Six Flags Over Jesus- The Business of Big Church

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org and with me I have my co-host, minister and friend, Chenle Ross, pastor and the voice of the Understanding Scripture and Truth by Chenle D. Ross, YouTube channel. Chenle, it's good to be back and today to step on a whole lot of toes. You and I talked about this a few times in the past and we talked about it just before the podcast, but this idea of going to these massive, massive churches,

you know, when growing up in this Branham religion that I escaped, the churches were somewhat of an isolationist mindset. The, you know, they weren't fully secluded, but you didn't find too many bring-a-friend days at the church. And so the churches were kind of small and I'll never forget I was going up this one mountain in the Ozarks to this old Branham church and the people were so backwards that as they were paving that road up the Ozark Mountains, there was a tree right in the middle of the road and rather than move the tree or cut the

tree down, they actually paved the road around it and you got to the top of Hill. There's this little church up there with handful of people in it and I went to another church that was literally in a Boy Scout Clubhouse, this little tiny building, concrete block building. We all sat in the same folding chairs that the Boy Scouts did. So that's the mindset that I grew up in and then to leave this and go out into the world of denominations, it's totally different.

The churches, a lot of them have, you know, a lot of them are bigger, more plush. I remember, you know, sitting in my grandfather's church at the Branham Tabernacle, these really hard seats. I remember back before there was any cushion in them and you compare that to the modern, it almost feels like recliners and the churches today. It's just, it's a world of difference, right? I try to take it all in and try to, you know, try to understand it and it's difficult for me to understand. But today I'm interested more, I think, to listen to you just to

hear some of your opinion that I am to talk about it, but needless to say, I am aligned with you. I do not really agree with these massive churches. I'm not a fan. I'll say it like that. I realize that there's a place and there are some people that get help.

But if you're in a massive church, there's just so many things that you're missing. And I have a lot to think through and a lot to talk about, but I am glad to talk about this with you today.

So let's talk about mega churches. Well, I don't know that you'll do that much listening, John. You're as much a speaker as I am. You always have plenty of faults that come to your mind and plenty of contributions to make.

You know, the last few weeks without even trying, somehow we have been on a little bit of a role as I looked at Hobart Freeman's life and ministry and looked at some really odd ways and we played clips earlier that demonstrated this saying how Hobart came up with his messages.

So that was one of the things we looked at. How does your pastor come up with his sermon? And for Hobart, it was, you know, either preparation versus inspiration and he always shows inspiration over preparation.

You know, as those clips would say, he said that God had told him back in 1967, if you ever need a message, just sit down and I'll prophesy it through you. And so he would prophesy to himself.

I mean, I literally shake my head at the foolishness and childishness of this, then he would write it down and then that would be a sermon and he would go preach that to the people.

And I've often said when you hear the sermon, you can definitely tell that came by prophecy and not by any kind of preparation in the Bible. But I think ministers like Hobart, they look, they're reading their Bible, but they're reading their Bible as though they're still living in a biblical day.

And I mean, we're not as far as the canon of scripture is concerned is closed. And they see how Moses got the 10 commandments while he just went up on the top of the mountain and God with his own finger wrote them in a tablet of stone and he brought it back down.

And how Isaiah and Jeremiah, they got their message by inspiration and how the Apostle Paul, he said, I didn't get any of my stuff from any man. I got it by direct revelation, you know, in Galatians 1.

So ministers think that's how I'm supposed to get my message is just by some kind of divine inspiration. And that's really not the way this works. And another thing then we looked at was, well, if that's how your minister gets his sermon, then how do you pick your minister?

What are you looking for in a pastor? And let's just be honest, if a pastor is gonna preach messages by prophecy that he got on Wednesday, you know, I could do without that, no thanks.

I got plenty of prophecies I need to be understanding and they're written in the old and the New Testament. That'll keep me busy for my lifetime figuring out those prophecies. And, you know, I remembered that in...

in seeking a particular pastor. How do you go about, what are your qualifications? Conditions in your mind as a Christian person for a minister, one of my adult children and his spouse were without a church and wanting to go and looking at different types of ministers.

And they ended up not where they really wanted to go, but they ended up at a little out in the middle of nowhere as far as I know, country Baptist church. And the pastor of this Baptist church, they actually stayed there for a couple of years.

And it did not teach all of the doctrine that they were looking for, that they believed in or were interested in, but the important thing about this church was that pastor. It was just, he was a no-name guy.

You'd know one whatever knowing. And sometimes I think those are the diamond in the rough. When he came to preach, he preached expository sermons. He would take a passage or take a chapter, even take a book of the Bible.

And he would, you know, to the best of his ability, patiently work his way through it. So in other words, he was not trying to entertain the people. He was trying to educate the people on what God's word said.

And, you know, my kids got a lot out of that. They didn't agree with all of it, but they got a lot out of it. And they appreciated the fact that this minister was trying to shepherd the flock and actually have something to feed them and to offer them come church service.

And also he was just a humble person. It wasn't all about him. He, if they had a church work day, he was just as involved out on the church long picking up limbs as was everyone else.

So they got to see a minister who's no glorious six figure person, but who was a real human being who really cared about the people. And, you know, they stayed there for several years.

So when I want to come to today, his, we passed this pastor sermon, we're through the pastor himself. Now, what about the church? So what type of church? And I am particularly John thinking of a size.

What size church is out there today? And what size church are people looking for? By size, I mean that, numbers, bigness. And, you know, in every church, you're gonna have some good people and some bad people.

I don't care. If it's 20 or 200 or in every church, you're gonna have some good, some bad. If you've got 20, let's hope that 18 are good and maybe two are peripheral members.

In every big church, you're gonna have lots of good people and you're gonna have lots of bad people. When you come to a mega church, I'm talking about a church in the thousands than this principle of they're gonna be some good and some bad is just multiplied.

And is that not the new American phenomenon? I don't even know when it began, but it is a big deal today and that is the so-called mega church where we're talking about members in the thousands.

Faith assembly at its height had as many as 2400 people. I don't know if you called that a mega church by today's standards, but 1980, that was a really big church. And what do we have out there today?

But they're at 5,000, 10,000. Probably some churches as many as 20,000. I don't know how many people are at Joel Osteen's church in Texas, but I'm sure it's way up there in thousands and thousands.

And I just wonder have the people who are attending these churches mentally processed? What all is involved? What is it that's leading them to that? I think our own culture is just obsessed with bigness.

You take from when I was a kid a single serving portion of a soft drink was in a glass bottle. We didn't get it very often and it was six and a half fluid ounces.

We lived in Mississippi. We'd go visit my father's parents so my grandparents who lived in Indiana and Vincent's in Southern Indiana. And every time on the way up there, we'd make the trip. We'd stop at this little gas station.

We'd go into the vending machines and spend, I don't know what it was in a quarter and get a pack of crackers. And then the whole treat of the trip was to put money in a machine and get a glass coke bottle, six and a half fluid ounces.

That was our soft drink and we were glad to have it. Well, today that wouldn't even make the fears on the top of these jumbo, 32, 64 ounce soft drinks. Our whole culture is just obsessed with bigness.

Somehow bigger is better. That's just the way it is, the bigger home, the bigger car, the bigger income, the bigger everything that numbers we judge success by numbers. And as a result, people just covet that.

So instead of having a normal church, whatever that is, and everybody's estimation of 50- people, a hundred people, 200 people, you know, we're not satisfied with that. We go to this mega church with thousands of people. You don't have a worship leader, which is what all the other smaller churches have. You have a worship team. You have a team of people up there.

And they fill up the entire stage and that's what it is. You know, it is definitely a stage and it seems to be a lot of performance. And, you know, I'm a part of American culture too, although I'll say up front and I may offend people, but I just have zero interest in mega churches and theologically personally zero tolerance for them. I do think they probably do more harm than good, more damage than good, but I'm a part of the same American culture where everything is big.

You know, our homes are bigger. Our bank accounts are bigger. Everything is bigger. Let me tell you an interesting story. Completely off the subject. Has nothing to do with church or God or religion or the Bible. But speaking of bigness, you know, John, that I also own a high-end custom cabinet company. And that's what we do. We make custom cabinetry. So I have a client that we've just signed a contract to do business for. And we're going to work for her towards the end of this year or early next year. And I got her through a mutual friend. The builder of her,

the addition she put on her home is a fishing guide. And you know, that's one of my other businesses. I'm a charter boat captain. As a matter of fact, this friend of mine that got me this job is actually guiding, I think as we speak, it's this time of year. So I'm sure he is up on Lake Erie doing charter trips for wildlife while I fishing up on Lake Erie. So he had worked for this lady.

This lady was looking for a particular person to do this project for her. And my friend says, I've got a friend who's a perfect, perfect guy for you. So here's the story. This lady, she lives in Southern Kentucky. She lives on a 500 acre farm. That's a big farm. She built a big beautiful new house just a couple of years ago, a three story detached garage that looks like a house when you pull up to it. You have to go around the back to pull into it. And once she lived in her house for a couple of years, she realized that her master closet, and she's not married. She

lives there alone. Her master closet is not quite big enough. And I've been in her master closet. And I did not stretch a tape on it, but maybe it's, I don't know, 10 feet by 12 feet, 10 feet by 15 feet. You know what our closet looks like back in the 1960s and 70s. You know, you can barely get a couple of jackets in there. So she's, dot, you know, a decent sized closet.

It's not big enough. So she hired my friend to come and put an addition on her home. And the addition on her home measures 24 feet by 26 feet. And it's nothing but a master closet.

And so I met her a few weeks ago, went down there to look at the job, bid the job, we got the job, we got a sign contract. And now we have a room 24 feet by 26 feet, nine foot ceilings, floor to ceiling, wall to wall, plus a 12 foot island, granite countertops.

This is a master closet. You talk about bigness, you talk about mega churches. This is a mega closet. Now as I met the lady, went through the house, snaked my way through the kitchen, down the hallway, through the laundry room, through the existing master closet into the current one.

I told her, or actually I asked her, what's your plan on getting anything in that room? You saw all those turns we made, you know, cabinets can't bend, either can granite countertops. What are your thoughts about getting cabinets in there?

Oh, we didn't think about that. So well, that's one of the things I do on every job. How are we gonna get these monster cabinets in there? We gotta take a window out, back a truck up to it through the landscaping.

They have a tree planted right in front of the window. She said, I will just move the tree. This lady has plenty of money. She said, we'll just move the tree, you can unload the cabinets, we'll put the tree back.

She has 10 floor to ceiling, nine foot ceiling, lazy Susan's to hold her shoes. So this is every woman's dream closet, you know, but you gotta have money to fill it up too. And I think she does.

So yeah, it's a society of bigness. Everything, we want to supersize everything. So we've become supersized Americans with supersized health issue problems and supersized health industry and health care problems because everything is so big.

So here's what we wanna talk about today, John. A little bit about mega churches. You know, my first YouTube channel got taken down by the cult, I think I've told you about this. I lost the entire channel, lost pretty much everything that I had done.

And I was debating, do I even put it back up? What do I do? Do I start a new channel? And I can't remember how the idea came, but basically I started working with Naomi Wright of being boldened.

And we decided we're gonna do a podcast together. And I did it in my closet. I wish that I was recording in that closet now so that you could compare it to what you're describing.

It was so small, I was hitting my head on the back of the, it was a curve ceiling, I'm hitting my head on the back of it, hitting the wall behind me as I was talking if I ever leaned back.

I can barely fit in this thing. And I was, at the time, I was restoring an old boat. And I had taken a lot of the upholstery out of that boat and got me some soundproof insulation.

So in this tiny, tiny closet, I stapled soundproofing insulation around it. Anyway, I made this little tiny thing and I was just kind of crouched in it. That's how big this closet was. And if you compare that closet to the one that you just described, it's like describing the churches that I went to in the cult compared to the ones that I went to after the cult.

It's a little bit crazy. When I left this brand of organization, I started to try to piece together, not just what they did to my head, but everything. I was interested in learning everything.

And I began studying all of the churches and I started going to different churches and some of them small, some of them big. One of them, the people called the nickname six flags over Jesus.

I went to that one and it was one of the lists that I wanted to try out. And I think as I began to go through this, I began to get curious about just the churches themselves, the buildings.

Why in the world am I in this big building that they call six flags over Jesus? Because it's so massive. And I started studying the histories. I think like Charles Bergen, for example, I think his church was, it was one of the more massive ones at the time, but it was like 5,000 people.

It's nothing to compare to what we have today. That was a good-sized church for its era. But if you fast-forward into the revivalist days, he had people like Billy Sunday who was packing out 10 to 20,000 people in some of his revivals.

Now that wasn't a church that was like in a tents or arenas, but that's a lot of people, right? William Brannum worked with FF Bosworth and Bosworth was a faith healer. He was packing out, I think I read, I think it was up to 16,000 people that were in some of the meetings he was attending.

But he also attended the, or held revivals in the Kadel Tabernacle in Indianapolis, which by some accounts is the first true real mega-church. It predated Amy Simple McPherson's Angeles Temple by a few years.

And it was planted in Indiana. There's some history there. If you studied, it's a little bit weird. I talk about it in a couple of my books, but there's some real sketchy details as to how this guy, E. Howard Kadel, no name shoe cobbler from Chicago, who worked in a casino and suddenly he got this massive amount of money.

and planted this massive, I think it was 10,000 seat church called the Cato Tabernacle. And if you study that history, especially if you study DC Stevenson, who's notorious in the clan, all the human cannibalism, the prostitution, all the weird things that were tied to that church is a little bit weird.

It was the clan headquarters. And Cato Tabernacle, E Howard Cato was a person who was connected to Branum. Branum was working with him. Branum says he was close to friends when he was pastoring a church in Milltown, Indiana.

And so it's a weird history. It's a rabbit trail if you want to go down it. But then Amy Simpelmick Fiercen, who was also in an organization, the four-square gospel, which was deeply connected to Branumism.

She predated Branumism. But Branum, whenever they held the 50th anniversary at her Angeles Temple, the 50th anniversary of modern Pentecostalism, or the Azusa Street Revival, Branum was one of the keynote speakers at that church.

So you start looking at this, and you compare E Howard Cato to the Angeles Temple. And then now you've got all the way up to Joe Osteen and his massive mega-church. Joe Osteen's church is, I don't know if it is, the biggest, but it's one of the biggest in the world.

And his father, John Osteen, was part of this Branum Revival movement. He was, I've got newspaper articles on the website. You can see him. He's preaching at the Branum Headquarters Church in Shreveport, actually the voice of healing headquarters.

But at that time, it was Branum's organization. If I understand the history correctly. But he's planning a church that would become John Osteen's church. His church would not have existed if not for the full gospel businessman who were sponsoring Branum and Osteen and all of these guys.

I mean, it was the funding entity behind creating these mega churches. So if you study this and you study this network and understand that they're all kind of tied together in this weird history, it raises so many questions.

And the biggest one that I have is, what on Earth does all of this really have to do with religion or Christianity? You're talking about from the clan to the entertainment, filling seats. None of that really has anything to do with Christianity.

Yes, it's just big American business. It's the known as the evangelical complex now. So if you, John, or I, or any of our listeners, if you're dropping down the street, you're dropping down Willow Street in town, and you see two churches, which one are you going to go in?

One of them is in a little nondescript building, and it's got 15 cars parked outside, and you drive another. a mile down the street and there is a stadium, a coliseum, you know, with parking attendance and security. And I mean, it is a mega church. What would you choose? What would you choose the little church or the big church if they're sitting side by side and they are those big churches, such as the one you referred to earlier, that I have attended a few times, six flags over Jesus in Louisville, Kentucky. And there are other six flags over Jesus in other states

and cities, but that one is not far from where I live and not far from where you live. And I mean, that's a good nickname for a church like that. It has other churches in that neighborhood that are small, that people obviously go to. So which one would you choose?

I think people have different reasons for choosing big. And it seems to me that one of the reasons is, again, it goes back to our culture that people interpret bigness as goodness, that they interpret bigger as better. They interpret numbers with success. I mean, you have had success in the numerical sense, whether you have success in God's eyes or in people's lives, those are probably different standards and their different criteria by which you would measure that. But as far as just American big business, the evangelical institutional complex, you've definitely hit a home run if you've got a five or 10,000 member church. And so I think

some people choose big. They choose these churches because they want to be with a winner, you know, who wants to be with the loser next door there that has 15 cars in the parking lot. You know, isn't that just kind of the way we're wired as Americans? Our mind tells us that guy with the 15 cars, he's a loser. But this guy with the fleet of luxury automobiles and the staff that surrounds and insulates him at the big church next door, he's a winner.

I mean, we want to hang out with whatever the end thing is. We want to hang out with what's happening. We want to hang out with the winner. But I think that our whole mindset is probably not very healthy if that's the way that we think. If we think that by definition, bigness is better. Well, we definitely have missed, we missed a boat on that. The Bible would have a whole lot to say about bigness and, and betterness that they're not necessarily equated at all. As, as a matter of fact, I would say not always, but more times than not, that's

probably not where you're going to find better, wherever you find better. It's very well possible that the guy next door with 15 cards in the parking lot. It's very possible that he's a better pastor, that he's a better preacher, that he's a better leader.

I mean, how can you just cannot automatically say because this guy has 15,000 church members that makes him somehow better or more worthy of being followed? That is strictly a numbers game. And a numbers game is just not a valid game to play.

So I would challenge people to think about why they're choosing a church. As I gave the illustration earlier with a couple of my kids, I'm sure there were bigger churches around, but they chose a smaller church and for a variety of reasons, but one of them had to do with that leader up there is he going to be someone who opens God's Word and does to the best of his ability with whatever his training and background and schooling and knowledge and experience are, is he going to try to feed us the Word of God?

And that is exactly what that man did. I've never met the man, don't know him at all, but I trust my kid's opinion and they said, you know, Dad, he was, he was a great ministry.

He's just a Baptist country minister. But would they choose him and going to church there over the pastor at six flags over Jesus a hundred times out of a hundred they would because they know we just stand a better chance of really being fed God's Word and being cared about by the church leadership.

So that's one reason. Here's another reason that I think and that people choose a big church and this, this could have some validity to it as maybe we will investigate and dive into. And that is the fact that a big church and people really need to think through this, a big church affords and an empathy to people.

You know, if you are a shy person by nature, you probably would rather go to a church where the microscope is not going to be on you because you're one of a dozen, where when you're one of 12,000, you can literally disappear.

You can blend right into the woodwork and no one will even know you're there. So it's a great church for shy people. It's a great church for I think people who want a dose of God.

They just want a spoonful of religion, but they don't want to have to get involved and participate and anything be depended upon them. If you're in a little small group of people, if you're in a small group because it's small, everyone depends on everyone else.

If you're in a big group, as long as we have a few big dogs, they'll just run the program forever. Everyone. So a big church offers the anonymity that shy people are looking for.

And there are just shy people out there. I'm not one of them. I don't think you're one of them. You tell me that you are, but I don't believe that. I'm not a shy person.

I don't want to go into a mega church and be able to just blend in. I want to know the people and I want to know what's going on there. But I've also wondered this, John, and you would probably know more about this particular topic than I would know.

I wonder, you know, I hate to just paint with a too broad of a brush. And it's something that's just never wise to do and say every single mega church is wrong. I probably could say that.

But the other statement is you should never, ever go to a mega church. That might be painting with too broad of a brush because I have wondered about people who have escaped some of these cult backgrounds.

And I think these people go through a period of their life. Maybe they go through it for the rest of their life, but at least a short period of time where they don't want to be inspected weekly by the pastor and other members.

They're trying to get their feet back on the ground of what is church? What is the Bible? What is God? They've come out of something where they were manipulated and massaged and managed by the pastor and by the church and by the church leadership to get them to believe this and don't go there and don't do that.

And this is what you must do. And you know, guess what? If you just go into a big mega church, you just disappear. Nobody even knows you're there. So you get to experience maybe some, I don't know, I haven't ever done this.

So I'm not speaking out of experience. I'm speaking out of, I suppose this probably could be true and has been true in people's lives that they could go into a big church and disappear for a period of time as they try to sort out what their background was and where they want to go from this point forward.

But again, let's paint the picture of the little church and the big church side by side. One, you're gonna have to be a part of the other, you don't. Which of the two are you gonna choose and why are you gonna make that choice?

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I'll never forget, as I was trying out different churches, I was also running my business, I was doing executive level consulting, so I'm meeting with some of the more elite people in Louisville. And I met this one guy, I had known him for years actually, but we were sitting down talking and I, he could tell that I was, you know, going through some stuff, it was written all over my face, and he asked me so.

I explained some of the cult stuff that I was doing, he says, well, you ought to try out my church. I go to, and he named one of the churches, I'm not going to give the name.

And I sat there, first I was scratching my head, while on earth, does this guy go into church? This is, he does not seem like a church-going person, I'll just say it like that.

And it's fine, you know, I'm glad he went. But when he named the church, it was one of the larger churches that you can attend in this area. And he was, the way that he described it, he was going because there were other people in his business circles that were going to that same church.

And so I began to piece together that going to church for the average person is just a community, going to church for an executive level, a very wealthy man, it's more than that. It is a way to connect with other businessmen.

And yes, I'm not going to say that it's bad that they're going to church, but I have to question the reasons why they're going to church. And so I went to the church and I'll just say like this, it wasn't for me.

And I went to this one church, and there was, as I sat down in the seating, there was like at the basketball games, they've got those big TVs, you know, like hanging in a cube in the middle of the auditorium.

So you're sitting down in the stadium seating, you can see the, in the distance, you can see the platform where the preacher speaks. And then here's the preacher, well, on this massive screen, I caught myself just watching the screen more than I was the speaker who's in the distance beyond this cube.

And I just, you know, what he said was good, but I just, I couldn't do it, man. It felt like I was in a sci-fi movie. And then the irony is, after I left this and I went to another church thinking about the sci-fi movie, I go to one, and it's like, you know, I...

I sat down in the stadium seating and the pastor came out onto the stage, and it was a hologram. And I'm thinking, oh my gosh, man, now I'm in a real sci-fi movie. It's a hologram.

And why on earth am I sitting here listening to a hologram? It was like I had left Mad Max from the Thunderdome, and I went to this other one. But anyway, all this to say, there's a wide variety of churches.

Some of the big ones are not for me. I do not like sitting in a place that reminds me of Mad Max and the Thunderdome. Just say it like that. But you mentioned people who go because it's a good place to hide in a crowd.

There's two things that come to mind. The first one is almost every one of these churches that I've mentioned along this way. I'm being careful because I know four members that go there specifically so that they can blend into the crowd.

They won't be spiritual abused because they're just a number. That's all they are as a number. And they do get a lot out of it. I'm not going to say that they don't because they'll tell me, you know, the things that they've learned.

And they're excited. They say that there is a community there. I guess I just wasn't there enough to experience it. And how do you do it when there's 10,000, 20,000 people there? I don't know. But they do enjoy it.

So I'll say it like that. But on the flip side of that. The spiritual abuse is so widespread that I have attended some of the smaller churches not wanting to go to Mad Max's Thunderdome over Jesus.

And the minister wanted to just really get into my business. And I had left a cult, man. I had left a church where that was the way it was. They were all about your business.

And now I go to this. I'm not going to mention the denomination. But the ministers just they even preached how if you neglect to let them get into your business, you were avoiding the spirit of God.

And I'm sitting there thinking, no, man, you are not the spirit of God. And event long story short, I ended up leaving that one. But there are people who, like you say, they do blend into it because there is a...

You go to one of these massive churches. There's this feeling of safety. It's like a safety blanket because you're sitting there in a crowd. You don't know the person next to you. You may have never even seen the person on the other side.

And there's this security blanket and knowing that you're not going to be spiritual abused. And yet look on the news that the people who are being spiritually abused and even physically abused in these mega churches. It blows your mind.

Yeah, that's why I hated to paint with too broad of a brush. I'm sure there are people that go there and get something out of it. And for those very reasons, what I'd say is I hate John that they have to feel like because I've been abused, I need to go to a big church.

and hide and not be abused. I mean, if that's why they're there, the very reason that they're there shows me the trauma that they have come out of in their past life, or they wouldn't even be in a big church, and we could say hiding out in a big church.

But yeah, I just think that the big churches, there are so many problems, as you were just explaining with your Mad Max diagrams. The church loses focus of its mission. I mean, hasn't it just become a big business run like any other corporation where the bottom line is crucial.

They have church accountants, they have church attorneys, they have church personnel.

My wife and I, when we drive by these men, and not just mega churches, let's beat up some of the denominational churches for a few minutes, too. Big denominational churches that might have, well, big by their standards, might be four or 500 people.

But I look at this cathedral that they're in, and my wife and I both, we just shake our head, and I say, I'm a hundred percent opposed to that. Do you know how much money, how many assets are sitting there just in the real estate of that church?

Whether it's a mega church that literally has built a football stadium or a coliseum, or whether it's a big denominational church that has pillars and steeples to heaven and stained glass window and imported marble from Italy, and I shake my head and say, this is not what church is supposed to be like.

This is not the Christianity that I read about when I open my Bible. If you've got that kind of money, spend it on something that's eternal. You know, invested in the lives of people, invested in the help of missionaries in foreign fields do something worthwhile, but they pour all of this money into these enormous buildings and they're so proud of that.

And so who is going to put up a pole barn and call it church, you know, it's embarrassing? And we can't attract people. We'll see, what are we back to? We're back to how many people can we attract?

We're back to playing the numbers game here. Let's build a complex, a structure that's attractive so we can get people to pull in here off the highway and attend our church. If you had a church of 500, why couldn't you...

put up a very modest building at minimal expense. You know, that's what I would be all about. And that seats the people comfortably that has heating and air conditioning. You know, I'm not gonna go third world on you here.

We're in America, let's try to be comfortable where the people have a chair that they can sit in. They don't do that because I know I have talked to people overseas, they'll walk for miles and sit on the floor and listen for hours to a guy preach.

Well, you can't get away with that here in the United States. We live in a totally different environment. But if I was a part of a church and I know so you've got several hundred people, there is pretty good amount of money coming into that church.

I don't want it spent on the church building, you know? And I don't want the minister to have all of those hundreds of thousands of dollars either. I want him to be paid sufficiently and adequately.

And then let's do something good for God's kingdom. Well, with this extra money that we have. So, you know, looking back on Dr. Freeman, since this is the topic that I have been on with him for, with you for a long time, he started just as a home church on just a small home church met in his own living room and met in his living room for a number of years.

But he felt that he had this end time message and I know he was just itching to grow it and to get out and to get bigger and maybe every minister in that situation has aspirations for bigness or something.

I don't know, I don't think all of them do. I know some who don't have that aspiration. But he did begin to grow and got bigger and bigger and bigger and ended up with several thousand people in his own church.

And so these big churches you and I have just talked about where they have thousands of people and you said, well, I guess there's some kind of community there, but I'm not exactly for sure what it is.

I'll tell you exactly what they do. Do you know what they do? They recognize. They recognize something isn't right. They recognize we're too big for our bridges and we're too big to really serve the people.

And so you know what they do? Then they start little home groups and you have these little, the church divides up during the week, depending on where you live in the city, you have a little Bible study, a little Bible group that might have 50 people in it and you made in brother, so-and-so's house or in sister, so-and-so's house.

And what that tells me is that there is a recognition that there's something wrong with this bigness program because they realize we can't have this intimacy we need with these people. So we're gonna have during the week our own little cell groups or our own little home groups.

And if it's flashing in somebody's mind that hey, wait a minute now on the- Epinocross, 3,000 people were saved. Well, that's true, but you need to carefully read the first two chapters in Acts.

There were 3,000 people that were converted, but there was no building that held 3,000 people. If you read the end of Acts 2, it said that they went from house to house, breaking their bread, they did ether food with gladness and singleness of heart, and God was adding to the church daily, such as should be saved.

There were the 11 apostles, the new replacement apostle, Matthias, and there were 108 other people in that upper room. There were 120 people in that upper room who were all filled with the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost.

Peter wasn't the only one out there preaching. Luke is just giving us a bare bones outline of what happened on that day. There's not 3,000 people standing right in front of Peter that could even hear what he's saying.

All of those people in the upper room were a part of what was happening on the day of Pentecost. So yeah, there were 3,000 people that ended up getting converted, but then where did they go after that?

They went to what the New Testament talks about. Believe it or not, they went to home churches. Paul in 1 Corinthians 16, Paul again in Romans 16, I believe,

talks about the church in the homes of certain of the early disciples. And you find that reference on a half a dozen different occasions there in the New Testament epistles. People were a part of a home church.

And I know people say, well, that was back then. Well, now we are today. I don't know, John. There is a woman, sure you know her, and I'll tell this little story because she's told it herself.

And I just think I have a lot of respect for her because of the story she told. She's an investigative journalist who does her own podcast called The Royce Report, and her name is Julie Royce.

And if you do a little study of Julie Royce background, she's actually, I think she was educated at Wheaton College. She worked for Moody Bible Institute radio program, I think. She's trained in her field in investigative journalism.

She's got some degrees. She's a smart lady. She knows what she's doing. She's done a lot of podcasts. She did podcasts. She was doing some investigative journalism working for Moody Press when she found out some things about people at Moody Bible Institute.

And when she shared that, you know, she lost her job. And so then she said, well, I think this is just what my calling is. I'm just gonna keep digging and see what I- I can find in all of these mega churches and mega ministries.

And she's actually done a fantastic job. The point I wanted to make about Julie Royes is I'm pretty sure that she comes from a vineyard background. So she comes from this charismatic Pentecostal background was a part of a vineyard church.

And the vineyard movement, we haven't talked about it, but you've talked about it with other hosts, John. The vineyard movement is, you know, a John Wimber, a California, a big movement. And it's been all spread all over the United States and around the world.

And I'm fairly certain that Julie Royes was a part of the vineyard movement. So she was in a vineyard church of, I don't know how many people, but I do know this, that she got out of that.

And the latest that I heard her say, she is a part of, you know what, a home church in Northern Illinois. So here's a big personality, quote unquote, who wants to try to do things as biblically as possible.

And decided, you know, I don't want to be a part of this thing that is big anymore. As I open my New Testament, I read, you know, greet Aquila and Priscilla and the church in their home.

And that's what we read. We read it in Colossians four. We read it in Philemon. We read it in 2 Timothy three. There are at least a half a dozen different passages in the New Testament that help us understand, yeah, there might have been 3,000 people converted on this day and 5,000 converted on this day, but they did not join a 5,000 member church.

They were all broken up all over Jerusalem and eventually all over the Mediterranean world. And guess where they met? They met in the homes of other believers. And what do you think that does to the bottom line financially?

You don't have any investment in some mega complex or building because you're meeting in someone's home in a fellow Christian's home. So I think one of the big, one of the first, one of the biggest problems of the mega churches is they just lost the total idea of what the mission of the church is and they are simply patterning themselves after bigness.

And you almost can't have a big mega church discussion without involving C. Peter Wagner and the church growth movement because that's really where this is coming from. Yes, there were large churches, Amy Simphome of Pearson, but we're talking, you know, that was what, 5,000 when that church opened, consider 5,000 compared to 100,000.

And some of the, I don't know what the number is. Joe Osteen's church, look at the crowd and you can tell that there's a lot of people, whatever the number is. And Wagner and Wembers, part of the church growth.

movement, they wanted to spread the idea that we need to convert the masses. We need to do it quickly, we need to get a lot of people, and they started using entertainment to bring the people in.

One of the forms of entertainment was worship music, which we've talked about in other podcasts series that I'm doing. So you had this initiative to grow the church, but when I began studying this, part of the reason why it fascinated me, and I wanted to go that down that direction, is because I had also studied the Spanish Inquisition, and watched what happened whenever you tried to forcibly convert all massive people.

What you end up with is not Christianity. You can say that yes, they called it Christianity, but that's not really what it was. And I have to sometimes wonder when I look at the church growth movement, what is it?

Because yes, there were some Christians that are converted. I've talked to a few who they say that was their conversion point. They don't agree with everything that they saw. But then I've talked to others who they were like, you know, I was just a number in a crowd.

I was happy in that crowd, but I can't say that it was really a Christian crowd, and they're now in other churches. So for me, the question was just why does this exist? Why were they doing it?

What is the initiative? And every trace of history that I go down, every thread of history, when you end up at the very end of it, there's always money at the end of it.

And I don't get this, why, if it's Christianity, why are you after money? What is the reason behind that? Now, in the church growth movement, it is a complicated, it's a study that you can't really sum up in one podcast, but money is required for the community.

You have to build a community. It's literally you're operating a church like a business. That's the church growth movement you have to. But then once you build the community, you have to have all of the supplies that you have to support your community.

And essentially, these things become much like little cities. And the people who are in it are a community of the city within a city, which also reminds me of John Alexander Dowie's Zion city within Chicago, until it overgrued and, you know, an out-scienced city, Illinois.

I have to wonder if it's not that same mission. Are they trying to create their own culture and cities? And then you look at what it developed into the New Apostolic Reformation. Now you've got dominionism.

You've got this idea that you want to go conquer the governments and change our culture to meet your religious standards, some of which are good, not all of which are good. And I just, I look at the mission, and like you said, this is not the same mission that Paul had.

It is a mission, but it's not the same one that Paul had. You know you're right, John, because you've got a curious mind. You've asked yourself questions, you know, why, and from where did this come?

And Dr. Freeman didn't go down all of these paths. But if his church had been 3,000 or four or five or six or seven instead of two, he wouldn't have objected. They would have just built a bigger building and he would have railed even harder. I mean, what does this bigness and power do to the people in top leadership?

What do you think that does to the psyche of a man? A man who was preaching to a dozen people in his living room? What do you think it does to the psyche of any human being? Not just Hobart, William Brandham, or Oral Roberts, or T.L. Osborne, or Joel Osteen, or Steven Furtick, or Robert Morris, or any of these guys who have these monster mega churches. What do you think that power and that bigness does to those men in top leadership? I mean, it cannot help but go to their head.

You don't ever find any of them saying, and so this should be proof positive right here. Look, 2,000, that's enough. We're going to draw a cutoff line. No more people can join the church.

We'll start a separate church and this guy can pass through that. 2,000's enough for me, or 500's enough for me, or 200 is enough for me. Have you ever heard any minister draw the line and say, no, no, they don't do that. Well, they don't do that now. I do know if people would study some of the churches in the Reformation era in Geneva, Switzerland, they were very concerned about the shepherding of the people once they were converted from Roman Catholicism. They didn't want to just have another Rome, another giant church. I know over years, Presbyterianism and Lutheranism

kind of became all of that, but not in those early days. So in Geneva, Switzerland, which was a stronghold for the Reformation, for people who were leaving Roman Catholicism and converting to Christianity, it was a stronghold in a good sense. So they just kept the number at 50. Every local group would have 50 members, and then we would put a leader over that. There were men who were writers and theologians and the apologist of the Reformation who were very well known, who went down in history like Malanthin and Calvin and John Knox and Martin Luther,

but none of them were pastors of 10,000 member churches. They became famous especially later, because of their writings, not because they had some huge mega church. So I don't know, I just don't ever, I never heard Hobart being willing to dial things back. I actually heard him say earlier in his ministry, and we won't take time to play that now because we've got plenty to say without that. But when He was small, he only had 250 people at the glory barn.

He said, it's wrong for a church to get big. And he said, you know, we should never grow 10 times this size. You know, if we were going to get big, we'll just split the church up and have multiple churches.

Did they ever do that? No. Because once you start down that path, you just can hardly resist the draw and the pull of the power that it gives you. So these leaders of these big churches, John, are just surrounded by, you know, yes, men.

Hobart was surrounded by 40 or so word ministers, quote, unquote. You couldn't get through to him. Those ministers were there as any of the entourage around ministry in a big church to protect the brand, to protect the image of the church, to make sure you can't get to and get through to him.

You have a complaint against the minister, good luck. You know, you'll lose every time. Nowadays, the only way people have been able to win against people like Robert Morris, you know, who's been, I think, tried and convicted and sentenced, the only way you can win is, you know, with audio tapes and with documentation.

Prior to documentation, it's just your word against big, powerful leader. And you'll lose every single time. You don't stand a chance. Because of cell phones and videotapes and emails, people now can be held accountable for some of the stuff that they have done.

But I'm afraid that the big groups, because of the power of the man in charge soon become what I call, and I didn't come up with it, the calls of personality. I don't know who first coined that, but it's a great term, the cult of personality.

Whenever you have a charismatic, small sea, persuasive leader, a dynamic leader who has personality or who has something there to offer,

then you're going to have a cult of personality. And you're gonna have people attracted to that. This person thinks that they are, we've talked about this before, John, they think they're more important than they really are.

I'd be the first to tell everyone, if you ever for a moment, as Hobart did, we played clips of his, and we know Brannum thought he was more than he was, if you ever for a moment, think that you are, I don't know, the fulfillment of some Bible verse or some Bible prophecy of you, if I, if you think you are the fulfillment of some Bible prophecy, you need to, if some smelling salt and wake up and come back into reality and realize none of us are that important that any of us are the fulfillment of any Bible prophecy.

We say that John and Lath about it, but people like Hobart, they are so into themselves, the more the following increases, the more legalistic they become, the more legalistic, the more control they have, the more power they have, the more power they have, the more power they have, the more they feel like, there's no way I could have all of this power unless I am a really, really, really significant and important person, so significant that maybe Malachi prophesied about me or maybe the Apostle John wrote a verse about me and I am gonna be the fulfillment

of this in the last days. Just get over yourself, come back into reality, get your feet back on the ground, none of us are that important. So here is another problem, I would say John, it's just the fact that the power is going to corrupt the leadership at the very top and this leadership is more interested in themselves than in the people.

And because we've got 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, the whole analogy that the Bible uses of the shepherd and the sheep, Paul uses the body, the human body as an analogy for the local body in 1 Corinthians chapter 10, where you have an arm, an eye, an ear, a tongue, Paul said, if everyone were the tongue, where is a hearing and vice versa?

If you've got 20,000 people, you have totally lost that analogy of the intricacies and the interworking of the human body and therefore the members of the body of Christ in a local church.

I am a huge believer if you cannot tell obviously of a small local church. And as soon as you say,

as soon as you define with a number what small is and you've created your own definition, you know. Small is small and big is big. I don't think you can possibly shepherd a large group, not the way the Bible intends for us to do it.

And I don't think you can really experience the Christian life as God means for you to experience it if you're in a big church. But I think both of those things can be fulfilled in a small group.

In a small group, guess what, you know, you got to interact. You don't have to be the most loquacious in the group. You can be at the shy end of the spectrum. But if you're in a good, small local church, then you have...

have a leader who cares about your soul. He's not there for the money, obviously because there's not enough people there for him to be there for the money. He cares about your soul and you're with a group of people.

If they're good people, you're with a group of people who love you, you love them, and you're all there for each other's benefit. You know, away with all of these programs and this nonsense and this mega madness out there, and I would encourage people to return to the New Testament pattern, which is a pattern of the church in the home.

For me, I have a hard time going to a large church like this because it becomes without question a cult of personality. There is not a way that you can have this many people and not have it turned into a cult of personality.

It just doesn't happen. And that term, interestingly, comes from our usage of the term I should say, comes from Russia. It was in a famous speech where Khrushchev was denouncing Joseph Stalin for two things.

Think about this. He condemned Stalin for the excessive, he condemned the excessive glorification of Stalin as a near infallible figure. And look what you have in these mega churches. Almost every one of them, once it grows to a certain size, the minister is infallible, you have to trust everything.

It's just a mess. The second thing is he criticized the propaganda and the, I don't know what you call it, hero worship. That phrase, cult of personality, came from a term that it meant hero worship before this, basically.

But Khrushchev, basically in his speech, the secret speech, he condemned the leadership and he said it became an authoritarian-style leadership and created authoritarian-style systems. So if you take just those two things and then think about these massive churches, I have to say Khrushchev just would not approve.

So I'll end with that. That's about all I have to say about that. But this is interesting. I can talk about the history of it for hours and I guess I'll stop there. But it's crazy.

I can't believe people fall for this. Yeah, me neither, John. I just think there's not any scriptural warrant for their existence and I think inherent in their very bigness are just too many problems that cannot possibly be overcome.

People that are a part of a big church say, yeah, but we have a million dollar budget for mission so we can do good. But you're gonna have the same amount of money if you split that church up a thousand ways as you do.

You still have the same number of people. You'll still have the same amount of money. It's just it's not all invested in one mega church and mega minister. I have never in my life been a part of a big church.

Thank you. The church is John that I have pastored in different places, have always been small, and I've always thoroughly loved every single moment of it. You get to know the people, and know you can't, as you said earlier here, you went to one small church when that minister wants to know everything about you, no, that's not his job.

You know, you go to a small church, you want to reveal something to the people of the minister, you reveal it, if you don't, you don't. That's your own business. That's the way it should be in a small church, but you get to have someone who cares for your soul, and you get to have someone that you get to know, none of us know these big guys.

We have no idea what they're doing behind closed doors, not at all. You get to know the guy, if you live with the guy and live around the guy, and you get to know the other people that are in the church as well.

So I'm a big believer in the New Testament church in the home. And the only thing I have left to say is it's a mess. I'm not going to condemn it because like I said, I know people who are in these things, even the ones that I made the most fun of, I know people who are in it who are getting very good help.

They have escaped a cult and they're getting good help from the churches. So I'm not going to go too far with my condemnation. And I really don't have any condemnation other than this is weird, man.

Why would you want, why would you want Mad Max's Thunderdome for your church? I agree. That's all I've got to say. So anyway, 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-Brandom.org. For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.