Seven Mountains and the Business of Missions- How Land Became the Strategy

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brannum Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannum Historical Research at William-brannum.org, and with me I have my co-host and friend, Jenny McGrath, founder of Indwell Movement. Jenny, it's good to finally be back and I don't know how it is where you are, but it is freezing cold here. So I've got my little heater blowing under my foot and hopefully it's not too loud for the microphone, but anyway, good to be back and this topic that you've chosen

for today, I've been wanting to dive into it, but I wanted you to be ready to talk about it, and that is to, from multiple aspects, study the Seven Mountains mandate. I know today we're going to be talking about as it relates to the land and the mission overall, but we could also talk about the psychological aspects. How does it affect kids, if the kids are raised in this type of mentality, there are the political aspects, there are the skewing of politics, there's like a thousand podcasts we could do on the subject, but today we'll

talk about the land and there's some interesting things if you really think about what's happening with the missions. Absolutely. Yeah, I'm really excited to be back here with you and to dive in. I feel both ready and daunting to talk about this because it is such a big topic and feels so loud in our world right now, and so that also tells me that it's really important for us to engage, and I think there's so many ways that we could engage it, but I think that's a good way to ease into the conversation. That's the

odd part about all of this. You know, whenever a first came across youth with a mission, somebody said I should look into it and they were very neutral. They just said, John, you should look into it. When I first saw it, I saw a bunch of missionaries and I saw that they were doing things with the youth. This potentially could be good, right? If it's not a destructive thing, it could be good. But the more I found out, the more I'm just kind of scratching my head, talking about the land. So when I picture a missionary, I am picturing, I'll use

the first church that we attended after we left the cult. I'll use that as the example. They would send people on missions and they sent the youth. They would send adults with the youth, and it was a very healthy thing, I thought, and they would go into places where there was a...

strong need. And maybe it's a need of providing food, teaching people how to plant and grow food. I mean, there's there's a wide variety of needs, right? I have friends who are carpenters who went on missions and they were helping to build houses and land that was just ravaged by the storms. Well, that's a good mission, right? And you're going into somebody else's land, you're going, um, you know, with not not much of an agenda other than to help the people and you help the people on their land. But then I started to realize that you the mission doesn't

really do quite that. They take the land and they buy the land and they own the land. And how does that work? What does that look like to the people of the, I mean, I hate to use the word invasion, but the people in the lands that they're invading, what does that look like to those people?

I think maybe I'll even start from my own experience. And I've shared this before on here. Um, but if folks haven't heard that episode or maybe this will give more context, I, um, I, at the age of 14 knew that I wanted to go live and work in northern Uganda. And to make a very long story short, I ended up there, um, when I was 19 years old. And I went for what was supposed to be a short term trip to western Uganda where, uh, why we have had an established base. And I was quite surprised

even then to see this sprawling property with a garden, with many houses, with multiple dormitories on it. It was, it was a big piece of land in western Uganda. They also have other ones in eastern Uganda, but there was no, why we have presence at the time in northern Uganda. And I didn't ever go thinking I would establish a base that was never my intention. I just knew I wanted to try to figure out how movement and dance could be used therapeutically, uh, with folks who had been through war. And so I went to northern Uganda for what was supposed to be a few days. I ended up staying

months turned into years. And I would go back and forth between northern Uganda and back to Colorado Springs. And within a very short amount of time, as a 19, 2021 year old, I started literally being put in conference rooms with oil tycoons from, from Texas, who had, were so excited that Uganda had just discovered oil and that I could potentially be the bridge between what they were doing for God in Texas and what I was doing for God in Uganda. And even at the time, I had fully drink the, the court, cool aid. But even then, I was like, hey, this doesn't seem...

Right. And I have my own concerns about what the implications of this are. And it was such a rapid pace where it was such a whirlwind. And come to find out that this is how I wear my operates in many places around the globe. That it has maybe one or a few people there. And then within a few years, there is a base or multiple bases. And they tend to buy up property and land. And it really is this giant Mycelium network. I'm sure there's thousands and thousands of properties across the globe. It's incredible. And from a business man standpoint, if you understand how

business works and understand the collaborative relationships, in fact, maybe I should pause and break that down for people who aren't in business. So in Louisville, Kentucky, which is just right across the river, as I was starting my business up, there were these little groups that you could attend. And they would often be advertised on either Facebook or on the internet or newspapers, etc. And small businesses could collaborate with small businesses for a common goal. So you might when I started my business, it was really small. And I was doing like website work. So I would go,

I could do a website, which is a not a lot of money. And I'm talking to other businesses who probably already have websites. And they're trying to find ways to make me useful while offering me something in return. So they might talk to me and say, well, do you have, we have a business that does printing. Do you have any printing needs? And yes, of course, I need a business card, which is to them, it's really tiny to me. It's really tiny. And they say, well, interestingly, we want this new page on our website, which is a small job. So we're talking peanuts here. I mean,

these are really, really small jobs. And on a very, very tiny scale, that's a collaborative effort. Two people can, two businesses connect and they have a common need. Now grow this. I reached a point in my business where I'm dealing with hundreds of hospitals across the nation. I would never sit down in a business meeting like this and say, I'll do a website page for business cards.

You talk to larger groups of people. And the bigger you grow, the bigger this gets, that's not insidious. That's how business works. That's not how Christianity works. I don't go to a Christian church and try to get all of the business. Interestingly, I went to some, I'm not going to mention the name of the church, but I went to one of the larger churches and they had established something like this for small businesses. And so if you're a small business, you could work with other church people and you had this base of church customers that just magically appeared.

And those people kind of thrived in that area, but they're locked in. They can never grow bigger because... That's their customer base. Now think full gospel businessmen. Think about the Kardashian family, which is the patriarchs behind this movement.

And I understand that there's a little bit of separation there, but think of the large-scale business that we're talking about here. Full gospel businessmen goes global. And they're connecting businessmen who can get potential customers in a religious world, going to religious conventions.

They set up all of these events. Now bring in the new apostolic reformation. Now you've got all these conventions. Your business, which targets the Christian customers can go to the convention. Now you have this established customer base and everybody is working together.

Even that is smaller than what you're talking about. Grow that to the next, next, next, next level. Now we're talking about we are going to take land in another country. We're going to connect you to oil tycoons who can work the land.

And they will fund our business. They will help with the missions. But we're still going to make the parents pay $10,000 to send their kids. So we're getting revenue from the parents. We're getting revenue from the oil tycoons.

There's only one winner here. Yeah. It makes me think of a professor that I really respect. named Rose Mangy. He has researched quote unquote development work for many, many, many years. And he says, you cannot fight poverty.

What you can fight is those who make people poor. And a lot of the land-based consumption is so correlated to capitalism and to establishing capital, which will always benefit those who have the most power and the most capital.

And even as ideal as the idea of trickle down may seem, being on the ground with those who are furthest from the capital, it only exacerbates the exploitation of communities, of resources. It pulls money out of the community long term, rather than really establishing and allowing folks to pull themselves up by their bootstraps to borrow a problematic phrase.

But if you get what I'm trying to get at here. So I did this business thing where I'm attending and I'm getting small peanut jobs. The interesting wake up call for me was, I bought into the idea and the hype that you could have a Christian business work with another Christian business, and this helped society.

This isn't really how it works, man. I encountered businesses who they were proclaiming that they are a Christian business. Who would rob you blind in business? The Christian, it wasn't a Christian. and tactic they were using.

I'll just say it like that. And I wrote off tens of thousands of dollars. So I'll just let that go and leave it at that. You don't always encounter people who are Christians running Christian businesses, but they're there because they know they can have an instant customer base by using the name Christian in it.

But to your point, in the industry, say you have 10 businesses that are providing a service and you have one that is capitalizing off of this, you know, whatever you want to call this mess.

I don't even know if I want to call it Christian, but this thing where you can have Christian people to service your business, well, think about all of the other businesses that that hurts and impacts.

And I'm talking about supply chain, the vendors, the, you've got this whole network of businesses that can be impacted and shifted the wrong direction. If you do this, well, now take this to a global scale, you're putting businesses out there who are connecting with people in areas that they don't even have expertise and all of the local businesses that could be thriving, the missionary work can actually suck the life out of the places that you're invading.

And then it really turns into an actual invasion because you're going on a Christian mission, you're sending the children and you're just destroying the economy in that area, right? So there is a lot of things that you really have to think through as you look at this mess.

And I'm thinking of, you know, I was, I was and I'm sure still am in many ways. I'm not even aware of yet. So complicit in this. And I'm thinking about even when our ministry started building on land inevitably in Northern Uganda, it was, you know, it was a land of a family.

We didn't actually purchase the land yet. We sort of infiltrated it is a great word and started to build. And yet one time we took a team and we were laying bricks for the building that we were building and doing a terrible job.

Meanwhile, local masonry workers who should have been getting paid and would have done a much better job are not able to do the work because, quote unquote, volunteers are there and have spent thousands of dollars to be there rather than use that to boost a local economy and actually value the labor of the laborers that are there.

I think there's so much grandiosity in we're just going to go and build this home or these buildings and sadly, I know many stories of communities where they would literally have teams come and build something because they might get some gifts or some exchange.

but they became so dependent on this that they would literally destroy the building so that a new team could come maybe the next year or a few years later. And it becomes this really impossible cycle for those communities because everything has been leached out that their literal main industry is volunteerism or short term ministry and missions work. And so they have to try to find ways of gleaning the small pieces that they can from these teams that come. There's a really excellent book by Pippa Grundy called R's to Explore that goes into some of these narratives and

these stories of communities that have been devastated by short term missions going and exploiting not only the land but the labor and of course we're focusing on land but as we're seeing all of these seven mountains are so also I think intertwined and the then diagram of each of them is so overlapping. I was trying hard not to laugh while you were saying volunteerism. That's a new word I'm going to have to use right. And that's really what it becomes. It's more we've talked about this before but it's more about the mission for the missionaries than it is for the people that

they go help. And it reminds me I'm certain that I use this example with you before but I'll use it again as I'm studying early Pentecostalism and you come across people like Frank Sanford who had the same I guess it would be the foundation that all of this notion is built on the spiritual warfare and these territorial demons. He took his entire cult following onto two boats whenever he was at risk of several lawsuits and they sailed the world trying to convert the world and the way that they did it was they would sail up to the banks of a continent and then preach at that continent and

sail off to somewhere else. Well most of the people in the land didn't even hear the sermon if they were preaching at it right they were on the boats. And if you read through that story you're just scratching your head thinking well what on earth was that for and for the central figure it was to escape all of the criminal allegations that he was facing or civil allegations to the people they're on a divine mission and that's a mission from the missionary leader who's by God.

Well now expand that thought into youth with a mission they're taking over a territory what better way to preach at territorial demons than to claim the territory for your own bring the kids in well now the territory itself becomes hallowed ground. This is the territory where the Christians are the enemies on the other side of the gates. So everything instead of missionary to convert the people this turns into literally a missionary to stand and preach at the people on the other side of the the territory and the territory boundaries. So for me this it's a very very similar

But it's still, you just scratch your head thinking, what on earth were they thinking? For sure. And most of the bases, if not all of them, I would say at least most, their revenue and their power comes from the discipleship training schools or secondary schools that they run.

And so even in Uganda, it's folks from various countries who are there for five months, three months, nine months doing this missionary school, paying thousands of dollars. And sure there's some community outreach, but it really is actually really embedded in the community.

And this happens both globally and locally. You know, it was an action odd thing for me, the base that I joined staff on before it was a highway and base, it was a hotel in Colorado Springs.

And my brothers used to have their end of the year soccer tournaments in the banquet hall of this hotel. So I had literally experienced this building as a hotel and then over the years, I don't know what happened with the hotel, but then Y-Wam bought it.

And what's wild is that, you know, Y-Wam owns or someone owns, I don't know exactly the back story of on paper who actually owns this building. I believe it's in the name of Y-Wam.

And yet, everyone who lives in those old hotel rooms turned into apartments basically pays rent. They pay for any renovations that they wanna do. They pay for any type of like remodeling. And then when they leave, they have established no equity or no assets because they don't actually own that.

And so over the years, these bases become more and more profitable to the organization. When I was in Montana, we were on an old military base. And my work duty for two hours every day was stripping copper wire so that the base could sell it and make money.

And then I came back to show my husband the base years later and the building that I had striped copper wire and was now this like giant water tower that the base had built on their own.

And I was like, wow, I guess all of my hours of hard labor really seemed to pay off for that. It's incredible. I mean, it is one of the best greatest business strategies that I think is slipping under the radar.

People just don't realize that this exists. And for good reason, I mean, we're talking about your base was on the United States. What would possibly be the mission? I mean, were they helping the people of the city, were they teaching them about Jesus?

What was the mission when you were there? It was training disciples. So the mission is... we're going to have this base and then we're going to run these schools and maybe once a week, once a month, we might do some type of community outreach. But in my experience, there was not a lot of emphasis or if people were involved in the community, it was of their own accord. When I lived in South Africa for nine months, me and people from my school, we decided to start a Bible study in one of the townships that we would go to on our own. But none of these were things

that were actually established or long-term community connections other than a few select people that YM may send their teams to go work with as part of their outreach. But the mission itself for each base is primarily to train disciples or to know God and then make him known. So they're kind of these intentional incubators. But then what happens is that they just keep incubating and no one ever really then is able to leave. And a lot of times that you don't have skills that you know how to translate to the market. And again, in South Africa, our base was also an old hotel.

And they were bringing in lots of money, lots of US and European currency, which would have translated to even more money in South Africa. And me, I lived in one room with three roommates, very small room and a bathroom that had mold on it for months and months and months. And so we kept saying we need you to do something about this mold. We need you to do something about this mold.

Literally in the winter, we came in and they had just put a two-foot by two-foot hole in our wall straight to the outside. And we're like, we fixed your mold problem. And we were freezing.

And we spent months because apparently the base didn't have money for some reason, eating lettuce and mayonnaise and peanut butter sandwiches. And so I've always had this question of where is all of this money going? Where is all of this capital going? Because it's clearly going somewhere. And it isn't going to the people that are living on these bases and actually contributing to the assets that these bases become. Well, and that's just it. It's gaining assets. So whenever the parents are paying for all of this money, they're thinking that they're paying for the money that goes to the child so that the child can further the mission. But then the child,

you know, it doesn't cost this much money to put a child up. And if you do it the biblical way, you go with only the shoes on your feet and the clothes on your back, right? But when you're doing this and you're gaining assets, you can make it sound appealing to the parents as though we're a small operation. We don't have any money. And that you can show them the bank account.

You may not have much money, but it's the assets that I think it just slips under the radar. People don't realize. So every dollar that goes in, you're gaining assets in Africa. I have known people who can invest large sums of money in green, watch it travel from one country into another country, sell that green, make a heck of a lot of money off of the sale.

Well, you can't trace any of that money. It's just, it's money that's invested and much like an investment in the United States, you put the money in and you hope that it gains you something.

And as these assets continue to grow, we'll think, you know, 10 years, 15, 20, 50 years from now, 100 years, how many of these assets do we accumulate? And if you've got a seven mountains mandate of taking over the world, well, if you gain the assets in the other countries, you're actually legitimately taking over the world.

Now put yourself in the minds of the politicians in the countries you're invading. And look at the outcry by some of these countries who are solidly against the United States. You have to wonder what's going through their minds as they see themselves silently be invaded by something that it's using the name Christian, but their operations aren't really the Christian type operations.

Yeah, I think that is such an important aspect. And I think that there's another aspect which is something I traced with Uganda is that it's the opposite in some ways that Musevone has had a very entangled relationship with the US Christian right for decades and has maintained power in part because he has followed the purity culture and the rhetoric of the Christian religious right.

And so that was even something that was brought up in these meetings with these oil tycoons was, well, Uganda is a very favorable nation because God has placed Musevone in power. Never mind that Musevone has changed the constitution multiple times to get quote unquote re-elected whether or not those elections are fair or not.

But the idea is that because this man follows these particular ideologies around the religious right then God is using Uganda. And the base that I was a part of focused on the 1040 window if folks aren't familiar that with that is the most unreached people groups in the world.

And it's primarily North Africa, the Middle East. It was an idea that was made up by a missionary many years ago in 1991, I believe. And Uganda technically wasn't in that window, but I made the case at the time that Northern Sudan was kind of the line of that window.

And it was primarily a- Aslam area, and so we needed to develop strongholds of Christianity in Uganda so that the Muslim people couldn't come down and bring their ideology. We had to establish ours first.

And it really was this, like, this is a battleground. And anytime we learned that there was Islamic hospital that went up, we're like, oh, there they go again. And yet we were there doing the same thing with our own ideology and really implementing that in ways that have proved really harmful for certain communities in Uganda.

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I was listening as you were talking, and I was thinking about the other aspect of this, which may be for another podcast, but I'll mention it. Whenever you start taking over assets in a country, it puts you in a position where you can actually impact the politics.

And there are examples. I've got them on the website. You can go to my website and type in Robert Gambura. Robert Gambura was a Brannumite. He was establishing a Brannum sect. And he was revered as the spiritual leader. Well, as the sect began to grow, and obviously he's got land in his compound.

As the sect began to grow, they started working with maybe there would be a elite member of the message cult that was in the banking system, where they might rise up into the political system, whatever it was.

Well, in Zimbabwe, they basically grew to such a level of control that if you went to the bank and you wanted a loan, you almost had to be the Brannumites were favored over the people who were not Brannumites.

You almost had to have that position in that pool. So they were, at least in the region he was in, they were controlling the banking system. If you control the banks, you also control the government. He got into the government. He was helping to organize a military coup.

to overthrow the government, all of that research is on the website. And while all of this is going on and he's proclaiming Jesus or using the word Jesus, he is producing illicit material, I'll try to keep this G rated for YouTube, but he's producing illicit material because he had convinced all of the females in his sect that he was their spiritual husband. And as spiritual husband, he could take, he could partake in the physical aspects of husbandry, keeping this G rated as I go, right? Well, he went to prison and there's a whole story you can read about that. But what I'm trying to point

out here is once you start to build up assets and you get people in high places, now you have connections. And if I go back to my little tiny example of small businesses working to help each other, well, what's to say the ones who are being connected to the political wings or the political arms are not doing the same things? You experienced it with the oil tycoons. Well, there was also a political arm that's doing the same thing while you're entertaining the business tycoons. So as this thing grows, it's like this spider web that is literally invading a country. And he take a step back and you look at it and from

a religious standpoint, it doesn't make any sense. You just scratch your head. Now enter the family into this and the connection between the interface between Washington and religion is the family, which we've talked about. William Brannum's campaign manager was a director in the family. So there are, there's some historical connections. But if you look at what's happening today in the New Apostolic Reformation, all of the framework that was laid by Brannum and others, the man's name was the Baron William T. Freri von Blumberg was the director, Brannum's campaign manager. What he helped to establish in the United

States in a broad were several organizations similar to the family in other countries. But they did it under the skies of the faith healing revivals. So that network was established. Then it kind of dissolved. You don't hear much of lettering or the post-World War II healing revival. But all of those apostolic networks are what became the New Apostolic Reformation.

So as it's building layers and layers and layers of complex strategies to invade governments, now we have youth with a mission that's doing the same thing, but it's built on top of those networks. So you see all of these layers and it's like peeling an onion. Where do you stop? You peel off Y-Wam where you're going to find under Y-Wam was this other organization.

Under that was another and another and another. And I'll bet it's back as far back as you want to go through time. You can find this is happening to some extent. But I can't think of a time when...

They actually owned as many assets as we're talking about. I can't either. I think it's been intentionally, like the family. It's been this undercurrent, underground, quiet movement. And of course, there are louder, more prominent figures.

But I thought, even when I was in it, that Y-Wam was more niche and more small than I'm realizing even the more that I look into it, the more that I learn. And there's this story that Lauren Cunningham and Bill Bright would share, that they both were in Colorado.

And they both had a vision of the Seven Mountains idea. I wasn't mountains at the time. But the seven spheres of society. And they came together and they had both written down the seven spheres.

And we're like, oh my gosh, God showed me this, God showed me this, even though the seven spheres were already in the zeitgeist of that type of Christian world. But they had that meeting in 1975.

And so this has been a really long, really underground movement that I don't think we can underestimate all of the tendrils it has. And I don't think we have time, obviously, to go into all of this.

But there's also curriculum that was being implemented in schools. You can't all of the different mountains or spheres or whatever you want to call it have been impacted. We've visited 44 states now, as we've been in our van traveling around, and almost every place we go, you can find a Y-WAM base, especially for bigger cities.

It is not hard to find. They're everywhere. And that's any country. I can't think of a country that I know that there's probably not, and they probably don't own property and aren't establishing themselves.

And again, for me, it's not a problem for a church to be in a country, but usually the churches are going into the country so that that country can thrive. They'll go into a city, so the city can thrive.

But more specifically, it's usually an operation to a neighborhood, because we're talking about small missionary operations where I'm going to teach people how to plant, grow, hospital work, et cetera. You're going to train people so that they can train other people.

And what is spreading is the ability for self-survival. That's usually how the missionaries work in developing nations. Some of the nations that I've looked at with youth with the mission, they're not even developing nations.

Then you're talking about Colorado. That's kind of funny, too. But whenever you think of it like that, The only purpose that I can see is to gain assets. I can't see anything outside of gaining assets.

Yeah, and a lot of, you know, the main primary bases for a very long time were in Switzerland and Kona and still are. And these really expensive, really luxurious locations. And it's like, oh, interesting. God called you there.

Wow, that's convenient for you. And so many of the properties and bases are on really idealic places, really prime property. Well, and to somebody who thinks like a business, I mean, my mind's racing because I know how well this works.

There are phases in business that you may have one operation is just to get the assets. And once you collect enough assets, what's a better way to put it? I can bring it down to everybody's level with monopoly.

When you play monopoly, you go around the board and you've just got a board. Well, once you get enough money saved up, which is your asset, money is your asset in this case. Now I want to put a house on there. Well, once you get enough houses, you get a hotel. Those are phases of business and monopoly is just a game of business.

Once you get all of the assets, and if you've got prime real estate, well, you can either sell that prime real estate when you need a sum of money to do something else or be, what if I want to do Christian tourism?

I've got the perfect property for Christian tourism. Bring your wife, bring your family and come here to our Christian resort. I mean, that's right. I hate to say, but that's really what I'm thinking. And to be honest, there's a part of me just being a businessman.

If I was him, that's exactly what I would be doing. I would want the hotels on top of the properties in monopoly because why not? So as you understand how this grows, that's it. But I don't have the mind that is as evil and villainous as some of the more insidious characters that I've investigated.

Those that think beyond the monopoly game who are thinking, how can I manipulate every other player who's playing this game? Or how can I cheat the system and get a hotel before I get all of my houses? There are people that think like this.

Take it to the political world. How can I change this government's policy so that it gets me more benefit for my assets and the value of my assets grow faster? That's how insidious these people can think. And I'm just like I'm just grasping at straws because I don't think like this.

There are people listening. In fact, if you're a commenter and you've got one of these minds, maybe comment in the feed, you're going to see all kinds of things that people can do all kinds of things once you get these types of assets.

And in the end, what's the purpose? You gain the asset. If the objective is to teach the children how to be better Christians and how to convert other people to... a Christianity so that we can go to heaven.

Well, what purpose is the asset? Are you staying here? Are you going to have a land bridge that goes between heaven and this property? None of it makes any sense. You know, you have the base.

And then what you typically have is all these little splinters off of the base. So even as I talked about Colorado Springs, I also worked for a ministry that splintered off and it literally called itself business as missions, which is how I got connected with these oil people.

But then they also went on to buy another property in Colorado that's a very large property to start an aquaponics farm where they sell lettuce to local businesses in Colorado Springs. It really is like these businesses.

And it's always under the explanation of we're learning how to do this so that we can go train orphanages how to do this or various things. And again, I don't want to feel like I'm totally disparaging of what it means to go help other people.

But I really do believe in this phrase that I shared of you can't fight poverty. Like if you're only ever going to put out these fires, when are we gonna pause and look at the systems that are in place of why these countries have been underdeveloped in the first place?

And why these countries are impoverished? It's because of hundreds and thousands of years of history that I think we really need to take into account. Otherwise, we do get the sense of grandiosity that says, well, I can go help them, I can go fix it.

That doesn't take into question, why do I have thousands of dollars that I can go spend on a plane ticket? And this person is struggling to come up with means for school fees or food or why don't have to pay school fees when we don't have to hear.

All of these questions that I think are so important and not taken into consideration when it is just this charging forward and the sense of urgency of the great commission and getting everybody safe.

Well, and those aren't even the questions that I'm thinking about. Whenever you do this kind of an operation, there are what the best way to call it in business, we call it risk assessment.

Before you went in to gain assets, you had to assess the risk. What are my risks? What are the risks to those involved? And I don't really think that that's been thought through in this case because if you come in, you take over assets, each place that you go into has different sets of laws.

Some of those laws may not even make sense to people in the United States. You would never even think of these laws. But say, for instance, you take over the land and they've got laws around zoning.

So you take over this land, you're this big international operation. Well, what about the locals that are in that same zone? How do you... pack them. Do they have to move? Do they have to go to another zone? Politics. There are agendas in some countries if the one with the most money wins. So if you come in and you've got this massive asset, well, we're going to tailor all of our laws to fit these people and make them feel like kings while they're here, which that I'm certain that part is happening.

Well, what about the ones that the potential converts to Christianity who are watching this happen who are now being oppressed because of the political sway? Suddenly, they're angry. There's, you heck no, you're not going to convert me to this enemy who has invaded our land.

We were peaceful until they came into our land, right? There's all of these things that you have to consider. And in the end, it becomes more of a, it's like a partnership between the business side of the religion in the United States, the asset side, and whoever is helping to supply the needs for that asset. Sometimes it's local, sometimes it's from the United States, but it turns into a business operation that has to have a revenue stream, has definite expenses, is gaining assets. And in the end, are they missionaries who are coming as guests who bless,

or are they basically settlers coming to manage? Yeah, and I think about in terms of if you could Thanos and snap your fingers and all the YWMases disappeared, how many of those communities then would collapse? Because there has been this created dependency on short-term teams that are going to come and leave gifts, leave food, maybe have a special bond with a few kids that they support school fees for, you know, like there's so much of this, I think, conditioned dependency. And so even if you were to look at it and go, well, it looks like they might be doing something for the community, is that actually helping the

community become self-actualizing, or is that community just then dependent? And it becomes, I think, this version of a prosperity gospel, or it's, well, they have the access, they have the resources, so God must be on their side, or, you know, God must be on our side without questioning the human interactions and determines and everything else that's going into that.

To that point, the property itself and the prosperity that's involved with it, it centralizes the power to those who own the property. So for everyone on the outside looking in, they see, to them, it's no different than if some other foreign nation said, okay, we're, I don't know, Vietnam, we're going to put a Vietnamese-based- we're going to train Vietnamese people and we're going to operate independently of you who are not Vietnamese. I mean, I hate to say it, but that's exactly what it is, whether you use the word Christian or not to the locals, that's what it feels like. And picture this in Vietnam, you've got

this communist hierarchy and they're all going to the central figure and the central figure is the one with all of the power. Well, to the people who are in the land who are watching this happen, they're thinking, oh my gosh, now we've got this supreme power who's coming in and in this land, this is the land of that supreme power. On the NAR side, you've got the apostolic authority, the apostles, they're wanting to create the dominionist ideology, they're wanting to create theocracies. They see it as the same thing. It's basically communism, rebranded as Christianity, to the locals, that's how it would feel, communism, rebranded. And they see it as this invading force.

And so while from the missionary side, from the parent side, they see we're sending our kids and they're doing a good thing for a community, well, that community is not as receptive because of the structure that is being set up. Whereas the churches that I mentioned earlier, the people go in, the land is not theirs. They're helping people to better the land that they're on, that is not their own land. They're helping the people to establish networks of helping each other learn and grow and support the land. And they're basically building communities that can, the ideology of,

or the strategies of building that community can spread to other communities where the entire nation becomes a better place. As you're talking, I can't get one of the Y-Want bases in Eastern Uganda out of my mind, where it's, I would guess, 60 plus acres. And it has high ropes course, it has its own farm, it has these giant buildings. And it does. It hosts people for retreats. And it is its own ecosystem. And everyone who is there has paid to be there and is free labor. And so you have at least two hours of a work duty where you're going to be digging, cooking, cleaning,

nobody really hires locally because you're going to have an IT person on staff, you're going to have a maintenance person on staff. Like everywhere you go, it's these little insular bubbles. And it's like, well, again, why be there if you're not actually there. You're just this, this own little sphere in the midst of these communities. And often those are also, you know, European or American leaders of those bases.

Very, very rarely is it actually folks who are from that community, much less even that country or continent that are leaders of those bases. Yeah, the whole thing to me, like I said, it just simply does not make any sense.

And the fact that you are discovering this kind of blindsided after having been in it, it really shows that there wasn't a good transparency. People aren't, people in leadership aren't transparent about what's happening, but there's so many aspects that are wrong.

Usually this type of operation would have a very transparent mission, transparent governance. You would have local partnerships that totally replace everything that you just described. You would try to find locals to do each one of those tasks.

And if you couldn't, you would bring in somebody to train the local so that you still, in the end you had a local partnership. And so when the locals see a partnership, now we want to be part of your community.

Oh, your Christian, we want to be Christian too. I mean, that's how it works, right? So missionaries work. And I think the key that you mentioned is the, I can't remember how you ordered it, but basically it's the idea that this is a limited time commitment for us to help you establish yourself as a community that is thriving.

And we hope you're a Christian community when we leave. That's usually how missionaries work. Instead of this, we're going to come in and this land is our land and it's not your land. I mean, that song's going through my head.

It's kind of funny, but it's just, it takes me back to the mind of a, of a bad kid. It's not the good kid who wants to help the other kids. This is the bully in the room.

And I hate to say it, but I look at why I am and all I can see is the bully in the room. I'm thinking that the only locals we probably really helped or supported were bodas are these motor cycle taxi drivers.

And the Y-Wam base is about 30 minutes from town. And so they got a lot of money because there was constantly Y-Wammers riding back and forth. And even in town, I would hail a boda and they would go Y-Wam and they just knew like you're a white person, you're not from here.

That's probably where you're going to go. And other than that, I really can't think of locals where the assets or the money or finances or labor were getting distributed too. It's so sad. And there's so many more things that we could cover.

I mean, like I said earlier, this is just one small aspect of the problems that not many people think through as they're thinking through seven mountains mandate. But so much more we could get into.

Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you. Really nice to have this conversation. 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-Brandom.org and indwell-movement.com.

For more about the dark side of the new Apostolic Reformation, you can re-weaponize religion from Christian identity to the NAR. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.

You can find us at William-Brandom.org and indwell-movement.com. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.