Joel’s Army: Mental Manipulation and an Isolated Community - Detangling IHOPKC

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, Jed Hartley, son of a prophet and former member of the International House of Prayer.

Jed, it's been a weird series of events. The research will have been published a long time before this actually comes out, but I was digging into Paul Cain and it was purely by accident. I've actually forgotten more research than I have published.

I was looking for something else and I was going through the newspapers and, oh my gosh, there's the granny bandit. I had forgotten about the granny bandit. And so I started digging into that and anything. Anyway, one thing led to another and we were talking today about Joel's army and I found where Paul Cain was and we'll get into it further, but he was deeply embedded into the Joel's army ideology way back in the 50s before any of the International House of Prayer.

And I've not yet published this, which I'll surprise you maybe a little bit, but it wasn't his first rodeo. Pretty much everything that he did at International House of Prayer, he just redid from earlier versions of his quote-unquote prophecies.

He rebranded him, changed the details and said, oh, lo and behold, I have a prophecy and the world will end be scared. Once you find what works, I mean, just recycle it, right? Absolutely. It's so ridiculous to think that they're men that actually do this kind of thing.

I have to put people in different categories because some people are mentally unstable and they do them because they can't help it. And I truly feel sorry for them even though I realize many of them might be praying upon individuals, I understand that, but I have a bit of compassion for people who need help and just don't get it.

But some of them do it with a malicious intent. And I haven't really put Paul Keen into a category yet, but I really don't see too many signs of mental health issues with him.

He looks like he was just a rotten to the core kind of guy. So I'm still categorizing him, but whenever I look at the mess that he created, he seemed to attract a lot of people that did have mental health issues.

Those mental illnesses kind of fester within the community where if it... was something that was addressed in your 20s and 30s, it could have, you could have dealt with it, but instead it kind of prays upon that. Tells, if you're hearing voices in your head, tells them people that it is from God and to lean into it rather than to recognize it as mental health. But then yes, you have the people like Paul Kane who, whether probably it's just grandiose, delusion and selfishness or whatever motivates these individuals, but it is, it is very eerie when someone is very put together and are lying to the extent

that someone like Paul Kane was or are being deceptive to that point because it just feels like, why would you even do this? Why would you have this behavior if you were put together, like you could just go be a business owner, you could live a very normal life.

What is it that's driving you to create these end times apocalyptic false prophecies and then draw in people who do have mental illnesses and create a community that is surrounding these apocalyptic and deceptive practices. It's perplexing for sure.

I'm convinced that there's more money in it and less work in it than an actual business. So there's that, you know, but you know, a lot of people that I've studied joined for different reasons, like some of the guys that I've studied in the ancient history, I can say clearly had a, maybe not, maybe they weren't insane mentally, but they had some real problems.

And so they really believe some of the nonsense they said. And then what's interesting is, they seem to, some of them seem to have stabled out, but they built such a following around the nonsense that they said when they were a little bit mentally disturbed. And they started believing the stuff that they said while they were mentally challenged. So that's a weird category that I don't even know where to place those guys. But then there are other people who there was clearly a strategy and they saw the money involved. And like John Alexander Dowey, there's no way that that guy did not know that he was doing what he was doing.

They're towards the end. He did lose his mental capacities, but after he had swindled, I can't remember how many millions of dollars back then. So you've got different categories of people. And I'm still trying to form an opinion of the whole thing because one crazy guy and his ridiculous prophecies that nobody who is Christian today, even in the Pentecostal movement, would have believed. They would have all said this is nonsense today. But they're stepping stones of history to get all the way up to the charismatic movement. And so...

There's this clear problem and you can't just say, well, all of Carismani is rotten to the core. It's not. But there's all these building blocks that get there and the building blocks that get there are rotten to the core. So what do you do with that, you know?

Yeah, the foundation of the house is certainly built on unstable ground is probably an understatement of that. And it is, it is really difficult to then be in your shoes or my shoes where you're trying to call out the fishers and the cracks in the foundation because it feels like you can't do that with how criticizing the movement at as a whole. But it's just so foundational to the the way that the movement has developed. And you do have the same characters, Dowie and Sanford and then Branum and Bickel and Jones. And they just play by a lot of the same

same play sheet. And it's it's pretty impossible to extract their impact on the charismatic church from that sort of church history. And then to further complicate it, especially today. So we're recording this way ahead of when it's going to be released. Today is actually the day of elections between Kamal Harris and Donald Trump. So today, I got my vote sticker on there.

I don't have my haven yet. I haven't cast it yet. But I don't have mine. Everybody, it's funny. I'll read through the comments and they all are certain who I would vote for. And they have no clue, man. I have no clue. But you look at today's political mess and it's more than just a political mess. It's a political religious mess. And me saying that I think is why they falsely assume who I would vote for. But it is a political mess. And religion has wrapped itself around politics because they want to control politics and make it part of their domain, their dominion. Yes.

Well, this is nothing new. If you go back and you study history, every single evil, vile character that I've mentioned in the past, John Alexander Dowey included, every single one of them wanted to manipulate and control politics because if the laws are written to stop the swindlers, then their whole empire crumbles. So they want to be able to control those laws and they want to embed themselves in government. So what we see going on today with religion and politics, I can find you hundreds, thousands of newspapers where it's happening back in the 1900s. And you know, you go back before that, I'm certain it happened in

the 181650s far as far back as you want to go. But what's interesting to me is that because of the Pentecostal movement, Stringing it together through different waves of Pentecostalism, things like Joel's Army, which was a gross misinterpretation of scripture, were taken and carried forward through those movements, and then repeated today, and the mess that we have today is actually, largely because of that, and Paul Cain, Mike Bickle, these guys, they help resurrect the laterine version of this Joel's Army doctrine.

So, the Joel's Army, even that doctrine itself, it's roots, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's roots are in the laterine movement, right? And that Brannum, Jim Jones also had the Joel's Army,

or the manifest sons of God, wasn't that, were those two related, the manifest sons of God, and the Joel's Army doctrines? Absolutely, so there's a prophecy, the reason it's called Joel's Army is because it comes from a chapter in the book of Joel and the Old Testament.

Pentecostalism, the original, while the new modern Pentecostalism, which started in 1907, was largely based off of a passage from Joel to talking about the former and the latter reigns. So if you go back in the New Testament and you read what the apostles are saying about the former and latter reign, they're saying this day to day, the day of Pentecost and the New Testament, is the former reign to the, or the latter reign to the former reign that happened years ago, right?

Well, then modern Pentecostalism said, well, no, that's today, let's ignore what the apostles said and let's claim it for today. And they did it because of British Israelism. With British Israelism, they were able to take specific passages out of context that was meant for another culture in the ancient world and then apply it, they would say it applies in twofold.

It was in shadow back then and now we're seeing it fulfilled today. And then they can vaguely say one single sentence from the Old Testament ripped out of context applies to the president, or the former president who's running, or the existing president's vice president, they can really apply it to anything they want.

So what happened was that wave of Pentecostalism from the early 1900s began to fade away, latter reign was another wave of Pentecostalism that brought new vigor and excitement. And so they started saying, no, we're the former reign to the latter reign of the original Pentecostals at 1907 Azusa Street.

So they're just repeating this idea that they can take that one phrase and rip it out of context and apply it. Well, if you read that prophecy and understand what it means to the ancient world, it is talking about war.

and battles, and it's talking about plagues, and there's an army of locusts that attack, basically. And they're talking about the crops, aren't producing, you know, the vegetables and the fruit for the people to eat. They're talking about God sending famine, basically, in this prophecy. Well, because the word army was used, and if you read, continue through the book of Joel, you start to see there's some very militant terms that are used there.

Well, remember the world war one and two had were happening, had just happened whenever the Latter-Rain broke out. They were looking very closely that a third world war would break out. So they thought it what would. And so they're applying that prophecy to the war that they feel as impending, then you had the rise of Communism. So they kept just regurgitating the same mistake over and over and over and over again. And it all applies back to that prophecy from the book of Joel. Well, today, now that Russia's starting to flex its muscles, and it looks like there is going to be wars in different parts of the world, they're able to reuse

that even further today. So it's interesting. If you go back and look at what was happening, whenever the prophecies were being revised in the 80s and 90s, all of the different global conflicts that were happening, I don't have the recordings, but I'll bet you could go back to each one of those ministers and they could apply it to the current state of events back in the 80s in the same way that they did in the late 40s. Yeah, well, even in my, the way that I've seen the Joel's army prophecies used, I've seen that evolution in my own life, only being 33 years old or 32,

however old I am, 32 years old. And when I was very young, there were several different schools that I hopped was setting up. There was what was called the Children Equipping Center, which was kind of like the ministry, children's ministry, we would go off, it was led by a man named Lenny LaGuardia, and we would have these meetings that were just like normal Sunday school children's meetings, but there was a heavy emphasis on prophetic and the gifts of the spirit on being able to speak in tongues, being able to interpret that, there was a lot of like

interpretive dance that we did, there was a lot of like sort of manifestations of the Holy Spirit that we were encouraged to. learn and operate in. And during that time, there was what Bob Jones was kind of prophesying over the community that even preceded IHOP. So this was the Kansas City Fellowship or Metro Christian Fellowship that preceded the International House Prayer. The prophecies were about these like young children growing up and having being an army. The metaphor was the Gideon's army where it was going to be only 300 or so that was going to change the battle. And instead of

being 300, I think it was the prophecy that Bob Jones gave was that there was going to be billions who or one billion people who were led to Jesus in this final hour and that there was going to be an army of 300,000 young adults who were equipped with prophecy, with healing, with speaking in tongues, being able to do all of these miracles of the spirit.

And that we, my generation, was going to be the ones who kind of led this end times army

through the gifts of the spirit. And then there was a lot of prophecy about Truman and Terry Truman in Kansas City and that there was going to be symbols that this church IHOP was going to be the forerunner and types church and it was going to have to do with a march that was led from the church to Harry Truman's property, which when I was young, the prophecy was about the arrowhead stadium because like we've talked about in the past, it was all about football. That's how Bob Jones granted a lot of his, his prophecies. But the arrowhead stadium and the Kaufman stadium,

which is the Kansas Chief's football stadium is arrowhead and then the Kansas City Royals is Kaufman stadium. That whole complex was called the Truman Sports Complex. And so the idea was that there was going to be a massive revival and that they were going to basically sell out the entire, that entire complex was going to be filled and that there was going to be this march from Metro or from wherever all the way down to that stadium. And that was the very specific prophecy. But then Mike Bickle turned it into a prophecy about Truman properties instead of

it being about Harry Truman's, the Truman Sports Complex. it turned into a prophecy about the Truman Properties in general. And lo and behold, Truman had a several mile development that he had owned and been a part of the development that was called Truman Corners. That was in Grandview, Missouri. There was buildings that were first sale in that area.

Michael buys that building or actually my father was a part of putting the trailers on that building and then there was another global prayer room that they bought. And basically it was just all this sort of fulfillment of property or prophecy because they were on Truman's property.

That was never actually what the prophecy was originally about, but it became sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy where they were able to make it happen by buying property that was once Harry Truman's property and that's where the global prayer room came about. But anyway, all of this to say is that there was all of these prophecies about the Joel's army raising up and about Harry Truman's property and it turned into all of these prophecies about Israel. And now that Mike Bickel is under the gun, he's really hammering all of this sort of prophecy about the nation of

Israel. And of course, there's a lot going on in the nation of Israel right now as there has been for the last, you know, since Israel became a nation back in 1946, wasn't it? Or so anyway, all that to say is that the way that these prophecies sort of bubble up and are about one thing, but then they change and they're about another thing. But I'm fascinated by how much it focused on the youth and how much it really was this indoctrination process that I grew up in where it was like we were being trained for one specific purpose and it was very militant. It was always about the

gifts of the spirit, you know, it was Joel's army and they were going to have spiritual warfare be their warfare. But it was very militaristic. It used a lot of that language. It was extremely intense. And what's crazy is that I feel like that has been a pattern with since the latter reign movement even began, it always has been there's focus on the like raising up the young generation to be spiritual fighters and spiritual warriors who go and do battle and it's a terrible, terrible environment to be raised in. I know that I've said something very similar to this in

previous episodes, but I want to. hammer at home, like that is just an awful way to grow up because there's this absolute fear on your life, because I think that there's going to be an actual war that's happening that I'm going to be a part of and that I, to win the war, I need to be the spiritual warrior who can move in the gifts of the spirit, but guess what, I can't actually prophesy and get divine information about the people who I like, I'm not actually a miracle worker when I pray for my sister who hurt her leg, like her leg still hurts, like there isn't

the healings aren't happening, the prophecies aren't happening and so there's a war coming and I am not actually equipped to be in that war and yet I'm supposed to be one of the leaders of that war.

Like you said, it's been a theme recurring over and over and over again, so you mentioned the nation of Israel, that was one of the factors that really birthed the latter reign because the nation of Israel had just formed whenever all of this broke out.

So they saw this as a quote unquote spiritual sign, so you've got British israelism, we're taking the passages of the Old Testament that applied to Israel, we're saying it applies to us and lo and behold, the nation of Israel is born, so you can see how they kind of pieced all of that together and then it's really so weird when you think about it.

We had William Brannum and his mentor Roy Davis, the head of the clan, who were going to spiritualist camps, one of the largest spiritualist camps in the nation was in Indiana. So they're going there to learn how they did these tricks and gimmicks and they convinced the locals that the gimmicks were real, that they were real spirits that they were resurrecting.

So it's a good versus evil, the spirits are rising, we need spiritual warfare to attack the evil. You can actually go, you can read books and I think there may even be a video on the spiritualist camp in Indiana, they talked about how it was all a hoax, they never really dreamed that it would get as big as it did and it did, but they had things like up levitating piano that would play, the Beverly Hillbilly is ending, right?

And people back then believe this, right? And so in today's world, it would never fly. If I'm trying to picture a world where Paul Cain and Bob Jones went into Kansas City and said, we believe the spirits are coming and they're going to play the Beverly Hillbilly's jingle on a piano and we must have spiritual warfare.

There's not a single person that would come to this, but Brannum did it back then and he goes on tour and you can find, I've got some articles on this, but you can find references of statements from the men who are saying that Brannum went and he would do things like move bracelets.

in the air or he could cause things to move with his mind. Basically all of the tricks that he's learning in the spiritualist camps and he's convincing the people that they needed spiritual warfare because spiritualism is rising in the U.S. which it was and we see this global war that is about to break out and the nation of Israel has just formed. So you take all of these elements and it was the perfect storm. So they started to create an army of spiritual warriors but it's not spiritual in the way that you would think of it as a Christian. They were literally training them

to move objects with their mind and thinking they had the power of doing this, right? Yeah. And nobody in today's world would believe it. So I have to laugh. I've read through some of the quote unquote prophetic history at IHOP. They fail to mention the important parts like that. Like IHOP KC lists their prophetic history and then cuts it off. But if you trace it all the way back, there's not a single person that would believe this nonsense. Yeah. I mean, I hope that you're right that no one would believe this nonsense today. Like it feels like this is something that was

in the past that there wouldn't be people who get tricked by some of these tricks. Although there are, I don't know if you saw there was this big looingle led. Oh, I can't remember what it was called, but there was this big gathering quite recently that was like the women's march. It was very political. It was very pro Trump. And I think it was it was geared towards women. And it was like women. But it was part of this sort of larger charismatic movement. And it's interesting because I've been reading up on some of the people who were, I don't know if the right word is preaching

or giving messages, some of the leaders of that event. And one of them, she talks about werewolves and she talks about how there's the spiritual warfare going on and that she is met changelings and werewolves who are hiding amongst the group. And very seriously, I'm very genuinely and she was up there. Along with a lot of people who were partners with my dad in different ministry settings, like it was weird to see some of these individuals up there and just know, hey, they saw all of my my dad's sort of prophetic grift and they didn't have any problem

with it. So as much as it seems like some of these connoisseurs of the past

are just in the past. There are present day manifestations of this that maybe it's not about levitating pianos anymore. Maybe the tricks are changing, but these fearful, bizarre stories about werewolves.

And I think honestly, it's just a continuation of the serpent seed sort of rhetoric that William Brannum had of that there are people amongst us. I mean, it obviously pairs with a lot of the conspiracy theories about reptilian people running the government and some of those wild things that you don't think anybody actually genuinely and seriously believes those things.

But Bob Jones talked about different. He used a lot of that seed rhetoric, a lot of the idea of there are generations that are set apart from different generations and whether it was very explicit with Brannum of it being like you can't race mix because race mixing is destroying God's people or I don't even know how Brannum totally grounded

his obvious racism, but that was that sort of fear mongering of like there is a group of people in the world who are not fully human, that their seed has been tainted either by the Nephilim seed or by I guess werewolves now

whatever it is that this has been a very common trick and story and I would love to think that it is fading out. I would love to see us as like both Christians and just as human beings be able to rise above

a lot of this clearly insane and extremely destructive and horrific rhetoric, but I think it's still, I think these tricks are still gonna get played and people are still gonna fall for them. 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, 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 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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Wherever there's a charismatic minister who can pray upon victims and fine victims, they will do it. That's the problem. You know, I look back at some of the way that this developed over time.

And the patterns are just, for me, it's the patterns that really give you the full detail. Because it wasn't a move by God, clearly. Whenever you can see that men who were either having mental health issues or they were seeking to get power, money, fame, sex, all of the things that these guys are doing, creating building blocks, leading up to this great event.

The problem that I see in the way in which they're praying on the victims is that they're portraying a God that is giving the spiritual insight to this small group of people. While there are many, many other Christians in the world, right?

But they're saying that we have this knowledge. We're going to be the spiritual elite. We're going to be the spiritual warriors. In your case, we're going to be commanding the army of spiritual warriors against the demons.

Well, where is the recruitment for all of the other Christians in the world? That's the problem that I began to face as I started examining this, because even in the cities where Laterane is developing, you find in the newspapers the surrounding churches.

And so you've got the Laterane church here who's saying the world is ending and we need to be ready to fight the spiritual war. Over in the next building might even be adjacent or across the street.

There's a group of really good Christian people who believe God. And they believe Jesus is coming too. It's not like their anti-Christian, right? But you don't see them going out and trying to say, hey, look, we must band together as one.

Instead, we must band together separately. And that really was the key. Once I realized that these guys are, they have a strategy of separating Christians, isolating a specific group of people who will believe them.

And then the whole rest of Christians are completely ignored. And to a large extent, if you follow all of their doctrines out to its conclusion, they're ignored by God. So begin to realize either we have a ridiculous God who doesn't know how to lead a war or they're lying.

about the war or they just don't understand the coming war so you know I'm piecing all this together and I go back in time and I'm looking at most of these guys base all of their end of days theology as you know off the book of Revelation where you can go back every century all the way back to 70 AD they were all saying this is it just I don't know if you've seen Sanford and Son it's one of my favorite shows growing up he would say this is the big one and they were like this is the big one this is it this is the we must

be ready Revelation says clearly can't you see it over and over every single century half century all back through time and I finally came to the conclusion that nobody knows and if anybody says we know but we're not going to let those other Christians know then this has to be somebody who is either off the rocker or they're trying to deceive you yeah well and I think that you absolutely nailed it of using the word isolating just like it it's an isolating doctrine it's an isolating experience it's an isolating community where the goal is not

they have no grasp or understanding or or even desire to graft in other churches with slightly different doctrines you know not even extending beyond just non Christians it just even within the Christian world there was there's just no place for people who are not explicitly a part of this isolating extremist doctrine and again going back to what it is like to be raised in that

it I remember so many experiences that I had as a kid where I grew up having friends who were not within the uh I hop world who like my my mother um got me and my sisters involved in a co-op group that was other homeschooled Christian um believers within within Kansas City um but it wasn't all I hop specifically and so I even went to a prep school for a few of my like junior high years that was more of a conventional um probably evangelical you know just a typical evangelical school and I remember feeling this isolating experience when I would then talk about the one

thing conferences or when I would talk about religion in general there was just this sort of like I am supposed to be a part of something that's different and greater but Because it's not greater because I'm not operating the gifts of the spirit because I can't do healing, it is just different. There's no greater. Like I'm supposed to be the city set on a hill, supposed to be the example, and I'm just set apart for no good reason. I'm just kind of different and isolated. And then even within the community building friends and whatnot, like it just was all

this extremely isolating, very radical, very intense community that made friendships and normal relationships so difficult. And you can see why predators, sexual predators specifically would find so much success. I don't know if success is the right word, but who would pray upon those communities? It's because isolating young women and young men, but isolating young individuals is the way that you successfully pray upon young individuals. And so there's this community that isolates everyone. Of course, there's going to be rampant sexual abuse that happens in there because it's not going to be reported and there's not good ways for people to

understand and talk with each other and have normal conversations, much less conversations about something that's really terrifying and difficult or talking about the failure of your leaders. So yeah, incredibly, incredibly isolating from the top to the bottom, just all of the experiences were so so isolating. I remember when I was in it, I studied, I was fascinated with cult. I studied Jim Jones and I studied different guy. I can't remember the guy's name, but was it the Haley Bop comment guy that basically gathered a bunch of people together and said, the comment is coming, let's kill ourselves. I'm fascinated with how people come to do this. So I've studied it.

And in each one of those cases, you find that there's a physical isolation. And so while I was in the cult that I was in, I said, well, we're not like that because there's no physical isolation. I can come and go as I please, right? And then I began to study deeper and I came to realize that it's really, it's rarely the case where there's a physical isolation. It's usually in the head.

Usually they have you create mental barriers around the people. And so you can go right up to somebody's face and talk to them and not actually engage them because you've shut them off. You put at this wall of isolation between you and them. And then after I left, I started thinking about all of that because it's something that I had thought about quite often. And I started noticing myself right after we left. Whenever I would engage in conversation of spiritual things with another Christian who wasn't a cult Christian.

And I began to realize that I'm having trouble following their train of thought because I'm putting up this mental barrier between them. And I was really struggling. And so I started attending a men's group and they had the Bible studies, et cetera, had started scheduling launches, working to talk to people, tried to break out of that mold.

And I found it was very difficult. After you've been manipulated to isolate yourself in your head for so long, you basically become a mental hermit. And that's what I was. Yeah, and you are taught to defend everything that you are taught to believe.

So and you are given this position like you are going to be attacked by other Christians and certainly by non-believers for these set of beliefs. And so there was this sort of practice of how do you defend your belief, the apologetics, of how do I defend my belief against these particular attacks so that when someone says something and I have this mental isolation where it's like, I believe this very specific thing and I need to hold on to it.

And here are the six ways that I can defend it in this situation rather than just being like, okay, you can hear other people's beliefs and you can wave them on their own and go through that sort of process that is an epistemically humble process of just being like, I don't know what I know.

Well, you know, I don't know what I don't know and I need to hear other people out and not be threatened by people having different belief systems than me. There just wasn't that option.

There wasn't that space to find common ground with other Christians, much less other people of different faiths.

In the, there was something that I have here written that I wanted to read to you. Not something that I had written, but this was in the Ernie-Gruin report about the international house prayer.

Well, this is actually pre-international house prayer, but this is a pastor who was very critical of Mike Bickle and Bob Jones and a lot of the abusive sort of prophetic patterns that they did.

And he was the one who kind of organized the report, but there was a lot of different individuals who testified to it and wrote their own opinions about different things. So it wasn't just Ernie-Gruin, but I was reading back through it recently and I, thought it was, it was something that I should read to you because there was this dominion Christian school that the Kansas City Fellowship community had established. That was a children's school that I went to. I didn't, I went only on Fridays. They had a Friday school and I, I was largely homeschooled. But on Fridays, I would go to it. I only have the Vegas

recollection of being a part of that school. But someone wrote about it and in the report, they said that it is my belief that dominions, Kansas City Fellowships Christian school, lackadaisical attitude about education is not conducive to a sound learning environment.

To quote one child, if I can go to the third heaven and get out of a test, more power to me. And then later, they wrote about it. They said, we all have a problem when an entire group of precious children are being subjected to these absurdities. In both the church and in their Christian school, they are indoctrinated to believe that their specific generation is the elected seed of all the bloodlines of all generations, foreknown, predestined, and hand-selected from billions of other seeds to be a part of the end times Omega generation. That was all Bob Jones

prophecies. They are told that they will do 10,000 times the miracles in the Book of Acts, and that they will be 10 times worse than I, Bob Jones, and in regards to seeing angels and demons and walking in the supernatural, and that their generation is specifically called the manifest sons of God. They are taught that out-of-body experiences are the norm. One mother described her son's experiences with a friend from Kansas City Fellowship. She said that my son spent the night with his cousin, who still goes to KCF. Later, they all went upstairs and sat in the circle.

Then the seven-year-old son, who is one of the KCF leaders, told them if they held hands, they could go into the third heaven and see angels and taste the tree of life from a Christian counselor. It is my belief that Dominion, oh yeah, this is what I already quoted that, but it's lackadaisical attitude towards education is not conducive to a sound learning environment.

There are accounts told from visiting parents who saw children at Dominion lying in the halls for a great length of time, experiencing uncontrollable weeping or giggling, and we're told these children were simply drunk in the spirit. And I remember reading this actually just very recently, I had read some of this in the past, but then I'll go back to there and go in report just to just to see what sticks out with me. That is new.

and I totally forgot about this entire account because so I went to a school called the Daniel Academy, which was an offshoot of the International House of Prayer.

It was connected with not in any official capacity, but all of the community was IHOP community. The leaders of it were my own father and then Bob Frazier and Lauren Frazier, who were ministry partners with my dad and who led the Joseph company.

So it was all very directly tied with the International House of Prayer. And during the years of 09 to 2010,

there was what I'm sure that you've heard about, but there was the student awakening that happened at the International House of Prayer, where the college students at the university of with IHOP,

which I don't like calling it a university because it's not a university, it's not accredited or anything like that. But their college organization had a bunch of individuals who were suddenly being slain in the spirit.

There's a lot of different manifestations of God's presence. There were people seeing dreams and there was just this big sort of exciting energy that had bubbled up there. Well, it quickly caught on at the high school, the Daniel Academy, that was part of it.

And we would have these morning services, where it would be 30 minutes, where people would pray and worship and then we would go about our day. That was part of the Daniel Academy sort of curriculum and the way that it would happen is that we would always have morning prayer service.

Well, what started happening is that people, there would be manifestations of the Holy Spirit during these morning prayer services and children would fall over out of their seats and they would be laughing and we'd have prayer tunnels where that people would run through and fall out with the Holy Spirit and people speaking in tongues, all that sort of stuff.

And we wouldn't end up going to classes. So most of my senior year in high school,

I didn't really go to class. We just had these things happen and honestly, even as like an 18 year old, like, or 17 year old, however old I was, I kind of was a part of it too.

Like I remember encouraging it and having some of these like praying up front and really being excited about it. And you know, it just didn't feel important that education was getting thrown off to the side because what was happening was the realization of all of these prophecies that I had been told growing up. Like this was the Jill's army sort of coming to life. These were all the young kids who were suddenly prophesied. And like I remember, I had a few dreams during that time and I thought, oh, this is now kind of happening to me. And there were some questions that I had. There were

some a few things that I was like, this isn't quite right. But largely, I was just very excited about it. And what ended up happening is that it just was extremely academically negligence. I got a really poor education during my time at the Daniel Academy even before that happened.

They're just the teachers there weren't trained to be teachers. There were a lot of volunteers despite both my father and Bob Frazier being multi-millionaires. It just didn't have any funding. There was mold throughout the entire building. The whole message of the Daniel Academy is that it was going to be this special school that raised up these special Daniel like students who would go out into the marketplace and go out into the seven spheres of influence and who would be set apart and be able to excel like Daniel did and be able to interpret the kings dreams and all that sort of stuff. And irony is we just weren't being equipped to just

handle life in general. Like it was a high school. We were supposed to be learning how to study, how to

reading math and science. Like those are the things that we could have learned to equip us. And instead it was these weird miracles and poor education not enough funding for the students. And then there was a lot of you know some other students could speak to this better than me.

My sisters specifically but there was just a lot of like there was abuse that was going on. There was sexual abuse that happened among the student body that was handled horrifically. There just wasn't good leadership in general. And it just is for me it gave such a great indication of how this message and this type of gospel and this type of

the religion, ideology, this lettering movement in general. It's just so destructive to its own kind, you know? It's not, there's some group served where it gets you isolated and selfish and you're not good for the rest of society, but at least you succeed in flourish in your own little world.

But like, it doesn't even give you the tools to succeed in your own world. I don't think that anyone who graduated from the Daniel Academy is like actively involved in leadership right now. I think almost everyone who I know of has completely left that world entirely because there just is not good fruit that comes from that community.

There's a lot of good people. There's a lot of, and I'm sure there's some individuals who appreciated their time and experience there. So I don't wanna paint with too broad of a brush there, but largely it just was, it was a negligent upbringing and to then now see, so then I pull up the earning grew and report and it kind of breaks my heart to see that, oh, that was happening in the 80s and the 90s.

And my parents and the leaders, Mike Bickle and others were being warned about the detriment of these programs that they were running. People were pointing it out saying, hey, this is not good for your own children.

Your children are talking about listening to Bob Jones and talking about opening their third eye and that's Kuku Banana Shit. Like, that's just too much and there were warnings about it and yet nothing was changed.

And so I had to go through the same experiences that people were going through in the 80s and 90s and I'm concerned, the Daniel Academy still exists. Like, the Bethel Academy still exists. There's a lot of these schools that are about equipping the young generation and it's just destructive and it's gonna keep going because these warnings are falling on deaf ears.

I think that's one of the biggest problems that I had with this. We, so we didn't call it Joel's army, we didn't call it manifested sons of God. I didn't know that was a thing until I started my research and I was like, oh my gosh, there's a name for this thing that we have.

And what's funny is if you go back and you study the histories, they, it's not credited to Branum that all of this came from but I can find him teaching it long before these, the guys who are credited were starting this.

So this, and I don't think Branum invented it. I think it was an emerging collaboration. It was like, you know, these guys cross-pollinated. So I believe it was an evolution into this and one guy claimed it, but that was one of the biggest problems that I had because when you're focused on creating the army for the end of days, you're not focused on living out until the end of days. And all of the children, so we talked beforehand, I was one of the fortunate ones, I actually went to public school because my parents thought that this was nonsense that you can't go to public school. So I went, but many of my

peers did not. They were homeschooled and there were these pseudo homeschool curriculums that the way it worked in many states, you had to get an official approved curriculum. But what they would do is they'd get that and they would get some cult thing and they would just kind of blend it together, focusing more heavily on the cult than they did in actual education. I had a problem with this and I knew some people who there's no way that they could have ever amounted to anything beyond just grunt labor because that's all they had. They didn't have the skills, right?

And then when we moved to Jeffersonville, my, and I got married, my wife was a school teacher, she's got a master's degree in education. But her family was more in favor of the homeschool thing. So I let my kids do it and we began to notice that there's just huge problems with the way that they're teaching school. They're not teaching school is the problem. And they focused on our prophetic history. So my kids could tell you that backwards and forward, but the things that they need to know to survive had no idea. They knew, you know, there are elements that they had to know to

pass the the board approved curriculums, et cetera. But it never went beyond that because it always focused on, did you know there was a prophet and the angel came down to see all this nonsense, right? So we had a problem with this. We ended up taking our kids out of the group thing and we did our own homeschooling. And the whole thing is just I look back and I regret that I put my kids through this because they're doing well now, but they had to really struggle to get back in touch with reality. Once you've been, once you've been robbed of that, that's robbing a child of his

education, basically, once you've been robbed of that, you can't just give it to him. It takes a lot of time and effort and not not just for you, but for them as well. So I'm glad we're not part of that, but I'm really saddened to know that it's not just our cult that had that. This was spreading across multiple splinter groups. Yeah. And the and the reasoning behind it even in my community is this, well, we're going to raise these children up who then will go out into the seven spheres of influence and be able to be messengers for the gospel. But I had no

One idea, how to interact with people who didn't believe the same things that I did, because I was so isolated going back to that isolation thing. So not only was there not the being equipped with a proper education, you also just are not, you don't know how to interact with someone who is a Buddhist.

Don't know how to interact with someone who is an atheist, and don't know how to interact with someone who is, especially if someone is in the LGBTQ community, and you short-circuit, because you're like, I don't know how to interact with a person who has different pronouns or something like that.

There's no exposure to the rest of the world. And so this fanciful idea that these children will be equipped to go out into the world and be sources of light is just silly. It's just a silly idea, because of course what happens, we go out into the world and we're totally ill-equipped, and we get run over and swallowed, living in a place like Los Angeles is gonna eat you up so quickly if you are not ready to know how to swim in this environment.

And it's a lot of children who are just not being taught how to swim and then expecting them to suddenly go, not just go into the current and know how to swim, but to be these beacons of light.

And it clearly is not working. It clearly is, you know, there's a big question that religious leaders of this sort of ladder rain NAR movement have to address at some point is how many of their own children are completely abandoning the religion entirely.

You know, it's just, the Joel's army that was supposed to be raised up is almost exclusively agnostic and atheist or certainly even if they are Christian knots NAR versions of Christianity because so many people are just abandoning in that because there's no way it's not sustainable.

I think of myself specifically, even if I had wanted to stay in that world, there absolutely was no option for me to do it. It just, there was no coherent path for me to honestly live in this world.

Unless I just became a liar like my father or like Michael, there was no way for me to honestly survive in the world that I grew up in. No, it's difficult to survive. I mean, you can, but it takes a lot of work.

And, you know, in the end, it really comes down to this. We live in a world where education is key to... surviving. You have to have at least the basics of an education. So if you leave and you've been robbed of this, then one of the first things that you have to do is further your education.

But you know, you mentioned people leaving the faith. This is common also among the message cult people. Whenever a brand of might gets into the real world and realizes that they have been robbed of their education and start to get one, there's another interesting problem that happens.

When you are educated of the things of the world and I'm not talking about just secular, I'm talking about world history in general. You're educated in the good guys, the villains, the history, the good bad and ugly. You start to see patterns in that history and then you suddenly start to think, wait a minute, I grew up in a religion where it matches that pattern. I don't care which history figure Hitler, for example. You look at how he manipulated the masses and the things that he did. It clearly matches many of these cults and charismatic leaders.

And you start studying that history and you're like, well, what do you do with that, man? And because they have so closely tied the cult and its ideology to what they say was Christianity, the one and the same and the cult mine, we have to give it up. So people just leave it all together.

In the end, it's another thing that you have to process after you leave. What was that that I was in? What good was it? What did it do for me? And then the harder part is not everything that they taught you was bad. So you have to kind of weed out. What was good? What was bad? What's useful?

What's not useful? And I will say in the balance scales of life, the usefulness like way down here, but it's a process and it's a difficult process, but I'm glad that you're able to come through it and I'm hoping that somebody listening can realize that there are ways to get around this and to move forward in life. And I hope something that we've said can help somebody to do it.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that that's probably been one of the most heartbreaking things that I've had to deal with even in this last year or two years where all of the scandal with Mike Pickle and my own father and really realizing some of the degree of the depravity of the world that I grew up in is I've had to fight so hard to hold on to the good of not just the community that I was raised in, but the people and the virtues has felt so choked out because all of the toxic messages has been intertwined with all of that, which is good. And it's hard not to feel this

of nihilistic, just throughout all meaning, throughout all value, all of it is for not. And fighting to have the compassion, fighting to have the love and the understanding and the empathy that I was once taught as a young child is like one of the most difficult processes here to extricate the good from the bad. But I hope that, yes, that people listening in my process of this and your own process of this can help others because it is a worthwhile process to try to salvage that was, which was good and meaningful from a world that was otherwise very

corrupt. Well, hopefully it helps somebody. So if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Branham.org. For more about the dark side of the new Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponize Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Soon, Audible.