Faith Assembly: Hobart Freeman's Version of Branhamism?

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brandham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brandham Historical Research at William-brandham.org, and with me I have my co-host, minister, and friend Charles Paisley, author of Come Out of Her My People, and also today we have Chino Ross, pastor, and voice of the understanding scripture and truth by Chino D. Ross, YouTube channel. And today we're having a very special episode of Brandham vs. Freeman. I don't know how better to call this. I've had several people, and I think you may have two, Chino, but people from Faith Assembly who've contacted me and people from

the Brandham cult that have contacted me. The people from the Brandham cult informed me that they were part of the organization sending the literature, and they were sending crates of these books into Faith Assembly, the version of Faith Assembly that is Hobart Freeman, and I've had the Freeman ites tell me that they had the books and had the recordings. In fact, just I want to say it was either last night or the night before. I just received another person who said that they studied William Brandham intently, and whenever Charles pointed out the similarities that I somehow missed,

but Charles's Brandhamite church was called Faith Assembly, and Hobart Freeman's was called Faith Assembly. I thought I've got to get you guys in a room and just duke it out. So this is going to be I represent the Freeman camp, and Charles, you represent the Brandham camp.

It's pretty interesting, isn't it? I thought what I would do today, John, and I came prepared to do a little bit of a Faith Assembly show in Tell. So our church, Faith Assembly Church in Indiana is the flagship church of one of the largest sects of the message. Most, no, I won't say most, half of the churches in our sect of the message are called Faith Assembly. There are Faith Assembly churches of our sect across the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa, Australia, the Philippines, we are one of the oldest, largest sects of the message. And the fact that Dr. Freeman's church

was called Faith Assembly is a big coincidence. We always actually had awareness of Hobart Freeman in our churches. And so I was a little bit surprised when I found out that Hobart Freeman's churches didn't have a...

awareness of us. And so I thought I would maybe talk a little bit about our faith assemblies, what we were like, what we preach, what was going on back in those same years. And maybe, hey, maybe you guys can find some interesting overlaps.

And I think one other thing that for myself, John, one of the things that shook me like crazy awake when I was in the message is we believed we were an elite special people with an elite special revelation that nobody else in the world had anything like.

And our fivefold ministry of preachers was the special group from God that had all the revelation. But when you start discovering that there are other groups that are almost exactly like you, even down to the name, it kind of shakes you out of that whole mindset that you're so special.

Because the truth is we're all actually just copying from each other and we're all splinter groups of the same letter of reign movement. Yeah, I'll never forget whenever I started to deprogram. And I began working with Dr. Hassan.

He was explaining how mind control cults work. And he and I actually worked with a few different cult experts and they were sharing with me just the structure, not the theology, but the structure of how a cult works.

And it's almost as if there's this cookie cutter stamp and they just stamp them and create, here's another cult. And here's another cult. Now the doctrines may be different. And so the people who escape, they don't see the similarity so much, but the framework and the architecture of it is the same.

Geno, I know I've been forwarding you a lot of the emails from Faith Assembly, the escapees. Have you encountered anybody who has mentioned brannemism or anything that is remotely resembling what we came out of?

The only person so far that has mentioned anything regarding the William Brannem was the gentleman I heard from yesterday, or actually I reached out to him. He had sent you an email, you forwarded to me.

And maybe at some point you'll have him on the program. But I did call him last night and we had a decent conversation. I was busy with some at a car repair shop. So I said, I'll, I will call you again this weekend.

And we will talk some more. But he said that he had heard quite a few of William Brannem's messages, but was actually a part of the Freeman Faith Assembly for a number of years and knew the men and knew the ministers.

And I myself, as I might have told you months ago, John, in an interview with you on this, as we first got to know each other and we're looking for the connections, Hobart Freeman mentioned William Brannem often, mostly on the early tapes and on the very early tapes, it was in pretty high praise of Brannem.

And when I say, really early, like 1970 and 71, 72. And then by the time we got to 73, 74, Hobart was trying to distance himself from a lot of the ministers that he had mentioned under favorable circumstances before.

Like John Osteen, Kenneth Hagen, Lester Summerall. I mean, there were a lot of people, but the big one was William Brannum. And even though he distanced himself, the way he did it at the end was saying, and I've given these actual quotes and timestamps, it doesn't matter what people say about William Brannum, I believe he was God's prophet.

He actually said that on numerous occasions. And the reason he had to say, I don't care what people say about Brannum, is he thought there were some erroneous things that Brannum was beginning to teach.

This is always Hobart's view at the end of his life. So he wanted to distance himself from that, but he never could say, William Brannum was a cook, never said anything like that. He said, I believe he was God's prophet.

So I'm just gonna play referee. I'm gonna let you two start talking. And I'll just sit off, I'm a third wheel on the side, but you two have the wealth of information. So Charles, I'll let you take lead and you can ask questions, and we'll just take it from there.

Sure, so I came prepared, like I said, to just do a little show and tell. I think maybe we can, I'll give some some marks, maybe as we come along, but the first thing I thought I would show you is the printed literature of Faith Assembly.

So this is called the Contender magazine. It's the printed voice of Faith Assembly. We published about a dozen issues a year with the teachings of our churches. What I'm holding here is our issues, two issues from 1983, which I'm sure is a year of infamy in Hobart Freeman's Faith Assembly, right?

And as you can see, we published a multi-dition articles, divine healing, what it is and what it is not. And these were actually published in direct response to the scandal that unfolded with Hobart Freeman.

And from this point forward, we were in full denunciation of Hobart Freeman. And this is actually how a lot of us already had awareness of Hobart Freeman. I know for me personally, this is where my initial awareness of Hobart Freeman came from is when we didn't announce him, and more or less we said, hey, we have nothing to do with this guy.

And growing up in our Faith Assembly Church is of course, naturally, I thought, well, that must be it. We never had nothing to do with this guy. Hey, it's a total coincidence. His church has the same name as ours.

It's a total coincidence. They believe a lot of the same stuff we believe. Yet, our leaders tell us we had nothing to do with them so we must never have. But as I'm on this side of things, and woke up, I no longer think that's the case.

I think that, you know, if we dig a bit, we will probably find that we share some common roots in the 50s or possibly even the early 60s. Our faith assembly is actually older than Hobart Freeman's.

ours was started in 1955 in Jeffersonville, Indiana, or rather, you know, Southern Indiana. And so what I have to, one more thing I want to show, this is a newspaper article where Hobart Freeman became pastor of the Baptist church in Sellersburg.

This church is roughly four miles away from our faith assembly church off the same road, okay? Which again is just almost too much of a coincidence to dismiss. I really find it inconceivable that he was not aware of the existence of our faith assembly church.

It's almost impossible that he was pastor of the Sellersburg church and could not have been aware of our faith assembly church. And at that point, our faith assembly church was still growing. It was before Brannum had died.

And we actually, before we had went on all of our church planning and recruitment and grew into the international fellowship that it is now. So, anyways, that's the first thing I thought I would share.

So timeline for Hobart, he got saved in 1952 into a Baptist understanding of scripture and graduated from that into the brethren belief of scripture. And that happened because when he went to Georgetown College in the early 1950s, he went to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, which is not far for people that are away from us, not far from Jeffersonville, Indiana, just across the river.

But at that time, this was pre-Dr. Albert Moller, who is the current president of the Southern Baptist Seminary. That was a very, very liberal time at the Southern Baptist Seminary. It was not like what you'll find there today.

And Dr. Freeman, at that time, just Hobart Freeman, did not agree with that liberal message. So he worked his way up to Grace Seminary in Winona Lake, Indiana, where he ended up getting his doctoral degree in Old Testament and Hebrew.

So while he was at Southern Baptist, that's when he would have been a supply pastor, a student pastor at a church or several churches there in Southern Indiana. But whenever he received the baptism in the Holy Spirit in March, March 19th of 1966, then his whole outlook on theology and on the church changed.

So in my mind, I would go back, Charles, and say, I'm sure he was aware of Brannum's group of faith... assembly, random version in Southern Indiana, just driving around there in the late 50s and the early 60s, and probably thought, yeah, what a bunch of nuts over there, speaking in tongues and believing in healing. But when he got the baptism in the Holy Spirit, one of the first things that he did, and he tells this over and over on his tapes, is he went to Dallas, Texas in the late spring of 1966 to Christ for the Nation's Institute. They were having a big meeting there. Gordon Lindsay

was still alive at the time, and the keynote speaker was Kenneth Hagen. And of course, Brannum had died just, I mean, not even six months prior to Hobart going to this convention with Gordon Lindsay and Kenneth Hagen. And it was at that convention that he got this famous prophecy from Anna Schrader that was calling him into this, you know, unique end time ministry.

And I'm sure when he went away from that, now all the charismatic literature and parts of Christendom were extremely interesting to Dr. Freeman. And you guys know better than I do, Gordon Lindsay's connection to William Brannum. So you can only speculate the stories that he heard down there as a newly baptized in the Holy Spirit seminary professor about William Brannum.

So when he comes back, he is going to be very interested in following up on what's going down there going on in Southern Indiana. You know, what we have found a lot of times as we look at these people is that we find that they were not always quite honest with their backstory.

And let me poke a few holes there in Hobart Freeman's piece. So Christ for the Nation's Institute didn't exist in 1966. It didn't actually come together until the 70s. What Gordon Lindsay had back then was something different. It was actually the transition piece where he was wrapping up voice of healing and transitioning into what would eventually become Christ for the Nation's. But Christ for the Nation's didn't exist as its own entity at that point. That was a creation of the in the 70s. So what he would have been going to then, so like when he told that story,

he was probably kind of rewriting what happened there. You know, to say he was there in the early, basically using their later label to what he was there at in the 60s.

They were still deeply connected to a lot of the stuff going on in our churches back then. Like Gordon Lindsay had been with our pastor holding meetings just a few months prior to that.

And you also mentioned how he traveled from the southern and he would have been at the seminary in Louisville. And then the church that he passed in Sellersburg. So the main route from there, between those two sites actually passed directly past our church too actually. So it's impossible that traveling from that seminary to his church, he would not have drove...

directly passed our faith assembly. So I suspect if we dig a little bit, something had to make him aware that Gordon Lindsay even existed, right? Something had to make him aware, made him want to go to Dallas. I mean, why pack up and go to Dallas out of the blue from a Baptist seminary?

I would suggest he probably had some connections in that period of time that he has not told people about if we dig a little bit. Going out on a limb a little bit, that turned him onto this stuff and he conveniently leaves a bits of pieces of that out of his story and kind of transfers his start to, you know, that point in Dallas. But I would bet you, if we look, we'll be able to find out that he was in connection with our churches in the late 50s and possibly into the, maybe as late as

the late 50s, early as the late 50s and maybe in the early 60s as well. Just to guess. There's some interesting history too that ties all of this weirdness together. Southern Baptist and seminary, when you hear the name and you think about it, you're thinking Southern Baptist and there's no way that they would be connected to Laterane. Well, William D. Upshaw, former Congressman William D. Upshaw, who toured with and promoted William Brannum, promoted him from Louisville and Upshaw was the vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention and you can go to the Southern Baptist seminarian Louisville and you can find all the Upshaw information. He was one of William

Brannum's probably the most strongest supporter of William Brannum. He's the one that entered into the prayer line in a wheelchair pretending that he was confined to it and Brannum raised him up. So there's that connection but also I don't think we've ever talked about this channel.

William Brannum was deeply, deeply connected to the brethren church. He was very close friends with E. Howard Cadel who is the reason why the brethren churches exist in this area. Cadel was planting churches left and right and he was, they called him the tabernacle man. He was going around through Southern Indiana, Northern Kentucky planting brethren church tabernacles and William Brannum's wedding. I can't remember if his first wife or second. I think it might be his second was performed by a brother and minister. So Brannum was deeply in bed with these guys and Cadel is the one who ran

the clan headquarters in Indianapolis. His tabernacle was the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan that Upshaw was the public defender for and I think he was one of the original founders. I can't prove that yet but he and Davis were working together with the original clan. So you've got the white supremacy connecting it all. You've got the brethren church and then you mentioned Anna Schrader.

Well the reason why Hobart says that he went astray in the later years is because Anna Schrader prophesied that William Brannum in the end of his life had gone in the way of Dalley.

and that was the big prophecy that all of these guys were saying he's a true prophet of God and he went like Dowie so that's where Hobart Freeman got this directly from Anna Schrader. I got one other thing I'll show you here. So this is a book published by Gordon Lindsay in 1966. This would have been published at the same time that Hobart Freeman would have supposed to have come into contact with him. Here's the published date in it. But this is the man Elijah will not die. This was published within a couple two or three months of

William Brannum dying. Okay. Gordon Lindsay, and this was part of a series, Gordon Lindsay after when William Brannum died in those exact years was having to retcon his own beliefs, right? And try to refit because he had helped William Brannum launch the message cult. I mean, to be honest with you. And he was one of the main cheerleaders in the 50s, two William Brannum's Elijah claims, right? And so Gordon Lindsay's basically erased most all of his history prior to 1960 and really Christ for the nations. Gordon Lindsay don't like to remember that anything before Christ for the nations happened is really the reality. And

that's actually the point in time when Hobart Freeman came in contact with him was before Christ for the nations. Gordon Lindsay was still a British Israelite teaching the Elijah nonsense when Hobart Freeman came into contact with him, right? And if if Hobart Freeman went to the back of his building and bought some literature that day, these are the literature that would have been laying in the back at Gordon Lindsay's church for him to pick up. And in here he is refitting the Elijah prophecies, which they had been using towards Brannum and repackaging them for what they're going to do with them in the

future at that point in time. So again, another very interesting thing that you know, Hobart Freeman would have got all over right there. I feel sorry for the people trying to follow us today. They're just so many ins and outs to all of this. Some of which we know and some of which we are speculating about, but I'm 100% in agreement that there are some deep connections here. We've just got to root them out. You know, Hobart in telling his 1966 Dallas story, he didn't preface it with anything and he didn't say anything after it, but obviously, no, he didn't just spend a dial and say, I

think I'll go to Dallas, Texas. There was a reason for that. How he found out about Kenneth Hagen or Gordon Lindsay or William Brannum, you know, I don't know. But another part of that story that he tells is I know Kenneth Hagen was the main speaker and Hobart said, he said, I was right on the front row. You know, here's a cardiac patient. He had just suffered a serious, serious heart attack in January of that year. Part of that's what precipitated his being open to receiving the charismatic experience.

One of his colleagues, former colleagues at Grace Seminary was Dr. John Ray. And John Ray, who had been a teacher there at Grace, had received, he and his wife, the Holy Spirit Baptist, him just prior to this, and was so very interested in sharing, and was able to share that with Dr. Freeman.

And at that time, Dr. Freeman was, you know, he'd hit a loap point in his life, and he was willing, you know, to listen to what Dr. Ray said. So he ended up down there in Dallas, and he tells also he said, I was on the front row with my tape player recording and with my pen and notebook.

So here's a Seminary trained, highly educated, a degree in Old Testament and Hebrew, listening to these charismatic guys up on stage. And I'm sure it was just, it was brand new to Dr. Freeman and probably pretty wild, but he was in it 110%.

He said the first day, I looked at that guy up there and said, what in the world is this all about? The second day, I said, I want this, and the third day, it had already been prophesied, it was mine.

That's the way he tells the story. So over a three day period, he had also now been prophesied over and given some splinter at least of this end time message. And it did involve healing.

It definitely involved the prophet Elijah. And as you listen to Hobart's teachings, wow, it's, it's elitism, it's anti-denominationalism,

a heavy, heavy, heavy. It's the end could happen at any time. John and I did one on the urgency of this whole message where in early 70s, Hobart saying visions have been given to God's saints that we see the pages of the calendars of the 1970s and by the time we get to the end, it's just flittering in the breeze.

We don't have much time left. And that was hammered into the people. Now he dialed that back as he went on. As you got out of the 70s, you have to dial it back because that was obviously a false vision or false prophecy.

But the 144,000, the overcomers, the manchild, the manifestation of the sons of God. Yeah, you and I Charles have corresponded some recently. All the topics, all of them, yeah, all of them. Hobart repeated this, the thing I thought about Hobart and the thing that made him so attractive to so many people is as each generation has come along, he seemed as though he was able to purify, quote unquote, some of the weird or some of the extreme or some of the whatever elements of it.

And the other thing was, unlike these others, he did have a doctoral degree in theology. So he was a trained biblical scholar. He wrote a major textbook that is still in print today. an introduction to the Old Testament Prophets, which was published by Moody Press, he was a scholar and did good work, but he did in vibe on some of this weird stuff, and even though he was trying to purify it, I don't think he was successful.

You know, I would agree with that assessment. So I've had people email me who they knew the brand of connection, they agreed with me 100%. I've also had some skeptics from Faith Assembly reach out to me, and they're saying there's no way there's a brand of connection, you've probably got the same, and heard the same in your meeting with them.

I think what people miss is the fact that not every cult leader starts from their inception, thinking, hey, I'm going to create a cult, and I'm going to destroy the lives of several people in my church.

Instead, they actually believe what it is that they're getting into. And I see the Freeman trip to Christ for the nations as that. I think he was truly seeking something. He went there, like Charles mentioned, I can confirm, just like Charles said through the timeline, these guys were brand of mites through and through in 1966.

1966 is the same year that T.L. Osborne, who is, you know, partnered with Hagen and the word of faith teaching, the prosperity gospel, T.L. Osborne called William Brandham God in the flesh in 1966.

So you've got Freeman going into this cult, and he doesn't know what it is, but these guys are worshipping William Brandham some of them. And like Charles said, the British Israel teaching, the Christian identity, Gordon Lindsay was a leader in the Christian identity movement at the point in which it had turned racist.

I've got confirmations of this on my website, which explains some of the themes, the 144,000, and all of these, you know, trying to restore ancient Israel into modern Christianity. Gordon Lindsay was a big part of this.

And remember, these guys had turned it into a circus act that was breaking in billions of dollars. So when Brandham died, they wanted to know, okay, where's the next circus? Who wanted to form?

That's the same year that the shepherding movement emerged. And you had Ern Baxter, who was part of the brand, he was a campaign manager before Gordon Lindsay or with Gordon Lindsay, Ern Baxter helped start the shepherding movement.

What I see happening is they did lay hands, I would agree with your history that they did lay hands on Hobart Freeman and elevated him into this position. But I think they were trying to figure out who's going to be the next headlining act like Brandham was.

And here's a guy right from, not 10 miles from William Brandham's church who's now getting into this thing. I wonder if he's the next one. And then I don't think they chose him. I think it went off into Neo-Carrish Maddox.

Yeah, well, you mentioned T.L. Osborne. I could also give timestamps on Hobart's tapes where... he definitely says TL Osborne isn't a possible. So surely, I mean, Dr. Freeman showed up at that meeting, not knowing, he didn't know these characters, or if he knew him, he just barely had any information.

And maybe Charles, he had heard the name William Brannum, but yeah, we've got a picture guy showing up totally out of his element. And he's seeing the grandfather of the Word of Faith movement, Kenneth Hagen.

And so in between these sessions, you're congregating and talking with other people. And these people are saying, yeah, that's brother Hagen, you know, blah, blah, blah. And that's TL, and then they talked about TL Osborne.

And you need to know about William Brannum. And you didn't know brother Brannum, well, you know, he just died, you know, what, four months ago. So Hobart got to be thinking, you know, wow, look at all of this stuff happening.

And I've had my head buried in a Hebrew textbook. And here's what I've been missing out on over all these years. And you guys have mentioned the subject of race relations several times. Dr. Freeman was very well known and you probably don't know this, but he did two messages.

They were on his old, this is the last tape list that came out one month after his death. It's January of 1985. And there's 1157 of his messages on that list, all of which are online, by the way, and all of which I've heard many times and have tried to categorize them.

But tapes number 423 and 424, God's answer to the racial problems part one and part two. So he was delving into everything. He might have heard something about this, this the race issue and in the movement and might have objected to that.

And so put out his own messages on what he thought the Bible taught in that area. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation?

You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Steven Montgomery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book.

You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top.

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I know in our churches, we would have said the answer to the race problem is segregation. Isn't that terrible? I'm not sure what Mr. Holbert Freeman would have said. It's really fascinating to me that Holbert Freeman, what came from a reformed background, he is one of only two preachers I am aware of that ever came into the message from a reformed background or a, you know, kind of a Baptist.

That's not normal. Are we normally most all of the early ministry came either out of Pentecostalism or Methodist churches? Reformed background is a very unusual background to come into the message from. And so that brings with it I think a unique flavor perhaps that may be colored the way that he evolved.

The teachings of the message, the teachings of the latter reign movement. So I find that really fascinating. One thing you said I know in an earlier podcast was that one of his early famous sermons was Nebuchadnezzar's dream.

Nebuchadnezzar's dream was also Raymond Jackson's famous sermon, the founder of Faith Assembly. Here is where it was published. This is from 1972, but he actually preached this at the Brannum Tabernacle while Brannum was still living.

And made a big, a big splash out of that. Let me show you a few other things that our Faith Assembly was teaching. Again, just see if any of this rings bells for the listeners.

So here is a front page of our latter reign contender that we published. This is from I believe 1970, 1970, you know, the latter reign. Here I have on the backside of it a reprint of 1971 manifested sons of God.

Let me read you, let me read you the, just the headline out of this manifested sons of God. And this is again from the printed voice of Faith Assembly 1971, Raymond Jackson. Manifestations of the sons of God, when, where, and how has been a topic much discussed by Holy Ghost believers be accompanied by a miraculous end time revival by powerful demonstrations of the Holy Spirit.

What will produce these sons as taught by certain teachers, the 144,000 of Revelation 7 and 14? Are these the manifested sons? If not, who does the scripture proclaim to be the manifested sons?

What does the role of adoption, the Holy Spirit and resurrection play in this magnificent role of God's manifested, producing these manifested sons? And he goes on to say that this is something that's soon to happen.

I don't know if that's a, again, that's something interesting. This is another one that was published. This is from 1969, who are the 144,000? There's a topic of that coming out of our churches.

Another one I think that was a common ladder reign theme, the perfection of the saints, which is all about... eventually becoming manifested sons of God, right? The Body of Christ. This one will be from, let's see.

This is from July, 1974. This was certainly being taught. This would be the first time it's probably printed. But this is all about how the body of Christ will come together and be the perfect manifestation of Christ on earth.

The choosing of a bride, it was all about the bride was going to be, the bride is the elite faction of Christians that make up the end-time church elite that is going to have all of these manifestations and stuff.

So I just share those to the world. And if you're in Hobart, Freeman's faith assembly, I'm just curious, do any of those topics ring a bell? And what are the odds that these predate Hobart, Freeman's own sermons on these topics?

Or we're right along in the same timeframe. I have a feeling that we're going to see a very strong overlap and what we have to remember, obviously, is that Brannum predate Freeman. So if anybody is copying from anybody, we know what direction it has to go.

So let me answer some of those questions, Charles. Tate number 530 is entitled Nebuchadnezzar's Dream. It was taught in 1970. It was the first in a series that Dr. Freeman was doing in a house meeting at that time.

This was pre-Glory Barn Days, a series on the Book of Daniel, the subject of adoption. He taught on that a lot. And I just saw it was, and there is definitely a Bible teaching on adoption, but I never heard anybody teach on adoption before.

And he stressed it that we're not naturally born sons of God. We are sons of God by adoption. And I knew that he had to have been getting that kind of emphasis from somewhere.

So anyway, he did a series in the Book of Romans in 1975. Tate number 725, which dealt with Romans 8, 14 to 17, is simply entitled adoption. And we have mentioned, John, that particular message before, simply because it's on that tape that he deals with the fact that Alice Rogers had just died in childbirth.

That was one of the earliest deaths there at Faith Assembly that brought some health department attention. And it just happened to be on that tape of adoption. As far as the deeper life, he was famous for his book, Deeper Life in the Spirit.

And the whole thing, the whole thrust of this book, emphasis of that book, is to become a matured son of God, the crucified life, to die out to self, so that you can be prepared to be part of that end time army.

And this is something that John and I haven't gotten to in our own podcast. as yet, but I really want to spend some time with once we get through the chronology. Hobart was known as a faith teacher, faith in healing.

I mean, that's what he hung his hat on. But the entire goal of the ministry, and he would say it over and over and over. You know, we're learning these things about faith people, we're learning this about healing.

This is all just in preparation for what? It's that end time army. And he would talk about Romans 8, and he'd say, don't be afraid to say it. It's in the Bible. Don't be afraid.

And I thought, you know, I had come from a Presbyterian non-carrismatic background. I didn't know what Romans 8 was talking about. And you'd get over there. And it actually does use the term, the creation is waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God.

So what these cult leaders do, rather than exegete that passage, you know, word by word in its narrow context, in its broader context, they know that they've used a scriptural term, manifestation of the sons of God.

And so what the what the dumb sheep do is they see it and go, oh, yeah, well, I guess it does teach the man, well, it does teach the manifestation of the sons of God, but not your version of it, you know, not your version of it.

And that's the problem with all of these cults. And that was something I tried to, that I actually did some messages on. Actually, Hobart's wife, June Freeman, ended up with a copy of my series of messages against, well, it was really on what Hobart taught greater works ministry, John 1412, because I go to the Father, the works that I do, you will do also in greater works in these.

And he would teach on that, tie that into Romans 8, that we are just waiting for the greater works ministry to unfold. And then he would occasionally describe, you know, what the greater works ministry was going to be like, but it involved emptying the hospitals, going to into the psychiatric war, laying hands on everyone, emptying the psychiatric war, and literally, you know, bringing revival to the whole world.

And that's not at all what Romans 8 is talking about. It's in a totally different time context. But the manchild tied into the overcomers, tied into the 144,000, tied into John 1412, the greater works ministry, tied into Romans 8, the manifestation of the sons of God.

That was Hobart doctrine at its core, where they were headed, and why all of this biblical training was necessary. It's really fascinating. And what you're describing there is not just the teachings of the message.

The message has a variation of that. What you're describing, it's, this is the broader laterane teachings that came out of the entire laterane movement, and all of the different factions of it have the And what you're describing is actually slightly more aligned to the Sharon orphanage branch than the message branch, right?

And so I would say, you know, he's probably getting, it would make sense, you know, especially if he's with Gordon Lindsey because a lot of them kind of, they, they angled back that way a bit after, after Branum died.

The message takes a lot of those exact same themes that instead of to the world, it becomes isolated. And then we're the elite and all of everybody else is going to all get to burn up and we'll, we'll be the survivors that then rule, you know, but it's the same thing except it's not going to be a global revival for everybody else, it's just going to be for us, right?

But yeah, the, the same themes, it's really fascinating how each of these groups, they take the same concepts, the same core elements that came up here in the ladder ray movement and they just kind of spun it in their own unique little way, their own unique, you know, is maybe 10 or 15 percent different and that 10 or 15 percent difference gives their leader the, you know, the, the wherewithal to say, I alone have the special understanding, I alone have the truth, right?

Everyone else, they just have shades of the truth, but we have the 100 percent and if you want this manifestation, you're going to need the 100 percent, you need, you need what I got and, you know, they put themselves into that special category because they have the right interpretation or the right way to look at these teachings, they all do the same thing no matter which group you look at it and it's, it's fascinating, but it's also sad, it's sad for the people in there and I think all of us that lived most of our

lives in these groups can, can look back with a lot of sorrow on the turmoil that caused our lives to wake up from that terrible hold that it had on us. Yeah, in the very early days, Hobart mentioned all of the people we have discussed favorably.

You can go on any of the tapes from 70 to 74 and the T.L. Osborne or, you know, F.F. Bosworth, Smith Wigglesworth was a, he was a huge fan of his and Dowie and Tommy Hicks and Gordon Lindsay and just all of these people, Catherine Coulman, Anna Schrader, Claire Grace,

he mentioned all of them favorably because he had gleaned some stuff from them, but when you get to the end of the 70s and especially by the 80s, you know, Hobart was unambiguous in saying that God had given the full end time message to one person only and he began and that was him and he would never say, and I'm the one, he would just say, well, I don't think we need to say any more than that.

You know, he was a master of speaking out of both sides of his mouth and he was a very skilled communicator occasionally and it's not happening as often as it used to be. to, but everyone who still wanted to follow Hobart would blame the people on misinterpreting Hobart.

And my response to that was Hobart was a skilled communicator. He didn't have any problem communicating exactly what he wanted to get across. He knew what he wanted to get across and he knew he had succeeded in it.

So I never wanted to hear, oh people misinterpreted. There's not any way to misinterpret the things that Hobart taught. He taught it so often. He taught it so thoroughly and he taught it from a background of a very skilled speaker.

I had a woman that I talked to, by the way, last night, who was a member from Wayback in pre-Glory Barn Day. She said she was actually there at the lower level when they still met, they're like 50 of them that met down in the bottom of the glory barn.

They hadn't remodeled the top and it was just a coffee shop area. And then in 72, they spent money on remodeling. So she said we went from 50 people downstairs to 250 because we could hold 200 upstairs.

And every summer, she said it was like next summer, 400, next summer, 600. We were just growing and growing and growing. But she said, hey, I have one objection to something you've been saying, Jenna, on the podcast.

And she's totally right. She said you've made the comment maybe more than once that Hobart's ministry really attracted the working class, the non-college educated. And I really believe that 80 or 85 or 90 percent probably were that.

But there was an element of educated people with degrees, with professional jobs. This woman and her husband were two of them who were attracted to Hobart's ministry because he was a college professor, a seminary graduate level teacher.

And because he was skilled in the biblical languages and because he was just skilled in communicating the message. William Brannum came across as this, you know, I'm just, everything I have is obviously divine from heaven because I don't have any education.

It's one way to present it and be very convincing because people go, wow, if this guy who doesn't have formal education knows this, there must have been an angel that appeared to him. But then there's another group of people.

If they can hear that same teaching come from an ex graduate level professor, well, nobody that smart would have balled into anything this dumb. So he has to be right, you know, so it's just an interesting connection between Hobart and William Brannum on their educational backgrounds and yet they're able to very successfully teach the same message.

I would actually argue that the people who are smarter are more susceptible to it because the people who are working with their minds from Monday through Saturday. By Sunday, their minds are tired. You know, if you're a carpenter and you're swinging a hammer, your arm gets tired by the end of the week, you've got to rest it.

Well, people who work with their minds, they have to rest their minds. And so what happens is they go and church on Sunday, totally shut off all critical thought because this is a safe place, I can shut off my mind and then they get assimilated by the cult group.

I'm curious what the worship style was like, yeah, you know, at Hobart Freeman's church. And I'll just kind of describe our faith assemblies. Our faith assemblies have ecstatic worship. You know, singing, shouting, dancing, running, jumping, sometimes, people speaking tongues.

There's lots of manifestations of the, you know, the gifts of the spirit, where there's personal prophecy, where there is tongues, interpretation, where there's discernments. There's, I do all these in air quotes, you know, if someone's listening online, because I look back now and some of it I think was definitely a scam.

But, you know, we had lots of that. And it was very common throughout our churches. It's going all the way back, you know, to the, to the fifties. I, faith assembly, Indiana, Northern Indiana would be similar Charles.

I have seen videos of some Pentecostal churches, where I mean, it is literally from running the aisles to swinging from the chandeliers to riding on a camel's back. None of that stuff happened at faith assembly.

There would not even really be any dancing or jigs, but it would definitely be very lively worship, hands lifted up, clapping, definitely a manifestation of the gifts of the spirit. And I think some of that was definitely valid, but I think some of it, you know, I would, I would definitely question.

So it was definitely a lively kind of worship service. It became a little more grave as they went along. I don't know if that was just due to Hobart's influence or just due to the fact that it's not as new for the people anymore.

But they were pretty well known for having a real, I mean, I don't want to really say anything critical about that, a real beautiful worship service. And the worship leader was Jerry Irvin. And Jerry goes back, you know, to the, when it was in Hobart's home rather in Claypool in 1966.

He had dated Hobart's middle daughter Kathy for a year and a half. And he ended up being the worship leader there in the home then they moved to a three car garage at his house and they moved to the glory barn.

And he was the worship leader to the end and I just had an hour and 16 minute conversation with Jerry last week or week before. And everybody, everybody who knows faith assembly, they're gonna have problems with a number of the ministers but nobody ever had a problem with Jerry.

He was just a beautiful brother still is. He's invited me to come up and spend a few nights at his house so we can talk about things in the past. And I think I probably need to take him up on that.

He's just a wonderful Christian man, kind, gentle spirit, beautiful voice, you know, ability to play the guitar Everybody has fond memories of brother Jerry That's interesting. So it sounds like you know kind of a typical charismatic Sort of a worship server as Pentecostal issue. Yeah, we we were the same way in that way as well. So Very interesting. I had mentioned earlier and you had followed up a little on lester some role Did he play a major part in your movement? Oh, absolutely. You can find him on the voice of healing magazine publications he he's quoted supporting William Brannum and they even mentioned his defensive William Brannum in the

assemblies of God. He was definitely a Brannum I threw him through Well, here's an interesting connection. Hobart had three daughters Pam, Kathy and Becky and They were all married to a minister. Pam was married to Steve. Kathy was married to Bruce and Becky the baby girl was married to Dave Freeman and Dave Freeman was a pilot and one of the reasons he got kicked out of faith assembly in the mid-1970s Hobart's faith assembly was because of his association with lester some wrong Lester some wrong needed a pilot and Dave Freeman who was a pilot Signed up to fly him to a lot of his meetings

Well, lester some wrong had connections to Kenneth Hagen and Kenneth Copeland and these people teaching the Jesus died spiritually the JDS heresy and so that was an absolute taboo Dr. Frame was getting ready to write a book about the JDS hit heresy that didn't come out until the 1980s, but he was addressing it in the 1970s So to have any connection with a lester some wrong was a no-no, and that would be his youngest daughter's husband Was the pilot for lester some wrong. So how about that? Wow And one other connection to Gordon Lindsay Charles you have correctly

mentioned that Christ for the nations didn't come on the scene until the 1970s and I had forgotten that um When I went to the ministers meeting in indiana a month ago One of the ministers there ex-faith assembly ministers Who no longer you know supports and agrees with all of Hobart's take on everything who has chosen a better path of ministry But early on this would have been I can't give you the year I don't know when Christ for the nations began, but I would say he told me 71 or 72 or 73 somewhere along there

He took a year off in indiana and went to Christ for the nations, you know to get a Bible education And he said he was sitting there in the audience the that Gordon Lindsey died upon stage. He said, I saw all that happen. So here's another connection between, you know, a faith assembly minister who was down there in the early 70s to get, you know, a year degree from a Bible institute or whatever and witness the death of Gordon Lindsey on the stage. Well guys, this has been incredibly fun. There's been so many connections and I know we'll

never have all the answers. I know that people who have escaped the faith assembly, both faith assembly cults, interestingly, both are going to be watching this interesting to see is there any direct connection, but it's like everything else with that we've examined in branemism and everything connected. It is such a complicated mess to try to understand that there is no black or white answers. There is what I call it is basically there's this there's this influence that just happens because of people being connected and hearing hearing a thing that they enjoy or like and then they'll integrate it into their ministry and they study it more kind of like you you

mentioned with the adoption and the manifested sons of God. That was a theme through branem's ministry starting in the early 50s all the way through 1965 and branem's version of adoption was that basically the manifested sons of God will be adopted as the elite sons of God essentially, which I think that's somewhat similar to what Hobart Freeman taught, but there's so many connections and it doesn't come from one source. So these people just kind of learn it by being together and that's what we have that's that's that's the purpose of this podcast to share that, but thank you

for doing this with us, Jenna. Oh, you're welcome. Glad to be a part of it. And Charles, always good to hear from you. If you haven't already by Charles's book come out of her, my people, but thank you for thank you for entertaining me as referee between you two, Charles. I've enjoyed chatting with you and Jenna, great episode to day, John and you know, you're right. I mean, we may never, you know, fully be able to understand just exactly how our faith assemblies might have been related, but I think it it's clear we all branch from the ladder rain movement in some way or another. We're

all following just our own take on the same ladder rain ideology. So again, just just fascinating stuff to consider and you know, for people maybe that we're in Hobart Freeman's faith assembly, maybe the shock of seeing another faith assembly teaching the same things that you never heard of might might help jar the mind awake a little bit. I think that's really what this does because as we talked earlier, everybody when you're new in your own group, you think your group is unique. It's unique. It's special. It's a it's sui generous. It didn't come from any other location. It came to

this minister and just by virtue of the fact that we can make these connections That should cause everyone, just to maybe not give up what you believe, but you've got a pause. If you're intellectually honest, you've got to pause and say, how is this happening?

How is this possible? That's what it always did for me and that's what I hope it will do for other people. Yeah, I agree. Take a step back and it doesn't, even if you're in a healthy church, it doesn't hurt to examine what you're in.

If it's a healthy church, it's going to come out as a healthy church in your examination. This morning, I've been exchanging emails with a lady who's in Kenya. They're having a trial of a mass cult suicide, hundreds and hundreds of people who starve themselves to death in Kenya.

It was a result of this laterane movement and they isolated themselves in this forest and among the prized possessions that they brought with them into this compound that they had in the forest was this whole array of random books.

This is directly connected and if people can go to that extreme, we've seen that with Jonestown, we see it again with Kenya. It can happen to you, examine the church you're in. I'm not saying it's a bad church, but does not hurt to examine it.

Thank you guys. 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-branam.org. For an overview of the historical research of William-branam and the healing revivals, you can read preacher behind the white hoods, a critical examination of William-branam and his message, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.