"Prophets" or Opportunists: The Kansas City Fellowship and International House of Prayer

Music 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 and friend, Jed Hartley, son of a prophet and former member of the International House of Prayer. Jed, it's good to be back and I'm a little excited for today's episode. You probably don't know this but in the latter rain circles, especially in the Brandham cults, there were all these series of, they were called sermons, quote unquote sermons, but they were questions and answers and the way it worked was everybody put their question

into a little basket and brought it up to the front. But I strongly suspect that the questions that were placed in the basket were pre-filtered and the, there might have been some that were invented to go into the basket and then William Brandham would proceed to answer questions as though he's defending the faith. But the funny part of it is if you actually ignore the answer but just look at the question itself and try to understand what was being asked, you can unravel like the whole cult. It just kind of falls apart. It's a little weird. People are like,

why are you preaching this nonsense? And he goes like these circular answers and there's really no good answer. So it's kind of funny today we're doing questions and answers. That's the first thing that comes into my head. That's funny too because my dad did this process with his business and with our family where we would do a similar question and answer we would put in questions and he would like read them out. This only happened a few times but every single time he did it he would have questions that he clearly wrote but it was he was doing it as a bit like he was like

you know if he was I can't remember exactly what it was but Bob how are you so handsome? Oh thank you guys well you know like he would do the questions that he wanted to answer. I don't think it probably was as insidious but that's weird that it's that was also a pattern in my world.

Yeah yeah it's it's so weird like the question if you can understand what's being asked, and then you can obviously tell the ones that are invented. We did a year ago, two years ago, I think it was with Naomi Wright, who handles a lot of the support.

She and I did this thing where we cumulatively started asking questions that everybody has been answering, asking, which is very similar to what you and I are about to do. But the questions weren't like somebody's writing it out on a piece of paper, it's just we had 10, 15 people asked the same thing, so let's go for it.

And some of the questions, honestly, I had myself. And so I just simply asked them. And I know that during the course of this episode today, I'm so curious about a lot of the inner workings of IHOPK.

See, I'm probably going to be the one asking some of these questions. But anyway, this could turn out to be a lot of fun. Yeah, absolutely. All right, so how do you want to begin?

We've got a lot of people who are asking about the Kansas City Provinces, Mike Bickel, Bob Hartley, Bob Jones. All of these guys who got together and how did all of this begin? Was this a genuine movement of God?

And there's a lot of mystery surrounding how it all was conceived. And the answers given are so vague. I've read to myself, and you read what's called the quote unquote prophetic history. It's so vague, man, that if it were a real history, it would have been more concise.

You know what I mean? You wouldn't be dancing around big topics. So I know the biggest question, which we may not even be able to answer, was this real? What happened that brought these men together?

What made this all come to be? That's the most common variation of that is the most common question that I get specifically in reference to my father of like, what drew him in what did he have?

Was there some early prophetic stuff at the beginning that was genuine? And then it just went all to hell, so to speak. And so just to clarify, in this, I am just giving my opinion.

A lot of what I do is just sharing some of my opinions. But in the past, I want to be clear when I know things specifically, because I've had firsthand accounts of it, or my mother, my father, has had firsthand accounts of particular things.

This is just speculation for me, because of course, we can't know what was going on in the minds and the hearts and souls of these men. And I wasn't even alive when a lot of this began.

But I think that I would love to just give my. best shot at answering this question, because I kind of have danced around it for a while. Quite frankly, I don't think that any of it was ever real, at least with my father.

I do not think that he ever genuinely believed it. And this is where I've, this is, this is a recent belief of mine. I think he's still an opportunity to be in a position of power and he liked and appreciated

the attention that he got from that community. I think that if he was in California and he had found some new wave, new age cult,

I think that he would have joined that. If he was in a Buddhist circle, he would have joined a Buddhist cult. You know, like I think that it wasn't anything other than the appeal of the world of this grandiose world

where there was prophets, there were visions, there were dreams, there were miracles, there was healing, there was a world of magic. I think that that appealed to a sort of grandiosity that my father has always had within himself and that's what led him into it.

I don't think that he was earnestly seeking after a relationship with the Lord or a devotion to the Bible. In fact, he talks, he tells a lot of stories about how when he first was a preacher, which if you know his testimony and a lot of other individuals' testimonies, you see a lot of these young believers get grafted in the community and that start preaching right away.

You have this sort of like, there's no downtime, there's no ghost study for four years at this institution.

It's kind of catch the wave, right the wave. And if you are a charismatic individual who's good at public speaking, you're gonna get thrust to the front of the wave as long as you can breathe, bring people in.

And so my father even jokes a lot about how he was like preaching trotskyism. Like he was full like communist, he wanted, he was preaching like pro, you know, communal living and all that.

When he was first, when he first got saved, he didn't really understand a lot of the ideology of the specific world that he was in. And naturally, I think that that is more, like he has these like beliefs in communal living and.

and originally he was very much believed that, you know, wealth accumulation was bad and negative. And so there was this sort of like give everything to the poor and then come together as a community, which there were some culty issues with that too of he wanted to be on a, like him and my mother moved to Zimbabwe for a while right after they got married because he wanted to go work on a farm where they did communal living.

And he wanted to learn what communal living was like and he was doing it on behalf of Kansas City Fellowship. And the idea was that he was going to come back and teach people how to live off the grid and all of the, he's different things.

That of course never materialized because that was never really the full intention of the organization or the ideology of the organization. Especially with Mike Bickel, like Mike Bickel is not pro those things. And so it never came to be.

But for a very long time, I have dealt with this too of whether or not my father did believe or does believe now. And I just don't think it makes sense. I think the story makes more sense if you say that what drew him into that world was this, it was an opportunity, not straight like grift, like there's a bunch of suckers in this world and I'm gonna take advantage of them.

But when I say these things to this group of people, they treat me like I'm a near God. And I like that feeling. And I think that that's what he was chasing after. I think he's what he continued to chase after.

I think it's what he got him sucked into Bethel that does the exact same thing that Aihop does to maybe even a larger level with this sort, their sort of hero worship of spiritual heroes.

And I think it's ultimately what caused his unraveling is because he continued to seek after that high

of being a sort of adored prophet and that led him to them making up stuff, fictionalizing things, doing a lot of fraud to fill that in. And I think that that ultimately kind of tore him apart.

I've very seldom given my opinion. I usually just talk about the facts, but this is one question that you're never going to find facts to really satisfy the question. So the closest I can do is give some opinion that is based on some similar history.

But as we've talked about Aihop KC was basically randomism 2.0. And the key players in Aihop KC are very, very similar to the key players. that I grew up with in the random call, right?

And so the same personalities, it's so odd because I see in Mike Pickle, I can name the faces of the people who are the Mike Pickles that I grew up with or the Bob Keynes or the Paul Keynes or the Bob Jones.

It's so freaky weird. Yet at the same time, everyone in the random calls and in the IHOP calls and in you name said cult, they're trained and manipulated to live in a very black or white world.

True or false, right or wrong, good or bad, good or evil, you know, this kind of thing. And when you're around the upper echelons of these cults, whenever you're around the key figures in it, you are aware fully that people are far more complex than yes or no black or white.

You have some of the figures that I, I can picture their faces in my mind is so weird. I picture them in my memory as a good person because I knew the good person.

Some of these people were really good people inside. At the same time, they're very flawed human beings. Some of them had severe problems, not to the level of what we see with Mike Pickle, but some of them had problems because they're human and they have their struggles.

Some of them, even though they were completely ruining the lives of people, they were doing it unknowingly and they had good intentions. So you have this foundation of people who are just highly complex.

You can't really put them into a box that says, these people had bad intentions and so they created this cult or so they did this doctor, whatever it is. What's really weird about this is, and I'm gonna try to say this delicately because I know I'm an anger a lot of people.

In the charismatic world, there is this emotional hype and I think the best way that I can explain it, I live in Indiana and I'm not a basketball fan, but no means. I should be, but I'm not.

I do like to watch the chiefs, which is ironic because of Kansas City, but I don't like basketball and one of my business partners asked me to go to a, things are Louisville Cardinals game.

And I was like, no, I don't wanna go. I don't wanna see this. I don't like basketball and I tried to say it in a nice way that didn't sound offensive as what I just said and he coerced me into going so I went.

So I go into this auditorium fully aware that I don't like basketball. I'm like, as I'm walking down to my aisle, I'm like, what am I doing here? This is gonna be so boring to me.

The hype and the emotion of the crowd and all of the sounds and buzzers and it was one of the best times I've ever had. it was fabulous, right? Because I was getting into that hype, that emotional high that's in the building.

Well, these same people, if you meet them outside of the building, say you're just like my grandpa worked on a farm, so I'd go talk to him on the farm, the most boring person ever. But you get him in a crowd and the way they speak, the way they talk, the way they draw on the person's emotions, there's this very charismatic style that brings people into a hype. And that's one of the things, if I said, I've never said my opinion about the charismatic movement, but if I were to have a problem with it, it's that the hype has more focus than the fundamentals. And that's for me, that's a huge

problem because of what we see here. So some of these men get into, you know, likely good intentions, they get together, they get in this hype and they start speaking. And like you said, the crowd responds and they feed off of it. And they start thinking that they're somebody. And my grandpa, if you knew him, he was this humble, like you would not expect him to be like this, but get him in front of a crowd, man, and he ate it up. And he felt like he had the authority and power because of the crowd and because of the way they responded to him. So it put him into a place

where he had the power to ruin people's lives and it should have never been. So you've got these complicated men who get into a religion of hype, they feed on the hype. And the problem is the flaws are the thing, are the anchors that keep holding them back from doing good things. And as we see with, you know, the problems that are coming out with IHOP KC, very flawed individuals should never have been in power and were. And the people are the ones that that really elevated them into the status of authoritarian figures that they were.

But let me ask you this. So if you, there's a big difference between getting sucked in, right? Because I love the metaphor of the basketball game and the sort of frenzy. I've, I totally get that. In a lot of times, the only times where I felt a sort of like the same thing I felt during some of those spiritual conferences that I felt as a kid that with all the spectacle, especially at IHOP where there is so much music and production, honestly sports games are some of the only thing that I felt close to that because there's this near frenzy and everyone's in

some sort of agreement. So I think that's a really good analogy where the question is, is, and we might talk about this later because this is another question, but people get... People getting sucked into that makes total sense to me because it's so appealing.

You go to this conference, you're not thinking about it, you know, you don't know what it entails. You get there just like you being like, oh, I don't really care about basketball. And then suddenly you're there and you feel it.

And it feels different than anything you've felt before. What I think is different is there are people who are leading the conference. And it's one thing to believe what someone is saying up at front.

It's another thing to be upfront and be the one who is coming up with what is being said. Knowing for well, that it's not true. You know, it's just some extent because this is the thing is that you have patterns of Paul Cain, Bob Jones all have talked about how they have prophesied and they knew that their prophecy was false.

They were manufacturing something. It wasn't just my dad who was doing that. There is all of this sort of at least to some degree. I fully believe that they believed, you know, half the things that they said, but they knew some of what they were saying was not from God that it was totally made up.

At the very least, they knew some of it was fabricated. If not deep down knew, all of it was fabricated. And I think that that is where the story of someone who has good intentions getting sucked into a radical world makes total sense to me.

The story of someone who has good intentions who creates a radical world or creates their own version. So Mike Bickel wasn't a Paul Cain disciple or a Bob Jones disciple and so far like he created his own thing.

He created his own doctrine, same with my dad. My dad created his own doctrine, his own prophecies. Bob Jones created his own doctrine and prophecies. Paul Cain, Branum obviously created his own doctrines. There was models of it that had gone before them.

But they were generating something new. They were creating their own conference or their own basketball game, so to speak. And this is where I, and obviously I'm going to be a lot more critical than a lot of people because I saw this.

I saw my father like lose his soul to this entire spectacle.

But this is where I say I have heavy doubts that it was well intentioned men who then got sucked into the spectacle. I believe that it was men who always intended to be at the center of the spectacle.

Yeah, I get it. And see, that's the problem too. You can't really look at this in a black or white. They're all good and they're all bad or they're all bad. You know what I mean?

Yeah, so I'm not going to see. at which, in my opinion, are the villains in the scenario. But you can have one or two guys who are just totally full of crap, making up all kinds of stuff.

And then the other guys who are kind of believing it. And what's weird about it is, again, and it has to do with the way that the emotional highs happen in the Pentecostal Charismatic Movement.

I'll give another example. There were quote-unquote supernatural things that took place that were unexplainable that happened within my family. Some of them connected to Brandon, some of them not, just they happened, and the family can't explain what happened, it's kind of weird.

You take one sibling of, say my aunt, who saw this thing happen, whatever it was. And for years and years, she tells the story to people. But because of the way that the Pentecostal Charismatic Movement creates a supernatural spin on some of the stories, some of the things which likely could have been explainable were instead, God did this great thing.

Some of it was unexplainable, I'm not gonna deny that. But there were key elements that were explainable. But because the story sounds better, when you tell it to somebody, you start supernaturalizing some of the things that aren't supernatural.

Yeah. Well then people start repeating that story and it gets back to say my aunt, right? Well she hears it and she gets confirmation that it's supernatural because it has gone through that circle and the group think has started.

So the next time she tells the story, the bits and pieces that she had somewhat supernaturalized were fully supernatural. And she tells the story to the next group of people and then it goes through the circles.

And the story grows and grows as like a fish story. It just grows and grows forever until it's insane, right? I have another aunt who was not around any of this and she was there whenever these said supernatural events happen.

So in her mind, she doesn't have the group think aspect. All she is aware of is something happened. I can't really explain it. And then she hears the testimony from the other aunt who's in the group think and she actually called me up and she said, John, this is crazy.

You gotta look what she's saying. Yeah. Now here's the weird part to the aunt who's in the group think because it has happened so gradually and so supernatural, quote unquote supernaturally, she truly believes the nonsense that's coming out of her mouth.

Whereas the other aunt has a memory that doesn't have the group think and it just has bits and pieces. So... In this group of men who were starting IHOP KC say one of them is insane say Bob Jones was insane, which I I have an opinion. I'm not gonna say it Yeah, say he was insane and he starts rattling off nonsense The other key element to remember in the Pentecostal Charismatic hype is Whenever you spout off these quote-unquote supernatural things You have a tendency Because of the bias because of the confirmations as it goes through the circles

You have a tendency to be extremely vague in what you say So that it can be interpreted in a supernatural way if you give all of the details it really can't So Bob Jones say he was insane and he has some weird prophecy, but he's so incredibly vague that you could apply it to anything Then After some event happens whatever it is he goes back he goes to Bickel or whoever and says look That's exactly this vague thing that I was talking about and then Bickel's like oh wow I see the red and green equal or the red and the white equals Kansas City Chiefs or whatever it is

I don't know You know that process happens in in these movements and it's for me. It's a real problem because I'm more of a I don't know I'm more analytical than this. I have to know all the details But by nature the way that all of this happens it happens so vaguely that you don't get the details Yeah, you know what it the What it reminded me of is if you've had a friend or Someone or even you yourself at a time if you're have a Terrible terrible crush on someone and say they're say you're going back to high school

Whatever and you have a terrible crush on Some girl who's in one of your classes and you're talking with your friends does she like me? Does she not and she says something little that it gives no real indication That she likes you but over the whole summer you think about it and you're like oh this really This really meant something and it builds up and it builds up and it builds up and by the time You know the next semester rolls around you're convinced that you and her are Gonna write off into the sunset together or whatnot and that's obviously a much like more common

Less insidious or or just sort of natural way, but I think that What I heard you saying sometimes is that When you have this desire for great things and for great spectacle there is not even a

Outright sinister way that these things can go from true to false, you know, that they there can be true experiences that were hard to explain in a variety of ways that then become, you know, there was a comment over Kansas City that foretold of Paul or Pat Beggle being healed and then suddenly becomes this thing and that Jesus is going to return in 2012 and all this, you know, how you got from A to B is not always someone behind the scenes with a pen and paper being like, I'm going to trick all of these suckers. I'm going to create all of this. It's not that sort of

con artist setup. You don't need them to be con artist to see this world develop because all it takes is a lot of people invested in the spectacle, invested that the desire to be great, to desire to be a part of something great and the desire to be close to a God who is only speaking to you and your group, you know, and I think that those sort of motivations can then lead to people having a lot of a natural progression of this sort of detached grandiosity that I hop be camp. I will say, I do think that there I still will push back and say, I do think that there was

some pen and paper scheme. Especially with Mike Beggle and my father, which those are the two I'm probably closest to and know Mike Beggle, like you got to think about that Mike, Mike Beggle was grooming women before he even began doing the church, you know, before he, with my mom, when she was 15 and he was 20, he was using sort of the love bombing, narcissistic sort of tendencies to who my mom, with there being an age gap and he was her, he was the pastor, he was the youth pastor at the church that she went to so he had a position of authority over her. So this is before he,

it's married before I hop before all of this, he was already doing some of these practices and then you think about when he's 25 and Tammy Woods is 14. This is when he's just starting, this is when he's getting the solemn assembly prophecies, all the big prophecies. In the meantime, he is plotting and scheming how he can develop a romantic relationship with a 14-year-old.

And that's not a natural progression of some desire, you know, that's sinister. And he knew it was wrong. And if you read her story, you can see her talk about how he would say, hey, if anyone ever catches us, you have to take the responsibility for this, that you have to say that you were the one who was coming onto me because I have a family and I have a ministry and all of these things.

And so he was scheming. He was outright scheming. If he would hold her hand and then if someone came around the corner, he would drop it. He knew what he was doing was wrong.

And he continued to do it and he figured out ways to do it in which he would not be caught. So I think that with Mike, and very similar, I think to my father, too, of like, I actually think at the beginning, my father was less devious and sinister because, again, it was more about grandiosity for him.

But there was always a measure, there was, I remember being, I remember being like eight years old. And one of the, this is a, I don't want to trauma dump or anything like that.

But obviously, I share a lot of trauma on this podcast. But when I was very young, consistently the thing, my father was, would get pretty angry and he would get pretty intense. He would be physically abusive in any instance in which his prophecy was questioned.

So, and he still is that way, where if there was ever a time where I told him that I didn't believe in his prophecy or I didn't take it. So there was one time he confronted me from a prophetic stance and I told him that it wasn't true.

And I was really little and he got physically abusive with me. And it was one of the first times where I, like, was terrified of my father. And it became pattern where it just, it became something, do not question his prophecy because if he, his question about that, he will become literally violent.

And I think that that, to me, indicates like I'm sure that there's, I don't want to, you know, there's a lot of people who will psychoanalyze what that was coming from. But for me, I think it was pretty straightforward of he felt in a sane amount of guilt that he was always repressing about this sort of manufactured persona that he was creating.

And any time, something close to him, shined a light on the sort of man behind the curtain that led to violent reactions. And I think that that, That's where I'm getting out of this.

I do think that there were plots behind the scenes. I think that there was men who knew what they were doing was wrong. And I think that the only way for me to personally understand the world that I grew up in is to have at least some understanding of that, that there wasn't just well-meaning people who got caught up in the spectacle.

There was a desire to hide what they knew was sinful throughout it. 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 Brandham Historical Research's website, William-brandham.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon, and others with links to the paper, audio, and digital versions of each book.

You can also find resources and documentation 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.

And as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching. On behalf of William-brandham Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support.

So let's talk a little bit about narcissistic personality disorder, which has, you know, if you study the colts and if you read Dr. Stephen Hesson's book, combating cult mind control, it goes into it quite a bit.

To be a cult leader, you almost have to have this disorder because you have to have the visions of grandeur and the self importance, et cetera. So they all tend to have it. And I've wrestled with this for years because like you, my family was in this mess and we're really destroying the lives of people.

And I've wrestled with it for a long time. And I keep coming back to the weirdness that I remember because there were things that my grandfather clearly knew to be false. He was there when he witnessed it to be false.

And he would be quite untruthful in saying the things that he knew was false. He would say that they were true. There's a few things that Charles and I have mentioned in the historical podcast where like one of the big things, it really reminds you of the Church of Latter-day Saints, the Golden Plates, that never can be found.

William Brandham had these prophecies that can be found. never be found. They were buried in the cornerstone in the church. My grandfather was there when they dug them up twice. And both times, the first time nobody knew that they weren't there and Grandpa was probably truly surprised. The second time he pretended to be surprised, and I'm told, and even as a child, I had no idea there's dug up twice, but I would hear him say, it's buried right there in the cornerstone. So he clearly knew, right? So there were things my grandfather knew that was completely false. And if you look at, if you just look at the retirement

estate or the estate after his death, you can tell that there was some financial schemes behind this thing. It clearly was. There were millions of dollars that I had no idea existed. So on pen and paper, I could tell you that yeah, there's a strategy. And from the things that I know, I can say, yeah, he was lying to the people. And this was a plot. But here's the other weird part about this. As I said, people are complex and personality disorders make it even more complicated there. There were things that my grandfather fully believed. 100% without question,

he thought it was real. The things that he knew were false were a counterbalance to the things that he truly believed to be real. The things that were false, if they were false, everything that he believed can't be true. That's how weird this is. But he believed it. And he genuinely believed it.

There are personality disorders where people can't reconcile the things that are right in front of their face. And then take it a step further with narcissistic personality disorder. Take a person who's in that exact scenario. He believes part of it. He knows part of it is completely fraudulent.

He knows there's a financial strategy and he can become rich or he can get power or fame or whatever. And he's completely flawed. But he has this personality disorder where he feeds on the praise and the worship and rises up into power. So when you add the narcissism into this equation, it ends up with a scenario where there is no black or white question that you can ask that has an answer because in many cases it's actually both. Yeah. And I think that it's such an excellent point to be made. And it's hard because on one end we don't want to be diagnosing all of these

individuals and saying they have this disorder, especially because the one thing sometimes When you attribute, especially sinister behavior to a disorder, I want to be cautious about that because I think that there's a lot of people who have different personality and mental disorders, schizophrenia or dissociative identity disorder and stuff like that that don't create aren't dangerous, aren't inherently dangerous.

So there's a moral component that doesn't disappear. Even with narcissistic personality disorder, I bet a lot of celebrities and sports, I mean Patrick Mahomes has to be a narcissist because he thinks the whole world revolves around him because it kind of does.

I shouldn't quite say that because I don't know anything, but I just mean to believe that you're going to be the best in the world and anything takes a little bit of delusion and that's not always leads to sinister things.

The one thing that I want to talk about more specifically though is with narcissistic personality disorder, I've given this metaphor before, I can't remember if I did it with you on one of these episodes, but if I did, I'll just repeat it because I think it is worth repeating.

When I try to describe what it's like when I say that my father is a narcissist and he even agrees over the last several years, he's like, I think I probably am a narcissist, which was one of the better moments between me and my father when he sort of was like, yeah, maybe you're right, maybe I do have this, it grounded our relationship a little bit better.

This was several years back before a lot of a scandal, but anyway, the way that I would like people to say because that word is used a lot of times and I think it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

It can mean just like egoistic, love the side of your own reflection, very self enamored, but with my father, the way that I describe it is that, imagine you, there's that character who runs a foul of some wizard, that there's this character who is cursed by a wizard and that person is cursed so that their very existence is contingent upon other people noticing them.

So theoretically, let's say that if you are not being thought about constantly, if there's not someone in the world who's thinking about you at every moment, you suddenly blink out of existence. You disappear and you cease to exist and you're forgotten in the world.

Say that curse is over a particular person. Now think about how that person might interact with the world, how they might go about living their daily life. They are going to take every opportunity they can to thrust themselves into the center of attention of every situation that they are ever in.

And if you have ever, for people who are listening who have ever met my father, they are going to sudden things are going to click because not even in sinister ways, just in like when traveling with my dad to we go in to order coffee, he's like interacting with people or just like reading their book.

So he's like, hey, what's your reading there? And can you tell me how to get to heaven and all doing all of these different things that for a while was like endearing about my father, but then it became a little too much, but it's not even that he needs to be adored, right?

It's great if it's adored, it's great if everybody loves him. He just needs to have people thinking about him. And if you think of him acting like this character who like if for any moment people forget him, he disappears out of existence, you can understand why this world of the charismatic

spectacle world and being a prophet in that world might be really appealing to someone who has a narcissistic personality disorder like that because you can become a celebrity and you can become the most important person in someone's life instantly.

By just saying the magic words that they want to hear and is it insidious, is it wrong, is it more of it? That's where I think that it gets to that line of like it is genuinely a personality and like a mental disorder.

Like it is like in the same way someone with OCD cannot help but think I like do a seven step procedure

to make sure that all of their stove tops are turned off before they leave the house, even though they didn't even turn the stove on today. Like in the way that there are mental disorders that compel people to do things that don't make rational sense that aren't really reflective of their character or their belief system but it's just this sort of necessary compulsion that they have.

I think that's what you see certainly with my father. I think that it's different with Mike Bickle, but some version of that is true with him,

certainly with Bob Jones as well, whether that humanizes these men or whether it just is adding sort of more context and explanation. I'm not sure, but I definitely think that that is a very real reality when talking about these men.

Yeah, for me, that's really the hard part about all of this because I'm fascinated with psychology. I probably had I had the chance to do my life over, I'd probably become a psychologist because I'm just fascinated with how the brain works. And some of these people, like you said, have severe problems. Some of these problems are criminal problems. If the allegations are true, these are criminal problems. I'll say it like that. What I have come to do is to separate the criminal and the flaws of their psychology, the flaws of their mind from the religion. Because

as weird as this sounds, you can have people who are in leadership, who are criminally flawed, who believe in the religious side of things, and believe that they're going to be saved from the criminal flaws that they know that they have in their head. So they're inwardly wrestling their entire life. It's actually sad if you really think about it. I know for the victims, this is a terrible thing for me to have said, but if you study psychology, you're aware that this this is a problem. And yet at the same time, the men and sometimes women who are in this position

because of the structure of the, especially in the Pentecostal Charismatic Circles, but sometimes beyond that, even in I've seen this in mainstream churches that are visited, because of the structure and hierarchy of the church itself, where the leadership is just slightly above the people, where they're your authority and you have to submit to their authority. I actually sat through a sermon where I was asked to submit after I left the cult. And that was, it wasn't long before we left and we started attending another church.

Anyway, this is a huge problem, but because of the structure, people have learned to shut off critical thinking. And you cannot do this. This is really, if you really take everything down to its roots, this is the problem that allowed IHOPKC, Branemism pretty much every cult to exist.

If everybody in there in the movement starts shutting down their critical thinking and then a question arises, is this person, what Is this person a predator? Is he doing something bad? The first inclination in these groups, sadly, is, no, this is a man of God or a woman of God.

It can't be. Let's give him another chance. And I had this conversation with Adam recently. If your daughter was on a volleyball team and that question came up about the coach, there's no way you're gonna get a second chance, man.

Pull my daughter out of this. I do not want my daughter to be around this, right? But in the church, it's different, and it should never be. So, like I said, I've learned to separate the religion from the criminality.

But what does that leave you? Because now you've got a problem where yes, this person was in power. Yes, this person had problems. Yes, this person needed help and wasn't getting it. But the people themselves really allowed the situation to happen where they didn't get the help they need and it progressed.

Now, where it gets interesting is in the case that we're talking about here, this all began from years back before. If I remember the dates, right, is not the allegations. It's not happening at the same time this alleged prophetic history is happening.

Like it's all playing out, right? So that gets even weirder, right? Because was this person, was Mike Bickle? If he was truly doing the things that they say he's doing, was he really thinking that if he became this man of God that is being proclaimed, is God gonna take this away from him?

Or was it a means to cover it all up and then have further problems? And that's really a question. I'll never be able to answer. I don't even have an opinion. I just don't know.

But what fascinates me are people with that complex and the group that enables them are so complex. Yeah, yeah. And that process of enabling, so this is, I love what you're saying because it gets to, a lot of the discontent that I have felt in the last couple of years about the path that my own father that I've watched him go down

because there's this rhetoric in the church that you believe the best in people. And especially about leaders. That it's actually not, it's maybe exclusively for leaders because you have these churches that are quite genuinely some of the most judgmental churches in America right now.

I mean, they have the most specific judgmental politics, policies, it's not like this is some universal list everyone gets into heaven. They have very firm exclusionary doctrines that do not believe the best in people, that do not believe the best in other truths.

or anything like that. But yet there's this rhetoric of that, you know,

Mike is innocent until proven guilty and that we should believe the best and just because these accusations are out there, doesn't mean that they're true. And I saw a lot of the stuff with my father and it was very weird to seeing people say that to me about my own father, you know, we should believe the best in him.

And my dad would say that to me too, is like, because he would be like, well, you know, gosh, have you heard my side of the story and just, and it's like, I live with you.

I saw, not all of this is not a side to the story. Like, this is what happened. Like, I have the marks from when you abuse me. Like, and I've seen this in other people, this is exactly what is happening.

And what's crazy about this covering of leaders, this protection and enabling of them

is actually probably the most destructive thing for those people individually. Because if you look at my father as an example, if someone had stepped in two decades, or three decades ago, would he first started to exhibit some narcissistic tendencies with prophecy and all that?

And held him accountable for it and said, hey, you can't do this. You can't be a part of this community if you're gonna keep doing this. Then potentially, who knows? Maybe he would have just found a different community, but maybe he would have had to address these sort of mental health issues that he had.

And the compassion, like it's weird to talk about these men who are very much villains and talk about how they might have been influenced by mental health issues because it, you don't wanna have compassion for these men or because they're villains, but at the same time, I do think compassion would have been useful at the beginning.

So even, even, even, let's say, Mike Bickle. Mike Bickle gets confronted at 25 years old for grooming a 14-year-old girl.

There's not really a good way that that story ends like that is just horrible, but if he certainly, it would be good for his family to know that, that his wife to know that she just married a man who's prophesying her death, that would be, that would be edifying for her, but also for Mike, you know, gives him an opportunity to probably go spend some time in prison and then you can have actual restoration.

Like, this is that so much of the... Christian world talks about, restoration and all of this, and they just skip all the steps of accountability. Like, it's like if Samuel had confronted David and been like, hey, you did this and David was like, ah, you got me and then just everything went back.

Like, the whole point of that story in the Bible was that David did something horribly wrong, had to repent of it, still lost his son because of it and was punished severely for it, had to repent and sack off the nashes.

And his failure is recorded in the Bible for pretty much the rest of human history to be aware of his failings.

And there's none. There's none of that. There's no accountability. There's only covering. There is this sort of like, let's just look in the other direction. And so I know that this is, I had a conversation with someone.

I reached out to someone who is still close to my father right now and I was like, hey, I'm really concerned because he's still abusing alcohol and I'm getting text messages from him that indicate he might have dementia and I reach out and I'm like, I'm very concerned for him.

And this person that I reach out to was like, I've seen what you've said about your father don't pretend like you care about him. And I understand that from their perspective, they're wrong, they're horribly wrong because I do, whether people understand it or not, I do care about my father.

And that's why I wish. I wish I could go back 10, 20 years in time. I don't know what I would have been able to do as a child. But I wish that there could have been intervention before there was obscene issues of abuse, right?

I wish that there could have been some sense in which there was accountability before the spiraling happened, before my father lost connection with his family, before he abused these women, before he built an entire ministry and industry out of fraud.

Like I wish for his sake, not for my sake, not for the victims sake, I care about that too, obviously. But just for my own father's sake, I wish there had been some measure of accountability.

It's also why, frankly, I'm furious at IHOP, Mike Bickle and Bill Johnson and Bethel. Not because, like the reason I'm most saliently angry at these individuals is because I saw my father be covered by them and lose his whole to that world.

I mean, I'm also angry because of all of the other abuse and all that sort of stuff, but yeah. The way in which the covering of abusive men is destructive to everyone, including the abusive men, and yet no one is doing anything about it, it's just such, well sorry, no one in leadership in these charismatic communities is doing anything about it, is so, so discouraging.

So the funny part is you have pretty well summed up where I was headed with this, and we didn't compare notes at all for this episode, which is kind of funny if you think about it, but where I was headed with the sum of my thoughts, I very seldom give my opinion because I don't want to paint myself into a corner, and I want to be open to learn and grow and change and what I believe today, it may not match next week if I get new information, that's how open I am to learning, and you've probably seen it, if I mention anything negative about the

Pentecostal Charismatic Movement, I get 100 people sending emails or comments that are saying, you're a cessationist, and they have no clue because I've never said, either way, I purposefully don't say what it is that I believe on those opinions, so I'm going to open up and be a little bit more open than I usually am about the Pentecostal Charismatic Movement, my opinion on it. I have absolutely nothing against it at all, and people can take this or leave it, but some of the things that they accuse me of no longer believing, I have experienced myself, so you can't

really say this about John, right? I'm not going to go into details because one of the problems of this movement is when you do, if you mention any of your own experiences, suddenly they put you up here above everybody else, and everybody's trying to get up there with you, and no, man, I'm lower than everybody who's listening, I'll say it like that, I'm least among you, so I don't want to be painted in that corner either, but the problem that I have with this is, just like I said before, they try to spiritualize things that shouldn't be, and in doing so they create a fictional

world, and the fictional world is always black or white, good or evil, angels or demons, all good are all bad, there's no chance for reform, and because of the way that they have done this, it really leaves families like yours to a place where they can be ruined as a byproduct of the movement, I don't know if you're aware of this term reformatory, there used to be, now they call them correctional help, or correctional facility, something like this, but it used to be called reformatory, because up to a certain age, if you committed some offense that wasn't like we're talking about here, you would go to this facility,

it was a prison, but they call it a reformatory because you would reform, they would work with you and correct your behavior and you would get out. And that term, for me, is more fitting of what the facility is supposed to do. Because now instead of painting them all bad or all good, well, this person has a problem, let's help them quickly so that they can get out and be better.

In the same way, mental health, if you, I have family members who struggle deeply with mental health and I've sat in the hospitals with them, when you walk in, you're not walking into in a sane asylum, like the current common term, you're walking into this, usually there's a big sign that says, behavioral health, because they're correcting your behavior, because some of these problems, not the extremes, but some of them, are a behavioral problem that if caught early and worked with early, you can correct and people can be better. But in these Pentecostal Charismatic movements, especially the more legalistic ones, it's an angel or a demon. So whenever they catch

somebody who is a potential predator or who even face, you know, whatever inside of them is leaning that way. If they had not been painted with this black or white, he's got a demon or whatever it is, they would say, hey, you need some help, man. Let's go get you some help.

Let's go to the reform place and you can reform quickly and then your family can grow and you can be happy. But they've painted themselves into their own box in that they can't do it, because if you do it, now he's the bad guy, he's got a demon. This is an evil person because it's good or bad, black or white, angel or demon. I see this as a significant problem with the movement.

And if I were to speak negatively about it, that's the one thing that I would say, this is bad, this is bad, what you're doing. Don't do this. So that's the closest outcome to giving my opinion on all of this. But it's been incredibly fun. I know we've got more questions. I guess we'll have to split off and come back again next week. So this has been fun. Hopefully you've got got some good answers out of it for me. Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, I think it makes sense that we do a question and answer time and we really only answer to one question. But hey, you know,

it was a deep question. It's a deep question. Yeah, it's a load of one for sure. So no, it's always fun. Yeah, cool. We'll pick back up next time. 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-Brandom.org.

From more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR available on Amazon. door and audible.