Dennis Bennett, Wimber & Britain’s Charismatic Shift- A Deep Dive

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 very special guest, John Garvey. John, it's good to have you on and to talk through the English Charismatic Movement. You and I have been exchanging a few emails and I've all admit I have not yet had enough time to really dig deeply but we're talking about specific names that were tied to the full gospel businessmen and during years as I'm looking up through just

briefly what I can see in the newspapers I can see that it's definitely tied to this movement but it is definitely a path of research that was off of my radar so when you brought it up in email I asked you if you could join and we could talk through it but thank you so much for doing this let's let's just begin by having you introduce yourself tell everybody a little bit about yourself okay my name is John Garvey I'm a retired medical practitioner now a writer and musician living in rural Devon in the west of England I'm a member of

a Baptist church that contrasts origins back to three troopers in Oliver Kromwell's regiment in about 1646 so we have a proud history there but I'm also married have a three children five grand children and a dog and we'll live happily ever after I was converted at the age of about up 13 through a very excellent Bible class in my hometown Gilford in Surrey which has been mentioned on your podcast before I know and they basically had the basic gospel it was I think the opposite of the experience I picked up from your podcast because as well as learning the truth of the gospel for the first time

and being initially shocked and then saved I was also shown an example of Christian freedom and liberty it was a kind of controlled godly anarchy in the Barba class I mean we had up to about 120 boys every Sunday so I was converted at a camp 1965 and immediately started doing the things that new Christians do reading my Bible praying went to the the Bible class Bible studies and also I was constantly told I was a religious fanatic by my family so that was okay. Time passed I also ended up leading the school Christian union so I got a

stuck in as far as I could at that age. Fast forward five years I went off to Cambridge University to study medicine and play guitar but not necessarily in that order and the last is significant because I threw myself into the Cambridge University folk club and learned a lot of skills handling an audience playing ragtime guitar playing blues all sorts of stuff and as a result of the fact that that was getting known by my friends I was invited by another friend to take part in a Christian coffee bar in the following summer down in the west country where he lived and that was

just hard work we were doing evangelism writing music playing and for some unconnected reason we weren't particularly studying the Bible or anything but I came out of that week kind of much more on fire and in particular there was a real work of God I think in giving me a love and affinity for scripture which has never really left me I've been digging in the scripture ever since and that really was a work of the spirit but I got back home and immediately found out that the local Baptist church which has also been mentioned on your podcast before in Giofford was holding an

open-air music festival and so I said to my friend or I could take part in that and he said oh no no it's professionals so with the arrogance of youth I said well I am a professional long story short I met the guy who was one of the guys who is running it who is a guy called John Russell lovely guy later went on to join a band called after the fire which had a minor hit in America with dusk commissar but just after they split unfortunately but he was very enthusiastic and was enabled me to play and I went along to the prayer meetings that they were holding in

advance of this thing and for the first time came across the charismatic movement before that I'd heard nothing about at all except that there was this these people in America who handled snakes and spoken foreign languages and it was a bit weird that was about all the balls on the on the radar in those days but there was also in Giofford a Bible teacher a very good one he'd come there in 1968 called David Paulson and he was good he he came and spoke at our Bible class he I invited him to speak at our school Christian Union but I'm been owned to me at the time he had

been also influenced by the very early charismatic I think movement, and I don't know how he got involved, but he'd begun to introduce that into his own church, and so I went along to these prayer meetings organized by the young people, and found that they were giving prophecies about what was going to happen.

So it was my first experience of that, and they said that we're going to be a thousand conversions, so one of them did. Also, though, Rome was forecast, the law was going to give us a sunny day.

So that was my first exposure as well to failed charismatic prophecy, because there were only about five or six people converted at the thing, and the weather, well it rained so much, somebody had to hold an umbrella over me on stage, which was an experience.

It got into the local newspaper that bit. So that was my first big Christian concert too, so that was fun. But it was also an experience of my first experience in the aftermath, in the discussions afterwards, the first time I come across excuses for failed charismatic prophecies.

So the initial idea was, well, a thousand people will be saved through those five people who were saved on the day, and even at the time I thought, pushing it, and they finally settle it on the explanation that we had been too overconfident, and even at the time, you know, completely new to me, I was thinking, but wasn't the whole idea of the prophecy to build our faith and build confidence, so it just doesn't work. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by this, I mean, one failure doesn't make you dismiss the whole thing.

When I went back to university, all keen and got much more involved in the Christian union, which was very strong at that time, I think the student body at Cambridge then was about 4,000, and there were about 400 people in the Evangelical Christian Union, but the majority of those had come through private boarding schools, you know, that Cambridge in those days was that, and the atmosphere of Christians was very straight-laced, it was sports jacket and ties, relatively short hair, but I began to discover a few creative people, other musicians, cartoonists, playwrights, that kind of thing, who had been much more in touch with this Jesus

people movement that was beginning to move things, so that's how they were kind of very much into being filled with the spirit, and we were all on this fantastic quest to get this experience, and that's at the point at which people said I got to read this book by Dennis Bennett called Nine o'clock in the morning, which I never actually read, which public explains why I never had the experience, but in fact, looking back, the realisation that A week before I'd ever come across this business, a work had been done by the Holy Spirit in me, invisibly, without being asked that did change my life.

You know, I've been teaching Bible, well, for 30 years now, I've done a, I have a blog which has hundreds of thousands of visitors on theological themes written to books published by Cascade and America, and I think you will, you know, that's the real thing.

So you mentioned the five people being saved and they might possibly save 5,000. I called that, straining at a net and swallowing a camel. We had similar prophecies in Brannemism, Brannem claimed that when he went into India, he had prophesied, thus say at the Lord, when I land in India, you'll hear of tens of thousands times, tens of thousands being saved.

And what happened essentially was he got booted out of the country, which is a little bit funny. I had somebody contact me not long after I published that information and they said, well, we have at least, and I can't remember the number, it was small, like 1,000 people.

We have 1,000 Brannemites. Can't you see this is growing? It will grow into 10,000 times 10,000. And, you know, for me, that's not what the prophecy was, if that was a prophecy.

It's just, you know. But anyway, you were, so you contacted me and you put together something that I had wanted to piece together and I had, I just simply haven't yet had time to go there.

When I left the Brannem movement, I started to experience other churches and I used that word very loosely, experience, because literally that's what I tried to do. I tried to go to a church that was out of my comfort zone and I would go there.

I would try to take note of everything I agreed with, everything I disagreed with, mental notes, and then go study it and see how much did I really disagree with, how much could be backed by the Bible, etc.

But I started to notice something weird. As I'm meeting new people, as I'm attending new churches, some of the churches I attended were very, very rigid. The priest would come out in the robes and he would quote a few things and it compared to a Pentecostal movement.

We called this a cold formal religion, which is, you know, the Latter-Ein movement, that's they were trying to brand the other churches like this, right? So they would use those phrases. Not to universal almost in the Islamic movement, isn't it?

Exactly. However, I also made new friends from new churches and some of the friends who are in the liturgical churches shared many of the things that I shared in the Pentecostal background and I was scratching my head.

Why is this? Why are there charismatic themes in the Episcopal churches? So I began studying and I found a few names. I had not found Dennis B... it, however, until you emailed me. And this opened up a whole new world of explanation and exploration that eventually I want to go there. I wanted to have the conversation with you to kind of kick it off because you have some history for me. But to everybody who is unaware, Bennett is often called the what is it? The father of the charismatic renewal in the mainline churches. He was an Anglican Episcopal priest. For a period of time, he had

spent time in Seattle, Washington, I believe it was. But he toured heavily on the ticket of the full gospel businessmen. And he is touring with people like Pat Roberts at, and many word of faith, many prosperity gospel leaders. And he became known among the full gospel businessmen as a, they gave him a nickname. It was something to the effect of a priest who accepts the Pentecostal gifts or something like this. And you can see the advertisements.

I will eventually have a web page up that has some of this. But he is really, from what I'm understanding, he's the bridge that kind of opened the door. But then there were several others who copied him. So the reason I was having difficulty in finding that bridge was I didn't find the starting point. I had found some of the others who did the same thing. So I was very glad that you sent this. And like I said, I'm fascinated. I want to hear more and I want to dig in more.

Well, I'm interested in particularly in the way that as it were, Pentecostalism has come into and been maintained in evangelicalism to the ordinary churches in Britain. And it is a different world in that there's a guy called Jim Packer who was reformed theologian, not a charismatic, although when he wrote a book about it back in about 1979, he was recognizing that God was working in many of these people. But he calls the British version white collar Pentecostalism, which contrasted with the blue collar American. And it was, it was the case because apart from what I've pointed out, the strand coming in through Christian

music, which was about American based through the Jesus people, as I think you've had talks about on your podcast. But there were a number of evangelical sound, suddenly brought up evangelicals, who were unhappy with the way that the, the formality of the churches. And it's particular, I think it was because many of them were brought up through the Cambridge and Oxford Christian unions and that very public school or in England, private school, atmosphere. So they were thinking that if only things were looser. And I think it was in itself to do with Pentecostalism, but it's interesting looking at their stories. There's a guy

called David Watson, heard of him. He was an Anglican evangelist, lovely guy, but his story was that he was actually working as a curate in one of the student churches in Cambridge, having come from a working-class area, which is a lot more relaxed, not to say violent, but he says in his autobiography that he was studying the history of revivals. And because by that, he names the Wesleyan Revivals, the Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards. He mentions the Welsh Revival, which seems to be independent in 1904 before Pentecostal movement. And he mentions the Hebridian Revival, which I think 1949 or something like that. But he also mentions these Pentecostal

chaps in America. And it's interesting to see that whereas the holiness movement and the roots of Revivalism in Britain, which had come through Wesleyan people like that, that had evolved in the way it talked about a second experience of the spirit, whether it was holiness, entire sanctification, power for service, that kind of stuff. But David Watson also mentioned the gifts of the spirit. And you think there is a link with Pentecostalism.

And that link was always there. I'm not sure on David Watson's case how it came. But even the Welsh Revival back in 1904, if you actually look at the literature on that, you find that Evan Roberts was in touch with one of the proto-pentecostals at Azusa Street. Frank Bartelman, is that the name occurs? Yeah. And before Azusa Street, they were in correspondence saying maybe we could do something like this in America. So those links are actually there. But in England, seems to have been, first of all, coming through evangelical trained people and also tapping into the history

of Revivalism in Britain since Wesleyan. And the result of that, I think, was that they were fairly critical of some of the stuff that, as it were, came across the Atlantic. So whereas Dennis Bennett talks unashamedly about being baptized in the spirit and the gift of tongues, when David Watson reflects, he doesn't like, he disagreed with Martin Lloyd Jones as another evangelical with a link to the Holy Spirit Ministries. Martin Lloyd Jones was very keen on the baptism and the spirit, and David Watson disagreed with him and said, no, no, we're baptized in the spirit when we're

converted, which is absolutely true. So he preferred to talk about being filled with the spirit or having the release of the spirit. And it's only later after he managed to persuade himself the detail of that experience, which didn't come...

through people laying on the balance, he eventually realized that because he had the spirit, he just had to kind of pray that God would show himself to him, which

he seemed to do. So what we have is an experience chasing a theology. It changes all the time that theology, and the one common factor is, apart from the spiritual gifts that are coming through Pentecostalism, is an experience that's supposed to be special. But the more you look at it, the more it is that, in my case, God dealt with me in a particular week, in a particular way, and at other times dealt with me in other ways. So the whole idea of this big special experience, second experience seems to kind of dissolve when you look at it. But it's gone on to kind of briefly

capitulate on what's happened on the recapitulate, what's happened in the British scene. Through the taming of charismatic movement, through people like David Watson,

you have that kind of charismatic thing, but much more restrained. And by the time, I suppose about 1980, it was beginning to fade because when it came down to it, very few other prophecies came through. People usually didn't get healed when they had hands laid on them. And David Watson himself was prophesied over by John Wimba. David Watson actually introduces John Wimba to Britain.

So at that point, just as it was kind of looking like, well, a bit of a storm in a teak-up, and British evangelicalism is still based on the Bible. You have John Wimba coming with us with the Kansas City prophets, and prophesying a great core came with prophesying a great revival in London. It's the event with Paul Kane that made me really interested to dig deeper into this. And like I said, I just haven't had the time, but I did start before I got, I've got in sidetrack because I've got like a thousand different topics that people have asked me to

research. So I'm going through those, but it was the Paul Kane that really sparked this because I began to wonder how did England, how was England so receptive to this? I knew that in the Americas, you had Pentecostalism. I knew that they had spread abroad, but the English version of the charismatic movement is quite different. So I began digging into it, and one of the first things that I started looking at was the early, I don't know what you call this, basically the Pentecostal Charismatic Strands, like the Jeffries Brothers, the Elim. There was an apostolic church in England, but they were quite different than what we had in the United States.

And the Church of England was very cessationist, formal, and what the lettering religion would call cold formal religion, basically. But in England, you had this thing that was happening that was much like in the Americas, in that there was a massive church attendance during the war, because everybody scared the ministers, especially in the Pentecostal world were just preaching, this is it, the Doomsday is coming, get right with God or die, and so everybody's coming to church whether they want to or not.

After the war, everybody realized, wait a minute, the world didn't end, and these guys said that it would, so there was this mass exodus of the churches, and from what I've read, and I have, again, I've not gone too deeply, but from what I've read, their same thing was happening in England, and what this did, when there was that pull away from the churches, now you have this breeding ground where something else can come in and pick up all of the fallout, and based on the timeline, especially from what I see with Bennett when I'm looking through his timeline,

after William Brannum died, the shepherding movement started to become big, the home church movement became big, even in England, and there were groups of churches and people who were bringing over the shepherding guys, Ern Baxter, who was Brannum's campaign manager, Derek Prince, the deliverance movement guys, so all of this was coming into England taking in all of the crowd that had fallen away from the church after they got burnt out, and so they kind of sucked them up into this weird charismatic holding place, and then, like you said, John Wimber comes, and now there's this breeding ground where everything that was planted is now taking root, so I see all of

this as a progression, but I see the Wimber Paulcane event, I see that as where it just explodes. So I try and fine tune that kind of understanding, I think Pentecostalism in Britain was very much a minority interest, working class and separate from the churches, like I'd never heard of it really when I was a kid, and the main line churches I think came in because it was respectable, you had respectable people like Watson, Michael Harper, and with that first wave at the charismatic movement, and the young people saying we want to kind of play

rock and roll rather than hold him, etc. And that kind of was not entirely unhealthy, it did bring life into the church. I think the shepherding movement, what's the name of the guy? Dennis, I'm not, what's his name? Derek Prince, Ern Baxter, yeah. Derek Prince, I think, was brought over on the strength of the charismatic movement that was developing. He was respected, he was considered to be okay. My wife heard him when she was a student in Cambridge, and immediately was put off, by the fact he was teaching this prosperity gospel, which of course we'd never heard

at all. But I think the shepherding movement came along after that, became a scandal that probably damaged the charismatic movement. But as you say, it kind of reached a kind of calm point. It seemed to be where things were happening and the music was beginning to develop into the worship music that not quite what it is today because we've now have the industry.

But you were beginning to get people playing guitars worship leaders, that kind of cult. And I think one of the centres for it was one of the, what I'd been one of the three Bible churches in London, which was Holy Trinity Brunton, which I was a member of when it was still a charismatic church, sorry, when it was still an evangelical church.

It was initially some Paul's Oneslow Square, which was the relevant authorities combined with this high church where they had rather than cheese and biscuits, they had caviar and sherry, so that was what I was actually there that they had this strange meeting.

And they took over Holy Trinity Brunton and the people who replaced the pastor at that point when he retired, became really into the the charismatic movement. So Bob Mumford had been starting the vineyard in Britain.

He brought that largely because he was recommended to John Wimba, or John Wimba was recommended to him by David Watson, who had met John Wimba and was impressed by him. By the time 1980 or whenever it was that Wimba came across with the Kansas City Profits, I think, yeah, he came into the Holy Trinity Brunton, there was only one person within that sort of general movement who said this is not right, and that was this guy Clifford Hill.

Now he'd had an experience of the Holy Spirit through the usual meeting with Pentecostals and had acquired what seemed, what I, in my view, was a genuine prophetic ministry because he said there would be no revival in Britain until repentance comes.

So he wasn't saying the nice stuff. He was actually saying, we're going to treat this seriously. He had a background not only as a congregation of minister, but also as a serious sociologist so that he was invited on to parliamentary committees about child abuse and that kind of thing.

So he was a good guy. He started a magazine called Prophecy Today and he was not happy with the Kansas City Profits from the start and he wrote a letter saying these guys are poison.

And pretty well, the entire charismatic leadership in Britain said, no, no, these guys are really good and we believe that they're of sound morals and they have true prophets. it gift. So he stood out in the crowd. He turned out to be right. And not laugh towards, well, maybe five or six years afterwards, I was taking his magazine and didn't like one of the issues and wrote a letter to him saying, I didn't like this. I took apart the articles one by one, thinking he would cancel my subscription. And instead he invited me to join the editorial board, which was, and I was with the magazine for

the next 15 years. And as a result, when the next big thing happened, which was when the Toronto blessing came across also via Holy Trinity Brompton. And once evangelical church are belonged to, they started falling over and making clucking noises.

You mentioned prophecy today. This was about the time when I was starting to get into the research that I'm mentioning. They, when I published my book, Preacher Behind the White Hoods, prophecy today did a massive write-up on this book. I don't know if you see it or not. But yeah, they went through. I was expecting the opposite. I was kind of like you. I was expecting them to be offended by it. However, it was quite a, quite a review of praise that they gave me in the write-up. So I sort of think through 2021 that

they published. So it's pretty recently. I think they were digging into, so they were digging into the pathway. And I'll tell you this, because this is where I'm headed with this area, this trail of research. Whenever I began researching after Preacher Behind the White Hoods, the clan connection to Brannum, all of this, when I started noticing that it was developing beyond Brannum into what we see today, the merging of politics, religion, Christian identity themes, all of these things, making what Stephen Montgomery calls the converging apostasy. I started to try to piece together, okay, how did it make it

into some of these other countries? Because some of the things, like, so Brannum's Serpent Sea doctrine, which was a racist Christian identity doctrine, the idea that even the Garden of Eden made it with a serpent to produce cane. And so you had two blood lines, one good, one evil, one black, one white, believe it or not. Well, you have even Brannumite preachers and even non-brannumite preachers in Africa who are black, who are preaching that they are inferior to white men because of this Serpent Sea doctrine, which is really weird, if you think about it. They're in a religion that condemns them, yet they're in

that religion. So I'm wanting to figure out all of this. And I'm digging into, again, I had missed Dennis Bennett. There's another name, and I don't know if you've mentioned him yet in this podcast or not, but I'm looking into a guy named Michael Harper.

Yes. Are you familiar with Michael Harper? I'm not as familiar as I should be, but I know that he was another, you know, sound evangelical. who became a proponent of the charismatic movement early on.

Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism, transition through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org.

On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins Charles Paisley, Stephen McCummery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book.

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On behalf of William Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. You've got Michael Harper, you've got the home church movement. They were bringing in this restorationist theology, and what happens is you start to see the latter reign ideas reappear, which is really odd if you think about it.

The latter reign begins to reappear and then there are people who are convinced that you can have these apostolic prophetic networks, which is essentially, if you compare what is going on today in the UK to what we have here, it's almost like a UK equivalent of the New Apostolic Reformation, but it is somewhat different.

Yeah, I agree with that. I think the, as I said, when I came into it, as it were, always slightly on the edge, because, try as I might, I couldn't have electric shocks down my body, perhaps I'm not built for it.

But I think we had, we had a Holiness movement, we invented John Wesley, and we had the Kessik Holiness movement in the 19th century. Those were seeds, and they were connected to the American revivalist thing that gave rise to Pentecostalism.

As I said, the Welsh revival, there was correspondence, so that was happening, but British Pentecostalism went off into essentially a corner, and although there were names that come up who influenced Americans, essentially, we had a respectable, so white collar charismatic movement that came through universities, young people, through the Jesus people, Larry Norman, great musician, and it had stabilized, I think, and even died down a bit, as people thought that actually the, whatever the charismatic gifts were, they were what the New Testament had, the healings didn't work, usually, and we, by and large British people were not all that keen on to

the same world. He is healed even though he's dying, that tended to make people think that of us. They people did brain tongues but the prophecies, I was in a medical practice that was a Christian practice.

So in the town I was living in Essex for most of my career, I knew most of the Christians and being a local musician in Christian musician, you know, had a lot of conversations about things.

And there are so many different prophecies from so many different people in so many different churches and some of them were completely wild and virtually none of them were came true. And I was beginning to think more and more.

Yeah, definitely put my boat on the wrong, whatever the saying is, you know, I hoisted my flag on the wrong pole or whatever and began to question these things even as I was reading John Wimba and thinking, you know, how do you tell when there's a demon and how do you actually, you know, know who's going to get healed?

Beginning to realize through Cliff Hill, really, that this was actually something of a house of cards. So the Toronto blessing comes and it clearly is a house of cards and yet because I think the church had been softened up by the charismatic movement and given the appetite for experience and the worship music was beginning to more and more be orientated towards God, rather than towards each other building up the church.

The Toronto blessing particularly to came through a big centre like Holy Trinity Brompton attracted many people, even a member of my church back in the 90s went out to vineyard and I'm the Toronto vineyard rather to experience the blessing and you know, it was attractive to many people and it also affected because it was Holy Trinity Brompton they revoked the evangelistic course that had been written by actually a contemporary minor Cambridge to tack on essentially a Toronto blessing version of the Holy Spirit and they had a Holy Spirit weekend built in which I always thought, hey, this is dangerous stuff.

You've got people many of who were not converted and you're asking them to experience the Holy Spirit in a way that in many cases is going to be emotional rather than spiritual and they're going to be completely wrong-footed in their spiritual lives because they're going to believe they can hear God speaking to them and they're just here in their imagination.

So the half of course become a major course source of evangelism in Britain particularly so that there are a whole generation of evangelicals who've become Christians through that movement and then we get the whole business of particularly dear or not dear to my heart of what's happened to Christian music as it's become centered on the mega churches.

and on the doctrines and the biases, both in terms of the theology of worship,

that is orientating things towards an experience of God, towards encounter, whereas for two thousand years, it's been so embedded that we sing together to build each other up. It's the football crowd, it's not the concert, but that I become as a worship leader. Well, I never called myself worship leader because I don't believe in the culture worship leaders, but I've stood at the front and and lived convocation in singing and so to see what's happened and what is happening and the way that

as I'm sure you said it's an attractant towards Bethel and those those mega church heresies that people will come now of what videos and so you find that the whole theology I almost in many churches which are evangelical and you get two theologies working at once, one is from the pulpit from the guy who's been trained in Bible and then he gets out the pulpit and it's the worship session and the theology is all essentially, you know, Bethel or Hilson and I don't think it's room for both. One of them is going to give and in some churches you find that

the emphasis on the Bible disappears and it's the voice from God and who's going to listen to delve into the commentaries and the difficult stuff of reading through these hard texts when you can just actually open your mind and God will speak to you and tell you what to do next and that's the danger to me and what's what's happened in Britain and I guess in America too as well as as you say the tendency to kind of get a post millennial view of politics that will make you want to change the world by force if necessary. You can always find those connections with with the William

Brandon thing as I'm increasingly finding if you look hard enough. I'm glad you brought up the music so when I left the Brandon movement there were several things that really made me sad. I was extremely sad to have lost everyone, everybody who cut me off but beyond that there were parts of the religion that I did like I really enjoyed one of which was the music. We played the old hymns. We played the music back when I consider the Christian music back when it was good Christian music and when you listen to it the theology depending on which song family you chose the theology

pretty much matched the Bible. Then you get into what we have today and it's all esoteric. It's all about the feelings, the emotion kind of like you said. So I left that Brandon church and I started attending new churches. The new music really bothered me because I'm sitting here thinking one of the songs is about sitting on a cloud and playing a harp. There's silly things that they're talking about. That's not what heavens like man. That's not what the Bible describes.

No. There's just weird things like encounters with angels and you know, you listen to it and it sounds good, but it has this catchy beat. And as a musician, I know how this works.

I can play a song that I hear on children's cartoon in Sesame Street or something like this and give it a good fancy beat and everybody's going to be tapping and singing with it.

That's how music works. I understand this. I just, I recently got this cello. I've been, I've won a cello. I've won a cello my entire life and my grandfather died. I was mourning and I went with my brother and we, anyway, I stumbled on to this unbelievable deal on a cello.

So I got a cello. When I play the thing, I don't even look at the new Christian music. I'm playing amazing grace. That's the first song I'm learning on the cello. And I go back to those songs, but what happened?

So a lot of people praise John Wember. They say that he brought this good thing and he did all of these, you know, the music, the worship style, all of this. Well, if you understand the theology behind the new worship style, you can't really consider all of this good.

Maybe he did have some good songs. I'm not going to say he didn't, but with Wember and the Kansas City prophets came the idea, fivefold ministry entered into England. You had the C. Peter Wagner's idea of citywide church, these mega churches under, I don't know what you call it, apostolic governance, basically.

You had this massive community that's to be territorial because also that came also an idea that came with these guys was this idea of territorial spiritual warfare, which is like one step away from Harry Potter.

To me, it's, it's such a mess, man. They integrate those themes into my music. Michael Harper was, I think, a strong proponent of spiritual warfare. That was his introduction to Britain at least, but yeah, I agree with you.

Yeah, it's just such a mess. And like I said, I go back to the old school music whenever I'm playing it. I like things that really make sense. If I'm studying the Bible and I'm reading things that match my music, it makes sense to me.

Playing music outside of this, well, I might as well play rock and roll their country or circus music. Well, I think the process, when I started playing it, because of the contacts I'd made, I had about four years of playing evangelistic music around Britain, and there were a few more of us.

It was a small scene compared to America, and there was no money in it, I mean, even the folks in Britain, people couldn't sustain a living, but the gospel scene was even worse. But people like Graham Kendrick, because he, known in America, made a songwriter for the British.

He may be known, but I've not come across the name. To the minds of some of us, he sold out when he started doing this worship thing, because he made records basically art, it was art, musical art.

But he started wanting to do copying an American model of leading worship, so that whereas in British church, of course, you had the organ or whatever, you began to have guitars and bands leading.

And that was okay, the songs were not always good, but what it led to was the cult of the worship leader, first of all, I'm going to hear Graham Kendrick or whoever it might be.

And it's going to be on the stage, and then, of course, you've got the way opened, particularly when you've got a big commercial capital record, however, beginning to kind of say worship music is a good lucrative genre.

You begin to have the light shows, you begin to have the mega churches, because the ironic thing is that when you bring that to England, and in non eccentric churches, we are obviously selective, so you'll tend to get the songs that are in themselves quite sound.

The danger is the association more than it is in the words, and the fact that they're all in the wrong key and no one can see them. And I feel struggle for me over the years.

Why don't they write them in the wrong key, because they've written for the next album, and so that the person who is the star, it suits their vocal range, you know, it tests them.

I've done that. I've been there. It's not thinking in terms of building up the convocation together. The worship leader should be the convocation, the Holy Spirit working in 150 or 2000 people wherever it might be.

What was I saying? So by the time you've actually got that industry going, you get to a small village church, or even a large church, and instead of having the sort of Bethel huge stage with the lights and the smoke and the always with the blonde, with the lighting on them, or the bloke with the funny hat backwards.

You've got a not particularly accomplished band, and a not particularly good sound system, and the songs themselves, being not that strong, are just not so good. And you find yourself coming home and singing amazing grace, or working through the English hymnol, which is what I was brought up on, even though I was a rock musician, you know.

Yeah, I feel you. I just, like I said, I go back to the old songs, and that's what I play. But you know, when you think of that emphasis on music, and people get into that emotion, it releases endorphins in your body that gives you more than just happiness.

You're actually getting a hit from dopamine and other chemicals. So you start to feel something that is addictive and people start to going to these churches to hear it much like you If you go to a rock concert and you feel all that energy It's the same thing that you feel in the churches, right?

So they go because they get this hit and then when they leave they feel saddened because they're missing it So they want to come back and Honestly of all of the things that I think are most destructive that happened with Wembur and some of the others They introduce this idea into the churches that it's a good thing to have this hit these these chemical release in the brain Because it keeps people attending it causes the church growth people grow bigger But you have to ask the question are they growing bigger because they are Christian and because they like the Bible or

Are they going because they're addicted and for me this is problematic? The other thing that When you consider what happened afterwards you watch all of this growing into what you see today There aren't really many guard rails over this they they focus so heavily on the experience that they're not looking at all of the other things outside of the experience And it's like a train with no rails. You just you don't know where it's going to go That's absolutely true as I said in the early days With someone like David Watson or probably Michael Harper's world you had them saying hey come on

We've got to get off theology right in order to make the best use of the Holy Spirit But I think since or particularly since Toronto blessing A church a British church that was tending to kind of moderate these things and to be selective has become open to almost anything so I heard of some our children kids teenagers going off to a youth camp and Being commended for you know spending five minutes to listen to God and You say well can you show me anywhere in scripture where prayer is a link to listening to God?

But and I've not found one in 60 years And Lord's prayer should have included something like that shouldn't it you would have thought but no it's all asking for stuff it's And it's dangerous because If you're thinking you're hearing God and you're not well part of taking the Lord's name in vain, which is not Supposed to be a very good thing to do You're you're being then of course and if you're not hearing God's voice you're either hearing your own or worse Absolutely and there are many documentaries and movies made about people who think that they're hearing God and

Commit horrendous crimes because God told them to do these things and it's it's really dangerous I don't think that people you know When I look at people like Wemba, I don't really think that they came with ill intent But I don't think that they really thought it out to its logical conclusion if you bring this thing that's emotionally high And you don't put any boundaries on it whatsoever. You just let it go You have to know that there's going to eventually be somebody who comes into that emotional high who has either ill intent or who is mentally has mentally

issues, mental problems that cause them to go down pathways they shouldn't. And then the bigger problem is those people can sometimes get into leadership. And because you don't have these boundaries on what's happening, once they get into leadership, you have all kinds of really bad things happening.

So I see what was created in England and throughout, actually this is throughout the world, but specifically in this research with England, I see many of the things, same things that I'm seeing happening here in the United States where the New Apostolic Reformations created this mess.

What I'd not seen yet, which I think will come, they're falling like dominoes in the United States, sex crimes, all kinds of criminal activity, all of these things because the movement itself at its core, it's not really something that's based on the gospel.

So it's attracting all of these wolves among the sheep. Do you see the same thing playing out in the UK or do you think that this is unique? I mean, certainly on the snares of leadership and sort of sexual and spiritual exploitation have always been around, I guess, and it's happened in the Anglican Church without being linked to the charismatic movement.

We had where I was before, there was a local church or nearby church, which was absolutely a carbon copy of one of the American cults and an extremely abusive church. Most of the local Christians realized it, but one of my patients was a chap who'd actually laid his own charismatic church and then was attracted to this one because it was doing more.

And a victim of severe spiritual abuse by this guy, and again, predictably, eventually he was found out in sexual sin and disappeared out of the church and went off to London and started another one as far as I know.

So there was that, that's uncommon in Britain. We haven't got quite the same number of, again, because we haven't got the showman church leader. You know, it's unusual for someone to say, I want to start a church, I will call it John Garvey Ministries and that will be, you know, a great thing.

What you have, God, is the direct influence of the NAR on small charismatic fellowships. So local to us, there's a church, there's running, I was the name of the in a healing course, the Bethel runs, I think I want to call it now, but they're doing a version of that, which of course is designed to get people in to that and incredibly dangerous.

And the local churches are aware of it, and perhaps there should be more aware, I did a Bible study on Jude with my house group yesterday when we were looking at the way that Jude was going to write a nice letter about their shared faith and ended up saying, I know I got a right, you'd let us say, get a fight, fight, fight against, ever.

And that perhaps we need more of in this country to be aware of the dangers of this. But again, because the music is so all pervasive, even telling people in the church that this stuff isn't good.

Why are we seeing, we're not a charismatic church, not a pentacles of church. Why are we seeing jobs from pentacles to mega churches all the time? Well, the answer is because they're sold to us and it's all over the radio.

I can write in a friend's car and they're going to be playing it because that's just what's on Christian radio. And that's what sells. And it sells because of the catchy beat. If I were to play amazing grace and jazz it up a bit, everybody would love amazing grace.

But nobody likes the old classical style that I like. So it's yeah, well, the danger of being a dinosaur, but it was a bottom up style. I mean, our church first started singing in 1695 because particular Baptists had had a thing against music

of all the denominations. I don't know why, because the others were seeing metrical Psalms, et cetera. But we were late to the game. 1695, our church started singing. In 19th century, we were getting a harmonium in and that kind of stuff, probably based on Moody.

Well, thank you to be exact. Sange had a chiseled whistles, so we had that one.

But hymns grew, a godly man with a poetic gift we'd write a song and a godly musician would put a tune to it. And they were sung by the congregations

to the Lord and to each other. And the minister would be the guy who introduced it. So we'll sing number 496. And if they were really bought, they'd say, and it was written by Spafford, when he lost his family at sea or something like that.

But what he didn't have was half an hour of worship time and the focus on the worship leader who was the anointed person. No, I say, it's the congregation that's anointed. Yeah? It's an anointed person.

It's an anointed person. You know, whenever you have a good music minister and that's even a weird name to me. We call them song leaders, but when you have a person who's leading the songs, a good song leader isn't somebody who is heard by the audience.

It's who makes the audience heard to him or her. Yeah, it's like the bass, you know, the bass should be felt and not heard. And yeah, where are any positions to teach young people to lead worship, I'll be telling them to learn how the congregation is gonna lead you and to learn to control them in a sense of, in a good sense of being, you know, the leader of the musicians as it were, you know, a band leader.

Absolutely. This has been crazy, interesting, crazy fun. I'm probably going to pick your brain more in the future, because eventually I'm headed down this pathway. I've got 1,000 different things to cover first, but I do want to know more and I want to learn how this spread and morphed and how different is it.

And maybe we can do a second follow-up podcast and just talk to some of the differences, but there's so much more to explore. And I'm glad that you did this with me. So thank you for joining.

Well, I'm glad for your work. And what it's done for me is to make me aware of how there are streams, how it didn't arise from people reading their bibles and saying, hey, we need the gifts of the Spirit again.

There was a movement. And it's being partly deliberately spread, as you've said before, with, through honest people, as well as dishonest people. But the more I see the more I see the connections with a bad tree, which explains why the healing doesn't get healed, God still does miracles.

But He normally does them through people who aren't expecting to do the difference. Absolutely. It's a numbers game. Throw the dice and see which five people in the audience are going to claim healing.

And then focus on those five. Ignore the rest who weren't healed. They become your testimony. And I was talking to some guy when I began this research. And I was, you know, it's not that I don't believe that God can heal.

But when you have a crowd of 5,000 people, the larger the crowd, well, out of that crowd, you're going to have a percentage that's healed regardless of whether you're even prayed for them.

That's just how it works. I mean, I've had experiences of praying for people who are one of the things about being a doctor, of course, is that you're kind of never expecting anything to happen without your pills.

And when it does, you're thinking, oh, this was the real thing, you know? But I was, I specialized in back pain for a while. And that alerted me to the leg lengthening trick because I used to measure legs in order to see whether it was affecting back pain.

And, you know, to see people whom you kind of respect as a preacher doing slage magic. And obviously knowing you do it, you can't do that trick without knowing that you're doing it. And that shakes your kind of faith in human nature apart from anything else and makes you a lot more selective than who you're willing to listen to.

Absolutely. And I felt that so strongly when I found out that people were doing this and it was like an insjustify the means type of religion. They really wanted to boost your faith because faith and faith was the gospel, not the gospel.

Yeah. I think you're right there, yeah. Absolutely. But thank you so much for doing this. We'll get back and do it again. Well, I'm glad we got the machine working anyway. That was good.

Yes, yes. Thank you for your time. 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 www.William-branam.org. For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you...

read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.