IHOPKC and the Billion Soul Myth: The Error of Modern Revival Culture

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brannum Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannum Historical Research at www.William-brannum.org And with me, I have my co-host and friend, Bob Scott, former co-founder of the Kansas City Fellowship and the author of three books.

The latest is some said they blundered, breaking my decades of silence on Mike Pickle, the Kansas City Prophets, and the International House of Prayer. Bob, it's good to be back. I was telling you this just right before we recorded, but I'll tell the audience.

I have been recording a few of them myself because it is nearing the holidays and everybody's busy, everybody's going through different times of life that it's just too packed to sit and talk to me.

I'm less important than all of that, so I've been recording a few of them on my own. And as I'm doing it, I'm thinking through a lot of topics that I really have not yet thought about with the same level of critical thinking that I have now.

And going back and revisiting some of those, well, many of them, because I hop KC, Kansas City Fellowship, was really just another iteration of what I grew up in, but a more modernized version of it.

And what I grew up in was a more modernized version of something from the past. And it's a cycle that just keeps repeating and repeating. So anyway, there are so many things that I want to talk about. The one that really struck me was this idea of a billion soul harvest.

I just released a podcast on that. It actually came out today. We're recording this. This will come out, I think, in a couple of weeks or three weeks past this. But there's so many themes in that that I wanted to talk through with you.

So I just want to open the door and let's talk about the billion soul harvest. But specifically, because your critical thinking is a lot of mine, let's just break down some of the logistics of how, you know, there's many problems just with the logistics of a billion soul harvest.

So so much ton pack. Let's unpack it. That sounds like fun. I mean, something you just said that I want to just touch on real quick, because I think it would help people. You know how you were talking about that I hop was in a iteration of something before it and something for it.

So when you look at history, one thing that I find fascinating about history is history is just like a family tree. Like we can study genealogy, right? This generation is related. Did this generation, that's related to this generation?

So the two things you follow when you study church history is follow the family tree because everything is related to something a generation before it. Whether that's family or whether that's church or whether it's business, you'll see the same pattern, right?

So you know how they say, follow the money. Well, I always tell people when you study history, follow the relationships. Because all of human history moves by relationships. And you would be surprised when you unpack the real stories behind history about how many people were related to each other, right?

There was proximity. That's why events unfolded the way they did. So you'll hear a name like we, you know, when we study history, you'll hear a name and that person is famous. But if you unpack the story, you'll find there's family members, relatives, childhood friends, like relationships, people from their town that are all involved in that story happening, right?

But you don't hear that. You don't hear about those people unless you're somebody that really likes to drill down and study it. So the whole of the pinnacle of the world, as we've discussed before, is like a giant family tree.

You can go back and track everything, you know, back to sources that are generations, two, and three, and four ahead of us. So that's this whole thing about revival. Well, you know, to go back and look at it, this has been going on for a really long time.

Like for a couple hundred years. Absolutely. And there's so many, like you said, the family tree. It is a story that is molded from other stories. And I do, much of what I do is just try to piece together what those stories are.

And it's fascinating people because they've never heard that history. You have some pinnacle of steel tree that grew from something insidious, and they just never tell you the deep dark secrets. Well, whenever you talk about the deep dark secrets, everybody's interested, but it's not necessarily that whatever emerge was bad.

It's just that that's part of their background. You can look at my family tree. And on my maternal side, my family was the walkers. And somebody did some genealogy, and they traced it all the way back to the, they were the walkers of the king's dogs.

So I was a family tree from a servant. On the other side, it's got some Irish history. But each element of history tells a story and each element of history in the religious side can bring a doctrine, or can mold your view of the doctrine so that you see them slightly differently.

And honestly, when it really comes downright. do it. That's why so many different denominations exist. They all have different backgrounds. They all see the views differently. It's not necessarily that one's brighter, one's wrong, but they have a different perspective, I guess, as the best way to put it.

Well, I was stunned years ago when I did some research and found out there was over 40,000 denominations. And I remember thinking to myself, what? In heaven's name is going on here. Why do we need 40,000 different versions of Christianity, right? And why did this happen?

And how did this happen? So I was just actually having a conversation with the guy yesterday, because we were talking about a family tree here, which is relational. But what's happened because of technology that's taken us to a whole nother level now is DNA, right? Because now what DNA is revealing is the hidden history. Because we all have stories in our DNA that we didn't even know existed. You know, I think one of the funniest, I mean, this is terrible, but it's funny. I was watching a show a couple years ago where they took a bunch of very

white English people who were very proud of their European Caucasianness, right? And they did DNA testing and then they sat them down in front of a camera and told them that they had African DNA and Caribbean DNA and all this kind of stuff. And they're staring at the camera.

And they're in shock, right? It's like, what? I'm from England. Like, how could this be, right? And what you realize is that there's stories behind the stories, right? There's a lot of hidden history. And that's the same thing in the church world. There is so much hidden history. And I know you spent a lot of your life trying to unpack a lot of the hiddenness and bring it out into the light, which I've always really appreciated because there's a story behind the story.

Absolutely. And in the case of revival, as we were discussing, I know at IHOP, and then the father of IHOP was Kansas City Fellowship, right? So there's an even within my own sphere here in Kansas City. Well, there's actually, actually, there's IHOP. And then IHOP got birth out of Metro Christian Fellowship, which got birth out of Vineyard Christian Fellowship, which got birth out of Kansas City Fellowship, which got birth out of South County Church in St. Louis, which got birth out of New Covenant, which in St. Louis, which got birth out of Rosebud.

Right? In other words, you could just track the whole story back. Well, each one of those illiterations added a perspective or a piece. to the overall story. It's all that DNA is in this story, right?

Each one of those places and what happened in those various places added to the end product. So I am, and you and I are sitting here, but the reality of it is, is we are the conglomeration of thousands of years of human history is in us.

And it's funny too, because so you mentioned those names, the Kansas City Fellowship, what it was birthed from all the way back to Vineyard. Well, what's interesting is if you trace the histories, and so if I'm doing a story on Mike Bickle, and I mentioned Vineyard, all the vineyard people are up in arms, don't include us with the history, because they all want to separate themselves from the evil, but that's from the forward side looking backwards, when I go to the backward side and look forward, you've got the same thing because that's how history works.

I was, in fact, one of the things that spawned this discussion, I've been digging into the origins of the Laterane, the birth of the Laterane, how it was birthed. I think I shared with you, they started to claim that William Brannum had the mantle of Smith Williams' worth, which is big tied to the revival, right?

There's this revival theme. Well, Gordon Lindsay, I did not know how deeply he was involved, but he was involved with Christian identity, speaking at Christian identity conferences, at the point of time that the conferences were turning racist.

So if you think of a group of people joined under an ideology, I would never go to a racist conference and agree with it. Everyone who did is of the same mindset, and so whenever the Laterane revival is being birthed, people are historians, they look at it, and they try to separate the two, but you really can't do that.

I've been tracing Lindsay's connections to the identity movement all the way down to his doctrines, what he was preaching against, and he would put out these timelines of how things would be, how things would play out in the end of day scenario, and he would tie it to things that the identity leaders were pushing as political agenda, such as the New Deal.

If you look at any of Lindsay's charts, he was saying that the New Deal era was a milestone in the pathway to Armageddon, and fast-forward to the 50s, and that's what sparked this conversation.

Lindsay starts pushing the notion that we must have a worldwide revival. In the podcast that's released today, I talked through some of that history, but the precursor to that history literally is, we are seeing a roadmap to the end of days that began because President Roosevelt and the false Jews started to come over, air-quoting false Jews, came into the United States, and Lindsay's a part of that.

So when people are, pointing into the movement, it isn't just that he had this dark past and they were starting something new. He's actually saying it in the magazine that's being published during the movement's birth.

Now, fast-forward to today are they racist or they anti-Semitic? I wouldn't say so. I wouldn't call Mike Bickle this, but if you look at the historical lineage, there's some really dark chapters in it, and because of those chapters are ideas that come out like the billion-so-harvest.

Well, as you know, if you do DNA on your own family, there's lots of secrets. I mean, I don't want to get too personal here, but I grew up my whole life being told, because I was adopted.

So, I grew up my whole life being told that my birth father was Irish and my mother was Italian. Until three years ago, I did a DNA test and I had absolutely zero Irish in me and I'm 98% Italian, so you can imagine at 60 years old looking at my scientific DNA only to find out who I thought it was, and there's like a whole mother's story here that isn't anything like what I thought, so that's one of the reasons I think you and I get on so well as our personalities are such that we like to drill down, right?

Every test I've ever taken there, I always get, wow, you just love to dig, don't you? And it's because I'm insanely curious about why, like, why did we get here? Like, how did this happen?

How did we get to this moment? Where does that come from, right? You know, whether that's a person or whether that's a situation, whether it's a worldview, a theology, like it came from somewhere, so what's the history?

I have it, you know, and again, I don't want to over generalize this, but it seems to me that news, meaning things that are communicated in the moment, tend to be heavily saturated with propaganda, meaning people are presenting facts and information with an agenda to get a massive amount of people to look and think a certain way.

The reason that I love history is because historians, a hundred years after an event, after all of the propagandists have died, right? All the people that have a personal investment in looking good and telling a story that reflects positively, positively on them are all dead.

And what you end up with is people who have no dog and the hunt as we say, right? No personal looking at the facts. So I'll give you a case in point which a lot of people may not be aware of, but to this most unpopular sitting president in the history of the United States is Abraham Lincoln.

I mean, at the time that he got assassinated, he to this still to the state is the most unpopular president in office. Yeah. He is now a national hero. What changed? He didn't change. No.

Nothing that he did changed. What ends up happening is you get away from the events. Society changes. People begin to see things differently. And this is a sociological fact so people know. Your current frame of mind reflects how you tell history.

If you're grumpy and you tell a story about your past, you tend to tell a grumpy version of it. Like you go negative. You're in a good place and you feel how you tend to focus on the positive.

This is not debatable. This is scientific fact. So perspective has a lot to do with your current frame of mind. That's why you see people changing their perspective. And why I tell people there's a different version of you every decade of your life. Because every 10 years you increase in knowledge and understanding and you gain more information. And it changes your perspective.

That's what's called maturity. Hopefully. You're maturing. And why my generation sees things very differently than my granddaughter generation. And that's happened all through human history. That never changed us. So a lot of these stories that we tell, like what you're doing with all your research is you're going back now three, four generations from the actual events and looking at things and going, hey, you know, here's the actual facts. I know what they were saying at the time. But the reason they were saying it is they had a vested interest in looking good.

Now we look back and we go, okay, let's look at this. Let's do a post-mortem as we say, right? Let's look at this and find out why this thing crashed and burned. Why did this not make it? And so I think, you know, in the topic we want to talk about today, it's like revival, right? What is it?

Where did it come from? You know, where did you know? Because do you hear this is interesting to me. I don't see a whole lot of discussion about revival after the first century up until about the 16, 1700s or maybe even the 1500s. You know, a lot of people would say the reformation is a revival, right? I debate that and here's why. I don't see Martin Luther actually wanting to change Catholicism.

He just wants to change... in some theology. Like he wants to keep the system in place, right? He's not looking to change hearts. Like he's not looking for people to repent and change their course of direction, right?

He's just trying to say, hey, your theology is screwy. Right? And so I think the reformation, a lot of people said that's a revival. I'm not sure that's the case, because in my mind, and again, this is my perspective that a revival or a renewal is something that happens in your soul.

It works from the inside out. Luther was trying to work from the outside in, right? He was trying to change the system, right? In other words, change the way we do things. A real revival starts from the inside out.

Well, you don't really see that kind of thing happening as far as I remember until around the 1700s. And of course, in the U.S., the most famous revival is what they call the first great awakening, which started before the Revolutionary War, and the guy that's most commonly associated that was a preacher out of Massachusetts, called Jonathan Edwards.

And there's a very famous sermon that he preached called the sinners in the hands of an angry God. And so he basically got up at church and told everybody you're going to hell, and they all got scared to death and went, okay, we repent, right?

Then you see after Edwards, then you see the Finis, who is a lawyer and believes that there's a methodology to revival. In other words, if you say certain things and you do certain things, you're gonna get this outcome.

He was a process guy. This is the process of revival. And so he went through upstate New York and worked his process and had all these people supposedly get saved, except for then after, he went to Oberlin College, Nohio, and became the president.

That area that he did all those revivals in became known as the Burned Over District and nobody wanted preachers to come preach anymore because they didn't want to get beat up. They were trying to get beat up, right?

So again, is that revival, is that renewal? Yeah, in theology, if you go to Bible school, I mean, we were all taught that's revival, right? That's a revival. You know, people repented and whatever.

Would that work today? After our last conversation, when we were talking about how the brain can disconnect from the mouth whenever you're speaking. Anybody who's a speaker, you know what I'm talking about here, but if you get, and especially in the Pentecostal circles, where you're really getting excited and speaking very quickly, very loudly, very ecstatic, well, what happens is sometimes your brain disconnects whether you want to...

or not, and you'll say something that you really didn't mean to say, and then you try to correct it, and you over-correct. What happens is, sadly, whenever you over-correct, entire new doctrines can spin off of your over-correction. Or you might say something in jest, and somebody will take it spiritually, and it'll turn into a spiritual thing. The best example, obviously, for Kansas City is you've got Paul Cain, who's speaking to a crowd in Kansas City, saying, I saw an arrowhead stadium, Joe's Army in training. Well, why arrowhead? He's speaking to the people of Kansas City. If

he said, I saw in the Niners Stadium, no one's going to want to join in this thing, man. So he's saying this, and I go back and forth, but I kind of believe that I don't think he had a prophecy.

He was just trying to make a statement to excite the people, will it turn into a prophecy? That's my opinion. But I know how this works. When your brain disconnects and you say things that you don't really mean, people can take entire doctrines off of it, take the theme of revival. There isn't a passage in the Bible anywhere that talks about a worldwide revival before the return of Jesus Christ, not one. And I truly believe, like you said, I've studied Martin Luther, there's no way he was wanting to do what they would call in today's terms revival. The Bible does talk about a

renewal or revival. It comes from the inside. But in the logistical terms, whenever you're thinking logistically a revival that comes from the heart doesn't end up into the pocketbook. So the people are giving the revival. And so it's in their benefit not to have a inward thing. They need an outward display. Gather more people. That's how you do church growth. It's really it's the basis for what became New Apostolic Reformation. So when you think in terms of revival, you can't think biblically.

There is no biblical precedent. But because you're so persuaded by your culture, like the thing with Kansas City, the Joe's Army and training, he's speaking to the people of Kansas City. They culturally they love Arrowhead Stadium. It's appealing. You say things like this because it's appealing. Well, somebody is in a movement and they get excited and they say we need a revival, we need a renewal. And then, you know, they start building doctrines on top of it. Well, eventually, if you stack enough things on on top of a leaning tower, that leaning tower will fall over.

And I think, doctrinally speaking, the more they have built on top of this revival theme, because there is no biblical precedent. Eventually, it just topples. Well, something I've wrestled with. And again, we're having a dialogue about this. And you know, I don't always have conclusions because I'm still processing things. You know, as a historian, I always keep my...

mind open for finding something new, right? That will change it. So, you know, I'll make statements, but I'm always open to more things. So one of the things I've noticed, is you go back and study church history.

Af, you know, there was this whole thing about conversion, right? You had the early apostles preaching the gospel to Jewish people, right? But they weren't leaving Judaism. They were just getting a different perspective on the Messiah, right?

In other words, they were Messiah followers. It was all Jewish in nature. Then in 70 AD, the Romans come in there, destroyed Jerusalem and this Jewish centric church,

if you wanna call that, then ends up migrating to Rome, which is of course the New York of the ancient world. That's the economic epicenter. And there's 50,000 Jewish people in Rome, and that's why Paul heads there.

But then you see this struggle, and then Constantine comes along, and then two emperors later, they decide to make Christianity the state religion, and then you see this whole thing across the Roman Empire, where all of these, what's the word I wanna call them?

You know, the guys like Pontius Pilate, the guys that were administrators or prefects, or whatever they called them, you know, over these areas, then all try to force the population to convert, right? And remember the whole thing, it's converter die by the sword.

And so what you see is early on for centuries is this transactional version of Christianity. The whole idea is to move people from debit to asset, right? In other words, you're going to hell, you're a liability, you're a debit, you know what I mean?

You're in the negative column. But if you convert, now you're in the positive column. And so that's what I mean by transactional. It's like moving you from this to this. Okay, you're going to hell, now you're going to have it.

And all you gotta do is say these words. That matter how you live, just say these words, right? And then a whole religion develops where you can live like hell from Monday to Friday, but then on Saturday you go say, I'm sorry, and then you get forgiven for everything and you get it's clean slate and then go live like crazy for the rest of the week, right?

And that whole thing happened, right? And so you see this very transactional thing. Well, then even in evangelical world, even after the reformation, you see this same thing. And everything is predicated on, let's move people from hell to heaven, but it's transactional.

And so churches, you know, pastors, preachers like Billy Graham, they're all being evaluated for how good they are in trans-actioning people out of this. Debit state into an asset Right the reliability to the kingdom of God now they're an asset because we because they went up and they set a prayer My problem with this and what I've struggled with and I was just having this conversation yesterday with a Dear pastoral brother is that when I read Jesus in the Gospels I see Jesus focusing on Unmotive and the heart and how we live and Christianity is about a way of life, right?

It's not transactional. It's like whatever how we ever got here in some ways to me has completely Distracted us from the core of everything Jesus was about which is transforming your heart, right? Well now as you get into these revivals in early American stuff like that I think it was kind of both and meaning that There was still this transactional thing how many people got saved right and the way you knew people got saved was they got baptized Right, so you get the Baptist church who's now sending in reports every church is sending reports headquarters

We have 15 baptism to this Sunday, right? Which means we had 15 people get saved good right the guys who had the most Baptisms climb the hierarchy of their particular denomination again all based on this kind of thing Very little is talked about about the transformational nature repenting right in other words I repented of Myself centeredness which is where Jesus was going with all of his teaching because Jesus understood we have this default setting towards being selfish and Everything he's talking and teaching is about how to love others how to lay your life down for others

How to care for other people how to say no to yourself how to control Your selfish passions yourself. It's less your right. He's that's the whole focus of everything he's talking about Somehow we got lost and all that so then what happens is is then as we move into our age and I've thought a lot about this Because of the fact that as we were mentioning the billion soul harvest was the core vision of Everything that Kansas City Fellowship and the International House of Prayer was working towards you take that out and there is It's not that there wasn't anything else, but that's the reason everybody got together

There was because this is going to happen, right? Well most of the people in the early eighties that were gathered in it Kansas City Fellowship came into Their faith through the Jesus people movement I did and it's most every one of my friends did. Well, why did the Jesus people movement happen?

Did it just like it just came out of nowhere, in other words, the spirit of God was so strong that suddenly this thing happened, no, what was happening in the country? We were in the middle of one of the most rebellious seasons where my generation was rebelling against our World War II parents who were very rigid and strict and whatever, and we were like, hey, the problem is the rules, so let's get rid of the rules and all this stuff, and like, when I live free, you know, everything was about free, right? And the Jesus people movement that came out of

Costa Mesa happened simultaneously. So my question always was, if my generation hadn't been this rebellious generation, would the Jesus people thing have ever happened? I don't think so. I think we would have all conformed and carried on the very thing that our parents carried on, like we would have been good little foot soldiers and carried it on. The very fact that we were in this cultural moment of rebellion and challenging the past created the environment for this to happen. So the reason I go there is this was my question, to Mike and the guys, Bob Jones and all these guys, okay, I want a billion souls to get saved,

not man, right? It's like, who doesn't want that? I do. So how is it going to happen? Oh, well, the spirit of God's going to fall. Okay, so you think that what's going to happen, there's going to be this outside of everything else, just on its own, God's going to decide, I want to get a billion people saved and he's going to send his spirit. And suddenly now we're all going to be preaching and people are going to be falling down, going, what must I do to be saved, right? And that was really how they all thought, like it was totally disconnected from

anything else. Yet as a historian, as I go back, it never happens disconnected from something else. There's always something bigger going on in the society. The reason I bring all this up is that I believe that's going to happen. And not my last book, which was about Kansas City Fellowship, but the one before that's called in the company of Joseph. And I talk about five years ago, where things are going to go. The first four chapters set up the rest of the book. And I believe because of where we're headed with artificial intelligence and where our society is going, that we are going to

create culturally an enormous spiritual vacuum. Because everything that's driving our world right now is all tighten. allergy, right, which has no soul and for all its efficiencies and for all the things that it may make our lives better, it does not feed a core part of the human being, which is our soul and our spirit, right, our insights.

It leaves us, it's going to leave us empty. My point in that is, it's coming. If this course were on, keeps happening, it might be another decade, it might be 20 years from now, but there's going to be a certain point where humans are going to just go in mass and that's where the key, it's got to happen in mass, are just going to go, we're empty.

Like, we're missing something and when we hit that, it's called critical mass, you can study it, it happens in all kinds of different situations. When we hit that critical mass where enough people reach that point, you're going to see massive revival or renewal or whatever you're going to, and it's going to happen in mass and it always does because it's whole societies of people will come there and go, God, we need something more, God help us.

So that's what I'm saying, it's going to happen, but you don't need to be a prophet to predict it. You just need to be a sociologist or a prognosticator and just look at the facts on the ground.

Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation? You can learn this and more on William 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 Montgomery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book.

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

On behalf of William Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. You mentioned the Jesus movement and how the spirit of rebellion fueled a lot of this. Well, that's the funny part about all of it.

It's not just one detail of history that repeats itself. It's multifaceted. There are many aspects of history that repeat themselves. And you also mentioned the debit and credit referring to people. It's kind of funny because in regards to revival, the debit and credit can be a person, but it often refers to the pocketbooks, A.B. Simpson.

So A.B. Simpson was the founder, I guess, of the Christian Missionary Alliance, big time player in organ... icing and forming the doctrines that would become our today's revival movement. And he came on the heels of the, are member correctly, the timeline of events, the Civil War deeply impacted the world as he was, or the nation as he was finding fertile ground to preach his theology.

Well, he was breaking in, newspapers were saying tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in these revivals and people would just, he would openly say that the end of the world is coming, look at the disaster we just came through.

Give me your money. And people were doing it. His mission was to send people overseas because he believed that if he, he could forcibly convert the world, then they could usher in the return of Jesus Christ.

So people were just opening their pocketbooks, giving them money. And I found newspaper articles with this huge scandal where his, they were keeping two separate bank accounts and his wife was doing the bookkeeping and she was slipping money into their personal account.

So it turns into this real big mess that it's a little bit complicated to describe. But fast forward to, you know, the revival culture that created, that was spawned from this. Now you've got the fear mongering whenever world war one happens.

The world is ending. This is the war to end all wars. Then Armageddon happens, all the fear mongering. And what do you have after the world wars? You had the... Communism. Well, you had that, but you, you also had the raging 20s where people were just in rebellion, right?

The spirit of rebellion. So now you've got the fallout and that created another movement. And that's really what spawned the precursor to Latter-Rain. They were trying to say that no, get back into the fear, let me control your mindset because World War III is coming.

So every, with every world war came the fear mongering after the war came was the spirit of rebellion and that started another renewal, another revival. And in every single case, all of the rhetoric that they were using for fear mongering didn't come out, come to play, come to pass.

So they had to come up with new and more exciting ways to, and train and, and to, and trap the minds. Another thing that's going to factor into whatever is going to happen is we live in a completely different age.

You go back and study how information moves, right? You go back and, and study it. Whoever controlled, at one point, early 1900s, whoever controlled the print, right, magazines or newspapers controlled the information. Then you had radio, then you had TV, well, we're in an age right now where information can be moving across the world in seconds.

And we're all connected via a phone. So all of these studies in the past about revising... But well, we're in a completely different world right now, with a completely different technology, you know, so what's that gonna look like?

And so these are questions I asked myself, do we need, I mean, do we need, we don't go to what, we don't need to go to what, tent anymore, right? You don't need to even watch it.

Like, how is this all gonna happen? It's a different world. I mean, I remember when I was growing up as a kid in the 60s, we did a report on Japan. Well, in my little mind, you know, my little grade school mind, Japan was about as far away from me as the moon was.

I mean, I had no clothes like, so I was like studying Japan, thinking, oh my gosh, this is like so cool, and there's all these people and they're over there, and they're totally different.

Now, we're talking to people in Japan all day long, right? We're seeing information flying back and forth. It's the world is a much more connected place. So, how is this revival gonna happen? Does it need to have guys standing up, you know, on churches preaching?

Like, what do people not know? I mean, there's very few people that I know of out there that don't know about Christianity and about Jesus. Everything they need to know if they really want to find it out is all there.

It's all available, it's right. They don't have to go somewhere and hear it from someone else. It's all there. So, what does that all mean? You see what I mean? These are all the questions where my brain starts thinking.

If this billion soul harvest is gonna happen, it's gonna be very different than anything that's ever happened before it, because there's nothing before it that looks like where we are now. When you look forward, the possibilities are endless, but when you look backward, it gets kind of funny, because like history repeating itself, the mistakes of the evangelists repeat themselves.

And if you go back and study what they were, all of the rhetoric that was being used before World War I, well, we live in a different world today, none of it applies. They're pushing this revival that can't logistically play out because we don't live in that world.

In the Laterane Revivals, Brannum was preaching out, you may not know this. I don't know if I've even said this publicly. Brannum was in the tent craze. He wanted a bigger tent because Allen had the biggest tent and, you know, in today's world.

Oh yeah, Paul came to me that whole story. Yeah, I would not go sit in a tent today. Man, it's too hot. I wanna go to an air-conditioned auditorium. Nobody does that, but in Brannum's end of day scenario, he claimed that, no, what's gonna happen is I'm going to finally get that tent.

I saw it in a vision and I will sweep through the nation one last time and then the Jesus. will return. He literally had a prophecy that he would be take part in giving you your new bodies inside of this tent, right? Oh wow. And so number one, he's dead. This can't take place.

Number two, nobody's going to sit in a tent. And the further we get distance from that time, every aspect of these prophecies just completely fail. And there's a reason for this. In the movement's version of prophecy, it's actually not prophecy like you and I have discussed.

It's fortune telling. Yeah, it's prognostication. Exactly. They want to appear into a crystal ball and tell you what the future is and they excite you with the future. That's fortune telling. But their futures are always wrong. And they consistently get it wrong. And the further you go through time, the more wrong they get. I know this is going to flip out guys in the ministry.

But we're in an age where do we actually need preachers in evangelists and people like that for a revival to happen? You see what I mean? Historically because of the lack of technology or the current technology at the time, you had to go to the tent, right? If you were in rural America and the tent came through, that's the only thing showing town. I mean, people went to those tent meetings because they didn't have anything else to do. In some cases, they said, oh my god, that's why I know I'm talking to Paul about it. Sensationalism, creating stories, getting their names

in the paper. It was like the circus coming to town. It was the same thing for the revivalist. Create a bus. Get it all the people out to the tent. And then Billy Graham of course took that then into stadiums and it was the same thing. Create a bus. But again, you driving people to a place.

You know, parking, going to Arrowhead stadium, right? To a place. Well,

we're in a situation right now. Why would why do why would God need to do any of that? That information is already out there. Like this could happen. And where I'm going with this is because this would be interesting to see if this does happen in our lifetime and we're still alive.

What's going on in full? Because I know where this is going to go already because all of the preachers, the ministry guys are all want to control it. Right? They want to make sure that they're in control of it. And because it has financial ramifications, it has status, right? It's always about status and stuff, right? Underneath it all. So the two status and stuff, they're going to try to control it. Well, they could in the past because you needed to have this happen in person.

Well, we're in an age right now. It didn't need to happen in person. So what does that mean? And I mean, I'm probably being devious here, but the little boy in me is like, yeah, that would be so cool. I would love absolute chaos.

It's like where it completely just goes outside, you know, it's like a damn breaking, right? The system, you know, we're gonna control the river. And suddenly it just breaks. And then this move of God happens and it's completely overwhelms the system and all the guys trying to control it cause they all will and some guys will be able to do it.

But it's like we're in this, I would just love to see God do something where it's spontaneous. And it just happens, right? But what will stimulate it? The only thing, and again, it's, you know, Jesus talked a lot about soil.

You know, a lot of the parables, right? And it wasn't about the seed, right? It was about the soil. What is the soil? In other words, what's the environment? What's the cultural dynamics? And so I'm one of these people that is always looking at what's the soil of America, what's the soil of England right now, right?

What's the soil? Because whatever that soil is is gonna affect whatever gets planted in there. So I'm watching the soil, I'm watching events, I'm watching things happen. And you know what I'm watching for?

One thing, disillusionment. Because the root of almost all revival, renewal, whatever is disillusionment, right? People come to a place where they go at this ain't working. Whatever this is that I've been doing, following whatever is not working.

I need something else, right? That's the soil for God to move. Well, I'm not sure we're there yet. I'm, we're getting there fast, right? Things are, I can see it. I mean, we're already fragmenting, you know, there's a country right now.

So there's things happening underneath that I'm watching, but I'm watching the soil. I'm watching the, if I wanna call it the soil, but it's really the soul of America or the soul of Africa or the soul of Europe.

Because that environment is what's gonna determine when and how this thing is gonna happen. So I'm gonna go there with you and I'm gonna go through. Anger, I'm the rest of my audience. The bird dog right now I'm flushing you out of the bush.

Yeah, you're bringing me out. Because this is a thought that has really hit me and it applies directly to the conversation about revival. It's a man-made revival. It's all about control. It's all about a, everybody wants to be the Moses that led God's people out.

That's really what it comes down to. It's not even status and stuff for me. It's more about the recognition. They won't recognition, that's all that's status to me. So yeah. So take just simple basics of the Bible.

Whenever I left the cult, I started reading it again. The Bible over and over. all of the nonsense out of my head. And if you read it for what it says and not for what they're telling you, it says, there are concepts that are fully incompatible with what they're telling you in some of the churches.

The biggest one is this, Jesus said, if I leave this world, I'll send you a helper and he will lead you and guide you, the Holy Spirit. Right. This concept of revival is such that you need, you must have somebody who's a revival leader and you must all join together and then you can get the Holy Spirit.

So what they're trying to say is basically, you can't get the Holy Spirit until this thing happens, this worldwide revival. Take it a step further. Whenever I started going to the churches and I started to try to just unpack, I was in a oneness background, so I was trying to unpack, okay, trinitarianism, how does it work?

And I sat down with some different ministers, not just one church or denomination. And I said, okay, explain to me the trinity. How are three in one? And you get different answers from different people.

It's kind of funny when you ask it and you say, well, explain that, explain how this tree can be three. And it wasn't that I was pushing back against trinitarianism. I just really wanted to see how they would answer because I was driving at this one point and I was trying to see who would be honest and who wouldn't.

The ones that were honest would say, I can't understand God, God's more than I can understand. That's an honest person. The other people would just try to force you to believe whatever they believed.

And I said, okay, so you can't understand God. I said hypothetically speaking, somebody is on a remote island, they've never heard the name Jesus, but they realize that there's a God who created heavens and earth.

They believe exactly the same God we believe, but just have never heard a name to it. They're kind to the neighbors, they treat their neighbors as themselves, they love people, they love God above all else.

Are these people saved or are they going to hell? Right. And it's really, really funny when you ask this question to a minister because ministers in today's Christianity have been trained to believe that they must be involved in the salvation, not the Holy Spirit, not the helper.

So the answer by most ministers is that this, because they've not heard the name that God, that our Christian God uses, Jesus, because they've not heard that name, they're going to hell unless somebody can intercede and let somebody can sin the revival to their nation, right?

In other words, we must be the one to save them, not the Holy Spirit, not Jesus, not God. Take it a step further. They all go back to this passage for saking, not the assembling of ourselves together.

For the reading of scripture, Hebrews 10, I think it is, there's different passages they use, but basically they're trying to say that all of the passages that describe the ancient cultures gathering together for reading of scripture.

That is telling. you must come to church and pay tith so that I can pay for the lights and they are conditioning in this building. But if you really think about it, a vast majority of the people in the ancient world couldn't read.

Right. And there were people who were transcribing the Bible who could write but not read, which is something that took a long time for me to understand that concept. They could make the symbols, they could do a copy, they could copy, but they couldn't, they couldn't read.

But they had to come together for the reading of scriptures so that the religion could be established. When today's world, some four or five year olds can read the Bible decently, some six, seven, eight, can read it well, much better than they could in the ancient world.

So all of the scriptures really don't apply. But again, they're trying to say you must come to church so that I can tell you what the scriptures mean. In other words, I'm the one who's going to do the work, the role of the Holy Spirit to give you the Holy Spirit.

So they become this mediator between God and man. I have a huge problem with this. And as you think through the concept of revival, the concept of revival is just on a global scale what they're doing on a small scale in many of the churches.

As a historian, one of the questions, unanswered questions for me to your point is what was going on in Akhenaten's head, the Pharaoh of Egypt, right? And what I mean by that, if you don't know the story, there's thousands of years of Egyptian religion where they have a pantheon of God.

And suddenly this Pharaoh decides there's only one God. Like he goes from being a pantheist to a monotheist, right? Which causes massive conflict within Egypt, right? And so much so that when he dies, they like try to erase him out of history.

But something's going on, right? Like this is so, like outside the norm, like this is so weird to me. It's just one of these little blips in history that going, something's going on. Like is God talking to him?

Like is there something going on here in the way he ends up, of course, defining it is we're going to have one God, it's going to be raw, the sun God, right? Because that's the symbol of this monotheistic God.

So there's all kinds of stories in history like that where you're like, something's going on here. Like people are connecting to God or something in ways that we don't fully comprehend. This thing I want to mention is one of the things that I do, just if you want an insight into my thinking, I believe God's a creator.

And like every artist that I've ever met, whether you are a musician or a sculptor or a writer. The nature of you comes out in your work, your songs are an extension of you, right?

I of all believe that nature Is a reflection of God. So what do we know? But what is one of the things that's a constant in nature that we all observe that happens constantly and sometimes we don't stop and go, huh?

I haven't really thought about this. There's a cycle things live and die and Out of the death comes new life, right? There's all there's this cycle It happens in plants it happens in animals happens in human beings it happens in all of nature these cycles And so when you look at revival or renewal, it's actually the way of nature. That's exactly what happens. Things get old They get crusty. They get institutionalized and they die and Something new comes. So the reason I say all this is this is where I get frustrated with the prophetic is that if you just

Understand God's ways. If you just understand how things work I will guarantee you revivals coming and renewals coming It can't not happen It's the way, you know, I what's that? I don't know. There was some movie. I saw this is the way It's one of the side. This is the one that's the Mandalorian the Mandalorian. There you go. This is the way, right? That is the way So yeah, I don't need to be a prophet to tell you revivals coming of course. It's coming It has to come because things are gonna get old and crusty right and and it's gonna die and new things are gonna come

That's just the way it is. So you just got to watch the cycles or in Lion King the circle of life It's everywhere, but somehow we don't stop and take note of it And then with some guy stands up then goes revivals coming and we think he's speaking for God and you're like God Like mr. Hello, mr. obvious, you know, that's what I want to like y'all from the back row. Hello, mr.

Obvious Of course it's coming What it's you can't not happen, right? It's like of course it's coming So that's what I mean. It's like that and they call that that's prophetic. Well I have my book before it was some said it blundered was actually gonna be called prophetic or pathetic And And that's pathetic. You see that's the pathetic side. It's like gosh That's like and everybody's clapping right because they don't like stop And step back for a minute and go well, of course it's gonna happen like you don't I could tell you that I could stand up there and go

God said That revivals coming. Yeah, of course. It's coming it always When do we get, when does this thing die, right? So it's where I get frustrated where then it's like presented as some sort of divine revelation from God.

And of course to get back to our billion soul harvest, this is like not new. I thought it was new. When I started at KCF and Bob Jones showed up and told us about the billion soul harvest, that fit right in with what Mike and I wanted to do.

I mean we were, saw ourselves as church planters and we wanted to grow, we wanted to see revival. And that happened because Mike got a hold of David Brainerd's book while we were in Rosebud and it was all about prayer.

And so from Mike's point of view, if I pray enough, I can pray and revival, right? He got deeply affected by Charles Finney's process mentality. So that's the whole of Ahab goes way back to the late 70s where somebody, I.e. Mike Bickle, developed a worldview that I can pray and revival.

And I want to see revival. Then he meets Bob and you take his, Mike's worldview with Bob saying suddenly there's going to be a billion soul harvest and it's like ding, it's like two magnets, right?

And suddenly now we have, it's like Shazam. And the whole, you know, the whole of KCF just explodes with all kinds of people who want revival too. Guess what? Every year Bob Jones would do the shepherd's rod and he would tell us that somehow God appeared to him and you know, and this is what he told us for this year and it's eminent.

Like this billion soul harvest was eminent. And so we had a whole group of people in their 20s and our grandparents now and have it seen it yet who were living in the moment waiting for this billion soul harvest to happen this year because it was eminent.

And that's the second piece of this thing that I find really manipulative, right? This is, it's this carrot. It's not the carrot 20 feet away from you. It's the carrot two inches away from you, right?

It's like they put it right in front of your mouth and then they just keep pulling it, right? And they always keep it, it's always eminent. And that's the hook. Like in this, you know, how you have a hook in the song.

The hook is, it's always eminent. And that's why, you know, people keep hanging on. That's how they keep people, you know, kind of enslaved to this, you know, this expectation. And then what happens is, what happened to Elisa KCF and it also happens that IHOP is all our 20-year-olds got married.

We ended up having kids. We had to go get jobs. And the real world hit us like a train wreck, right? T-bone by reality. Oh my god. I got I got to survive, right? I got a wife and kids and get a job and you know and okay I hope revival happens, but yeah, it's and we're putting on the shelf right now because I got to get a paycheck and and again, what takes over nature the life, right?

The tangible world in front of us ends up taking over. So then what is Mike to you? He leaves and reinvent himself and goes gets another group of 20-year-olds and tells all of them that the billion you know billion soul harvest is eminent and now they're praying for 25 years, they're sacrificing their just right because it's all eminent. Well I knew you would have an inside perspective that would just blow the minds of the people and in my mind too. So many things thanks so much for doing this. Okay well I hope it's helpful to people and again you know I don't

want people to think we're being negative because it's it's not I'm not I'm not against something what I'm actually driving at is I just want the real thing. I want the authentic thing and in order for us to actually get an authentic thing we have to do post mortems and be honest and look at things and open them up and turn them around and go what is this really? And so the encouraging thing it's gonna happen. Now we may not live to see it but it's gonna happen but just keep living your life and loving the people right in front of you and do what you can and let

God worry about when it's gonna happen. I was in the bank the other day and this teller held up my $20 bill up to the light to see was in this little strip and she wanted to make sure there was a real dollar bill and or a $20 bill and I came to realize that in order to understand what is the real thing you have to first understand what is the false thing right so it's not that we're negative at all but to understand the real thing you really have to understand what's wrong so.

We're trying to get you to not waste your time on fruitlessness. Absolutely right bad investment. Right well if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information you can check us out on the web you can find us at William-Branham.org. From more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR and from more about Mike Bickle and IHOPKC you can read some said they blundered breaking my decades of silence on Mike Bickle the Kansas City Prophets and the International House of Prayer.