The Voice of Healing Prosperity Gospel

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brannum Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannum Historical Research at William-Brannum.org, and with me I have my co-host, researcher, minister, and friend, Charles Paisley, the founder of Christian Gospel Church.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 think today's episode is the one that I am most excited about.

We've been building up to this, and if you think about what happened in American Christianity, you have all this dark and sinister history that's building up to this point in time, and it has a deep intersection with some dark and sinister history that comes after this.

But this is, in my opinion, this is the nuclear bomb that started to explode, and it exploded into several splinter groups and movements and just some really weird things. If you take a step back and think about it, and, you know, historically, a lot of people are aware that these things happen.

Some people have tried to cover it up or erase it, but there are some evidences that it exists, and there are some people that built their entire ministries on top of this. But today we're getting into basically the foundation for what would eventually become the word of faith movement and several others.

So like I say, I'm extremely excited about today's show. Yeah, I am too. You know, in our last couple episodes, we've been talking about William Brannum's divine healing beliefs and his positive confession beliefs.

And in this episode, we want to talk about the voice of healing organization and how William Brannum interacted with the broader healing revival movement, and how these ideas he held were spread and popularized in the late 1940s and into the 50s.

And, you know, without a doubt, William Brannum was the most important figure in that healing revival movement. And that religious movement of the healing revivals and the lateral rein movement that started in the late 1940s is one of the most significant religious movements in the history of the United States.

States. Those events are what kicked off the second wave of Pentecostalism. It ended up impacting millions of people globally. But you know, really this period, honestly, it's very poorly studied, John. There's only a few good books or resources that are out there on the topic. There's really not a whole lot of good research that's been done on this at all. But we have tons of source material here. And I guess got a whole lot of it that I've collected over the years, especially once I started investigating into the, you know, the sources of our beliefs and the message. And I would also recommend, you

know, if there's any listeners out there that want to look into this stuff themselves, I would also recommend the oral Robert University in Tulsa, Oklahoma to anyone who wants to research the healing revival period. They have a mountain of original documents out there in their library covering the ladder rain, the healing revivals, and all of the healing evangelists and publications and magazines just from those years, all kinds of stuff. And if you're interested in studying the healing revivals and the ladder rain, their library is a really great resource. And I've been there multiple times to

pull documents on things and fill in some of the holes in my own collection. And of all the places I've been to research, they probably have the best, the best tools and resources for researching these revivals that I've seen. And of course, John, your website is got a mountain of information on it too.

So, but yeah, that's what we're going to talk about today, Gordon Lindsey, the voice healing and and how those things came together. Yeah, and you mentioned oral Roberts. And a lot of people aren't aware that oral Roberts was in the message, you know, the message cult following William Branham back when it was called the ladder rain message. And before it turned into the, you know, the cult of personality, what it became later, you know, and later versions of William Branham stage persona, he's speaking very strongly against oral Roberts and Billy Graham and their his chief competitors basically. But in the early

years, it wasn't that way. He was William Branham was trying very hard to get connected to Billy Graham and even worked through Matt's and Bozay to, you know, stage a meeting between the men and Billy Graham, you know, by that point, he was so big, he really didn't need William Branham moved on.

But oral Roberts in his early days, he was connected to this, he was in this. And I recommend anybody who is just curious about the names that were connected to this, go on our website.

And in the menu, go down to the voice of healing, you can look through these magazines and you'll see hundreds, if not thousands of men who were involved with William Branham's ladder rain message at the point of time in which it was, you know, the voice of healing revival and the last.

at a rain movement merge for a period of time, then they split, but they were cross-pollinated by that point. And you'll see in these magazines, you'll find laterane guys, you'll find men who separated from laterane, but they're all still very, very connected.

Right, and you know, I think as time goes on, we're gonna do some more episodes on how all of these things break up and split out, but laterane, the laterane side of stuff, as time goes on, really Joseph Matson-Bose, and the herald of faith kind of represents the mainstream of laterane.

But what Joseph Matson-Bose and herald of faith are to the laterane, is it diverges. Gordon Lindsay and voice of healing are to the mainstream of the healing revival. And I think Gordon Lindsay and the voice of healing are really the keys to understanding how their healing revival's worked at kind of an organizational level.

And I wanna talk about that just a little bit about how that voice of healing organization was created. And you know, as I, as I look over the history of how all this got going, it seems pretty obvious to me that the first priority when they started to make the Voice of Healing magazine in 1948, that first priority was really to try and counter all of the negative press and negative publicity that William Brown was getting in the newspapers.

He was getting almost universally bad press. The truth be told, as you come into the late 40s. And the Voice of Healing really started out as a publicity tool for the brand-um campaigns. And they did that because like I said, the newspapers were just giving them lots of bad press.

And the Voice of Healing magazine was a way they could start to make their own press and to control the narrative about what was happening in the healing revivals. And honestly, in that respect, it was very successful, wasn't it?

For most people who look back at the healing revivals, I mean, nobody remembers the newspaper articles when Carol Ruth Strubler died, right? Nobody remembers the article that Donnie Morton died. Nobody remembers any of the bad press, but everyone remembers all of the healing stories told in the Voice of Healing.

So in that way, it was very successful. And for people like us in the message, really the only lens through which we saw or understood the healing revivals was the window that Voice of Healing gave us.

We just heard and saw what they wanted us to hear and see about it. And really nobody remembers that mountain of newspaper articles and negative press that a lot of it's been dug up and's on your website now.

Yeah. And you know, there's a lot of people that are unaware that the negative press took a severe toll on William Brandham's mental health. It's something that the elites in William Brandham's cult of personality are aware, but the vast majority of the rank and file members of the cult of personality have no idea that will...

Bramham had a complete mental breakdown and it came on the heels of all of the bad publicity that happened in 1948 and you can easily piece this together without taking our word for it.

Just take a look through the Voice of Healing magazine. You'll see the first issue is clearly advertising William Bramham and his ministry, his meetings and you know this goes out and then all this bad publicity happens and William Bramham just disappears. Nobody knows where he is and I have I just dug it up this morning to try to remember when it was but it was the January 1949 issue of the Voice of Healing. There's an article entitled Bramham is Back. So 1948 he launches Voice of Healing to advertise himself. The bad press happens.

He disappears and at that point Gordon Lindsay basically took control of his magazine and there was a minister I believe is William Freeman was the name. He became basically William Bramham's replacement in 1948. Then when William Bramham came back, Bramham was the chief editor but after his mental breakdown Gordon Lindsay becomes the chief editor and William Bramham and William Freeman become the supplemental editors of this publication and it's significant if you think about a cult that was created off of the healers of somebody losing their mind but that's actually what happened here and there's just so much information that you can dig up to support this

but the cult elites have known this for years. Right and I think that's a real good summary and Gordon Lindsay you know I think understanding Gordon Lindsay as as you mentioned he ends up running this thing before or too much too long after it gets started but Gordon Lindsay is someone who's really important to understand in all of this and I know somewhere down the road we probably should do a full episode just on kind of Gordon Lindsay and his backstory but just kind of a brief summary of Gordon Lindsay for this episode is he had been born in Zion Illinois into the

Dowry cult. His family like John Lake, John Lake had been working in Zion with Dowry too and after Dowry died his family follows John Lake out of Dowry out to Oregon and then they're more or less followers of John Lake. And Gordon Lindsay's got a really high opinion of John Lake and Lake was one of his key influences and they're all Dowryites they're all really steeped in British Israelism they're all following Dowys divine healing practices and John Lake he's at Azusa Street. I don't know that Gordon Lindsay was but you know he had direct connections when all this stuff was

happening with Azusa Street even and as a boy and so Lindsay had lots of connections because Lake really kind of got him his start in ministry and Lindsay ended up with connections all over the Pentecostal movement as a result of John Lake.

And so when he comes into contact with William Branum and kind of takes over his publicist and campaign manager, he's very popular, very connected, and he's really integral in taking William Branum's fame to this peak level that it goes to in the late 40, starting in the late 40s in.

In April 1948, that's when Earn Baxter and FF Bozworth have become part of William Branum's team, and they all start that voice of healing organization together. And you know, a lot of people, they maybe make a mistake of thinking about voice of healing is just a magazine, but it is much, much more than just a magazine.

The voice of healing was the main organizing force of the healing revival movement. And Gordon Lindsay ultimately, he's really the brains behind it all. And it starts with that magazine, and initially that first year, that magazine, like you said, it was aimed strictly at reporting William Branum's campaigns.

And as you look at the different articles and stuff from the first year, it really was targeted mainly at William Branum to try and counter all of the bad press. And I think one very important thing, John, that you mentioned is that the very beginning of this thing, William Branum is the head of this organization.

I mean, he is listed as publisher, and you know, more or less senior editor of this magazine as it begins, and he is the head of this thing as it starts out. And as you look through it, it's that way in all of the early editions of the magazine.

But one interesting fact too, just, and I think we've mentioned this is about how this, how this got its name, and I think I've got it here somewhere. And William Branum kicked off this magazine.

There's an article in here about how he named the organization in the magazine. He called it Voice of Healing, and he talks about being inspired by certain Bible verses to name this voice of healing.

But we actually found out not too long ago that he stole the name Voice of Healing from W.D. Kitson's magazine, because back when he was working with W.D. Kitson, he had been, there had been articles being published in Kitson's magazine under a column named The Voice of Healing.

So William Branum actually stole the voice of healing name from W.D. Kitson for the magazine. Yeah, and I found some newspaper advertisements predating the voice of healing publication where William Branum has advertised heavily as America's voice of healing.

And what's interesting about this, you know, William Branum who claimed to be illiterate, have a, what was he said, seventh grade education. You can listen to his sermons in the... he's pretending to talk this Kentucky English in some sermons, other sermons he's not.

And he claims that he's this illiterate country bumpkin. But prior to the voice of healing of which he was the chief editor, he was an editor for, like you said, the W.E. Kiddson's Harold of Truth magazine.

And that was his main publication that was advertising William Branham at the time. Now it advertised other people too, but William Branham was mainly advertised through that. And in 1948, he, April 1948, he stills the name voice of healing from Kiddson, starts using it in advertising propaganda.

And right there on the front page of the issue, it says that this publication, the voice of healing, will supersede all previous arrangements. And he names the committee as Reverend Branham and then Jack Moore and Reverend Gordon Lindsay.

And he uses the, you know, Shreveport, Louisiana, Branham Healing Campaigns PO Box. So what this is essentially stating is, I will no longer work with Kiddson. I'm taking all the, taking everything and running.

And I'm going to run my own show until he has a nervous breakdown and he can no longer run his own show. Right. And Jack Moore's church is in Shreveport. So he's no doubt the one manning the mailbox and the facilities there in Shreveport from day to day.

Yeah. Why Gordon Lindsay and the rest of them are out on the field. Exactly. And keep in mind, Shreveport was a significant location for the white supremacy background that we've given. Roy E. Davis had a significant stronghold in Shreveport and would hold one of his most famous campaigns for the clan in Shreveport.

And William D. Upshaw, who's working with Davis and Branham, he is so well known in Shreveport that the newspapers basically know him by first name and nickname. And so you've got, you know, the clan, you've got the Jack Moore connection.

And during this time, William Branham is still holding revivals using the name Pentecostal Baptist, referring to Roy E. Davis's Pentecostal Baptist Church of God sect. So as all of this is growing, he's still, you know, a bishop in Roy E. Davis's sect.

But he, it's kind of covert. He's not openly stating that I'm working with Davis. But we know, you know, according to the newspaper advertisements, he is still working with Davis at this point. Right.

And in these years of time, Davis himself raises to the rank of Imperial Wizard National Leader of the clan. And Roy Davis is going to come back into the picture in a central way at a certain point here.

And we're going to get to that in a fun episode down the road, too. Right. Roy Davis is in the background in these years, and how connected they are, there's a whole lot of coincidental connections or coincidental circumstantial evidence that there's something going on in these years, but it's going to be a little bit down the road before the hard evidence that Roy Davis is back in the picture, it returns.

So yeah, so William Brannum, he's listed as the publisher and the editor and the leader of this organization as it gets started, and this thing, voice healing, the organization grows really, really fast. You know, by the end of the first year, they got 40,000 subscribers to the magazine.

And I think it's important to remember this too, because as we mentioned, William Brannum is not a novice at this point in his ministry. He is, he's not some fresh start, because this is kind of the view we have in the minute, and I felt like in the message, it's he's more or less a novice preacher as this healing revival gets started, but that is not true.

No. You know, William Brannum is 40 years old. He's been preaching for 20 years. He has been an editor at multiple Pentecostal magazines at this point. He's not just a novice naive humble little preacher that had no, you know, experience with anything when 1947 and 1948 come.

That's far from the truth. William Brannum has been doing this for decades at this point, and he has been reinventing himself over and over again. And finally, as you come into the late 1940s, he's finally found the winning combination, winning success, and he's attracted some very talented people around him that's going to help him take these things to the next level.

And so at first that voice healing, it did strictly focus on William Brannum's campaigns and giving him good press and good publicity, but like you mentioned, John, that changes as you come into the fall of 1948 when William Brannum has those mental health breakdowns that happen.

And that starts around August of that year that he seems to start having that mental health breakdown and disappears. And when he does, he stops touring for about the space of three months. And if you read Doug Weaver's book on this, he has some really some very interesting insights to this period of time, and they kind of line up with certain, I would call almost legends that were passed down to us about William Brannum in this time too, in our part of the message.

And I don't know about you, John, but in our part of the message, we had heard stories about what had happened here, and it's around kind of what Gordon Lindsey does. So when William Brannum disappears, obviously there's no one to publish articles about in the magazine, right?

And so what they do, here is an article, they publicized oral Roberts when William Brannum disappeared. He started publicizing oral Roberts as well. when William Brownham goes off the scene and disappears. And that is really, really important.

Oral Roberts really was not all that popular or famous at that moment. And it's actually that publicity that Voice of Healing starts to give Oral Roberts that actually blows his ministry up in those months that William Brownham is absent.

And like you mentioned, Oral Roberts was kind of, he hadn't been preaching. He wasn't on the scene like this before William Brownham. And it's really when he starts to, he comes into contact with William Brownham and Gordon Lindsay using this opening when William Brownham is absent to publicize him that puts fuel on his ministry and really launches Oral Roberts in the national thing.

William Brownham indirectly and his organization directly launched the popularity of Oral Roberts ministry. And what that did, you know, as that gap in time was there that William Brownham couldn't tour for three months.

Oral Roberts, or Gordon Lindsay took over and he just started publicizing other ministries. And so I don't know about you, John. But this goes to those legends that we heard come back in the message.

But to us, the name Oral Roberts was a dirty word. Absolutely. If you say the name Oral Roberts in the message, it's like a dirty word. And we didn't like Gordon Lindsay either in the message.

I mean, not in my sect, we did not like Gordon Lindsay either. But we liked Oral Roberts even less. And I'll tell you the truth. I had a whole lot of anxiety going to Oral Roberts University to look stuff up.

It was that serious, the level of dislike we had for Oral Roberts. Were pilgrims in a non-Holy land, Indy? But through the internal stories handed down to us, John, we understood that William Brannum was very upset with Gordon Lindsay for publishing these articles about Oral Roberts while he was sick.

He was very upset because he wanted this magazine focused on his ministry alone. And when he publicized Oral Roberts and Oral Roberts got so popular in those few months while he was off the field, it really upset William Brannum.

And when all of that was said and done, William Brannum had more or less a temper tantrum. Again, the stories that come down to us. And because they'd publicized Oral Roberts without his permission, he pretty well dumped voice of healing onto Gordon Lindsay and told him, you just take care of it all.

Again, just because he was upset at the time about him publicizing Oral Roberts. And in the message we use stories like that to turn Gordon Lindsay and Oral Roberts into bad guys who took advantage of William Brannum and didn't support the prophet like they should have supported the prophet, right?

But I think really looking back, I think a lot of those stories are telling us that truthfully they're telling us William Brannum had a huge ego and he wanted everything. to be all about him even back here in the late 1940s.

I think that's really what we can take away from that. And Doug Weaver and David Edwin-Harrill actually both cover this in passing in their books, if you read their books, but there was some sort of a temporary falling out between Gordon Lindsay and William Brannum over this stuff in late 1948.

Yeah, what's interesting, if you think of the impact of this, had William Brannum not had a full and complete mental health breakdown. Oral Roberts would not have come into the scene. His entire ministry would likely never have existed in the way that it does today, because this is what literally made him famous, but not just him.

So whenever he became the national icon that he became, all of these other ministers saw what this magazine could do. And it empowered Gordon Lindsay beyond what his wildest dreams could have ever pictured or imagined, right?

So this turned into this weird pyramid scheme. Yet Gordon Lindsay at the top, you had William Brannum who wanted to be at the top. Gordon Lindsay basically took a step above him at that point.

And they had realized by this time, the winning combination of creating a stage act. And if you just go to my website, William-brannum.org, pull up voice of healing, thumb through any issue. You're going to find these guys who I was visited by an angel.

God gave me a commission. God spoke to me in this vision. I had this prophecy. They're all doing exactly what William Brannum did. They're literally clones of William Brannum. So you had Gordon Lindsay who's, you know, I'm imagining this.

There's no way to know because we weren't there. But you've got Gordon Lindsay who sees this power and uses it and likely he's saying, look, if you come be a part of this movement, I can make you famous, I can bring you crowds, I've got a magazine where we've got 40,000 people sending us their names and their addresses, think of the discernment.

Many of these people writing us letters and, you know, it's even mentioned, they have boxes of testimonies. These are people who are giving their names, their addresses and their diseases. And you find that a large percentage of the minister who are ministers who are involved with this thing are doing these, all of them are doing these healing acts, but many of them are doing discernment.

And they've literally got this engine created that can make a minute, I'm not a minister, I'd never, ever wanted to be. But I could, you know, become part of this and then suddenly I could claim an angel and claim discernment, you know it.

Anybody can do it if you've got this engine. All right, because, see, oral Roberts had came to William Brannum's meetings for the first time in earlier in 1948. and here's a photo of Oral Roberts standing by William Brannum at one of his revivals and at this point William or Oral Roberts was still just you know small potatoes and what happens is that after he after Oral Roberts leaves that meeting with William Brannum that is when Oral Roberts suddenly gets the sign in his hand and that Oral Roberts suddenly starts performing all of the same types of things that William Brannum was doing it happens right after he

comes to William Brannum's meetings and witnesses William Brannum doing all of it right and so of course the way we would look at it well he was so inspired that the Spirit of God gave him the same gifts and he had so much faith that he went out and did the same thing and maybe or maybe he reversed engineered whatever William Brannum was doing or he got friendly with William Brannum and he you know got in on the secrets how it all works right we you know you don't know right exactly how it happened but he comes he meets William Brannum

and he goes out and he starts doing the exact same kind of things right and that's why he is kind of set up as when William Brannum goes off the scene Gordon Lindsey goes to the next guy that's managed to start doing the exact same stuff right and he gets publicized and so you know like you said will Gordon Lindsey really becomes very important after this after his after William Brannum mental breakdown in 1948 that opened that space up for Gordon Lindsey to start publicizing other evangelists and this is what takes the voice of healing

organization to the next level and it's really really big when he does this and and what what happens here is this is when they form the voice of healing fellowship right right so the voice of healing fellowship is when it really starts to become a whole lot more than a magazine and by 1949 that voice of healing fellowship becomes the framework through which the the healing revivals just really take off and and are organized by the time you get into into those years I mean FF Bosworth is one of them T. L. Osborne Kenneth Hagen A. A. Allen

Oral Roberts Jack Codd Raymond T. Richie Velmer Gardner Tommy Hicks earned Franklin Hall right I mean minister after minister after minister popular evangelists is just more or less coming out of the woodwork and are coming and being part of this voice of healing fellowship and as they do all of this they start to publish things like I think I had a picture of it here on on this front page they they put out the inner evangelical policy of the Brannum campaigns and this policy starts to define what these men will preach what they'll do what they won't do so they almost start to develop like their own

statement of faith yeah they have their own start to put together their own organizational structure of ministers that are kind of associated and endorsed by the group. And as this happens, all of these people coming together are looking towards William Brannum really as the senior leading figure in all of this.

And Gordon Lindsay is the organizing brains behind the whole thing. And they also start, I think I've got another, yeah, I've got another one here. Of the one thing. So as they're doing all this, they put together almost like a traveling seminary.

Yeah. And they're, they're training deliverance preachers as they go. They put advertisements like this. And so they're, they start training people to be deliverance preachers. And you can pay the tuition. You can go to their week long course that they have.

They have text books. They have course materials. I mean, this thing is a full on little mini seminary for being a deliverance preacher. Yeah. And as they travel around, they're training. They're training a whole generation of preachers with William Brannum's, FF Bosworth's deliverance healing, positive faith, word of faith type beliefs, to go out and spread these ideas to the world.

Yeah. What's really interesting is a lot of the men involved with it were either Pentecostal or considered themselves to be non-denominational, leading up to this. And especially after, you know, when Laterane hit and caused the big split in Pentecostalism, a lot of ministers actually left Pentecostal and they became non-denominational.

Well then, whenever this voice of healing movement started, they started using the term Enter Denominational, which means basically your denomination can join with my denomination, can join with this other and we're going to have unity.

It's basically setting up for a big failure, but more to the point, all of the things that these ministers held as significant elements of their faith. In other words, if you're going to be part of my particular denomination, you must believe X, Y, and Z. Well, this voice of healing fellowship made the roadmap where no, you can't emphasize X, Y, and Z because that is in disagreement with this other member in the fellowship.

So you have to find unity and you have to find common ground and so these men were taking things that they considered to be fundamental to the Christian faith, suppressing them. And they were identifying other means to find unity among themselves.

And what they're doing essentially is they're creating a new denomination of Christianity that is completely dumbed down. And there were a lot of men who joined into this thing and they were starting to get offended because there were ministers who literally preached against their sect or their faith, their denomination.

And yet they couldn't preach against, you know, the other way because this thing was, they were giving education, books, and training sessions on how to get along with the people who are polar opposite from you in our new denomination of faith.

Right, you know, in the message, right, this knowledge would make your head explode. You're telling me that William Brownham was the head of an organization that had a traveling seminary, training preachers, and organizational had a statement of faith called, you know, this and that, that would blow your mind, right?

But that really is the truth. They don't, they have, instead of a statement of faith, they have a policy of doctrine, right? Instead of a seminary, they have a deliverance minister training school, okay?

Everything that would, everything that constituted as the denomination, they built it. They just gave different names from kind of the traditional stuff and William Brownham is right there at the peak leadership role in this thing.

And what they, what they're doing here is they are building a huge network of preachers and ministers being taught all these things. And what they're doing is gonna influence an entire generation of Pentecostals and beyond.

You know, basically in these few years of time, William Brownham becomes the most influential Pentecostal preacher in the world, okay? In these years, William Brownham is the most influential Pentecostal preacher in the world.

And all the other major Pentecostal preachers that are famous, you know, in the second tier and third tier are part of his voice healing fellowship, right? These guys are the most popular Pentecostal preachers in the world.

And it's really hard to overstate how influential and important William Brownham was back in these years. But I think, again, one way maybe to demonstrate how famous William Brownham was. I mean, take a look at this.

This is the 50th anniversary celebration of a zoosistry in Los Angeles, held at the Angeles Temple. William Brownham is the keynote speaker at the 50th anniversary of a zoosistry. And every other minister who's anybody in Pentecostalism is at this thing.

And they're preaching after William Brownham's keynote address through this week. William Brownham is, I mean, unquestionably. And there's a lot of people who don't like this fact because of what happened with William Brownham in later years.

William Brownham was the most influential Pentecostal preacher in the world in these years. And that is the truth. And if you read these biographies, all of it, it really... is true, and he was not the most influential for a day or two.

He was this way for nearly a decade, nearly a decade he was in this position. I think the reason it's so difficult for historians who were never involved with this or know this history to start to piece this together.

The later versions of William Brannum's stage persona, even preach sermons entitled, why I am against organized religion, right? The mold that he created for his later stage persona, which is the one that would be remembered throughout history, is completely different than the version of William Brannum that we have during this time.

He is literally creating an organized religion. He's a bishop in Roy Davis's sect, and again, we're gonna get into Davis in later episodes, but at this period of time, Davis is kind of out of the picture.

He's just went to prison, he's off building the clan, and likely he's silently working with Brannum, but Brannum himself, this is all going to his head. Now, he could be the Pope instead of the bishop, right?

So he's creating this new world that really doesn't have Davis in it, and this will play out into some future episodes, but he's creating an organized religion, and it's the exact thing that he taught against in the later years, and I don't know about your sect or the message, but in my sect, we were strongly against seminaries and training and teaching.

It was supposed to be given by God through the prophet, and the ministers were supposed to be parrots of the prophet, basically. What we're having here is the polar opposite of what I would even consider the message, and this was the message at that time.

Right, what we do in the message is, we blame Gordon Lindsay for all of this. Right. We say, Gordon Lindsay did all of this stuff against the prophet's wishes, and, but that's not true.

No. Okay, so William Brannum is wholeheartedly supporting this and going along with it and reaping all the benefits of it. It's not until time goes on, and he has his falling out with Gordon Lindsay that he decides that all of this was terrible, right?

Yeah. And so that, we in the message, we did think all of this was terrible, but William Brannum didn't think all this was terrible at the time. He's the one teaching at this school.

I mean, when you read these articles, all right, he's one of the seminarians, okay? How can something be terrible when so much money is flowing through it? I know, right? I mean, isn't all the money proof that God loves it, right?

Like, so this is, we're going towards the prosperity gospel now, if you can hear that. Yeah. Speaking of which, interesting side note that I've got to inject because this just blew my mind. I'm still, my mind is blown.

We were talking about, you know, the prosperity gospel of today. all these ministers who say, God will give me an airplane. Just preach and just pray and believe and send me your money. God will give me an airplane.

We used to laugh at that kind of thing because William Brandham would never do this, right? According to the way we were thought, yet we knew that William Brandham told a guy to buy him an airplane.

Yeah, caught kind of dissonance. I knew this. I knew that William Brandham told somebody to buy him an airplane, but it's again, this was the early formation of the prosperity gospel. Right, and we have this way in the message of doing such, so the same thing in our sect of the message, we know we knew that William Brandham told the, the mostly brothers to buy him an airplane, right?

And the mostly brothers kept that airplane around long after he died, but we with what we did is instead of blaming William Brandham for telling them to buy him an airplane, we blame the mostly brothers, right?

Oh, the mostly brothers, they're crazy. They're out of their mind, buy him the profit and airplane, you know, Brian William Brandham, we would make fun of the mostly brothers, but they just bought an airplane because William Brandham asked him to, you know, and it's just like this, we blame Gordon Lindsay for doing all of this stuff, but he was just doing it to help, you know, for William Brandham, I mean, William Brandham was there going along, supporting, and benefiting from all of this stuff.

And these men are taking these beliefs far and wide, and here is just, you know, one page, and there are multiples of pages of all of the revivals that they're having globally, and this is just from the space of two or three weeks.

These people are having dozens and dozens of revivals every single month globally, like here, here they mark on a map all the countries of the world where they're having revivals that month. Like these beliefs, these things are doing are globally, right, if you look at this, they're in Canada, they're in the US, they're in Mexico, they're in Cuba, they're in Jamaica, South America, Argentina, Chile, Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, India, Pakistan, South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, Ireland, Germany, Sweden.

I mean, and that's just, if this one's I'm making off off the top of my head, on and on a ghost, Finland, and they are global with this stuff. They are taking these beliefs to the whole world, right?

And it's not just that, you know, that they're going out and people are having healed and getting benefits and things like that, but they're taking a set of doctrines that had not been believed on in these groups or areas before.

And specifically, we'll talk about a little bit as we come down, but there is a whole new set of beliefs that these guys are spreading, that they've learned through all of these seminaries that William Brannum and Gordon Lindsay have created, and they're taking these practices out to the world.

And it really is something. And what happens here, some of these men in this fellowship, they get, So big, they get so popular that they totally outgrow the need for denominations, and William Brannum is one of the men in that category, A. Allen's another or Robert's another.

They're so big, they've gained so much popularity. They have such a great amount of access to the people. They can fundraise directly from the people. They don't have to rely on the denominations for any sort of financial support anymore.

And that makes a really big shift within Pentecostalism as a whole. And this starts the era of the mega preachers and the mega churches, right? It starts these, it starts with setting off the era when you get what really popular preacher builds a really massive church, and they're pretty well independent from any other church body.

And this sets all of that in motion, right? Yeah. It did. You know, somewhere, I don't have it in front of me, but this thing became so big. I mean, just look at the map, William Brannum was the Pope of this thing.

He's creating basically, you've got the Catholic Church who's worldwide, and he's the Pope of the anti-Catholic Church worldwide. It became so big that it even had somewhat of its own banking system. The voice of healing magazine towards the later years was actually selling annuities for these ministers who joined in.

Yeah. And they're a very loose fellowship, right? Like there's not a, it's not terribly command and control, but William Brannum is in the senior position, and he has influenced the beliefs of all of these men.

And you know, because of what happened with William Brannum in the later years of his life, the truth is most people who survived, you know, their ministries into the 60s and 70s after William Brannum's fall from grace, they really tried to downplay how important William Brannum was, right?

But William Brannum was by far one of the most influential figures in Pentecostalism in the 1950s, and the healing revivals are what got him to that level, right? You know, it's that's the exact same thing that lets William Brannum be the keynote speaker at the 50th anniversary of the Azusa Street Revivals, right?

And here's the thing, at the exact same time that William Brannum is keynote speaker at the Azusa Street Revivals, look, look at some of the advertisements that are running in voice of healing. International Christian Fellowship Convention, this is voice of healing endorsed convention held at the cable tabernacle, host pastor.

The Reverend James Jones, right? At the exact same time that William Brannum is in this position, him and his organization are supporting Jim Jones, right? These are the things that are going on the fringes of this movement.

that again, nobody owns, nobody claims responsibility for. But Jim Jones and figures like that are creeping in and circulating in this movement at this time. Yeah, there's an implosion that happens in a few years later and Jones becomes a more significant figure that we'll be getting into.

But this was attracting all kinds of people, some of them good, some of them bad. And if you really think about what happened in their ministries, this engine of creating ministries, basically was responsible for the big names that we have in American history and American Christianity.

Without this thing, they would not have existed in the way that they exist today. Right, and keep in mind, William Brannum is certainly the most responsible perhaps for like creating Jim Jones ministry, but Jim Jones was on the platform with Oral Roberts.

Jim Jones was on the platform with AA Allen. Jim Jones was there with all of these people, just like they all want to forget William Brannum, they definitely want to forget Jim Jones, right?

Absolutely. But this stuff is all happening together at the same pot at the same time. And we'll talk a lot about Jim Jones in some more episodes. But I know, John, I think that because of the popular repeal of all of this, the broader healing revival, it kind of had a more different flavor than the latter reign side of things, right?

The healing revival had a much smaller emphasis on the fivefold ministry, a much smaller emphasis on end time teachings and overall a much smaller emphasis on any sort of doctrine, right? Like those policy statements that they made, they kind of control what the preachers could preach.

It really focused them and the movement overall on healings, miracles, signs, wonders, the gifts of the spirit, right? The main thrust of the healing revival is different than the main thrust of latter reign.

The main thrust of the healing revival is miracles, wonders, lights, camera, action, right? The evangelists of the healing revival are very interested in broad appeal and maintaining broad popular appeal, right? And because popular appeal is so important to them, the healing evangelists as a whole, they end up a lot less cultic than the people on the latter reign side of things.

And you know, if you think about that, that makes sense because the healing evangelist, they generally didn't develop the same authoritarian structures that the, or even the behavioral controls that were developed on the latter reign side of things.

And although they're mixing here, what happens is that gradually the latter reign side of things, they start to take a low view of these healing evangelists, right? The latter reign starts to accuse the healing evangelism.

And the people kind of circling and coming into orbit of the healing evangelist, they start saying, they don't have any standards. They don't have any principles. They just follow the money. They just care about numbers.

And that is kind of becomes the way that the lateral rein side of things starts to look at the healing revival focus side of things. And I think in some extent, maybe the lateral rein is true.

I think maybe they were interested in numbers and money. And I think that that really probably was one of the main driving factors of what was happening in the healing revivals. It could be, I wish that we had actual recordings and transcripts of every single person that was involved with both the voice of healing and the lateral rein, because if you have them all and you put them together chronologically, you start to see this shift in doctrine.

We can see it clearly with William Brannum. When William Brannum opened this thing in 1948 to become basically the leader of it, has his mental breakdown or Robert Steps-Anne, William Brannum comes back, and during those times, you can see from the limited number of recordings that we have during that time that his doctrine was really dumbed down.

He didn't really get into, like you said, the cultic things during that time. And interestingly, a lot of his recordings were missing from that time. There's a period of time, which we'll get into this later, but there's an implosion that happens, and William Brannum separates himself from this for a brief period of time.

During that, he's like a train off the rails, man. He's starting to bring in the manifested sons of God, doctrines, and some of the more heretical things. Then, voice of healing takes him back for a brief period of time, and you watch his sermons again, they start to be dumbed down, and he's preaching the Trinity more often, for example.

Then completely separated from William Brannum, the two part ways, Gordon Lindsay and William Brannum are no more, and that's when William Brannum literally goes insane and off the rails. So we have this chronology of William Brannum's sermons doing this.

Well, we also have a lot of sermons from Jim Jones, and you can see Jones, even during this time, his sermons weren't that, if you were to listen to it, you would think, well, that's not really that bad, until he starts to separate from this movement, and he starts also teaching William Brannum's manifested sons of God, doctrine, and that's when Jones goes off the rails.

So this framework that was being created, although, in my opinion, it was a very bad thing that they were doing, it also had some, at least some structure for maintaining some sort of doctrinal position that wasn't destructive while they could contain it, if that makes any sense.

Yes, that makes perfect sense. to me because the healing revival side is while they have their excesses and their problems, it is a much healthier environment ultimately than what the latter reigns side of things turns into. The healing revival sides since they're designed and their goal is brought appeal, they end up being more open, less rigid, less controlling of people, and it evolves into what you see with Oro Roberts. Oro Roberts goes out, he makes Oro Roberts University. He's bringing in all kinds of people from all kinds of places. People who focus more on the healing

revival side of things, they ended up being a lot more open, as they come out of this thing, whereas the people on the latter reign side and the more influence you are by the latter reign, the more you end up this way, you come out of this thing closed and rigid and more authoritarian. It kind of depends on where you are in the spectrum, how much of the latter reign influenced you coming out of this thing as really relates to how cultic, how authoritarian, how controlling that you are. Again, it goes a lot to those doctrinal statement of faith policies

that William Brannum and his team issued because they were less open about those things in the broader healing revivals. It was really only when the latter reign crowds that they go into this area that's eventually going to produce the things that we call the message. I think also that's kind of why when things break up, like in my sect of the message, John, even though the healing revivals is what made William Brannum so popular, we would say the healing revivals and those other healing revivalists, we had nothing good to say about them. We thought really poorly of them,

and a lot of us would say, well, they were just after money or they were just after fame or popularity, right? The reason we said that is because that's what William Brannum told us about them after he separated from them. The thing was, he was the chief among them. He was chief among them.

I mean, think about this. For somebody who is never, ever involved, I was raised in this thing, so my way of thinking is a certain way. For people who weren't, it's difficult to understand, but in parallel, William Brannum was white supremacists through and through, and the white supremacists absolutely hated the Catholic church, hated the Catholic church, and there are a lot of men who were influenced by the white supremacists, and they also hate the Catholic church today. I've learned that this is a common thing. It's not just William Brannum, but take the Catholic church as a parallel example to put it into a different perspective.

In the same structure in the Catholic Church, William Brannum would have been the Pope. He was creating this new anti-Catholic Church of which he was maybe not in full authoritarian control, but like the Pope had a subset of men who organized with him and made decisions just like the Catholic Church.

And picture in the Catholic Church, if all of these men who were under the Pope suddenly realized, hey, the Pope is a white supremacist and he's evil and he's got all of this really shady dark background.

And he's starting to say things that are not quite an alignment with the Bible and they're fundamental to him. We need to vote this guy out. And that's what happened on the voice of healing side.

And then the Pope leaves, gathers a small group of people, creates this destructive cult and says, all of these guys that I used to be working with, by the way, are the devil. They're all evil people.

In parallel, it makes no sense. I mean, you look at this and you laugh, you think, well, that just sounds absurd. But in the real world of actuality, this is exactly what happened with William Brannum.

Yeah, yeah, as this thing breaks down, we're going to have to do multiple full episodes on this thing. As this thing breaks down, he decides that all the denominations are evil. Why? Because he don't want his people going back to the denominations.

He wants to keep them out with him. He decides all the other healing evangelists were evil. Why? Because he don't want his people going back with the other healing evangelists. He starts erecting systems to keep his most loyal followers loyal and to not go here.

This is like starts of information control, John, and all kinds of thought control, right? To keep them away from going back and hearing the truth about what had happened and why he got kicked out of all of this stuff.

But you know, so as the healing revivalists, they generally ended up less cultic than the message or the latter ran groups. But there are two really important doctrines that spring up in the healing revival on that side of things.

So they're somewhat ladder rain influence, but they're more on the healing revival side of things than the ladder rain side of things. And they are the prosperity gospel and the word of faith and the word of faith movement.

And those things were both birthed in the healing revivals. They're two related ideologies, but they are different, different ideologies. And if you kind of trace those out, I think we want to talk just a little bit about how they arose within the healing revival here.

But if you trace them all the way back, the prosperity, gospel, and word of faith ideas, you'd have to go all the way back to the mid 1800s. And back in the mid 1800s, there was a movement called new thought, new thought, and there's a man I got a picture of him here.

Phineas Quimby, he's probably the father of new thought, and this is not a Christian movement at all. They don't even claim to be Christian, right? It's a pseudo-science is really what it is. This is where the initial concepts of some of this stuff develop, and a lot of people called it Quimbyism, and some of it turned into what's called Christian science today.

In the later 1800s, quite a few ministers associated primarily in the British Israel movement, they begin to adopt some of these Quimbyism ideas, right? John Alexander Dowey, Russell Kelsal Carter, AB Simpson. These people are taking some ideas that come out of new thought, out of Quimbyism, and they start adapting them.

As they do that within their movement, they create an early version of positive confession, right? So positive confession actually, primarily through flu or grew out of British Israelite ministers who had been impacted by Quimbyism, or believed in some of the stuff of Quimbyism.

And so that is where positive confession takes form in the late 1800s, and the way they do that is when they integrate it with Christian thought, they go back to the atonement, and they say there's a dual atonement.

They invent the theology of dual atonement, John. And you've talked about this before or where. If you, they believe that you're saved by faith and you're healed by faith, and Jesus Christ purchased both on the cross, therefore, since you can be saved merely by believing on Christ, instantly you should be able to be instantly healed merely by believing on Christ, and it's a package deal, right?

And so they start really tying divine healing to salvation very closely. And this is part of the theological rationale for positive confession. And that, again, develops primarily among British Israel ministers in the late 1800s.

And so we know how that gets down to William Brown, right? It comes through FF Bosworth, who was there with Dowie and the other British Israelite ministers, John Lake got it from Dowie, British Israelite as well, Gordon Lindsay got it directly in that line as well from John Lake.

And these things pass down to William Brown, them into these healing revivals, and they're preaching positive confession. I think as we've demonstrated multiple times all through these healing revivals, it's part of their training material and their seminary that they're running.

And what happens is positive confession, eventually births, word of faith, and the prosperity gospel in this healing revival movement. And John, to the best of my knowledge, to the best of my knowledge, maybe you know better.

A.A. Allen was the first one to preach the full on prosperity. Gospel here in the healing revival. And what he did is he took the positive confession beyond just health and he also started applying it to well. Okay. Right. So A. Allen starts preaching health and wealth positive confession, which is prosperity gospel. Yeah. And oral Roberts picks up a flavor of this. He really likes that. And this is how the prosperity gospel is born. And of course, the prosperity gospel is is pretty popular today in a lot in a lot of circles. So positive positive confession bursts prosperity gospel during the

healing revivals. My opinion is slightly different. Again, I've mentioned this a few times, but the message cult as we know it was not a religious cult. It was a political cult that was disguised as a religious cult. And it could be argued that during the days of voice of healing when William Brannum became the Pope of this thing, that it tried mainly to transition to a religious cult. But underneath the framework was still a political cult. And off to the side, I'm picturing Davis getting angry because here's William Brannum who's becoming much, much bigger than Davis globally. And he's got this ego and you know, it becomes

the thing that Davis can no longer control. But at the bottom, at the, you know, the foundation of this thing, it was a political cult. And people make the mistake. I think this is probably why historians struggle to understand this. They make the mistake of looking at specific doctrines as the religious foundation, assuming that the Bible or their perception of the Bible is the core philosophy of this movement, which isn't the case. If I look back at John Alexander Dowey, Dowey, as he was growing into his multi-million dollar status, hundreds of millions, he also was preaching elements of the prosperity gospel. Dowey was also deeply,

deeply into Christian mysticism. And if you take Dowey's religious framework off of the top of this thing, what you end up with is Christian mysticism and positive confession, and basically, you know, the prosperity gospel. People have actually argued with me trying to say that William Brannum was in no way connected to word of faith and that word of faith was in no way connected to quimbi. Because, again, they're looking at the surface. They're looking at just these little tiny doctrines that's built on top of this foundation that is the exact same thing as quimbi. And the example that I give back is, if I hand you

a big Mac and you eat it, you're going to know that this tastes like a big Mac. If I take red paint and spray paint the big Mac and turn the whole thing red, you're going to look at it and it doesn't look like a big...

Mac. But when you start eating it, you know that this thing is a big Mac. That's what we have with the prosperity gospel. It's going through, you know, Dauy, it's going through Bosworth, it's going through Brannum, it's going through Allen, it's going through Roberts. You've got all of these things are built on top of this framework of Christian mysticism and anti-biblical themes, and they all emerge in, you know, as various other movements and sects and doctrines, etc. But at its core, you've got this thing that basically was the fundamental elements required to create all of these heretical movements. Yeah, what I have discovered in reading all of these books

is that there's no such thing as a static ideology. There's no such thing as an idea that remains consistent over time. Ideas and ideologies are constantly evolving. And, you know, at what point does an ideology change so much that it's no longer the same ideology, right? And so what I do is, when I look at it, like I, for example, I look at positive, you know, the prosperity gospel, right? I look who is the first person that I can find that gives this in this fully formed way that it's health, it's wealth, it's all of the above, and you can just kind of name it and claim it.

And so I start there and I think when I can find that all in a package, I'll call that the prosperity gospel, right? But know what the person who comes up with that did not come up with that out of the blue, right? They just didn't sit down one day and say, hey, I'm coming up with the prosperity gospel. Now they, they're already part of a preexisting ideology and they're just tweaking that preexisting ideology and adding in another component to create prosperity gospel. And as you, you keep tracing these things all the way back to the initial seed that was planted,

that grew into it. That's, that's how I look at it. Quimbiism is the seed that was planted. And it sprouted up and it had some concepts, but it was not quite fully formed positive confession.

But when the British Israelite ministers picked up the seeds of Quimbiism, it grew and it grew into positive confession. And positive confession is 75, 80% identical to the prosperity gospel, right? So now you've got that. And then as you come to the healing revival, the other 20% fills in and now you've got the prosperity gospel. It's gradually growing and it's growing in stages through different people over time. And the root of it, though, the seed all the way down here that it's built on is Quimbiism. So that's, that's kind of how I look at it. And I look at the, the, um,

word of faith the same way right so word of faith is is an ideology and it has actually a somewhat different rationale on the back end of it than the prosperity gospel has right the prosperity gospel is ultimately built on the dual atonement as part of the rationale for for making it all work but word of faith is different word of faith does not rely on the dual atonement to justify how it works and when you kind of pick those pieces apart on the back end and you start tracing them back those ideas where do these ideas originate how do

they come in together in combination you're exactly right John word of faith is manifested sons of God that's where that comes from okay so what happens in is so a Allen oral Roberts they like the prosperity gospel right which is positive confession dual atonement taken to another level word of faith is something different word of faith is positive confession mixed with manifested sons of God that is what what that is and that happens as a laterain influences coming into the healing revival and what happens is TL Osborne Kenneth Hagen they are also ministers that are very popular in

these circles and are part of the voice of healing stuff going on but they're also they're on the side that's becoming influenced by laterain right and what word of faith is it is the positive confession idea evolved with mixing in some manifested sons of God ideas because the way they arrive at word of faith is not because of the dual atonement we can speak these things into existence but now word of faith says we can speak these things into existence because we're reaching a higher level of Christ likeness and we're reaching a new level of something and that gives us the power to be like Jesus and speak

things into existence so while they are similar in their outcome the ideology behind it on the back end is substantially different and they they derive through different sources and so that that's and I think that's important I think for our listeners to to make sure they understand that otherwise you can get confused as you as you try to unravel this stuff I think that's a really good way to explain it because I mean think of this if you take Roy E. Davis William Brano's mentor away from the equation then you take away the spiritualism that influence William Brano Davis was deeply into

spiritualism that's how he held his revivals he had the stage act of being a converted spiritualist that influence Brano so if you take spiritualism away from Brano you've taken away the seed of spiritualism that grew into the manifested sons of God and in to some of these other movements.

Then if you take William Brannum's manifested sons of God theology out of this movement, word of faith can't exist. The prosperity gospel can still exist, but it takes a much, much different form. But if William Brannum would have remained in his catatonic mental health state, whatever happened to him, and you took him out of this healing revival, then you take the manifested sons of God in a way you take some of these other things that he introduced into the movement away, and all of it doesn't exist.

You've got no voice of healing, you've got basically, you've got nothing without Brannum. So all of these seeds growing and combining and merging, none of which, Charles, not one of which are actually Christian.

None of these things are Christian, but all of these elements are what created something that heavily, deeply influenced American Christianity. Right, and none of these things are original to William Brannum, right? None of these things are original to William Brannum.

They're all pre-existing ideas, and in the context of the healing revival, and in the context of the latter reign, these pre-existing ideologies are being tweaked, they're being modified, and they're being reformulated a bit, right?

So positive confession in the healing revival reformulates into prosperity gospel, and it reformulates into word of faith by merging in some manifested sons of God pieces. And William Brannum is the man with the stick during the pot, what all of this?

As all of these ingredients are going, William Brannum is the one stirring the pot. The witch is blue. So the word of faith theology and the prosperity gospel, they're born at roughly the same time.

William Brannum is at the center of this, without a doubt, he's at the center of this. Now, here's the thing, William Brannum, William Brannum did not like the prosperity gospel, and I think more than anything, he didn't like the title of it, honestly.

I think he didn't like the word prosperity in it, but he believed 90% of the prosperity gospel. But he wholeheartedly believed word of faith. He was, he preached word of faith. I mean, he wholeheartedly believed word of faith.

And honestly, it's hard to tell exactly, but we can be quite certain that really T.L. Osborne and Kenneth Hagen almost certainly learned word of faith from William Brannum. I mean, because William Brannum was the conduit between them and the broader laterane movement, honestly.

And William Brannum himself was involved in laterane as these things were as word of faith or manifested sons of God was coming together. Let me just read a few quotes, John, just of William Brannum on Word of Faith.

That way, maybe our listeners can pick up what he's preaching here. This is from a sermon called Expectation. William Brannum says, now that same spoken word of God, the Holy Spirit, can make any promise of God manifest if you'll just believe it.

Right? William Brannum didn't so much use Word of Faith, but he tended to call it spoken word, is usually what he used instead of Word of Faith. Here's another quote. He says, it's God's eternal spoken word by born to gain people by prayer, asking God, and God's obligated to His Word.

When that real, not put on, not make believe, but a settled faith is in a man's heart that don't vary from God's Word a bit, it's God's Word being spoken by mortal lips. And that is the faith that was once delivered under the saints.

That's from a sermon. The faith delivered once under the saints. And let me give you one more. This is from another sermon, Confirmation and Evidence. William Brannum says, and I said, to think that God who made the universe, the God who made the solar system, who made the heavens and the earth, and created them by His spoken word.

Remember, a word is a thought expressed. God thought it, then he expressed it, it has to happen. For the world was framed by the Word of God, and things were made out of things that do not appear.

It was God's Word. He thought it, and he spoke it, and it has to come to pass. It's a seed that's growing. And marvelously, that has to bring forth in its season. And we can take His Word, and we can see He promised in the last days that He'd draw this people out, and we would do the very same thing He did.

So William Brannum is teaching word of faith concepts, but He tended to call it spoken word. That tended to be the phrase that He used for it. And He's preaching all of these things before Kenneth Hagen did, before T.L. Osborne did, for sure.

And whether they learned it from Him or some other laterane preacher, I think the most likely thing is they learned it from Him, because they were listening to Him the most. And what William Brannum is doing with quotes like this, is he's teaching people the idea that they're going to be able to speak things into existence, just like God could speak things into existence.

And I know the way I understood it personally in the message, John, and maybe you can add what you think. But the way I understood it personally is that it wasn't my own power to speak something into existence, but God would inspire me to say His Word, and then God would bring His Word to pass.

And it's kind of along that line that it was supposed to work, and that's kind of the way I understood the message version of it. Yeah. William Brannum, even the titles of some of the sermons are very, very clearly word of faith.

Speak to the rock. He's got all of these sermons and themes. And like he said, this long predated Kenneth Hagen, and Hagen was a big part of this movement, too. He's a voice. to healing revivalist.

Teal Osborne also was one of the editors for this thing. So these guys were deeply embedded. They heard it. Now, you can argue that they're the ones who made it popular. William Brannum never focused on this in the way in which they focused on it.

Because he's like this sponge of all kinds of doctrine. And where you squeeze the sponge and what you get out of the sponge happens to be different from revival to revival. But it's part of the sponge that they absorbed.

And then they're basically a sponge absorbing William Brannum and squeeze them and you've got word of faith. But these men are teaching this thing. And I think the way that it forms differently in the minds of children who are raised in it.

But in the way in which I believed it, which was solely based on William Brannum, he's got all of these statements and doctrines about ye are gods. And he would, you know, he's clearly referencing the framework that Kenneth Hagen uses later.

But he's basically telling us that we are gods and we have the power to speak. And he's referencing all of these passages in the Bible about you can move mountains. But he says, he ties it to word of faith.

He says you have to speak to do it. And so I'm just one of many children that did this. I know others that did, we'd go around speaking things, trying to be sorcerers, you know, we thought we had this power to do things with our minds.

And in no way, shape or form did it resemble Christianity, but that's what he's telling us is Christianity. Yeah, you know, what makes, again, word of faith, word of faith is the rationale behind how it works.

Because you can change the rationale behind it and end up with the prosperity gospel instead. But word of faith works because you believe you're becoming little gods, right? You're having, you're being, William Brown said little messiahs.

That's how he was, he phrased it. Messiah ets is how William Brown, I'm called it. This is how it works. We're becoming little Jesus's, little messiahs, right? Which is different than the rationale behind how the prosperity gospel works.

And here's a quote, I've got another quote. This is from William Brown, I'm sermon the Messiah. This is a pure manifested sons of God sermon, John. But he says, man, what is he? He's got a hand like God, got eyes like God, got ears like God, got a body like God.

He's fashioned after God. He's given an earth and a dominion. He was made God over the earth to rule the earth, a lesser God. God rules the universe and everything, but man was given the earth to rule the earth.

He was a, he was a Messiah et. And that's when he introduces the little Messiah, the Messiah et stuff. And you know, William Brown, I'm gave very lengthy explanations about just what all this means and how it works.

and in that 1961 sermon, I just quoted again, that is pure manifested sons of God, latter-rain ideology that William Branham is preaching. Even though in the message most people probably don't realize, that's what he's preaching, that is latter-rain manifested sons of God ideology that he picked up and helped formulate in the latter-rain side of things.

And he preaches this in the later years. Now, Kenneth Hagen and TL Osborne, I should say, rather TL, Osborne stayed connected to William Branham all the way up even through the insane years, John.

TL Osborne was one of the men who officiated William Branham's funeral. Right. Okay. He stayed with him all the way to the end, right? And so did some of these other men, the most radical of them stayed with him all the way to the end, as he jumps off the deep end with a lot of these crazy ideas.

And again, like we talked about in our manifested sons of God episode, what really matters here is what you mean when you say, be like Jesus. But I'm pretty confident, you know, what William Branham is talking about when he says that we're all gonna be little messiahs is something kind of dangerous and toxic, right?

Yeah. A humble person, they hear, let's be like Jesus and they think, well, let's be kind like Jesus. Let's love like Jesus, right? But a lot of people come to this from the angle of pride and of ego, and when they hear be like Jesus, they hear power, authority, control, right?

And this word of faith idea can take you to a dark place, right? And it has, I'm afraid, for quite a few people, when they come at it at the wrong, when they come at it at the angle that a lot of people tend to.

Yeah, a lot of people are unaware how deeply these men were connected to William Branham and not just William Branham, but in the cult that was created after William Branham and continued to grow, we have corp docs where Kenneth Hagen and Tia Lasborn or are in government established entities with the William Branham sons, as late as the 80s.

I can't remember the exact date. I'll pull it up for the video, but these men were deeply connected and I'm just shocked that this history has been covered up. Right, and Kenneth Hagen claims that he prophesied William Branham's death and maybe he did, and he said he prophesied it because William Branham went off the deep end and went crazy.

But why did he stay friends with him his whole life and support his ministry and the cult after he died? I mean, what in the world? Yeah, the one thing that I've learned about this movement is that hindsight's 2020, and these men capitalize on the fact that the general public doesn't aware, isn't aware that they're doing this, but after something happens, they'll say, why prophesied that?

And it's very easy to say that you prophesied it after it happened, especially if nobody can prove that you did before it. happened, right? So William Brannum, I will say that they were probably prophetic in knowing that after William Brannum died, he would be seen as a heretic. And so they all began severing ties after he died. But like you said, leading up to the point in which he's very much alive and about to die, these men, he was, he was their golden goose, right?

He's the one who's bringing all their money. Why would they cut him off? I know. It is, it's something else, right? It's something else. So, you know, I know these things can all be a little complicated to understand how these ideologies emerged. But, you know, hopefully, I guess what we're saying here will be plain and clear and help people understand how some of this stuff came together. And I know I've, I've spent years at this point trying to painstakingly piece all of this together, John. And so this honestly is the best of my knowledge from having read all these books here behind me. And ideas from New Thought

Quimbiism in the mid-1800s were picked up by various men all associated with John Alexander Dauy. And it was in their ranks that positive confession was formulated in the late 1800s, which then took a full turn into prosperity gospel as you come into the healing revivals.

And A. Allen, rather, and F. F. Bosworth and William Brannum were the bridge that those ideas came into the healing revival. And then Kenneth Hagen and T. L. Osborne took positive confession. They mixed it with the manifested sons of God ideas that William Brannum was preaching as well and produced the word of faith theology. And William Brannum is right in the middle of all of that. He is the conduit through which all of that's happening and being cooked up in the in the mid-1950s.

Yeah. I think it's pretty good summary. And it is, you know, even in this episode, I don't think that we did it full justice. For somebody to understand just how complex this is and how it all fits together, you really have to deeply study this and not just for a week or two weeks or a month. You have to study this thing for years to understand the intricate details of how all of this is interconnected and interwoven. But at its core, William Brannum is literally the thread that binds it all together.

Yeah. And I know before we wrap up this episode, there's one last thing I definitely wanted to make sure I made a point of, you know, that voice of healing fellowship, it started first as just associated evangelists. But they actually really were building a full on formal denomination, you know, as time went on. And the full gospel fellowship international is the voice of healing denomination that they feel. Full gospel fellowship international.

And they do a whole lot of church planning. Certainly hundreds of churches in the United States and Canada that they plant. And other churches join into the full gospel fellowship of churches. And there are still full gospel churches all over the place today. If you see a church with full gospel in their name, there's a pretty but odds that they sprung up during the healing revival and were planted by these healing evangelists, right?

And also just wanna point out a few numbers, right? You know, at the start of the 1900s, there were maybe, I've looked into this the other day, there were maybe 200,000 people who believed positive confession style beliefs at about 1900, right?

But by the time you get to the end of the healing revivals in the 1950s, it's no longer just 200,000 people mostly in the United States and Canada, but it is millions of people in dozens of countries that have adopted these positive confession, prosperity, gospel, and word of faith kind of ideas.

And it is these healing revivalists inspired and led by William Branum that spread these ideas globally, right? And then oral Roberts and Kenneth Hagan and T.L. Osborne, men like them, they kick off televangelism.

They are the original teleavangelists as you come into the 1960s. And when they do that, they take these ideas to even wider audiences and the charismatic movement starts to emerge as you come into the late 60s and 70s and they push all of these ideas into the charismatic movement, that second wave of penicostalism as it really takes off.

And through their ministries, tens of millions of people are exposed to these ideas. And Kenneth Copeland, he got his ideas from Kenneth Hagan, right? Those ideas poured into the new apostolic reformation today through him, just like a lot of William Branum's laterane ideas poured into Paul Cain and for Paul Cain to the Kansas City prophets and from the Kansas City prophets to the vineyard movement and to Bethel and to all these other kinds of places that are out there today.

And from Earn Baxter, they went into the shepherding movement and from there out into wider Christianity as well. So these things just spread far and wide and there, if you know the history of the movement and you know the names and you know who worked together and the stuff that happened, you can trace all of these ideas all back.

They converge in a nexus around William Branum. And like you said, John, if you then go back another generation, they all converge again at Alexander Dalley. It's very clearly fully connected. I mean, it's like if you took a big pain of glass and then just shattered it with a sledgehammer all the pieces of the glass become slightly different but they're still originally they're part of this thing which was basically the voice of healing movement.

And like you said, the voice of healing denomination which will blow the minds of people who were in the message cult because I'm sure you're the same way but we were just manipulated in program to think that even the word denomination was satanic.

And yet that's what they were doing. They were creating a denomination. And how these ideas evolved, again, maybe one last point. I keep saying one last point. This is it. I promise. You can tell I'm a preacher, right?

The so I mentioned how these ideas grow, right? It's a seed that's planted. Quimbiism turns into positive confession, which turns into prosperity gospel, which turns into you know Today we're in another one or two iterations beyond this stuff, right?

These things are no longer exactly what they were in the fifties and sixties, right? They these ideas have modified again, right? And what people do that are brainwashed John, right? And I know exactly what people do when they're brainwashed about these things because I was once brainwashed by these things John What they do is they say what I believe. No, that's not positive. That's not prosperity gospel That's not word of faith. This is some divine thing that came from the Bible They're unable to grasp that this is an evolving ideology Right, and what I believe today even though it's 10% different, right?

Does not mean that this is a brand new ideology that somebody got from God. What this means is I believe the same thing And somebody decided to tweak it, right and tell me God told them to tweak it But now this is this is the same ideology and this is the next evolution of that ideology, right?

And the thing is you own all of the baggage all the way back to the beginning of this ideology, right? Because for you to believe that ideology today you have to believe that TL Osborne was inspired of God and Kenneth Hagen was inspired of God when they made their tweaks to it and William Branum was inspired of God when he made his tweaks to it and John Alexander Dowie was inspired when he made his tweaks to it and On all the way back to the original man who invented the seed concept that he was inspired of God when he planted that seed to begin with

So you have to own you have to own the whole growth process on your beliefs You really do and You have to own what the Bible says about this. I mean to be honest the Bible says it talks about the parallels of building the house on the Shifting sand, right? It's literally talking about if you have all of these principles that are on a false foundation The house is going to fall When you're manipulated in this type of movement as we were and even you know some of the word of faith people that I've talked to

Recently as of like last week These people are also manipulated in the same way if they can just find one percent of difference between What William Branum said and what Hagen said for example, they say no, this is disconnected. This is just guilt by association They're avoiding that passage about the shifting sand William Branum laid the foundation that these men built upon to create their ministries So there's just so much you know here that we could talk about and I'm kind of like you I could keep going Let's let's talk about this. Let's talk about this. Why don't we put those into the next episode and

We've got so many more things that we want to share with you. There's just so much here. 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-Branum.org and www.ChristianGospelChurch.org. For an overview of the historical research of William Branum and the Healing Revivals, read preacher behind the white hoods, a critical examination of William Branum in his message, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.

Join us again next week. We've got a great episode coming.