Keep It In-House- A Former YWAM Counselor Breaks the Silence

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-branham.org and with me I have my very special guests, Jenny McGrath and Shelby Hauffer, former members of Y-Wam. Shelby Jenny, it's good to have you both on and to talk through Shelby's experience at youth with a mission. I'm very glad that you're here Jenny because I'm certain there are questions that I would not even know to ask so it's going to make this all the more interesting to get into but

before we do, maybe if you could just take a moment Shelby and tell us a little bit about yourself. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here to get to talk with you both. So I am American Swiss. I live in Switzerland with my husband and I was part of Y-Wam for 18 years. So I did leave in 2024 and have been just processing and deconstructing and reconstructing and trying to figure out what happened to me, what happened to so many others that I have worked with in my roles, various roles that I had in the past. So I'm really

happy to be here to get to explore this with you guys today. Thank you so much Shelby. I imagine in that time span there is a lot of directions that we could go and I'm curious even as you name just the amount of time that you spent in Y-Wam if you could just start with what feels loudest to you from your experience and what you would want us to go talk about today and sort of set that direction. Sure I think now what has become loudest for me is seeing the amount of abuse that has happened in Y-Wam around the world. The people that I have

worked with I am a trained counselor. I'm not licensed. I would qualify myself as a lay counselor I guess. But I was working in what we call member care in Y-Wam towards the end of my time specifically and what feels loud as to me is the consistent and overarching global lack of response from Y-Wam towards use victims and abuse stories that come out.

So that's definitely one thing that keeps me up at night, where I, you know, it's only when there's maybe public outcry. I don't know if you guys ever saw the Guardian articles that were written last year from the UK.

And so in that moment, why I'm England finally made a response, a public response and said X, Y and Z. But these stories had been out there for years. And it's only when the public gets involved that the response begins to come out.

The second thing that feels really loud for me, and this is a lot of things to John and your podcast and your research that you and your team have done is understanding the influence of the NAR on Y-WAM and the theology because Y-WAM is decentralized.

And that's often a very key argument for people who are pro Y-WAM, they want to highlight the fact that it's decentralized. And so there can't be accountability, you know, because everybody does their own thing, but to see the threads of the NAR and the theology that is so impactful, and I think continues to lead towards more abuse and more ignoring of the abuse because of this theology.

So I think those are the two loudest things for me right now. You know, what you're talking about is really just simply accountability. If the group was accountable, and it was widely known that there may be a problem here, protect your kids, it would look entirely different.

And I get asked all the time, well, why not, why target youth with admission or any of the others that we are investigating? It's not even that we're targeting them. They say, why not look at, you know, I don't know, I'm pulling a name out of the app and maybe the Baptist Church, they have issues in the Baptist Church, right?

But there's a key difference in mainstream churches. Yes, there are issues because wherever there are people, there are people problems, but there is not a need to cover it up to maintain the integrity of the group.

And in groups like youth with admission and some of the others I've looked at, if this word were to get out, the model itself would just implode. I mean, if suddenly it's broadcast, hey, we have a predator among the midst of the kids in Y-Wam, what parents gonna send their children there, right?

So you have to kind of bottle it up until it becomes too big of a problem to bottle up. And then you give a short address and you just say, yes, we acknowledge it and move on and try to distract focus from the fact that, hey, that just happened.

Whereas in some of the mainstream churches, yes, they have issues, but it's not such a big deal that the integrity of the group eyes on it. And so they're very, you know, maybe not as transparent as they could be, but they're more transparent than some of these groups like youth with a mission.

Something that came to mind as you're talking, John, and that I've seen in various spaces that I was a part of or that I've interacted with is this term in-house. You know, let's keep this situation, i.e. abuse, in-house. And let's talk about it, try to essentially cover it up. And I'm just wondering if there are experiences that you had where that you witnessed that and what you'd feel comfortable sharing about maybe different bases or the institution at large trying to keep these abuses and these accountability is, quote, unquote, in-house.

Yes. That was very common in my experience. And I think my experience, I wouldn't say is necessarily simply unique. I'm sure there are more people out there with the same sort of qualifications, if you will, to speak to these things. But I did my university degree with the University of Nations, which is their, you know, education arm. So I was traveling around the world in various locations for those five years that I was doing that. And then having sort of landed in Switzerland, in Europe, and then working in member care Europe as well, working with a lot of people from a lot of different places, visiting bases,

hearing stories from many different locations. And I was really able to feel like I had a relatively complete overview of what is going on in various sort of regions of the world. Obviously, don't know everything that was going on. There are loads of stories. So don't come after me in the comments for that. But this, I did have a bird's eye view of what was happening in a lot of places around the world, even though I was based in Europe. So I'll let you say the stories that I know are horrific. And this idea of let's keep it inside, you know,

is, is that was, that was the MO 100% of the time that I had heard a story or was directly involved in a story because we don't want to ruin the reputation of the organization. We don't want people to, like John said, be afraid to send their young people to us. We are already not liked by the local church. You know, people already say we're stealing their children from the local churches. And we don't want to, you know, feed into that. So it was only when it had actually impacted the local community in some way or somehow it got out

like to the degree of guardian articles where there had to then be this exterior response. Even in my personal story where I finished YWAM, the group of victims that I was a part of trying to bring accountability, we asked for a public apology. There's a lot of things that we asked for, which none of which we got, but it was very, no we can't do that, we can't make it public.

It's in, it's done, it's over, now we all just move forward into the future of what God has for us was the attitude. So it's very much kept in-house at all times unless it somehow has leaked out into the public sphere. I just find myself feeling grateful for you sharing your story, especially with what you're talking about with how difficult it is to get those stories out. Something John and I have been talking about is that somehow YWAM has seemed to fly under the radar. There's been other documentaries or kind of these things blowing up about other types of cult institutions

and we see that it is very scary and very difficult for people that have been in YWAM to tell their stories. And I wonder if there's anything about that that you would want to speak to, of what you think, what you've experienced or seen, might make it difficult for people who have experienced abuse and harm to feel like they can tell their stories.

For sure. I have written to loads of people wanting to see if there was something to be investigated. I mean, there is something to be investigated, but the most common response I get back is there's no one headship, right? There's no one centralized location like Bethel or IHOP case and so while Lord Cunningham was the sort of founder and then everything came from him, the legacy words, the foundational values and all of these things, they really heavily pushed this plausible deniability via decentralization. And that I think is why we have not yet seen some sort of large-scale documentary sort of thing. When the Guardian articles came out,

there are there's been articles coming out in the Netherlands, so they're in Dutch that English speaking world doesn't get those unless you go looking for them. There are things happening all over the world where locally YWAM is maybe being investigated.

But, again, it's hard, I think, for them to sort of look at across the globe because of international laws and different things around recordings or evidence or whatever. So, I'll just say that I think that's why we've not seen something yet, but I would love to see something.

I think that some of the biggest challenges for people sharing their stories, and I know that you guys have talked about this. I think in some of your previous episodes, Jenny, where when you speak up, you become a poriah.

You lose your community, you lose your friends, you lose your reputation, you lose your job. There's a lot of people that wind up speaking up about these things have built a life, a whole life, maybe in that location, and can't leave.

And so, what do they do? There is absolutely the threat of spiritual consequences that are given out. You're gossiping. You have a spirit of rebellion. You have a spirit of Jezebel. I mean, I think I have like five or six spirits from my time at Y-WAM, for sure.

Because I asked questions, and so, when you are sort of made a poriah, then other people see that, and they don't want to experience that, right? And so, I mean, I stayed as long as I did, because I heard how other people were spoken about, and I was like, I can't go through that.

And I had friends with mine tell me the same thing. They heard how I was spoken about when I left. And so, that's why they stayed longer until their bodies literally began shutting down, and they had to leave, or they would continue to lose their health.

So when it becomes easier, becomes more painful to stay than to go, right, you stay. It's only when that becomes more painful to do that than you go. But the threats of spiritual consequences, for sure, the loss and the grief that comes with that, it's just something that people don't, they don't want to deal with, because spiritual abuse impacts our identity.

It impacts who we think we are, who we think God is, who we think God thinks we are. It's so insidious, because it impacts our very souls. You know, there is a difference, and I, Jenny, you can correct me if you feel like I'm wrong on this, but there's a different impact between a physical abuse and a sexual abuse, not to minimize that at all.

It's horrific, and oftentimes, from what I understand, the sort of psychological emotional spiritual impact from those forms of abuse just decades can last your whole life long. So there's a lot that is lost if you choose to speak up and I think that's why oftentimes people don't. You're talking about the labels of the spirits and I, I wear them like a badge of honor. I've got so many now I can't count them and I wear them as stripes on my shirt but the shirt isn't striped enough. I don't think I can count them. One thing that fascinates me

about youth with a mission. If you take some average person who is into Christianity even fully devoted into Christianity in some group that's not affiliated with any of this new apostolic reformation and then propose the idea that they do this or they send their young kids to do this immediately the response is going to be well that doesn't sound like a very good idea and they're just not going to do it. But yet there are people who do. I'm always fascinated to hear the why. What made you decide to come into the group? Well thanks to your excellent research I

realized I grew up in a full blown nar church like Cindy Jacobs has prophesied over me multiple times and so it was one of these things where I joined why I'm only when I was 24 so I was working, I was doing local volunteer work and things as well and I wanted to go to this university.

I had heard about it you know through a friend so I was like oh I have to do this DTS thing like six months, sure, whatever. So when I got into their DTS programs and discipleship training program that first six months immediately I was like some of this feels familiar because I definitely grew up in a nar church but also some of this is totally cuckoo bananas and like what is happening here and but it was a thing of well I've spent so much time and so much money invested that they can't all be like this right like this has to just be this one location spoiler alert that was not true.

So I think that when you look at specifically maybe the nar's influence or just this sort of charismatic evangelicalism and you know obviously the deep deep impact and influence it has on American churches that's also heavily influenced South American churches that is then influence heavily South Korean churches. So Brazil and South Korea are now the two biggest centers of people into Y-Wam and you see you know the how like sort of Europe and Darby and all those guys came to the US and then that sort of filtered back into Australia with Hillsong and then into Europe again. So

I think that's the why is there such a heavy influence from charismatic evangelicalism, even though Wylam says that they are inter-denominational, now they have a very specific theology that if you do not adhere to, you are outed or you are punished until you do adhere to that. So I think there's just such a such a heavy influence from charismatic evangelicalism that draws young people into it because right when we are young before our frontal lobe is fully formed, we want adventure, we think we're invincible, we think we can do anything and that lines up really well with the stories that you're told

in Wylam around you know faith journeys and let's send we sent this group of young people out into the city with no money and it's a it's a faith journey they had to come back 24 hours later. I think it just seems exciting, it seems fun, you know parents at that point are often trying to figure out the relationships with their children, how do we let you go and make your own choices? The sad part about it though is that it does suck you in and I will use the word indoctrinate. It can indoctrinate you rather quickly and therefore by the time your

parents or maybe your your support community back home which you're not encouraged most often to stay connected to. In fact you're told this is a time set apart for the Lord, you know we don't need to be talking to mom and dad, we don't need to be talking to people at home, they don't understand, you know this is really just time for God, just focus on that and by the time you're at the end of that journey even people are unable to reach you because you this the voices that you're hearing just line up with I don't know maybe what you're wanting to do and live the adventure

which can really quickly turn into a nightmare. Something that's sticking out to me about your draw to why I am is the idea of the university and something that we're beginning and we'll talk more about is the seven mountain mandate and what it looks like to overtake these spheres and I'm wondering if you could speak to what you thought the university was because I think a lot of times it's sort of this alternative to what maybe quote unquote mainstream education would be and the influences of that you spoke to five years in that and thousands of dollars invested

was that what you thought it would be or what you thought a university would be that drew you in in the first place. Yes ultimately I did it was five years and it was about 90,000 US dollars I calculated at some point with you know flights and tuition So there's no joke, that sort of investment, and that was why each step in, I got, felt like people have been giving towards this. I have to finish. And bless, like, I didn't have anybody.

While my family thought I was Kukubananas, there was no sort of, like, this feels unhealthy. This, you might be part of a cold. So maybe you, you know, we should talk to you, not to blame them.

You know, it was as well that situation of you're saying you're doing it. You know, I was a whole adult person. So there was that, but it was definitely promoted as we train missionaries, we train people to be missionaries. And I had wanted to, I thought I'd become a psychologist.

I really didn't want to go do math. I thought the whole, like, situation in US university is with these generals, you know, thing, it was, I did not want to do that. So when I heard about this, where the generals were a humanities course, a communications course, and a Bible course.

And then everything else was directly impacting whatever major you wanted to do. I thought, my, that's fabulous. And I get to travel. Awesome. So once I got past my DTS, my next course was actually a counseling course. And they had, like, legitimate, licensed people teaching us. So I was like, okay, this feels better. This feels normal. It was the base I went to next in Australia in Perth, where I was like, I might be in a cult. Like, this is, but also now I've got even more time and more money, you know, all of this stuff. So I could just have to suck it up because I had a

normal experience, you know, with my counseling course, I had legitimate people who knew what they were talking about. So it was this push and pull through that whole, that whole time. And I liked the idea of being able to help missionaries. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to help missionaries stay on the field. I wanted to help them be healthy and live holistically healthy, beautiful lives. And that's what they promised me that they would help me do.

You mentioned that you had been listening to the podcast and the research and came to the realization. It's a nor affiliated church you came out of. Jen and I have not yet talked about this. This will come out probably a little bit later. But we, I identified some research that concluded that the shepherding leadership was actually going to some of the Y-WAM bases.

We have got a newspaper article that I think it's earned Baxter for our member correctly, who was William Brandham's campaign manager and partner. So there was a shepherding influence. And if you to understand the shepherding cult and the authoritarian structure they were creating, it raises a lot of questions for me.

How much of that authoritarian structure did you witness when you were in Y-Wam? A lot.

So on my DTS, even, God bless. I was 24 when I did my DTS. I think my DTS leader was like 23. It was his first one. My mentor person was maybe 22. There were no adults in this space.

And I was asking a lot of questions. This is who I am. I was deeply, and I came to why I'm thinking there, I know there's things wrong with me. I know I need to grow and change, and I was very open.

And at the same time, when I began to ask questions, I was told that I would not be allowed to go on my outreach because I was influencing the group too much with my questions.

And I literally did not speak for a week. I did not speak in class for one week. And at the end of that week, they came back to me and they said, you know what, we've really seen a change in you.

So yes, we're gonna allow you to go, but we're gonna be watching very carefully. So there was so much control. The stories of control that I could tell you would make you weep or trauma laugh.

Like just horrific control when I was in Perth. It was the, this is where I was like, I think they meant a cult. It was so controlling. They would control every aspect of your schedule.

If you were sick and you couldn't come to class or something, they would come and like check on you and make sure you were sick enough. They literally, I was 27 when I was there, they would come and check that our bedrooms were clean enough.

And if they were, we would get demerits, which would give us more work duties, like more sort of job, you know, stuff to do. They wanted to control who you dated, what you wore, what you ate when you ate.

So I would say this whole idea of, you know, do not touch the Lord's anointing, submit to your leader because we were taught for instance that we could hear God's voice. And I love the Holly Pivic podcast.

She's talked about sort of breaking down this theology. But we were taught how to hear God's voice and we would say, they would say, okay, we're gonna go away and pray and ask the Lord where we're gonna go on outreach.

Then there's three choices. And then you'd come back and say, I felt, God told me that I'm going to Thailand. And then they would say, oh, that's really sweet, but actually we heard something different.

You're actually gonna go to Uganda. And so there was just this constant sort of overarching the leader knows best. You must submit to the leader if not, you have a spirit of rebellion, you have a spirit of independence, you have an orphan spirit, that was a big one here in Switzerland at the base that I was, because it was an orphanage, so all those little orphan spirits stuck around and glombed on to us, I guess.

So the yes, the authoritarian structure was very strong in 2018, why I'm trying to flatten the structure of authority across the world, which just made things, in my opinion, a hundred times worse, but it is, it's a, what is it called, an old boy's club, you know, it's who you know, that's how you get into leadership positions.

There's no qualifications necessary, it's simply who you know. So yeah, the authoritarian structure there from those movements is heavy. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism, transition through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation?

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

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On behalf of William Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. You call it an old boys club and often go back to the Little Rascal show, the He-Man Woman Haters Club.

That's kind of what this all reminds me of. It's so, I run and many of the groups actually do kind of hate the women if you really think about it. Yes. But one of the problems that causes, which Jenny and I have been talking through in several of our podcasts, I can't remember if they come out before this one or after it, but the erosion of self-trust.

When you're in that authoritarian structure and you are forced to trust the leadership for everything, and it's levels beyond your average NAR church, right? Because you're a way in some other location on a base, your trust has to be in the leadership for everything.

Yes. Well, this place is the self-trust, and Jenny and I have talked about this a bit, but I want to hear from you, your feelings and your thoughts on what it's like whenever that happens.

I experienced deep, prolonged, cognitive and spiritual dissonance for years because of doubt. So on the one hand, they're saying, you can hear God's voice for yourself. You know, that. So.

you can bring whatever ministry you want to. You can show up exactly as you are. And then on the other hand, it's like, well, no, but not that ministry. No, but you can't do that thing. I mean, it got so crazy in the place where I was where like the leader was moving around, you know, furniture, taking furniture from places and it was a project I had done and I had moved it back. And I was, I had a spirit of independence for doing that.

So yeah, it's quite intense, the self-doubt that you leave with. It's taken me years of therapy to come back to a place of believing that what I saw, that what I understood, that what I experienced was wrong. It was real. It was abuse. I had to fight long and hard to be able to accept that language and to help other people learn to accept that language. So the self-doubt is certainly the most damaging part of the, for the people that I've worked with and helped either leave Y-Wam or helped them, you know, process through their own spiritual abuse. The self-doubt is the killer

because it's not just self-doubt in spiritual matters. It becomes self-doubt in any choice in your life. So one, can I leave Y-Wam? Yeah, let's get you out of there. You know, there's no ability to then make choices for their own lives to say, what do I need now? What do I want now? What's going to be healthy for me? It's simply so destructive for the people. And you see that there's a Facebook group called Spiritual Abuse in Y-Wam that has, I think, 1200 members right now.

And people talk about this all the time of just how their ability to show up at work. In a meeting to advocate for themselves is completely eroded by the time they leave and takes years and years to get back. Yeah, I feel that and I've experienced that and seen that it's so challenging. And I'm thinking about you asking questions in your journey to university and in an ideal world that is a place where your mind gets to expand and grow and learn to think differently and uniquely. And I know this was many years ago, but I'm curious if you remember like

the types of questions you were asking and the things that got you in trouble in your DTS. Like what was it that you were watching? to explore in the very, very early days or what wasn't computing for you.

There was unfortunately a lot, which should have been an orange flag for me at that time. When I remember specifically, was this speaker came in to the classroom and I immediately got a major ick, like something is off with this person. But I was like, who am I?

Who am I to say? He's this big speaker guy. I am nothing. I'm not going to say his name because he is still doing Father's Heart Ministries. But he was talking about, it was this week called Openness and Brokenness, or sin and repentance as it's known in other places.

We can talk about that if you'd like. But he, by the third day of class, he called a meeting with me and my mentor. We call them one-on-ones because he said that I was shooting daggers at him through my eyes from my seat. And I was like, I am sorry, I did not mean to. I had a lot of questions about what he was saying around confessing your sins and digging up past traumas and things like that.

So he then wanted to pray for me. I was terrified I was going to get kicked out. This was all this was going to be a waste. So I was crying. He tried to put his arm around me and I stiffened and he did let me go. But he then met with each student with their one-on-one for private ministry sessions. And he asked the women and only the women to sit on his lap to receive healing from the father. And I, when I heard about this because he knew better than to ask me to sit on his

lap. But the other young 18-year-old, 19-year-old women in this course shared that with us. And

that was so angry that this was being allowed and encouraged. And I went to the staff and I said, excuse me, this is crazy. And they said, oh no, he's so lovely. Like we've received so much healing from him. We have him on all of our DTSs. He always teaches this week. He's so great. And I was like, no, this is never okay for a man to ask a woman to sit on his lap to receive the father's healing.

And again, there was these things that got me in trouble because they were like, no, you're wrong. You don't know. You're just new. You don't have the YMDNA. That's a big one. If you don't have the YMDNA, I'm literally made of the YMDNA people now. So...

I could talk about this. It was those sorts of things that were just, you sort of sit there and you're like, how is this even possible? And the first speaker we had on my counseling school, in my first counseling school, I asked her about this.

And I was like, is this ever okay? And she was like, no, like never or you would never. And I tried to report him to like the DTS center like the DTS center in Hawaii, where I was at the time, because my base in Colorado, Colorado Springs had come to Kona that year to run their DTS, because they didn't have a building as weird, but they brought him.

And I was like, mm-hmm, and then nothing was done. Nothing, they thought, no, this is super lovely. Yeah, so those sorts of things, anything about theology, any sort of questions that I had, what's funny is because we did an inductive Bible study method in the course that's called the biblical core course, or the School of Biblical Studies is the long one, biblical core course, I mean, I was never talking about, is the three month one.

And there they taught us to read the Bible inductively. And that was what got me in trouble in the end, because I did what they said. And what they were teaching us did not line up, like about the Bible, did not line up with what they were telling us about literally everything else.

And so that, that, that, that's the dissonance became so heavy, I actually became depressed. I went home for six months after that, and was drunk almost every single day, because I did not know how to cope with that level of dissonance.

When you were talking, it reminded me, I've mentioned this on the podcast, but I read the Bible over and over and over to wash all of this nonsense out of my head. And hearing you say that, it made me realize that I've never really qualified that.

I read the Bible when I was in it, but the way that they teach you to read the Bible is incorrect. The Bible was written like you would read anything from top to bottom, turn the page, top to bottom.

But they want to read in sections, and they would point to you, read this chapter here. And then because of this chapter, we know this other chapter. And the Bible is this great big puzzle.

Let's get all of the puzzle pieces. Well, what they're doing is they're rearranging the pieces to where it makes a different picture. They'll take a car from here, and a boy on a bicycle from here, and the scene looks entirely different when they're done.

But when you read it straight through, chapter by chapter, verse by verse, you begin to realize, no, what they were doing was quite wrong. It's not what the Bible says, it's not the intent.

And you start to read the original intent, and the two are just simply incompatible. And as it's definitely, people ask me how I stayed in that sense, or what was the sort of thing that helps me leave eventually.

And I'm like, well, it's how I went. I'm taught me to read the Bible. Yeah, so I feel that strongly. I did school. bit local studies and had very similar experiences. And I feel just my blood boiling as you talk about this experience of these young women. And I'm aware this is heavy things to get into and this is a podcast. So obviously we want to honor the spectrum of that. But I'm hearing what you're talking about with spiritual abuse. And I'm hearing and I've seen so many intersections of sexual abuse, whether that be very, very overt or these slimy or settler covert

violations of consent and of bodily autonomy. And I will not ask you to elaborate on any of that if you don't want to. But curious if there's any of that that you would want to speak more to because I think especially for women in this organization, not that it doesn't happen to men, I think that there is a systematic way in which our bodies are conditioned to not be our own.

Yes, I thought that was super helpful when you hit that I think on your first, you know, episode on this podcast, that whole purity, it's your purpose pipeline that you were talking about. And that resonated so much with me. And again, when we're linking the sort of pipeline of care from charismatic evangelicalism into why when that would then therefore mean that there's a lot of purity culture that or women that have grown up and men that have grown up in purity culture who are now in this organization. So for sure, I have been involved in and seen

sexual abuse, sexual, you know, harassment, sexual molestation, like all of the things. And as we said before, it's, you know, captain house, unless, you know, the victim is going to make a lot of cry. And then the police, you know, might be notified. Of course, as we understand just the culture, even outside of why I am around victims reporting any sort of sexual abuse, there's a billion hurdles for them to overcome to be heard and believed and to have something done about those things. So yes, I have been a victim within why I am with those things, nothing was done.

It was sort of, you know, blown off as like, oh, NBD, no big deal, you know, oh, you just misunderstood or whatever I have helped other women report, tried to talk to why I'm leadership about things that have happened. And it is, again, captain house kept very neat.

know. And that is tied to theology. So that is where they this, you know, oh, grace and forgiveness and, you know, everybody makes mistakes. And, oh, but what was she wearing? You know, all of it, you know, she had a part to play in it as well. Like all of that grossness kind up in a theological Christian bow, because we don't want to, what is it, you know, ruin the fruit? Like look at all the good things, why I'm has done. Look at all the good things that person is doing. And I have since come to understand and always answer that with

the fruit is not the works, right? The fruit is the fruit of the spirit of joy, patience, kindness. You know, is that what people experience when they come into Why-Wam? Is that what people experience when they're under your leadership, when they're in your schools? If not, you're doing it wrong. But as we know, you know, that's, that's not often the focus.

It's more on the, the works or how many people we've had or how many people we've accepted to our schools or how many young people we've put into positions of leadership, but they're absolutely not qualified for who just harm the people forever and ever on. This goes back to some of the podcasts that I'm doing with some of the other hosts, but there was this idea that was being burst and it's really difficult to find where to originate it with. You can find multiple trails into this, but from Brannum's aspect, it was, it would have been the spiritualism background

that he and his mentor had, but there was this notion that we need to summon Jesus. The world, world war had happened. They thought it was the war to end all wars and it didn't. So they began fearing a world war three. Well, why didn't Jesus come before this? All of the Bible says that Jesus should come. They're, and I should qualify that, they were teaching through their theology that that implied that Jesus was coming imminently. And when it didn't happen, they said, well, it's something that we've done. We must summon God. And so the spread throughout the entire movement

let's summon God. And when you're talking about the fruits based off of the works you do, that's really what this is. Can we do the works enough to summon God? Yes, actually, got my handy, dandy little y-wam book here, Making Jesus Lord, the dynamic power of laying down your rights by Lauren Cunningham. I've just had to write a graduate paper about the theology of suffering and y-wam, that's why the perhaps. And he says explicitly, so that book was written in 1988.

And he says explicitly that Jesus is coming back in our time. And we need to make it happen, that that will only happen by us going out and evangelizing people. And now this is interesting, because I talked to friends of mine that are still in y-wam. And I say, you know, this is the eschatology in y-wam. This is the belief about the end all things that we need to evangelize. Without us, it's not going to happen. We have to go, and once we tell everybody on earth about God and they have a chance to make a choice or not,

which let's talk about informed consent, then Jesus will trigger the second coming. And so like Jenny said, if you have that sort of eschatology, the only thing that matters is souls. Bodies don't matter. Your body doesn't matter. The body of the person that you're wanting to tell about Jesus might be used in order to gain access to their soul. You know, we might do clean water, we might do feeding programs, we might try to get women off the streets out of prostitution, you know, and into safety. That's not the ultimate goal to get them safe and fed and educated,

and know the ultimate goal is souls. And it's not either about actually discipleship. It's about how many people checked, yes, I believe in God, you know, on that thing. And like I said, there's a lot of people that I spoke into and why I'm better like, that's not the theology at all.

It literally is. We all have to read this book in DTS. So go back. I got my whole stack of, what are my books? Very interesting to go back and read them now. But yes, it's that my body doesn't matter. It's not mine. It belongs to the Lord or my leader, because now I'm under his spiritual covering. I'm under his spiritual authority that creates this whole mishmash of we're going to make Jesus come back. We're going to make him by telling everybody about him.

There's so many dichotomies that I want to talk about. I feel like we could have many more conversations with you. Shelby, this is so lovely. And I'm just I'm thinking about one the dichotomy between keeping things in house and silencing abuse while the double side of that sword is these father heart of God weeks where you are meant to divulge your deepest darkest secrets and how that essentially then gets turned into black male or fear of those things being used against you.

I'm also now thinking about the dichotomy between bodies don't matter. And yet something John and I were just talking about last week is the capitalistic property gains of Y-Wam. And as you mentioned, but your caller out of spring space was in Kona. I don't know if this is before after you were there.

I was sharing that my my brothers used to have soccer end of the your tournaments in the hotel that turned into the Colorado Springs Y-Wam base. And that is just one of many Y-Wam bases that I know.

I'm wondering if there's anything you'd want to speak to in that dichotomy between the body doesn't matter, but we're going to also gobble up as much capital and land and power as we can while we're here. Well, you have to do that so that you can have more people come to your location so that you can, I don't know, continue the cycle. And there's a deep sort of spiritual like language and the spiritual ties, if you will, not actual ties, but you know, the connections that they make to we received this property or we were able to buy this property at a, you know,

while all of these dominos fell into place to allow us to acquire this property. And therefore, we have to keep this property forever. And it's very interesting in England, actually, they just sold a base homestead manner. And it was a big deal. It was a big process, but thankfully, one tiny bright spot is the board had said in order to run this large property, you need X amount of people to come and commit to doing this. And they didn't get it, they had a few, but they didn't get it. And so the board shut it down. And I want to give kudos to them for actually

selling that property and saying, you know what, this is not going to work just because God said, you know, with six people when you need 20. So good on them. But no, it's in Switzerland alone, YWAM has many multi millions of Frank's worth of property, a lot of it empty or being lived in by people who used to be part of YWAM, like the OG YWAM in this region. And then they're just living in these beautiful spaces. So it's, there's, I have never experienced any sort of financial transparency within YWAM. I used to run a school called the Humanities and Science. Again,

what helped me get out. But, you know, you are charging a certain amount of money to the students that are coming and you as a school leader do not know exactly. You're told that money is going to housing and food. But you don't know what the mortgage is on the, on the, on the building.

Is there a mortgage or is it done? I mean, here in my village, it was an orphanage that was given to YWAM. So actually, there's multiple properties in this village that were given to YWAM because YWAM cared for the old people when their families didn't. And so then there were sort of bequeathed properties or they purchased properties that were sort of on the way.

So there's definitely a really interesting situation there because like you said, they'll gobble up these properties, but then maybe not maintain them. Maybe not take care of them. In the UK, there's properties like little holes in the floors that these young people are like, oh, how funny.

There's a hole in my floor, in my room. And wow, that hole keeps getting bigger. And wow, I don't have heating. I have a friend who was in a location in the UK where in her room, it was literally one degree Celsius. So just above freezing in her bedroom. And she was trying to get a heater. And they were like, all that's too expensive for the like, she's like, I'll pay it.

And they're like, no, that her nails stopped growing. She stopped eating her hair stopped growing, her electronics stopped working, her dish soap like froze. And they were like, oh, sorry, suffering for Jesus. They didn't believe her when she said this was the temperature of a room.

And it was only when she showed them, hey, this is this is the temperature. And they were like, oh, gosh. So this, yes, there's properties. They're falling apart. They're being run down. I can go on and on. You know, there's so many times I feel like I am always like, I know these stories, but am I just being conspiratorial? Am I being dramatic? And then when I hear someone else validate and speak to, I feel like we could just never get enough of these stories.

And knowing that there's much more we could talk about, I'm just curious, similar to my first question, is there anything that's feeling really loud to you in this moment that we haven't talked about today that you would want to dive into a little bit? I think something that, you know, I had a quick browse through some of your previous episodes on YouTube. So I listened on my phone on a different app, but I was looking at some of the comments. And one of the things that I see most often is this response to, you know, people's abuse stories or negative stories

and why I'm saying, well, I had a great time. And, you know, you guys are just talking, you know, crap for no reason. Like I had a fantastic time. Yeah, nobody is saying you didn't Susan. Like, this is not what this is about. And I find that sort of disconnect, like really fascinating in a lot of ways, because it's sort of saying, like, well, this person's actually assaulted me and like, but no, like they've never sexually assaulted me. And so it cannot possibly be true. And so this is, yeah, it's something that I guess, like you said, feels loud for me. This response is a really

common response to people sharing about the dysfunction in I went because it's not just abuse stories, right? Those are horrific as they are. What is often much more traumatizing is the response to someone's abuse story.

So when you say you speak up and you, you know, say this happens to me and you don't receive the support that you need, you don't, you aren't believed. You, the burden of proof, you know, it sits on you in some, in some way.

And then when you share those things, maybe with your friends or family or online and the responses, oh my gosh, well, I've never had that experience with why I am. I find that just really sad and really frustrating and I sort of want to shake those people up to say, listen to yourself

and believe victims. Because it's not just about the abuse that happens it's the institutional failure of victims of abuse. If YM was simply able to stand up and say, this is so not wrong, we're going to remove that person, you know, we're going to make restitution, we're going to pay for your therapy, you know, we're going to make a public statement, we're going to sort of let the rest of YM know, this is not allowed.

And instead, we're sort of met with, well, that's not my job, well, we're decentralized, we can't fire anybody. I was essentially blacklisted from YM for telling a very sanitized version of my story on Facebook in 2024.

So they couldn't fire the people that abused me, but they could blacklist me from teaching or having any sort of interaction with anybody in the circles that I was previously. So I find that really sad, but I think for me, it's the thing that gets under my skin almost the most is to say this, we're not saying nobody is saying there aren't good people in YM, nobody is saying that good people aren't trying to do good things in YM, what we are saying is there is a structure and a theology that not only allows abuse to happen,

but often encourages abuse to happen and then there's an institutional failure for people when those things happen as they inevitably do. And this has happened from the very beginning of YM, you see people sharing, when I was there in the 70s, when I was there in the 80s, this was my story.

So this is not simply something that we can sort of blame on the younger generations or blame only on young leadership. That's another thing that often comes out from YWAM leadership is all their young leaders, they're gonna make mistakes that people that abused me were in their 40s, you know, they had been in the...

the mission for 20 plus years. So I think that's what's loudest for me right now. Yeah, I hear that. It makes me think about something I talk about is the ideology of purity culture and you use this word either which I think is totally right about indoctrination into these, what I call split, where things are all good or they're all bad.

And I think for folks who have had good experiences in Y-WAM, it's really hard to hold nuance. One of the hardest things for me is that, yeah, some of my favorite, funnest, most alive experiences happened in Y-WAM.

Some of my best times and my worst times or some of my worst times and holding that nuance and that complexity, I think is really, really, really challenging. And so I know that we'll need to wrap up soon, but I'm curious if you could kind of step back in to you.

You know, if you were to introduce yourself now to you doing your DTS going, what the heck is going on? This is inappropriate, this is wild. I'm still wanting to get this university degree.

What would you want that 24, you were 24? What would you want that 24-year-old to hear from the therapy, from the nuance, from what you've learned? What would you want to say to her now?

I would want to say, trust your gut. Rust your instinct, because it is not going to lead you any more wrong than it would if you stood here. And also to say, it's okay to leave.

It's not a failure, it's not, you're not missing out on what God has for you, because that was the thing, that's the spiritual consequence. You're going to miss out on what God has for you.

Like there's this one magical path that God has. And if you step off of it, you're screwed and you're lost forever. So I wish I could say that to myself. And I want to say that to people who are maybe thinking about going in or who in it, and they're wondering, if you're asking yourself, should I leave?

It's already way past the time to be leaving. But trust your instinct and keep your support system. Keep the people outside of Y-WAM, don't allow yourself to enter into the echo chamber of Y-WAM.

I just sort of a small aside. I realized when I went through all of my Y-WAM books that I collected over the course of my degree program, 99% of them were written by other Y-Wammers.

So don't allow yourself to... stay in that echo chamber, build a whole life outside of why I am. And if why when becomes your whole life, something is wrong. I love that trust your gut.

Yes. Thank you so much, Shelby. And it's been difficult to wait in these waters, but also lovely to wait in them with you. I'm really grateful for you sharing your story and expertise in this matter because it has been embodied in your story and how you've lived and how you've broken free. So just so so grateful for you and for your time.

Thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure. And like you had said in a previous episode, just the the sort of validation that you get of like, oh yes, it's not just me.

I'm not crazy. You know, there are so many other people. So thank you for having me, looking forward to seeing what comes out for you guys in the future. Well, this has been so interesting. And there's more questions that I really want to get to the bottom of. Would you be interested in coming back and doing this again?

Yes, absolutely. I think it's really important to talk about these things that so many people are scared to talk about. Well, thank you so much for doing this. 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-Pranum.org.

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