Selling Heaven: Poverty, Power, and Prophets - Jed Hartley - Detangling IHOPKC

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brannum Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannum Historical Research at William-brannum.org, and with me I have my co-host and friend, Jed Hartley, son of a prophet and former member of the International House of Prayer. Jed, if you can't tell I'm still laughing at the son of a prophet, thank. But I got to thinking back about to my grandfather. My grandfather was such a conundrum, and my grandfather, if you knew him, he was this humble, poor farmer who just happened to be the head pastor of Brannum's

Brannum Tabernacle, where all of this thing exploded from. And so all of these visitors from around the world, serious figures in the NAR who have come to visit my grandfather, and they see just this humble farmer who's driving this old Osmobil, it's a nice Osmobil, but it's older, and he looks like this humble little guy with no money. And when he died, the, according to the documents that I got my hands on, he died with four million dollars. And I was shocked, man, my jaw dropped to the floor. When I started telling other people who were in the cult,

they, I couldn't even convince them, even though I'm holding a government document. It shows how much money this guy had. Wow. They, they could not, they would not believe it. And what's even funnier is, and the reason I was laughing as we're getting into this, in his resignation speech, he is got the stage persona of a person who has no money. I, even at this point in time, I did not know that he had nearly that much. Talking to a congregation who doesn't know how much money he's got, and he's condemning the random brothers and their organizations saying that it's all about the

money. You got to watch where the money goes, and he warned the whole crowd, if they can get to your children, they can get to the parents. And if they can get to the parents, they can get to the parents pocketbooks. And he said this in this resignation speech. And so I've been wanting to do an episode about money. And when you brought it up, my mind just started spinning out of control with all of these things that I want to say I never have. Well, that's, I'm, I mean, because it's obviously such an important part of these organizations, but yet the culture around money.

in at least in, I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of overlap between your experiences and my experiences, but at the international house prayer, the way that money was talked about was so weird because everyone was poor in all of the community members.

That's an important distinction, but like everyone had, especially for the group of individuals who were full-time on staff, who were students, who were part of it. Of course, students are, there's always gonna be some level of poverty with students, but with the students who are going to the university and for just like, people growing up in it, largely everyone was donating most of their time because the way that it felt like it was administrative.

The ministry is not a money-making world, it's a non-profit. We're donating most of our time. It's through sweat and blood- sweat and tears and hard labor and endless devotion that we keep the fire on the altar from going out.

This is the sort of mentality about it. And so everyone was pressing hard. No one had, I remember there was food banks around the international house part of that. Some community individuals would set up food banks where people would come and get cans, beans, or whatever live off of like beans and rice and can tuna and stuff.

Or, and like the housing, the international houseper had like specific housing for members of staff and it was like subsidized through the international houseperer and their housing was at Hermhut and the housing there was just the most rundown,

horrible place to live, not safe place to live. This has become abundantly clear, especially now that there was like sexual predators that they were not, that they were allowing to live in those like known sexual predators that were allowed to live in those same sort of sort of like student housing as all of these students.

And it wasn't official student housing, it was unofficial, but that's where all of the students and staff members lived. And so on one end, you have all of these people who are giving everything, they're giving all of their time, all of their social capital.

I mean, everybody's friends and, and. Love ones are within this area. You're taught to isolate yourself from your loved ones, but then finances, just the entire finances. I mean, most people were donating, like not getting a penny from IHOP, but those who were on staff, those who were, well, again, even not everybody on staff was getting paid, but those who were getting paid on staff would be getting like $500 stipends and whatnot to be on the worship team.

And play, I mean, you have to play a lot. You have to do hard work. And then you have to be at the prayer room for like 20 hours every week. It was like a requirement that you had to be at the prayer room for an extended period of time.

And these people were getting, yeah, like $500 a month in stipend. And that's what you're supposed to live off, which is just ridiculous. So you have that on one end of just everybody giving everything.

And then on the other end, there's people who behind the scenes, unbeknownst to probably the larger population are gaining a lot of assets, or there's properties, those properties that are being bought up have to go into somebody's name and someone's owning those different properties and the lot of money is being donated to organization.

And that's got to funnel through someone. There's all sorts of, I'll let you jump in here, but there's like two different, there's just two different sides where a bunch of people making money and then behind the scenes and then the larger population of the organization just having to live off of like literally canned food and pennies on the dollar, you know?

The Bible says that it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle rich person to go into the kingdom of God. Yeah. And my family was very good at living in the way that the scripture describes.

I remember eating food out of a spam can. I remember living in a mobile home not enough heat in the place during the winter and my family was really poor, legitimately poor. I remember pushing my father around in a wheelchair and trying to, you know, we were scraping by trying to survive.

That's the life that I lived growing up. And my family was somewhat outcast in the larger scheme of the entire organization. We were somewhat outcast, I'll just say it like that. But what was really odd, when you're poor, you really notice the difference in lifestyles.

And it seemed like the quote unquote spiritual people were all the wealthy people. I don't know why that is... is, but it's like whenever grandpa would call on brother so and so to pray, this brother so and so is driving a brand new Cadillac or Lincoln, and he's wearing a watch that I'll never be able to afford. And that's the kind of people that were spiritual. You know, they never really called on the poor people to have them elevated to the same level of status.

And yet at the same time, some of the people who were insanely wealthy, you just never noticed it. Like I mentioned, my grandfather, you would never have known it. Yeah. I have an uncle that was a deacon and he drove an old Dodge pickup truck to church and hey, falling out of the back of it, you know, he's wearing a somewhat older suit with cowboy boots and you'd look at him in his cowboy hat and think, well, this guy has no money. I actually have him on my website and I can't talk too much about him. But when he sold his house and moved to become

deacon in the Brannum Tabernacle in Jeffersonville, people like John Travolta flew into his private runway to look at his mansion that he was selling. And he had cars like you wouldn't believe. I think he had, I think it was Elvis's motorcycle that he owned and Rolls Royces, Corvads, all kinds of stuff. Yeah. You know, and he was more spiritual than my father who had literally nothing. You know, we were, we were pretty poor. But the difference, whenever you are poor, you notice the difference.

And it's not that I, you know, as a poor person, I didn't care that they were the ones who were more quote unquote spiritual, but I noticed it, you know, and after having left, I really wonder what the difference is. And, you know, if they tie it based on a percentage, I know that the richer people are giving more, more money into the baskets. Is that why? I don't know. But there is clearly a difference between what happens with the rich people in the movement and what happens to the poor. Yeah. And I think that like there, I always, you know, there was, there's a way that

people will talk about it of like, there was a difficulty around addressing wealth inequality within these communities because like you said, everybody who was higher up in the organization, everybody who's aunt preaching from the top is like, of a level of wealth that's just different than everybody else in the community. I have never met a poor itinerant minister, which is, is kind of crazy. But if you think about it, because that doesn't, that shouldn't make a lot of sense. Like, you know, you who think that you'd have the jail in the Baptist types, where they're going

and speaking. And it's like, I don't, you know, there's not a lot of money to be made in itinerant ministry. But that is just factually not true. I don't know exactly know how it happens.

But I know my father made a decent amount of money doing itinerant ministry. He also, which is his ministry was in the marketplace, which was just a way of framing like, oh, we're just gonna cater our ministry to business people and that was very lucrative and profitable.

Not just in the stipends that he would get for speaking at conferences, but just the connections that he would make. A lot of business and a lot of wealth accumulation is about knowing the right people and getting connected to the right organizations and having that sort of, you know,

country club access of talking with other, you know, other individuals who have good wealth and opens up a lot of like opportunities and whatnot. And that's what I know the ministry that my father had.

I know it opened him up to a lot of like very influential wealth of people and that was very beneficial for him and he like developed a decent amount of wealth just through these different things and through his like for-profit organizations that he led.

But, you know, there's always this taboo nature of talking about wealth because, yeah, like I said, all of the leaders of the organization were making a lot more than what the followers

of the organization were. But also, I, it was about controlling the general population. I never realized this until I was in my probably late 20s but it wasn't a bug that so many people at IHOP were poor.

It was a feature. Like that was part of the coal system because when people have are giving up all of their life and giving up everything that they have, it's very difficult to leave, you know?

And so, one, it's not just about greed. It's not just about, Michael says, we receive this amount, we're gonna reduce our stipends so that I can go and buy a luxury condo. I think that that is the case for a lot of the Pentecostal church.

Like you get a lot of the prosperity, gospel, to all esteem and stuff. Like there are a lot of individuals who we could talk about who are just clearly in it to like take all the tithe and then build up their own sort of kingdoms and build up images of themselves cast and gold.

Like that is just clearly what is going on in a lot of the charismatic Pentecostal church. But I think with the international house prayer and this sort of like more coal community, it was less of that.

Mike Bickle from my understanding didn't live like- a very like lavish lifestyle, didn't have, you know, the Rolex watches and the giant mansion and the, you know, different Cadillacs and stuff like that. Now don't get me wrong, he lived very comfortably, but he, it wasn't about him gaining a bunch of wealth through this organization.

I believe that it was about controlling the masses and having a bunch of students who were in this place of desperation. I mean, I hop was a community that thrived on desperation. And there's nothing quite like the state of desperation that is evoked when you are truly desperately poor.

And when you don't have enough money to pay for your food, when you are skipping meals because you can't afford. So like, there's a lot of people who fasted at I hop and I've done this myself like at times in my adult life of like, I would fast, I just didn't have money to pay for food.

And this was like a good way of me thinking through, you know, and contextualizing and pretending like I'm not impoverished is that like, okay, I'm just not going to eat during these different times because I just can't, can't afford whatever it would be.

And I mean, that and then not knowing where you're going to live, you're all your housing when you're paying rent or you're a part of an organization where the only rent that you can afford is the one that's subsidized by the international house prayer.

And so that you're having to live in a place that if you leave the organization, you now are homeless.

You so not only are you not making money, but you're homeless, you don't really have job experiences. This is another thing like the I hop you, the university they would have people go through.

Like that degree meant nothing to the outside world, absolutely nothing. I mean, hundreds, well, thousands, tens of thousands of degrees were given out by the I hop you university. I would say there was probably a hundred or so people who ever used that degree in a way to like make money outside of like the I hop sphere.

And I don't, you know, maybe people used it to transition into a seminary program having an accredited university, largely though, you just paid money to learn propaganda and and develop no real skills, develop no resume.

So just to keep these people in the state of desperation, this is part of the the recipe of it is don't don't provide them income and and moralize that make it holy to not have income make it holy to be dirt poor and then it was universalized where it wasn't proportional right it wasn't about the individuals who had a lot of money and had a lot of wealth and while others lacked it was about all of us we all demonstrate greed in some sense like it was it's kind of like how it's kind of like how environmentalism is sometimes done

bear with me for a second here but like people will talk about like recycling and it's like what what are we going to do to like help the environment and it's like it's sort of ridiculous because you have corporations that are you know you have oil spills and these huge industrial plants that building efficient like air conditioning systems because it's cheaper on the front end instead of sustainability like very little of like day-to-day consumerism in fact impacts like global climate change it's more about the like sort of corporate policies and stuff but yeah it's universalized to make it be like well you better you better recycle your if you don't recycle

your bottle and put it in the the blue bin instead of the green bin where that one's for paper you know like it makes it everybody's problem instead of the individuals who are actually like destroying the planet and I think that this is like very similar to the way that we talked about greed is like it was just that it was like a individual sort of like attitude it was it had nothing to do with like what the wealth people had accumulated or not accumulated it was just sort of like are you giving all okay well if you're not being greedy with your resources are you being

greedy with your time are you giving everything to the Lord so like these poor individuals who are at the international house prayer who are already giving all of their time all of their money all of their energy were still treated as if they needed to give more so there wasn't any real ability to address wealth inequality within the organization or poverty and and and the way that people were abusing the system because the rhetoric around it was made to make everyone feel the same and feel guilty one of the books that I read on authoritarian cults and

it might have been combating cult mind control that this is in but it talks about the cult dynamic of dependency money is just one attribute of dependency but whenever an authoritarian structure is created the people become dependence upon the cult internally and it creates this cohesive unit whether it's fine Antially or some cults, I think I, I hop KC fits this pretty well, but they demand a lot of your time and in effect time is also money because you could be spending that time outside at a job or whatever, so you're effectively giving to the economy of the building and in doing so, all of your investment

is in this organization, so you become dependent on it. And whether it's by design, maybe people have figured this out or maybe it's by pure accident that some authoritarian figure suddenly realizes if I do this, they'll stay in the cult, it creates this bubble where people it's much more difficult to leave because I think of like us in the stock market, if you invest all of your money into this one single stock and you're just riding the wave as it goes up and up and down, up and down and you continue to invest in it, there becomes this connection to it where you

don't want to leave it because I've already invested so much money, what if I lose it? Well that applies to the cult dynamic, you're investing into the cult, your time, your money, everything else that you do, but beyond that, there's this weird economy, it's a donorship economy that is created within these cult structures and especially in the Pentecostal religions where they really heavily either in force or they heavily push the 10% tithe, every 10th person makes an entire salary and in some cases some of the buildings aren't that expensive, so if you do the math on the people sitting in here, you're like wait a minute, I've done this math as a kid, I'm just

thinking as I'm watching the 10% going into the basket, all it takes is just to just count the heads of the people and you're suddenly thinking that's a lot of money, where is it all going?

And in the cases that I have been involved with, much like you describe, the ones at the top did not often have the appearance of having a lot of money, yet at the same time when poor people came to the church, there was no money left in the church to give to the poor and that creates this other donorship economy, a lot of churches operate like this, you have multiple salaries going into a building that doesn't cost that much money, but when a poor person is in need, they have this prayer meeting and they say hey, we need to lift up brother so and so, is there

anybody willing to give a special offering until the past day offering plate? What's a donor economy? The church essentially had the money because of the 10% tithe, but they collect more money for the instance and it creates this cycle where they're demanding more and more time money, whatever you can donate to the church and it creates that structure where you're just invisible walls are holding you in. Yeah, and I think that the way that it's done too is you don't always see the Let's say you get a million dollars comes into the organization, which like I hop at its peak was probably

bringing in more like 20 million dollars due to donations and music, like the music that they were producing some of the most popular Christian music during the time. So there's a lot of different like revenue streams that I hop was bringing in.

Now does that mean that Mike Bickle and Bob Hartley or whoever are getting $7 million salaries each year? Probably not. It could have been happening. I'm not totally sure. I hop stopped becoming financially transparent in like 2017.

I think they like filed, I can't remember exactly what the qualifications were, but like they made it so that they were not, they did not have to file public, which I think has like nonprofits you're supposed to file your financials publicly, but I don't know.

That's I should probably look into that and maybe next week I can give more specifics on that. But anyway, all that to say, let's say they were at their height bringing in 20 million dollars.

And then there's, it's not like that it's just being funneled exactly to the director instead is that it's used to them by assets, like by buildings, by whatever it is, like by lands, like there was a lot of land accumulation, building accumulation, different real estate stuff, different, I mean, primarily through like real estate and land ownership, they take the money.

And so it looks like, oh, well, I haven't made this much, but we just expanded, like it just went back to the organization to that building. But then when I hopped falls apart as it just did, someone still owns that land.

And when it's dissolved, it's not like it's sold and then the profits of the property are then doled out to the individuals based on the amount of time that they smelt at the international house prayer.

That would seem fair and equitable that everyone would get a check based off of like we liquidated these assets and it went back to the people. That is of course not how it happens.

And what happens is Mike Bickle gave, had a lot of like in he had different like shell companies and had different organizations that he would like then donate land and properties to. who either the organization or to individuals, like the Shiloh property they owned, that became something that was used as a bargaining chip or is used as something that to give and reward his own family and whatnot.

And so it's really, what ends up being is that, like when everything hits the fan and IHOP is kind of held accountable for the things that it was doing, not just that Mike Bickle was doing, but the whole organization was doing and the sort of abuses that were going on, the people who immediately have the most repercussions

of IHOP falling apart are not the individuals who lead it. It's not Mike Bickle, Mike Bickle is fine. He has plenty of assets that he's built over several decades in this organization. He can go back to his one of his several properties that he owns and he can live there comfortably for the rest of his days with his family also owning like a lot of different property like he's fine.

There's no financial repercussions of this just because the IHOP dissolved like, okay, great, that's fine, he's in his 70s, that's no big deal. But all of the different individuals who were there presently and who have been there in the past, are left kind of holding the bag, left being like, what are we gonna do?

I mean, so many, think of the university, IHOP university, I have no idea what happened to all of those individuals who are halfway through their year at this university. Did they get their tuition back?

Did they get their tuition back for the previous year because they didn't get there, they weren't able to finish it out. Even if they do get their tuition back, that's just like four years or three years or two years down the drain.

And it's done in such a way that I think largely, if you interviewed 80, 90% of the people who recently were just a part of IHOP you, they would probably blame people like me and Deborah and Tammy and my mom and individuals who blew the whistle

on Mike Bickle instead of blaming Mike Bickle because they are in such a state of desperation, instead of recognizing the corrosive corrupt structure of the organization that they were a part of and how its failure was like indicative of the way that it was built.

Like it's indicative of like the structure that Mike Bickle and IHOP had set up, instead of looking and blaming those individuals and blaming the real villains, they blame the people who raised the, though, alarm. And I think that it would probably be a decade or so until a lot of individuals recognize that they spent, you know, their early 20s in an organization that was fundamentally like

abusing them and taking advantage of them. Right now, I would not say that most of them are able to recognize that. Because again, it's just a state of desperation. And when I hop fell apart, they weren't saying, sorry, this is on us. It was, you know, it wasn't this sort of like, we did you wrong, we should have structured it in a different way. We didn't have the financial, like

barriers in place to send tuition back to provide you guys with any sort of stability. If this happened, we also didn't, you know, weren't doing a good job of making sure our leadership wasn't fundamentally abusing people behind the scenes, like that there was not any responsibility that the organization took for its own collapse. And instead, it was prophecies about the black horse and about attacks of the demonic. I mean, that was all the conversation around there. And if you're in a desperate place, in a desperate situation, I think that people should, I speak very like compassionately for all the people who are deceived. I want to be very clear,

like, they're still like, people still are accountable for the beliefs that they hold. And like, I do think that there was a lot of individuals who needed to take responsibility for being deceived and being in the part of that organization and not spreading more lies and rumors about, you know, the attacks of the demonic can be like, no, we are in this position because of the decisions that our leader made. This is 100% on the fault of Michael and Stewart Greaves and the other individuals who like were abusing people and created this structure. But it is,

even though I think that it's wrong of these individuals to excuse Michael and excuse the system, I think it's wrong, but I think it's understandable. I get why they're doing it because they're desperate. They're in a desperate situation and it's hard to come to terms with the fact that you gave so much to an organization that was taking so much from you without giving anything in return.

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On behalf of William Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. You mentioned the real estate, and that's something that was a little bit surprising to me that I didn't catch it. I consider myself to be a smart man, and yet I still kind of overlooked it, but in multiple cults, not just in the Brannum cult, there seems to be this tendency to invest in real estate. And some churches just simply call it expansion. You know, I went to one church interestingly, not going to mention its name, but it was a very, very large church that had multiple

campuses in this area. And the minister was preaching this good, grace-filled sermon. You know, we went there probably seven times and seven or eight times. Over and over, we're hearing this, you know, we're in the new covenant, and he tries to separate from the legalistic religions and Christian faith that focus on the old covenant. And he said, we're no longer under the old covenant. And it was pretty good sermons until they needed money. And when he needed money, the completely reverse course, and basically took everybody out from the new covenant and back into old covenant law and said, today I'm going to preach on something that's going to make some

of you a little nervous. I'm going to talk about Ty. Then he went fully reverse course, right? And as I left in the middle of his speech trying to beg me for money, I grabbed the financials on, they post the financials by the door and I grabbed it. And they had gone, they had tried to invest in some real estate and create another satellite operation. And apparently went over budget with it and needed more money to fund that. And I get to thinking at that point about just the real estate in general, like you said, that's not something that is easily tracked when you look

at a person and see how they look financially, you know, they could wear ragged clothes and get up and preach. But if they've got multi-million dollar real estate investments, they still have a lot of money. And that type of investment goes beyond just the real estate. I was taught, I had a conversation with somebody about, I'm not going to give his name because it'll create battles in the comment feeds, but one of the well-recognized, well-respected charismatic leaders who had books.

And I was talking about, you know, the books is an investment, right? And even if the guy's dead, his family still gets the proceedings from the books. And I have good friends that are authors who are famous authors who have had John Goodman movies made from their books.

And when I first began my publishing of research, I think I was only making maybe ten cents per book and I had a conversation with him and he says, John, that's not sustainable. You'll burn out.

You won't keep it up. You have to raise your rates. I ignored it until some other people finally convinced me, yeah, I will burn out. But he was telling me how the proceedings of the money works in the book.

It's not like you publish a book and you suddenly get a massive sum of money. There's no instant surge. In fact, it kind of starts out low and it goes up over time. As your book gets more recognition, it's like an investment.

It grows over time, right? It's an asset that you have. Well, if you look at any of these NAR people that are producing all these books, there's a reason why they're producing all these books.

It is a revenue-making vehicle and I was looking at some other things. One of my friends sent me, I think, Bethel Church has this clicker that they're selling. Click for God or whatever. I can't remember how they worded it, but it's that kind of thing, right?

It only costs pennies to produce these things and they sell it for a few dollars. That is an investment that is now turning into a product that you buy. Well, it all goes back to the economy of the cult.

Whenever you get the people to invest in your cult, they're basically buying into your economy and when they buy, they become more trapped. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And like those different assets, I was trying to think of it when I was talking about and all I could think of was real estate, but you're totally right about assets like products and books and music and this is the corrupt way that, you know, IHOP would have produced just all of this different music, but it was all through their label and through their organization and through their name.

And I know that there was some shady dealings with like a lot of people were upset because they weren't, you know, these misty Edward CDs were making boo-koo bucks and not everyone was getting a proportional cut of that and it, and if you're an organization leader, you could be like, well, it's a ministry.

We're not in it for the money. We're not doing this. We're doing it and we can sew back into the ministry itself, but who owns the ministry? You know, who is the financial, and who is making the financial decisions for that ministry because exactly what happens is, you know, a few years before things start falling apart, your organization, this big organization like IHOPKC that you have built and you have developed millions and millions of dollars worth of assets with, even though even if you've only been giving yourself a hundred thousand dollars a year, which is like a still exorbitant compared to

the staff that is making, again, five thousand, or sorry, five hundred dollars a month than living off of that, you know. But even if you've been giving yourself only a hundred thousand dollars a year, it's salary. You now have millions of dollars with that worth of assets and not always clear financial evaluations of those assets because you bought them earlier at lower prices because you knew the individual who gave you a good deal and you've been paying low property taxes on it and you donate it or you give it to a different organization. So like

this is exactly how it's happened several times and I know this because this happened with my dad too and I've seen this. So say I have an organization like IHOPKC that I am running and then I have a property that's worth seven million dollars and it's not actually, I'm not paying property taxes worth seven million dollars over it because, you know, it hasn't been reassessed in the evaluation of it is still at like, you know, say we bought it for two million dollars or something like that. And then I choose to sell that for a million dollars to another non-profit that I

start a different non-profit. This non-profit, you know, it's big, it's larger, there's more people on the board but still I have great control of that board and then I have this other non-profit. That's just my non-profit. Let's call it JEDS Ministry right over here and it's just about me and whatever I want to be, you know, and that's where I have my books and I've published all of my books through JEDS Ministry. I haven't published them through IHOPK. IHOPK doesn't own them. JEDS Ministry does and even though I, so I've put IHOPK, I'm only famous because IHOPK gave me my name and fame

but I've been, you know, keeping all of my individual assets over here and then I purchase this multi-million dollar building for pennies on the dollar from JEDS organization purchases from IHOPK and then when IHOPK dissolves and people are like, hey, we need to pay, we need money for an investigation about the structure of IHOP. Everybody looks around and says, hey, we're broke. We don't have any assets. Oh my goodness. This property that we use, we don't even own it anymore. We He sold it to this different group that we're now paying rent to, you know?

And that's exactly what happened with these different. I mean, if you look at Mike Bickle and everybody's known this for a long time who's known Mike Bickle, he has like 40 different, I mean, that's a little hyperbolic, but not super hyperbolic, shell company.

I'm so many different nonprofits and they're all in different names and they aren't clear who owns what. The whole reason that the Firefly organization and ticking the, or Ticcan, or I never know how to pronounce that name, that organization got involved with investigating IHOP because the leaders Isaac Bennett and some of the other leaders of IHOP tried to create a new nonprofit and they listed Ticcan as on the board of it somehow without them ever like talking.

And so they basically were trying to create another shell company, another shell organization to like move assets or to, you know, dump the IHOP name to really brand, whatever it was. And normally that has worked.

Like 100% of the time in the past, like that was a good effective way to avoid accountability and to avoid sort of people pointing to an individual and saying, this individual is worth $15 million while he is having people who get paid nothing, who are lievering below poverty, who are having to go to government food banks and who are having to like do, you know, have no healthcare and just ignore a lot of their health issues because they don't have money to deal with it.

In order to like keep from having that clear income inequality present, there's all of these little tricks of the trade and it's ridiculous, it's so ridiculous. And I saw it happen. One of the only arrests that I know of in the organization, I think I've talked about this before, there was a mayor of Grandview,

his name was Steve Dennis. Have I talked about Steve Dennis before? No. So there was a mayor who, his name was Steve Dennis. He actually passed away about a year after this but he was elected as the mayor of Grandview and he ended up going to a prison for, I believe it was a year because he had taken money, I hopped donated to his campaign and I believe that he had just like used that money as individual sort of sell.

Like he just, I can't remember exactly what the law, what law he, broke, but essentially it was, I just gave him money and he used it to pay for his sort of living expenses and whatnot. And I remember Steve Dennis was actually very close to my father during this time. And I remember my dad was just furious and so perplexed because of what happened and he was like, they're just out to get him. It's ridiculous. And he was like, if he's guilty of that and if that's illegal, then everything that I've done, I should be in

prison too. And I remember being, I was only like 18 or something when this happened. And I remember being like, wait, should you be in prison instead of like him? It told me something where I was like, Oh, he was basically like, we do this all the time. We give money to different people. We have them ear market for one thing. And then they use it for a different thing because that's just, you know, that's what you have to do so that you don't get taxed by the government.

So that you're able to make sure that these assets, you know, it's just sort of like moving money around that is loosely identified with these different parameters. So that is legal. If you use it for this different thing, who cares? Like we would, we would do so many different things where we would go on family vacations. And he would be like, okay, now, Jed, I'm going to talk to you about some business idea. He was like, see, now all of this was

tax deductible because this was a business trip. And I was like, I have no idea what you were talking about. But this is, you know, a way of, and I still don't fully know what was illegal or what wasn't illegal about what he did. But it was this, it was a game. It was this entire game of like play hide and seek with the money so that people, whether it be the government, whether it be outside accountability, isn't able to identify the amount of assets that you have. Then when it comes to investing in new properties, then play, give them a different sheet of money and inflate your

value so that you can get higher, you know, loans with lower interest rates that you can buy into these larger organizations because you have all of this amount of wealth. So like when it came time to buy into other different things, like when it was profitable to have a lot of money, there was suddenly a lot of money on the spreadsheet. When it was profitable to not have a lot of money, it was, hey, we're living poor, we're living, we don't have a whole lot of assets, it's not our assets, it's the organization's assets, it's just, it's a total game of hide and seek.

So it's kind of funny because you and I didn't really talk about what we were going to talk about in this podcast other than money. And I'm kind of glad that you headed me here because this is where I was wanting to end up, believe it or not.

What you're referring to is organized crime. And there's a lot I can't say for obvious reasons, there's some right here that I won't go there. But organized crime, I'll just give the definition of it.

Organized crime refers to criminal activities that are planned and controlled by powerful groups, but then they're carried out on a large scale. And again, I can't talk about that, there's some danger there, there's some history there that I won't get into.

Instead, I will talk about organized doctrinal crime. And you can understand that underneath the organized doctrinal crime, there's other things that exist. I'll just say it like that. But by doctrinal crime, what I'm referring to is, if you are hardcore in your theology and everybody else outside of your group, is condemned to hell because they don't believe you 100% to your theology.

Think of the irony of bringing other people into your church to minister who have a different theology. And then take it a step further as they connect with you. And this is all spread throughout the NAR networks.

They have one person come and speak and they sell the books and they sell the recordings. And oh, by the way, we've got a magazine. And we're going to have a convention. And this guy has no beholdings to the organization that they're speaking in, other than the fact they're in this network.

And the people who are at the top of the network control, who gets to speak and who doesn't get to speak. And so if you go to the leaders in this organized doctrinal crime and you say, hey, I've got a book I'd like to sell, what can I do?

Oh, come speak at our church. I think that that's such a good point because viewing both wealth accumulation and power accumulation or authority accumulation as similar processes, I think is something that I haven't really analyzed it from that perspective.

But when you were talking like that's what I was thinking about of just the way that people were elevated, the way that certain doctrines were elevated, the way that certain doctrines were held, even though it wasn't believed by the community, that some of the more fringe, lateral reign doctrines, there was never really a reason that we had to hold onto that from the populist perspective.

If you went and talked with individuals at the international house prayer, would they have been, yeah, this is really important. We have to fix our whole identity on this particular doctrine. No, but somehow those doctrines became the established doctrines of the upper echelon of the community.

I mean, yeah, it really is. Similar to this sort of like organized crime where there's a lot of decisions and processes that are made that are happen behind the scenes where there's no clarity, there's no transparency.

There's no rhyme or reason and a lot of the real rhymes or reason are like purposefully hidden. So specifically, let's think financials. Like a lot of the financial doings of the international house prayer were explicitly done in order to make it confusing and to have these seven different shell companies that own different slices of the international house prayer that have different board members.

Sometimes the same board members are sometimes just a few of the larger board member group and it was all done with the explicit intention to make it unclear. And like whether again, unclear to the IRS, unclear to the people who were in the organization, unclear to anybody who was sort of externally trying to bring accountability to the organization, you know, all of the above.

It was purposely made sort of gray and this was totally what was the case with like I never understood who got elevated and who was allowed to speak at the international house prayer and who wasn't.

It made no sense to me. I still to this day, I think I've talked about this before. No one who I knew who grew up at the international house prayer. So none of us, you know, my generation was the generation that was Joel's generation and was the generation that was gonna speak in tongues and healing and prophecy and tenfold that of our fathers.

We were built in this very, you know, we've obviously discussed this in different times but very, very insidious way there is this sort of investment into the youth that we would be these sort of like grand special things.

There's not a single member of my generation and I'm, you know, I'm 33. Now it's not like I'm still a kid but even the generation is slightly above me. Like anybody who are in their like 30s, 40s who grew up in IHOP that has any sense of authority within that community.

Like there is no public, none of the public speakers, none of the individuals who are writing books or who are doing it. Some of the like worship leaders have branched off and done some of their own things like Corey Aspery and, you know, there's certain individuals who have had some of their careers launched from the...

the music side, but there was not a single career launched that was doctrinal of the of the group that I grew up with. So like we were all being groomed but not for a particular platform, like clearly not for anything and and just so like being groomed and then cast aside groomed and then cast aside. It's just it's wild think and that I think that that goes back to this sort of lack of transparency of there was no hierarchy at the international house of prayer that was clear that you and structured you know you put in your 40

hours a week at the international house prayer you do these things you pray these prayers you stay committed and eventually you will then also be able to like sell your own book at at the prayer room you'll be able to have your authority you'll be able to speak from the pulpit it's like

nope it's all behind the scenes all done in a shady way with zero transparency same way that they do the finances and it was never intended for us to ever share in the power or the finances of that world. Well to wrap this up because I think we could go all kinds of different directions here the the difference between a cult and a non-cult church I think it's good that we point that out because I had no idea whenever I was in well I had no idea was in a cult to begin with but after I left I didn't understand how different the structure was internally and it

wasn't until after leaving we had attended a new church probably I want to say it was like six months before it really clicked but after church they asked me if I wanted to stay they were going to go over the financial reports and this is just something that I didn't do this doesn't interest me why would I do this and they explained to me the importance and significance of it especially from what I had came from so I went and I got handed this piece of paper well the stack of papers that they had stapled together and it went through the financial reports of the business side of

a church not not many people are aware but a church has to operate like a business to stay open and there there's an income there's an expanse it has to go through accounting proper accounting and the that phrase proper accounting is critical because they they went through the report and they said we have air conditioner units that are aging we're expecting that they're probably maybe they're going to last another year maybe two years but we need to start accounting for that so here's a category we're going to put into the budget for this and we just spent x number of

dollars on toilet paper and it was an astronomical amount of money that they spend for toilet paper I was a little surprised at how much toilet paper a church actually uses but it was accounted for and right down to the dollars and send I mean If you did the math in your head, they got a pretty good deal on the toilet paper.

So I was a little surprised at that too, but it was ran like a business and they had people who were negotiating for better deals. They were trying to keep the money, the cost low.

But more than that, they were being very open and transparent about everything. There was, in the church that I attended, a media laughter leaving the cult, there was a real estate investment and they were using it for something that I didn't agree with at the time.

I actually ended up leaving over what they used that for. However, their transparency about the structure itself in the real estate, it was very open. I was clearly on board with their spending, just not doctrinally where they went with what they did with that building.

But I knew up front, I knew the building was coming, I knew doctrinally what was coming. There was no surprises whenever it happened. I just knew because they were open and transparent. And out of everything that we have said in this podcast, I can assure you that not a single thing was transparent and out in the open at IHOP KC, definitely not in Brannemism.

But I've talked to many, many cult members who have escaped their cult of choice. And it's the same across the board. If you find a group that's really hiding where your money goes. And again, you can do the math.

If you're sitting in a crowd of 10 people, that's a salary. 20 people, that's two salaries. You can do the math, right? If they're giving 10% like many of these groups proclaim, you can do the math.

And then you can kind of do the math on what the building costs. What would it cost if you were in a home of this size, right? So you can do the math and you can tell and just ask yourself, are they being transparent?

Where's the money going? I've been thinking about this recently, what's heartbreaking too is that the wealth accumulation that happens in these organizations, like you talked about finding out that your grandfather had $4 million that you're like, how did he have this and how did he accumulate this?

And I think the same with Michael and my dad and other individuals who have been able to use sort of deception and able to use some coercion and business or whatever to etch out a little bit of wealth.

I want the way that we talk about wealth is it's still not like money. It's still like, I've been rewatching Game of Thrones, which is probably not great for my mindset of any of this, but it's like people willing to sell out their family in their area so that they can get a slice of the kingdom.

It is just so heartbreaking. And it's like thinking about how these individuals who use deception and... portion and sell out their family and their friends and have people, you know, give 40 hours a week of their lives to an organization so that they can sort of accumulate this wealth. And then the wealth just isn't even that much. I mean, I was talking to, this is maybe too much detail, but I remember talking with my father and he was, I kind of, I was upset with him because of this thing. I was just like, what have you done? And he was like, I've built all of this wealth

and he was very proud of the amount of money that he had made. And I was like, look, if you, if you had the same amount of wealth that you have accumulated over an entire lifetime, like all of the lifetime of tricking people, deceiving individuals has accumulated this amount, right? If you made that every single week, so all of your 80, you know, well, he hasn't been left for 80 years, but all of your, you know, 68 years of life, all of the wealth that you made and you collected it, all of the assets that you had. And every single week from here in the future,

you made that same amount. I think it, I did the math on it and it was something like 12,000 weeks before he would even crack the top 10 of wealthiest people in the world. So that's like something like 200 years or something like that where it would take hundreds of years, making all of that wealth back again and again and again to just be one of the top 10, not even to be the wealthiest man life. And it's just the exorbitant disparate, this is, this goes to the exorbitant wealth disparity in the United States in general,

but we won't talk about that. That's, that's maybe for a different topic. But I just, the amounts that people are selling out, the people that they love for just a slice of wealth, that is just so meaningless in the grand scheme of things. And I don't, I don't know who I'm talking to here, but I need to just express that because it's just so ridiculous how much we are letting a sliver of wealth buy our souls and these different individuals who are just giving up. I mean, the Bible talks about this all the time. It talks about how wealth

accumulation, like how you can't serve two gods, you know, Maman or Yahweh, you know, like that you have to, you have to choose whether or not you're giving your soul to this, this wealth accumulation or whether you're giving your soul to, to God. And it is quite clear that like I've just seen so many individuals just absolutely lose their souls for just a glimmer, just a glimmer of wealth.

And I think it's just so meaningless. Well, at least with Game of Thrones. knew who was going to betray you, who was going to die, and whether what was actually coming. DieHopKC, you just got prophecy in paperwork and whatnot.

You still ended up broke, so. Right. Anyway, thanks for doing this. 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, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available in Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.