The Bethany Deaton Tragedy: What Really Happened at IHOPKC

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 and friend, Jed Hartley, son of a false prophet and former member of the International House of Prayer. Jed it's good to be back and I'm a little excited for today's episode. Last time you left one of those teasers out there and kind of reminds me my wife and I just finished watching the series justified and at the end of every episode something would

happen that you just had to watch that next one. That's you left me hanging and I have heard the name that you mentioned and I think somewhere somebody probably sent me some information that I have yet to digest but I was a little excited because I want to get into that story and yeah it's from just the hint that you left me that that cliffhanger you left me on made me want to come back for more. Well perfect and hopefully also people who hopefully it's not just you tuning back in for the second one but no I I mean I think it's

interesting I was thinking about it the other day of how we've talked and we've had I don't know a dozen or so episodes that we filmed together and about International House of Prayer and some about Bethel and Y-Wam but this was what we're going to talk about today was probably the biggest scandal that rocked the IHOP world before the Mike Bickel scandal and this scandal that we're going to talk about today is about a woman named Bethany Dean who was a part of a community that was directly tied with the International House of Prayer and it's

a very like intense ensemble discussion and I'm you know just as a for warning for those listening like we're going to talk about things mention suicide and murder and a lot of really intense subject material. Right so warning out to anybody who's listening who has children also listening you probably do not want your children to listen to this episode. Bethany Deaton died of in sort of mysterious circumstances in 2000 2012, like late 2012, and it was a situation where it was first ruled suicide, but there were some just kind of eerie and weird aspects of her death that we'll definitely get into.

Later, someone in her sort of sub-community, and her kind of, there was a sub-cult community that was connected with the international house prayer led by a man named Tyler Deaton, and one of the members of the community confessed to murdering Bethany Deaton.

Just giving the broad strokes and we'll get into more of the details. Later, the young man who confessed, Mike and Moore, he confessed to killing Bethany. He later recanted his confession and said that he confessed under coercion, and that it wasn't true and it wasn't real, and it remains an open investigation.

I believe that most people who are close with this do kind of lean that it was probably suicide, but the entire event just sent shockwaves through the, certainly, the IHOP community. This is in 2012. I was in Y-WAM at the time when this happened, but I mean, it sent shockwaves even to me and to sort of even the people within Y-WAM, like people were hearing about it, because it was just, you know, it was a mysterious death. There was potentially a murder within members who had gone to IHOP. There were plenty of people who I know were like close with

various members of this community, and it was really intense, and then it came to surface that IHOP had been very involved with the sort of coercion of Mike and Moore, and that there was delivering sessions that were going on. And so, anyway, those are the broad details, and I can kind of go back through and get, but that's what we're going to be talking about today.

There are some very mysterious things that happen in the cults, and because everybody in the back of their minds, they know that they're being manipulated. That's the weird part about cult psychology. Inside, internally, you know that you're being manipulated. You can't come to terms. Many people can't leave. They're trapped. But whenever something happens, often they will have their own conspiracy theories of what happened, because everything shrouded in mystery. We're in a mystery cult.

This must be a mystery, too. I'll never forget, whenever I first left the cult, I had a couple weird experiences. One person contacted me and they said, you need to look into this particular death.

Happened around this area, it was just as much of a mystery. In fact, I wish I had a document and I probably would go back and, if I could remember the name, I'd probably go back and dig deeper, but there was a death that happened around the cult.

I never heard of it. Every church that I went to, nobody talked about it. I started publishing information about another death and I got this weird, weird warning. I can't give too many details, but basically the essence of the warning is, you can talk about religion all you want, but when you talk about a death that is mysterious, the person who may or may not have committed a murder if it happened may still be alive and then your life is in danger for talking about it.

I have, by and large, avoided it. We had, recently, we had two podcasts that I recorded that talked about a similar situation and mysterious death ruled suicide, this kind of thing and interestingly, the week before they were to go out, both of them got pulled.

They both said, we have to go now. Interesting. Which raises all the more questions for me, right? Right. I'm very cautious about releasing these things unless it has been somewhat already documented that way you and I aren't in any danger, which I can tell this has been documented.

There's no risk for us, but to anybody who's listening to this who wants to chime in and say, hey, I know this other story too, I'm just going to tell you right now, I may not publish that.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's also, whenever someone, especially when someone dies or, and they can no longer represent their own testimony and what the story they want to tell, you know, if someone's abused and is a victim of a situation and then they go and share their story, you know that their story wants to be told, John, I have so many different stories about abuse, especially pertaining to my father and that I'm obviously never going to share because the victims themselves don't necessarily like, they've shared it with me or shared it with people who are close to me, but they don't want their story to be told for whatever

reason, for, you know, fear of wrench, but you shan or for just vulnerabilities, say, can not wanting their name to be out there. And then when you have something like this case with Bethany Dean, you know, you also not only is there the scary side of talking about murders in a cult community, and though, especially when they have not been, no one's been brought to justice about it.

There's also the like telling the story. or you want to be really careful and gracious to the victim and the victim's family of being like, hey, I know for a fact, I know for a fact with the Bethany Deaton scandal, there was a lot of, it brought in some press that was not interested in a whole lot of the community that was going on at the International House of Prayer, but was just like, you know, murder podcasts, like people just like a good murder story and I can understand that, but it was, I know that there were several people

within the community who felt really exploited and betrayed by how many people who were just like sensationalizing what happened there. And even part of the reason that I haven't, I mean, it's interesting we've had so many episodes and I haven't really talked much about the Bethany Deaton scandal is because I wanted to have the episode, the last episode that we filmed, I kind of wanted to do that first because I think that throughout telling this whole narrative, you know, I think that this is really a story of about how cult franchises kind of work of like the dangers of normalizing

a lot of like cult rhetoric, because basically, so what was happening and I'll start telling some of the details of the story now is that there was this cult community that was independent to some extent of the international house prayer that they called it, I think they called themselves the community, a lot of people reference it as the Deaton cult or the Tyler Deaton cult because the charismatic leader of the group was a man named Tyler Deaton and by all accounts, very, you know, has all the telltale signs of a charismatic cult leader which is very passionate, extreme, very charismatic

but like eerily dispassionate about different things and unemotional, especially when some of this went on and this is, I'm cleaning this from some of the like accounts that are available of people who actually were in this cult community and there was a really good episode that Julie Royes did with one of the previous members of the Deaton cult community and she spoke at length about kind of her experiences and it was very fascinating

but Tyler Deaton kind of organizes along with others, I'm sure that there was other individuals who were like helping lead the community but like it very much was led with Tyler Deaton as the figurehead, I believe they were in Tyler, Texas or they were in some city in Texas They moved up to the International House Prayer.

Many of them went to IHOPU. Tyler himself was at IHOPU, and he was briefly on staff during the scandal broke and when Bethany Deaton passed, he was actually on staff at the International House Prayer if I'm not mistaken.

And so it was sort of this separate community that kind of was grafted into the larger IHOP community and in this separate community, they were like doing some of the more extreme commune things that people associate with colts.

They were living in the same houses. They have four different houses where they were segregated primarily by gender. There was the men's house, there's two women's house, and then there was a couple's house and so they were kind of living together.

Tyler was not employed during this time and he was getting money from the different cult members. They were sharing finances and it turns out there was sort of being a lot of sexual, I don't know if the word abuse is the right word.

I mean, it's certainly coercive and any sex within a cult community, I question about whether or not it's violating borders of consent and boundaries of consent. But I mean, they were all relatively close to the same age in their mid 20s, but Tyler began having sexual relations with some of the other men in the community and this caused a great strain for Bethany because Bethany and Tyler had gotten married shortly before she was either killed or committed suicide.

And Tyler during that time had talked with her. He had talked openly about his sort of homosexuality and or homosexual desires and he had kind of preached that he was being saved and God was cleansing him of his homosexual desires and that his marriage to Bethany was going to help in that sort of process of cleansing him of it.

And so long story short and I'm glazing over a lot of different details of the story, but Tyler ends up, Tyler and Bethany get married and then I mean, I've kind of already spoiled it.

Like right after they come back from the honeymoon, Tyler immediately begins having sexual relations with some of the men in this group and Bethany clearly was rattled by all of them. All of it was rattled by their honeymoon.

No one really knows what happened on their honeymoon, but it was not great, whatever happens. And she was clearly quite depressed by some of the things that happened. She even threatened suicide at one time in front of Tyler.

And I believe the police had to come in for that situation. And so she was clearly not doing well. And then a few months later, her body is found. And to give a little bit of the explicit details of it, her body is found near Longview Lake, which is right next to Grandview, Missouri.

And I grew up going to that lake. And she was found in a car where she had a bottle of sleeping pills. And she had died of a fixation with a plastic bag that had been put over her head.

She had a suicide note there. So apparently, she committed suicide via a fix sheet, self-affixiation, and using these sort of sleeping pills, which is, I don't know, seemed always like a bizarre way to go.

But she had this suicide note. And so it was originally ruled as a suicide. And then what happened is IHOP then became more involved. Alan Hood, among others, a woman named Shelley Hunley, got involved with the ex members of, or I guess at the time, they were still members of this sort of deep and cold community.

And there was sort of this, like, IHOP comes in and takes control, realizes very quickly that there was really problematic behaviors going on in this sort of sub-community. It's like a house church within a larger church.

They were part of the community. And there had been a couple of times where some red flags had been raised to IHOP leadership about some of the behaviors that were going on in the deep and community.

And someone from IHOP leadership was supposed to come and investigate and talk with the members of this community because there were some shady behaviors going on that never happened, unfortunately. And then this suicide happens.

And so, or what appeared to be a suicide. And so there basically was deliverance sessions that were held, and exorcisms that were held right after this, where I hop leadership kind of comes and brings these people.

It's really interesting because the woman who, she's anonymous, but the woman who is on that podcast and episode with Julie Royes who was a member of the Dean Cole. She speaks very defensively and fondly of the International House Prayer, or specifically about not Mike Allen Hood and Shelley Hunley, because she really feels like they came in and protected her and did sort of through a lifeline and helped her escape from the sort of Dean Cole.

But at the same time, everything that she describes is really, really intense spiritual, like she talks about how Allen Hood proclaimed over them freedom from the spiritual spirit of witchcraft and that he kind of prophesied over them that that community had been like consumed or was being oppressed by the spirit of witchcraft and held like a first sort of deliverance session where they all fell out in the Holy Spirit.

And she describes it very genuinely. Like it, you know, she absolutely believes it happened this way where light broke into the room and God came and broke something over them. I know people get all up in arms whenever we mention anything critical about deliverance.

I'm going to be very careful here, but you have to understand that what they're calling deliverance today, it doesn't even closely resemble what is in the Bible. I understand that it has grown into this thing and people think that it is, but you have to understand just like we mentioned before in our last episode and we didn't go that far with it.

This all began as a very strange mystic ritual that was happening in John Alexander Dowie's Zion city as Charles Fox Parle was trying to take over control of the empire of Dowie. And you had FF Bosworth, who is Brannum's mentor, John G. Lake was a member of this sect, handful of others, and they were killing people, they were actually killing people in deliverance and they're trying to cast out demons where there was no demon present.

The example is a woman was so crippled and hunched over. They tried to straighten her body because they thought that the crippled bones was a demon. And modern Pentecostals or Charismatics in AR today would just laugh at this if they knew what the history was.

They would say, no, that's a crooked bone, it's not a demon. But that's how this a r- Genated and from that spawned off all of this nonsense where, you know, I've got a book I think the hiccups are a demon and you just can't live like this. What happens is you begin to separate from reality and Whether that played a full factor or not. We don't know in this case that you're talking about But it does something to the people of psyche and so it it turns into messes that should have never been from my perspective of very

frankly critical perspective of some of these behaviors is I mean your meat and coal activity with more coal activity and you have the international house prayer Who's coming in and doing these deliverance sessions and doing these Riling up like very like intense emotions with this group that has clearly just been traumatized and And then what happens is They lead they continue with these deliverance Extracism sessions and they begin having more private sessions with some of the men Where they're doing this and in it in one of these sessions Micah in the in the wake of finding out that Bethany is

dead Micah confesses and he says that Tyler had told me to To kill Bethany and

I think most individuals He's hard because it's still an open investigation I and I encourage people to look this up and not just take my word for it I'm trying to give the best report of this as I have gleaned from personal conversations with people who Were close to it as long as as well as everything that's listed online I believe that the overwhelming consensus is that Micah did not kill Bethany that he was You can use the word coerced you could use the word he was in a vulnerable state and he you know Whether it was because of these sort of deliverance sessions or because of sort of his

previous coercion and the Tyler Deaton coal or Malgumation of all of these different things He clearly is described to many instances as as being a bit vulnerable and and being emotionally vulnerable and erratic and So anyway, he confesses to this killing and it seems to be an erroneous confession, but this causes a cascading sort of wild Sequence of events where police are getting involved and murder and and there's questions about the international house prayer and then I hop I remember I hop doing some like crazy branding stuff to try to distance themselves from this group and this organization,

while I do know behind the scenes that I wanna be clear, I do think that certain members of the International House of Prayer leadership were trying their best to handle this situation in the best way they knew possible.

And it's like I know Shelley and Mike have spoken very like, or sorry, not Mike. Shelley and Alan have spoken very like regretfully

about how this sequence of events unfolded and how they wish they would have done differently and better and I genuinely think that those two individuals were doing their best from their perspective to try to take care of this community.

But this is, and when we get into, once I get past explaining sort of the event, I can give you sort of my take on some of these things, but to give a hint, I do think it's just like, Alan and Shelley were extremely ill-equipped to handle this situation because of a lot of historical reasons and because of the culture at IHOP in general and because of this like, you know, Alan speaking over, you know, a spirit of witchcraft that was on them and all of this sort of stuff, I just think that it's so desperately missed the mark

of what was needed in that situation. Were they wanting to do good? They're absolutely, you know, I think that they were trying to help. So I hope that people understand that. Like I am not trying to further expose some of these IHOP leaders for, you know, being involved in a murder, cover-up or anything like that.

But just showing how, when disaster strikes in these communities, especially the International House Prayer, it is so ill-equipped to handle it. It's so ill-equipped because of these hyper-spiritualizations and everything, but again, I'll get into the commentary in a second just to finish telling sort of the broad strokes of the story and then John jump in if you have any questions to because obviously it's a big story.

So anyway, this investigation goes and then later, Micah gets a lawyer and gets his sort of testimony, his confession to be stricken from the record or at least like discredited because of coming from this sort of like exorcism moment.

It wasn't a confession that first happened with the police. It was a confession that happened at the International House Prayer with like prayer leaders in this and so... Oh, it just became quite, like Michael was arrested,

but later the charges were dropped. And I know it to be an open investigation now and they're still, I think that it probably, unfortunately, especially if it was actually a suicide as it seems like it might have been, it's so heartbreaking because the parents, the family, the people who are close to Bethany will never really truly have resolution on what actually happens with their loved one and because of all of this heartbreak that happened afterwards and confusion that happened afterwards.

And furthermore, I mean, like it's obviously just heartbreaking in general that like she might have felt so hopeless and that she would have taken her own life to begin with. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation?

You can learn this and more on William Brandham Historical Research's website William-Brandham.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Steven Montgomery, John McKinnon and others with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book.

You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top and as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching.

On behalf of William Brandham Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. On our website, if you type in Keith Loeker, I have some research that is not quite the same but it is similar in various ways that I'll get into.

Charles and I talked through this whenever we were going through the Revival History Series as it related to William Brandham but I think from a psychological standpoint, it needs to be examined a little bit deeper because many of the things that cause the situation that happened relates to what you're describing here, especially in regards to deliverance, et cetera.

Keith Loeker was the, like I said, he was in a cult splinter group, they had the small community. William Brandham visited multiple times. He called it Little G ocean so he was giving his blessing to this and he was telling the people how good it was that they were in this little g ocean place.

Well, they were very similar in the way... that you're describing a world where it's always angels and demons and this deliverance and you have sins that you need cast out and sometimes they would cast them out physically.

And that's where it done really problematic. I have to be very, very careful how I say this so that YouTube doesn't block this video. You can go to the website and you can look it up, but it's horrific what they did to children.

But with regards to the loaker family, and I'm trying to speak delicately because it's a really sad situation, the situation was very similar. The husband had homosexual tendency, he was homosexual, the husband was.

And yet at the same time, it wasn't really a forced marriage, but a coerced marriage to a female so that this devil of the homosexuality might leave him. And it didn't as we see in so many cases.

They got together, it was not a union that was a happy marriage. And so whenever they did have a child, the child grew up in this unhappy home. And psychologically what that does to a child, you can't even imagine.

The child is raised, neither one of his parents want him, they don't want each other. I can't read too much into the family situation other than what they told in the California Supreme Court trial that came in the aftermath of this.

But in this cult compound, they would line up people who were disobeying and beat them with boards or sticks to the extent where they would beat so many times that the men's arms got tired and they would pass it to the next guy.

And I mean, it's just horrific. We had one lady that told some of this story and they were doing marches, etc. Now I'm certain that the levels that they went to is probably far beyond what you're describing.

But with regards to the deliverance, this idea that you can force a marriage on somebody that you can get into this and it's going to solve your homosexual demon, that's not how life works.

Right, simply doesn't work. So the boy was raised in this type of environment and I can only describe what happened afterwards as suicide by police. That's what he tried to do. Oh, God. So it goes on this crime spree that makes no sense.

The police come and they're shooting at him. He actually got caught and he went to death row. I think he's still alive on death row if I remember. Oh, wow. So he got caught.

He did not die, but it looked as though he's trying to commit suicide by police. And very much like you described, you know, had he died, none of it would have made any sense.

You would look at this and you think, well, why did you do this? None of this makes sense. And the problem is psycho- logically, whenever you're trapped in that situation and you're trapped in a cult, now you have two levels of being trapped.

How do you, if you break out of the first, you can't very easily break out of the second. And so there's no where to go other than death, and that's how, unfortunately, how some people see it.

We know several people that have escaped the cult by suicide, and it is very, very tragic. Yeah. I can't attribute them all to situations like this, but what I can say that is, there are a lot of similarities between what you're describing and what I have seen as a pattern.

Yeah. Well, and I think that's what the reason why a lot of people who were ex-i-hop or even still involved with I-hop really last time to the story, before the Mike Pickle scandal, this was at least in my memory, the first, like, real scandal where it was like, there's something wrong.

There's a problem with the international house prayer, and this is an extreme symptom. And it's sort of the, like, people don't believe you're hurting unless you're bleeding sort of issue where, unless you can show the scars, people generally just don't understand non-visible scars.

A real thing with people who deal with chronic pain or illnesses that don't have any, like, external symptoms where they don't have a lost leg or something like that, or they don't walk with a limp, but yet they have a lot of, like, shooting pain up their leg.

If people can't see it, they're rarely sympathetic to what's going on. Unfortunately, for Deaton, Bethany Deaton and her family and her loved ones, I think that many people kind of lashed on to this story because there was this, like, I know bad stuff is going on, and I think for me, like, I know of probably, I mean, I probably could list a dozen people, obviously, I will not, for their sake, who have expressed suicidal ideation to me or, or, you know, expressed that they were in places of extreme suicidal ideation directly because of the sort of hopelessness and oppression of being in the

IHOP community because it's so intense. And then when things, like I said, when things go wrong, it's just a terrible community to be a part of because the solutions to it, a lot of people, I know a lot of people who...

who struggle with having a sexual identity that was not accepted by the community that they were with and sort of like, oh, I have these desires, but like this is not, this is a demon and this is a part of it and not knowing how to like express and talk about those things without being villainized and demonized within the community or people who were married and then their marriage was falling apart and they didn't wanna speak up and get divorced or talk about, I mean, especially women because of the issues that they would feel of like not being accepted by their community

and issues of beliefs having doubt, having questions. This is something that I cannot talk to my community about feeling isolated, feeling like everybody else here in this world is speaking to God yet I am not and I feel lonely and I feel misunderstood and then I'm being not only just like further misunderstood when I speak to leaders but I'm being blamed for it.

Like it's my lack of faith that's causing these different things and plus even if you then talk to a leader who is empathetic and who does care about you, they start casting demons out of you instead of actually being like, oh, hey, we need to get to into therapy and we need you to talk to the police or to go to the hospital or for whatever reason it is.

There's this like, we'll handle it internally sort of thing like we know how to handle it and actually nobody else knows how to handle it because we're dealing with a spirit of witchcraft or something like that and only we can release you can't go to the hospital and have them get you out of the spiritual witchcraft.

There's no medicine that you can take that eliminates that and you can't go to a secular therapist or even like a Christian therapist that's sort of mainline Christian therapists because they aren't kind of cast out the demons but the only solution to your problem is exorcism and I think that that's a very deep representation of this sort of like terrifying wilderness that you get in when you suddenly find yourself isolated from your community and this goes back to what we were talking about in our last episode of sort of subcommunities that fill into the larger IHOP community.

IHOP was never a church. I mean, it's more of a corporation. than anything else, like there was IHOP University. There wouldn't, when I was young and there was Metro Christian Fellowship and then later forerunner Christian Fellowship, there was like sort of a church there.

But there wasn't like a church community you had instead because it was kind of bigger and was getting kind of mainstream. You had subcommunities in it. Like we had our own little home groups and house churches within the IHOP world.

And those could be really radically different. We've talked about all the ones that have locationally branched out and how you can have, there's the Pasadena house of prayer. There's the New England house of prayer.

There's all these different like house of prayer and different communities that are regionally different. But even within the IHOP community locally, there was many different sort of separate many communities that fed into the international house prayer.

And you know, if something's going wrong within that smaller community, going to IHOP leadership was just not. Especially if it involved anything to do with sexual assault or sexual immorality or anything like that.

There's so, so ill equipped to handle any of these things. And purposely so because Mike Bickle was sexually abusing people behind the scenes and like structured it so that all the information came back to him.

And it was tight, there was this idea when disaster is striking, don't go to outside resources. Don't go to the police, don't go to the other church down the road, we will handle this, we will bring it back in.

And I think it's so corrupt how IHOP handled some of this behind the scenes. Again, I want to have empathy for Alan and Shelley

and some of the individuals who have taken a lot of heat for this when this happened. They were kind of the people who were put on a pedestal of like the ones who did it wrong, where I think it's much more an institutional problem.

It was just like IHOP in the way that it was structured in general, but I remember and I just I found, I pulled up the quote too, but Ed Novak, who was one of the lawyers for International House Prayer made a statement to the press after Deaton, Bethany Deaton was found dead.

And again, regardless, whatever them, whether that had been by suicide or murder. And he wrote, IHOP did not, no, didn't- not know what Deedon referring to Tyler Deedon. I have did not know what Deedon was doing.

The group that he organized and was working with, IHOP has no knowledge of, no oversight over, and no participation in. I have a hard time believing that IHOP did not know about this. We've done studies and you know, I've had X members of different groups tell me the level of information that the cults have on the people, just the general rank and file people. And it's unbelievable.

There are, I'm not going to mention the names of the splinter groups of randomism, but there are different ones that actually keep files on each person. And I go into stories of that. I won't go there, but at minimum, they had to know it was happening. And yes, maybe the organization itself in, as a company unit, maybe they didn't know, but IHOP is not really just an organization. IHOP is a movement. So the movement had to have been aware of this.

IHOP did know about it. And they didn't, I think that the no participation in, I can understand how you can kind of say that from a legal standpoint, because like IHOP as a business entity did not have direct sort of payment or, oh, you know, there weren't, like I can see, it was sort of off the books, you know, disconnected. But almost every member of the Deedans group was going to IHOP you. Like that's why they came out to Kansas City. The Deedans and the Deedans, the community came to the International House Prayer to be a part of the International

House Prayer community and to go to IHOP you. Furthermore, this, this, the former member of the community, Deedan Cole, shares in her testimony about how there was an incident where one of the girls within the Deedan Cole community was spending a lot of time in her own room alone that she was reading her Bible. And she wasn't engaging with the like large or with the other community members. And they all were angry about this because you have to be extroverted. You have to be a part of this. We're doing something together.

We can't isolate on your own. So they took her Bible from her and they removed her door. So which is a very known abusive tendency that parents often do with their children. But this was a grown woman and other grown individuals like removing the door from, I mean, very abusive activity.

that was done. And when that happens, IHOP leadership, because the woman who was kind of isolating, according to the Deaton community, she was involved with IHOP. And I don't know if she was an IHOP youth student, or if she was just attending IHOP, but she somehow got to IHOP leadership that these people had removed their Bible, or her Bible from her. And they had Tyler and other leaders of that, or the Deaton group come in and they spoke with them and there was this sort of like, hey, what are you doing? That's not okay. They didn't talk from my understanding. They didn't

talk about the door, or maybe they did, but it was more about the Bible and removing her Bible. And so they kind of, that was the sort of like first involvement. It should have been a red flag, and would be a red flag in 99% of other church communities. If you hear about a group of young adults who are all living in sort of commune groups, and there's an abusive thing like, hey, one of them has their door removed, and they're all students at our Bible community. People should have gotten involved with that. And apparently, Ed Hackett, who is a leader of the IHOP still is

a leader of the, like I grew up with Ed Hackett, and was supposed to kind of go and had said that he was going to visit the Deaton community and like see and try to make sure everything was on up and up. And he never, he never did before this happened. And, and this is where I just think that it bleeds back to like a lot of really, really toxic and cult behaviors are so normalized at IHOP and in these lettering communities that when it is so far red flag situation, like people, people, it's the frog and boiling water sort of thing is just it all feels kind of normal at

that point. It's sort of, it's the same way that Mike Bickle could give prophecies about his own wife dying and to groom young women into believing that they would, you know, one day be with this great prophetic leader. Like that's, if you say that someone cold out of nowhere without like an understanding of prophetic or being sort of inculcated into this prophetic world or to this prophetic world, that's going to be absurd. And people are going to be like, okay, you're a weirdo cold creepy.

person, but because so much of this is radicalized and normalized, they're just there's not like a great way to address it. No, there's no way to govern it. You know, I mentioned John Alexander Dauy and Zion City earlier where the deliverance killings were happening. Well, before all of that happened, he had set up these divine healing homes that people would come and give large sums of money to be, quote unquote, healed. And what was happening? People were dying of diseases that they, you know, for the by and large, they could have been cured of if they just went to a normal hospital.

The undertaker is taking them out from the buildings in the shade of night. The problem that the city faced is that he's operating basically a hospital outside of the laws that govern, you know, the medical profession. And because he's taking the conditions that are physical conditions and he's removing them from reality into this spiritual realm, so-called spiritual realm, basically it becomes a fantasy and the laws of the United States do not apply to fantasy.

Well, the problem with all of this is whenever you do that, you're also bringing with you all of the people who believe this, you're bringing their psyche into this thing. So their mind is no longer focused on the real world, their mind gets focused on the so-called spiritual world. And there's this disconnection that happens. And for some people, I mean, they're nervous breaks, there are all kinds of different bad things that can happen mentally. And the result of this, as as we see, there are very bad things that can happen in these cults because of it.

I was listening, I, for this, for your and I's podcast, John, I was relistening to this episode of where the woman who was involved in the community kind of shared her experiences.

And the big, one of the big things that stuck out to me, that's, you know, I think probably we could do a whole another episode on, on this issue. But she talked about when they, when I hop kind of got involved with the deepened group after Bethany's body was found.

She talks about this sort of deliverance session. And like I said, Alan Hood proclaiming over the group this sort of exorcism from the spirit of witchcraft. And how he had like seen the spirit of witchcraft over the deepened group.

Like I understand why Alan said that. I understand why it even resonated with this, with this woman. I don't, it is so problematic. The way that like you see this group and then you label it this spirit of witchcraft.

First of all, witchcraft, this is a whole different thing and tangent, but like the word witchcraft and it being used feels very othering than Christianity. It's like something separate and if not explicitly kind of racist with, because a lot of the witchcraft associations are with like the Caribbean sort of like black cultures and voodoo and the sort of Haitian that there's a lot of association with that.

There's even like the Salem witch trials, the first witch was a black woman and, but that's probably a topic for another day getting into this, but I think that this idea, they have been possessed by something that was separate and distinct and this, you know, like witchcraft, even like it maybe came from a different religion as if Tyler was worshiping a different community and different God and like secretly was doing voodoo stuff on the side.

I think that it's just so problematic because it's like, it's not witchcraft. It's, it is, it is penicostalism. Like it's what we've seen throughout the whole community. Like it's a fruit of the same tree and I'm not saying that it is, I'm not saying that it's good fruit, obviously it's not good fruit.

I'm not saying that it's like, it just defines this movement just as much as the miracles do and this is this, I think it goes to this sort of really toxic and corrosive idea that like Bethel and Iha propagate where all of the like positive testimonies are what God is doing and what is really true of these communities and what Ihaap and Bethel is really about and then they dismiss and ignore all of the things that are going wrong and the same with like people who are getting wounded and who are abused in the community and leave the community,

they just dismiss, they cut off everything from the tree that is not, doesn't look like good fruit and they pretend like it is from something different. It is a part of something different. I've seen this even the way that people have to kind of treated my dad and have talked about him because my dad is now very blatantly corrupt and all of this information has come out about him and people will be like, well, he was never of us and it was like, no, he was, if he was never of you, he would have never been famous, like he got to be famous

and or infamous or famous in his own right in his own little world because of his prophetic ministry with Bethel and with Ihaap, like it, you can't just take the things that you dislike, say that it's voodoo, say that it's It's a witchcraft, blame it on a different religion that has different like racial connotations and be like, this is not of us.

Like there could be people in other communities who are like, oh, this is Pentecostalism stuff in the same that way that we talk about like voodoo, because it's just, this is absolutely fruit of the tree, like ever since.

Normally I pick on, or I critique the New Apostolic Reformation, but like this truly is been a part of like a lot of different Pentecostal history of having people who are obsessed with spiritual warfare and with gifts of the spirit and healing and prophecy.

And it's led to having like narcissistic cult leaders come in and sort of use that for really, really corrupt and evil purposes and when you separate it and pretend as if it is fruit of a different tree, you are not recognizing the reality of the world that you are in and how I've helped cultivate.

Absolutely, like I said, they try to bring everything physical out of the physical realm into the quote unquote spiritual realm because when they get there, if they can bring the people there, the laws that are written do not apply in the spiritual realm.

So what happens is like, like you said, it creates problems where they're not associating themselves with reality at that point. And it's like a train going down the track with no rails. You don't know where it's headed once you separate from the real world and you enter into this realm.

So it's scary, it's sad. I mean, this is a heartbreaking story. It's very difficult to listen to at times, but unfortunately this is a pattern that has been happening since I can trace it back to the 1900s.

I'm certain it has happened before that, but this is a pattern that keeps repeating itself. And at some point we have to ask ourselves, when can we make this stop? This is enough, we need to make this stop.

So thank you so much for doing this. Thanks, yeah, my pleasure. 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.

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