out with the missions to help feed the homeless in the city. That's a good thing. I think every church should do this, right?

And that's the mission. But what has happened is, Because everyone, not everyone, but because many people are influenced to think of the gospel as a gospel of me correcting you. Yeah. Then whenever you have these differences in the denominations, they start to indoctrinate people to think that they're a different type of Christian that is slightly better than the other one.

Not cultish, maybe they're not destructive, anything like this. But there is that mentality, and like the example that I gave, that church down the road with the sign on the door, you saw what they're preaching.

We don't preach that. When you get that mentality, once it gets to the level where a minister is saying it, who has narcissism or some mental health disorder causing that, well, there are people that are receiving this in a way where they don't shut off critical thinking.

And unfortunately, there are many people that just accept it as the gospel. This is a minister saying it, it's our gospel. Well, take that and apply it to what you just said about sending Y-Wam, these organizations overseas, and also apply it to the burning building.

So when they send missionaries out, like I said, there are churches galore that are sending missionaries out. And I have heard stories of missionaries going into a certain area, and they had trouble working because of the other missionaries in the same area.

Which none of it makes any sense, man. Yeah. So the burning building example, picture me as a redneck Yahoo who sees that there's a fire down the street, and I run with my axe and my water hose.

Well, I get there, did I plan for where am I going to hook up my water hose? Do I have a sufficient water supply? Yeah. I'm a little guy, I'm not prepared for this, right?

Well, many of these groups, if they were to be working altogether as all the missionaries in a collaborative unit, think of the change they could bring. But you find that these cults will send small groups of people, and they'll...

I'm actually of the opinion that it's more intended for the members than it is the people that are sent to hell. If I can give them a mission, they feel important, and they'll stay on the cult.

But so they send this group of people, they're unprepared, they may not have the supplies they need, they may not have the strategy they need. And so they're starting to watch other people who are in other missionaries from other churches, and their strategy's working better, so they phone back home, hey, those guys have a water hose, and they water supply.

Water supply. Now, I'm talking about a fire here, but they're doing this in ways of even the gospel, like they're not enough bibles, they're not enough people who are trained in a certain area.

This particular community has a problem with this certain sand. Do we have anybody who's familiar with this, or maybe it's... to health, whatever it is, if you're not organized and prepared and you're just randomly sending people, what do you get when you're finished with this? You get a bigger mess than what was there to begin with.

Well, and I like your sort of continuation of that analogy of the burning building because it's like, yeah, it's sending people who are ill equipped to the burning building who don't even know where the exits are and who aren't prepared. And you then have this issue of multiple people from multiple different churches coming into the metaphorical apartment complex, screaming about the fire. And they're all saying to go different directions. And so like, you know, then it becomes just an issue of who's screaming the loudest. And so I think that when we're talking about like initially, when we first started talking

today, there's sort of this conversation about branding and church branding. And the issues of needing to like differentiate yourself from the church down the street through branding and you, it's kind of the problem. This is not just like a problem in the new Apostolic Reformation. This is not at all a problem, um, exclusively to the new Apostolic Reformation. This is a problem just with churches in America and Western culture in general is that you need to like, it's all about funding. So if you can't raise the funds, you can't buy the church, you know, or you can't give money to the minister and you, and you can't

pay for a budget to advertise your things like it, it's all about money and it's all about needing money in both a sinister way and just a practical way like that. And so you have all of these churches who are really having to work on their brands to separate themselves and be like, okay, there's a dozen churches within, you know, a mile of me. If you're in any metropolitan city in the United States, like, um, or any metropolitan area in the United States, there's probably a half dozen churches within a few miles of you. And so there's this like, how do you,

how do you make sure that people want to go to your church versus the church down the road? And that's a huge problem. But this is where, this is sort of the warning. Laterane churches are always going to win that battle or not at least, maybe not always win that, but they have the leg up.

And it's the same with marketing, like if you are a, you know, a restaurant down the road and you're fighting against the like McDonald's that has national brand or if you're fighting to get someone who's like using all sorts of advertising tricks and in your face sort of like intense using, you know, sex cells and having all this sort of stuff, like you're gonna be in this position where you're like, if you're advertising as an ass good, as the church down the road, or the restaurant down the road, I'm mixing metaphors here, but you're going to lose your people.

But like the latter-ranked message is so much more intense than the, you know, mainline Christian, Baptist, Methodist, universalist, whatever, like teaching, if there's this, if there's one church is like being like, live a good humble life, be give to the poor, you know, do X, Y, and Z, come on Sundays, give 10% of your tithe, this is like sort of cultural, that appeals to a lot of people, but this new church comes in, banging on the drums and being like, there's a revival coming, and it's gonna happen in this city, and people are getting healed,

and you know your niece who has this disease, like she could be healed too, and you know, your grandmother who passed away, she could have been healed, and you know, speaking with the dead, like I heard your grandmother came and visited me in a dream, and she's told me this, and then you have the magicians like my father, who are false prophets, who are manufacturing things, and outwardly deceiving people, and saying, hey, I actually know your name, and I know your birthday, and I know the address, and God knows me, your pastor, back at your church,

he doesn't even remember your name, you've been going there for 20 years, and he forgets your name all the time, but God knows your name, and I know your address and all this sort of stuff, like they're always gonna win the branding war, because it's just more exciting, and it's more intense, and they target, who do they target?

Target youth and old people, like it's either the young adults, or with like fear-mongering stuff, it's the older and more vulnerable population of individuals, using AI to generate these prophecies and stuff like that, and that should be a whole nother topic.

We've focused on the youth, but at some point we should talk about the way that it also stirs up like vulnerable elderly populations. But yeah, I think that it's just, it's clearly the situation in which it is a process of radicalization, and it is a process of trying to capture what is already from a Christian standpoint, already territory where the gospel is being spread, and it's way more about seizing control, and then it is...

about actually saving people from whatever fire. Like I said, in the end, it really comes down to many of the missions I suspect are more intended for the people they're sending, for the people they're sending to.

Because like you said, there's already people everywhere. You almost can't find a place in the world where there's not already a Christian presence within some traveling distance. I understand that there are some remote countries where this can happen.

But if you organize properly and you have a proper team, many of the situations might turn out far better. And I think many just don't realize that. But the cults do have an edge.

And I was hoping you would say this, but the one thing that goes beyond what you said is they also appeal to the itching ears. Because it's not like the normal gospel where you're just teaching Jesus saves, and we have this secret.

Do you want to come here, our secret? That's what it is, man. And especially in the developing nations, wait, they have a secret. I want to know their secret. Is their secret better than the shaman or the witch doctor in my time?

And I mean, literally, that's how latarine was spreading. In fact, latarine, you can go back to Brenham Sermons and he is preaching a message that would really appeal to people who were in the witch doctor camps.

Because he's doing things like metaphysics where he's got bracelets moving on their own. And wow, that's magic, man. That's better than my witch doctor can do. So they're entering in these places and they're appealing to the itching ears.

And I have to, I've went back and I've looked at some of the locations where the not just Brenham, but many of the missionaries were sent. And there's already like, many of them are cults, unfortunately, but there's already other presences there.

So why did they send them? What was their mission? And that's where, in the beginning I said, might lead towards conspiracy theories. I suspect that their missions, if there were to be a mission, was beyond just manipulating the crowds that they're sending in the gospel.

You look at, you know, Brenham's campaign manager was a member of the Fellowship Foundation, the family. The one who goes to the National Prayer Breakfast and the one whose, you know, this group is strongly influencing Washington.

Well, if you go back in the newspapers and you understand that history, they're sending these men on these missions and women, some women, not many, but they're sending them on missions and they're establishing similar organizations in other countries, especially in the developing nations.

History's kind of forgotten that because they were developing at the time, but some of those nations have now developed. And so they've got this very, very strong cult presence in nations that have, you know, a complete infrastructure.

Now the cult presence is strong at, as strong as some of the denominations are here in the United States. So was it a mission for planting for Jesus or were they really planting to establish their franchise?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, establish control and to be in these places. But also, you mentioned it and we've talked about it before, but you know, part of the reason of sending people out is, I mean, there's many, many different sort of agendas that we can kind of pinpoint of why you would want these plants all over the world of these different church plants.

But one thing, have you ever heard of, I don't know how exactly they call it, but Niko, it's like a thing in Y-Wam. It's called Niko. No. But and it doesn't stand, it's like a Greek word.

I never went on this, but I knew people at the University of the Nations, Kona, where I was at, who also had either done it in different locations or whatever, but it's basically, there's this method that several different Y-Wam locations still do and training centers do, where they will send out young students for five to six days in the wilderness, either in the wilderness or in a, you know, rural area or an urban dense population, where there is in a whole lot of western influence, and they basically send them with no information, no real supplies, and you're supposed

to go on treasure hunts, forgot, where you're just supposed to be led for the spear. It's this idea of like, throw the baby in the water and let it swim on itself and throw them into the deep and see them swimming.

And so whether it be in the wilderness or whether it be in like the urban population, you know, or urban high density areas where you don't know anyone, which feels a little bit like the woe wilderness and feels just as terrifying as the wilderness and some respects, if you like, don't know the people there.

And you have to rely on God. It's like a faith act thing. So this isn't even, this is like the missions with the missions part removed because you're not really sharing the gospel. I think that that's part of it is that you're supposed to meet people with this sort of act of faith.

And I ate this idea up when I was in my like early 20s because I felt very adventurous. It was just like, let God lead you. And so I did with a few different people our own like many things where we would do this and like in India I kind of just went off for on excursions where I was like, I'm just gonna lead wherever the spirit leads or I'm just gonna go wherever the spirit leads me and praying where it's in India and I don't have a cell phone back then and I don't have location, you know,

fortunately India that plenty of people speak English and if I can just be like, oh okay, here's a taxi, get me back to here. I'm fine, you know, and it's cheap to get around.

So like I'm gonna have enough money in my pocket, but a lot of times what would they would do on these like more extreme excursions is they wouldn't have any money. So you couldn't rely on sort of money to get you there and you had to rely on people and the generosity of people and everything like that.

Well, and I wanna look this up and I wanna make sure that this story, but like is, I was trying to research it a little bit and maybe in a later podcast we'll all talk about it more or if anybody who's listening knows more about this and can reach out, but someone passed away, died during one of these excursions and this became, it became a little bit more taboo and I remember being in YM during some of this period of time where this happened where it was like, oh, maybe we shouldn't tell people that we're doing this,

but this was the mentality. This was like the idea is that you throw them into the fire and let them learn and grow on their own and have God support them and like, I do know too, like this is also what's really hard because I know a lot of people who have gone on similar journeys and they, it went fine for them because they were like, oh, I just wanna have faith in God and then they met someone and that person was like, really helpful to them and they said, come, and so you can learn a lot about the goodness of people

by doing excursions like this or, and of course you're gonna hyper-spiritualize that and be like, God sent that person to me. But it's such an unnecessarily dangerous thing to do and it's like people who make it through without any scars say have nothing but positive things to say about the experience, but the people who don't make it through are, leave YWAP, never to return because it was so traumatic for them and there isn't that sort of like, you know the, you know the image of the, there was like certain bombers

that were being sent out. out in, I think this is World War II, I might be mixing it up, but there were spammers being sent out and they were coming back and people were looking at where there were bullet holes in the planes and they were putting, they were reinforcing those areas because it was like all these are the typically the areas that get shot because they were looking at the bullet holes and they were like we need to reinforce these areas.

And then more planes were being shot down and they were like what's going on our reinforcement isn't helping. And it's like no you don't want to reinforce the areas that have bullet holes. You want to reinforce the areas that don't have bullet holes because like the areas that get shot that aren't, you know, that if you have a bullet hole in this particular area, the plane's probably going down.

So you need to look at the planes that went down, not the planes that returned because you're only looking at planes that returned and not the ones that were shot down and going back to this whole idea of the way that these NAR movements churn through people, they do it where they churn through people and then they spit them to the side and then they leave the community and then they build their sort of system to ignore any criticism.

Like the XYWAMmer who's just bitter who talks about YYWAM, they just ignore what is being said. The person who went on one of these Niko excursions and got sick and of course, or did had to go to the hospital and YYWAMmer didn't pay for that and lost a bunch of money.

They're just bitter and they move them, they cast them aside. So it's sort of reaffirming and reinforcing only the planes that have returned sort of thing and ignoring what is actually going on here.

So I don't remember the exact point I was trying to make with that but that was thought out apt metaphor for this whole thing. It's really ironic too when you think about it because this movement grew and developed from Pentecostalism.

You can trace its history directly back to the birth of Pentecostalism. Most people refer to Azusa Street as that birth but it has a deeper, more rich history which is a more odd history.

But Frank Sanford was a very incredibly, I'm not gonna say powerful but well-respected man. He had set up a Bethel, I think it was called Beth, a Shiloh school and it was a world famous massive school.

There were people from all over the world coming to see it because he was, believe it or not, before Param did it, they had speaking in tongues in the school. They were teaching Christian identity.

to T. So this was part of the spread of that. And what's your name? Is it it might be a millionaire airheart somebody flew over this and one of the early planes flew over the school and thought it was the governor's mansion because it was it was just massive, right?

But anyway, he decides that he's much like we're describing. We're going to go on a mission. And it's more about the people than it is the mission because his cult is kind of imploding at this point. Sends them on these two boats. The history is on the website if you want to read it. But the interesting part of that mission is as they're going from country to country with this handful of people on two boats. He's preaching at countries, not in, but at. You know, float the boats up to it, preach at it. If they did, they surely

had to have gone ashore. Maybe they held a little meeting revival there on shore. But you can't convert a whole nation from one little meeting right there in the shores, right? So the whole strategy, if you're thinking strategy, this is not a strategy that even he had to have known it was not going to work. But for the sake of the people that were there, they go in this tour. The tragedy hits the boats. Basically, two people had two boats. People had to combine onto one boat when one boat sank. They came back. They only

had enough food and supplies for about a third of the crew. People were dying. And this comes back to the United States and he goes to prison. Charles Fox Parham visited this sect because he wanted to learn how to establish his own cult. So he goes there. He also goes to John Alexander Dauy's cult, which we've mentioned. And then he starts, there's this weird event. And most Pentecostals will deny this. But there's this weird event where some lady who is related to Charles Fox Parham starts writing chicken scratch on a piece of paper. You can go to my website. You can type in Charles Fox Parham. You can

see this paper. It looks much like a tic-tac toe game meeting a grade school person who's just scribbling. That's what it looks like. And they said it's Chinese. Now, today's well, we've all seen Chinese. We know what Chinese looks like. Every Pentecostal who sees this, they will deny it. No, that's really Chinese, my brother. No, I've got Chinese friends. That's not even there's no dialect Chinese that looks like chicken scratch. But that was what was called writing in tongues. And the writing in tongues predated the speaking in tongues. Yeah. Now the chicken scratch, nobody could read it. Even the Chinese people

could not read the chicken scratch. Right. Didn't they started speaking in tongues, thinking that they could evangelize the world. They were going to do the same thing that Frank Sanford did. They send missionaries to the other countries. And much like the chicken scratch that can...

can't be read, they were speaking chicken scratch that could not be heard. So they get there, convert no one and they come back. That is something in Pentecostal history, they don't teach you when you're in Pentecostal church.

This didn't work. What they instead teach you is, this is a language that nobody can hear, my brother, we have to have interpreter. But that's not how it started, you know, right. On your history, if you believe it is of God and this is talking directly from God, on the history where it didn't start that way.

But the point of all of this is, because of the way that parham established this group and because of the way that all of the others defended, this notion that you can send missionaries for the sole purpose of sending them, not that they can do any good whatsoever, but we can send them and by glory to God, it's good that we send them.

That's really the purpose of it, is to send, not to actually have any fruit from it. Now, what happens is, when there is fruit, say that it works out, say that they send people and I don't know, some soul gets saved and then it spreads through a whole community.

That's a good thing, I'm not saying it's bad, but think how much more broad and scope it could be if it were organized. Let's not send missionaries who speak this thing that they're calling Chinese, that not a single Chinese person can understand it.

Let's send some people who actually speak Chinese into the country and let's spread this thing. What's interesting is, had they done it correctly, Pentecostal might be the major religion in China, who knows? Right.

Yeah, well, and this has been a theme that you and I have talked about so many different times, like whether it be the phoning PhDs or just the cutting corners of the Pentecostal world through spiritual spirituality, like that, I've talked to many times about like, if you want to heal people, go to school and learn how to be, like the Lord has given us a good brain and it's like the ability to write things down and to study things and like you can be a good study doctor and you can bring about a lot of good by just learning,

you know, to learning medicine or if you want to share the love of God in China, learn how to speak Mandarin. It'll take you a couple of years, if not, you know, more, but invest in that and then go there instead of like, six month period where you're at this discipleship training school.

I'm picking on Y-Wam a little bit today, but, you know, six month training... in school and then be sent to this area and then wander around and be the person who needs to be saved.

Like you end up being the person who needs help rather than helping the people because you're just going off and like the the the the Sanford and his boat like so many people died and were malnourished on that boat.

Like they were the ones who needed to be evangelized to like whatever groups they were going to. It should have been the you know Hindus in India, whoever were like come and eat like we we've been called to help you because you guys are going to die without our help.

Like and I think it's just it's so egotistical and it's so impatient the world of the the latter reign of of this rhetoric of it's got to be now and it's got to be miraculous and it's got to be big and you know I am empathetic to all of the individuals who get sucked into that.

But especially when the horror stories of how that's gone bad are just not told and this is kind of like you were saying with Pentecostalism just in a larger sense, know your history. Like these I think that places like the international house prayer would be way less enticing if people knew the stories of Frank Sanford and of Parham and of the deliverance session at the Paramites where a woman died and had all her bones broken.

I remember that was the first exposure that I had to your work was reading about Parham and the Paramites and the abusive things that were going on there. If people like but I was you know that was only a couple years ago that I was not just exposed to your work but just exposed to that story in general.

And I grew up in this community. I grew up with Shiloh and Bethel but like places, places not just like Bethel Church, but we named several of the locations in the international house prayer sort of ecosystem.

We named them after similar biblical concepts that had been used in the past like they were the Shiloh Center and hearing and reading about the Shiloh Center with, it was Sanford was connected with Shiloh, right?

I mixed up who had what, it's all such a weird mess. Sanford had Shiloh, Parham planted Bethel School and Dowian Exion. Right. And these are all the names of the like, I went to all of those different schools.

Like there was Zion school. There was, well, there wasn't Shiloh school, but there was a Shiloh at IHOP and then there was a Bethel school. Like if we had just known the history and even if you are still believing that there were miracles in those times, like if it's not just that the miracles are exaggerated, it's the miracles are exaggerated and all of the horror stories are buried.

And people like you and I who talk about them are labeled, you know, all sorts of things. I don't know what they label us anymore. I, you know, I'll, people, well, I'm not right, I was gonna go out to answer it there, but it's just the same method and it's just so clear how it continues to propagate and grow and the kind of final thought that I have on this too is it provides, I always grew up with a lot of crazy stories at the International House of Prayer and people doing, like there was a story of a couple

who had malnourished their child and the child died and the child was like they were fasting and they were having the child fast and the child died of malnourishment and they were associated with IHOP but it was IHOP distanced themselves from this family and the idea was like, well, IHOP just sort of attracts the crazies was the rhetoric within the world like that wasn't, that was what we sort of, the defenders of IHOP, that's what we said is that, well, you know, IHOP's a bright light and it sort of attracts the crazies.

Well, that's true. It is, it did attract a lot of the crazies because it gave ways to structure and institutionalize in some respects pathologies like for the narcissistic people who wanted to build their own cults and have a small, calm, calm, you follow them.

The International House of Prayer provides you the perfect rhetoric and this is my last point. If you look at what it takes to launch your own house of prayer or your own Y-WAM, it is crazy simple.

Like with Y-WAM, they're like, as long as you know someone who's within the world, I don't know if I might myself be able to just go long to Y-WAM right now. They're just isn't, because I was with Y-WAM, but I don't even know if you have to do it, dude.

yes, to launch your own Y-WAM school. But there was like a few different qualifications. And it's basically just like as long as someone within the circle can vouch for you and that you are financially independent, that you can establish your own and you're doing it with the purpose of doing it permanently and not just like popping up and being there for a couple of years. And it's like, I can understand how a lot of cults are popping up in Y-WAM's name because it is very easy to just be a part of this organization and have the brand with you. I mean, it is quite literally a million times easier to start your

own Y-WAM and then to like join the McDonald franchise. So you know, you and I could do that. We could start a Y-WAM. We could put off a bunch of these writing in tongues from Charles Foxborough Arms history and pass them out and say, this is the spirit of God written in Chinese.

And it would actually be to the effect of leading people out of cult because they would see it and they would immediately say, that's not Chinese. You guys are freaks. And we've come full circle. It's much like whenever I was in the cult and I said, did you know God sent a prophet and he said, but did you know you're a freak? There's a reason why that they don't share the writing in tongues these days. I'll just say it like that and not say anything more. If you want to believe it is of God, that's your opinion. But in my opinion, it's not Chinese. And in the opinion

of my Chinese friends, there is no dialect of Chinese that's like this. So so much more we could talk about. I'm like I said in the beginning, I'm crazy fascinated by all of this. And I know I'm kind of joking and laughing the different denominations. I understand it. It's just to somebody who didn't grow up in it. It is very confusing when you see it. But then like like the path that you let us, when you go down and you focus on these little tiny groups that invade for no purpose, whatsoever, having no good effect whatsoever, maybe a little bit of effect in some cases.

None of it makes any sense. And when you take a step back from all of it, you have to ask, well, what is the reason why all of this is doing it? And maybe that's the why, the why in why? Yeah, that's good. Yeah. And just the tease, we talked about this at the beginning before we're doing it, but just the tease for people, I think a really, really good example of this sort of like the cult franchise and the way that like the I hop rhetoric can then be used by smaller cults. There's a really, really good and heartbreaking example of that with a small sort of

splinter group that was associated with the international house prayer, where a young woman and next session that you and I are on, we're gonna talk about that, and I'm looking forward to talking about that because I think it is also good for people to recognize.

I'm not just, we're not just talking. This is not just our perspective. There are very specific examples of how this can go wrong. We're not, we're not, we're not speaking prophetically in this sense of what could be.

Like we have seen a lot of the disaster and we've seen the way that I hop and Y-Wam and Latter-Rain rhetoric has been turned into like, so pretty nasty cults. And so we'll talk about one specific example of that next time.

Well, I look forward to it. If you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Branum.org. For more about the dark side of the new Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.