From Healing to Heresy: The Descent Into Doctrinal Extremism

Hello and 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, minister and friend, Chino Ross, pastor and the voice of the understanding scripture and truth by Chino D Ross YouTube channel. Chino it's good to be back and to talk about all things Hobart Freeman but before we did you and I were talking offline about the possibility of maybe connecting with some people from the Faith Assembly sacked and thought I'd put the filler out there if there's anybody who's interested in helping

us to organize a meeting where people from Faith Assembly could get together and have conversations. People who have left the cult obviously. If you're willing to organize that and to help us you can contact me on the website.

That's William-Branham.org. Just go to the contact page and say hey I'm interesting in helping to facilitate this how can I help and put the offer out there maybe there's interest and people might get together. John I've had several people contact me and want to do something get together so this this would be something maybe we would target for towards into the summer early this fall give people enough time to make plans. It is not a Faith Assembly reunion it's just more a meeting greet get together in person face to face compare note share notes ask questions share stories tell stories something I would be

willing to do you know and I think it would have to be done probably somewhere northern Indiana where a lot of these people are but enough people have mentioned that to me I thought we ought to put something out there be happy to do it over a weekend period of time and just see what comes of it so as you said if anybody's willing to help organize and spearhead this then they can contact you at on your website sounds good well today we're getting into some of the transitional phases of Faith Assembly and the irony of this is Charles

and I just had the same exact conversation with a different splinter group of the message but when you're in one of these cults and you're being indoctrinated slowly and gradually over time you don't notice how significantly things shift over time because they're happening So so gradual and I've I've told this story out. I'll tell it again. I can't remember his with you one of the others, but I'm a bit of a prankster and I like the long pranks.

I was working with this guy in an office and he had his back to the wall and had his desk as he walked into his office. There was his desk and then he was on the other side.

And as a prank, I came in with a friend of mine and every day after work we would work a little bit late and we would push his desk maybe a millimeter or maybe two millimeters closer to the wall. And so he didn't notice that desk moving. And after the end of I don't know how many months went by and he started saying, man, I just feel like the walls are closing in on me.

I feel like I need to lose weight and I'm I'm solely responsible for that man's diet. He can thank me for his health benefits. But what the point I'm trying to make is when things happen so gradual over time, you don't catch it. If I had walked into his office and pushed his desk a foot and a half toward the wall, he would have immediately said, hey, man, this desk is too close to the wall. Let's push it back. But he didn't notice that. And mentally, people in these cults are doing the same exact thing. Yeah, we looked at last time, John, at how I think that some

of the reason for Dr. Freeman adopting his health and wealth gospel had to do with personal situations in his own life. I wouldn't say that that is the only reason. But he definitely came from a poor background and he came from a sickly background as a child.

And he had various real serious ailments as an adult. So whenever he did end up down in Dallas, Texas in 1966, and by the way, let me get ahead of myself just to say that in the future, you and I are going to have a good conversation or two about that meeting because we actually have the pictures of the meeting room where Dr. Freeman went. I'm not for sure if you know this yet, John, but in some of the information you have on your website, because you do have Gordon Lindsey's publication month by month by month back in 65 and 66 and 67.

They Dr. Freeman did show up for a meeting and they actually interviewed him afterwards in that magazine. And it says Dr. Holbard E Freeman pastor of the Brethren Church in Claypool, Indiana. And then they quote Dr. Freeman. So he was there for those meetings. This is where he got his faith message. This is where WV Grant was Larry Hammond, Kenneth Hagen and a Schrader.

So we're going to talk about that and we have the pictures and we have the proof of where he was. And so at that time in June, it was a two-week seminar in June of 1966.

Hobart had become charismatic in March of that year. This is all brand new to him. He goes down there to Dallas, Texas for this two week long seminar. It was really billed as a deliverance seminar, but they covered prayer, healing, gifts of the spirit as well as deliverance and casting out demons. And it was at that conference or meeting where Hobart first began to hear and learn these things that later became integral to his ministry. And one of the things that he learned that he had actually taught against was the possibility of divine healing for today. He actually before he had become charismatic had just taught a series how healing

is not for today. And then he ended up in early 1966 having a heart attack. And I've shared some of that before and I will share that again in more detail when Dr. John Ray came to the hospital and shared his charismatic experience with Hobart. And the good news that healing is for today.

So early in Hobart's life that was joyful news that maybe God is still in the healing business today. He had been raised in southern Baptist brethren church circles where healing was for the first century, but not for today. And when I came into this walk under Dr. Freeman, I was already saying I was already in the charismatic movement before I ever knew the name Hobart Freeman. But shortly thereafter when Hobart Freeman came to Memphis to a Howard Johnson's motel in the spring of 1976. And we were able to get some tapes from that meeting and began following him. This is where

he was in his walk and his understanding of healing whenever I came into it. So healing was brand new to him. I mean, it was 10 years old by that time, but it was still relatively new in his life. It was a joyful experience. It was something that was positive. It was something that not only was he excited about, but everybody was excited about. But at that time, it didn't have any of the negative connotations associated with it. That is the anti medicine, anti doctor that it's going to have later on as you talked about here in the introduction today. It's just like

the old story of putting the frog in the pot on the stove and slowly heating the water. You know, if it was boiling hot, so as you hit the water, you jump out. But when Ever it's slowly heated, you never know what's going on around you.

And so in those days, Dr. Freeman ministered with other charismatic ministers who would teach a doctor's and prayer message. And Hobart would teach a prayer only message. And he didn't have any problem sharing the platform with them at all.

He would praise other healing evangelists who wore glasses or went to the doctor took medicine. In other words, he didn't see that as a problem. He didn't see it as a contradiction. He even was somewhat proud of the fact and used this in his ministry.

If he had charismatic friends who followed his ministry, who were dentists and doctors, that was something good to say because he could say, look, I've got a doctor friend here who has all the training, who has the medical degree, but who still believes in divine healing.

And I've mentioned this and you showed this before, this tract, um, entitled, may I refer you was written by Dr. Joseph Sneed down in America's Georgia. He had gotten this message from healing message from Dr. Freeman in 1971.

Still a medical doctor traveled to the glory barn, wrote this little track and had this track, may I refer you would have that in the waiting room of his medical practice. And so Dr. Freeman, we talk about him.

So for instance, in the series entitled Gleening from Galatians in the message entitled Faith, Fact or Feeling, he mentions Dr. Sneed and he mentions, you know, the publication coming out by people like this. So my point in saying that is that healing was 100% positive back in that day. Healing was joyful.

They were so glad there was a healing message and he was an anti anybody. He was just all pro God and pro healing. So when I first came into Dr. Freeman's ministry, that's what I heard.

And so I was hearing the same thing that he was thinking. My Presbyterian church either hadn't ever told on healing or if they ever had, I don't remember it. Obviously wasn't something they emphasized and probably something they didn't even believe in.

So when I heard that, wow, God might heal. I thought, you know, I've never heard that before. And then I would hear the verses, you know, by his stripes were healed. First Peter too.

Wow, this is awesome. You know, so I'm learning something new from the Bible that I did know. So that was the good beginning. And then the next thing that I saw happen and it was this slow.

I mean, so slow and incremental over time, there became a preoccupation with faith and healing. Whenever I went into the ministry and anyone go back and look on my early tape list, you'll see there's faith and healing for sure on there. Allah, Hobart, Freeman, and the other health and wealth piece. But there were so many other things that I was teaching and because I was studying, I was interested in more than just divine healing. I didn't come from a sickly or poor background, so I didn't have this built-in, crushing need to hear that healing is for today. And I've also

mentioned John over the podcast that this, this healing and faith message, it works if you're in your 20s because, A, nobody cares at their poor, nobody knows it, and B, nobody's sick. So, I mean, but none of us had the intelligence, none of us had the ability to recognize when I was in my 20s, let's say the first half, first three quarters of my 20s, I didn't recognize, I never was sick, and I wasn't poor if I was, I didn't care because you know, because you know that material prosperity comes by time and process and accumulation, you know, you have to work a long time,

and then you look back on it and say, oh, man, I have a lot to show for my life. That, of course, wasn't Hobart's message. Hobart was all for right now. But I'm just saying, yeah, this message is easy for 20s and even 30 year olds, it will work for them. But as we know, it doesn't work when you get past that time and it did not work for Dr. Freeman.

There's so much to unpack there, man. I, in the brand of call, it wasn't to the same extremist level that Hobart Freeman had, but we still looked at divine healing much in the same way.

And like you said, when you're 20, 30, it works great because your bodies are very healthy, in most cases. But you go into some of the older people's houses and I can't tell you how many houses were like this. You go in, you walk into their kitchen and you're expecting, you know, the tablecloth, the little display in the center. When a lot of these houses that I'd go into, there would be this big tub of herbs. And as you get older in your body, your health starts to decline and you're in these divine healing cults, you're against taking them, you know, casual

medicine or even important medicines. And so when you have an ailment and you go to the doctor and the doctor says, hey, I can, I can help you get over this, just take this little pill.

In many cases, in the brand of calls, people would say, no, let's wait till it gets a lot worse. In Hobart Freeman's call, it's, no, I'm not taking it at all. But you go into the houses and instead of medicines, they found alternative medicines is really what it is.

they're trying to do. And in some cases, it gives a little bit of relief, not a lot. And I would say probably in only three to five percent, does it actually help entirely in the same way that the medicine does?

Because usually it's something that you need medication for. But they're trying to circumvent that medication doctrine by all of these herbs. And just like you said, in the early years, Brannum was much the same way.

And I always refer back to that voice of healing magazine that you're describing, because it shows all of the clear shifts and transition in just the entire movement, not just Brannumism, in the very, very first issue of this.

It is William Brannum's magazine. It's called, I'm trying to remember the title without looking at it, but it's something like an inter-evangelical ministry of the Brannum campaign, something like this. I'll throw it up on the screen.

But it is clearly a Brannum magazine. And Brannum is the publisher. It's Brannum's magazine. It's not Gordon Lindsay's. And then a year into it, Brannum's ministry explodes.

We can't get the medical records, but I've been told by more than one person and the newspapers kind of confirm this. After a year of this, Brannum went mentally insane. And he was whisked out of the country.

I think it was Mexico where he was locked up in a padded room, comes back into the field. And then he mentions that he kind of alludes to the fact that he went through this.

But he says, every seven years, I face a similar problem. And you can watch those seven years. And you can see how he just goes off the rails, crazy. But in the early years, that inter-evangelical, everybody's welcome.

It's not a destructive cult from its outward appearance. If you're Catholic, I don't care, come join me. If you're Baptist, I don't care, come join me. And then you see this transition over time to exclusivity, authoritarian control.

It's all documented right there in the pages. And then that entity becomes Christ for the nations because Gordon Lindsay just takes it over and runs with it. Yeah, we're gonna have fun when we get to the voice of healing additions since you guys have all that on your website.

But I'll say the rest of what I wanna say until we get there. But Hobart's preoccupation with faith in healing and definite preoccupation that I think was harmful because it began to elevate it as one of the important doctrines of the Christian faith.

If you talk about it all the time, you don't have to say it's one of the most important doctrines, just the repetitive nature of your teaching says that. And one of the things that I first saw, the way I was able to identify the preoccupation is in the most interesting way that you...

could imagine and that is whenever the glory barn would have a communion service, whenever they would have a communion service. So they're going to serve the bread and cup and Hobart talks about it at the beginning of the message.

We're going to serve the bread and cup and so we know what that's about. That's about the death of the Lord Jesus. That's about his atonement on the cross and we think we know what that's about.

I say that in quotation marks, you know, having been in church, we think that's about his payment for the penalty of our sin, his sacrifice that we can be brought into a right relationship and right standing with God.

That's what we had been taught the cross was all about. When Hobart would have a communion service, he would invariably start the message and I'm going to just give a partial list and there are dozens and scores of them on the tape list and you can almost spot them by the title.

When he would start the message, he would say, because people could tell, they could see, you know, communion apparatus out there and he would say, no, we're going to observe the communion of the bread and cup today and so the Lord has given me a message about our full redemption, about our full redemption and every single time there aren't any exceptions that I'm aware of, John, when he would talk about, when they were going to have communion and he's going to preach a message, then he would say, I want to talk about our full redemption, but invariably he would only talk about half of it and that's a bodily healing.

He never addressed the other side, he never addressed sin and salvation. It's almost as though he thought, if I preach enough on healing, I can balance out the scales of what all these people have heard every time they had a communion service.

I'm sure their minister talked about sin and salvation. So I'm going to balance everything out and we're going to talk about our full redemption. And so here are just some of the titles. These are messages on Hobart's list where they were going to have communion and he preached on healing.

Our one remedy for healing, that's a communion service. He preaches from Luke 6, right thinking, the key to healing and health communion service, work too, will thou be made whole, a message preached from John 5, but it's not any spiritual health.

This is all physical health, the healing of the whole person, the redemption of the whole body, the healing question, surviving the pill generation, son of and versus medicine man, the Lord's report, versus a medical report, holding fast to what you have.

Healing is easier. Communion and Calvary, no warning on the label, and on and on, were messages on divine healing at a communion service. And obviously, I think everyone can see what a normal person's reaction would be.

If you're gonna teach on our whole redemption, how about 50% of those times being about the spirit and 50% about the body, you know, it was just completely out of order. It was completely out of balance.

And I would say out of order, surely, surely we all agree that the sin problem is way larger in the grand scheme of things than the physical sickness problem. At least physical sickness, there is a way, there is medical science, there are natural herbs and vitamins and techniques.

There is no cure to the sin problem apart from the sacrifice of Christ. There's no cure for that problem at all. And I just saw he was so preoccupied, he was so bound and determined that I'm gonna give you what you people have never heard before.

I'm gonna give you the message of your full redemption of the body as well. And so he would go down these long tangents of constantly talking about the healing of the body and not in my opinion and not balancing it with the salvation of our soul.

It wasn't balanced and the focus was just not on the gospel as you would expect in a Christian church. You'd expect if you're a Christian and you go to a Christian congregation, you're going to be hearing the gospel.

I, for 37 years of my life, I never heard it because the gospel took backstage to this divine healing message and people would focus more heavily on stories of what was than the gospel itself.

I can tell you countless sermons that I heard where I knew every detail of William Branham's life from start to finish because not because William Branham said it, but you'd go listen to these sermons and they would talk about hunting stories and fishing stories and things that I'm trying to picture a person walking in off of the street who their own vacation to say, hey, honey, let's go try this church around the corner and they walk in and they hear some guy talking about hunting a squirrel in the woods.

What in the world are they going to think? Is this a Christian church? Is this some kind of a lodge? What is this? But that's the way it was and what had happened is once the cult started to form, the mythology of the cult became the new gospel.

It replaced the actual gospel from the Bible and that mythology was deeply rooted in divine healing. So if you were an outsider, you walked into this church, you're going to hear the mythology, all of the weird stories that are focused solely upon the central figure, not upon Jesus, and its relation to the divine healing, because in its original form, in the cult that emerged in ladder rain that developed into Hobart Freeman's cult, divine healing was called the gospel of divine healing, and it was deeply rooted into your salvation included the healing. It came one in the same. In other words, if you were sick

and you accepted the gospel, you had to show the fruits of this by being healed. The sad part is some people had diseases that there is no cure for, so these people sadly thought that they were unsaved. I think Hobart evidently thought that the gospel was just getting people saved, John, because he was very critical of the denominational churches and denominational church Christians, and he just called them John 3.16 people, whoever believes on the sun can have everlasting life, that he just, he always downplayed anybody who he categorized as a John 3.16 Christian,

like there are, like that there are these different levels, and I'm not saying that there aren't different maturity levels among believers, but at the end of the day, everybody who is a believer is a believer, and yes, some people walk their Christian life more satisfactorily than others, and yes, there's a degree varying degrees of reward in the next life, but we're still all believers, regardless, we are still all saved by the same blood of the same sun, of the same God on the same cross, and it's the same sacrifice. I remember hearing one of my favorite all-time preachers,

Dr. R.C. Sproul say, he would give this analogy, he would talk about a long line of continuum, you would have way over on the far right side, you would have the Lord Jesus, and over on the far left side, you would have Adolf Hitler, and then Dr. Sproul would say, and where do I fall on that?

He said, in comparison to the Lord Jesus, and who he is, he said, I'm only about a millimeter this side of Adolf Hitler, and I thought that was so appropriate, because all of us who are fallen, even all of us who are redeemed from a fallen life, we're a lot closer, if we really want to look at our life and be honest with ourselves, we're a lot closer to Hitler than we are to Jesus, we just are, and for a person not to be willing to admit that or not to acknowledge that, probably shows that they have been pre-

occupied with some of these peripheral matters like divine healing instead of studying some of the things we really need to be studying in the Bible. And so Hobart didn't preach the gospel because he thought the gospel is just getting saved. But to whom are the New Testament epistles written? They're written to believers and look at all the wealth of teaching. Paul's not telling people, and here's how you get saved, those people are already saved. That's why he's writing them these letters. These are as JB Phillips said in his translation letters to young churches from from James and from Peter and from

Jude and especially from the Apostle Paul. And if you look through those letters, look for the teaching or instances of divine healing. You don't find very much. You don't find very much at all. The stories of healing are in the gospels and in Acts. And what the people need who are now believers, that would be from Romans on through the end of the New Testament. They are being taught all of these things about now that you are a believer. How should I live my life? What is the Christian life about? It's all about our service to God and the

Christian virtues and our prayer life, our service to and love of one another. That's what the epistles are telling. They're unwrapping and unpacking all of this Old Testament typeology and doctrine that was that was realized in Jesus earthly life and ministry and death and resurrection and ascension. The apostles are interpreting all of that and applying that to the lives of the early church. That's what we should be hearing. Instead, at a communion service, at the glory barn, we are again hearing, I'm going to give you a message on your full total whole redemption and we're going to talk about divine healing. And then

the next step and Dr. Freeman's progression, this is the frog and the warm water in the pot on the top of the range. The next progression and it's just inevitable. If you stay with this, you run out of things to say is basically what happens. You run out of things to say. So your next step is how bad doctors are.

You don't hear that in the early messages. Zero. You do not hear that. As I said, Freeman had Dr. Friends and he praised them and he never said, oh, that's evil to be a doctor or they need to get out of that profession. No, this is the natural progression as you go down this path. He ran out of things to say about healing. He and his mind taught all that he knew about it. So now he has to talk against doctors.

He begins using scare tactics. He begins using shame tactics. The scare tactics are to scare you away from these doctors because they're bad, they're evil. He began doing that by giving all of these and he's got lots of tapes on this.

These, the medical statistics tapes where he would give and he got it all by the way out of Reader's Digest Newsweek and Time Magazine. That was the extent of his research. But he would find some articles that some surgeon had operated on the wrong leg.

You know, when you go in to have a leg operated on, I think the nurse marks the one that you either are to be operated or not. I don't know how that works, but they mark it.

And so he would give us statistic that somebody had the wrong leg amputated and they had a sponge left inside their internal parts after they were operated on. And then he would say there were 10,000 unnecessary operations.

And you gotta see, this is coming from your leader, a leader of 2,000 people. He's given these statistics. You're not allowed to read anything or watch TV or go anywhere. You don't know anything.

You're totally pendant on what this man is giving you. And those statistics are probably viable statistics. He is probably telling the truth, but what people aren't processing is, so what a sponge was left in somebody.

There's a hundred thousand cases where the sponge wasn't left inside the person. Yes, doctors are fallible. And yes, doctors are gonna make mistakes, obviously. But the mistakes they make are relatively few compared to the successful times that they operate on someone.

And if you look at the statistics of death at faith assembly, those statistics were sky high of them dying from something that the doctor could have prevented. But in these people's mind, John, they are hearing, golly, these doctors are terrible people.

M.D. came to stand for medical deities. And so they thought that was so cute that they were talking against medical deities. And people were so afraid. He was scaring them away from the doctors, scaring them towards God instead of the earlier message, which was just welcoming them to healing.

Like we didn't know healing was available. Isn't this great news? Now it's you better not go to the doctor, the hospital, because they'll probably cut the wrong arm off of your body.

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There's a sign-filled episode where Elaine is, she loves these jujee fruits and she's eating the jujee fruits and they just happen to go to a medical observation where they're having an open body surgery on one of the friends and she's standing up in the balcony and drops a jujee fruit and it goes down into his body cavity.

And they sew them up back up and he's just not getting any better. The whole story escalates from there. But when I saw that, the thought hit me. The one in 10 million chance that somebody's going to drop a jujee fruit and somebody's body cavity, that statistic is about the same as these ministers do in these divine healing because they want you to know that somebody somewhere in some random unorthodox way made a mistake and therefore you too, brothers and sisters, you are very much at risk for that same mistake.

They want to put that fear in you and they're not telling about the 999, you know, two infinite 9% that you're going to go in and the jujee is going to be okay. And what that has done for me personally, after leaving, I no longer believe in that way at all.

But in the back of my head, I always have that thought. When I go to the doctor, what if that mistake happens and then I have to tell myself, okay, that bozo that was indoctrinating my head didn't tell me about the almost 100% times that it succeeded.

You wanted to find that one little jujee fruit example. John, that is so true. And everyone who followed Hobart can identify with what you just said and what we're talking about, it was terrible bondage those people were in and I felt so sorry for them.

I recognize this, even when I was still somewhat of a follower of Hobart, I recognize this pretty early, that something has happened. You've gone from a joyful message to a fearful message. You've gone from the privilege we have of trusting God and the hope we have of healing being available in this life.

You've gone... On from that, too, it's just a purely negative message. It's just a hundred percent negative. It's bondage, it's fear, it's condemnation. Hobart himself did not throw away his glasses, get rid of doctors, get rid of insurance.

The first day, month, year of his charismatic walk. He definitely didn't because you hear him having those things on the early tapes, but at the end of his ministry, he's insisting that everybody follow him quickly and immediately, there's no grace period.

He doesn't give anybody the same opportunity he had when he was new in the walk, and that's part of the shame tactic that I mentioned earlier. My word, he would scare you with the medical statistics, but then if he didn't scare you enough, he through the church would shame you because everybody else, they were his little Gestapo, little SS secret police, and they would be monitoring as anybody out here on any kind of medication or going to any kind of doctors.

There was just no grace in that church at all. It's a wonder it lasted as long as it did. I was so thankful when it all came to an end. I wasn't happy that Hobart died sick, and I'll tell all of the stories we haven't gotten there yet.

About his death, I did call June Freeman his wife that very week on the phone to talk to her, hoping that Hobart's death would bring this to an end. I kept thinking to myself and even saying to people in my own church, somebody has got to stop the madness.

People were dying left and right, and the people who weren't dying, wow, he had done, he was very successful, as any call leader is, very successful in getting people to buy into his message and creating such fear and suspicion.

There was no way I at that time and trust me, I tried. I talked to June, I tried to talk to other ministers, I tried to talk to people. I mean, you were not getting through the arm or they had on them.

Not even after Dr. Freeman had died as sick as he died. I thought, surely, that's gonna upset this whole apple cart and bring these walls crumbling down. Man, it didn't do anything like that.

If anything, people just, they just circle the wagons even more and try to figure out why Hobart died, but we're not giving up this message. And you're so right to this day, people who are free, that's just the power that the manipulation of the mind has in a cult like that.

To this day, people who are free still struggle with it. And you and I talked before, if you were a part of a healthy Baptist or Pentecostal or a priest. as material in church for two, three, four, five years of your life with a normal minister.

No, maybe not preaching all the things that he should have or that you wished he would have, but at least he wasn't a cult leader. And you leave that, you don't have any long-term ramifications from that, you know, you just don't.

You don't have any long-term ramifications. You're not, that minister's terminology and his words and his stories aren't embedded in your brain for the rest of your life, so that you can hardly get away from them.

Like they are with Dr. Freeman or William Brannum, or some of these other people. You made the comment on a recent video because I looked at a person's response. Someone who has been, I don't think totally bought into this anyway, I'm not gonna mention names.

They will know who it is because when I tell the story, I don't think they totally bought it. They've been away from it regardless for years, but you made the comment that now that you're getting old or something, you have like Old Man's disease.

And this person said, I thought to myself, oh no, you can't say that because that's a bad confession. Oh, that's right, I don't believe in bad confessions anymore. It, you saying that triggered him into thinking that oh no, if you say that, it's gonna bring all kinds of calamity on you because you can't confess anything about age or about being old, you just can't do that.

And it scared him for your sake until he caught himself and realized, what am I thinking? I've been out of that cult for all these years, you know? I do have Old Man's disease, I got it early, and everybody's bound to get it.

That's the thing about these cults. They try to offer a solution to the world's problems that everybody has because if they can be the answer to that problem, then you can join them and you too can have a new body before you leave the earth.

And it's just so weird, but the indoctrination sticks with you. I had the conversation with my wife just last night. Even if I get a headache, I struggle to take a Tylenol for it because that's the way I was brought up, man.

I can suffer through this, I'm gonna take the pain. And in the back of my head, I'm thinking, you know, you watch those commercials on Tylenol or Advil and they've got that little sentence at the bottom of the page that says, bottom of the screen, it's gonna say, if you take this, you might have this random symptom, this other random symptom, and half the symptoms of those medications, if you look at it, they're symptoms that you would have for the causes that make you take the medication.

And so they're like covering all their bases, right? But in the back of my mind, those sentences that they run at the bottom of the screen that says, you're gonna get this and this, and it scares you to death because that's how the sermons were focused.

And... I had the conversation just last night, I ended up taking some Tylenol, I got pretty bad, but the thing of it is, we were indoctrinated to focus so heavily on that, and how in the world did that become a sermon that's preached in a Christian church?

It has no place or relevance, even if it's the opinion of the person who's preaching. He can have that opinion, he's welcome to it, but he doesn't preach that in a Christian church. It would make me so mad.

I told someone the other day, I can remember years and years ago, I was a young man, and I had not heard a few of Hobart's tapes, and I was missing a few, so I would order a few from John A. Bill, who was head of faith ministries and publications, and I'd receive those in the mail, and I would be so excited, and I would open up that package, and I would pop in the first tape, that's when we were listening to cassette tapes, I'd pop in the first tape based on the title, oh, this is going to be good, and I would start listening

to it, and invariably, I would go, oh no, not the same healing and anti-doctor stuff. I was really hungry, and I wanted to learn something about the Bible, and it would be a message with a long list.

I'm talking about the message itself was taken up with anti-medical deities statistics, that you could get from reading whatever article Hobart read that he gleaned those statistics from, and to your point, no, why are you talking about that in church?

Even though I'm sure those statistics are true, who cares, that's not why I'm coming to church, you know, I'm coming to church, or I'm buying a religious tape, because I'm wanting to learn something about Galatians or Philippians or Jeremiah, I don't care about these statistics, you've worn out, this is an old horse, you've beat him to death, it's all worn out, but it's almost like Hobart, he was just a broken record, and he was stuck, and he couldn't get all that, and he kept using the same examples from the Bible, like Moses in Deuteronomy 34, where we read that Moses was 120, and his eye was not

damn, neither his natural force abated, that's I think in verse 7 of Deuteronomy 34, Deuteronomy 34, 7 is, I was not damn, and his natural force or strength was not abated, and he would, he just pulled that out of his contacts and throws it in to a message on healing, and what you began to see, obviously, is a terrible hermeneutic, a terrible misuse of Scripture, where they took a Scripture verse, that is true, that applied to Moses.

and try to apply it universally. And I saw pretty early on. I mean, when I first heard Dr. Freeman, I thought, oh, yeah, this stuff is great. When I first heard him, shortly thereafter, you've heard all this stuff, and then you're beginning to wonder, I don't think this is really the way it's supposed to be.

Do you know, John, the very first time, I just thought of this the other day, because I have it on the tape list, the last one that came out right after Hobart died. Tape, which was then entitled, F under the Faith Heading 136, our family physician.

That was taught on a Sunday morning, August the 15th, 1976. First time I ever showed up at the glory barn. I'm 17 years old. We had driven from North Mississippi. We were headed to Niles, Michigan to visit.

Some friends of my friends that I was traveling with. We stayed up in Niles, Michigan that weekend, but then drove back down early, early Sunday morning to North Webster, Indiana, to attend the glory barn.

October 15th, 1976. First time I was there, first time I ever met Hobart after the message I went up and shook hands with him, and it was on our family physician, which then to me, I thought, oh, yeah, this is great.

Because before we all had our family physician, it was Dr. Smith, Dr. Jones, but now Jesus is our family physician. So we can get rid of all those guys, and we're not going down that path anymore.

And he even talked, this was the very first time he mentioned the ORC, plan of health. He would talk about how people have blue crawls or blue shield. He said, now we used to have that, but we now use the ORC plan.

This was the first time he mentioned the ORC plan of health. So everyone's on their edge of the seed. I'm in the second floor of the glory barn. There's hundreds of people on the second floor of this barn.

We're way back at the back. We didn't know yet to get there early to get a good seed. And we're hearing this, our family physician and the ORC health plan. Well, it stood for the old rugged cross.

He loved these little abbreviations. He later taught against abbreviations, remember. But he loved these little abbreviations to help make the sermon cute. And of course, to those of us who are new there and we think, wow, this is great.

Moses was 120 and still had great vision. And he was 120 and he was just as strong as he was when he was a young man. And he would tell the story of Caleb and Joshua.

Caleb was 80 years old. He said, I'm just a... strong to go in and go out as I was in the day Moses promised me this mountain, 80-year-old man, just as strong. It was a very poor hermeneutic where Hobart would take something that was meant for a specific individual and just universalize it, just it's a blank check for everyone.

And then they would use rationale by pulling other scriptures out of context, well, God is no respecter persons, right? So why would God do something from Moses that he won't do for you? That's the way Hobart's theology was.

Pulling all of these verses out of context, God did this for Moses, God's no respecter persons, right? Right, because the Bible says that. So God will do that for you. And after all, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.

So you run all those together and then it's like I said last time with Kenneth Hagen's famous sermon, you pretty much could just write your own ticket with God and get anything that you wanted to get.

Another thought I've had recently is that the irony of this faith healing movement is that they were strongly condemned medication and they would point to the examples. The world is getting into a worse place because of all these doctors and medicine and you take the medicine and it makes you worse.

You got to take the blue pill so that you can remember to take the green pill and the green pill because you take that, you got to take the yellow pill. They go through all those scenarios and they they convinced masses of people.

We're talking I would say in the tens of thousands of people that taking medicine was causing the decline of health in the world. Yet, if you look at the statistics, I don't know if you've done this, the average life expectancy of the 50s and 60s when this movement was in its steam is it's like 20 years less than it is today.

Medical science has actually helped us progress in a good way, not in a bad way. These guys, ironically, the same people that are saying you don't need the help because Doomsday is right here around the corner.

The rapture's coming. We're going to be carried away. You don't need the help, yet we're going to force you to believe this and to take not to take medications. All the while, the medical science is actually progressing in a better way than what their plan was.

You're so true on that, John. It's just a very strange scenario. I did not, honestly, as people can tell from my testimony, I did not recognize this early on in my life and none of these other people did.

You did, none of the people that followed Brannum and you're in it as a teen, as I was 17 years old. I didn't have health issues, so healing or not healing doctors or not doctors was in a life or death issue for me, but it is a life or death issue for a lot of people.

Well, and we've documented plenty in these podcasts, people who died following Hobart's method. It wasn't a life or death issue for me, but I thought it was interesting that I had never heard that Jesus had died for the whole man.

But I just knew as a Christian that my struggles in my life as a Christian, they were due to spiritual issues. They were not due to physical issues, and that the growth that I wanted to see in my own personal life was spiritual growth.

And of course, all of us want to feel okay. But I was smart enough to realize whether you are in pain or not in pain, doesn't have anything to do with your eternal destiny.

Your standing with God is just the most important thing to love the Lord, your God, with all of your heart and soul and mind and strength. And then secondly, which we just were not taught, we were not encouraged, we were actually directed away from this, and that is to love your neighbor as yourself.

You know, there was so much elitism and isolationism and faith assembly and the circles that followed them. There was so much shame involved. People were scared to go to the doctors. They were ashamed to anyone who did.

They would try to hide it if it was found out. You were cut off if it was found out by the minister. You became a topic of the next sermon. There was no Christian love.

And yet Hobart talked about 1 Corinthians 1, 10. We need to all speak the same thing, believe the same thing, have the same doctrine. It was an absolute cult effort to get everyone to agree with everything he said and believed.

And there'd be no differences at all. And that's just not reality. And the differences that people wanted to have would be in areas where Hobart didn't want them to have it. And so he just would come down even stronger.

And like the case I gave with Moses and his eyesight, you know, I can remember looking at that passage and thinking, yeah, that's true about Moses. But guess what? I'm not Moses. And to even look at the face-to-face contact that man had with God.

God said, I'll talk to Israel through you, but with my servant Moses, I will talk to you face-to-face. He said, I'll talk to other prophets in similitudes and dreams and visions, but it's not so with my servant Moses.

I will talk to him face to face. I don't compare to Moses. I did not have that ministry and that calling and that burden. And for this man to have accomplished what he did in Pharaoh's court, and to lead millions of people who were slaves out of slavery across the desert right to the very threshold of entering the Promised Land, he needed his strength and he needed good vision.

You know, in a way that the rest of us don't need, and therefore we're not going to have. And I've said on these podcasts, I'm 66 years old, and I want to continue to say, I am so thankful to God for my health.

But I've had my own health issues. I've gone to a doctor, I've taken medicine. It's not been often, and I'm very thankful for that. But it doesn't make me a better Christian, closer to God, closer to an overcomer, because my trips to medical science are less often than someone else's.

It doesn't have anything to do with that. But that I am in good health, that I'm only half Moses age, and I still don't wear glasses. I'm very grateful for that. But I can pretty much predict, if I lift to be 120, that you'll see me with a pair of glasses on.

But I'm not going to live to be that old. I don't even want to live to be that old. I just think it's been such a terrible misuse of Scripture by all of these men to take these passages that are to a specific person and just universalize them.

It's just cherry picking. It's practicing that old childhood game of hopscotch. We just jump from square to square to square and hope we don't fall on the crack in between. It's just cherry picking our way through the Bible.

And of course, we're all humans. I would like to have $10 million in the bank as much as the next person would. And I would like to be in perfect health just as much as the next person was.

I want that we don't all have the same wishes or aspirations as Ponce De Leon did. That's why he was searching for the fountain of youth. But we all need to live in reality.

And we all need to major on the majors and minor on the minors. And I realize when a person is very, very sick and ill, that is a huge issue in their life. I get that and I'm supportive of that.

And we should do everything we can to help that person and aid in their comfort and their recovery and their healing from that. But at the end of the day, you know, to die is gain.

And I'm not saying wishing death on anybody. but I'm just saying at the end of the day, our relationship, our daily walk with God, our life of prayer, our ability to love all of our brothers and sisters in Christ and have fellowship with all of them. We don't see eye to eye on everything, but let's focus on the things that we do see eye to eye on and the things that we don't. Let's be willing to work on those together, not in an argumentative way. But let's lay down on the gauntlet and say, let's let's approach this and let's see if we

can figure this out. But you know, in all things charity as the Apostle Paul said, now abide at faith and hope and love. Dr. Freeman was all about faith and he didn't really like to talk about hope much and even verses that actually use the word hope like in Hebrews 10. Let's hold fast to the confession of our, the Greek says hope, not faith. You would never know that from Dr. Freeman because that was a let's hold on to our faith confession. It's not the Greek word there. Faith, hope, and love and Paul said the greatest of these is love. You know what they did in effect was they turned the

blessings into a curse. The Bible talks about divine healing and it talks about God can bless you with the healing of the body. And these movements took that and they said basically flipped it on upside down and said that if for whatever reason God doesn't heal you, you're cursed and we're not part of you. And if you're in a religion that wants to support the curse and take them to get medicine because God didn't heal them for whatever reason, they're part of the curse. And so we're going to sever ourselves from them. We've in effect severed the body of Christ. That's what

these guys did. And they totally avoided all of the passages that talked about the evil ones that would come to sever the body of Christ. So you can't really have both. You can't uplift part of the Bible that's giving the blessings and then totally ignore the rest of the Bible. And that's what they did in effect because in the end it was a different gospel. It wasn't the gospel of Jesus Christ. So I'm glad that I'm no longer a part of it and I'm glad that I was able to take some Advil or Tylenol, whatever it was from my head last night so my headache could go away.

John, I'm glad you're feeling a lot better today. Good deal. Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Branum.org. For more about the dark side of the new Apostolic Reformation, read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.