KCF- The Prophetic Movement That Shaped the NAR

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org and with me I have my co-host and friend Bob Scott, former co-founder of the Kansas City Fellowship and 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 and I'm a little bit excited to get into this. I've kind of been building up to these moments. I've

got this list of things. I really want to pick your brain on because you were there and you know I've listened to many podcasts about IHOP KC, Kansas City Fellowship, all this and it's all from people who learned about it after it went destructive. They really weren't there during the beginning and there are some elements that you talk about that really match my story and so I'm certain there's going to be a little bit of crossover but basically one of the things that I have been building up to is I want to I want to learn more about the

prophetic in the Kansas City Fellowship before it turned into the International House of Prayer. There's a reason for this. So whenever William-Branham was in his destructive phase that would have been the phase that created the destructive cult I was in, he was the only one. I'm the king prophet, there are no others, they're all fakes, they're all scoundrels, yada yada yada. But there was a moment in time prior to this much like the Kansas City Fellowship prior to International House of Prayer where it was building up this idea of this fivefold ministry where there's prophets, apostles, you know, teachers, pastors,

et cetera. Well in that moment there were many prophets that were coming forward. There were many apostles coming forward and they were all kind of joined in unity and what happened is they built this platform from which they could build other ministries and they started to watch those grow and it became like this pyramid scheme of religion. It was, you know, there's a point of time in which laterane and the voice of healing revival is combined to form the post-World War II healing revival. And then they split after they kind of split because of this thing I'm talking about. But there were many prophets and then after the

split, each group, if you study the climax of their destructive cult, they're usually, I'm the only one, they're... or no others, they all go down the same pathway. So I wanted to talk to you about the prophetic as it relates to the Kansas City Fellowship.

That'll be a fun topic. You know, one thing that fascinates me about our relationship is that in many ways, we couldn't be more different in terms of our journey. You know, you grew up in this Pentecostal world.

I grew up Catholic kid in Milwaukee. And I lasted until my teenage years, but then I got kicked out of CCD for asking if we could study other religions. And my reasoning was, my father was looking for a new car and we were out driving and sampling all these other cars that make a decision and they had stuck me in this Catholic, it was a Catholicism class and we only had one option.

And I wanted to know what my other options were anyway. So I got me in big trouble. So then I spent the next seven years being an existentialist, even though I didn't know that was the word for it.

Only when I was 18, I ended up having a rather interesting spiritual experience in the middle of the night, which created this curiosity of, you know, who's God and what's out there. So I went to my parents' pastor who's evangelical.

So here I am then going to an evangelical Bible school being taught that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are a dispensation that's passed. Those things are no longer relevant, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I meet my pickle or roommates at Bible school. After Bible school, we reconnect after not talking and he tells me he's pastoring a church in Rosebud and I should come down and visit him.

So here I am, I drive from Milwaukee down to Rosebud, Missouri, to this little country church that he's his first pastorate. And I arrive in the middle of the week, so I don't, you know, I'm just meeting him and some of the guys that are hanging with him.

And then Sunday morning we have church service and this place is like a wild panacostal event

that I have never in my life experienced. Right? It's got wood floors, right? The old wood floor, God, you church. So people are stomping and there's all this stuff going on and I'm horrified, right?

Cause here I am with my roommate from Bible school, right? Who is an evangelical and we're in a middle of a panacostal church and my head was spinning but it tells you a little bit about Mike Saikier.

right? It's like he was so bound and determined to be in the ministry, eating, care, what flavor it was. He just wanted a church. After the meeting, I like pull them inside and I was like, I go, what are you doing? What are you doing? And he like, winks at me and goes, don't worry, I'll have them all converted in three months to eat, you know, you man, of course, that never happened, right? We get pulled further and further into it. I end up going to these meetings in union Missouri, which was kind of the county center, you know, the

and it's full gospel business meant. So suddenly now, I'm with a whole group of guys that are telling me that my proof of being a Christian is that I'm supposed to be speaking in tongues. Like, I have no idea what this is, right? But I just listen to all these people babbling, right? And of course, my brain is just freaking out here, right? It's just like, what am I into? So you can imagine, right? This is only a few years before Kansas City. So we moved to Kansas City and open the church in November of 1982. And in March of 83, this

roly, poli, white hair guy shows up with electrical pulses going through his fingers and it's just saying weird stuff, right? Oh, my God. You know what I mean? It's as you can imagine, it's just like, this was a collision like so in your world, that would be like normal, right? It's like, oh, yeah, go up with this. In my world, this was like, what is this?

Right? So here I am now on the associate pastor of this church. And suddenly now we have this force, this spiritual something that has just come crashing into our church, because the whole purpose of the church initially was a giant prayer meeting. It was sort of a model after the meravians and there are a hundred year prayer meeting Mike wanted to have day and night prayer. So the whole focus was prayer, right? And then suddenly, we end up having this prophetic thing, just t-bone us, or what was claimed to be prophetic, right? So just sidebar here, even though my book is called some say they

blunder, the original title was prophetic or pathetic. And the reason being is then the next eight years of my while seven years really, the next seven years of my life, were me trying to struggle with exactly what you're talking about this, this systemic prophetic thing, because it literally changed the whole culture of our church. I mean, it literally took over. I mean, it was, I mean, I don't mean this derogatory, but it was like a we...

It's just literally we were having perm meetings and suddenly now Mike puts this guy on stage who's got these weird Things he's saying and people are just lapping it up and I'm sitting there struggling going okay This I don't know if this is good or bad. I don't know what this is Right, and so I spent the next seven years just drilling down Asking a lot of questions which got me into a lot of trouble in sideways with Mike on a lot of things

Because people didn't like my questions Whenever you are on the outside of what I was in and you're looking in What you see when you see Brannemism you see Pentecostalism you see elements trace elements of latarine all of these different things and And you described the people much like you described to me. Here's the funny part While I was in it we often heard sermons how we're not like those Pentecostals Really and I yes, I had in my head I had An indoctrinated this idea that I wasn't Pentecostal and yet we were Pentecostal through and through that's the funny part

Now you got my brain going here. So why was that why did they need to make that distinction? Was there some conflict with Springfield? Well, think of how a destructive cult works and by the way people if you don't what's Springfield is it's the headquarters of the assembly of God, so Exactly, so think about how a destructive cult works at first as you're building the cult everybody's welcome come join our call It doesn't matter if you're going to church a b or c We want to have fellowship one with another and then once you get them in your group

You start talking about how bad churches a b and c are you guys need to leave those things right well That's that's the way this worked. So Brannum was Brannum in the beginning. He would say things like If people draw you out of your circle draw a bigger circle and draw them back in everybody's welcome and everybody from Catholics to Baptist to Methodist et cetera Well, once he started being sanctioned by different groups the assemblies was the first in 1949 I think it was they they issued this resolution and said Lateranus is a bunch of very destructive groups

So they cut Brannum off and what's interesting is that created this split in Pentecostalism You either with Brannum in the Lateran or you weren't and Brannum was walking down the middle of this trying to wait on both sides And so what would happen is he would say things that were approved either side could approve it Until they fully cut them off and then he denounced them and this went all the way through until he finally is denouncing Pentecostalism in general Well, what happens is he's dead now we have all of these people who are believing that every word spoken by this guy is the divine word of God, and how do you reconcile this?

In the beginning, he's favorable with the Pentecostals. In the end, he condemns them. Well, it must have been progressive revelation. So towards the end, he's not Pentecostal. None of us are Pentecostal. We're different than those Pentecostals.

And the other. Exactly. And how that relates to this conversation is this. Towards the end, he becomes the all-in-wonder prophet. There are no others. There are all the mockeries. There are all the fake that sent to deceive you. And we were given that mindset. The five-fold ministry really didn't exist.

There was the kingpin who is now dead, and there's everybody else. But what happened was each minister who rose up tried to become central figures of their own. And so they would fight with each other. You have cities where there might be five different churches of the same denomination, none of which could fellowship with each other. They're all different.

And so what would happen is you had a guy who's not claiming to be prophetic because that would step on Brannum's toes. He's claiming to be in the fivefold. He's just a pastor. Where it got really interesting as it relates to this conversation as I was in one specific church. And they invited a back in the old days you'd call it the circuit writer preacher, but basically this missionary-type preacher that's going from church to church. And preach is normal sermon. And then at the end, he pretends like he has this prophetic gift. I'm about 22 years old at the time. I could see

straight through him. And he was doing stupid stuff, like picking out people based off of the way of addressing obvious things, right? And saying, I have, God has told me that you sitting there, and he goes through the spiel. Well, it's all fake to me, but he's in this church pretending to be a prophet. And the ministers are allowing it. So when I think about Kansas City Fellowship, and in the early years of this, there were multiple prophets that kind of some of them disappeared.

Jed talks about his father and how he was cut off. But then towards the end, as you're starting to write what is called the prophetic history, you limit this to the cult's central mythology.

So the mythology basically replaces the idea that there's this prophetic gift coming to the church. Well, if you'll indulge me for a second, I want to put on my sociology hat because I think there's a cultural sociology dynamic that not only impacts the church world, but secular culture as well. And that's what I call the influence pie. All through history is, you know, I'm an avid historian. It's how I watch all these battles. And what I became to realize.

It's what the battle always is, is who's got the most influence. That's where all that, whether it's political, you know what I mean, whether it's religious, whatever. And so the reason I use the analogy of a pie is that a pot, you know, there's a limited amount of people in a particular area, right?

And so then there's a group of people in there, and they're all vying to be influential. I learned this the hard way, Zimbabwe, with my friends that got killed. They got killed because in the civilization, they gained influence because they were saving people from a genocide and feeding people who were starving.

The government was losing influence. And what I was so naive of it as a 30-year-old was that whenever somebody gains influence, somebody else is losing it, right? It's a, there's a, you know, the pie is only so big.

When somebody starts losing influence, conflict arises and sometimes it gets deadly because you become a threat, right? The minute your influence increases over somebody who's powerful, right? In this case, they had guns and, you know, they had a military and all that kind of stuff.

So they were able to take these people out. It's the same thing in the church world. Right? And I find it fascinating, fast-forwarding now to our modern culture when you see people defying the day in the social media world, what are they called?

Influencers. So this is so funny to me because here I am kind of figuring all this stuff out in the 80s about influence and now years later, that's like a common term. They're an influencer.

Well, what are they influencing, right? Who are they influencing? It gets, right? And then there's a battle. I'm seeing it. Now, I mean, I mean, I don't, again, I want to stay away from politics here, but you're seeing it in the post-Charlie Kirkworld of Turning Point USA, right?

And I had told some friends of mine that are on the board there. This is exactly what's going to happen now that Charlie's gone. Watch this. And they're all calling me and they're all going, oh my God, how did you know?

And I said, it doesn't take a profit. It takes a historian and a sociologist. This happens everywhere all the time, right? So exactly what you're describing about what happened. It's a battle, right? And then initially, the battle was between the assemblies of God in Springfield and, you know, the Brannemites in what Jeffersonville that we're in, of course, was actually it goes a little bit beyond that because there were states that became rogue states.

within the assemblies. So Kentucky, for example, I've had people from Kentucky who were in the standard assemblies of God churches that denounced Laterane, who were inviting Laterane ministers, which is kind of fun. But you see the battle, it's all about who, again, it gets down to. This is where why James 316 to me is just as important almost as John 316, because James said wherever you have selfish ambition and greed, right, you're going to have chaos and evil, right? So wherever there's a drive for status and stuff, i.e. gaining influence, right, wherever that's the motive,

you're going to have conflict, chaos, evil. People are going to do bad things, right? And it's like for somebody like me, who's, you know, like you said, studied history and sociology, I just keep, it's like a broken record. It just keeps happening over and over and over and once you begin to see it, right, you see it's everywhere. There's a reason why there's 40,000 Pentecostal denominations.

Like, is that the most ridiculous number? Why do we need 40,000 Pentecost, I mean, you know, Protestant denominations, right? You know why? Because somebody was driven by the loss for status and stuff and wanted influence, right? And somebody wasn't giving it to them, so they threw a little hissy fit and went off and started another thing, right? So they could have influence, right?

So the whole, so where you're going with it is then what ends up happening once that person makes that move because they're driven by this desire to be influencers, is it becomes systemic, right? They have to create a system to maintain the influence, right?

And that's where you start getting memberships and signing up and loyalty and donation, right? You see this whole thing and it's, you know, in the business world, we call it a sticky relationship, right? We want to have a sticky relationship with our clients, you know, and so because we want to upsell other services, right? We want to handle this and we want to handle that for them. So we want to integrate them into our, you know, into our business services or software or whatever, so that they always need us, right? They're always dependent on the next upgrade,

you know, we have a continual revenue stream. It's not any different in the church world. And this is what, you know, because of my Joseph company global world, and if, you know, we can have a whole conversation about that sometime, but I live between the business world, you know, the secular and the sacred world is people like to define it even though from God's perspective, there is no secular, sacred world like that just doesn't exist.

But I see it all the time, right? So it's like people just think because we're the church and we're serve God that we're like different, right? And we're not. It's like we do all the same things.

We just put religious words on it and it makes us feel like we're really being spiritual, right? But it's the same motives. Exactly. So ironically, you're describing where I was hoping that you would head, but I didn't want to lead you there because I wanted you to tell it as it was.

But so go back to the very beginning of this. Pentecostalism's kind of dying out. It does exist, but it's not the same. It doesn't have the same force that it did in the early 1900s.

Laterane is basically the second iteration of this. And whenever they initially started this revival and it started spreading and became this thing that overwhelmed the assemblies of God so much so that they denounced it, there was a weird aspect of truth in it, even though it was mixed with things that weren't quite sane, I'll say it like that.

But in it was this. The reason why the assemblies of God denounced it is because there wasn't really a system of checks and balances on who could become a prophet. They basically, you could lay hands on someone and deem them to be a prophet.

And then suddenly there was no accountability. Magically you've got an unaccountable prophet. But there was a biblical aspect that got removed later on. I don't know if you thought about this. There is a passage, I believe it's in Corinthians that says, let two or three prophets speak and let others judge.

If you study that word judge, it means way, evaluate, discern. Basically is this a true prophecy or is this just some guy that's full of it? And in the early years, whenever everybody's welcome, everybody can be a prophet, you can be a prophet, you can be a prophet, you too can be a prophet.

Well, they did this kind of thing. The prophets would prophesy. And somewhere I read, it might have even been in Monobranum sermons, there were people that were doing this in the back room before services and people would weigh the prophecies and see if they accurate.

And then what happened is over time, as this thing that you're talking about where the balance is kind of shift and some guy wants status and stuff or some girl. There were females that did this too.

Once they wanted to become the big wig, well, no longer are they accountable to the others when they prophesy. And so that shift happened. And like I said, the assemblies of God saw right very quickly, this is bad guys, you need to stop this.

Not everybody did until really, I wanna say, it was more towards the shepherding side of things whenever. This is just so destructive people, don't do this. And it kind of dissolved a little bit.

And I often talk negatively about whimper and some of the things. things that Chuck Smith was involved with, but in this one area, I would say that they're actually more towards the biblical side than what was brewing in the Laterane post-World War II healing side.

They didn't want authoritarian structures. Wimber did not, Chuck Smith did not. And then what happened is really odd because fast forward to the Kansas City Fellowship, we have people who were clearly brand-amite. Paul Cain was clearly a brand-amite.

Yeah, he loved going brand-am. We've not talked about it much, but I've talked to him on the phone and right up to his death, he's promoting brand-am. You've got Bob Jones, who was also promoting brand-amites, very strong brand-amites.

Yeah. And what did they do? Of course, I was utterly naive to because I'd never heard the name William Brandham, right? It's only until I got a hold of Harold's book. All things are possible.

I had no idea. I'm just this evangelical Catholic kid trying to hang on to the tale of a tiger, right? And this thing is so out of control and then when I read Harold's book going, oh my God, that's us.

Like this is where, you know what I mean? It's like, you know, some of you that know my story know that I was adopted and I only learned a few years ago my actual biological history.

And it was sort of the same thing with our church family, right? It's like, oh my God, that's who our daddy is. It's like, I didn't know that, right? It was like, oh my God.

That way it means so much sense, right? It was suddenly, you know, like all these pieces of things that you're seeing, feeling, whatever, that you can't contextualize, right? Because it's just like they're all happening and it's all dynamic.

And then suddenly you read something and you go, oh my God. That's how this all comes together. Who's your daddy? I know. I was looking at him. Exactly. So you have these Branamites and you've got, now you've got this world where there, yes, there are people who are authoritarian figures.

It's not that it doesn't exist, but it's not as widespread. And what happens is you have these people who are Branamites start the working with Mike Pickle, the Kansas City Fellowship. They basically institutionalize prophecy and they basically turn it back to what Branam had created in the destructive years of his cult, whenever prophets were not accountable to anybody.

There was no, this let two or three prophets speak and let others judge. There was no accountability for the prophecy. And that really set the foundation, it set the pace for what would become the New Apostolic Reformation of authoritarian figures.

Well, one of the big conflicts that Mike and I had early on was that because of Bob Jones's prophecies. about Mike, right, that reinforced Mike's elite, spiritual eliteness, right, fed, you know, the myth of the mythology around Mike, right, right, making him more influential, right?

It's like Bob's, you know, my platformed him. My problem were Mike and I would get into conflicts. It was like Mike, I have a passion for the prophetic. Like, I see where this can go if it's really got. This isn't it, like, this is not the guy that I want to be modeling what is prophetic, right? Well, I got overruled, like totally overruled. And I understand later, why I got overruled because this was, you know, Bob was the spiritual energy, right? That was, you know, he was the gas it might take. He was the nitrile. Actually, he was the,

you know, Mike already was a dynamic personality, but Bob's prophecies about Mike were like an injection of nitrile. It just took everything. But here's where it got institutionalized in our world is because Mike platformed Bob and gave him such stature. Guess what happened in the church? Everyone wanted to be Bob Jones. And this is where I really had problems, right?

Because you had this whole group of young people who don't really have any history, any context, no theology, right? But they are pumped, right? Mike's got everybody jacked up and Bob's feeding all this. And because Mike put Bob on a stage, right? What is everybody's seat? Oh, if I want influence with Mike and the guy's in leadership, the way to do it is to be like Bob. Well, I'm looking at this guy, no, no, no, no, no, don't be like Bob, right?

But I'm in the middle of a buffalo stampede, right? It's just like suddenly when this thing hits critical mass, it got so freaking weird that nobody could talk to you like a real human being everybody suddenly became parabolic because Bob would talk in parables like he would, you know, it's, you know, it all sort of like, I don't know if you've ever seen being there with Peter Sellers. But it's the story of this guy, Chauncey Gardener, who's basically has some sort of disability, and he's grown up his whole life serving a rich guy. He gets kicked out into the real world. But nobody

realizes that he's actually slow like he's, you know, he's got a disability. And so anyways, in the movie, He starts, through a whole series of weird things, he ends up meeting world leaders. And he's going, when the snow falls in the spring and the plate, right, and he's giving them these little gardening analogies, and all these world leaders are hanging on their edge of their seats, right, because this guy is so profound.

I remember when I saw that movie, I was like, oh my God, this is like Bob Jones, right? In our world, right? It's like, this guy is a blue collar, you know, he lives in this little bungalow in Independence, Missouri, right, this little one bedroom house.

He's like a tree trimmer. He's uneducated, right, and ever. But because he speaks parabolically, everybody suddenly thinks he's profound. So suddenly now, I'm trying to interact with people who cannot have a conversation with me because it's, well brother, God showed me, and I had this, right, and what got interesting to me, and this is how weird this gets, is it was like, because Bob spoke in these weird parables, now everybody had to tell you they're parable, right?

And the reason was, is because the weird dream or vision that they had was the thing that validated their propheticness, not the actual point of the whole thing, right? And so, I was like, can you just tell me, that like, what's the point here, right?

It's like, can we just forget all the how you got it, and just tell me what, right? And it got like that to the point where it was like, this is weird, like, if anybody walked in on this from the outside, where would it be?

Like, who are these people? Where this even got weirder was because of Mike's whole

focus on end time revival, right? So it became this, not only were all prophets, right? And we all speak in parables, we all have dreams and visions. It's like, we're all getting ready to leave this end time revival, which is gonna solve all the world's problems because the way that Mike's presenting it is that when the revival comes, the apostles and prophets are gonna rule the nations, right?

And it's all gonna get better. And I'm watching all this and I'm going, this seems out of control, you know, and so me and Mike are fighting behind the scenes because I just, I think, you know, this is, I mean, you know, we're in space now, we're untethered, like we are going down a road here that it's not gonna end well.

And I remember in July of 1989, It ended up putting the three guys on a stage in Anaheim. And I watched what I call later the dueling prophets, right? And to get back to your world, because of the fact that these guys all wanted to be influential, right?

Because it's all about, you know, being influential. They start competing with each other on stage about who could have the most dramatic prophecy. So the thing escalates, right? It starts, you know, with a word, you know, for sister so and so on, brother, whatever.

And by the end of the meeting, I mean, it's, you know, it's worldwide revival and blah, blah, blah. And it just, and the crowd's going crazy and I'm watching all this going, oh my God, because the crowd doesn't know that Egos, right, this need to be influential, this need to be seen as whatever is actually driving all this.

They think it's God. And because it's tickling all their ears, they're like going crazy, right? Long story short, even before this event happened, I got so concerned about my head to go somewhere. And so he goes, hey, you know, I, I did not like being in the pulpit.

I don't like public speaking. And he goes, can you give a message? So I just decide to speak my truth, right? And my truth was this that I had discovered in reading the book of Acts that every time the supernatural power of God moved, people got hurt.

And there were three groups of people, was either religious leaders, economic leaders or political leaders that attacked the early church and the leaders. In other words, real authentic, spiritual power threatens people in power because you're gaining influence and they're losing it.

And they get mad and they beat you up and they throw you in jail and they stone you to death. So I end up giving a message at the church called the glory and the glory, the other side of revival.

And I remember standing up there and people's mouths were just like, right, because nobody had actually opened the Bible and showed them what really happens when the power of God moves. People die. People get martyred.

That's what happens. And so it's like, I brought this real kind of soap. Like at the end of the meeting, nobody was talking, like it was dead silence, right? Because I told him I go, so you all want to do this, well, you know, get prepared.

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 Branham Historical Research's website, William-Branham.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.

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-Branham Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support.

You know, there's another Bible verse that it goes hand in hand with what is happening here. And the other irony is that you're talking about exactly where I was wanting you to go with the second point.

Before I got there, again, and we've not compared notes at all. No, we've not had this conversation anyway. In first John, I think it's first John 4, it says, to test every spirit, to make sure whether the spirit is of God or not.

So Bob Jones comes in and he's talking in all of these parables and people see it. And there's not anybody who's really heating that scripture. They're not really testing. Well, is he just full of it or is he is this something?

Well, there's some are, right? There were some people that left because of Bob Jones. But the vast majority stayed because they loved what he was saying. Exactly. And there's a reason for that. So within Brandemism, this is kind of a thing.

And I look at IHOPKC much like I do Brandemism 2.0. Whenever you speak, often your brain disengages from your mouth. This is a problem that many, many people have. And it's not necessarily a bad thing.

It's just simply you're processing at a slower rate than you're speaking. And people will say things and then suddenly realize that I made a mistake. And the normal person who's not been affected by any of this nonsense would say their conscience just kind of stopped them and said my conscience stopped me because I told you something that wasn't true.

What I meant to say was and they will back up and say this. Well, in Brandemism, one of the tricks that he did, and this was brilliant if you think about it, to bypass that scripture where you're supposed to test the spirits, what do you do to bypass this?

If one person claims they have a spirit and they're talking prophecy, they're talking all of these things, one person is doing it. Well, everybody who knows their Bible is going to look at that person and say well, we need to test it because that's what it says in 1 John.

But if instead you try to bring everything down to the spirit level. Everything now you've got people who they're they're walking in the spirit constantly and He trained people to believe that that conscience that inner voice that every human has what even if you're an atheist you have this Train them to believe that that's God speaking to you and I remember sermon after sermon if you hear that still small voice brother And it tells you you better obey it and would give examples exactly like I just did where if you've said something that's untrue Well, that's your conscience. That's whatever. That's what atheists. That's what bootest Muslim Catholic everybody has this

But if you bring it down to the level where everybody is now in the spirit How do you test this because there are too many people it would overwhelm the system and that's exactly what he did He overwhelmed the system So once you institutionalize prophecy then bring every single thing down to the spirit realm where everybody has the spirit There's another thing that happens when you do this There are people who are so arrogant. They don't want their spirit to be tested So once it's down to that level nobody wants their spirit to be tested

Anybody who claims to have it well, we're just going to randomly say yes They've got it because they told us they have well, you know, it happens when you do that They split off and start another church, right? That's why we have all these denominations because somebody got held accountable And they go, I don't want to be held accountable. I mean, that's the whole reason, you know, why Mike started I hop And people don't know the real story unless they read my book about it But he didn't want to be accountable to a group of guys

So he ends up coming up with this, you know, this miraculous spiritual Event right that you know that you know authorize Tim to go start You know what he was really called to right all the whole time hiding a secret That he didn't want anybody else to find out Absolutely and think about think about watching a mystery movie if you watch a really good mystery movie They give you hints and clues on the way to string your lawn. That's right And then suddenly the mystery unfolds and before they have explained all of these things in the past

Your brain has has connected to it because you already know those milestones You think you're brilliant. You think you're a wizard. You solve the mystery And you don't realize that they've led you they've strung you a lot like this They've strung you a lot. Well, this this is a normal thing that happens in human beings Their brain is thinking subconsciously even just simply reading they're taking mental notes And there's points at which the brain kind of combines those mental notes and you start to form a thought and that thought may not match Exactly what you're reading at the time you're reading it

So you may read through the Bible and you've been reading you've been studying. I don't know Sacchariah some other passage and suddenly you're reading revelation and your brain makes that connection well because every things down to the spiritual level.

People think, oh my gosh, God just spoke to me and revealed the scripture to me. And you talk about spinning off denominations. Well, what if the connection that you just made, which may or may not even be accurate, differs from the connection made by the other guy in the church.

And both of those differ from the leader who has a different connection. Well, now you've got a leader who's wanting to fight against the two people. The two people wanna break away and start their own group.

And that's literally how all of this Pentecostal mess started to add and flow and split and divide. Well, I've been in the religious world for 50 years and I could tell you, I've got dozens of stories who got, who, of guys who started churches, even in our world because we didn't platform them, right?

It was just, I saw it over and over again. And part of the reason was that I have a sixth sense about things and I could tell early on what was driving and what was motivating them, right?

And I was like, this is trouble. And so I would not put them on staff, which resulted in, there's a lot of churches in Kansas City from guys letting put on staff, right? One thing I was thinking about this,

this whole issue of influence. You know, one of the things that preachers figured out is that people love to be told what they want to hear. The church world in my lifetime, in your lifetime, has gone from, it's, I exist to serve God,

to God exists to serve me. I have watched this transition in the church world and you can see it in the pulpit every Sunday morning because what happens is is that the preachers get up and they tell people what they want to hear.

It's all about God wants to give you this, God wants to do that, God want, right? And it's, and oh, by the way, it's all the things that I want. So one of the things that I, that I was very saddened by is I saw this creep into the prophetic, right?

And I saw so many of these wannabe prophets standing up and telling people what they wanted to hear. And I used to sit there and, and because I can't explain it, I get a physiological reaction to bullshit.

Sorry, people, I know you don't like me to swear, but I don't know any other way to say it. It's stunk, really bad. And I could feel it, right? And it, and it, and it's just like gross.

It's like, you, it's like, you want to go home and take a shower? You know, John Wimber used to have this phrase called Slob and Slime, right? It was like, like, I think you got it from Ghostbusters or something like that.

It was a slime, right? And, and, and so much of the church will just slimy, right? Because it's people who are driven, by selfish ambition and greed, right? Seeking influence and in order to get it, they flatter people.

And so that's how far things have sort of descended and one of the reasons funny enough, this is the paradox of all this, is that in thinking by telling everybody what they wanna hear, that they're gonna gain more influence and grow the church, the church is actually shrunk.

American church is half of what it was when we were kids. You know, half the amount of people go to church anymore, right? So somehow the flattery isn't working for a lot of people, right?

And the reason was, as I've discovered, is people may not all be prophets, but most everybody has some level of discernment. Like they have a little meter too, right? And it's just like you, right?

It's like, I remember, you know, I love to honey. You know, you put a little bit on your cereal, right? And so one day I was like, ah, I'm gonna think I'll be tablespoon out of it.

It's not about a big tablespoon of honey in my mouth. I got almost gagged. It was overwhelming, right? And I think that's what flattery, what's happened in the church, even in the prophetic world, right?

It's just flattery, flattery, flattery. And it's systemic. And now, once, and this is where I get really concerned, because there's this entrant system that has all these unspoken rules. And so anybody that's young and coming into the system now, models themselves after all of this, right?

That's why I said, I don't think we have prophetic. I think what we have is pathetic. And I know that's harsh, but I'm just trying to get people to understand that we've lost the real prophetic edge.

We've really lost it. And the driving force, the two driving forces behind it are ego and finances. I remember, this is a true story. I remember Paul King and I had this conversation because he preached something and I happened to have written it for him.

And he did, there was a whole part of it, which was counting, you know, there was an accountability like it was just, you know, bringing, like holding a plumb line up. And he never talked about it.

And so after the meeting, he went, hey, you cut out a whole part of the sermon. And he goes, well, if I said that, they'd never invite me back. And he was just being honest about it, right?

And I was like, yeah, that's the way most of these itinerary guys are. If I said that, right? And that's, you know, so it gets back to what you're talking about. It's this whole systemic thing that's become so entrenched now that I don't know how this gets put back on track.

I mean, you know, typically, I mean, historically, what ends up happening is there's a T-bone, I call it T-bone, something unexpected comes out of nowhere that completely upsets the system. Right? As I wrote in my book, you take money out of the church world, the American church world, and you'd have a completely different looking world that would all be based on authenticity and real relationships, sort of what you have in China.

There's a reason why the Chinese church is so massive, right? Because it's illegal, right? There's no money involved. So they have authentic relationships with people who guide them and guard them. Against a system, right?

In some ways, that would be the healthiest thing that happened in the American church is something comes and opposes it. And without that opposition, so that's how we ended up in this place, to be honest.

So if you go back to the beginning, if there were two or three prophets, not one, not one that could become authoritarian, two or three, and they prophesied, and then people judged their prophecies to see are they true or false, so this guy make it an upper knot, then you would be testing the prophecy.

Right. If you were to also test the spirits, then you would be testing to see, this person really of God, or this guy mentally insane, and there's some good questions there with Bob Jones of maybe not insane, but some of his mental stability, mental faculties may have been missing.

But here's where it gets interesting. For everybody who's outside of all of this looking in, they say, how can you avoid passages like Deuteronomy 1820, I think 21, I think it is? When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, and that word does not come to pass, that is not a word that God has spoken.

That's a very obvious thing. If you say something... See, there is or is it, right? If you tell me something, and it doesn't happen like you said, well, obviously what you said was untrue.

A normal human being thinks like this. Well, because everything was brought down to the spiritual level, you can have the spirit, you can have the spirit. If you have a conscience, it's a spirit.

You can't test the spirits, because we're not going to test in this group. We're going to train people not to test it. Well, there's one aspect which you just mentioned. Ironically, this is the third time.

One aspect that alters the course of what is prophecy, and it actually dumbs it down. If you really go back and study, and I've spent five years doing this. I'm fascinated with psychology and culture and history.

If you go back and you study the prophecies that were being issued by these men, not just Brandon, but there was multiple men doing this. But don't study just what they say is coming to pass.

study their audience. They're talking, you know, Gordon Lindsey is talking to Christian identity people and Christian identity conferences. Branem is talking to people who are working with the clan, also Christian identity people. They're speaking to Pentecostals who are not wanting change to happen. There's this fundamental rejection to change, especially modernization in that era, maybe not now, but in that era. Most of the prophecies have to do with either A, people who were deeply affected by World War II and they remember those things and it's appealing to think through them. Be, opposition to change in the prophecy. They don't want this change to happen.

We don't like this change. It's too modern for us. See, just simply things that they want to hear that are related to doctrines that they have taught them to believe. Well, if you teach a people in a certain way as it relates to Scripture and then have a prophecy in that direction that you've trained them, everybody's going to accept it, right? And because you're telling them prophecies that they want to hear, they're not going to test it. That was one of the strategies that was employed here. And I look back, obviously I've not studied every prophecy, but I've gone a lot

through what Paul Cain was doing. Some of what Bob Jones was doing. I've went right down the line with these guys. Bickel, I've talked through Chad. Many of the prophecies, they were either things that people wanted to hear or they were directly tied to doctrines that they had planted breadcrumbs.

Much like the movie mystery that I'm talking about where you give all the seeds that are taking you right down that path. Well, they strung them along and then gave the prophecy down the path that they had strung them. And so you're giving them prophecies that they want to hear.

And in the end, what happens is people aren't going to test this. They don't care to test it. They believe it. Whether it comes true or not, they're going to believe it. I think there's great wisdom in that biblical verse. And here's why here's where my brain goes with this. God put into the DNA of life a principle. And the principle has resistance built strength.

It's woven into everything in life, right? Whether, you know, if you work out, right, the reason you're working out is you are fighting resistance, you know? That's what builds you up. If you go back and you study people's stories, right? People that have come from really difficult childhoods. It's about what they overcame, right? Life was resisting them. Culture was resisting them. Things were against them. And they got stronger because they overcame it.

I think because of the fact that we do not hold people accountable to your point. And we do not judge. And we do not resist what we have. is pathetic. It's weak, it's anemic, right? It's a giant jellyfish, right? It has no backbone, and that's one of the reasons why the church role has lost its influence, right? It's just sorry, but it's weak. And so what's even more embarrassing to me, and again, this circle of shash, but what we really have is, instead of emperors without clothes, we've got profits without clothes. It's like, it's like, this is embarrassing. But sad, though, is because

it's a system, right? And people are taught where to look, what to see, and how to interpret it. There's a whole group of people out there who are told, oh, the profits got close. So they all see clothes, right? And it's like, oh, that little innocent one, he's naked. Yeah.

And you see, I see this all the time in the church role, that's why they all come to me behind the scenes, because they're in these situations, like everybody's going, oh, my God, oh, my God, right? And they're like, yeah, but this doesn't seem real to me. Like this is not authentic. And you're like, yeah, yeah. And the reason is, is because you've not been inundated, saturated, manipulated, brainwashed by the system. And that's what people, I don't think understand.

Something, again, and I know we got to wrap this up, but I learned something a long time ago. When you're in a discussion with somebody, and there's two different points of you, and you're trying to convince them to see things like you see it. And they start to get emotive, right? You'll see this happen, right? It's like you're having this discussion about the facts.

And then things start getting a little bit more. It starts escalating up, right? And then you get to a point where if it really goes off the rails, people go ad-hon and that meaning that they, they don't no longer talk about the facts. They attack you personally, your character.

You're an idiot. You, right? Whatever. I was always, you know, I'm so logical. It's like, I don't understand. Like it, like what happened to the facts here, right? What I didn't understand is that we all grow up in these little subcultures and these little systems, whether it's your family, your friends, your peers, you know, your ethnicity, right? You have a subculture. That subculture has a worldview that has a system. The only way that you can maintain your relationships in the system is to conform. When you start trying to convince people to think differently, what you don't realize is you-

You're actually creating fear, like absolute paranoia, because the implications are, if you're right, and I think like you, I'm gonna lose my whole world. And so this whole thing degenerates into this emotional thing.

And I think we have to be a little bit more sensitive about what you're dealing with with people. It's really strong in the church world. I mean, the church world is, as we've talked about many times, almost cultic, right?

And there are loyalties and there are worldviews. And it's in, I mean, if you look back historically, there's probably more humans that have died in the name of God and defending theology or a worldview than probably most world wars.

I mean, it's unbelievable how far people will go, right? To defend the religious system. So when you're going down a road here that has huge implications, right? Because what's at stake is a lot for most people.

There's a book out there, this is just a genocide bar if you guys wanna check it out. There's a book out there called Born to Rebell. And the whole theory is basically birth order.

And what he talks about, he goes all through history. And there's always, in every family, the black sheep, right? It's that one rebellious sibling or child. It usually doesn't happen unless you have three or more kids.

Well, history has been changed by the black sheep. It's the rebellious ones who have ended up being the innovators. And so the system mitigates and does everything it can to cause you to conform.

But it's weakness, right? It perpetuates all the flaw, everything, right? So it takes somebody that's a bit obstinately rebellious, right? So this is one of the paradoxes I found in Christianity, right? Because we're all taught that we need to submit and obey.

Good people obey. History, though, is driven by those that rebel. Well, I knew you would have an opinion. I wanted to talk to you today. I have a perspective. You have a perspective. We both have a perspective.

Interestingly, they both seem to match, which is fascinating. Because you and I, like I said, we start from very different places, but we tend to end up always in the same place. Yeah, we do.

We're like the family circus where Billy's going all kinds of different directions and he finally is there. So hopefully people will find it helpful, because I think, you know, based on reading some of the comments, you know, I think a lot of people identify with our journeys and like, yeah, yeah, I see that too.

You know, that's been my journey. Painful, but, you know, I'm grateful for what I understand now. Absolutely. Thank you so much for doing this. Alrighty, buddy. 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-Brandom.org. For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR. And for more about Mike Pickle and IHOPKC, you can read some said they blundered, breaking my decades of silence on Mike Pickle, the Kansas City Prophets, and the International House of Prayer.