The Latter Rain Message

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 together we're examining the history and the intersections in history between William Brannum and other key figures that either influenced or were influenced by the post-World War II healing revivals. Charles, I cannot believe that you've made me wait an entire week to continue this laddering conversation. I've been waiting so long to get into it and now we've had to wait a week but I'm so excited for today.

Me too, John. These topics here are incredibly, incredibly interesting to me. Like I mentioned in our last episode, one of the most important things to me personally coming out of all this has been to figure out where the things that we believe in the message had come from.

You know, of course in the message we believe that God or an angel came to William Brannum and told him a whole bunch of this stuff and that is the basis on which we came to have our divine revelations. And of course, you know, when we found out that none of that was true. God have mercy. None of that was true. It became quite interested to me to figure out where did this stuff come from.

And as we as we talk today about the ladder rain movement, it is so critical to that and many other subsequent movements because the ladder rain movement birthed a new ideology, John, and that ideology found life in the message and the life in many other groups.

And it actually, I would say the key framework with which with which the message operated within originated in the ladder rain movement itself. Yeah, I agree. You know, when I was a kid, there was this game that we played called clue and you had Professor Plum and Colonel Mustard and it was this big who done it. And it was really one of my favorite games because it put you right into the mystery.

And when I learned about ladder rain and learned how absolutely significant it was towards the creation of numerous. Oats, movements, splinter groups, basically extremist Christianity, all finds its roots in Laterane. It turned into this big who done it.

But the more I dug into it, I realized it would be like if you take that clue game and everybody done it. They're all, you know, everybody has some stake in this pie that they've, that they're putting together, you know, it's, it's so weird to think about so many people collaborating and then realizing it's destructive and then trying to cover it up.

That's the part that just blows my mind. Right. And, you know, the, the Laterane movement, so many of the, there's a whole lot of people that were in Laterane very early on that actually went on to be very prominent in the message, right?

I mean, we have, and I should have pulled them out here. I can give you copies to put on the screen, but, you know, Roy Borders was very early involved in the Laterane. One of the ministers there, Lee Vail, was involved very early in Laterane, earned backstair, of course.

You know, he was heavily influenced by Laterane, went on to produce the shepherding movement with, with some other men, Franklin Hall, Paul Cain was another very prominent figure to be influenced by Laterane, and, and all of these men, they, some of them of course came in and were very influential in the message.

But others went within other movements and took Laterane ideas elsewhere. And so the, these ideas that came in Laterane, I should say, maybe the distinctive doctrines that developed in Laterane are, are very impactful.

And I pulled out, I did pull this off the shelf, just to show one of these, the Herald of Faith magazine. And I mentioned this in our last episode, Joseph Matzenboze, there's a picture of him here in the magazine.

Joseph Matzenboze was, he was just a very prominent figure, this is him right here, in, within Laterane. And this is his publication. And, and of course, they, they publish these. And if you want to get a good idea of what's going on in Laterane, a good idea of their doctrines and ideas and teachings, these magazines are one of the best ways to do that.

And of course, Jim Jones was heavily involved in Laterane for quite a few years. And there's, there's just so much in these magazines that, that you can get. So I would encourage anybody that wants to find some stuff out and look at some primary source material on Laterane's to look at this magazine set.

I have a, almost complete collection. And I know, John, I've, I have digitized that. You have quite a few of them up on your website, if people want to look at them as well.

Yeah, there were several big surprises for me whenever I started digging into this. Number one, we were in a cult that was called the message. The cult called themselves globally the message and then there's all these.

spin-off groups within the message cult of, you know, they're all really the message. They all use William Brannem as their framework. But I learned that that message that we were in was basically a rebranding of the latter reign, what existed.

It used to be called the latter reign message. And over time, when it became popular and mainstream for a brief period of time, you, people stopped saying the latter reign message and they just shortened it to the message.

And I first stumbled onto this through a friend. They showed me that Jim Jones had been using this phrase, the message. He was a minister. He was a leader in the message. And at that point in time, I disconnected the two because I had no idea Jim Jones was actually in William Brannem's cult until years later.

But that, you know, that was a shocker to me to learn that the message that I grew up in was actually at one time called the latter reign message. And number two, the second biggest shocker was that I started, you know, discussing this with other people.

There are many people who weren't aware. They've, you know, long since forgotten who Jim Jones was. Yet ironically, one of the phrases don't drink the Kool-Aid has made it into mainstream. And everybody's aware of this phrase because, you know, it means don't just dive in head first, check things out.

Well, Jim Jones was a leader in William Brannem's cult and he took years later after he left, after he parted with William Brannem. He took 900, I believe it was, followers down to Guyana and in South America.

And they committed mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. I was really shocked that people had forgotten this history. And then the second, the third biggest surprise, I started, once I learned this, I started talking to the heads at the Jones Town Institute.

I think it's called now alternative considerations of Jones Town and people's temple. And they were largely unaware that Jones was even in this, but they started sharing their research with me and we combined our research and over time we started to realize it wasn't just that Jones was in it.

Jones was a leader in it. He was actually a very critical fundamental leader in William Brannem's message cult. And largely due to the message, his people's temple existed. And you can find that research.

I'll share the link here in the video and in the description, but it's just so shocking to learn that all of this exists because of the latter rain. And we're going to go deeper, but not just Jones.

but there were several other movements that are very destructive that exist today because of latirane. You're spot on, I can't wait to get into our episodes when we deep dive on Jim Jones John because as you know in our part of the message our leaders, our pastor believe I guess in hiding everything in plain sight.

So I remember him preaching sermons to us about Jim Jones being in the message. And so I look forward to communicating to you a lot of the things that I have learned about Jim Jones time in the message.

Yeah, but Jim Jones was like you said, he was in there and he was influenced by these doctrines as well and there's one we're gonna talk about today in particular that I think can very safely be say is the vehicle that Jim Jones used to declare himself God and the same vehicle that William Brannum used to preach his son of man theology and things of that nature.

So we're definitely gonna get into that as we talk about these doctrines a little bit today. And as we kind of talked in our last episode, one of the, I would say the key distinctive doctrine, the main thrust of the latirane movement was restorationism.

They believed they were restoring the church to an early form of Christianity. And the way restorationism works, and there have been restoration movements throughout the history of the church. Restoration is, it's itself is not some new concept, but the flavor of restorationism, the interpretation of restorationism takes a new form in latirane that such that there had not been such a view of restorationism in the past.

And what they did is they took the initial concepts that were developed in restorationism within the Pentecostal movement. So the Pentecostal movement believed they had restored certain things of the church, tongues, holy ghost baptism.

They take, and then they add on this, a second layer of restoration. And their restoration, of course, they believed they're restoring the sign gifts in an even more powerful degree and the manifestations of the Holy Spirit, and an even more powerful degree than what the original Pentecostals had.

But they also, another key thing they believe that they're restoring is they're restoring the gifts of apostle and prophet to the church. And they are instituting a form of church leadership that is mirroring the church leadership model from the very early church.

So this is something they believe they're restoring. And they have a very defining impact and a very defining control. over how subsequent movements are going to look at the form of church leadership. And what they develop is something, I'm sure almost every message believer knows this phrase, John, maybe less so than the ones that only press play, but the fivefold ministry.

Yeah. They developed what would be known as the fivefold ministry teachings. Now, the basic concepts of a predated ladder reign, but they took it, they put a very unique spin on it and defined it in a way that definition is carried down into many, many, many, many other movements.

Yeah. Most of the churches that I grew up in were the press play churches, the ones that just listened to the audio. And I was a little surprised. I'd never heard the phrase fivefold ministry because we just pressed play.

We listened to the name of the random. But the phrase that they use, God will restore the offices of the prophets, the pastors, the teachers, et cetera, Brandon used this all throughout his ministry.

So he was preaching fivefold ministry. I'm actually starting to rephrase and rebrand how I describe restorationism because the version of restoration, restorationism, like you say, is not that bad. But the version of restorationism that this cult created is actually very dangerous.

It's very destructive. It restorationism has, like you said, existed throughout time, but John Alexander Dowey, whenever he was literally turning insane in this latter years of his life, he tied restorationism to his political party and he merged the two so it became political restorationism.

He actually created a new political party in the United States and tried to take over the White House. Dowey strongly influenced Pentecostalism, strongly influenced. And that made it into these laterane revivals and then that spread through every denomination that joined in, Methodist, Baptists, I mean everybody, everybody joined in these things.

And over time, where it ended up, which is another story for another podcast, but you've got groups like the family who are actually a cult in Washington that are trying to take over Washington to basically restoration cult, to restore the political party to the church.

And you've got groups like full gospel businessmen, worked with the family cult, and they also set up in Washington and William Brannum joined in as he, I've got actually pictures of him at the National Prayer Breakfast.

And then fast forward and escalate it to what we see today. You've got these very, very hardcore, right wing religious leaders that are preaching as much politics as they are Christianity, and they're just denouncing the Democratic Party.

And I'm not saying I'm Democrat by no means whatsoever, but it's very dangerous what they're doing because they're basically using religion as a political platform to overthrow the people in office and place the ones that they think are basically the cult. If you look at this as on a global scale, this cult of restorationism, they're trying to overthrow the government and put them into Washington. Very, very dangerous stuff.

Where this fiefold ministry, stuff starts to develop is, you know, the early Pentecostal denominations, they had a view of, they had a view of prophets and apostles, and of course they believe they had prophets and apostles, but the historic church and the Pentecostal church is specifically that the lettering emerged out of.

They believed the, the apostle's authority and the prophet's authority was invested basically in the, in the corporate body of Christ rather than solely in the hands of single individuals. And what the, what the lettering movement did is it, it not only created ministries that had, you know, a title apostle and did the ministerial work of apostle or prophet.

It also created offices where they held singularly as a single individual apostolic or prophetic authority in their church. And what happens is these movements, these single leaders that have this power become incredibly, incredibly authoritarian. That's what happens.

And so as that, as that goes on, you know, the movement didn't actually start out to create a bunch of authoritarian leaders. It really had started out these teachings to say that anybody in the congregation can be empowered by the Holy Spirit.

Anybody can be touched by God and have all of these supernatural qualities as an individual. But as time went on, it didn't take very long for this movement to turn very authoritarian. And they, they started focusing very strongly on submission to the preachers, submission to the preachers. And they used Ephesians for really to, to hijack submission to Christ and turn it into submission to preachers.

And the preachers through Ephesians 4 were going to be the agents that would bring about the manifestation of the sons of God and the perfecting of the, basically the perfecting of the church. put themselves specifically into this position.

And this interpretation, again, it's just a very incredibly powerful position that the preachers put themselves in. And they begin to take a very, very high level of control over the lives of the people that were involved in the movement.

Now, that wasn't the original vision, I think, of the first people there at North Battleford as they started this stuff, but it quickly swept and took control. Like I said, they did this through the five-fold ministry teachings.

They took Ephesians 4, and they say that the only way that you can become perfect and be like Jesus is for you to submit to a five-fold ministry and to let them perfect you.

These concept, that concept originated in Latter-Rain. And so that doctrine, what it does is it creates an elite group, a higher order of Christians that literally take Ephesians 4 to say the preachers, the preachers are God's gift to the church.

And the preachers, some of them literally do believe they're God's gift to man. Don't they, John? We've met a few of them in our life. Unfortunately, there's quite a few like that. The preachers literally believe they're God's gift to man.

And they take a Bible verse to say that we are God's gift to man. And the people end up becoming incredibly dependent on these preachers for personal direction and their life because they've been taught and they believe they need this in order to attain that higher level of Ephesians 4.

The manifestation of the sons of God is what they end up tying it to in the early days of this movement. And the shepherding movement, for example, is a movement that's entirely built on these five-fold ministry ideas.

The shepherding movement was started by Ernst Baxter, Derek Prince, and a few other men. There was a mumford that was involved in it and two other key figures. They started the shepherding movement. And it's built around this concept that everybody needs to be living and total submission to a minister in a position of authority.

A couple of very interesting facts that I just recently discovered about the shepherding movement. Its origins, it was very popular in the late 70s and early 80s. Almost over 100,000 people were in it.

But if you trace its origins back, it actually began forming the year after, the year William Brannum was buried in 1966. It's whenever their origins formed. And if you look at the cult globally, you've got William Brannum who died before some of his prophecies that he was supposed to be alive for came to pass.

So he would have been a false prophet. So you've got this disbanding of all these people that were following William Brannum. You've got earned Baxter who worked with Brannum coming in collecting those people to create his own cult.

Then, around the same time, you've got this weird movement within the message that grows actually until the height of the shepherding movement, where the sons and key figures within the message are trying to collect those cult members that would be leaving this for the shepherding.

So, you've got this weird tug of war between Baxter and the Brannum family that goes on until late 80s or early 80s. So, this belief that you're going to need a fivefold ministry to perfect the church, to bring about the manifestation of the sons of God and submission to this ministry is the only way to have that.

That idea comes to fruition in the latter reign. It finds expression in the shepherding movement. It finds expression in the message and all of these other groups that were impacted coming out of the latter reign.

Now, it varies in degree. Some groups are incredibly, incredibly out there authoritarian. Like, John Robert Stevens and his group was called The Walk. You know, we was the message. It was The Walk. They were probably the most extreme authoritarian latter reign group, but it's like a rainbow.

And you've got varying shades of this authoritarianism, so you've got that extreme. John Robert Stevens and their authoritarian interpretations of it and what they do with the fivefold ministry. You've got the shepherding movement and the message of probably about on par with what they did with the fivefold ministry teachings.

Then you kind of come over into other groups like Sam Fife and the move or Raymond Haas and the Body of Christ, right? They take it and they go their direction with it. But then Paul Cain goes with the Kansas City prophets and he promulgates out a version of it.

And it's primarily actually through the shepherding movement and through Paul Cain's Kansas City prophets that these fivefold ministry movements and ideas move beyond the core latter reign groups. And then kind of dispersing out into broader Christianity.

A lot of historians who aren't familiar with this history see all of these as separate movements. But what they're missing is the underlying foundation of all of this is William Brannum's latter reign message, William Brannum's cult.

And the real issue here and the reason why this is so complicated to understand when William Brannum started this movement, he called it enter evangelical. There's even a clause in the voice of healing publication that says that basically we don't care what you believe, keep your beliefs separate, we're joining together in faith.

In other words, I don't care if you're oneness, I don't care if you're trainitarian, I don't care what you are, I really don't care what you... you believe, as long as you join in this movement with me.

So you've got all of these various disconnected ideologies under the same shelter. And the reason it turned authoritarian is because they're all playing tug of war internally. It's literally going to internally implode. So they had to create a hierarchy of command to keep it all together.

And so if you look at the cult pyramid structure where you've got a central figure or central figures at the top of the pyramid, and then you've got the enforcers in the middle and then the rank and file at the bottom, they literally had to create the cult structure in order to keep it together.

Otherwise, the whole thing would have imploded. Yeah, what their fivefold ministry teachings do in combination with the manifested suns of God teaching, which we're going to get to in a minute. It creates an inevitable disaster, OK?

Because you've got all kinds of people that all think that they're speaking for God. And the only way to reach the end is to bring about this manifestation of the suns of God or whatever interpretation spin they put on it.

And each of them, as this thing breaks down, kind of end up turning on each other, going separate ways with their own different take because they're the voice of God for their group. And in the other group, things that they're the voice of God for their group.

So it creates this inevitable explosion between them when a disagreement comes up and can't be rectified. And so it's really interesting to me, John, that the movement turned so authoritarian because that really was not what the initial young people, I guess, really were looking for at North Badaford when the thing started.

They were looking really to empower the individual members of the church. But very quickly, they became far, far more authoritarian than the groups that they had left before. They had actually been a deeply opposed organizational structures in external control.

That's what gave birth in a lot of ways to the movement to begin with is because the preexisting denominations were so controlling of them in a way that they did not like. And so the revival, in some way, started as rebellion against the Pentecostal assemblies of Canada and the assemblies of God's practices because they believe they were cold and dry and they wanted this new exciting experience.

And so they rebel against the original denominations because they're controlling. And then they become far more controlling than the original denominations that they rebelled against. Yeah, I'm actually a bin in contact with... Like in the message, you've got the central core message cult, and then you've got all these splinter groups or sub cults. And they all think that they're different from each other, but they're all really splinter groups from the same cult. I'm in contact with people from the core laterane cult, who are the historians of laterane. And they will denounce all of this that you've discussed. Let's say

they're not true laterane, they're not part of us. But in effect, they're all splinter groups from the same sect. And they're all, you know, practicing the from the same foundation, they're practicing the same ideologies just in different ways.

It exactly. So laterane is where these concepts originated. They're, I mean, there's just no dispute on that. And each of these groups took these, took these core distinctives of laterane, and they each have their own unique span, their own unique degree to which they would take it. And then they run with it. So these, these ideas, these concepts, they originated in this form in laterane, and some of them evolved very quickly over a short space of time.

And when I, when I talk about authoritarianism too, in the leaders, maybe let me just put, let me just say what I'm, I'm maybe some specifics here to help, because, you know, obviously, you know, you want a preacher that that's going to give you good advice and positive encouragement, things like this, right? You know, and a good preacher, he will give his people good advice. He will encourage people to follow Christ.

He will seek to be a mentor to people, right? That, that's good. But these preachers, and especially their ones who find their way to the top positions in these movements, they tend to go far beyond that far beyond just giving advice and being a mentor and being an example. But they start directing people's lives and really taking total control of them. They decide some of them, they actually decide who goes to heaven and who goes to hell, right, John? I mean, there's, there's preachers out there who think they have the power to you experienced it

with your grandfather. What, what did he do when you decided you didn't believe the message anymore? They turn you over to the devil for the destruction of your flesh. You know, a good example, you can examine the fruit, you can examine the tree by the fruits, right? Good example of this is the shepherding movement. The entire movement's core concept is that there are shepherds, your pastors who are going to be authoritarian over you. And in, in its initial form, it really wasn't as destructive as what it became. They, they literally wanted to teach people good ways to live. That's not a bad thing. But

over time, those people didn't adhere to this and they became more authoritarian. The, the preachers did. But you've got this strongly disconnected movement, hundreds, 100,000 people who also came from all of these different ideologies.

So the shepherds themselves started playing tug of war, and they weren't controlled. So then the central figures, the five who created it, had to shepherd the shepherds. And again, you create the same cult pyramid structure of authoritarian control.

Exactly. And where it lands is it ends up. It's people deciding that they know what's best for you. They manipulate you, they pressure you, they discipline you, and they control you. And the preachers actually take on themselves the role of the Holy Spirit, right?

There's no concept that you have a personal relationship with Jesus, and God can direct your life in a personal sense. The preacher becomes a middle man, and he has authority to tell you what God says and what you need to do in your life.

And if it conflicts with what you're sensing yourself or you believe yourself, you've got to submit to the preacher. And there's no limits, right? There's really no limits on it in some of these groups.

And it can get very extreme, like it goes to the point in the message. Honestly, the message they controlled who we could marry in a lot of ways, John. I mean, that's true, isn't it?

I actually have been in message churches that I was there towards the end of the life of the pastor, but the pastor controlled who they married, they could not buy a vehicle unless the pastor approved it.

They control, I mean, one person, and I'm sure they, I'm certain they were exaggerating, but they said, we literally cannot buy hairspray without asking the pastor first, can we buy the hairspray? That's how the deep level of control these pastors have.

Yeah, what kind of haircut you can get, what kind of car you can buy, what kind of house you can live in, what kind of jobs you can work. You can't take a job that's going to interfere with this or that schedule of the preacher, right?

I mean, it gets very, very controlling. They'll even get to the point that they control what vacations you can go on, where you can go on vacation, where you can't go on vacation, who you can have relationships with, who you can't.

When you can go to the doctor, when you cannot go to the doctor, I have seen all of those things and far more carried out by the preachers in the message. And the thing is, we know that it's not just the message where these five-fold ministry concepts took on this form.

We can, like I said, if you get these books by, this book here, for example, by Michael Moriotti, he goes through all kinds of cases of people who, or I should say, the form that these teachers come on.

Here's a book you can get called Damage Disciples, the Victims, the Casualties of the Shepherding Movement. You know, the Shepherding Movement, which earned Baxter, Derek Prince, Bob Mumford, and those created coming out of Laterane, turned incredibly abusive.

There were all kinds of horrific abuses that happened in that movement, all kinds of testimonies of terrible, terrible things that happened. Eventually, Bob Mumford won... The top leaders in the movement came out and blew the whistle on the whole thing.

And they shut basically the movement imploded and collapsed. The shepherding movement after Bob Mumford came out and blew the whistle on all the abuses going on. But the other men in there that were involved in all that, Derek Prince earned Baxter, the other key figures, not a single one of them ever took responsibility or accountability for what happened or all of the victims, all the victims of that movement.

And that's how it is, right? The leaders, the leaders are involved in these terrible things that happened in their movement. And then they walk away and don't want to take any responsibility whatsoever for what went on around them.

They find ways to say, I didn't have anything to do with it. It's not my fault. It's not my responsibility.

And they just go on, you know. But what happened in these movements coming out of this is horrific. I talked about John Robert Stevens and the walk.

They shut down because they ended up being widespread sexual molestation of children going on in that movement, right? These things, I mean, when we talk about authoritarian, we're not talking about a preacher's given you good advice.

We're talking about these people become incredibly abusive. These things turned horrific. And nobody's able to do anything about it because the people at the top have absolute power and are seemingly immune from being able to even do the least thing to hold them accountable for what they've done.

It's probably good if we pause for a brief second. And we have two distinct audiences. Our main audience are basically people who are interested in the history and were never affected by this cult.

That's actually my target audience, but that's the bulk of who are watching this and listening. Then we also have people who are in the message cult, who are just curious. And we have to separate those two because people who were never in this will listen to all of these things we're saying and say, that's horrific.

I can't believe that a man claiming to be a Christian would do this thing. Then on the message side, the people who are manipulated to believe this, they are actually manipulated to think everything that we're talking about is a good thing and that the splinter groups that turned destructive went destructive because they were disconnected from the core.

But the problem that we have here is that the core itself is actually extra biblical and in some cases, anti-biblical. And the framework of the core is what allows these things to happen. If the framework were actually just grounded in the Bible and did not have all these extra elements that aren't in the Bible, then many of these things.

that we see would never have happened because they're not, they're not even resembling Christianity, but to the people who are still in the cult, they really don't realize that this is not Christianity because they're indoctrinated to belief that it is.

You know, the message, you know, there's a variety of sex and there are, there are sex, just like we look at the ladder rain, there's ones that become incredibly extreme, you know, and go different ways.

Like, for example, you look at the press play churches that you came out of John, right? Yes. That is the weirdest thing in the world to like to my sec, right? Like you don't have preachers for each, like that is so weird, right?

To our listeners who aren't in this message cult and have never been, we keep using this phrase because it's kind of a joke to us now. It's so silly that I can't believe that we're in it.

What we're talking about is the recordings of William Brannum that we're allowed to have. There are others, but from 1947 to 1965, that's the collection that is available to the public and we can listen to.

The press play churches, there is actually a slogan that has, it's part of their marketing material of the cult, just press play. In other words, just listen to William Brannum. Just listen to the taste.

Don't preach, don't bring your own, you know, teaching to this. And what the present profit, as believed by some says, is press play or the fivefold ministry's job is to press play. So they still have a concept of fivefold ministry, but they've taken it, their job is not to preach, their job is to press play on the tape.

But that's just one, one sec. I think the majority of the message still very much believes in the actual ministers preaching and caring on the functions of a fivefold ministry. And William Brannum did, like you said, talk quite a bit about what that looked like and they're actually trying to implement that.

So, you know, what made the message a cult and make no mistake, the message was a cult. And what allowed so much abuse to flourish in the message. And again, make no mistake, there is and was widespread abuse in the message.

It's not just that we had a profit who told us a lot of stories that weren't true, but there was a system of leadership that made it vulnerable to abusive authoritarian figures because there's no way really to deal with them when they got their hands on power.

Once someone got their hands on power in the message and honestly in most of these other groups that have implemented this leadership style, there is no way to stop what happens next. There is just no way to stop it.

And, gosh John, we're gonna have to do some episodes on abuse at some point down the road because these things just turned horrific in some of these. churches right the best way to identify a cult dr. Stephen has and created the bite model and bite stands for behavior control information control thought control and manipulation and emotional control we have been up to this point in our podcast talking about the control of information definite control of information in this cult they do not want you to know what is in this podcast today we're talking about basically the behavior control the latter

reign established an entire framework of behavior control yeah and you know when I when I look at this specifically to the message you know the Bible does say apostle prophet pastor teacher evangelist you know it's it's got these labels in the Bible there's going to be preachers with these title according to the Bible right and and we read through scripture we see the preachers with those titles we see how they operated we see how they function but the apostle Paul never abused people the possible Peter you know didn't take children in the back room and do things to them that he shouldn't have done

right I mean this this was not happening in the Bible so you know the but these things do happen in message churches absolutely and it's not it's not universal it's not every single preacher there's lots of very nice kind preachers who have good motives in there but if they have if they're honest with themselves they know that there are other preachers in there who are like what I'm describing and they have to acknowledge that absolutely nothing's ever been done to be able to control a lot of these people over the years that's how you end up with Leo Mercer and little Goshen that's how you end up with Paul

Schaeffer that's how you end up with Jim Jones that's how you ended up with a whole lot of these incredibly dangerous people and things that that came out of the message yeah there is a passage from the Bible I'm no preacher nor do I ever intend to be or want to be but I still read and I still am familiar with you know the text and there's a passage from Luke 16-16 the law on the prophets were until John since then in the translations very but basically the next phrase means the gospel since then the gospel is preached and there are

groups that believe that means there will be no more prophets which I personally don't think that's the case but what it's essentially saying is that God is no longer leading the church by prophet authoritarian prophets and not that he really ever was but that that phrase basically means don't establish this kind of framework it's literally telling you don't establish this laterane cult because what they created was this thing where anybody who claimed to be a prophet not even if they were but claimed that they were could take authoritarian control so all you had to do was pretend that you're a

prophet and you know like we've shown with William Branagh Some of the prophecies weren't even prophecies, but he was able to claim it and take authoritarian control. Right. And honestly, if you look into the scripture, you see that there was no single authoritarian apostle in the Bible. They actually had a council of apostles that rule, I don't even know for rules, the right word, but jointly led and jointly made decisions. That was the biblical model not one man hears from God and says, I've heard from God, now you all obey me.

And they had disagreements. And so they got together and like normal people talk through the disagreements. An example of this is the circumcision. You've got Barnabas who wanted the circumcision. And then, you know, they threw the consortium of apostles they got together and reasoned this out like normal people would. There was no hierarchy of authoritarian control to say, no, you're not going to have this or yes, we are. Yeah. So anyways, this this concept of apostles getting or apostles and prophets getting words directly from God and directly controlling people's lives in these incredibly intimate personal ways. This is something in that can be

traced back and really took form here in the early Laterane and came into these different sex of coming out of Laterane in varying degrees of authoritarianism. And so the other the other piece that goes alongside with this John is the manifested sons of God. And the the fivefold ministry piece comes into focus because they believe they needed that in order to get to the manifested sons of God. And so let's talk about the manifested sons of God now a little bit.

And it's an ideology that evolved also and changed quite substantially from the very earliest versions in the early days of the Laterane revival. By the time you get to the mid-1950s,

different groups have taken it in different ways and it's evolved quite a bit and varies between these groups. But it started out also again as something intended to be an empowering thing for the individual people in the congregation to say that they wanted to say that all the gifts of the spirit are open and available to everyone and that God works in everyone's lives. And so again the basic premise that developed in Laterane about this had in a way a good motivation behind it. But again very quickly turned ugly as different leaders began to take it in different ways.

William Brannum for example, he ended up having his take on manifested sons of God. Jim Jones had his take on manifested sons of God. And when you tell people in an open-ended way that you can be like God, some people go off the deep end, right? And quite- a few people went off the deep end. And that really is what manifested sons of God is.

It's saying that you or certain other people are going to end up being just exactly like God. And by the end of his ministry, William Brandham was claiming to be one of these manifested sons of God. Jim Jones did the same thing, quite a few others did. And the results were always disastrous when you got to the point that these men believed they had become this manifested son of God.

Another key detail of a cult that you can easily identify as this a destructive cult is they have overloaded language, loaded language overloaded keywords. They specifically for the manifested sons of God take the passage that says in the last days the son of man will return. And they take that son of man and they overload it so that it means to this cult theology that in the last days the Jesus is coming back in the form of this fivefold ministry being empowered. And basically God's manifesting himself inside of us, Kenneth Hagen was deeply influenced by this. And he said, you know, basically, well actually

an actual quote, he said, every man who has been born again is an incarnation. And Christianity is a miracle. The believer is as much an incarnation as was Jesus of Nazareth. And what he's saying basically God was manifesting himself in the believer as much as they were Jesus. They're becoming Jesus.

In 1965 William Brandham says that the son of man Jesus is going to return in the form of a prophet. And he says specifically not a man but God. And he also says that he's returning in the form of Elijah. And he had convinced his entire cult following that he was the return of Elijah.

So he literally just said indirectly that he was Jesus Christ. And when you listen through what William Brandham the way that he arrives at his conclusions, the scriptures he uses, his reasoning, he is using the exact same concepts as the manifested sons of God, the exact same scriptures as manifested sons of God theology to arrive at those conclusions. And you know, oftentimes when we think about ideologies, we can think about them as a static idea. You know, but all of those doctrines that started in later reign, they evolved over time.

And some of them like they changed quite substantially. And some of them ended up becoming the exact opposite of what they started out as John. Instead of becoming a power and becoming a authoritarian and controlling. And manifested sons of God in the same way. It took this twist.

You know, the manifested sons of God ideology itself again began in the same effort to how are everyone in the congregation to be like Jesus, right? It became, it was, you know, in that way it was a field.

It was to level the playing field. We can all be like Jesus. We can all do this stuff. You know, in a basic sense, that's a good thing, right? I mean, in a basic sense, Christianity is all about being like Jesus, right?

That's what it's about. But within the latter reign movement, that idea of being like Jesus, it really started to take a very radical turn because they're, they believe they're going to be, they started to believe they were going to literally be like Jesus.

They were going to have great miraculous powers. They're going to speak things into existence. They're going to have a power and authority like Jesus had. They're going to have superhuman abilities. They're going to be a miniature versions of Jesus, right?

And so it takes this really radical, radical turn. And in the message, the message, when you listen to William Brown, I'm talking about being the son of man manifested in the church. He is preaching, line for line, manifested sons of God theology.

And he picked that up from the latter reign. And by the end of his ministry, like you said, John, he was claiming to be a manifested son of God. He went to scriptures in Luke, as it was in the days of Noah's social, it'd be in the day when the son of man is revealed.

And he preached that the son of man was being revealed through his office as a prophet. He went to those same verses and used them in a lot in the same way. You know, I've had some people ask me, where did William Brown, I'm get the interpretation for those verses in Luke.

As it was in the days of the, was in the days of Noah's social, it'd be in the days when the son of man is revealed. That is latter reign. That is latter reign.

That is manifested sons of God theology is what that is. And what's interesting, if you look at the historian's view of the manifested sons of God, they all trace it back to George Warnock.

And they say that Warnock, this originated with Warnock. But Warnock got it from Brannum and the foundation of the manifest sons of God actually predated Warnock with Brannum, but Warnock made it popular. And so he gets the credit, while Brannum created the framework that Warnock used to create this thing that Brannum had already created.

Yeah, and it's a slightly complicated thing because they're both inputting into each other, right? There's aspects that Warnock and George Houghton and other leaders in latter reign are influencing William Brannum. And then there's things where William Brannum's counter influencing them back.

So it's not exactly that there's a single point of... Journal of authority in the ladder rain movement, but it is it's a mixing of ideas and in each one of them are

In my opinion, they're each trying to see what benefits them and so brand on this piece benefits me I'm gonna insert this yeah, the southern preacher this benefits me. I'm gonna insert that the southern preach This benefits me and search that and so you end up with You know while they're all while they're all still together while they're all still getting along They're all inputting together like they're all in they're all putting their ingredients into the pot, right?

Yeah, that's why I said Professor Plum and Colonel mustard both did it This and that's also in in the introduction to this show. I say who were influenced or were influenced by This was a consortium that the thing to understand though William Brannum introduced these ideas and they they grew and other men can claim them But William Brannum also controlled and manipulated even that we have examples like the audio letter to leave ale Who was a ladder rain minister where Brannum is saying I'm going to suggest this now It'd be really good mr. Vale if you come back and follow up with this other thing that builds upon this

So he was manipulating the leaders in the movement to come to Basically this his own ideology William Brannum was doing this So late forties early fifties while they're all still together, right? They're all they're all bacon cooking this thing up together before it explodes But you know when it explodes George I think do you know this John? I think you probably do George hot and actually got ex-communicated from ladder rain yes And earn earnest his brother Ernest His brother Ernest hot and he resigned He was so offended by all the abuses that were going on because these abuses started out very early

The abuse of things I talked about started out very early in ladder rain Ernest hot and resigned He left ladder rain moved to Californians, you know took a church there George hot and ends up ex-communicated from the main group and George hot and I think it's fair to say George hot and was a message believer for his entire life I mean he preached in message churches. He held revivals with Perry green The the core of a fair amount of the core leadership of the original ladder rain movement Came right over into the message of William Brannum

Yeah, you know there we the message of William Brannum is one of the main branches of ladder rain The hard thing to understand hot and if you talk to people who knew hot and in his later years They would say no, he was not a message believer But see there were different versions of Brannum stage persona He was of strong adherence to one of those versions not the later versions So when people compare the end of his life with the end of Brannum's life They say no, he wasn't a message believer, but he was and it's so deeply rooted in the things that we've talked about in the past

hot and Believed in William Brannum theology about a super race that was based off of the clan ideologies, and Houghton was actually in his later years exposed as being a white supremacist. Yeah, and so the latter rain groups, this also comes through that manifested sons of God theology, right? They believe there's a point in time when these manifested sons of God are going to appear on the earth and and basically usher in the end time. And they believe, I mean, this is direct quote, that there's going to be a race of Superman, right? That's going to come in. They're going to

set up a global, a global theocracy in usher in the second coming of Christ. And a lot of them, they go to the, they use that verse in Ephesians 4, which is common in message circles I was in, till we all come to the unity of the faith, the stature of the, the fullness of the Christ, in the stature of the perfect stature of the Son of Man, Ephesians 4, 11 on down through 13.

So this verse also tied into this manifested sons of God. They believe that was what would bring in the manifestation of the sons of God. And that verse came very strongly into focus. There's this state of perfection that everybody needs to get to when they get there, the sons of God are going to be manifested and the end will come. So, so it, that theology was picked up by all these groups, and some of them take it to this extreme that there's going to be a race of Superman that are going to set up a global theocracy when that happens. When this, when these sons of God are manifested,

they're just going to have power to, they're basically going to be a bunch of little Jesus' walking around, speaking things into existence, throwing down governments, just literally seizing the power of the world is what some of them believe. And so all the latter rain groups, they take, they have some concept that these, these things are going to be fulfilled. Something is going to bring about a perfection or a completion in a church that's going to manifest these sons of God and then some great end time apocalypse, catastrophe, rapture, end of days scenario is going to happen.

And they each take it in little bits of a different way. And so, but that idea, that idea that there's some climax that we're heading towards, that there is going to be a day or an event where the church reaches this climatic state, and then the end is going to usher in. And it has to do with, with people reaching a certain state of Christ likeness. I'll leave it at that. That concept also originates in latter rain as well. And so, yeah, that's an incredible thing to learn.

It's also very common among all destructive cults. It's the the carrot on the string, right? You tell them that you can achieve perfection. but as humans, we'll never achieve perfection. So you've got this cared on the string and you lead them with it and you can lead them anywhere, any direction that you want to go because they'll never achieve what the cult sets out as their core platform.

Exactly, and whether or laterane did it on purpose or rather they, whether they arrived at this formula on accident, you're exactly right, John. They developed two of the most critical elements of forming a cult, chasing perfection and authoritarian control, right?

Yes. And again, whether they did it on accident, whether they did it on purpose, they brought together two of the most important and key cult forming elements. The most unbelievable thing is not that they did it on purpose or did it on accident, it's that they did it together.

We're talking several big name evangelists. I mean, some of these people are respected today as Christian leaders in the Christian church. These men did this together. Yeah, and so long as you have benevolent men, right?

So long as you have benevolent leaders in a movement like this, it goes long, okay, you know it? Yeah. But the moment you get a narcissistic dangerous person,

once they get their hand on the power in a movement like this, it very quickly turns destructive, very, very fast. And that is what happened over and over and over again with these different laterane splinter groups.

Now, not all of them went as extreme, but a lot of them did. I mean, a lot of them went to these very extreme dark places. As it came to, as the laterane splintered up into all of these different groups.

Now, I don't know if we have time. I still have a whole other section of laterane doctrine I want to talk about, John, besides manifested sons of God and besides a faithful ministry stuff.

But we might have to go to another episode. There is so much here. I mean, and this is so fundamentally important to understanding what we're going with this podcast. So I'm almost in favor of taking, I did not want to do this, but taking what we have and then splitting it off into episode number three because it is very key that people understand how this thing created and why, how this thing was created, why it was created and what it grew into.

So I still have another set of doctrine there that's important that I wanted to look at. And then I think we can try and start tracing it through certain movements down to the present day with laterane pieces.

But I would say, John, as I guess kind of wrap up then our thoughts on this episode, I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with restorationism. I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with the essential concept of fight.

ministry. I don't think necessarily there's even anything wrong with wanting to be like Jesus. I think, I think honestly those are all in a sense very good things. But something has clearly went off the rails because all of these groups, if you look at this book, churches that abuse, Ronald and Roth, you know, every single church and group that's analyzed in this is the ladder rain splinter group. You know, when you go through other things you can get. I mean, there is so much on this. The subtle power of spiritual abuse. Again, the cases and everything

that they go through in these books, it's almost exclusively ladder rain influence groups that produced all of this abuse. So there is something inherently wrong in the way that ladder rain approach this because it did not produce a Christ likeness. It produced just as much abuse and horrors as it produced good in these core groups coming out of it. And it's a little bit scary to think, John, how these ideas are being revived again today in new apostolic reformation because you know what it's going to do? It's going to produce horrors 2.0. That's what's going to happen.

You can always examine, you can know what kind of treat is by the fruit that it bears. You can examine what this thing is by all of these various splinter groups and what they became. And we can't really even blame William Brannum for this. There are so many men involved. We can't even really blame him for the tree because in my opinion, William Brannum was just a puppet on a string. You've got so many men with so many different, even conflicting ideologies that are controlling him. You've got the Roy Davis and the white supremacists who mentored Brannum, who basically trained him to

become what he was. You've got FF Bosworth who was out of Dauy's cult that the ladder rain really would not have existed without Dauy's sect and ideology. And it was also horrifically destructive. You've got all of these various men who are just pulling William Brannum strings. And William Brannum, as it will show us time goes on, he adheres to whatever ideology is going to give him the most attendees in his revivals. He really doesn't care which stage persona he uses as long as it works. So he will go to one ideology, he'll go to another. And that's why you see all of these

different varying conflicting stage personas in his ministry because he really doesn't care. He's a puppet on a string and he's going to go where the string leads to the most people who will listen to him. Yeah, you know, that's the thing too. I wonder, did William Brannum actually slatter rain stuff and just like everything else, I'd be honest, John, I don't think William Brandon believed any of this ladder rain stuff. I really don't. I think, you know, because one day he preached ladder rain and then the next day he preached not ladder rain, right?

One day he preached oneness and the next day he preached trinity. I think he was doing what he had to do to appeal to the crowd that was in front of him on that given day.

That's what I think was happening at this point. If you bought a red car, would you, would you believe that it's blue? Would you tell people that it's red or would you tell that it's blue? If you believe something, you're going to continue until, basically until you don't believe it. And at that point, you say, well, I didn't, I don't believe this because I've learned this is incorrect. There was never, ever an apology or a retraction from Brandon. There was always a defense from Brandon.

And at the same time as he's using these different stage personas, he goes in and out of them. So he'll preach to one group and he'll enter the stage persona. Then to this other group, he'll enter this other stage persona. Then he'll go back to the first one and go back to the second one and so forth. A person who believes in ideology won't transition so swiftly between other ideologies.

Yeah. And there are definitely, I would say most of the message as it exists today is very lateral rain influence down, some less so than others. I would say the main sect is maybe one of the lesser in some ways, lateral rain. So compared to some of the other sects, the sect I came from was was very heavily lateral rain influence. I mean, our pastor Raymond Jackson, he preached the lateral rain. He preached manifested sons of God. He preached sermons by those titles to us, even. And so we had our own take and spin on all of those doctrines as well. And so I always had an awareness that we were

descended from lateral rain as a result of him sharing those things with us. And it's just very obvious. So many of our doctrines are just an evolution or a tweak or modification on these doctrines that came out of the lateral rain movement. I think what's really scary is I came from the main sect and the main sect leaned more heavily towards the manifested sons of God splinter group. That's the same exact splinter group that Jim Jones was in. And that's literally that's what empowered Jones. You would not have the Jones down massacre if not for the manifested sons of God. That's what the core main sect of the message

believes to the extent that when William Brannum started claiming that he was Jesus Christ, my own grandfather, I've got a recording of him on the website saying that William Brannum was God manifested in human flesh. And we have people that actually post advertise, there's a truck that during the Easter meetings and whatnot, this truck would drive up.

saying that either William Brannum was God or his son was God. These people believe in this manifestant sons of God theology, has did Jones and all of the people who died because of Jones.

So this is very, very scary stuff that we're talking about. Yeah, and it's possible, you know, if you can mobilize lots of people that believe this, it can go in scary places, it sure can. And so it just entirely depends on each group, you know, because like I said, every group has taken manifested sons of God, fivefold ministry, and they have their own unique spins on it at this point. And it's just use that bite model, John, that you've talked about. And you can take any individual group and just kind of throw them on that bite model and find out how far they land. And you'll find some

are certainly far more extreme than others. Some are closer to benign, but some are, they've become incredibly destructive. Yeah, there's so much here. I think let's wrap it up, and I hate to do this because this is so exciting. I actually love to talk about this all day, but I think our listeners need a break. So let's continue this next week and dive just a little bit deeper on the manifested sons of God. Because like I said, it became the core message cult.

The William Brannis message cult of personality would not be what it is today without the manifested sons of God theology. Then all these splinter groups are derived from that. So I think to understand what happened within the message cult and William Brannis, you have to understand this, but then also to understand all of the movements that, you know, like the shepherding movement, today we call it the new apostolic reformation. None of this would have existed either without the manifested sons of God theology. So let's prepare for coming back next week and getting into this. If you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web.

You can find us at www.William-brannum.org and www.ChristianGospelChurch.org. For an overview of the historical research of William Brannum and the healing revivals, read preacher behind the white hoods, a critical examination of William Brannum and his message, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible. Join us again next week. We've got a great episode coming.

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