Chris Reed and Morningstar

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brannum Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannum Historical Research at William-Brannum.org, and with me I have my co-host and friend, Brantley Smith, a former member of International House of Prayer.

And together we are detangling IHOPKC and the new Apostolic Reformation. So Brantley, this is our, I guess you'd call it our kickoff episode. I had you on to tell your story and then had you a second time because we had some topics of interest.

And you used the word detangling and I thought, you know, and I'll, for the audience I'll embarrass myself and say, I won't even tell you the amount of time I spent trying to distinguish the definition of detangling versus untangling and see which word was better.

But anyway, I thought it'd be really better. I landed on detangling instead of deconstruction because I had to use the deconstruction word. I almost became prime target in the sides. Yeah, you know, it's funny whenever I use the word deconstruction or, you know, there's detarchification.

Anytime I use one of these words, I get all kinds of hate mail and hate comments. But anyway, I thought it'd be a good idea if we tried to detangle IHOPKC and I know it's a movement that's still going so it's not like we're coming in after the fact.

But there are a lot of people who are escaping and I thought it might be helpful if we, you know, focus on what it was, how it came to be and all of that.

But more than that, it really was the framework that helped develop and shape the new Apostolic Reformation as it exists today. And there are other events like the one that we'll bring up today that, you know, it's so similar.

You can't say that it's directly related, but it's so similar. You have to take a step back and try to detangle the mingling of the two scenario situations and try to understand what's happening.

So anyway, welcome as GoHos, man. Thanks, John. Thanks. No, this has been really fun. First two episodes were fun. And I've been getting a lot of great feedback on it too. And that's my hope that not just with people who are still in IHOPKC might stumble upon this at some point as a resource.

But also those who were out of the community, I hear all the time when people get out that they just for 10 years, they just put everything on hold. They didn't address spirituality, they didn't address what they experienced at IHOP KC.

And so to discuss some of my journey, my experiences, what I've observed over the past decade or so, decade or so, I think that it's helpful for people. I think to hear language given to it and to hear things named.

And so I hope that we can do a lot of that for people and that people are able to detangle.

Absolutely. You know, it's funny, one of the things that I have found that help people escape the most. And this is not just with IHOP KC or with a brand of message, but literally every cult in existence.

If you take a person who is not the central figure and just restate what the central figure is saying or what the doctor is or what their message, what they're standing for, just simply restate it in the same way that they advertise it.

People are like, oh my gosh, this is crazy stuff, man. Give me out of here. And the cult start attacking you when you restate the things that they're saying. That's the irony of all of this.

They think you're just, you know, you're slamming them, you're mocking them, whatever. But if you just simply tell people what it is they're supposed to believe, they scratch your heads and think, wait a minute, am I really supposed to believe that?

It's all so much of it. I think that's why I wanted to have the conversation that we're gonna have today. It's all so much of it, not only personally during the IHOP KC scandal crisis that happened last year with the CYA behavior that happened.

There was a real iconic moment for all of us that's imprinted on our heads, the day that the allegations were brought to the community there against Mike Bickle last year. And they were very vague in what they said.

They said, there had been allegations. I can't recall at this point, even if they said that they were sexual, but there are allegations of misconduct. And one of the former leaders stood up and he used profanity and I don't know if you allow that, but he pretty much stood up and said that it's righteous BS is what he said right there in the middle of the whole church, that it's well-intended righteous BS.

And I think that moment right there was a catalytic moment for a lot of people because we saw somebody else that we esteemed in that movement, set there and call their bluff on it and tell us that there was more going on than what they were letting on.

And I think that... that allows people to see through the fog. Yeah, we don't allow the term BS on this show. Instead, I try to use the phrase NAR prophecy because really both are the same.

Looks like it smells like it might be it. Exactly. Yeah, it's, you know, when you take a step back from all of this, I had a, I did an episode with Charles. I don't know if it'll air before or after this, but we were talking about the deliverance ministries.

And I got my, I got my hands on a handbook of training of said deliverance ministers. And oh my gosh, man, the stuff in there. If you, if you're not wrapped up in it, if your head's not indoctrinated and you look at this, he'll like, this is some crazy stuff, man.

This like one step away from dungeons and dragons for adults. I hope never got too weird with the, the naming of spirits and things like that that happened in some charismatic circles, but, but it really does.

It starts feeling more like larping than it does. Anything helpful. Yeah. So there's so many things that we could talk about on this series. So I'm going to call it detangling ihopkc. And, you know, if, if you are a member of ihopkc and you were indoctrinated in this, and you want us to talk about something, there's a specific topic.

Just send it to us. You can email me. Actually, you can go to the website, www.Williamdashbrand.org and click on the contact button and just send me a, send me a message. And I will add it to our list of things that we can talk about.

But today we, you know, there, there are things that we have to be careful because we need to do it in tastefully. But today, there, I want to say it was last week. There was a big event that happened in charismatic Christianity that there are some links back to the brandemism and some links to ihopkc that I'll let you introduce it, brandly, but the topic is significant.

So, approximately about a week ago, Chris Reed, all of the starman Chris Reed, resigned from Morningstar Ministries in Fort Mills, South Carolina, pretty abruptly. And I don't think that a lot of us had to had seen that coming.

I'd heard rumors, but ihopkc people are very familiar with Chris because he was the one who came in and spoke to the congregation immediately after Mike Bickle's allegations with public. He was actually with Mike when the allegations went public.

Whenever Sam storms in Francis Chan were turned away when they showed up at Mike's house to confront him. So, Chris became a prominent figure in that whole debacle. His message was, not to look back, but to only look forward that there's greater things in front of you than that lie behind you, which is a way of damage control, image management. Hey, this terrible thing that Mike did. Let's move on. Let's forget it. He told people that they don't want to be like lots wife and look backwards and turn into a pillar of salt. And so that was our, the former

IHOP members who hadn't been around recently. That was our introduction to Chris Reed and Chris from my understanding took over morning star or came to morning star in 21. And with the intentions of him becoming the president and CEO of Morningstar Ministries. And so that person up to that point had been Rick Joyner and Rick has ties to the Kansas City Prophet. So he was one of the guys that ran around with them. The ones that we talked about frequently are Bob Jones and Paul Cain, who were the two prominent figureheads. But Rick Joyner was a part of that

crew as well. One of the things always struck me out that really isn't anything of substance, but is that in the, in the five years I was at IHOP, John, Rick Joyner, I think I saw him one time pop up there. So there wasn't a whole lot of direct cross pollination like there was with Bethel Church in California and other houses of prayer and where we had a whole lot more overlap.

But Chris Reed also, I think, is significant. Have you seen the video of Paul Cain praying for Chris Reed? Yeah, I've seen it. It's, you know, and if you understand what's being said, it looks like very much like the passing of a mantle. I'm, yeah, yeah, I was going to say I'm curious your thoughts on it because the one thing that I don't think I've watched the video in its entirety, I think I've seen a clip of it. And, and how he almost seemed like he might have been taking a shot at you, John, that they were, they were talking about all the lies that have been spread about William

Brandham and all these things and that they would only remember the good things almost. It seems like what kind of what the prayer was, the passing that on the Chris. Yeah, there's some, I've not talked about it much and still I think I'm going to be a little bit reserved. I don't, I don't want to show all my cards at the moment, but there was a point in time in which it was about the time that I started to publish the connections between William Brandham and the high ranking officials of the Ku Klux Klan. And I still haven't really gone as deep as I could. There are, there are some

things in there that would blow people's minds and blow people's heads, some of which is it goes beyond even the Klan. There's there's a little bit of risk in saying everything, but you've got you know, in my book preacher behind the white hoods, I talk about the the unusual connections to the Kennedy assassination. Not saying that these guys assassinated Kennedy or anything like this, but you've got, you know, William Branagh's mentor is right there in the Oak Cliff subdivision in Dallas.

And he's the, what was he president, I think, of the Oak Cliff White Citizens Council, something like this. He was, he was so well known in Dallas that if you were in Dallas and you're watching the news, you're listening to the radio, you're going to hear his name.

This is the mentor of William Branagh. And you have people like Gordon Lindsay, the head of CFNI, who is also in the Oak Cliff subdivision. So they had to know each other and Lindsay is publishing letters from the, from the Imperial Wizard of the Clan in Voice of Helan.

So you know, you have to take, you have to sit back and just scratch your head and think, wait a minute, all these guys knew each other. And anyway, so when I began exposing all of this, I started receiving emails from Paul Kane and then phone calls and talking to, I've spoken to not just Paul Kane, but people, you know, on his staff, he had these, he had this weird harem of men that followed him around.

I don't know if you know much about that, but I've heard, I've heard that he's surrounded himself with male assistants and everything's like that, but yeah, there's, there's some weirdness there, but anyway, so he contacted me and I've never said this publicly, but it wasn't long after that that people who became significant in the Morningstar organization,

also were contacting me. And they were asking me questions as though they were truly a person who was seeking help from one of these organizations. And yet here I'm looking at the name and the person and oh my gosh, this is a ranking member of Morningstar.

And as I'm trying to answer questions, the focus was on prophecy and the questions were specifically about failed prophecy. So they were aware that I was publishing information about William Brannum, wherein prophecies had failed.

And I was explaining that, you know, diplomically, a prophet gets one chance, man, it's either right or he's a false prophet. There's no in between because if you're making stuff, almost use the word that I can't use on the show, if you're making stuff up, I'm bringing it out of you, John, you're bringing it out of me.

If you're making stuff up and, and you know, people catch you at it, then, you know, that you're making stuff up, it's that simple, it is really that simple. And one of the examples that I used in this private communication, when I was a kid and I was in this movement, you were taught as, as this, you know, we didn't use the word manifest sons of God, but that's essentially what it was.

We were taught that we could do these things. And so you want to do them, you want to be a prophet, you want to be an apostle. And I thought, I was a big guy and that's a big profit that I would become one.

I never saw myself as a profit, but things would happen that were just a little bit odd. I would have dreams that I had no inside information whatsoever, and then I would go to the event that was in my dream and suddenly I look around and oh my gosh, this is my dream and there's that thing that I saw in my dream.

How did I know it was there? That kind of thing happens, of which is explainable and in the psyche of a human mind. At that time I thought that I was having some special spiritual thing because I'm in this movement and then, I never saw myself as that, but then the problem is whenever one of them was not correct, well then I have to take a step back and even back then I thought, okay, well this is just a dream.

I have nothing spiritual whatsoever. I am not a profit because I don't even claim this to be true, right? I can't fake this. This is not something. If God is speaking through my mouth, I can't fake that He's speaking through my mouth or otherwise I'm a fraud, right?

So I was trying to explain this to one of the ranking members of Morningstar. If you're saying stuff that you shouldn't say, then you're probably a fraud and I didn't use that exact phrase, but I worded it nicely to the person and I said, you can't make stuff up or you are a fraud in a nice way and I can't even remember how I said it.

But anyway, all of this was happening. So whenever I saw the video of Paul Kane and he's specifically talking about what you said. He was talking about me and he was commissioning, it appears he was commissioning Chris to try to get involved and then you start seeing this whole series of videos of Chris with high ranking members of the Brandham cult, which is really, really odd.

And at that point, I started digging deeper into Paul Kane and came to realize that he never really left Brandham's message cult. So he was a message cult member until the end of his life and at that time I had not even yet started working with Charles and when I began working with Charles, Charles informed me that he was aware that Paul Kane was visiting message churches up until the end of his life.

So definitely he was a message cult member even after helping start the Kansas City prophets, I hop KC. And so you have to take a step back and think, wait a minute, is I hop KC message 2.0?

Is it Brandhamism 2.0? And I thought, well, we've recently, I thought we've got to get Brandley on here and detangle this. It's crazy because the prophetic manipulation stills. still happens, and that's a crucial part of what we see with Chris Reed's allegations.

So Chris Reed had his resignation letter, Go Public, and the shorthand of that is that he felt like it was time to step away. It seemed like that there was probably some internal disagreements of some sort, but that he was going to continue ministry, and he listed out a laundry list of things, including overseeing a house, church network, and all these different things that kind of threw up red flags.

And after he released his resignation publicly, or actually I think it was leaked publicly, after that was leaked publicly, Rick Joyner responded, and since it's been deleted. And his response was very quick to distance himself from Chris and disapprove of Chris for his actions.

He referred to whatever Chris was experiencing as a deceptive spirit. And then he hints around who I can only figure as probably Bob Jones and Paul Kane, and how he talks about how that a deceptive spirit stole many years.

I think he does go, I think he might have, no, he didn't name Kane in that, but he talked about that it robbed him of his ultimate purpose when referring to Kane. And he said that it took 10 years of effective ministry from him as well.

I don't know if that was a Freudian slip, or because we're not aware of any Rick Joyner moral failings that are public, but he said that it cost him 10 years. So I'm going to take him at his word there.

He quickly deleted that statement, and then we really didn't hear much besides the Royes report articles that they have two articles where they got some direct quotes from Chris. They released at that time allegations of clergy sexual abuse for Chris.

Morningstar is not referring to it as that. There was a woman who was, the way that they said it, that she was a Rick said it Sunday, was that she was not a young woman.

She was only a couple years younger than Chris. She was a lady, a woman. He said things like she, the woman who is supposedly involved. And so those comments like that create distance and make people forget those power balances, those power imbalances that happen of Chris as someone who is a figurehead at Morningstar.

And this girl, although she is close and age, is a student and someone who looks up and there's that power dynamic there. And especially when we see the messages and we saw that prophecy was used in the same way that we saw it with Mike, Bickel as well.

And that he would prophesy that his wife was going to die to people and that they were going to become his wife. That was like the golden thread prophecy that's been alleged and been corroborated by a handful of victims that the same thing was said to them.

Chris didn't do anything that out there of promising marriage, but he began to call her special that she was different, that God had something special for her, that she was more special than the other Morningstar students.

And so unless you've been on the receiving end of a conversation like that, if someone that you look up to that is someone in power and authority, you don't realize how much of a sway that can have on your emotions, how much that can.

It causes a bonding to happen when you feel like someone is speaking on God's behalf to you. It's a real slippery slope, but it's 100% prophetic manipulation. Absolutely. And you know, I'm going to speak in general terms.

I'm not going to refer specifically to any of the people under these allegations. Sure. Alligations are allegations, but the way that this type, the way that brandemism worked, and we see that this is a replication of brandemism in many, many different avenues that the Apostolic Reformation has taken, it creates a hierarchy that is unhealthy, wherein the men are far superior to the women.

The women are not seen as equals, even though I've heard sermons where they say, treat her like you're equal, she is your equal, and then explain the hierarchy why she is not your equal.

It's that bad. And the men and the women don't have the same spiritual status in these things. And so the women want to find and connect to somebody who is superior to them because they've been mentally trained to do this.

And whenever a predator sees the opportunity in that setup, it's literally the foundation for predators. They can use that tool as a manipulation to start making them feel more, you know, the word special, again, I'm not referring specifically to people at Morningstar, but you can make them feel special, and then that's the door that opens up.

And once that door is open, it can go to, you know, really, really far to extremes. And in the Brannum cult, I have seen time and again, there are leaders who have fallen to things like this.

And the problem is because the indoctrination has made people believe that the fivefold ministry creates an element of spiritualism over these things. figureheads where they are above human. Whenever they do something like this, whenever they pray on victims, because they're faithful ministers, it can all be erased simply by saying, oh, I did this thing in the past. And therefore, forgive me and put me back in the same exact position so I can do it again. That's where really I have a huge problem with this. Which is an interesting point that was brought up on Sunday by Rick as well. We have laughed and called him restoration

Rick, me and my friends because of what seems to be Rick joiner specialization in restoring people to ministry. He had a segment on Sunday that was very telling in that they talked about when they learned about this relationship with this student, this abuse in my opinion. They refer to it as inappropriate relationship. They refer to it as a naivety on Chris's part, a stupid decision, lack of wisdom. These are the words they use rather than calling it what it actually was.

But it doesn't seem that Chris was really removed from any kind of position of authority for a significant amount of time. Rick talks about how the church's view of ministry is messed up. And what's what's deceptive about this is that at first it sounds appealing. At first it sounds righteous until you think about how it plays out. He talks about that ministry is not platforms, power and position, but ministry is service. It's taking up your cross. It's laying down your life for another. And so in Rick's world ministry is necessary for restoration. I think he even went

as far as saying something along the lines of that public ministry has been a part of every restoration process that he has done. And so these subtle changing of things and not recognizing the power that is associated with the platform and the influence and the sway and trying to paint it as some kind of humble servant position. When we know that's that's farthest saying from the truth, what appears to be the truth, it gets real real messy real quick because they're able to make these things go away and act like it didn't happen as you were saying. They've become experts at

getting people back in the limelight and we're all bracing for the day when Mike Bickelitim said that luckily he hasn't yet.

The other thing that was brought up that was very interesting and not really going through this stuff chronologically with the service on Sunday and the stuff that Rick had said, there was also another video of another former leader who had published a response to all of it because at the end of the day what they're trying to draw attention to is that the sexual component that existed in this abuse between Chris Reed and this student was not conveyed at the initial moment of confession of whenever this girl first brought it to leaders so she she had talked about the text messages that had happened but she hadn't talked

about any kind of physical components and so it appears to me that what they're doing now is is trying to discredit her and saying that it's not true because she didn't say it then. You wrap in some Matthew 18 with that that they used to control things and Rick talked about specifically on Sunday that when someone faces someone at whenever they're accusing and the user comes to face the person they're accusing that stories change and he's so close to realizing the dynamics there of realizing that a victim should not be facing their abuser in that kind of situation but they use these

tactics I think to maintain control to be able to hopefully shape the way that victims respond and that the way they're perceived by the public it's that that part of it's horrifying did you guys have a lot of the Matthew 18 misuse because we saw a I hop KC did you guys have that in the brand of stuff the brand of cult we didn't have any loaded language that was specifically called Matthew 18 I'd probably need to know a little bit more about what what specifically in Matthew 18 you're talking about that's that's the that the

passage about if your brother commits a sin against you you go to him and so the way that these guys portray it like with Mike whenever these that Jane doe came forward and all these different people when when different situations were confronted were brought to Mike the way that he would respond is says that he would want to talk to them alone face to face got it because that's first step of Matthew 18 and so you you have someone in that power dynamic who is isolated there is even an instance with with the Mike Bickle situation where a

spouse had asked to come along and Mike refused until he got to meet with them privately first. And so it's all this that the phrase and even Joyner used it on Sunday. He says that there's a biblical due process.

And whenever they say biblical due process, Matthew 18's what they're looking at. So you need to go by yourself. If they don't hear you, then you bring a witness with you. Rick made sure to clarify on Sunday to the entire congregation that if they were not an eyewitness to events, if they did not see it with their own eyes, that they needed to keep their mouth shut.

And then he made some comments that honestly, I perceived as veiled threats whenever he said this, because what he had said, he said that there is severe consequences for those who slander the people of God.

And he begins comparing them to a stumbling block. And he says, the Bible says that if you are a stumbling block, it would be better off that you were not born. And he says these things in succession.

And I'm sitting there and you hear people clapping and you hear people cheering, but I'm like, I don't think you realize what he's saying. He is saying that if you didn't see this, you can't have an opinion.

You don't have a say. And when we see people get positions of power and they go unchecked, it's only those voices that provide any kind of accountability. It gets painted as gossip or whatever.

But really, it's their abusing power. And this is what it's come to. Did you guys have situations like that in the Burnham Colt? Yeah, you know, we had similar things in the Burnham Colt, they just taking a step back from the Burnham Colt, just applying it globally to the movement and all of its splinter groups.

There's a framework that was created wherein the best way to stop people from escaping the mind control of a cult is to suppress anything critical about the cult. And so not just with this, but with anything.

If you can take a scenario where people are going to suddenly say, hey, man, there's something really bad going on here, you isolate that and you have that discussion often to close, you know, behind closed doors.

They had that not just with the sexual relationships, but also with anybody who questioned the Burnham Colt. If you, if you're raising questions, they will send the quote unquote, brethren to come and basically verbally bully you into ceasing all questions.

But it goes far beyond that. I'm not going to get into details because some of these are legal issues, but whenever it gets into a sexual situation where there is a predator, I have been made aware of situations where that was the strategy that was used.

Get them away from the people. verbally abuse them into being quiet. If they are a predator, try to verbally abuse them into stopping, but don't go to the proper authorities. And to put it into proper perspective when we left the random calls, there was a situation in one of the churches wherein there was a predator in the midst. And I was a little bit shocked because we had normal church service in this church towards the end of the sermon. The pastor says, now I have something that I want to address the congregation after this. And I would like for after the service, I'd like for everybody except

for that family to stay here in the building. And after that family left, they started talking about there is a problem here. We have spoken to the person. And I just want you to know that there are situations where you may be at risk. We are dealing with this person. And if it goes beyond this, we're going to go to the authorities. They've been made aware of this, but be careful.

And that was how it was addressed in this church. And at the time, it was so shocking to me. I was thinking, oh my gosh, what if I, what if I was that family? I would, I would never set foot back in here again. It would embarrass the heck out of me. But after I really processed this, I thought, you know, if I was that person, I should be embarrassed. If I'm, you know, if that situation were to play out, it needs to be properly addressed. And this church actually did address it in a very

good way. That's not what happens in the brand of movement or brand of 2.0. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transition through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brandham Historical Research's website, William-Brandham.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon, and others with links to the paper, audio, and digital versions of each book. You can also find resources and documentation

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I can also see the inverse happening and that they use that as a way to make problems go away. At times, do you think that that's something that that had really happened and confirmed?

You know, that thought crossed my mind too. I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt, you know? Sure. Who knows? I know that there were some other issues. is that would raise that question, but I can say that it can be used both ways, but in the way that it was done, even if it were to make the problem go away, it does protect the children.

And in this particular scenario, it wasn't adults that were at risk. It was children that were at risk. So I'm like, yes, man, that protect our children. I don't wanna play with fire in those situations.

The other component to this morning star stuff was actually some abuse that it happens in the context of what they are claiming is an unaffiliated youth program of sorts.

And there was an investigation done that was internal, that was performed by, from what they have relayed by their head of security who was a former police officer. And there was another little slip whenever they were talking about, whenever Rick was talking about this and said that, I guess that he doesn't have a great relationship with the local police department as a former policeman, which makes things very curious.

They began Rick made sure to affirm that the negligence that they are accused of is that there are no way negligent that it's all false, that they did this posturing to try to make himself, I think, I think that this is why people do this.

Obviously, I can't know Rick's motives, but he postured himself in a way that he says, we stand with victims. And he says that our goal and he points to his lawyer, he talks about their lawyer setting there and that his lawyers have the same mind, that they're not looking at situations from perspective liability, but they're trying to get to the truth.

And so in saying that they stand with victims, these victims are, I guess, are suing the church from what I understand and some other people associated with it. They say that they're not going to stand against victims and he even says we're on the same side as the victims, but then says our ultimate goal is the truth.

And I think that that is the phrase that you want to know what their definition of the truth is and what that means to them,

because as we have seen, there's no collateral damage that stops these kind of things, that stops these kind of things, like the people are expendable. And from what I've heard, I've not seen anything published directly, so this is just conjecture, but this man who...

who abused these kids apparently was the son of one of the elders at Morningstar. And so you hear that he was not an employee of the church.

You hear them say that he was a volunteer, that he didn't have any kind of official position, all these things that are used to distance themselves from this situation. And they act like that they use the right language.

And that's why it's so hard to see through it at times because they say things like we're going to stand with the victims. They say things like we have to protect our people, that our people are the most important thing.

But I'm not sure when ministry say things like we got to protect our people, I think sometimes what they're worried about is more about not being able to keep the doors open or not having people have a mass exodus rather than the actual harm that happens in these situations.

He made sure to tell them all they had great insurance. That was a funny aside that he took to save for a minute and he made some very definitive statements about their insurance that their insurance agent probably had a panic attack.

We're covered for everything everybody's covered and it was all kind of language like that. It's like, okay, here we go.

But this image management, it's an interesting thing. It is. For me, it's really this simple. I am sympathetic to people who have mental health issues. And that includes people who are, again, these are allegations I'm going to separate myself from talking directly to specific people.

But when a person is a predator like this, it's because they have an issue. They have something that they really need counseling for. They need therapy sometimes medication. And I'm sympathetic to that. And I do believe in a forgiving God that can forgive them.

Where I draw the line is that whenever it's a position and leadership where they're placed in a scenario where now a predator is enabled by having prey, that's where this becomes problematic. Because whenever it is proven that this issue exists, it's not like this issue just magically goes away later in life and never again, they think about it.

They will always think about it. For the rest of their lives, they will think about it because they did this thing. And leadership who, if these people are true leaders and they're leading people, they're aware that for the rest of their lives, this person will face this situation.

Put, kick them out of leadership. This person, yes, they can be forgiven. Yes, they can, you know, if they're no longer praying, they can be in the midst of the crowd. out listening. But don't put them back into the place where they can do it again. That's really, really problematic. And we see it time and time and time again. And again, not two-name specific people, but we have people that, you know, Paul Cain didn't just give his mantle to one person. Paul Cain thought he had this gift that kept giving. And you look at Paul Cain and his problems. And he should have been kicked out of leadership

long ago. And none of this that we would not have this podcast today had Paul Cain just been kicked out of the leadership and everybody ignored this quote-unquote prophetic thing that he claimed to have. And in every other area of society, John, like there are safeguards in place.

If you are a sex offender and you're put on a registry, you can't live near school, like there's common sense guidelines in the rest of society that helps keep our children safe. If you're on a sex offender registry, you're not going to be a teacher in a public school.

You're not going to be a pediatrician as a sex offender. That's the things that they strip their licenses for. But for Restoration Rick and other people, what they do instead is that they take these people and put them through a quote-unquote process that, honestly, they have no training to do these things. They very much lean on their connection with God speaking to them, and they're in the Holy Spirit guiding them. When they need to ask some trained professionals on what to do in these situations, and that's why in the advocacy space, you hear people call for

third-party investigations all the time, is because churches don't know how to handle these things. They're not equipped for it. Thankfully now, in seminary, there's more and more training around this stuff. But in these movements, how often do you get a seminary trained leader?

That's an unfrequent thing as well. It astounds me the lack of basic boundaries with these situations that we allow to continue and blindly support. The other public situation that Rick was involved with was Todd Bentley, and we saw how that went. And these things, you would think that we would learn from our decisions. My favorite cop-out that I heard, I think it's a cop-out, that's my opinion, of Rick on Sunday, was that he told the people that he apologized for not discerning this behavior with Chris. And what he was most concerned about with Chris is that Chris

was being deceptive. It wasn't the- abuse, but he said he wasn't able to discern it. And he's like, I pray for discernment. And he's like, but the mistake I made is I didn't ask the Lord for discernment now.

I didn't ask for it now. He's like, the Lord answered my prayer. He gave it to it. He gave it to us now. But you know, now I learned I need to ask for it then before it gets to this point. And instead of taking personal responsibility for the situation as the leader of the ministry, instead he says it's God's fault because God didn't tell him in time. And those are the subtle things. And people responded to that John with laughter when he said it as if he was making a joke.

But he did leaders do that to pass the buck for lack of a better term. Yeah. Well, there's there are personality disorders where you are never fault. You're deflecting because you have to deflect. That's mentally that's mentally how your chemistry is working. That too is a problem. You know, if you don't, if you're in leadership and there is a problem and you don't accept responsibility quite frankly, you're not a leader. I mean, it's pure plain and simple. Yeah. That's, that's, that's, that's a character tell for me right away. Whenever I'm working with people on teams or anything like that,

when they're quick to take responsibility for failures. And it's not big moral things like we're just talking about here abusive things. But people who are able to own their, their junk and admit that they failed and move on. I would rather work with people like that.

Then I would that people who are not self aware or who won't take responsibility because there's, there's no growth. There's no moving forward. There's no progress there. It's not, it's not safe after a while when, when someone refuses to, especially when it's situations of harm, when they refuse to address that, it's, it's, they're no longer safe people. But, you know, we're seeing with these movements that, you know, they're getting a, it, it makes me laugh because I wonder if Rick Joyner 10 years ago heard Rick Joyner speaking today if he would think that he had gone woke because of the language that they use, that they co-opped. They start using,

using terms that they, they've not learned themselves, but they've heard other places to try to give an appearance. And so I don't have a whole lot more to say about the situation. Here, other than the way that they've, they've, they've treated the victim. And I think that they have not made the victim the priority, number one, that they, everything that we're hearing is about Chris and Chris's future. I have, I'm very suspect that they're trying to get Chris to come back, but language that they're using. Rick made sure to say that he would take him back if he came back.

There was techniques used to discredit the victim. They brought up the fact that the purpose of the meeting where the girl confessed first admitted that the abuse had happened. That it was a meeting where they were trying to determine her future in the school and whether they were going to kick her out or not. That right there was all of a sudden a red flag of what they were trying to do. Then there was other things that were said, like her age that I mentioned earlier. Whenever it came to abuse in general, Mike Bickle I thought was the king of made-up

statistics, but I think Rick topped him on this one and that Rick made a statement. It's egregious because it's one of those things it's hard to call out because it's not true, but it still is really bad. It was that he said that two thirds to three quarters of all women have experienced sexual abuse. With a quick Google search and looking at statistics and stuff, you see that numbers closer to one-third. The reason that I think that these kind of statements are made is to make it seem like this stuff happens all the time. Unless, of course, the NAR

keeps their own book of statistics on leadership and maybe that's accurate. I don't know. It might be accurate in an NAR church, it may be. Then he goes on to say the same thing about men. He's like, he goes, I think that the number of men is the same because men don't want to talk about it. It was very curious. Then he ended up going on a little tirade too of I think trying to get ahead of some stories where he went on a tangent about drinking an alcohol and how that they're not going to prohibit anyone from drinking alcohol because Jesus

drank alcohol and that they're not going to take any freedom away from someone that the Lord himself had because apparently in this lawsuit, the drunkenness at Morningstar was one of the accusations as kind of what he hinted at. He went on this big tirade about these man cave gatherings that Rick has. I'm assuming up in Moravian Falls, which at least fascinates me just because I've never known one of these guys to step out of the limelight and hide somewhere in isolation.

I don't want to get too much into that, but it fascinates me. Moravian Falls fascinates me. I make jokes about it all the time. It's also straight out of the playbook from Brad. I'm not going to name the locations, but similar things exist, and I'll just say it like that.

Was the Moravian connections? Did that happen in Brandonism? Brandonism? Brandonism? I can't even say the word, as well, because I know that that was a huge thing at IHOP and also Morningstar, like the whole Morningstar name, I think came out of like a Moravian publication, if I remember correctly.

Yeah, I don't know about that, but there are biblical passages, the bright and Morningstar, so on and so forth, that I think the name was actually taken from, but when you trace its roots all the way back, it goes back into British Israelism, they're trying to apply the names from the Old Testament to the New Covenant of Jews.

It gets really weird if you try to detangle that, but how those develop, there are probably some internal connections between all of it. Yeah. I think that if I was going to give some advice to people who are trying to parse through this themselves, who find themselves in similar situations, one, if you're a victim in a situation like this, find a support system, find advocates, find people who can fight on your behalf for you in these situations.

If you're someone who's in the pews, I think it would benefit you to assume that everything that is being said could possibly be untrue, to look at it with a hint of skepticism and to weigh it against facts that you see in other places.

One of the things that Morningstar announced on Sunday in regards to all this is that all of their, I don't know if they use the word all, but most of their communications regarding these events, the clergy sexual abuse and the lawsuit with the abuse of the young man who were in the youth group, that all of that communication will be through their app only through the Morningstar app.

And so they are trying to control where that information is available and who has eyes on that, who can see that and critique that. A lot of people will try to demonize these outside sources like the Royce report because you know, they do, I mean, they do make money off these stories.

They do make advertising revenue and things like that when they publish these stories and they get traction. But most of these places like, look, with Julie Royce, I mean, she was a whistleblower herself who experienced all that happened when she blew the whistle.

And so I, although I think we need to look at everything with a little bit of skepticism, I think that these outside voices that are bringing light to some of these situations are necessary not to be afraid to listen to these voices even when your leader demonizes them.

If I would have done that simple thing, year one at IHOTKC, I probably would have saved myself a whole lot of heartache. I mean, all it took was Googling his IHOTKC occult and you had pages, pages, pages of search results and there was even this guy that we all laugh about.

None of us actually know him, but some guy in Missouri know nothing about him, don't know if he's a good character, bad character, had this YouTube channel that we'd all came across. I think it was called Fellowship of the Martyrs, I think is what it was called.

And he would post videos all the time about the heresies of Mike Bickle and the Kansas City prophets and the guy was a bit of character, but if we would have had ears to hear what he was saying in those moments, if we didn't automatically take our leader's word for IHOTK is not occult when Mike went through his seven signs of occult.

If we looked at that was skepticism, so much of us I think could have been saved from the heartache of being ripped around, controlled, hurted like cattle, so much pain could have been avoided.

And so I think that's my advice. If you're a victim, find support, find a support structure of sorts, if you get legal help, if you need it, don't trust these guys in a room by yourself to treat you fairly.

And if you're somebody in the pews, look at everything with skepticism, start asking questions, look to other places besides your leaders for information and see if things are adding up. And I think that you'll be able to start seeing through the fog that they're creating.

Absolutely. That's good advice. You know, when you look at a minister and he's preaching to you, a lot of times you want to see the face of Jesus up there or Paul or their possible Paul or something like this.

Instead, if you look at this person, you say, that looks like Bob from the one that I met at the water cooler at work the other day, bring them back down to your level.

It's much easier to critically examine what they say. And you have to realize that whether they claim to be a prophet, apostle, whatever they claim to be, when you realize that they are your equal, they are human and you are human, it's much easier to put the proper critical examination on their speech.

And when you do that, often you can head all of this off at the pass. When a person starts, you know, if they got the water cooler, starts making people, making the women around him feel very, quote, unquote, special while you start to realize there's something odd here.

Let's be careful. So, great advice, I think that's the way it should be, but this is incredibly fun, Brantley, and I look forward to more of these, and I thank you for joining us to help co-host and detangle iHOP KC.

Absolutely, everybody let us know what you want to hear about, what you want to talk about. Awesome. Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web.

You can find us at William-Branum.org. From more information about the dark side of the NAR, read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Soon, Audible.