Tangled Spaghetti: A Former YWAM Member Speaks Out

Music Hello, 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 very special guest, Kim Spicer, former member of YWAM.

Kim, it's good to have you on and to talk about youth with a mission. As I was mentioning to you before, and I've mentioned on the podcast, I'm really, really curious about the group, because I get so much feedback.

Recently, I've had people who were in the group, and they want to say that it's a very good, good agenda, and I can't argue with this, but I also have people that tell me this was very cult-ish or cult-like, and they describe their experiences. I can't argue with what their experiences.

So I'm very glad that you're coming to share your story, and I don't know which one you are if you're leaning towards the critical or the non-critical, but in either case, I'm very glad to have you. Maybe you could tell everybody a little bit about yourself.

Thank you. Yes, well, from a very young age, I wanted to train as a nurse and be a missionary in India. So that set my path for myself in at school, choosing what subjects to do, and so on, so that I could go into nursing. So I did that.

I trained as a nurse and a midwife. I got a diploma in Tropical Health, and my aim was to go work in India as a missionary nurse, which was great. And I thought I, well, I had prepared in professional terms, very well for it, and growing up, I read books about India and tried to find out as much as I could about it.

So that was the path I sort of tried to take, but it all got a little bit, a little bit like Tangled Spaghetti, I suppose, in the end, when it came to deciding who I should work with, and that's where I went, comes into it.

I like your term Tangled Spaghetti. I'm probably going to use that in the future, because looking at all of this mass, there's no better... explanation. This is tangled ball of spaghetti. And you know, I've through my history, I've studied all of these different groups and how they're interconnected. Often whenever I publish information about a critical group, I get these sudden emails, the surge of emails and people are saying, you can't link those two. That's guilt by association.

But when you understand, it's all the same point of spaghetti with different ends of spaghetti. You have to understand that they're maybe they're not acting like the group, but there is influence there. And it's that influence that really, it just fascinates me. The plate of spaghetti fascinates me. Well, I was brought up in, um, that guilt for Baptist church. This was, it was 1967. We started going there. So I was six years old. And um, the reason I remember the, the year is, it's the year of the great flood in Guildford, um, and the river overflowed. So it's something that sticks in people's minds. And, um, we

had, um, a teacher, Bible teacher David Dawson. I don't know if you had ever heard of him. Oh, but he was good. He was, was very good. And so my, my parents, um, decided to start going to Guildford Baptist church, which was great. We had, um, solid contextual, Bible teaching and, um, snippets of what David Dawson said often come back to my mind. And I always remember him saying this, never believe something because I've told you it's so always test it for yourself, always look into it yourself. It's still with me now, but did I do it? No, I didn't. Um, and there are a few reasons for that. It's not an excuse,

you know, I grew up having been taught this, but, um, I didn't do it. And that's partly why I ended up where I did. So, yeah, so I moved to London. I did my nurse training trained as a midwife. I got lots of pediatric experience. And, um, I was planning at one point on working with the leprosy mission. I like people who have leprosy that they have a certain character about them, and they are lovely to nurse and to help. So I was going to go, um, with them, but then I joined Holy Trinity Brompton. I don't know if you've heard of HTB. There's a

big church in London. It was there for years, but they were starting putting together the Alpha Course, which is a very... charismatic type of thing. And I don't know, there's always stuff started creeping in. You were talking about influence and all this stuff started creeping in. We had, when I started, we had a figure there called John Collins, his name was, I would, yes, I would think that he's probably gone to be the Lord now. He was very elderly, but when he retired, the cura, it's Santa Miller took over. So we had Santa Miller and we had Nikki Gumball. Nikki Gumball was running out from. And under their influence, things started to become less focused on Scripture, a more focused on experience.

And it was a weird environment. You know, everybody was acting like something kind of psychologist. There was a lot of inhaling going on. And we were all expected to have this inhaling and it became very strange, but because I was a member of HDB and I'd been there for years.

I jumped in to it all and personally, I didn't do inhaling for people, but I went to the John Wimba conferences. And we loved them. We thought they were great. But again, I didn't, I didn't test it. All the things that happened. I look back now, Wimba conferences. I just think, Kim, I, I don't know why, but maybe the Lord said it happened.

For his reasons and maybe that's why I can now help other people who've been embroiled with it or and who have come out. So, but I'll tell you a bit more about that later. So yeah, we had the Wimba conferences and we all went every year and thought it was was brilliant.

And in the meantime, I'm getting more nursing experience and it was my small group leader at HDB who mentioned why Wimba to me. And that was the first time I'd ever heard of it. So she told me a bit more. And because of the teaching, we were getting at Holy Trinity then. It seemed like a good fix. You know, this is just a natural place to go.

So I applied to a DTS discipleship training course in the UK. I live in the southeast of England and why one has a base in the southeast. So I applied there. And it was it was ghastly, it was absolutely hideous. And it's really hard to to untangle the spaghetti because it was just so much wrong with it. But this is the whole cult thing. We just went along with it. And if you if you question things, we were questioning board himself and we could even be committing the unforgivable sin, both of which are nonsense. But that's what got me into a lot of

trouble in on my DTS. And we would have this this thing where they'd have a visiting speaker or maybe one of the leaders would say, teach us about anger. I don't recall the Bible being opened and it's been spoken of from a biblical perspective, but we'd have say it all is teach your anger. And then after a few days, we were all supposed to be delivered off these demons of anger. You know, there were demons behind every tree and ready to trip us up. And it's it's just so wrong. One of my favorite parts of the Bible is Job one and two. When

Satan has to go to God, say, can I do this? And God says, that's okay, but you can only go this far. And all power, God is omnipotent. All power belongs to him. Now he shares it out sometimes. He will give a bitter power to a king or to Satan. But he sets the limits. Satan is on a leash. So, you know, we don't need to fear because Satan can't go beyond what God has set for him. My dear mother is very charismatic. I love her dearly, but you know, like a lot of people, she'll say, Satan

is doing this and that and the other. And okay, God might be allowing him or one of his his demons to do something, but the power, the ultimate power is in God's hands. And Satan can't just go galey along and do what he likes. It just doesn't happen. But yeah, so we're all supposed to be delivered of all these these demons of anger, for example, or pride the next week. Hit yes. Everything you say is so fascinating to me, because I'm as I'm piecing together all of this history and trying to understand the world, the

Christian world as as it exists today. And then look at it through the lens of how was it created? People like Paul Kane, who was basically William Brannum's protege, he helped start the, you know, the Kansas City Profits, the International House of Prayer.

Well, he was deeply seeding some of the Brannum themes in the UK prior to everything that you're describing. I am familiar with the events that you're talking about. I studied John Wember as I was trying to figure out the intersection between him and the Kansas City Profits.

And you have to understand, in the United States, John Wember is this hero that's untouchable. He's believed that he's this perfect on-flood individual, but yet he's promoting these false prophets, and he's working with these false prophets in the UK.

And all of that history is just kind of whitewashed. Yes. So I'm looking at this and everything that you're describing, the fear, the control, the, I had this conversation, this is a side story, but it is related.

When I left the Brannumite cult, and it was highly, a highly controlled environment, high levels of fear, that's how they manipulated you. When I broke away from this, I began to understand how that manipulation worked.

They loved to attack the things that you could not control as a human, and say those are demons, because everybody has these problems. It's like a monopoly on spiritualism. So they would attack emotions often, and they would say this emotion is a demon.

Well, after I left this, I realized what they were doing. This is just manipulation, pure, and simple. And we went to a mainstream denomination after leaving, and I'm sitting there in one of the men's groups, and they said, today we're going to start a study on human emotion, and we're going to focus on the sin of anger.

And he goes off into this tangent where he's just condemning anybody who has an angry thought. And I couldn't help myself. I'm that type of person. I couldn't help myself in front of everybody in this room.

I said, but how does that apply when Paul says, in your anger, do not sin? And how can you have these two, right? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it really exposes the teachers in these kind of movements.

They're lack of proper, biblical understanding, because we know that it's right to be angry at sin. Right, your anger has a place, but that they lump everything together, and then we're all so all around, with these smiles and apathy fizz, and that's not found in the scripture.

Look at Paul, he's a good example. Getting righteously angry at people sometimes, well, Jesus, you know, in the Pharisees, but yeah, it's some, it's weird. What I found really hard was, well, all these people were being delivered, they'd be rolling around on the ground and screaming, and I just don't do that. I don't like it. Yeah, I don't like it. And that was one of my biggest downfalls, because we went to Thessalonica for our outreach part. And one of the leaders, I should never forget her, but for all the wrong reasons, she had decided that she kept saying she'd seen no change in me since the beginning of

the DTS. But the problem was, I wasn't doing the DTS to change. I was doing it because I wanted to work in India with Waiwa. And to do that, you have to do the DTS. They will accept people for short term missions just a few weeks without doing the DTS, but I wanted long term. And I didn't dare say that to you, because it's to imagine I've seen no change in you. And I would have said, yeah, but I didn't do it to change. That would have been fuel and fire. But every night, I had to go for a walk with her. And she just basically demolished me. But in the name of submission,

I went. My heart was broken. I just didn't know what to do, but I didn't know how to react. And she was just tearing me apart. It was so, so hard. I was blessed because I had a little group of friends, Ralph, Mark, and William. And the four of us stuck together. And they were great.

They were really good. And they didn't do the rolling around and screaming at us. So they were really supportive. But yeah, and it was really weird because at the end of the DTS, I decided for some weird reason, you could choose to go on another short term missions. And Ralph, Mark, and William were going to go to Cyprus, which I would have loved. But no, I don't know why. Or maybe I do.

I chose to go on this leader's short term mission to North Wales. Well, I've been to North Wales many, many times, which is fine. It's lovely. But why? Why didn't I just say, no, I want to go to Cyprus.

Actually, I think the reason was because this is another thing people do. I need to pray about where I should go. they should do. That is right. We need to bring things before the Lord. But that lovely first room, somewhere in Corinthians 4, does it go somehow? It's all things are permitted if it's helpful. You can do it. If it's not simple, you can do it. We're given a lot of freedom. But this was part of the thing that you didn't do anything unless first you'd asked the Lord about it. So I should have actually just said, no, I'm not to go to Cyprus.

Anyway, so I was going to go to North Wales. That was fine. But at the last minute, she decided that I wasn't allowed to go. And she spoke to the leaders of the base. And they said, no, you can't go. So yeah, that was a big disappointment. So I was left then with not having another mission trip to go on. But maybe that was just as well.

That verse that you're mentioning, I think it's first Corinthians, maybe all things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful. That's it. And that was one of the things that really, really hit me. So we came out of a fundamentalist type religion where it was rules-based. It wasn't about what God could do for you. It's about what you could do to make yourself more holy to be saved. That's the essence. And I realized after reading the Bible over and over, this was basically taking the gospel and putting chains on it. And then for me, it was putting a ball and chain on me. But yet I kept coming

back to that verse because I had heard that verse before. And it really took reading the New Testament over and over and over again without thinking about how they told me I should believe. Just read it for what it says. You begin to understand that that's one of the most powerful things that I found in the New Testament. All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful. So don't do the things that aren't helpful because you might regret it. It's that type of mentality. But the way that is taught, they want to put balls and chains on you. Because if they can control you, then they have power over

you. And I realize very quickly, I do not want this. If God tells me this, I don't want their power to control me. Yeah, absolutely. Well, it was weird because I was still working in London. When I came out of my DTS, I was still working in London and living in London.

I'm just trying to think of the sequence. I then left London and came home to the village where I grew up. And I got a job in a local farm shop, which is great. It sells cheeses So that was fun to do. But I was finding out where I could work in India with Y-WAM.

And I cut it up around and decided, this is 1989, so really pre-the internet. So it took a little bit of research to find it. But I decided to go to Kolkata, as it was. And so I wrote to them, said, look, I'm a qualified nurse, I'm midwife, I have years of pediatric experience, I have a diploma in drug health, have you got anything I could do? And they said, yeah, great.

Come and work in Ulaberia, which is a town about 30 kilometres southwest of Kolkata. And we're starting a new health program there. So this was all done by coast. So it was waiting for letters to come and go on some.

So I went off to Ulaberia, 1999, January. And I was really excited because I was finally there. I'd been working in nursing one way or another for 20 or 10 years and really preparing myself.

So I was really excited to start it. So I flew into Kolkata Airport and I was met by a couple of the boys from the house. And that was great because it was a bit of a journey to get from there into the city and then get a train down to Ulaberia.

And I arrived at what they called the Mercy House. That was an experience in itself, which is all a little bit of a sideline, but it was very, very basic. We had intermittent electricity, intermittent waters, flies, and very little to eat.

We ate rice and dial twice a day. Occasionally we'd have chicken, awesome eggs. But the main thing was the lead of the house. I'll just call him E was this chap called E. And his background was that he had been converted four years before then.

Before that time, he had been the leader of a drug cartel in the Philippines or Malaysia, Southeast Asia somewhere. So anyway, he was saved and went through Y-Bam. And then he was the leader of the...

he has, but because of the emphasis on submission, the fact that he was a leader, what he said went, even when it came to professional decisions, and I found that beyond troubling, he actually called himself Dr. Panadol, and I never forget this, he said, if somebody comes to the house with a headache, I can give him some paracetamol, I said to him, I said to him, I said to him, I said to him, he said, I can give him paracetamol, but how would he know they didn't have something else going on, it was just awful, and on the team we had two registered nurses,

and an enrol nurse, so we had formally trained professionals, but his attitude just demolished all our years of training and experience. I found out fairly recently that he he had started this health thing in a Liberia, based on the first-aid training he had had the boy scout in Malaysia, well I'm sorry, that's that's children's stuff, but for some reason he considered himself more than qualified to oversee the medical side of things.

It's really interesting whenever you're talking about the mob boss, because I don't go too far with this research, but there are certain things that you just cannot ignore, and all of this began when I began to realize that there were mafia individuals and William Brannum's campaigns, and he even openly admits that he had a mafia hitman, or I can't remember how he worded it, but then in I think it was the year 2015, Antonio Montella hit the news all across the United States, this was an Italian mob boss that was found in this weird religious cult, and the way that they

found him was, his baptism was on YouTube, and I go look it up and oh my gosh, he's with the Brannumites, and he's like the kingpin of the, what was the drug underworld I think it was in Italy, and you find all these weird connections, what do you do with this? It's like there's this big plate of spaghetti for the religion, but then there's another bigger plate of spaghetti that sits under this, and what do you make of this? I know, it's like a spider's web isn't it, and you can pick up a thread, and follow it, but it's not going in a straight line, it's not been joined by other

bits, you're literally doing this, and it's... It's really hard to deconstruct and I think maybe overall we can't deconstruct it, but we do get a feel for when something's not right, you know, obviously our main test is Scripture and not feelings, I just feel this is not right, but our main test is Scripture.

And since all the Lord has been so gracious to me and since he has rescued me, but you know, it's like I don't have to carry it all, you know, it's just like being lightened and it's simple, all I need to do is reach Scripture and live it.

Now that is hard, sanctification is a very hard process, but the Lord doesn't, doesn't wear us down with all this other stuff. You know, I found the same thing, it's actually, this is going to sound funny, but it's actually more difficult to be a Christian than it is to be a non-Christian one of these groups that call themselves Christian.

Yeah, it is, it is this person who was leading the house. Before I got there, they had been given a big fridge, you know, a tall fridge for keeping drugs in, which was great, but we didn't have a lot of drugs to put in it.

So it was mainly empty, and I wanted to keep some cheese and milk in the fridge, but I wasn't allowed because I was told that wasn't what we were given it for, it was given for drugs, so we must only use it for drugs.

And when I came home, I'll tell you a bit more about Dory and Leblou in a little while, but when I came home, I decided if I'm ever able to give for anything, I never specify how they can use it, you know, it's up to them.

So, yeah, it was really with the other thing was he was engaged and to a Dutch lady, and she did come and joined the programme after they got married, and while he was away, I had asked if we could get a notice board and put it up in the house, because a lot of us had photos with us, and we just thought that would be nice, and if we had visitors we could say, oh yeah, this is so, so, but when he came back to the house, he wasn't happy at all, and we had to take all the photos down, and he said it can only be you.

used the timetables and things relating to the house and it was he was very I suppose emotionally immature as well you know is literally you can only use the fridge for drugs because that's what it was going for you can only use the the um notice board for house factors and well I don't know it was a mess. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transition through the latter reign charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation?

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And I would dip in and out every now and again to see what was going on and what I found interesting was this adoration. You get this a lot in cults as well an adoration of the the leaders and there was a thing where they were doing a meal for him and his wife and family which is lovely but do you know Catherine Frick?

Some I don't have a lot of research but I have come across them in my research. Yeah she's just another one who her congregation come and kneel before her and tell her how much they love her and she puts her hand. It was very like that you know so yeah but the weird thing was sadly I found out actually not long ago that he died in 2020. Now I have been told that he had not happy as a result of his drug use years ago. But it's now been reported that he had cancer of the liver. So I don't

know which is true. And I don't know what his wife and family are doing. His family, they're not little children anymore. You know, we're talking quite a while ago now. So they are growing up. But yeah, as far as I know, he just stayed in my lamp and carried on doing that. Like you said, it's a big plate of spaghetti. And it's so weird to me when I look at the missions themselves, you're describing going to a very unprepared place. It's not even prepared with food to sustain the people properly, nourishment, et cetera. And I had this conversation, I think it was with

Jed earlier recently. We were talking about these missions that are by these cult groups that are unorganized. And yet they're going to territories where often there are other missionaries already there. And so it's really odd to me that these Christian groups aren't collaborating together and we're all going to work together. We're all going to help the people. And you come to realize that it isn't so much about the people that they're going to help. So much as it is each individual group.

And yeah, I have to look at it from the cult mindset. If you give somebody a mission, they feel more empowered within the group. And so they stay with the groups much longer. I don't know that that's what Y-Wam is doing. But if I look at the concept itself, it does not seem to fit the pattern of somebody who's legitimately trying to help the people. No, I think I don't know if you have this in America. In the UK, we have a thing called a gap year. So do you have something like that where young people finish their education? And then maybe they take a year off

before starting their job or whatever they're going to do next. And I think that in some ways Y-Wam is a sort of Christian gap year for people. And so you do get people doing it for just a year for much shorter times in general. As you go up into leadership, obviously, people stay longer. But I never forget this. This was crazy. We had a letter sent to the Pukata base once. And it was asking us to pray for a Y-Wam base in the US because what had happened, they had learned, they had a building.

But people had applied to join the base. But they were members of another cult. So bit by bit. They had joined the base until they reached a majority. Then they declared who they were and took over the base and basically threw out all the Y-Wammers.

And we were asked to pray about this and I can't remember what the outcome was because again, it was very slow. It was letters, not the internet. But I thought, how can you, I know Y-Wam's a mess, how can you accept people into your organization?

And not question them. They were doing all sorts of weird and wonderful things. But they accepted them to work with them. I mean, if I'd gone with the leprosy mission, they would have scrutinized me.

They would have said, why do you want to do this? What's your training? What's your background? Why Y-Wam doesn't do that is they take people on face value and it's not helpful, it's really not helpful.

And that's my point exactly, you know, even in the military, whenever you prepare to send people out troops who are going to, maybe it's not war, maybe it's for some humanitarian effort, you don't just randomly send them, you give them some training, some background, and you select who are the individuals who are suited for that task.

Because not everybody is suited for the same task, not everybody has the same skills or personality. It's just so odd to me and I look at this and I'm wondering what is the strategy here?

I'm very much, my mind is very much as a strategist and I'm thinking in leadership, it doesn't take a smart person to know that that's not a good strategy. And I have to believe that the leadership is aware that this isn't a good idea.

So I arrived at the mercy house and on the team was a married couple who were born in a Liberia and grew up there, so they were locals. They were called Dorley, that was the wife and a blue.

They had two little boys, Peacou and Papou. They all lived together in the house in one room which I don't think is necessarily the best thing, but anyway, that's what they have. They ran the children's ministry and it was brilliant.

We served three Bengali refugee camps. They were very legally, yeah, it was different than it is now, but to come to India from Bangladesh was seen as a step upwards. So Dorley and a blue, since 1989, I've run a children's ministry and it's done on a first-come versus basis.

So when the academic year arrives, Parents can go line up and the first, I don't know, 30, 30 children get accepted to do two years schooling and they're taught to read and write, do basic maths.

If they are particularly able, Storina Blue do keep them on and they get further teaching and one of them arm it, he has been able to go into something to do with IT, with computers.

So they're still carrying on, but what's interesting is that I left about a year, just over a year and not long after that Storina Blue left and I think that if you are the Lord's he doesn't leave you in a cult.

I know some people who say yes, but I want to say in it because I can, you know, hopefully draw other people out. I personally don't think that's the strategy because you're not being fed, you're not being strengthened on solid meat and why why would the Lord leave you devoid of the true church and all that you're supposed to do within the church and to serve other Christians.

So personally I think that if you are the Lord or he does rescue you, he pulls you out of a cult, he doesn't leave you there. So Dolly and La Plume came out of Y-Wam and they're still, since 1989 they're still serving the Lord, but I'm doing the children's constrict, which is really lovely.

They get discouraged, things are very dark place, you know, there's a church there, Christian church and Dolly and La Plume help out there, but since I was there, it was a big Hindu temple now, built right in front of it and it is a very dark place in Anabaria, but they carry on, they serve the Lord and they've been so faithful, even though it's been hard for them.

I don't know that you use this term, but people can say there's good Y-Wam and bad Y-Wam and it's very tempting, because it's so decentralized, some bases admittedly are good, which is fine, it depends on the leadership you've got, but what's it, some 127 monsters, unless the Lord builds a house, workers, labor and vain, and I think the foundations of Y-Wam are extremely shoddy. They weren't laid by the Lord. And even though there might be a few good Brits there on top of them, in the end when the Lord shakes everything, it will all come down. So yeah, I think the Lord does not leave his own within a cult.

And I think even though there are some good Brits about Y-Wam, the foundations are very unsafe. You were talking about how people want to stay in it because even if they realize that it might be destructive, they want to help the people there. What I have found is that because of the framework that is created by these groups, whether Y-Wam is one of them or not, I don't know. But a cult group will make it such that, number one, it's very comfortable to be in it. They want to give you this false sense of comfort and security.

But number two, it's very difficult to leave it because when you do, you're severed. All of your contact, everybody basically cuts you off. And so people inwardly realize this. And I know that I've talked to people in the support groups who, their decision to leave was hindered by the fact that it was just too easy to stay. It was more comfortable to stay. Yes. I mean, they do create very close and it groups. And like a lot of cults, you develop your own language where you, that sort of excludes people who aren't in the group, but you all understand each other. One of

the things on my DTS that was stressed was about not speaking things out. It's the whole idea is that we create reality. That's what it was down to. So if we were on the DTS and we were going to say, I am so tired, because we were, people would jump and don't speak it out. Because if you didn't say it, you're suddenly not tired. Some reason, if you speak it out, you've created your own tiredness. And I think that so groups like this do develop their own language and their own phrases. And somebody listening into them wouldn't necessarily

understand what the earth is going on. So yeah, that that also helps the closeness, I think, and wanting to stay. But after I've been there six months, or we had to leave to do a visa run, I went to Thailand, and we stayed on the base in Bangkok. And um...

That was great, but I came, we went down to Huahin and had some time down there, sanatory treat place for missionaries who were serving overseas and went back to the base in Bangkok and I suddenly became very ill and I had to have surgery.

And I was told, when I woke up, that they'd had to do some stuff and if I wanted to get pregnant, I should get pregnant within the next six months or so because they'd left me with very little that would make pregnancy possible.

Well, by this time, I was engaged to Rolf who had been on the DTS with me and we had decided that I should go to India because I'd done all this work for it and work there just for a year and he would come out and visit me, then he would go home and then when I came home, we would get married. He's Swiss, so that was great. So I had this emergency surgery and suddenly I found out that I wouldn't be able to have children. I had to stay on the base in Bangkok longer and my family had sent me money to get some Thai silk fabric for my wedding

dress. I gave all that money to the Y-Wam Basin Bangkok. It was just because I was there longer and I felt I should. It was for my wedding dress. It was crazy. But after that, when back to India, it became ill again and a lot of sudden changes and I see the hand of the Lord in it now because I was in the assemblies of God hospital in Bangkok at Christmas and my doctor was called Bobby and I never forget the question he asked me. He said, I'm not saying that Y-Wam is a cult, but are you under a cult influence? Of course, I said no, no. He was absolutely

right because by this time I was talking about staying on in India instead of going home to get married. You know, I looked back at it now and I'd be, oh wow, just I don't know why I did it, I just don't know. But the Lord got me home and lots of things happened very suddenly and I hadn't planned to go back home but I didn't go back home.

So I went back to London to start working there. I was traveling between the UK and Switzerland. This role for me, I was trying to sort out this marriage or language. Do we have the service in? Do we get married in Switzerland? Do we get married? It was crazy stuff.

But I landed back at HDB and then Toronto arrived. The Toronto blessing. And it was that that finally gave me the courage to say this, this whole thing is wrong. Sandy Miller had, he was going to show us what world could do. So he had asked this lady to go up to the front of the church and he was going to pray that prayer, Holy Spirit come, which is not prayer, but that's what he was going to do. So he did this and she fell to the ground.

And she was again rolling around, making very inappropriate noises and her skirt was going, no, nothing had been set in place to preserve her dignity. And I suddenly thought this is not the Holy Spirit. This is not what the Holy God does and suddenly I realised by saying that I wasn't committing the unforgivable sin. You know, I was right to say it and it was that point where I decided to leave it all and come out. So that was a blessing, that was such a blessing.

And I ended up back home. I'm going to Grace Church Killford, which is where I've been for years now. And they teach the Bible properly in context. They don't jump around, use improved texts and it's such a blessing. Rolf and I didn't get married.

And there was a whole mess of why that really messed my head up and the thing about children,

lots of reasons. But I'm glad for him that he is married and he has two lovely girls and a lovely wife. So that's a blessing. And I've been blessed with the gift of singleness. Once I wouldn't have been able to say that was a blessing, but I can. And when I look back now, I think, wow,

thought has been so gracious to me. You know, I have messed up time and again, but he has rested me time and again. And I've been helping out in a Facebook group called leaving the NAR, the new apostolic reformation.

And so I've been doing that sometime. And I've also enrolled with third millennium. Have you heard of them? I've not. It's a seminary in the U.S., that they provide the credited training for people, for people, but it's free.

I'm so people all over the world, if they want to be a pastor, if they're in a poor country, they can access all this training. It's great. It's hard work. But I love it.

I'm loving learning about the Lord, but in a right way. And of course, I'm not going into church leadership in the way a man would, you know, we have a group. There's one of us from New Zealand, one from Finland, I'm in the UK.

And then there are three from U.S., and our learning group is led by a man in the U.S. So we have to watch a video, and then we discuss it. And don't we have to do tests?

So I'm really loving to use scripture as God mentors to use it, you know, within context, to learn more about him. So yes, I'm doing this third millennium course at the moment. And we've finished first year, we've just started second, so that that's a blessing as well.

So that's quite a journey. I'm very sorry that you had to go through all of those things. Like I said, I've had other people contact me who have came out of Y-Wam or been through it, I guess, is a better way to say it.

And many of them share similar stories, not all, but many do, and it makes you wonder, what is the strategy? Why is it like this? What, if you're going to rob people of their lives, like this, then there has to be some point at which leadership stands up and says, well, we do have a lot of people that are having issues.

So very sorry that you went through that. If you could go back in time when you first join the movement and you started to have just a little question in the back of your mind, something might not be right.

And you could go back in time and give yourself some advice. What advice would you give yourself? I would advise myself to remember and apply what David Paulson said, just because I say something doesn't mean it's true.

And you need to check it out for yourself through Scripture. And that's where I went wrong right at the beginning. I didn't bother with that. It's easy to say oh yeah, but that's what was happening in London at the time which it was, but that's no excuse.

And it's made me a lot more cautious now to test things, to test the spirits for myself and Zick. Is this spiritual? And if it's not, I don't want to claim a bit. Well that's very good advice.

Thank you so much for sharing your story. Thank you for listening. 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-Branem.org.

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

Thank you so much. Thank you so much.