Miracles, Music, and Money: The Bethel and IHOPKC Connection

Hello, welcome to another episode. Of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast, I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org, and with me I have my co-host and friend, Adam Short, host of the grit in the wild podcast.

Adam, it's good to be back and to be a grit in the wild, and I'm glad we can now advertise your podcast on here. It was good having your wife on and you to talk through that. Hopefully people are connecting with it, and I'll put the link into the description for those who haven't. But thank you for coming back, and I'm excited today to talk about IHOP and Bethel and everywhere in between.

Always a pleasure and thanks for the plug to our little bitty podcast, grit in the wild. We're just kind of continuing conversations between my wife and I primarily right now, and just trying to really open the door, if you will, or pull the curtain back in our own experience and story, of trying to navigate a lot of things, including spiritual abuse on our own experience, toxic faith, and how that intersects and is continuing to intersect with the scandals that just continue to unfold and break. And many layers of these scandals as we've talked about and you're talking with others, so many other people who have first

experience with a lot of these leaders and so, yeah, I'm super happy to be back with you as always. And then, yeah, to cover and discuss some of the cross-pollination, I think, that exists between places like Bethel and IHOP and other places too, but especially want to hone in on Bethel and IHOP connections, because those two orbits do overlap. It's kind of like if you can think of two spinning tops on a table next to each other, they're like spinning in their own orbit, they have their own ecosystems, but then let's say they're peeling off or spitting out electrons and they're like the electrons that kind of radiate

out from each of those tops. They intersect with each other, they interact with each other, and incidentally, there's a lot of back and forth influence, I think, between the two organizations and movements. So, having been a part of both of those, it's interesting to think through. How and why they're connected, is it intentional, is it...

accidental, is it a little bit of both? And I don't know the answer to that, but I'm happy to talk through my unformed thoughts.

I use the phrase cross pollination because the two separate entities and the cross pollinating and but really it's deeper than that. So I've had conversations with Paul Cain and with people who worked with Paul Cain and surrounded him and there appears to be more to the story behind the the explosion of Bethel into what it became from what it was. I've got some of the history on my website. You can see how it began. It's just this little church and then suddenly overnight it exploded.

Well, it's that explosion that's interesting and unfortunately every person that I've spoken with they're a little afraid to come out and come public with with their story of how that came to be. But from what we can see on the, you know, that is published, you can definitely see that there was a heavy influence of the full gospel businessman's association.

You can find them holding FBGMI chapters right there in Bethel. I've got some of that in the newspapers on the website. FGBMI, Charles and I are going through this in the revival history podcast, but they were a key player in helping organize and orchestrate large ministries.

Like Joe Osteen's father, for example, that whole Joe Osteen church would not exist had FGMI not stepped in and found his ministry. It's a big deal. Did not know that. And the lot of people don't know this. Charles and I just recently came out with this information, but it was founded by two people. One of them was tied to the Kardashian family, which we've talked about.

Demonstracarian was the founder of it. Well, there was a co-founder. Okay. The co-founder was a brand of might and his family, many of his family are still brand of mites to this day. He lived, he was from, um, I want to say it's like 15 miles from my house.

And they they have always had within the full gospel businessman's association, they've always had keep figures who were associated with both the charismatic movement and tie strong ties to branemism. So when you bring all of that together and then consider that Paul Cain was William Brannum's protege and he was spreading till the day he died, he was spreading branemism.

When you think of those connections and then think of how Bethel kind of emerged and blossomed out of nothing, it really makes sense if you put your focus on the full gospel businessman. Well, yeah, and that whole piece there, I had never heard of until, you know, you and I started talking and looking at some of your research, you know, this is an organization that many of us younger, and if I could consider myself in one of the younger groups, I'm not as young as I once was as the country saying or the country song goes, but we weren't like I was not familiar with that organization until

I came across your research and it's just interesting to see that that is a integral part of the historical backdrop there. But like back to you mentioned Bethel getting at start and exploding and influence and awareness across the charismatic and even beyond charismatic world now because of their music primarily. You know historically Bethel was an assemblies of God Church and it's been it was I think it was the 50s when that church was started. So it was a kind of a regular plain vanilla as I understand it, assemblies of God Church you know through the 50s and and then it was around the 90s mid 90s when

Bill Johnson's father, Earl Johnson, Em Earl Johnson who was the pastor of Bethel before Bill was. It was around the mid 90s that I think and I don't know the exact year but somebody could look that up that Bethel left the assemblies of God denomination and I understand it was an amicable parting or you know parting ways if you will. And then coinciding with the Toronto blessing, if you're familiar with that movement that happened to Toronto with John and Carol are not at the Toronto Airport, what is it? The Toronto Christian Airport Fellowship or TASTAF or something like that. There was a kind of an outpouring

that happened there around 1995 time frame okay and Bill traveled to that church in Toronto and I might be getting some of the details off this is just going off a memory here I don't have an infront of me. Bill went to you know some of those meetings at John are not and Carol are not church in Toronto, came back to Bethel and read in the mid 90s-ish and because prior he was passed from your church and we reveal California which is up in the mountains and put middle of nowhere they moved to Reading and they sort of brought that Bill and Benny and his crew

brought that new expression of Holy Spirit you know being given the freedom to move in the church and that's when Bethel initially what happened was Bethel actually lost a lot of attendees at that time.

I think half of the people that went to Bethel then left because Bill made his primary mission of the church to be revival spreading revival and so from like mid to late 90s and then late 90s around 1998 Bethel School's supernatural ministry was started but it really wasn't until I want to a probably mid 2000s that Bethel really got on the map.

I think nationally and internationally, BSSM started to grow more and more exposure of its influence made its way out into, I think more corners of the church world. And then even beyond that, like after those years into the 2010s, Bethel really exploded.

And I think one of the catalysts of that, and I'm curious to hear your take on these events, but one of the catalysts of that was Bethel music. And because Bethel music initially was kind of, you had Bethel music and then you had Jesus culture, which was the youth organization, the youth group organization that banning leapsure kind of led from the beginning.

Well, it developed into its own thing, a Jesus culture actually became in its own right, very influential, and it still is. And they produce tons and tons of music as well as Bethel music, they have conferences, Jesus culture to Sacramento.

And even Jesus culture there for a while was traveling to all kinds of different big cities around the country. And I think even internationally doing conferences, primarily geared towards the youth. So those are some of the big footprint sort of tracing back, if you will, I think just in my understanding and knowledge, now there's probably a lot I don't know, like you're talking about the FGBMI, its influence and how it sort of set the stage for, for Bethel to be where it's at now.

But I think if you take Bethel music and look at how the footprint has been expanded that way, but then also Bill's books have had incredible influence. And they've been distributed very widely across, not even just the hypercarsomatic church, but even into some of the mainstream, I think evangelical streams, even though what Bill writes about in his books is very different than what you would find in your typical evangelical bookshelf, if you will, like a bookstore at a Baptist church or a Presbyterian church.

But I believe his books are pretty well known now and even people outside of the hypercarsomatic church are aware of him, you know, by and large. I would agree with most of that. It's like everything that I have studied, it's so complicated you can't really attribute two, three or four or 10 factors.

There are so many moving parts and pieces to the puzzle, right? But from what I can gather and understand, Bethel music was a huge part of it, probably, I would say it's probably the biggest contributing factor.

But beyond that, you know as a businessman, everybody who's listening, who's a businessman, understands that in order to make money, you have to spend money and in order to make large amounts of money, you have to...

and large amounts of money. So there has to be a funding backbone to this thing, right? I think the full gospel businessmen help establish that channel of money. I would say that it was probably a critical component just as much as the music, but the music drove the popularity globally because as you said, you know, Bethel music was highly popular then and still is now.

But beyond that, the timing of it all, as it is beginning to explode and you have the Toronto blessing happening and many other key contributing factors happening at the same time, people were looking for a new revival to quote and quote replace the laterane revival.

Something bigger, better, more wide reaching, I guess, wide spread. And Bethel, because of its musical influence and because of the timing, it all just kind of came together, it appears. And what's interesting is, so you mentioned the assemblies of God, they were an assemblies church.

Whenever you study, most researchers who study the connections between all of this and the assemblies of God, they go back to whenever the assemblies denounced laterane and they clue into this and they understand that well, there's a separation there.

So maybe it's not connected. However, many, many laterane churches went against the laterane instructions to avoid the laterane movement and you had what was called rogue districts and rogue states even. Indiana was a rogue state for the assemblies of God.

And they were supporting Brannum all through laterane but the main headquarters of the assemblies of God was denouncing it. So you had this tug of war that's happening. From what I can tell in the research, it appears that the Bethel church, during its assemblies of God years, was looking very favorably at the laterane, whether they were participating or not, it's hard to say without more information but it appears that they likely were.

So they had this background to signs, wonders, healing, ministries and due to their popularity, due to that background, due to the timing of the Geronal blessing, all of this just kind of came together and then it exploded and they were primed to be one of the key figures that would, key entities that would basically turn into the NAR.

Yeah, oh yeah, no, they're at the top of the list from that standpoint and it's interesting too because you look at the influential figures in the movement at large, right? Going back to laterane and then sort of the successors, Paul Cain really being a huge bridge.

between laterane and what we have today. And if you pull a curtain back a little bit more, you can see when we talk about cross-pollination between places like Beth on IHOP, it's not accidental, I don't think, because the people that were very formative in sort of building the foundation for these organizations like Beth on IHOP, were the same people.

I mean, even though Bill Johnson, to my knowledge, did not know Paul Cain. I don't know. Maybe you've seen research that says to the contrary. But you fast-forward in time a little longer or a little more like into the mid 2000, like around 2007 to 2011 timeframe when I was there.

That's when Bob Hartley kind of started appearing at Bethel, and I remember hearing about Bob Hartley at Bethel. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I know this guy. I've met him. I met him in Kansas City when I lived in Kansas City.

I met him in 2004, I went to his house and kind of would like to share a little bit about that experience. But zooming out a little bit for a second, it's like you're at Bethel and you used to live in Kansas City and here's Bob Hartley.

Where did he come from? It was like the second wave of leaders that really solidified the connections between Bethel and IHOP. And you even had like worship leaders at Bethel Music who started at IHOP.

And I can think of two right now that are very well known. I'm not going to mention their names. They started at IHOP and then they came to Bethel later, actually three. There's one I'm thinking of that I believe started at Morningstar.

So you can see like even in the worship realm, like the music and worship realm, there was crossover and pollination or cross-pollination between these three mechas. And it's almost like all roads led to Bethel.

Like go west, young man. That's how I feel when I look at it. I'm like, here I was a teenager. You know, started my church journey as a believer as a teenager. At Morningstar, then I went halfway across the country to Kansas City, you know, had involvement at IHOP, slash Metro Christian Fellowship, and then went on further west to Reading, California and became a part of Bethel.

And so my personal experience mirrors some of the, you know, better known, more well-known people that very directly were, you know, connected to all three of those organizations. And I think that's important for everybody to understand because many of these people are going back and forth between many of these entities.

That's what makes the NAR so powerful. It's the network. You've got this networking that's happening, and so the cross-pollination is much easier. As Bethel is growing and thriving, and IHOP is growing and thriving, people can cross-pollinate, they can invite to conferences or whatever.

I'm pretty sure Paulcane spoke at conferences at Bethel, I could be wrong, somebody could correct me, but I think I read that somewhere. And as this is beginning to grow and spread, what Bethel did that was somewhat different and unique is that they, like you said, tailored the message in such a way that they didn't come out as explicitly following the Laterane doctrine, though Bill Johnson would come out and say things that were probably negative of certain aspects of it.

But it became this hybrid, right? He hybrided the doctrine to where it was tailored to fit the newly rising charismatic revivals that were happening, yet while still appealing to some of the older Pentecostal ways, and so this blend began to happen that it really turned it into a new ministry and a new religion altogether, and then that started flowing through all of these NAR networks.

So that began to spread, and we have something that's entirely different and new. I look at some of the doctrines that, like IHOP case sees doctrines on how the end of days would play out.

If you were to be a Brannemite in common contact with this, you'd say, no, this is a different religion altogether. That's not what Brannem taught. But then you look at the underlying foundation of many of the other things they taught.

It could not exist without Brannemism. So it began to shift and change and evolve, and because it's cross-pollinating, you can't attribute the change to any certain church or person. They're cross-pollinating. They're getting new ideas.

They're seeing, like throwing darts at a dark board and seeing what sticks. That one's stuck. Let's choose that doctrine and go forward with it. This other one nobody liked. Let's just scrap that idea and go forward without it.

In doing so, it created a new breed of charismatic person. This stuff is so interesting to me because what you're saying about, if a Brannemite went into ihop and said, hey, well, that's not what we believe about eschatology.

That would be sort of like a turn-off for them, right? They would turn around and say, hey, we're not going to be a part of this. But you're right. There are so many other commonalities, for example, belief in the supernatural, belief in encounters, belief in angelic visitations or supernatural healings, or the way that a human can be in-dude with such a high level of anointing that they achieve almost a deity status.

All of that stuff, there's commonality across all of these organizations, and as I've learned from you and others about... what it was like in the William Brannum movement. I'm flabbergasted as to how similar some of the stuff, even though practical like outworkings are somewhat different, but like there's definitely that commonality there, and which is wild because it's like, in my mind, before I knew a lot about your research, and I've told you this before, we were just taught at Bethel that William Brannum just ended badly, and so we were like, well, just don't read the other six blue books.

Just read the first six. And so you just kind of thought, okay, we'll leave off the parts of his life that were, quote unquote, bad, but then you keep the first six books or the first part of his life.

And the first section of his life really was the part that was so emphasized at Bethel, and I remember many times being taught that, hey, we're seeking to have the mantle of William Brannum.

So there's another example of the commonality thread across these, but then I will say that when you compare I hop to Bethel, the doctrines and theologies are very different. There are a lot of differences.

For example, I hop was much more of a inward focus kind of organization slash group, where it was centered around the prayer room. Everybody basically spent their time at the prayer room. You know, you had to do a certain number of hours every week at the prayer room, and that was really the hub and the epicenter of the organization, even though they had lots of other affiliated organizations and outreach and stuff like that.

The prayer room was really the hub. And I would say in my experience, even though I was not formally a part of any of the I hop programs, I went to the prayer room quite a bit and do a lot of people I hop.

And it was influenced by their music and all that stuff. I would say that the overall vibe at I hop was a lot more somber, and there was not nearly as much relational connection amongst the people that went as there was at Bethel.

Like if you compare that to Bethel, Bethel was very much outward focused. You know, it's this, it's sort of like this offensive versus defensive like Bethel was constantly, constantly focusing on getting this out there to the world, influencing the seven mountains, getting out or getting people activated and released as kingdom carriers, you know, to get them out and to influence the world.

And really, I mean, as the world looks at it, you know, it kind of looks like you're trying to take over the world. But there was a lot of community at Bethel that I think didn't exist at IHOP.

But yet, even though you have those differences, there was still a very solid like commonality between the two organizations and networks. And so it made it relatively easy for people to go back and forth, whether you were just a lowly, no name, nobody, student, or attendee, or if you were up the flagpole quite a bit like Bob Hartley.

And I don't know exactly how he made his way into getting to know Bill and the upper leadership of Bethel. I don't know many of the details of that story, but I just know that towards the last couple of years that we were there, Bob Hartley had more and more visibility at Bethel.

I believe he spoke at the school. He would come into redding and invite people to come over to a house and he would profess over. Matter of fact, my wife reminded me the other night that she was in one of those groups that was invited over.

And Bob Hartley, he basically has his laptop open and he's prophesying everybody. And so it's very, very much kind of what Jed has described in his experience with his dad. Like, you know, it seems like everybody's got to file on them and there's this information and, you know, you're getting prophesied over.

And it's like, well, where did that information come from? Did you get it from data mining where you fed that information elsewhere? Did you get it from the dark side? Did you get it from the bright side?

Is it a combination of all four or is it another option that we haven't talked about? Well, the thing to understand is that the commonality between all of it is that the signs, wonders, so-called miracles, that was the religion.

All of the doctrines, the doctrines come and go, change and evolve. But in the end, it's the focus on the supernatural that really binds all of this together. One of the things that kind of is a little shocking when you think about the complexities of it, William Brannum's ministry began as the supernatural, what was it called?

The spiritualist craze was happening in the United States and there were people who were performing seances and they were doing all kinds of signs, wonders, things that you might call a miracle and his ministry imitated that.

So the early years, the years that Bethel would say that this was when William Brannum was a good guy and then he later turned into a bad guy. Well in his earliest form of ministry, he claims that his hand is changing.

colors to detect diseases. And if it turns to a certain color, it's a color that God can't heal you. You're doomed. You're beyond God's help, basically. And so that stage act, apparently, didn't last as long. It didn't work. It turned into a vibrating hand. And he, you know, Roberts had a vibrating hand instead of a color changing hand. And largely due to the fact that the car dash, I'm certain it was the Kardashians that gave him this, but somebody gave him this very, very expensive watch. And today's money's like a $10,000 watch. And he claimed that he had

to have this because the vibrating hand would break in a regular cheap watch like you and you and I might wear. So he had to have this very extravagant, very expensive watch. And you know, it changed and evolved over time into various weird things like he would go into a, this is on record. I think in one of his recordings, even he would go into a church and he would hold up a bracelet on a string and say, watch the power of God can make this bracelet move, which is oddly one of the tricks that I learned in kindergarten. You kind of wiggle your hand a little bit in the bracelet.

People can't see it, but the bracelet's moving, even though your hand is moving. But he's doing these kind of stage tricks. And that's the supernatural. Well, the focus was if you could elevate the people's faith enough to believe that you had some wonderful gift, there's almost like a mind over matter thing. You could also convince them that they were healed. Combine that with positive confession, whether they're healed or not, if you can get them to confess their healed, then suddenly everybody's claiming, oh, I'm healed. I'm healed. I'm healed because everybody else is doing it, so you get into this hype and then that's what they call a revival. Revival breaks out,

everybody's seeing these quote unquote miracles and you cannot convince one person who attended that it didn't happen because they're watching everybody claim to be healed, whether they are or they aren't. It's so funny to bring all this up because I was just talking to Mike Winger this week and I spent about two hours with him. Very gracious of him to give me two hours of time.

I got to talk with him about a lot of my experience in these movements, okay. But one of the things that he's diving into, and I'm sure you're aware of this, he's looking at stuff like this, almost like these props, right? You mentioned the watch that we embraced him more. And then lots of people have seen that Mike was Mike Winger is looking into the clock that was in Bob Jones's hospital room right before he died. And there's this whole phenomenon where the clock started moving really fast.

And the minute hand went around like this for several minutes and it finally came back and up to midnight, I think it was, or might be getting the time drawn. But anyway, Bob Jones's wife was in the room and this other man was in the room.

They videoed the clock. They have video of it, I watched it last week. And they had this whole spiritual explanation for how the clock was moving only in Bob Jones's room and that it was a supernatural message that was supposed to be broadcast and disseminated and admit this, that, and the other.

And then, but Mike went down the rabbit hole and he actually found out that there was a primex clock and that these are atomic clocks that have a receiver

and they receive a signal from a central broadcast, transmitter, whatever, and that's how it syncs up. And so if the clock becomes out of sync, the clock has to catch up or get synced or whatever, so the minute handle kind of do like this until it gets, you know, synced back up to the actual real time.

But see, they created this bridge from a very realistic, explainable, logical phenomenon and created this entire spiritual message and explanation. So I was talking to Mike about this and I mentioned about the, these magicians, you know, people like David Blaine or Chris Angel or people like that that perform in Vegas.

And I've walked, I've been to a David Blaine show live and you know, David Blaine actually changed for this stuff. Like he, he's been able to go underwater for, I don't know, it's like a world record amount of time and not breathe and they put him in like ice water and all this crazy stuff.

And so there's a component of what he does which is actually pure training and skill and endurance and stuff like that. It's not actual illusion, but there's other stuff that he does that I think is illusion and almost like a minimalist.

I think there's an actual thing called, called mentalists and it gets back to what you're talking about with. It's more than just slight of hand. It's like you incorporate potentially things like hypnosis or you engage the power of suggestion or you know, all these different things that can be done to sort of hyper person up or pry them to believe that something's happening when it may or may be happening.

Right? And then the interesting thing is, is if you're hypnotized, you know, or if you have external influence that affects your autonomic nervous system, you actually can have a measure of improvement of symptoms in your body, whether it be pain or discomfort or you know, stuff like that.

You can actually feel improvement because that's just how the body... it works. I mean, I think that's why some therapist uses hypnotism to help you feel better. So I still believe that healings happen. I mean, I've convinced that I did see healings happen over the years. But I also do think that there's a lot of this that wouldn't what they said it was.

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for your support. You know, I don't ever go too deep with my beliefs because I don't want to sway people in one direction or another, but one of the things that I do openly declare is that for the things that are supernatural that I believe in, I believe that God created this world with a set of laws that must exist. And they're like the laws of physics, for example. Anything that God might do because it's happening in this world, it has to happen in a certain way in a certain order. Otherwise, you know, you have a God of chaos. You have Loki,

not the God of the Bible, right? And so I believe that there has to be, if something happens that is unbelievable, it also has to be able to be proven in a way that does not defy the laws of this world. And so the funny part is that clock, I've actually seen those clocks. I have sat in a classroom and I've watched it spin. So I know exactly what he's talking about. But let's take the other side of the coin. Many of the people, sadly, who are in leadership positions in these types of movements, have some sort of mental illness

or mental conditions. I'm not saying that all of them do. I'm not saying even, you know, Bob Jones, I think admitted to some of this, but to some extent, there can be other things that are explained in that way. I had a great, I had a great uncle who had a clock. And his clock also spun like this. And he would tell us and he would, we'd be sitting in there and he would say, and I was in the room the other night and that clock just started spinning again and so we sat there and we thought about it, you know, but there's a catch.

This great uncle had Parkinson's disease and it had really, really deteriorated his mind. And it started from a spinning clock and we just kind of thought, well, he has Parkinson's disease, we didn't go any further with it.

It ended up from the spinning clock to after it spun, and this was after he had been telling the story for a while, after it spun, the arms of the clock would stretch down and these little people would come out into the room and rearrange my room for me.

Oh, okay. Now see, we're sitting in a room listening to a person who has Parkinson's disease and we know what's wrong with this story. Yeah. But the interesting part is because of the way that people in the Pensacostle and Charismatic movements have been primed to believe and look for anything supernatural.

If somebody is a little bit off the rocker and they say something like this, they don't stop and think, is the person sane? Is it explainable? Yes. Yes. Oh, my gosh. Have I seen a clock like this before?

I've seen this clock, man, but they've been primed to look so hard to find supernatural that they shut off all of them. One thousand percent. You are hitting on something that my wife and I are like really talking about lately.

And we actually talked about this, and I think it was our last episode. The best way I can put it is the bridge. It's the bridge that is built between explainable, tangible, logical, empirical experiences or circumstances, right?

Like you mentioned the clock is another perfect example of this. And there actually is a very logical explanation for this. But what happens is a bridge is built across that to then have a supernatural explanation for it.

And here's the problem, though, when you attach God told me or I feel like God said blank, it's like, who were you to argue with that? It's like, there's not really any objection you can have to that.

You're like, well, okay. We had Parkinson's, but he loves God. So he must be telling the truth. And his experience is we can take his experience at face value. And so if you multiply that by thousands and thousands of people's experiences, what are you left with?

You're left with a lot of stuff that is very questionable at best. And maybe down there, there is some legitimate stuff going on that's real. And I mean, I've had legitimate encounters with God, but I'm not going to go push that on people and say, hey, your experience should be this way, too, just because I had it.

And that's where it becomes very dangerous and abusive is when people start developing their influence and then they get bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger, they're following gets bigger, their influence gets bigger, and then fast forward 10 or 15 years and you've got people like Chris Reed and Bob Hartley and whoever else that they have normalized what they call their supernatural spiritual experience and they impose that upon other people.

And it creates so much harm because if the people listening don't have that experience, they feel that they are less than or they feel that they're not a spiritual or they feel that they need to make up for the deficiency on their own by whatever the leader says they should do like they need to pray more or they need to go do more outreach or they need to read their Bible more whatever the whatever the that it is.

And that's how you generate more, more harm is you're putting people on this treadmill to try to get to some level of spiritual attainment that actually never can be done and it's actually impossible.

It's something that we as people have been trying to do since the Tower of Babel where they built the tower they're trying to get up to heaven to reach God. And that is the nature of religion right there is it's man's attempt to reach God and we'll never get there.

And now complicate this even further with the people who are deceivers who are in the group. So I told the story about the bracelet, right? And this is again something that I saw in kindergarten the teacher did the same thing.

We all laughed and we did it too. If anybody were to have attended a magic show back in this time when Brandon was doing this and some magician got up holding a bracelet and watched it move, they would say their first thought would be, okay, how did he make that bracelet move?

And if he tied it to a rafter and it's sitting there in front of him and he's yelling at it and they're trying to figure out, well, how did he make it move? Their first thought is going to be he's doing something to that to make it move.

But he's got some supernatural power and God has come now through him and God is showing us the way, right? But because it's happening in a Christian church and a Christian setting, these deceivers, their predators, their spiritual predators, they're using the people's lack of critical thinking to deceive them by their own minds.

And that's what's really problematic because there are things that happen that can't be explained. I've witnessed things that can't be explained and I don't, because my focus is no longer on those things, I just think either one of two things, either maybe it is explainable and I just haven't figured it out yet, more.

you know, Satan himself disguises himself as an angel of light to come and to see people according to the Bible. Yeah. One of those two things. I don't immediately go to, oh, well, that's a miracle.

That's a sign. So therefore, he must be of God and ignore everything else that the man says that is anti-biblical. But the movement has been so conditioned to the point that the signs wonders miracles have become the God to these people.

Right. Oh, yeah. I don't know exactly when, but it was during my deconstruction journey where it occurred to me every period of time as I compared the gospels in the Bible, like Matthew, Martin, Luke, and John, you read the accounts of the miracles that happened in there, right?

So like Jesus healed people, He raised people from the dead, He delivered people from demons, you know, recorded in the gospels. Okay. Well, a lot of the time what's interesting is Jesus told the people that were healed or delivered or the people that actually were the recipients of the miracle.

He told them not to tell anybody, okay? But then later, it changed and He said, yeah, go show yourself to the priest, go tell, you can tell people. But who did the telling? This is what I told Mike.

I said, who did the telling? Was it the person who prayed for that person who did the telling of the miracle or was it the person who received the miracle? And it was the person that received the miracle who was telling the world about it.

And but yet what we've done, what we've done in the hypercarsomatic movement is we've made it about us, the quote unquote miracle worker people. We want to go tell the story because it's another notch on the belt and it props us up.

It makes us look spiritual. It makes us be like, oh, yeah, you've, you're a whoopedie do miracle worker. And that is not the point of it. Like that is actually not the point at all.

It's not the point to take all of this recognition for something that you actually didn't even do. The stuff that did happen, like it's not up to or it's not for the person to take credit for that.

And I think you're right. Like the miracles and the healings and the supernatural, those have become really the central fixture of the whole belief system and the whole like religious practice. And it's just like anything else that we put in the center of, you know, that we think is the most important thing.

It's an idol and God wants to be, he wants to be in the middle, not like. And you know, even if you don't believe in God, that's fine. I'm just saying like for people that believe in God, like, God should be the middle, the center of it, not some miracle or trinket that we carry around and brag to people about.

I think you've hit the nail in the head because that, for me, that is the architecture of this thing. I have examined movements that pre-existed brannemism and I have examined movements that came after.

And what I see is the shift in the idea that the miracles were designed to make the healer look more powerful whenever you come into the brannemism. And that architecture seems to have been carried forward.

I know people really dogged me if I mentioned John Wimbler, so unfortunately I've got to mention him again. His platform, whenever he started bringing all of this together, was signs, wonders miracles, the feels, the feelings.

And he's carrying it forward too in the same way. The irony is, if you study that trail, which I'm digging into just a bit, lawnmower, and Frisbee was working with the shepherding guys who were, in fact, he went to Don Basham, I think.

Don Basham was his seminary teacher or something to that effect. I've got that research preparing it to be published, but they're working with the shepherding guys who were heavily influenced by brannemism and the brannem style of charismatic preaching.

It was also designed with authoritarian control, the focus on the gifts, the signs, the wonders miracles in such a way that the person who is preaching or doing them becomes more powerful, so that the people look for those people as their spiritual guides, rather than empowering the people to do it themselves.

When you examine some of the ministries that came before brannem, although I'm certain that there are some that were similar, many of them who went off into cults, they attracted their cult by telling the people that they too can do this, and the cult tried to do it, and then by and large, they could not do it.

Carry the structure forward into the NAR today. Now it's the same exact thing, they've got the authoritarian style that came straight from the shepherding movement, they've got to focus on signs, wonders miracles that empowers the leader that came from brannemism, and all of this just came to flourish at Bethel.

Yeah, and I think that there's a lot of sincerity, but just like with anything, you can be sincere, but you can be sincerely wrong, and if you're a low level, or even a mid-level person in that organization, you know, you adopt this way of life and this belief system and just becomes a part of you and it becomes second nature and you're kind of propagating and duplicating it.

And you're a little bitty sphere of life, and you know, I think a lot of people are sincere in those- Sort of lower levels, but then you do have people in the higher levels who are either Intentionally and willfully blind or and or there could be and or it can't it doesn't have to be or it can be and or they are Intentionally involved in some dark stuff like we've seen over at iHop. I am still reserving a shred of optimism that At least Bill is sincere

That's about as far as I can go with that Well, see I come from a unique background having been in Close to some of the leaders of the brand-um side It's more complicated than a yes-no on off either or so my grandfather was also sincere and And I watched when he sincerely lied to the people to try to convince them of things that he knew was false But yet at the same time he would sincerely believed other parts of it So it's so complicated to understand the way that the mind works when you're in one of these things

You become indoctrinated you become programmed then Some of the people who are programmed rise into leadership positions They sincerely believe some of them the things that they see in here and understand However, they also because they've been conditioned to try to Orcas straight a miracle orcas straight some sign or wonder they'll go to extremes to do that With the understanding that if they can raise the faith of the people by Some fake thing they're doing They can bring forth a real miracle. That's what they've been trained to believe so you get this complicated thing where

Sometimes it's true. Sometimes it's sincere. Sometimes it's fake. Sometimes it's fraud Yeah, sometimes I know predators, right that they're doing this because they can get to women or money or whatever exactly 1000% I agree with you in every way on that it's it is so complicated and with the human mind like A lot of some Twitter have debated back and forth like and I think most of us agree that back to Mike Bickle for a minute like We really believe that he actually is convinced that everything that he's taught is true like it's I mean he he's

1000% convinced of it now that's the thing about truth you can be 1000% convinced of it, but it doesn't mean it's true You know you can you can say to your blue in the face that there's no such thing as gravity You know you can yell at gravity you can curse gravity You can throw rocks at gravity, but that's the thing about gravity. It's still going to still going to be there and Jump off a building. Yeah, you don't believe it gravity exists. Well, it's going to be a rude awakening. Absolutely and There's also a deterioration of the mind.

There are people who say something that's false enough that they too start to believe it. This is a phenomenon that you can find in psychology studies, but I don't know. He may have been sincere from the beginning.

I know talking with Bob Scott, Bob seems to believe so. There are people that I know who sincerely started out with good intentions and then just went down paths that I can't believe that they went down.

Bringing people with them into their own destruction. And that's sadly what seems to be happening in a lot of these movements. And when you look at really, really large organizations like Bethel, where now instead of some small church where somebody's headed down to destruction, now you're talking about how many tens of thousands of people that are headed down the path of the habit, it's unbelievable.

Unconifiable, yeah. Well, and I think about too, like you look at the new building that they're building. I think it's a hundred million dollar building. And they're well into that project. You can look on Google Earth or Apple Earth or Apple Maps, whatever it is.

And you can see that the land is under construction or they were building there. They've got the foundations. And, but I am totally offended that we received a card in the mail several months back asking for money.

You know, it was a card signed by Bill, a nice colorful, beautiful glossy. And, you know, it had a thermometer on there. This is where we're at on the fundraising progress. We've got X dollars and we need X still.

And I have no doubt whatsoever that they will fully fund the project. Like there's no scarcity of cash to my knowledge at Bethel. And they're like, what if you used that 100 million dollars to do something else?

Like, what if you didn't believe that your building was the epicenter of Jesus Christ? Okay. And that in order for somebody to experience transformation in their life, they have to actually get on a plane or get in a car or get on a horse or train or boat or spaceship and come to bread in California and come to your building.

You're bringing brand new building and you experience cancer healing or you experience financial healing or whatever it is. Why do I need to come to your church that costs 100 million dollars to get my miracle?

Like that is the biggest scam in history. And I think it is, it is an affront to the true gospel of Jesus Christ. And then set that aside for me. Even if you don't believe in God, it's still the biggest gift.

It's still the biggest scam because you got people that are writing checks, running the credit cards, and many of these people are financially... solvent and they don't have enough money to pay their bills anyway, and you got all these people given their money to an organization that is filthy rich. And I have a big problem with that. I think that it is wrong. I think that it shouldn't be allowed. And I think Bethel should give all the money back to their donors and not build it. Well, and it defeats the purpose of, you know, the Bible talks about helping the poor and the widows. And we have a country that has homeless.

We have a country that has widows. We have, like you said, the people who are poor sometimes are you given the money to the church. That needs to change. I don't believe that any church should be doing this either. But I'm not the one that makes the call for Beth also.

All I can say is it doesn't make sense. That's all I can say. But it makes sense if you're at the top of that fiscal food chain. It makes a lot of sense because you're the beneficiary of everybody's generosity. And you get, you get to be rolling in cash. And hey, you know what, if that's your jamming life to rolling cash, go for it. But why don't you do it and not take advantage of other people? Why don't you go invent like something that'll take us to Mars in 15 minutes? I'm pretty sure somebody would buy that. I've got this, I don't know if you've seen

it, but I've got this little channel where I do the fake, the funny satire news and the one that I just did yesterday was the church in Mars. So I didn't even see that. That's totally coincidental. Yeah, it's crazy. I should probably link that in the channel to you for anybody that wants it. But anyway, this has been fun. Thanks for thanks for doing this and helping me explore Bethel and I hop and everything in between. Absolutely, John. Thank you. If you've enjoyed a show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Branum.org.

For more about the dark side of the new Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.