Who Owns the Revival? Questioning the Restoration Narrative

Music Hello, 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, where history proves that truth, or at least their version of it, is truly stranger than fiction.

There have been many episodes that I have done about connecting the dots. And people often ask me, how do you come up with these dots? You know, it's difficult to explain. It is a long process of critical thinking.

But today, I wanted to talk about exactly how that comes to be, because I get to thinking about it. When we were in this revival-centered movement, we were not allowed to critically think. And if you did, you have an evil spirit. That's how they would frame it in these movements.

Movements that have discernment, so-called discernment, ministries. They will say often that you can catch a demon if you think the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, say the wrong thing. And in the end, what it really comes out to be is they're trying to manipulate and control you.

So people stop critically thinking. But there is a process for critical thinking. And Chinno Ross, who does the podcast with me on the Faith Assembly Sect, he's got this catchy saying about who, what, when, where, and why.

I can't remember his catchy saying. You'll have to ask him about that or watch his podcast. But it is true that if you just simply ask the basic questions, why? You find that there's a lot of questions to be asked.

And if you start to research those, you'll find that those spiderweb into more questions. And the more you dig, the more, I call them, dodge. You're connecting all of these dots. The more dots you see on your poster board of your brain to be connected.

One of the problems, however, there are several open questions when you do this. There are things that you'll ask that just simply have no answer. And that's the brick wall that you run into, right?

There are people who, because the movement has equated God with their version of God and their version of God has just as many questions as it does answers. Whenever you find that some of those questions will never have an answer and they don't feel right, people will abandon this image of God that's been created by the movement.

and say, I'm an atheist. In my opinion, they probably aren't. They just left this thing that they called God. And anyway, one of the biggest ones for this is revival. I started asking this simple question years ago before I started all of this weird mess that I got into researching all of these different splinter groups that emerged from the post-World War II healing revival. The healing revival itself was a revival. And who owns it? That's really the biggest question. If you go to the Brannemite sect, which is just one of many sects that spun off of this thing, they will say,

William Brannem owned it. He was the foremost leader of it. He is the one who was the messenger sent for the age. There's different catch phrases that they use. But in the end, what they're saying is he owned that revival. And God working through him, they will claim, is taking that revival to a small sub-sact of Christianity. I had a problem with this because in all powerful God, who has literally millions of Christians around the globe, how could this God abandon all of them to just choose this small chosen few and the whole rest of them be abandoned. Whenever I read the Bible,

the version of God that the New Testament was describing would not do this. And so it posed this question, who owns the revival? The weird part of it is, whenever I was in that type of mindset, in the Brannemite sect, I never really thought about all of the other sects that were in the revival.

And more to the point, I did not think about all of the different movements that came before that revival, who also claimed revivals and claimed that their end of days revival was the big one. And that would usher in the return of Jesus Christ and they would be caught away.

With each iteration of revival, you have people who claimed that this is where God is most powerfully moving. Right here, right now, to this little area, this little dot on the globe. And I began to have a problem with this. What about the other side of the globe? What about the Christians who aren't have no idea that this thing is even going on? Does God not care about those people? So this was one of the questions that I, you know, I started to follow through. These movements, they all claim the same thing. This is where God is moving most powerfully right now.

We are the continuation of the original New Testament movement. All the other Christians are religious. They're traditional. They're spiritually asleep. That's a big one for me. They have to explain a way why God doesn't care about the rest of them. And they'll say these things. They'll say these insulting things about other Christians. They're all traditional. We don't care about those. God doesn't care about those. He only...

hears about us, and then they'll say things like we receive this revival so that we can take it to the others, meaning that God cared more about these people who are in the movement and the revival, then he did the others, and he's going to teach them a lesson.

And again, I just, I had huge problems with this. To question any of this in the revival movement is to question or resist the Holy Spirit is what they will say. And I reached the point where I finally decided, look, these things need to be questioned.

They need answers. And so I began digging, and that's part of how this journey started to come about. But the real question for me, and I've made this slide, if you're listening to the audio only version you can go to YouTube, and I've got it in such a format that you probably need a computer to see all of it.

But I'll have a slide for each one of my attempt to organize all of my thoughts. But there's a central question, does any movement, place, leader, or network really have the right to define, claim, control, or distribute what God is doing?

So it would probably be good if I took a moment and just defined what revival is. Because when you think revival in today's world, you're thinking of a big crowd, you're thinking of a gathering of people to one specific location.

And all of the other Christians around the globe, they might get it later, but these people are going to get it here and now. And if it gets big enough and advertised enough, then the rest of the world might come, or they might send people.

And they'll send people back and they'll fill them with the Spirit by laying on of hands. That's usually, that's what the revival culture has taught us. But the biblical version of revival is quite different.

It's not a show, it's not a return, it's not a, it is a return in that it is God bringing His people back to Himself, but it's not something where the people are summoning God.

That comes from the occult. That's not something that is actually biblical. And I read the Bible many times after I left the movement. I don't claim to be a preacher, what I'm about to tell you are just simply things that I read myself, you can read them yourself.

And if you have questions, doctrinal questions, you can go to somebody who's more qualified than me, but just simply reading the Bible, it overturns the whole premise of what they're calling revival. I've got a few passages listed here and I've got them in this little slide, but a return to God is really what a revival is.

Psalms 85, God revives His people when they return to Him. And second Chronicles revival begins with confession and a humble heart. Deuteronomy, God restores people to His obedience and His ways. Second Chronicles, revival aligns worship with God's word, not traditions.

So you can see there's a theme going through here. I'll continue the slide on the screen, but the theme is that it is a restoration of the heart and soul. It's not a big gathering that is summoning God.

And revival culture will often redefine what revival is, large meetings. You've got crowds with excitement and emotion, and it's mistaken for basically this movement that's going to be created because of the emotional intensity.

The feelings are elevated above the faith. As John Wimber put it, doing the stuff is what matters. Well, that's part of what revival culture has developed. Signs and manifestations, the actual stuff that you're doing if you're doing this stuff.

Tongues, healings, prophecy, that's all associated with revival instead of reviving the people. Generally, it's a famous location, which is really weird, if you think about it, because why are these specific locations chosen? What about the locations in the other countries?

They're usually associated with famous leaders. Why does that personality matter? Why does God care about pointing to a human? Why not, if it's a revival, you're returning to him. Why not point people back to Jesus?

And instead, whenever you walk away from a revival, you read these history books of, okay, this was a revival, it was in this famous location, and these were the spiritual leaders. That's always what you read.

But the biggest thing revival culture has redefined, which really usurps the role of the Holy Spirit. It is a transferable experience. Much like the occult, if you get this spirit, you're a vessel to pour that spirit into another person, and it bypasses the Holy Spirit that, you know, that the Bible describes.

So there is a complete difference between what they're defining as revival, and what you read in the Bible, again, I'm not a preacher, I don't intend to be, I don't want to be, but I do read, and it's very easy to read and understand that what they're telling me isn't quite right, why are they saying it?

The other thing that I had to think through, very carefully, because this was a little bit difficult for me, I came from Brannemism, Brannemism was a descendant of Pentecostalism, Pentecostalism traces its roots back to the Azusa Street Revival.

And if you trace it forward, it goes through Brannemism into Latter-Rain, Latter-Rain to Carysmania, Carysmania to New Apostolic Reformation, so you can trace it backwards and forwards, but usually the book stops here when you go to Azusa Street.

And I began to ask the question, well, what about the other Revivals? Are they not count? Because the way that the Pentecostal movement has framed it, and interestingly, every iteration that came after they were repeating the cycle of history, they frame it in the same way.

way. This is a big revival. This is the one that matters. God is going to restore his people. Then he's going to return. And there's an action there. We have to do X so that God returns and does Y and Z. It's usually an action associated with it. But it all traces back to the Azusa Street revival. And I began to think through that, why do they get to own the revival? There are so many different Christians around the globe. Even back then, why was this little subsect of people part of this movement? And if it were to be the end of day's revival and God was going to suddenly

return, why did it fizzle out? And they had to have a second revival. And after the second revival fizzled out, why a third and a fourth and a fifth, you can just go through, you know, Toronto blessing. You can go to all of these different big revivals that claim this is it. This is God pouring himself out. But yet they keep happening. And all of the things that they claim associated with that revival never happen. So I began going back through just some of the big revivals.

And these aren't even an all-inclusive list. This is just the major ones that really had an impact on Christianity. The biggest one, of course, was the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s. Martin Luther decided he's going to return back to Scripture. He had the Freysola Scripture by Scripture alone, salvation by grace, renewal of worship. This was a big deal.

This created literally the Protestant version of Christianity. And Christianity itself split in a large way. You had the Catholicism on one hand, you had the Protestant on the other. And then it began to also include revivals that created additional splits. You had the first great awakening of the 1700s. Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, hundreds of thousands of people were converted in the first great awakening. You had the Wesleyan revival, 1730, approximately to the 1800s. John and Charles Wesley Methodist movement began to spread. Eventually around 1790, the second great awakening began to happen. Again, in the United States, mass revivals across America,

millions of people professing their faith. And there's a strong emphasis on missions with the second great awakening. So it laid some groundwork that would later be reused by the Apostolic Reformation. But 1800s, you began the camp meetings. You had the more than two million people annually attending these great revivals, these camp meeting revivals.

1857, you had the prayer revival that began. It was triggered by an event that happened in New York and it swept across all the denominations. They had a strong emphasis on prayer, repentance, and holiness.

And this kind of helped to spawn off the holiness revivals that began in the 1860s through the 1890s. People were believing that you had to be sanctified entirely, healed, holy, and sent in the holiness revivals.

Also another big one is the Welch Revival, 1904 to 1905. This is immediately prior to the Pentecostal Azusa Street Revival. People, entire communities of people were impacted by the Welch Revival. There was a focus on deep repentance and transformation.

And one of the key points here is the global influence. Immediately before Pentecostals claimed Azusa Street, the Welch Revival claimed we have a revival so strong that we want to spread it around the globe, God is going to be moving.

And again, this is 1905, whenever that revival started to fizzle out. 1906, Azusa Street happens. Who owns the revival? Which group, which sect of Christians owns the revival? That's the big question that I was just struggling with.

The more I learned, the bigger the question got. Because each group thinks that they've got God in this little box, and God can only operate in the manner in which their doctrines permit. But you had Revival just as big, if not bigger, in other places around the globe, with different doctrines, different people.

One of the answers to this that, in my opinion, is not a good answer, that brannemism and parts of the Laterane would teach. They tried to categorize everything in sort of a chronological order where God's giving just a little bit of the quote-unquote mystery to the people.

They would say that, yes, we had this big revival, yes, it was a move of God, but they don't have the truth that we have now. God only gave them just a little bit.

And that was really a poor answer, in my opinion, because why would God not care enough about those people, back in the, I don't know, Reformation 1500s? Why would he not care about those people enough to give them the full picture, if he's going to give us the full picture?

And it was really just a way to say that our doctrines don't really match those other revivals, but we have God in our box, they only had just a little piece of God in their box.

And so, brannem would say, he would often say things like, it went through Finney, to Knox, to Moody, and he would, he had this trail of succession of just a little bit of truth with each quote-unquote age.

Until his age was the big one, I have all the mysteries come here me, because I'm the all-powerful revivalist. So I began to think through that, brannem was not even born when the Azusa Street Revival happened, yet he was the foremost leader of another revival that came after from the same group of people that had the Pentecostal Azusa Street Revival.

How does this work? Why was this important? So I had to weigh in the balance. Was the Azusa Street Revival really the big one that they claimed? Was it influential? I could say yes, it was influential. Without the Azusa Street Revival, you would not have branemism. Without branemism, you would not have lateral reign. Without lateral reign, you would not have charismatic Pentecost, New Apostolic Reformation. It was influential in that it created a sub-sector of Christianity, but was it the greatest revival in Christian history? Not by the facts. I'm looking through all of these different revivals, and the

peak attendance alone tells the story. Whenever the Azusa Street Revival happened, it was estimated there were probably three to four hundred people there, maybe a few hundred conversions if that, and it lasted three years. So just simply by the numbers, this was a very, very small revival. And remember, there was a massive amount of Christians compared to this all across the globe. Did God not care about those people? That was a big question that bothered me. You look at the watch revival, for example, there were a hundred thousand plus in the peak attendance of the revival. And it only lasted 18 months, not three years. So we're

talking about a massive, massive national transformation in Wales. In the Great Awakening, you had tens of thousands per meeting, hundreds of thousands of conversions. Compare that to the Pentecostal movement, the Azusa Street Revival. It was just, it's trivial when you think of what Azusa Street really was. So I began looking at this in a much different way. It wasn't the big one that Pentecostalism claimed. But in my frame of reference, I was still trying to piece together the Pentecostal movement had their revival, the Azusa Street Revival. It fizzled out. We had the latter rain revival. Could it simply be that God came

down into this Azusa Street Revival and gave people just this little piece of the puzzle. And we're going to get the bigger puzzle later. So I was thinking along that, along that trail of thinking, because I was trained to believe that it was a mystery God was fulfilling.

But then, whenever I read the Bible, it said that the mystery of, you know, the mystery that's being fulfilled is Jesus Christ. Why do we need a revival instead of Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit? So my way of thinking really came full circle. I came out of the mystery mindset into now questioning which revival is the big one. And why do we even need it? Because we were taught still teaching today in the New Apostolic Reformation. We were taught that there would be suddenly this building.

and so harvest theme that after we have this revival culture and it spreads around the globe, when that last one comes in, I heard that phrase so many times in the meetings, when that last one comes in, that's it, the ship's going to sail, we're going to be out of here.

Well, that has been taught for decades and centuries. You know, centuries, if you go back time, everybody thinks that this is the big one. Once that last one comes in, once we do our part, then Jesus can come. And I got to thinking about that. Why do we have to do something? What scripture in the Bible will tell us that we have to do something before Christ returns? I couldn't find it. It just simply, if it's there, somebody can send it to me on the comment feeds, but I never came across anything that said that we have to do something. It was more, you would read

the passages where Jesus said it is finished. I have done the work. Now you just simply have to believe in me. So was this is a street? The big one? No, it was not. It was by comparison to the other revivals. It was quite trivial. And yet there are other denominations that came out of the streams of revivals that I'm mentioning that some of them are Pentecostal, but by and large, some of them are not. Who owns the revival? That's the question that I kept asking.

Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book. You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute

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I've mentioned before that I'm a big fan of the Andy Griffith Show and I'm proud to admit it. I have watched so many of those episodes that by the time I was about age 16 or 17, I could almost quote them verbatim and people would watch a show and I would be saying the words that they were saying before it came out of their mouths. And people would look at me like, John, are you crazy? There are two things that I like most in this world. One is Andy Griffith, one is cartoons. So everybody who knows me knows this. There was this one episode of Andy Griffith.

I think it was called dinner at eight if I remember correctly. But B is away from town, Andy is, he's at home batching it because Opie's gone on, I think it was a scouting trip and he's got his hands brought behind his head and he's just taken it easy and Aunt B asked Goober to go check on him and Goober decides that Andy needs to be fed.

And so he makes his special spaghetti and he's proudly explaining to Andy as Andy's eating it what the special ingredient is. And long story short, Andy gets invaded by people wanting to give him different spaghetti.

He goes to Howard, he goes to all these different people and they all offer him spaghetti and they all say the same thing. My special ingredient to this spaghetti is oregano, don't tell anybody, but every single one of them they all makes spaghetti and apparently oregano is the super way to make spaghetti which is kind of funny if you think about that in itself.

When I started looking through all of these revival ministries and meetings and movements and every single aspect of what they were saying, it reminded me of that spaghetti episode because they all say the same thing.

They all have their own version of what is oregano. You've got the, in the holiness movements, they are saying that we are recovering a biblical call to holiness. The whole world of Christians has forgotten it.

We must restore holiness. That was in the 1830s. Pentecostalism comes along, baptism of the Spirit speaking in tongues. We have restored the New Testament experience. Our oregano is better than their oregano. Each one that comes along, they all claim to be restoring what was lost to humanity and Christianity in general.

I have two problems with this. Number one, it is repeating itself. It's like Andy eating all of the spaghetti and in the end, he gets so tired of that spaghetti. He doesn't know what to do.

Well, if you think through these revivals, you get so tired of the revivals, you don't know what to do because they all make the same claim. The earlier revivals only received part of the truth but we have the next or the more full version of the truth.

We have the restoration. God is restoring the church to the state which they can be raptured or whatever is the result of the restoration in the specific movement. Laterane movement, same thing. We are restoring the prophets, the apostles, the impartation, the laying on of hands.

We are receiving the laterane of the Spirit. And you have to ask yourself, well, how is that different from Pentecostal's revival? They have restored the New Testament experience which would have included those things, right?

But each iteration that comes along, they will say, they only received part of the truth. Now we have the fuller truth and therefore our revival is better. So back to the antigriffus show each version of the spaghetti that comes Takes a different twist to the story because and he's as he's eating these things He's getting so tired of eating spaghetti and they all claim to have the same thing and we can't taste what antigriff Griffith tasted But we have to imagine that as he's eating these spaghetti. He's thinking that tastes pretty much the same as the last batch

Yes, they all use oregano. Yes, I'm getting tired tired of this oregano Well in the revival culture when you have this type of mentality that our version is true The other versions was partially true, but our version is better what it creates is the step ladder and in the step ladder the movement itself Gets elevated and so instead of elevating Christ the movement becomes higher ranking in status and higher and higher and higher With the addition of the apostles and prophets in the ladder rain movement Now the people are also being elevated. We have we have the best apostles today the apostles of days gone by

They only had a part of the truth. We have the full truth today And in the end you're you're elevating a movement and a human Above the call to repentance which is the actual biblical version of revival Again, go back to what the Bible says about revival It's restoring people to God Not restoring a movement so that the movement can be elevated and have more truth That's really if you weigh into the scales of balance of actual truth. That's what it is They just have misrepresented to the people what revival means and in doing so they have elevated themselves in a way that should never have ever happened

The pattern is repeated every generation people will adopt a legacy of the previous version But then claim greater power greater revelation greater anointing It will put itself at the cutting edge. They'll say we're at the cutting edge of God's promises to the church But while it is doing this it's downplaying the incomplete Status of the previous revival in other words what God did for them That's not important God God was not being fully honest with those people back then He's more honest with us today now. We have a better version of the truth And it paints God into a box that actually is painting God into a liar

God is not being fully truthful and fully open fully transparent with the previous version But he is to our version today Well when today comes and goes whenever the revival fizzles out now the next one is going to say that our version Does not have the full truth That was a problem that I began to realize Early on when I began to look at this Every single flavor of this many of them even have doomsday predictions. Every single version of this had the same exact scenario.

History repeats itself if you're not watching history to learn from your previous mistakes. The interesting part about all of this is that every one of these movements that I'm describing, they have their own version of historians. So each movement, as they progress through time, and they'll say the last iteration wasn't as good as ours, they're repeating the same mistakes with the historians who are dedicated to sharing their own biblical truth. And there's a reason for that, which took me a long time to catch on to.

The historians dedicated to each of these movements, who proclaim that these revivals that we're in now, this is the work of God, this is the Holy Spirit. What they do is they will eliminate all aspects that you might critically examine.

Anything that you might be skeptical of, they don't include it in their histories. And whenever they go back in time and look at the movements that really spun off their own revival, they won't examine the critical histories of those revivals. So the question that I began to ask, and it was a big one, really difficult to ask, are they really historians?

As a historian, you record all of the facts because they're simply facts. Good, bad, ugly. That's what a historian does. But yet many of these so-called historians will only present the facts that are in favor of the movement. So history repeats itself because they're not including any of the stuff that we don't want to make those same mistakes. All mistakes are eliminated.

And I had a huge, huge problem with this. Early on, this is one of the reasons that and people call me out on this rightfully so, to say, did not you read this history from this historian or this book from this author who's part of the movement? Didn't you read that? He explains this. Well, no, I didn't because if they're not telling me the whole truth, why would I want to read a skewed opinion and get a set of facts that are only partial facts that tell a different narrative than the history tells itself? So in the end, I began to realize that what they have, it's a restoration

narrative. Even though the movement, not all of the movements spawned off a restoration movement, they would all claim that we are the restores and we have a narrative. We have a, often they'll call it a, I hop KC calls it prophetic history. We have a prophetic history that tells how we got to where we are today. And in that prophetic history, you're going to find that they had just a little bit of truth before, but now we have the answers. We have a new apostle, we have all of the answers.

Same thing that I had in Brannemism. Brannem would go through all of the different histories, all of the different big names in the revival history, and he would say they had a little bit of truth, but we in our age, we're in the last age, we're in the age where the God is gonna come down and restore the church, and then he will come and take his church away.

So all of this is exactly the same. History is repeating itself, but for me the biggest problem with the way that they were doing it is again, A, they're concealing large parts of history and B, in doing so they're elevating the movement while not elevating God.

If you follow out everything that they say out to its logical conclusion, really you have to come to the conclusion that God is not in control. Most of the Christians are not in this revival culture, and whenever they talk about the locations of the famous revivals, most of those are in the United States.

Some of them, yes, did happen abroad, and they do get connected in, but by and large, we're talking about Toronto blessing, we're talking about Florida, we're talking about Azusa Street, we're talking about all of these things that are happening on the North American continent, and you have to wonder, well, what about the other continents?

Why does God not care about those? If God is restoring just a little bit of truth to each version of these people, and that truth is progressing with each revival, why is it centered on a specific location?

Why not India? Why is God not going into China where there isn't a lot of Christians? There's a small number. Why is he not breaking out into revival in China so that China can explode into Christianity?

So I began to think about just simply the Christians who were not in the revival culture, and I was a little surprised, because I was contained in this revival culture box, I was a little surprised to learn that most Christians are not even in this revival culture.

Revival culture in the end is not the whole story when you picture the history of Christianity. There are billions of Christians. Earlier in this podcast, I said millions, and as I'm going through my notes, I still am in that mindset, millions, because we were taught falsely that there's the small number of Christians, where I subset, but we have a small version of truth because they need to be restored.

And it's not even millions, it's billions of Christians worldwide who don't even identify a Pentecostal charismatic or any sort of apostolic prophetic ministry. These are just Christians who profess and believe Christ. And remember, it's by grace you're saved through faith in Jesus Christ, not of works, less than you man should boast.

People who believe in Christ are therefore Christians, and therefore God should care about them. But in the revival culture mindset, they're excluded from God's care, which that was a huge problem for me. It's a real huge problem.

So looking... at the numbers. And these are 2025 estimates. There are 2.3 billion Christians worldwide, 2.3 billion. About 30% of the world's population is Christian. And when you look at just simply the Pentecostal Charismatic Streams, there's only about 230 to maybe 700 million people who are in that stream. The evangelical non-Pentecostals, the historic Christian churches, all of these that are outside of the revival streams are larger in number than those who are in the revival.

So this picture raised another question for me. If God is in control and this revival culture is having revivals that have a little bit of truth than a little more truth and a little more truth, you would think that the truth and the growth would be exponential. In other words, God restored a church. We started spreading through the laying on of hands, however the spirits imparted in whichever revival culture you're talking about. As that spread and grew, it grew, you should have a greater number of Christians who are coming into that culture.

Otherwise, God's not in control. There are Christians who stay outside of the culture. Does God not have power over those Christians or does he not care about those Christians? That is the bigger problem. So I began to look at this in a much different way. I also had to take into account because we were sadly taught that if you're a Catholic, you're excluded from God's care immediately because you're Catholic. You follow the Pope. Therefore, you do not, you're not Christian.

That's how I was taught. That's how a large number of people are taught. I was not aware of the white supremacy connections that created that mindset. And if you go through the history of the church, the church was Catholic before it was Protestant. So I had to reevaluate that and honestly that's a bigger podcast that probably is deserving of a whole podcast itself just to talk through that. But at minimum, there are people who are Catholic. Whether I agree or disagree with the doctrines is not the question. There are people who profess faith in Jesus Christ. And if God is

all powerful, God is in full control. And there in more desperate need of Christianity or restoration, according to my mindset, why did not God strategically have a revival within the Catholic church that did the same thing? That was one of the questions that I asked. Was God not strategic? Did he not know how to operate within his own culture? That was a big question for me. And I came to realize that our mindset was just so far wrong that we really could not paint God into the box that we painted him, and fulfill all the scriptural things that are said about God.

Because if you break it down, Christianity is doctrinally diverse. You've got the Catholic and Orthodox. You've got the Protestant traditions, evangelical, non-Penocostal traditions, Pentecostal and charismatic traditions, and then you've got this global South expansion, which has a bunch of interesting versions of Christianity, which I won't even try to dissect in this podcast.

But each one of these people believe in Jesus Christ, they just have different ways that their doctrines have evolved over the years, and we can't agree with, you know, I could not agree with some of the things that happen in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, but they also could not agree with the things that I have.

And while I would point to say, are you sure you want a central figure, which would be the Pope, they would say the same thing about, for example, the Pentecostal and charismatic. Are you sure you want this apostle guy?

He is dictating to you all your doctrine and scripture. And when you weigh it into the balance, they're both saying the same exact thing. Yet at the same time, both groups will profess full faith in Jesus Christ, and the same passage that I mentioned from Ephesians, both will stand firmly on that passage and say, I believe in Jesus Christ, I'm saved.

So if you have Christians, regardless of the doctrines, regardless of what preconceived notions you have about those in the other categories, even if you believe those to be false movements, that's actually more to the point that I was trying to get at.

If it is a false movement in need of restoration, as this restoration, revival culture teaches, why did the restoration not happen within that culture? We were taught in Brannemism that the Catholic Church was the mark of the beast.

That's widely spread throughout the 60s, 50s and 60s in the white supremacy circles. They're invading the United States, therefore they're evil. That's part of the ridiculous mindset I was in. Yet the revival did not come within that movement, within Catholicism, to spread the truth about Christianity so that the Christians within the movement could come to the better truth as they called it in Latin rain.

Why is that? Why did God do this? I'm a songwriter, if you can't tell from all of the music. This is about the point in my life that it started to happen. I started having these songs come to me.

I'm a songwriter and I was writing them down as fast as I could. Some of them, many of them are lost, but they would have themes like, why did God come to save the saved?

Why did He not come to save the lost? And looking back, this was before I had really escaped Brannemism. Looking back, my mind was critically thinking about exactly this. And looking back, my mind was critically thinking about exactly this.

Christianity is so doctrinally diverse, yet each person within Christianity is professing Jesus Christ, the name of Jesus Christ, believing in Jesus Christ for their salvation. Why, if they needed restored, did not God go to restore them?

Why did He restore those who were already somewhat restored? It created a conundrum in doctrine, right? And then I began to realize that to each group of people, revival does not look the same.

You have some people who quiet renewal, that's more of my style, repentance, prayer, holiness. It may look ordinary to people who never experienced what I went through, but my experience was something that didn't have a big emotion.

Whenever I had an experience, it was more of me just connecting with God. And this happened, believe it or not, while it was in the Brennan movement, I had this experience. And I have to believe if that was God that I connected with, God led me out of the movement.

But yet, if you're in the revival culture, you're saying, no, no, no. You can't have connected to God within something that was occult. You connected with the cult God. Is that true or is God not in control of all of the people?

Now there are different people with different stories of what they've went through, and I'm not going to deny those. Some do get emotional. There are people who just simply, you know, their internal makeup is such that they want to show the emotion.

I'm not like this. I want to show the logic of what I did. I'm a more logical person than this. So with each person, it's different, and I'm not condemning that at all. But what I'm saying is, if we're calling it revival, and revival must be this big emotional display where all of these people gathered, what about the people like me who want to be as far away from that type of mentality as possible?

You could not get me to go to one of these revivals where there's 100,000 people in a ballpark. You just can't get me to do it. Even if God were there, I would be praying, God, I'm going to wait until you come out of that place.

I don't want to be in it. I don't want to be packed in like a box of sardines and get into the hype and emotion that everybody else is getting because that is their emotions.

That's not my emotions. I'm more of the quiet renewal type, but there are people who aren't like this, and I'll say that not all people are the same, not all Christians are the same, and that applies to each of the denominations.

They all have a different culture within them, and just because my culture is different from their culture doesn't mean that they're not Christian, it just means the cultures are different. Now you could say that some of the doctrines are incorrect or not biblical.

I'm going to put that off to the side for now. I'm just going to say that the cultures are different, and the people who are... in them are professing Christianity otherwise, it wouldn't be considered a Christian church.

But we're talking about Christians, and again, there are 2.3 billion Christians on the earth. If you go through this exercise and examine the revival culture, what it is, how it has developed, what it has became.

You begin to realize that there is a strong human element to this. And the question has to be asked, which I've asked in various ways, was God behind the movement, or was it mostly humans that were involved?

Interestingly, I just recorded a podcast with Pia Hugo about this exact question. I don't know if it comes out before or after this one. But she came from the New Apostolic Reformation version of the revival culture.

I came from the Brannum version. So our histories are, though they're intertwined, they are much different, and revival to her looks much different than revival does to me. Why is this because the cultural, political, and technological engines of revival differ depending on the time period?

And the conclusion that anybody who looks at this will come to, I don't care who you are, I don't care if you even believe in the revival culture. If you look at the history and look at the facts, you will come to the conclusion without question that revivals do not spread by the spirit alone.

They write on the winds of the times. So to speak, God can use any time and any tool. In fact, in the revival culture, they will say that God invented this technology so that we can spread our version of the revival.

The problem is, for me, if you dive deeply into that culture, you also see that the doctrines shift depending on social and cultural conditions at the time. So when these social and cultural conditions begin to fuel the revival, you have things like social instability.

The war, the unrest, war was a big thing in the laterane revivals. You've got the migration and urbanization of people. If not all of the people in the rural communities, it's hard to have a revival in the rural communities.

You have a city revival. People far from home will seek communities and new identities. And in the end, it's all about the location that the revival is happening. There is a spiritual hunger sometimes.

People would just get simply disillusioned with whatever denomination they're in, whatever religion they're in. And if there's a large number of people at the same time, that disillusionment will create this openness to a revival type of culture.

A big one within the Pentecostal movement is the in times expectations. There are people who just simply cannot help it, but say, I was told by God that he's gonna come on this day, this month, this hour, this minute, et cetera.

And you can walk back, history and it just happens over and over and over again, and in each case, when it doesn't happen, the people turn destructive because their in-time vision has not been fulfilled.

There's also a political and cultural fear. The fear creates the unrest, the unrest creates the people who want to escape all of this fear, so what better place to escape than into the revival.

There is a desire for people to connect directly to a divine being, and people who, even if you're not Christian, you want that connection, especially during the fear and unrest. Well, these people in the revival culture will tell you, we have the answers.

Come to us and you can connect with God. All of the other churches you can't, as usually how it's framed, and it's just simply not true. There are Christians who connect with God, billions of them, as I've mentioned all across the globe.

Well, one of the things that the revival culture has done that's horrific, in my opinion, is created celebrity leadership. The charismatic leaders become the symbols of the move of God, and therefore, they're named God's generals.

But again, it's not just the celebrities that enable all of this. For me, I have to look at the technologies, and it's kind of funny when you look at it, when you piece together the timeline of revival, look at what's happening in technology.

Look at the era when the railroads were invented, and people can now come to revival. Newspapers and tracks can be printed. Well, now you can distribute your call to revival. Radio, we had a big set of people, whenever radio was coming to be, and there were Christian radio preachers, where they would spark a revival just simply by preaching on the radio, and everybody's listening to it.

Come along to the television age, everybody's watching television, you have the big televangelists. All of these different things, all of these different technologies will spawn off the ability to market, promote, advertise, and sell your revival.

If you don't have that engine, you're not going to have what they're calling revival. Because again, it's trying to pack as many people as possible into a location so that they can give it offering.

I mean, I'd say, but that is the bottom line. That's what they're trying to do. When you piece all of this together, what you end up with is, it is a business. It is a revival business.

It runs like a business. They have different technologies that they use to advertise their business. In the end, what they're doing is they're advertising the celebrities. You can look at it much like, you know, there are people who say, well, revival culture's not that bad.

Yes, they have a celebrity, but you're watching Andy Griffith, John. He's a celebrity. That may be true, but the problem is the destruction that has come with that mindset. There are families who are separated from other family members.

numbers, there are people giving their lives to the movement, it's just horrific what they've done. And for me, I looked at the technologies, I looked at the culture, I spent a large part of time looking through the political currents that shaped it.

And I'll throw it up on the screen here, but I won't go deep into this. You can look at the political landscape during each era of revival. And you can see a direct correlation between what's happening politically and what's happening in the revival, especially whenever you get into the laterane movement.

By then, you actually have, the politics has merged so significantly with the revival leadership that they're actually instructing the leadership how to hold the revivals and what doctrines to preach. I've got an example of this, we covered pretty well of Richard Nixon talking to the full gospel businessmen, telling them the battles in the minds, we need to fight communism.

And the history tells what happened with this, but the evangelical community just ran rampant with this fear of communism and it turned into a gospel of fear, which is very, very destructive. So I won't get into that, you can read the weaponized religion books or you can watch the weaponized religion podcasts and you can see some of that.

But in the end, it came down to this one point for me, which is a big one. There was a true revival, which the Bible describes, which is connecting to God. And then there's this manufactured momentum that they're calling revival.

The manufactured version produces excitement, not repentance, personalities are elevated, division happens, it runs rampant through this, through this movement. What's interesting is it always fades quickly after the event. You've got a revival, it's breaking out, it's the biggest thing ever and then suddenly nobody remembers it, it's faded away.

But yet the leadership of the revival, you will remember those for years, for decades, because the revival spawned off the celebrity leaders and they're glorified instead of Christ being glorified they are. So in the end, when you weigh in the balance and compare true revival versus the manufactured version, it is the opposite.

The true revival is glorifying Christ, it lasts long term, not fading away quickly. There's a unity in the truth, there's a unity in the people, there are humility is one of the big things.

The Bible, the New Testament, talks about the sin of pride frequently throughout the New Testament. And if you look at the revival culture, you have a big, huge heaping helping of pride. In the true revival sense, whenever people are reviving themselves, they're getting closer to God, it humbles the heart according to the Bible.

So the two just simply aren't correct at all. And I'll put a caveat to that. I'm not saying that God keeps... and move through the revival culture. But the question is, how successful is it?

How many times has this thing happened that they claimed was the big one? This is it, this is the big revival. And then suddenly it just fades away and it's long forgotten as though it never really happened other than the leadership who are all remembered for the event.

The real problem exists today that many of the leaders who are associated with this revival culture are turning out to be people who you really don't want leading you. I won't give the names, you can read through the news and you can see the people that I'm talking about, but everything from sexual immorality, to theft, to greed, all kinds of problems.

And you have to ask yourself, would God who is in all power, who is strategically aligning his church for a restoration, which is what they're proclaiming, would he choose people who are like this to lead the movements?

And I have to say, I don't think so. I really do not, because if I wanted to say, I'm in business, say I wanted to create the next latest, greatest product, would I choose a bunch of people who weren't well suited to develop that product?

And in fact, some of them who would do just the opposite of develop it, they would actually destroy the product. I don't think that I would choose people like this. In fact, I know I would not choose people like this.

And I would not be respected if I did. If I went into a client and the client saw that I chose complete imbosules to do my work, and that some of them were actually working against me, they would question my leadership and say, we don't want you as I vendor for us, get out of here.

Well, the problem is there are many people who are in the revival culture, who suddenly wake up and say exactly that. If God looks like this, I don't want it. These people are horrific people.

I know that there are people who are suffering because of this. In fact, we share their stories on every Friday. Revival culture has spun off this thing where revival itself becomes a property, a product, and a power to the people who are leading it.

And that power is unwielded. It's unrestrained. The people who get this type of power, they start using that power to control other people. And the problem is that once that ownership is assumed, they run with it just like a business, just like I would with my business.

They own it, so therefore let's monetize it. How can we bring more money in? Let's sell products, conferences. We have the seed faith scheme, which is ridiculous, whenever you are outside of this culture and you look in, you think, oh my gosh, why did they even accept this?

The exclusivity. I know families, many families who are broken because the group became so exclusive that if you weren't in their group, they would just cut you off. Either physically you can't come around.

Just anymore or emotionally, I will never emotionally connect with you again. They will tell people and it's just wrong what they're doing. It creates a platform where other leaders can self promote and leaders within the movement will help them establish their own ministries because once that ministry is connected, it's also another revenue stream.

It all goes back to the monetization, the control and the manipulation runs rampant. There are stories. If you go to the Royz report, for example, you can read through stories of how people are being manipulated because a leader has gained control of the congregation that he should never have or she should never have.

That power has to have accountability. Without oversight, without transparency, without correction, you just simply have a mess and it's a mess that will destroy and ruin lives. You have to have consistency and the problem is the lifestyles that they live are not consistent with what they preach.

Living lavish, they've got these jets and some of them in the prosperity gospel have all kinds of things that their congregants would just like to have food on their table, but the problem is they're giving these people their money so they don't have food while somebody's sporting a fancy new car, etc.

And in the end, for me, the problem is that it is fruitless. You can give all your money, you can pour yourself out into this revival culture, you can give 200% of what you have to give to so-called give to God.

And in the end, you're not. You're giving it to a human and the human reaps all the benefits. So for me, the question still exists. Who owns the revival? I have come to the personal opinion that it's definitely not the God of the Bible.

So if the God of the Bible does not own this revival culture, does not own its properties, its mansions, its movements, its strategies, its financial gains. If the God of the Bible doesn't own it, who owns the revival?

So if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Brandom.org. For more about the dark side of the new apostolic reformation, you can read Weaponize Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available in Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.