Our Stories: Hobart Freeman: Leaving the Glory Barn - With Chino Ross

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-Branum.org and today I have my very special guest, Chino Ross, pastor and teacher. Chino, so good to have you back. We had a one single episode on Hobart Freeman and we started receiving all kinds of mail wanting more. In fact, I just interviewed a guy yesterday for the testimonies that we do every Friday and he was explaining his life and how much it impacted and in a negative way impacted

his life and broke up his family and, you know, so many things. It's just it's horrible story. I won't tell it here. You can go listen to it on the testimonies when they play on the Fridays but it is very disturbing and it reminds me so much of what I hear coming out of the William Brannum sect because this essentially was just a clone of Brannum's message cult following under a different name and I was surprised. I think the biggest surprise I got was from you towards the end of the episode last time. We were talking about

when Brannum died that's whenever Hobart Freeman was contacted and looks like there was this shift for him to be the new Brannum. I think you and I would probably agree John that it's not specific to Hobart Freeman or to William Brannum how these cults operate but I've always been amazed. You have a big background with the message and as I shared with you in our first interview when I was 17 years old I was first introduced to Dr. Freeman's teaching and for a point of reference I'm 65 years old today so I have been in and around Hobart

Freeman's teaching you know I have to say for all my life most of my life. Now I never attended I never was a member I never moved Indiana but I was aware of the teaching and closely followed it believed it the first couple of years in my teens and then as I explained in our previous discussion together I gravitated away from it but I just knew so many people who were a part of it like you with people who come from the message and I'm Of course, people nowadays, you can get online, and there are some online places people can find.

One of them may be called overcomers online or something, but there are a few of them, if you'll just, and people are good at this, digging in and researching Hobart Freeman and Faith Assembly, and to your point about the person you recently interviewed, you can go, it's just message after message, paragraph after paragraph, probably, I would guess the one I'm thinking of, 80% negative, you know, 20%.

Oh, he was God's man, you know, all of you people just misunderstood. He never said that and you took it out of context and, you know, all of that spin that they put on it, but most of the people tell some terribly tragic stories.

Thankfully, I don't have any kind of story like that to tell, you know, I was only closely associated with it for the last of my teenage years and then into my early 20s and I quickly gravitated away from it.

Although, you know, it always held, it's allure. And as I explained in our previous interview, I think a lot of the allure was that Hobart Freeman and did have a doctor's degree in Old Testament in Hebrew.

So he was not one of these, you know, just raised in a Kentucky holler somewhere and came out spinning his tails on Bible prophecy. He had a great, great foundation for the most part in normal orthodox evangelical theology and that made him in my mind and I think in other people's minds, a little bit different than the tried and true who were more like, you know, the Elmer Gantries in the old movie.

I mean, they were just selling snake oil is what they were really doing and Hobart would actually teach from the Bible and teach some good theology stuff. And that, of course, wasn't the problem.

The problem was when he began to teach brand of doctrine, when he began to teach manifested sons, matured sons of God, former rain, latter rain, when he got off on that, it's just like, where's good scriptural proof and contacts for this?

And it's just something that we couldn't find. You know, I have a difficult job because I record these podcasts and I schedule them ahead of time and I've got different flavors of the podcast running.

I'll never combine it in such a way where it's cohesive and coherent but I've got one podcast trail that's written running that is talking about the manchild, the manifest sons of God, where it came from Christian identity. Actually, you can trace its origins all the way back to Jane Leade.

So I've got that going in the converging apostasy series. I've got, as I mentioned, the guy who is in the Hobart Freeman sect and just horrific stories. He told me that he had a problem with his arm and it turned gangreness. And they told him he couldn't take any medicine for it. And it's horrific. He said, fortunately, it drained and he survived anyway. I've got that going in another one. And then in our weaponized religion series, we may have identified where William Brannam went to school. As I mentioned, yeah. In our last episode, we talked

about how none of his life stories true, not a single stitch of it. But I don't think I went this deep. He tells this tale of how he was poor and destitute, which that part was probably true. But then all of a sudden, what he doesn't say is he runs into all kinds of money. He's suddenly at age 16 buying new vehicles. I mean, it's really insane when you think of what's happening. And then he says he goes immediately after buying this brand new Ford, he drives out to Phoenix, Arizona. And he gives the location. And what he's describing,

you picture from an old Western movie, you know, some old ranch where he's bucking Broncos. Well, no, man, the location that he gives is right down and you can see the, I can't remember the name of the building, but it was just being constructed like 10 stories high building right out of his back window. That's where this would have been.

Well, there's a, there's a consistency flaw. His brother killed a man. His whole family was in the mob. It looks like his brother killed a man. And in the obituary, it says William Brandham from Kansas, not from Phoenix. And we have identified it looks very much. We can place Roy Davis, his mentor there. We can place Gerald Winrod, who was the kingpin of Christian identity. His son Gordon is the one who had the standoff in Arkansas, etc.

So anyway, we've got all these threads that are all coming together. And the interesting part is all of that backstory leads to what you and I are going to be talking about today, the carrying on passing of the torch to Hobart Freeman. You can document because he did go to schools, Georgetown College, Southern Baptist Seminary, Grace Theological Seminary, and Winona Lake. You know, thankfully, that can be documented. And of course, the other thing, John, is you're going back so much earlier in the 1900s with...

with William Brannum, then we have to go with Hobart Freeman. But I think where I kind of left off last time, we'll see how far we get this time, that he had been dismissed by Grace Theological Seminary for, we get two sides to the store.

You have Grace's side, and I think Dr. Homer Kent might have been the president of Grace Seminary at that time, I'm not exactly for sure. The Grace Seminary was, and is today, it is still in Winona Lake, it's a very prominent brethren seminary.

There have been illustrious professors there from the past, people like Dr. John Whitcombe, who co-authored with Henry Morris, the classic book, The Genesis Flood, which came out in maybe the early 1960s teaching that the Genesis account is a new earth, not an older earth account, and that the flood was universal.

So there were some notable professors who have come from there, they say that, because they've been interviewed, that Hobart was fired, because he was not compliant with seminary policy, and Hobart says he was fired, because his wife would not attend a Christmas party, get faculty members, and their wives were supposed to attend, and he, by that time, no longer believed in celebrating Christmas or any of the other holidays, but for whatever reason, he was dismissed and began a church in his house in Claypool, Indiana in 1963.

They rattled around for a while, he received the baptism in the Holy Spirit in 1966. The church began to grow a little bit, but it was really after the turn of the 1970s, they had moved over to a three-car garage on Barbie Lake that belonged to his songleader, Jerry Irvin, who remained his songleader for the entire time, I mean, from way back then to the very end.

And I would imagine anybody that you will interview from this point forward, from Faith Assembly, will have nothing but good things to say about Jerry, everybody loved Jerry. He was just a songleader, and he was just wonderful, I've never heard a bad word about Jerry Irvin, but what changed in the early 1970s was they were running out of room in the three-car garage, and simultaneously, there was a man named Mel Grider, who was an ex-alcoholic ex-military ex-biker writer, who had a barn on his property in Northwestern, Indiana, and...

He had started up a little coffee shop to try to reach. And you got to think of these days, 1970s, this is flower power, this is hippies. He was trying to reach those people, drug addicts, alcoholics, motorcycle gang members, all of that.

So it was the most unusual marriage you could imagine between Dr. Hobart Edward Freeman and Mel and Mary Beth Grider, who I think one of their children's names might be early missed. And the other one is dawn awakening or something like that.

Those were their two daughters. That's the kind of people that Mel and Mary Beth were. And so you've got this joining of education and ex-motor cycle. But I mean, I think to start with, it was a marriage made in heaven or made in Northwestern because Mel had the building and Hobart had the people.

And so what happened was Mel didn't have the money and because Hobart had the people, Hobart also had the money. So they joined up and the deal was, Hobart would write the checks which he faithfully did to remodel this barn and turned the second floor

into a very, very nice meeting area. The first floor was reserved for Mel and his coffee shop and that kind of outreach that he intended to do. You walk up the steps on the outside and go in the building, then you were on the second floor and at the very back of the second floor were more steps inside that went up to a third floor and that's where the griders lived.

Because I can remember when the first time I attended and I've got this picture that you can put up and see this was August, the middle of August of 1976 and you can see here just look at the style of these automobiles in the parking lot and you can definitely date the time.

It was a mid 1970s and over on the far left side of the picture you can see the steps that lead up and you can see people going in. Well, the way we got there is my friends who had first, I lived in Memphis, Tennessee at the time.

My young teenage friends had gone to a Howard Johnson hotel motel and had sat in on a weekend conference that Freeman had in the spring of 1976 there brought some tapes back. We all fault this is better than anything in the charismatic movement that we've been listening here to for so we're gonna follow this and see where goes. Well, by the end of that summer, you know, we were listening to a fair number of tapes.

I'm 17 years old, remember at the time. And so my friends had an aunt who lived in Niles, Michigan. And so their mom, their ancestor was going to make a trip. And we figured out, well, North Webster, Indiana is not far from Niles, Michigan. I wonder if your mom, if we go visit you guys aunt, if your mom will let us borrow the car as teenagers and we'll drive back down. That's exactly what we did. I got great memories of going to Southern Michigan in August of 1976. And they were meeting in the barn by that time. And when we went in the barn, you know,

we didn't know you have to get there four hours early to get a seat. We didn't realize that, you know, we were newbies. So when we got to that second floor, there was nowhere to sit.

So we climbed those steps at the back, going up to, we didn't know that anybody lived in there. We're sitting at the top of those steps in the back of the barn and watched the service.

The message that morning was entitled, our family physician. He was teaching on divine healing. And then we came back that night and he was teaching on faith or presumption, the Lagos Rema error that he felt was being propagated by Kenneth Hagen out in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

But anyway, back to 72, Mel had the building, hope art, began writing the checks. They began remodeling that building, turning it into something pretty nice for them to actually have the meeting there. And I think that maybe maximum they might have had, I don't know, maybe 400 people.

But it was a little bit unsafe with that many people in a charismatic mind you worship service, where people don't sit still. And they're in a barn and they're on the second floor of the barn.

And so that was my introduction to the glory barn and how it came about with the alliance of Mel Grider and Hope Art Freeman. You brought back so many memories and strange emotions. I have actually been in services like this where you're standing and you're the whole building is packed. There's not a single seat in it. And you are violating so many building codes.

I guess the people just lined up around the walls, you know, if they had any codes, right? And I have heard specifically sermons about the Rema while standing in this thing, not knowing that this is Kenneth Hagen word of faith stuff. And when you follow it back to its roots, he's really just, it's really started with Taoism.

through Dowey, through Bosworth, through Branham, to Kenneth Hagen, and so forth. You may have seen this, I don't know if you knew, but as late as, I think the government document I've got on my site is 1982, maybe.

I've got a corporation that was created by Kenneth Hagen, T.L. Osborne, the William Branham Association, the Voice of God Recordings, which is the other William Branham Association. And one, Branham cult pastor out west.

All these guys are financially connected, strategically connected, doctrinally connected. And what's funny is, I almost interrupted you. You mentioned the hippie era, which was slightly before my time. But we had a podcast interview.

And this guy was, he had escaped the Moses David Berg cult and children of God. Children of God, you know, I interviewed him, and I was like, you know, why are you talking to me about, you know, this is a Branham site.

And that was back before it hit kind of spun off to, you know, there's so many splinter groups you can't even count them all. Well, during the course of our conversation, he says, and if you go to this website, you'll find all of David Berg's praise of William Branham for helping him start his ministry.

And I said, what? And I go back and look, and he was, David Berg was almost, well, he was ousted for what appears to be sexual misconduct. And you know, in the latter reign, you would pray over somebody, and that would impart your spiritual gift to them, and they'd become a laterane prophet or whatever.

Well, apparently, William Branham did this to Moses David Berg, who started the cult of the Flirty Fishers that they had prostituted to Jesus. I had heard that. Unbelievable, man. So evidently, before there was an internet, there was a worldwide web.

And that's all of these people connected. I guess all the way back to Zion City, and John Alexander Dowley days. And I mean, there are so many connections between all of these people. Well, so they continue there in the barn, 72, 73, in 1974, Hobart started what they call the charismatic school.

And again, I want to give him props for this. He was really trying to theologically educate the people. They taught an Old Testament survey class, a New Testament survey class, biblical theology, some church history, archeology.

They did a class in Hebrew. I mean, this wasn't what you see online today, of just pop sermons and just mysticism. I mean, they were really going a little bit deeper into their studies.

And they did that, 74, 75. And then in 1976, this was the last year. that Hobart stopped his traveling ministry where he was leaving faith assembly, the glory bar at the time, to take outside speaking engagements.

All up until this time, at least once a month, he was gone out of town, out of state, in some speaking engagement. It would be one of his own that he would set up, later on, early on, it would be at a full gospel businessmen's meeting, or, you know, the Lutheran Church, whose pastor had become charismatic and invited Hobart to speak.

You know, he had all kinds of meetings like that. And that just, that continued in the 60s, late 60s, and up through the first six or seven years of the 1970s. But by 1976, that was the last year that he took those outside speaking engagements.

And I think there are probably several reasons why, I think the number one reason Hobart's message had begun to ever so slightly shift. And he was just fed up with what he perceived to be compromised in the rest of the charismatic movement, compromise or error and heresy.

He just didn't think anybody was going far enough. He felt that he had the end time message, the faith message, you know, the matured manifested sons of God. They were part of the latter reign.

I remember him talking about this reign business all the time. And Joel talks about it and Joel too. Ozea has some verses about it. The former reign, the latter reign. But the charismatic interpretation of that always was, the former reign was somewhere around the early 1900s and Azusa Street, Amy Simple McPherson and Charles Parum and William Seymour and all those people.

And that this, you know, post outpouring of the Holy Spirit on those students at Notre Dame in 1967, this is like the latter reign movement. And that was happening at Notre Dame with people like Father Kevin Ranahan and Hobart actually spoke to that group and knew Kevin Ranahan.

But they were feeling we are a part of the latter reign and the latter reign is going to be poured out immediately prior to the second advent. And so every year, well, this is the last year.

And then the next year, well, this is the last year. And then the next year, well, if this is the last year, it will be the last year. And you know, here we are, I'm 50 years, removed from Hobart saying it'll be next year or the next year.

Now they wouldn't predict a date, they were too smart to do that. But they would say all the signs are pointing to the fact that we don't have really any time left. The last days are upon us and we're in it.

And my goodness, John, when you're 17 and 18 years old and you hear that, I mean, I don't want to be left behind. I don't want to disappoint God. I want to be a part of everything God has planned for me and for the church.

He's going to manifest his sons. Well, I want to be manifested. You know, I don't want to be left out, you know, please include me. So as I said earlier, when you're young, you don't have the ability to critically think and, you know, connect all the dots.

And I, when I look back, I don't beat myself up for that one I owed a, you know, I was, I was living a, a great, happy Christian life. As I am today, I'm just living a smarter Christian life than I was.

But I don't want to have any less zeal or enthusiasm, whether the second coming is tomorrow or 50 years from now, you know, I want to keep my zeal and enthusiasm high. But Hobart was very unhappy with what he saw was compromised.

He, if you listen to his messages, hundreds of occasions, he basically would divide Christianity into three different groups of people. They would be the, the people who just got saved and that's all they did.

Then the people who got the baptism and the Holy Spirit and then the people who wanted to go on and become an overcomer. And so he would just talk non-stop about those people who just stopped with John 3, 16, you know, the salvation experience.

And it was almost like an afterthought to him. And I know what the purpose was. The purpose was to, you know, elicit this superiority feeling that he wanted everyone to have. But we're not just like those people.

We're not going to stop with salvation. We're not going to camp out at Pentecost. You know, we're going to go on to the deeper things of God. That's what he's trying to create in people.

But in looking back on it, John, it was just, if the worst thing you could communicate in my mind as a Christian pastor and teacher to try to tell people that your John 3, 16 experience, all you are is a Christian.

That's all you are that that is somehow marginalized or minimized. There's nothing greater that can happen in our life than to be converted to Christianity, born again and serve the Lord. There's nothing greater.

And he thought that was just the first step. And it, I mean, you have to have that to go further. But we don't want to talk about just those nominal people, those people, people that stop with John 3, 16, we want to go, and we don't want to talk about and be with those people that stop with Acts 2, the badges and the Holy Spirit.

You know, he began elevating faith assembly himself and his group to the putting down of anybody that doesn't reach our level. And those that didn't reach their level, quote unquote, were Christians. Oh my goodness.

You know, my salvation experience, John, is the greatest thing that's ever happened to me. Nothing can compare to that. And you can't trade that for anything, and you certainly can't put that down and minimize that as they did.

But I would bet that's probably what most of these groups do. That's all in the past, and we're wanting to elevate ourselves to something higher. Oh yeah. I have often wondered after leaving, and I was, was I 37 years old in a new church the first time that I ever actually heard the gospel.

I grew up in all of these churches, and they would use the word gospel, but I never actually heard it. And wow. I'll never forget my, this was a Baptist church, and the Baptist pastor asked me, what is the gospel?

Well, the answer I gave him was not even close. What is the gospel? I was expecting some complicated intricate strategy of power and healing and glory, and when he explained it,

I scratched my head, wait a minute, really? And so I go back, I read the Bible, I want to say like 10, 15 times after I left, and I was going through it one time, and I started again, this time at the New Testament, I just started reading through, I'm like, wait a minute.

It's that, and it's that simple. Why would they try to confuse this? And so then the question came to me, well, why did they not teach the gospel? And I started going back through my memory of some of the doctrines and theologies, and some of the ways that they would phrase what they were teaching, and they would say things like, we had this, and they would be referring to the gospel.

We had this, now as Christians, we have to move beyond this. So in other words, here's the gospel, we have to move beyond it. And it wasn't until maybe five years ago, six years ago, I came to realize, it's all because of this Christian identity, this manifest sons of God, form of Christian identity, because you're trying to create this man-child experience, you're trying to create a people who are more elite than all of the other Christians, because you, as the manifested sons are going to issue human judgment against other Christians.

And that is, when you really think about what's happening, that is horrific what they're doing. And I hope in a later broadcast, if we do this again, I'm gonna give you some exact quotes and we can timestamp those on the tapes for what you're talking about right there.

You know, and looking back on the people that I knew at Faith Assembly and I hate to make a paint with too broad of a brush or make too general of a statement, but it does seem to me that there weren't a lot of medical doctors or attorneys or professors that were a part of the church.

And what I mean by that is this message of health and wealth gospel, which Hobart 110% preached and believed that God wants everyone to prosper. And I mean, just sermon after sermon after sermon and making a light of things like, would you people do realize that cows are made out more than hamburger?

You know, when you're telling that to, you know, people in their 20s at our day laborers that, you know, don't have a big income, they're looking up to these ministers, you know, we don't need hemp wheat steak because, you know, our God is bigger, you know, and they're better cuts of meat that come off.

And that is obviously not the gospel. That is not what the gospel is about at all. If we read our New Testament, we read our Old Testament for the Lord's sake, but carefully, the prophets suffered.

Jesus said, the son of man half not where to lay his head. Paul was beaten, Paul was shipwrecked. They went through difficulty and extreme measures of persecution to preach their gospel. And the prosperity gospel preachers today don't do that at all.

But I think it attracted just a less educated, I'm not gonna say a lower level of society because it doesn't matter where in society you come from, but if you are less educated, if you do have less income, if you do have fewer resources to call upon and you are being presented a message that you never have to go to the doctor, that you never, that borrowing money is a sin, Roman 13A, you don't ever have to borrow money.

All you have to do is name it and claim it. God will give it to you. If you need a new car, if you need a new apartment, a bigger apartment, a new house, a bigger house, a new clothes, whatever.

Well, I mean, that's very appealing. It very much is appealing to people who may not have any other way to obtain that level of success where most of us you have to just go out and work and you earn it.

That's how you get it. And I just thought it was so hypocritical of these ministers who had a large following. If you've got a large following, guess what? That it comes with a large offering.

If you're a pastor of 10 people, guess what? You got a small offering, you know? That's your whole salary. right? Because they they tied you 10% so 10 people is an entire salary for these guys.

Yes. Yes. And the ministers that would go out from faith assembly who could not fight their way out of a wet bag geologically. They were a pale comparison to Hobart's educational level and his ability to communicate a message. They're going out to their little satellite groups. Now they've attracted you know 200 250 people. There was one in Indianapolis. There was one on the campus of Purdue University called the Lighthouse up in West Lafayette. They had you know several hundred people. These ministers and their nice three pea suits strode in there like in my Cadillac Lincoln town car. You know I'm preaching this. I believe it. I practice what I preach and here's

a proof of it and let me share it with you guys. Well these are college students. They don't have the income to do that. But these nutcase ministers thought it was their faith in God quote unquote that was giving them all of this financial abundance and it wasn't it was just you had a large congregation and that's how they came about. But I just felt so sorry for the people that were sucked into that. Oh yeah. I've also come to the conclusion that it is actually more appealing to the men who want to who see the dollar signs in their eyes and want to become a pastor

because if you can take something as simple as the gospel and complicate it where nobody can understand it. So they have to come to you for the answer of what is this thing. Think of the difference between that and what we read in the Bible where Jesus is taking very very simple people fishermen who aren't very you know maybe they're intelligent but they're not schooled obviously and they're taking something so simple and it spreads organically you know they can tell it to another person that person can tell it to another person everybody can share it. It's so simple

everybody can share it. Well they complicate it so they can become the kingpin of their church. Yes you know the years when I was a pastor I was never a pastor of a large group of people but I mean it was a decent group of people and I never took up an offering had a box in the back and what went in it came to me and if nothing went in it nothing came to me and I've never been I've never been hesitant to tell people my my biggest year of income was $20,000 I mean that was

the most I ever made in a year was $20,000 but you know I didn't care I was I was doing exactly what I felt called to do I was loving every minute of it I loved serving the Lord I loved my people I just couldn't believe that I was that privileged to get to be in ministry full-time.

I didn't have any kind of side gig or part-time job, and I just couldn't believe that I got to spend all of my time, you know, in and around God's word. So to get paid $20,000 to do it, I mean, that's the windfall as far as I was concerned.

Now, whenever I got out of the ministry because of personal situations with an ex-wife of mine, and I, you know, went into the regular workforce, but I established a couple of businesses, both of which I still do.

I'm on a high-end custom cabinet company that I have for over 30 years. I'm also a licensed professional fishing guide with a master captain's license in the Coast Guard. And I've taken people like Coach Danny Crumb, who coached the Louisville basketball team, and Buddy Ryan, who was NFL coach of the Eagles.

I've had all kinds of people on my boat over the years, and I've had a lot of fun doing that. But, you know, I've gone out and made my own way, become very, very successful, and I'm so thankful for that as well.

I am teaching, I'm teaching a group down in bowling green, but I won't accept any money. You know, I said, I'm just here to teach, you can give your money to somebody else. And I just think it puts a minister in such a good position.

When there is no one can accuse you of any other, they could accuse you of ulterior motives, but not financial ulterior motives, because there are no finances involved. And you and I know that's just been a huge downside to all of these big, big time public ministries.

Oh my goodness, the money, the mansions, the cars, the villas, the trips, the airplanes, the private jets. And that is just such a disgrace to Christianity. And of course, they'll have verses they use to prove it, but you can prove anything you want to prove from the Bible.

But if you take the overall thread and the overall tenet of it, to get financially rich in this world, that's not what the gospel is about, not what it's about at all. And of course, you can live verses out of context, and as I say, prove anything you want.

But I can't even, I look back on my early years in ministry, and I'm very thankful for them. But having lived on both sides of it now, where I'm still a minister, I don't receive any income from any kind of ministerial stuff.

I am very, very well off in my own life, but I went and did it on my own. I made my own business. I worked extremely hard. I really understand both sides of the pulpit now. I understand being behind it and being in front of it. And I don't think that I ever misused or abused my position before.

I'm not aware of it. And I'm glad I can look back on that and say, you know, yeah, channel, I'm I'm pretty I'm happy with you. I'm happy with you back in your 20s. I would feel terrible if I looked back and saw myself as one of these prosperity ministers and had gotten rich on the backs of other people. People who are working hard and who never could get to my level because I have so many of them providing for me and they only have themselves providing for themselves. You know, I look back on that. I have I have fond memories, but I am so thankful that I've gotten to experience

the other side and go out because what I'd like to tell a lot of these ministers is you need to go get a real job. You really need to quit preaching. You don't know what you're talking about. You're fleecing the sheet. You really need to get get out of that context and go get a real job and see what it means to work hard like all those poor people, you know, under your minister having to do and think of these international ministries that have hundreds of thousands if not millions of followers and supporters. It's a scam of the first order as far as I'm concerned. Absolutely.

That same church that I was mentioning, they um I think we may have discussed this in the last episode. I was shocked the first time they gave me the financial report because right down to the toilet paper man, you can see where all the money was going and I want to say it was maybe 50,000 a year the pastor made which if you do the math and inflation, that's about like your 20,000 probably.

It's uh it's not much money in today's world and um you know I was thinking back it's just so different. I have also seen both sides of it. I've always I've never been a pastor. I've always been a lay member but I've been around people who were in the upper echelons and I can see the things that they do to make money. Some of which is really underhanded. I have first-hand knowledge of men who they really like to attract the old elderly women to their little roots because whenever they die they get their inheritance. Yeah it's yeah.

Parable to think as they did. There are children of the some of these people they're not getting anything because all of it's going to the pastor and the first time I'm a businessman I know how business sales marketing all of this works not everybody does but when you consider what it took back during the height of lateral reign to pull off one of these big conventions.

It took a lot of money to make money. You've got to rent the auditorium, you've got the advertising expenses, you've got everything down to the hot dog stands. You know, back then it wasn't like today where these concession booths exist. You had to sometimes you had to bring in food to keep the people fed while they're in there. And you've got all of this going on. Well, before they can even hold this meeting, they've got to have millions of dollars back then to even set the thing up. So, you know, I, when I took a step back from all of this and I

learned that I'm not a big fan of the big mega churches at all. And, you know, there are some good men in them. But when you get to that level, you have to run it like a business.

And once you enter the business concept in, well, where's the gospel concept? Sometimes it sometimes not even intentionally that the business just overtakes the whole reason why you're doing it. Yeah, sometimes compromise happens. And we know where the compromise will come down. It'll be on the, the teaching of the word and not on the finances because if you don't have the finances, you can't keep running the big machine that you've got to keep running. Now, I'm a big opponent of mega churches. I think they just violate so many scriptural concepts and, and, and precepts. But getting back to Dr. Freeman, so

in 76, he had, that was the end of his traveling. I think another one of the reasons that he stopped traveling. And I just alluded to this briefly in our earlier one is that he did when he was two years old, he contracted polio. This was way, but he was born in 1920.

So he's a depression era child. And he had a severe limp. And, and it was very noticeable. Well, here you have a, um, a faith preacher praying for everyone's legs to be grown out.

That was the big thing back in the early 1970s. You'd sit a person in a chair, get them straight up and down on the, on the back of a hard chair, get them. You know about this, get them left in the right and you hold them in your hands like this. So that was a big deal. I don't even, I guess, I don't know. I don't, it's a magician's trick. No, everybody knows how it works. It's a magician's trick. Everybody knows how it works. You, you set them with one leg slightly cocked with their one butt cheek back behind. And then in front of

the audience, oh, look at this leg grow as they twist the, you know, the, the torso. My grandfather, I'll never forget. I've sit in the church and my grandfather said, I watched case after case after case. And my grandfather had this Kentucky accent where brother Brannum would take the leg and he would straighten that leg and you would watch it grow with your own eyes. And I saw a video of this guy doing it and I saw a video of magician showing how it worked. And I'm like, I can't believe I was, I was like, I was in my thirties and

fell for this man. Well, it was a big deal back in the 70s and so, you know, here you've got a major faith teacher traveling around teaching healing and he's got a bad limb.

And so he talks about that on a lot of his tapes that people in meetings would say, you know, basically physician healed myself. I think it became an annoyance to him. He never said this.

This is my own take on one of the contributing factors for him to stop all of the traveling. You know, every meeting he's going to, he's limping in like this and then he's preaching faith for healing.

And then he's having everybody come up, wanting to him to sit down and they say, well, pray for your leg to grow out for you. You know, I think he had just, he had probably had enough of that.

So, you know, he said, you know, I'm just going to stay at faith assembly at the glory barn. We've got the, we've got the school going now. He was plenty busy. He also began doing radio broadcast.

So he'd spend a day, a week getting tapes ready to send to stations. I don't know. There are probably several dozen. That was probably pretty big for him back in the day, back in the mid 70s, but he was definitely on a variety of radio stations.

So from 76, 77, by the time we get to 1978, as, as every one of these movements has its own progression, they just generally become tighter and tighter and tighter rather than becoming more loving and more mature and we should come with Christian growth and experience.

But in these groups, it doesn't seem to work that way. It seems to, you know, be a funnel and you're all headed down to the bottom end and it's just getting tighter and tighter.

And so Mary Beth and Mel Grider, who were the owners of the barn, said that they were unhappy with the way the teaching, the direction that the church was going. They were unhappy and how exclusive it was becoming because, keep in mind, Mel was, he was ministering to drug addicts and alcoholics and everybody downstairs.

And then one floor up, you've got Hobart, you know, teaching Gideon's army. There's only going to be 300 of us, you know, everybody else is going to be ruled out. So it was not going to be a good mix between the two and the other thing was the issue of divine healing where previously Hobart would teach divine healing, but he wouldn't legislate against medical science or doctors.

He would just say, well, if you don't have enough faith like the rest of us do, then you can go to the doctor. But if you have enough faith, you don't need the doctor.

Well, as he progressed, it became more than that that you must have enough faith. You have to. That's required. If you don't, maybe assign you're not a Christian. So now they're just pretty much cutting everybody off, you know, except themselves, you've got to follow us exactly.

Hobart on several of the tapes talks about, well, tomorrow I've got to go take my vision test from my driver's license and I'm just claiming 2020. Well, he never had 2020. He was in his 50s, you know, he never did wear glasses, but at the end, he's got up on the pulpit a giant print Bible.

So, you know, me and my simple, simple, uneducated, tiny mind would say, what's the difference between a pair of glasses and a giant print Bible? What is the difference? If you really have X-ray vision, let's just go to microscopic print then.

If you really want to prove your faith, let's prove it, you know, give me a demonstration of it. So I just thought and obviously Mel and Mary Beth said, you know, this, we don't like where we think this is going to end up and where it ends up, we won't get to it in our discussion today, but it's just dozens and scores and scores of preventable deaths.

They realize it's something not good is going to come from this. So they decided we're going to start charging rent. Prior to that, that had been a rent free place. Hobart had poured a bunch of money from the offerings, his money from the church into remodeling the place and the building didn't belong to him.

That belonged to the griders. So, you know, they had this building nicely remodeled, new air conditioning, you know, pens and women's bathrooms, they have all this stuff in there, which I think is a fair trade off.

You know, they got all that and Hobart got the use of it for the years that they did. But now they said, we're going to start charging rent, $425 a week, I believe is what they said.

And they had Hobart over to their apartment to discuss this and four hour meeting from what I have heard, a four hour meeting back and forth, them complaining about the direction the teaching is going.

And Hobart saying, I'm God's prophet, quote unquote, this is the message, this is what I'm going to teach. God's prophet. Give it to me. Free. Yeah. Yeah. So you end up basically with a with a stalemate.

And so I think at that point, and probably Mel and Mary Beth, although I'm not an insider into their life or mine, they probably had decided before if we can't get somewhere in this discussion, we're just going to we're going to stick a big figure out there that will probably run him off.

And that's exactly what it did. They said $425 a week, you know, two grand a month in 1970. That's that's not that much money with a 500-member church to grand a month in that much, but Hobart in the in his next message said that's extortion and we're out of here. So early 1978 was the formal break between Hobart Freeman and Mel and Mary Beth Grider. So the glory barn would stay as is, it would still be the building and then they were gonna leave. But where do they go?

They don't have anywhere to go. So it was a circus environment because they got a big circus tent. They set it up in Warsaw and then it ended up up in Goshen. And he's got lots of messages, you know, because the land of Goshen is down there in Egypt in the Old Testament and that's a bad place with unregenerate people. So there are lots of references on, you can tell the tapes that are happening in the tent in the summer of 1978 when he makes reference to the terrible people in Goshen because you're thinking he means Egypt, but really he means Indiana.

So they stay in that tent for, I mean it wasn't very long. They had a trailer park there with a lot of porta-potties because I mean these people are producing lots of offspring. They don't believe in birth control. They're home school. The women don't hold a job. The women are at home. The men go earn a living. The families are big. The couples are producing a lot of children. There's a need for a lot of porta-potties out there. So they go through 78 and they had a couple by the name of Don and Betty Nye, NEI, who had donated some property there in Wilmot, W-I-L-M-O-T, which is

where they ended up. They donated some property and so they began building the building. And the building is just a big, you know, pole bar and kind of building, metal building, single story, concrete slab, drab, which I have no problem with that. You don't need steeples and stained glass. You know spend your money in missions or something. Don't spend it on your own building. I'm fine with the building they build, but people look down on it because it looks like some industrial warehouse. Again, I have no criticism of that whatsoever.

On the inside, you know, it was comfortable, concrete slab, little small platform up front and then the podium on that and just, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of chairs everywhere. Lots of men and women's restrooms in the back and they had the tape ministry duplication area and the book distribution center attached to the building. Over the process of a few months, there were people who were a part of faith assembly. Now we can't call them a- worry barn anymore because that's in their history. That was the actual building. Now they're just the name of the church faith assembly, but people from Ohio, Illinois, contractors who had some construction equipment, maybe a concrete contractor, maybe plumbers in the church, pitched in, and they got that building thrown up quickly.

When they first moved in, I don't think they had, I think they moved in in that winter time. I don't know that they had heat, but you get 1,500 people in there and you just generate your own heat.

But things came together pretty quickly after that, but the big deal was whenever they made the move, before they made the move to the new building, when they were in what I call the transition in the tent.

Then the messages began, you know, now we're not in someone else's building. This is going to be our own building. No one can tell me to come or go. No one can tell me what to say or what not to say. This isn't a rented facility or this isn't a borrowed facility. This is our own.

In that transition period in the tent in Goshen, now the message became, you're going to have to line up with everything this pulp it stands for. And if you don't, you will be out the door. And if you're out the door, there are 6 people waiting to get your seat.

I mean, it was never, we're going to miss you or anything. It's get out. There are 6 people waiting for your seat. And they were proud of that statement. Like we have so many people that want to be here. If you don't count it as much of a privilege to get to a tent here as you should, then just leave.

And someone else will take your seat. And again, John, more than anything, it's the attitude of someone like this that is atrocious. When you compare it with the loving kind and generous spirit of the early church of the apostles and who were apostles after all and had all the authority from heaven.

But they just love the people and sacrifice to the point of death on behalf of the spread of the Christian gospel. And I don't see this reflected in Hobart Freeman's ministry one Iota. Now he'll talk like, oh, you really mean a lot and I pray for you. Yeah, but show it to me, you know.

You got to show it to the people and you standing up there preaching your sermon. That's not what shows it. It's in your love. Well, he wouldn't counsel with anybody. He was, you know, if you can't get it in the message, then what good would counseling do?

I mean, he said that countless times. I'm counseling by teaching all of you people. And if you can't pick it up here, I'd be wasting my time to sit down and privately, one on one, explain to you what I've just taught you for an hour and 10 minutes from the pulpit.

From that point on, the bodyguards, the spies, the lookouts, maybe some people resurrected from their SS Nazi graves hanging around to keep an eye on no outsiders allowed in here. This is Gideon's army.

We are the matured sons of God and we're going all the way. I have some very painful memories of people who are very, very poor, who needed help. They couldn't keep food on their table.

These guys who are driving fancy cars, living in nice houses, boats, houseboats, etc., and they're making all this money on the people and remember, these guys are pushing old covenant tie than many of these churches.

Old covenant tie is the 10% and they spin it in such a way where you're going to hell if you don't give this 10%. Right? After the old covenant, the priest got the 10%, but then at the end of his life, I think it was the year of the Jubilee, he gave back everything to the people except for what it took him to live the rest of his life.

These people are actually getting it back. These people in this movement, man, they're taking the money, they love the part where you give it to them, but they don't want to preach the part where you give it back.

Let me share two comments that come to mind regarding that. One is me personally, John. When I was 17, 18 years old, I'm hearing about prosperity, prosperity, Hobart always drove an El Dorado Cadillac, but then he began traveling so much, needing to carry tapes and books to sell at the tables at his meetings.

He said that the trunk on a Lincoln town car was bigger, so then he switched to Lincoln town cars. In my early life, I grew up thinking that's what I'm supposed to drive. That's what, about the second or third year of my ministry, I had saved and saved and saved and scraped together and I went and bought a used, I paid $10,000 for it, which is a lot of money back then, a used Lincoln town car.

I kept it for four months and I felt so terrible driving that to church. I felt horrible. I was so embarrassed to pull up into the church parking lot in my Lincoln town car and seeing what everybody else was driving.

I took that back to the dealer. I traded it in on a Jeep Wagonier that had 70,000 miles and four ball tires on it and I was happy as a claim because I fit in with my people better.

As far as Hobart was concerned, Hobart actually taught strongly against tithing. He said a 10% tithe is legalism. It's tied to the Old Testament law and tithing was done away with at the cross and tithing is not for a New Testament believer.

Rather, he said what the New Testament shows is that everything belongs to the Lord, that all of your possessions belong to the Lord. And so I would try to think, well, what goes through the mind of those people, hearing that, how much of all am I supposed to give?

Obviously, a lot more than 10%. Wow, that is so crazy. My, I think it may have been you, I know I told it to somebody recently, my grandfather, who wasn't the pastor. He was in a message called church.

And they tried to do the same kind of thing. They said, the Bible says, you should give all that you have to the poor. And therefore put it in the tithe basket. It was the doctrine, you know.

And my grandfather approached him and he said, well, look, man, if I give all that I have to you in the tithe basket, then I become the poor. He did. So he was putting on his critical thinking cap.

But yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for doing this. And we'll do this again. I know there's more to the story. I think we're only about halfway through it. So thanks again for coming on here.

Thank you, John. I know we probably went a little long today. I will send you, I'll try to get you some stuff emailed that you can put in this picture or in this broadcast.

Maybe that glory bond picture and a picture of the willment building that they build. But I think next time when we really can talk about what Hobart's death, what led up to it, what's going on around that time, and then his actual death.

And I can reference these newspaper articles. You can have already found them and do whatever you want to do with him. Does that sound okay to you? Sounds good. And I'm sure our listeners are going to be anxious to hear that one.

So if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Branham.org. For an overview of the historical research of William-Branham and the healing revivals, read preacher behind the white hoods, a critical examination of William-Branham and his message, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.