From Word Of Faith To Deliverance Trauma: A Survivor’s Story

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brandham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brandham Historical Research at William-brandham.org, and with me I have my very special guest, Candace Princess, former member of Christ for the Nations. Candace, it's good to have you on and to finally talk through your story. I mentioned this in email. I've been really wanting to get more people out of Christ for the Nations because that is the central hub for generating everything that we see today, and not many people realize it, but when

you understand its history, where it came from, how it's connected to Brandham, what they did after Brandham grew and developed a movement. This became a generator of heroes. Some of them turned into hero worship, others turned out pretty good, but it's such a fascinating story. I'm glad to have you on, so maybe if you could start and just tell everybody a little bit about yourself. I am Candace, and I'm retired. My husband's retired and we live on 10 acres in the country, and so I call us old stutters instead of home stutters, and I garden. We have rabbits. I so do creative stuff. I teach a Bible

study, and I just have my family and friends, and I'm not looking to start a ministry, but I do that. I went to CFNI in the late 70s, and then I worked there in 2000, and then in 2018, I was part of a cultish deliverance ministry, and so this is what I'm going to talk about today. I think I'm a survivor. So last year 2025 was really when the false nature of word of faith began to kind of get in my mind, and I'd already been sorting out my experience with this deliverance ministry, meaning I realized it was a bad thing, and then I wondered why I

fell for it, and it wasn't until I started listening to your podcasts that I realized CFNI played a part in that, because before that I didn't think CFNI had any negative impact on my spiritual life at all, and I think it did. So I began examining everything that I have learned over 48 years, and it was difficult because those teachings were like an integral part of me, and my thoughts and my opinions and my doctrine even, I had trouble separating me from all the things that I had learned.

But in the process of preparing for this podcast, which took me a month and a half, I began to see connections that I had not seen before. And I also need to make the observation that I have two minds.

And I've noticed over the years that I have two minds. I have a rational brain that looks at things and says, that's just not making any sense. And then the irrational brain that goes, don't think.

Things don't have to make sense. Everything looks great. And so there was a big disconnect between the two. And so I'm just going to go back to the beginning and just talk a little bit about myself and how things came to be.

And I wasn't raised in cultist churches. I went to liberal Methodist church and then a non-denominational church. And I loved church because I loved music. And I really like harmony and I loved being in the choir.

And so church and music were an escape for me because I did have abuse in my background of several different kinds. And then my father disowned me when I was 18. So there were some troubles and things back then.

But I got born again when I was in 1971 when I was a teenager. I don't know if it took because nothing changed because there was a lot of stuff going on. And then when I was 20, in 1977, I was taking piano lessons and my piano teacher invited me to her charismatic church.

And I got the baptism in the Holy Spirit. And what's really interesting is I had no emotion at all. I didn't fall on the floor. I didn't ride all over the place. I didn't scream in tongues.

I just repented. And the change in me was night today. And it was an amazing change. And it goes to show that you don't have to get emotional for God to do stuff. So then I started getting involved in church and in the charismatic churches.

And at the time, there was sort of this hippie excitement about Jesus. I think it was the end of the charismatic renewal. And we had Bible studies and people's homes. And they were interesting because we sang scripture choruses.

And I played the guitar not well, but I played the guitar and the chords were one, four, and five chords with an occasional minor. And so I could do that. And I really did enjoy that because I could hear the voices.

I could hear harmony. At the same time, there were really weird people. And there are always weird people. And this emphasis on supernatural experiences. One study that I attended, one Bible study, was led by this woman who would sit at her desk and empty her mind and receive automatic writing from God to teach at the Bible study.

No one said a word about it. I didn't know that was a cult practice back then, weird. through her glasses on the floor and stomped on them in faith so that her eyes would get healed and she had to get new glasses. And then cassette tapes, of course, of Kenneth Copeland were making the rounds. And this guy named Frank Hammond came out with his book, Pigs and the Parlor.

And that was pretty popular too. So that's kind of where, for me, the weird thing sort of started right from the beginning. You know, I envy you in a way. You mentioned you had two minds.

I wish I had two. I've only got the critical one. Yeah. Now, whenever I was in the thing, you know, I suppressed it. I think you're reading Dr. Stephen Hassen's book, Combat and Cult Mind Control. Great book, if you haven't read it. But it talks about how the cult identity suppresses the authentic self. My authentic self has a critical mind that is off the charts. But while I was in the cult, it was compressing that idea in my head. And I was only allowed to be oppressed.

I guess is the best way to put it. And so all of the funny things that you're mentioning, I did not smash my glasses. But I did other things like you're talking about because that's exactly how we grew up in that world. Right. And I think my critical mind did get oppressed a little later on. I'll talk about that. It's kind of odd how that happens. And that book is good, by the way. I met my now ex-husband at a charismatic church. And he had one of those amazing phenomenal testimonies that people sometimes write books about. And I was so glowy about this,

you know. But it is my opinion now. And I think it's biblical that new believers should be encouraged to sit down and learn and maybe get counseling before they are platformed on a local speaking circuit. And he was platformed full gospel businessmen, all of those things. He did that.

So right after we got married, we headed off to Dallas to the promised land to Christ for the nations. And this was 1978. I think it was about four years after Gordon Lindsay passed away, the founder. And my ex-husband wanted to go into the ministry. And so I had no previous discipline Bible study in my life. I barely knew the order of the gospels at that time. And so I thought Luke was one of Jesus' disciples. And I was right then for anything that came my way. And I have to say there were some really good things about Christ for the nations then. What I call again,

that hippie Jesus exuberance. And I don't think it was just my age. I think it really was the way things were. People were just excited about God there. And there was a choir, not just the worship team. There was a choir. So I got to be part of the choir. And I had some good classes like New Testament survey and biblical archaeology. And I learned a lot from those classes. Dennis Lindy Gordon Lindsay Son taught a class called Bible.

creationism, and that was very interesting as well. But at the same time, there were two major false beliefs that I learned there that I think became the core of what you could call my religion from that point on. And those, I believe, contributed to me falling prey to an abuse of deliverance ministry later on.

Number one, word of faith doctrine, including lack of critical thinking, us and them mentality, the damaging belief that when things went wrong, it was all my fault because I didn't have enough faith. Number two, idolatry of God's generals, which led really to an idolatry of all anointed leadership. And that idolatry led me to desiring everything they had, the anointing and the power of the Holy Spirit and supernatural manifestations and all the things. So what I'd like to do is briefly address those two things as as they apply to my experience. And then I'm going to talk about my second experience at Christ for the

nations and then the awful deliverance ministry. One of the things that I've been trying to bring out, and I'm doing it very slowly because this is something that to a lot of people, it's really offensive. Whenever the laterane movement, the, you know, the post-World War II healing revival began to die out, there were leaders who began to realize that we had created an entertainment form of the gospel and the stage personas were being worshipped far more than they should. And so they kind of shifted away from that. It was good, but they retained some of the negative attributes,

such as there are leaders that called it the Moses model. Basically, we were leaving behind the showmanship that existed in that revival. However, we liked their authoritarian control because it empowers us. That's really what happened. So they went forward with the Moses model and that became heavily influencing to several different streams of the charismatic movement. The shepherding movement, which was led by William Brenham's campaign manager and partner, helped to organize the shepherding movement. And they created it basically as a hierarchy of authoritarian control. That began to be adopted by several parts of the movement, but where it

ended up is essentially, instead of a God's general that was an entertainer, like the post-World War II healing revival, carnival style tent revivals, what they had instead was a God's general who was empowered as a general. And that turns far more authoritarian, I think, than people realized. At CFNI, word of faith was presented as the way it ought to be. I guess that's a foundation that Gordon Lindsay taught. And as well as the teachings, of course, as the voice of healing ministers, we learned about them there. And that is where I began to accept word of faith as the way it should be.

not taught critical thinking, or to examine teaching in light of scripturing context. In fact, Gordon Lindsay's writings and all the voice of healing and word of faith ministers discouraged critical thinking, not really in those words, but they implied that if you questioned it equated like a faith or disobedience to God or an attack by the devil, and questioning teaching or demanding evidence was considered a lack of maturity at best.

And so I developed this belief that when things went wrong, it was my fault because I didn't have enough faith and I hadn't prayed enough, or I hadn't spoken enough scripture to have the faith to get what I needed, or I must have made a negative confession. And according to word of faith doctrine, of course, when you don't have faith, you're in unbelief, and when you're in unbelief, you're in sin, and then you're a sinner, and you don't have faith. And it is a never in the merry-go-round of guilt and torment, or it was for me.

And that was just a lot of pressure. It was really devastating to live under that. You know, I had lists of scriptures to pray over me and people and things and everything else, and sometimes they ended up sounding like mantras or incantations.

And I tried to pray like the word of faith teachers, decreeing and naming and claiming and doing that. Eventually, I collected hundreds of dollars worth of books by all of the word of faith teachers.

And I listened to them all the time so much that I could still give their testimonies for them, and yet I didn't seem to have enough faith. And oddly, then for all my failures, there was this sort of pride that word of faith instilled. Like, I've got judgy about things, especially unbelieving believers, even though I wasn't healed myself.

Actually, in my opinion now, word of faith feeds pride and ego. And because it's all about our efforts, what we can make happen by doing everything right. And so that kind of leads me to the next negative thing that I walked away from CF and I with, and that's putting people with so-called supernatural, spiritual experiences on pedestals, which I had already done with my ex-husband. And we learned, of course, about the heroes of faith, Gordon Lindsay and John G. Lake, Smith Wigglesworth, Charles Parham's AA Allen, all of the people called God's Generals. We idolized these men and women,

hoping that we might maybe someday be as super spiritual as they were, but probably not. And what these men and women taught was taken as gospel, really, at Christ for the nations. And by me, up until last year. And I believe them, because what they said, they said.

But the claims, like you keep talking about, they can't be substantiated, and yet word-of-faith people take these as facts because they said so. You know, I write books. I've got a few books out there, and my books are critical of different ministries trying to show how all of this ties together.

So it's more of a history book. What these guys are writing in these movements is more than a history book because of the nature of word-of-faith and how it developed. They're writing it as such that it's a second book of acts, or a third book, or a fourth book, or a fifth book of acts.

So when people read it, that mentality of that book is in their mind. They read it as though it is a book of acts. Yet it's not biblical. It's not the Bible. Some of the things that they say may be biblical, but what they're trying to portray is we're in a new situation, and this is just as good as the book of acts.

The problem is it's really not. So if you read it and you get that mentality, well, you're taking on, instead of taking the identity of Christ through the Bible, you're taking the identity of the author.

If the author is just really rude to people, which I have a list of people who were in this movement, if they're really rude, you're going to take on that identity, and you're going to think it is godly to be rude to another person in that way.

Whereas if you read the Bible, it's talking about peace, humility, love your neighbor. So the identity is actually different. Absolutely. And I can see that. I can see that in the ministers that I've known and who they follow. You can see they act just like them.

I knew some of these people were flawed because you can't cover up some of those things, but we were told that the good they did so far outweighed the bad, but discovering the extent of the lies and the deception and the cover up that you have brought out.

It was like a punch in the head of reality for me, including what I learned about Gordon Lindsay. I had no idea. He was like part of this golden, glowing past of mine, and it was quite disturbing. In fact, one of your podcasts about him last year, I got partially into it, and I had to turn it off because I was so disturbed.

But I thought, well, Candace, that's being kind of childish. You really need to listen to this. So I did. But we were not encouraged to examine a leader's character. Now you can't go back and examine these people in the past, but basically the fruit of the Holy Spirit or the lack thereof.

And based on my experience now, after 48 years, if you don't examine their character, you can get really hurt. So, you know, idolizing these so-called faith giants led me to wanting to have what they had or said they had, and that supernatural power and control and anointing.

and I desperately wanted to be able to do all the things that they did because I'm an intense person that way. And so I had this belief if I could just reach the certain pinnacle of faith that germs would die in my hands like they did in John G. Legs' hands in his unsubstantiated testimony.

And I would pray for people and tumors would just roll out of them and I would never get sick and I could pray for people from a distance and they'd fall over and get healed.

You know, everything would be good if I could just work hard enough to have the faith to get that anointing. So I really feel like it was like an abnormal life in a lot of ways because there were those beating drums.

You know, you've got to do something really important for God. Being a mom and a wife and a housewife, that's not really enough. You've got to do more and get out there and God will bless you if you do more and give more and listen to more teaching, confess more scripture.

And I could never do enough and I did give up sometimes, but then I'd always go back to word of faith. So looking back, I think those are the beliefs that I got at Christ for the nations.

And like I said, I'm a little bit of an intense person. So I take things and run with them. And these things continued to be fed by teachers that I followed. And when we left Christ for the nations, my ex-husband was not called into the ministry.

And that was a blow for him. And things were not quite the same for us after that. And there were 20 years between that first time at Christ for the nations and the second time.

And I'm not going to talk about things in those 20 years. There were a lot of things, but for the sake of time, I'm just going to move to the second time there. You know, whenever I first came across Gordon Lindsay, I had known him through Brannemism.

Brannem mentioned him frequently. I did not know the complexity of their relationship. I just knew him as Gordon Lindsay, the man who uplifted our prophet. And I was a little bit shocked to find out that he was the man who uplifted several other prophets and basically helped generate their ministries.

That was the platform of voice for the voice of healing. When I first began to understand what he was doing was more of a business structure than a religious structure. And more than that, if you really get down deep into the structure that he was building, it was almost like a pyramid scheme.

And he was at the top of the pyramid. So he had all these people who wanted to rise up to the pyramid. And the thought suddenly hit me and I've actually not talked about this on the podcast.

There was a point in time in which my grandfather got so excited to be one of these traveling revivalists, I've got some old photographs which I won't... put on the screen. But he wanted to be part of that entertainment industry. And it was a religious entertainment industry. Now my grandfather's heart, I believe, was right. He wanted to convert souls to Christ. But he also wanted to do it in this fashion. You know, you see all these traveling revivalists, the tents, look at the massive number of people that they're converting and healing. I think he really bought into it and believed it. I don't think, you know, if I look

examined later years of his life, I don't think he believed everything that he was taught because some of it was, he had to have known this fiction. He just had to have known. But there's a point in time in which this is appealing to the people. They get into it. And then once you get into it, it's never fulfilling. And so there are people who leave and they leave trying to find something.

They don't find what it is they're looking for because they've already been influenced by the movement. So they leave for a period of time and sadly have watched, in fact, I know people, this has happened with, they've left for a period of time and went into something that was even worse. And when you go into something worse, well, now the cult looks better. So you go back to the cult. So this is a, you mentioned it like a merry ground. It is a, it is a cycle that continues to repeat over time. It really does. It really does. And I, I see that absolutely in my life.

Until now. I think we've, I think I've jumped off the merry ground now. I'm really glad. I'm glad to. It was the year 2000 that we planned to go back to Christ for the nations. You know, that was when the year was going to, the world was going to end during why 2K. But it didn't. So we planned to return once again to Christ for the nations. Things stood up and going well for us.

And I really hoped if we could just get back to the land of faith and promise, maybe things would get better. And it was a hard transition because we had to uproot our life. And it was a long life.

And I had to give up my dog because she couldn't come with us. And that still honors me. But I knew I felt like we were making this great sacrifice for our future. And I was desperate. I was desperate to heal my marriage and turn things around. So we headed to Dallas once again.

At that time, Christ for the nations had three schools of ministry that you could attend after your first two years. And my ex-husband was going to attend the pastoral school of ministry. And they had a one year school of music or praise and worship or something and then a one year school of the prophets. And so while he went to school, I worked at the school as an adman in what was called student services. And I dealt with most of the departments. I never had anything to do with the Lindsay. So I can't really speak about that. There were some nice people there. And

there were also some very weird people there. But the atmosphere of the school had changed since the first time I was there. It seemed heavier. It didn't have that ... He says, hippie thing going on.

And I think from my viewpoint, looking back now, it had been NARD, N-A-R-E-D, like that school of prophecy. I had not heard of a school of prophecy until I went there. And I thought it was weird.

And my rational brain thought it was weird because the New Testament doesn't have schools of prophecy. And the people were weird, because they just kind of floated around and prophesied who for people. So I kept wondering why, if prophecy is a gift, do we have to teach this?

It still doesn't make sense to me. Another change that I had noticed is that honoring God's generals had morphed into this thing called being a servant or putting all leaders on pedestal. And despite the school's reputation of being missionary focused, when people talked about being a servant, it wasn't about a pastor serving the congregation or the church serving the community.

It was about serving religious leadership and religious organizations. So I have to say, I have absolutely no good memories of my second time there. I hated it. I remember sitting outside our apartment, wishing I wasn't there.

I gave up my dog for that. And when we left, my ex-husband was not called into the ministry again. And at that point, we moved away and something died. And preparing for this podcast, I finally realized what died was hope.

I hadn't put two and two together before, and it's a terrible thing to lose hope. And I fell into a very dark hole spiritually. That's it. And it's kind of strange that happened because I've just been a Christ for the nations.

And really, I should have been on fire. I'm not blaming them, but I had a Christian baneer but on the inside, I wasn't so much pain. At the same time, I had great success.

I sold my first Christian, cozy mystery series to a real publisher because they had a short-lived cozy mystery line. And writing was an escape for me. I could enter a world of my own making, happily ever after, with a few dead bodies along the way.

And I could forget everything that was happening. And so my identity became Candace, the Christian author. And my editor also hired me to do acquisitions, editing, and do some content reviewing. And that's a really heady experience for a broken person.

I had speaking engagements, conferences, stuff like that. But you know success does not heal hurt. It just masts it. It's kind of like a scab over an infected wound. It just keeps leaping and success feeds the ego, but it doesn't draw a person close to God.

And on the surface, things looked good, but behind the scene. I was in wreck. I was not walking with God. My marriage was ending, and I was in spiritual darkness. And you know what I never learned as a word of faith, Christian, was how to walk through dark times.

Of course, if you're a word of faith person, you're not supposed to have dark times. I don't know, you're supposed to confess and believe and decree your way out of it. But I didn't have enough faith to overcome anything and it up divorced.

But here's where my hero God comes in because he's merciful and he's so good and he's so kind and he never left me. And after a number of years, I was blessed with a man I'm married to now.

And he's stable and he's good and he's very kind. And our marriage gave me the peace to start to restore. And that phrase word of faith means nothing to him. The only time, he can hear me ramble sometimes or babble about word of faith.

He has no idea what I'm talking about. And that's great because he doesn't have all this false doctrine and being drums in his head. But at the same time, I think it kind of puzzles him because I don't think he can really comprehend how twisted my brain has been by all of these things.

But for the first time in my adult life, there were not beating drums. Coming at me in the sense that the only important thing was the power and the anointing and what I could do with my faith.

However, word of faith did not leave. It went underground and I didn't recognize how ingrained I was in that belief system. And so over a period of eight years, I began to expand and grow actually enjoying things about life.

And without feeling guilty because everything was my fault that when bad things happened. And I was reading my Bible and I was studying. And then we can cue the creepy music right here. I discovered deliverance and became convinced.

I needed it because of that period of time that I had backslidden. And that led me to this deliverance ministry that I was part of. And with that word of faith came creeping out of the recesses of my mind because this deliverance minister was very word of faith and an AR.

And all those lessons that I had learned at Christ for the nations, including word of faith doctrine, idolatry of leadership, seeking supernatural experiences. Along with some of the abuse from my past, I think it made me susceptible.

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On behalf of William Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. I think one of the most important things that you mentioned was the dark times. I don't talk about it much because it is very extremely excessively painful for me, but we were in a ministry that taught you that whether you're in word of faith or divine healing or any form of this charismania, you're basically taught that God will always bless you and always give you good times. And when he doesn't, there's something wrong with you. And the problem is when something happens, because we live in a world where things are going to happen,

when something happens, you start to feel something's wrong with you. But worse than that, everybody who should be in your support group, who's in the church with you, they start to feel something's wrong with you. And so suddenly, you've got this scarlet letter of something's being wrong with you, right? I remember I went through a series of very, very traumatic experiences. The darkest time possible. In fact, if not for a cousin who kept calling me to keep me alive, I would not be alive today. But it was such a dark time. And through all of that,

I'm thinking number one, I'm trained to believe something's wrong with me. What have I done? Why is it like this? And you start going through all of your faults. So your faults become amplified, right? And you don't find a way to overcome that. And so essentially that is really what led me out of the cult. But I wasn't prepared for what come next, because once you leave that security blanket of all of these people that you rely upon, well now every dark time you're waiting through uncharted territory. And you're going to have dark times. So when people leave these

cults and they encounter a dark time, it puts them into a dark place. Whereas if you're in a normal, healthy church, and you're going through a dark time, even if you're the lowest center, you're going to have a group of people who support you, lift you up and say, Hey, you can do better than this. We can, we can help you through this. Let us help you through this. We didn't have that when we're in this group. And that's because of the way that they have trained you to believe that everything can be spoken into existence through the word of faith. Everything is blessed by God.

In other words, every single thing that exists in life that's going to happen to you because it will. If you live in this earth, you're going to have bad things happen. All of that stuff is your fault. Just speak it and speak it and conquer it. And nobody can conquer it. That's the real problem here. I didn't go into the details about that dark time, but I had a moment like what you were talking about that I just almost ended it because it is very dark. And I did blame myself because I was just a loser. So anyway, I'm going to move on here. You just kind of got me going there. I

had a little bit of emotion because you kind of I'm trying to avoid the emotions really, but you hit on some emotions there. I need to say before I get into the details of this deliverance ministry that this lady has passed away. And I'm going to refer to her as Lady Deliverance Minister. Looking back, this deliverance ministry, I have to say it was probably one of the most damaging experiences, religious experiences of my life. It just got worse. And I hear so much lately about the excesses of the prophetic and word of faith and all the other things. I think we need

to hear more about the excesses of deliverance. And I have heard some, there were a couple podcasts that I've heard because I really want people to see how harmful and twisted this kind of ministry can be. And so I'm going to go into some details here, some of my details about my experiences.

Now I discovered this lady deliverance minister when she taught a two-part series on witchcraft on somebody else's podcast. Witchcraft is a big deal in deliverance circles and for her it's a major big deal. And she knew a lot about witchcraft a lot. She could have written books. She also had a doctorate and I was impressed by both of those things. So in my mind she knew all this stuff and I could learn from her. And that's probably when the idolatry began. She had this daily morning podcast every single morning that I listened to religiously. There were some red flags early on

like her very very harsh personality. And she said she had to be harsh because she was always dealing with demons. And then there was this constant focus in her podcast on the demonic and on witchcraft. And at the time I didn't really view this as wrong. And in the meantime being the kind of person that I am, I began to study everything that I could about deliverance because I like that. And I bought books and I listened to all these podcasts. You know there's some really really weird people out there. And oddly, maybe not so oddly, after I started doing all that,

I began to have demonic manifestations in my home. And weird stuff. And at the time I thought that confirmed that I needed deliverance. And now I think it's me concentrating on all of that dark stuff, kind of maybe open spiritual doors, I can't explain this.

But it's like, if you ask them to come, will they come? I don't know. They like to put on boogie, boogie scary shows, so maybe it's just all deception. But after about six months after I'd started listening to her, she invited me to her healing home for personal deliverance.

I still need a deliverance after six months. And so the first day I was there, we sat in her office and talked for hours, I talked for hours. And it was very flattering. It's very flattering when somebody gives you that much attention hours.

And so I went from everything from when I could remember until that point. And she was extremely kind that day. Very, I remember thinking, this is not the same lady I've been listening to on the podcast.

She was so nice to me. And then the next day she called me back to her office and she said she heard from God about what I needed deliverance from. And she sat me down and she said, who's the witch in your life?

And I'm like, I don't know, yeah. But the only person I could think about was this holistic nurse practitioner that I had been seeing periodically. Who was new agey, but she didn't do like woo-woo stuff over me.

But anyway, I said that and lady deliverance minister said, that's the one. And so she demanded that I cough that witchcraft spear it up. And she's like kind of in my face doing this.

At the time, I wanted to be convinced that I had been delivered of something. But now I don't believe that. There is so much pressure in that kind of thing. You've got somebody right in your face saying, cough it up, come out, you come out of her.

And if you say anything wrong, they're gonna start talking to the demon in you and it's kind of scary. And if a minister has a powerful personality like this lady did, it's difficult. I've mentioned this a few times.

I've just fascinated with psychology. And I don't mean to offend people who believe in a wild world of angels and demons that exist today. I'm not speaking against ill against that. But what you just described is cold reading.

If you understand how cold reading works, you tell people, you get them very anxious, you get them very excited, you don't tell them the source of their trouble, but you let them reveal it to you.

And then suddenly, that's it, that's the one. That's the one I saw. That's how cold reading works, right? And I watch, I'm a big fan of science fiction. I just watched a science fiction movie where there was a carnival where the guy was doing that and that was part of his scheme.

And I got to thinking about how similar that carnival was to this religion. And that led me down this whole wide array of problems. But the other thing that I want to mention, I know people who otherwise, had they not been in the religion, they probably would have had been...

mentally healthy. They didn't have any sort of bipolar or anything like this. But the movement built you up with such anxiety that if you can convince them to have a demon while they're in that state of anxiety, they're going to go home and they may even see it.

In fact, I hate to say this. I'll try not to say enough that he can be recognized, but this one person, he got in that state and he went home and he said it was like the spider demon.

It went right up the wall and he's telling me this, and I'm thinking that doesn't really sound real. I think I've seen that one. I'm not joking. Is it real? I don't know. I'm not here to say, but I do know that if you can get somebody to that psychological state, you can make them think that they have seen it, whether they have or not. And that's not saying that it was real.

I just know that exactly what you're talking about, because you hear it over and over and over again on these podcasts. You hear about all these demons. Are you going to see them?

The interesting thing about this is, if you recall, I had a view in my background and that caused me trauma. She didn't address that at all. Even after I told her all about it, it was all about witchcraft. When I got home from this session, she called me and she said, now I can work with you. And I guess that's because I had been delivered from the demon witchcraft goodies or something. And so she started sending me her writing to edit. She used to write all the time.

She never published anything, but she'd write these little booklets and she just wanted me to fix them for her. And I could. So I did. And I was flattered by her request because it meant I could be part of her ministry. And it also fed my ego because I got to see her stuff before anybody else did. And so I thought that I could be part of the inner circle. And I was about as inner circle as you could get, but the nobody was really inner circle because she wasn't accountable to anybody. And nobody knew everything that she was doing. And the circle moved depending on

the day and what you had done, really. Now most of the time her podcasts were about demons,

how we got victory over demons, spiritual warfare, and of course witchcraft. And I still had all the word of faith, naming, claiming and decreeing going on. But on top of that, I was learning how to review and bind whatever those things were that I would see. And it was still my fault when things went wrong. And so, you know, looking back what she called discernment, look more like fear or superstition. And I began to have the same kind of fear. She saw evil everywhere. And she she instilled that in me. And I'm sure in other people. And to me, this is one of the dangers of

extreme deliverance ministry. This total concentration on the dark side. How can you not be afraid? One day, one week, I was watching my neighbor's cats. They went on vacation and they had two adult cats and a kitten. And I like kittens, so I brought it to my house to let it play so I could watch it. And she found out because I told her, because I told her everything. And she said, oh, you don't want to do that. You're going to bring a demon in the house. And at that point, I didn't believe it because I'd been doing it for three days. But I just, I let it pass. Even though

I didn't believe her, I let it pass. She believed that objects like jewelry and food could carry witchcraft spirits and curses. And we needed a revelation from God, really, in order to eat out or get jewelry from other people. And she even told us on the podcast, don't send me food, don't send me jewelry, just in case. And my question there is, are Christians really susceptible to being jumped on by random demons from random people? You know, that's one of the questions that plagued me whenever I left because I was still, whenever I left the cult, I was very clear with my family. I'm not leaving Jesus. I'm leaving the, I'm

and I didn't call it a cult. I'm leaving this movement basically. I was, I was really troubled by that because we started going to other churches and they're telling us, they're basically preaching a side of the Bible that I had never heard before. I'd read it, but the way that they're preaching it, it was a way of telling you that there's comfort in Christ.

There's protection in Christ. So I left the building with this feeling of security. And it suddenly hit me. Why have I only had this now? I was 37 years old. Why is this the first time that I have security? And I started thinking, well, there's something wrong with this church. God's not supposed to protect you like this. You're supposed to be afraid. And I mean, it sounds stupid, but I started that I understand. Yeah, I read the Bible so many times trying to figure out what's wrong with this place. And I found out that they were

more right. So crazy story. And I'm, that's, that is a good point. And I'm looking, we're looking right now. We just moved here recently. So we're looking for a church, just a normal church like really normal. That's what I want. You know, I think, oh, here's another story.

When supposedly demon possessed people left her office, she had to cleanse the furniture they sat on. And she had a very deliberate order of ingredients she used to do this to get the demons out of the cushions. I was there when she did it. So I'm not making this up. And I wonder, do demons really transfer through people's butts? I don't know. These things should have been red flags for me because that's weird. It's just weird. And all this concentration on demons made her suspicious of everyone and their motives, including me.

And I was so totally dedicated to her ministry, I wouldn't have heard her for the world. One day I asked her why she did her deliverance techniques the way she did because it was a little unusual.

She accused me of trying to steal her deliverance techniques because God told her that's what I was doing. I was kind of stunned because it was irrational and paranoid, but she said God told her that.

And I couldn't defend myself because she wouldn't listen to reason. And the irony is I had all of her writing on my computer. I could have taken all of her stuff and rewritten it in my own voice and changed it around and stolen it.

And that never occurred to her. Not that I would have done that, but it's just irrational, this fear. It's so crazy because that sounds exactly like the television show I was mentioning. And I had to go back and look, but I think it might have been written by Stephen King.

It was, I mean, it's so crazy the way that they do this stuff. It is not a Christian movement. When you're bringing that level of fear and demons and spiritualism, it's spiritualism really is what it is, but you're bringing something that's not Christian and you're branding it Christianity, which is really, really wrong.

And very harmful. Another time I traveled again to, and this was a 10 hour trip for me, by the way, to go get deliverance in person. And apparently, after two years of being part of her ministry, I still needed deliverance.

During our session, she brought up a house that I had lived in when I was a little girl, and there were some really bad things that happened to me in that house. And so I thought, finally, we're going to deal with something that happened to me when I was little.

No, no, no, no, not anything so rational. She said, I had a demon from a little Indian girl that had lived on that property centuries ago, or a demon that the little girl had had or killed her or something, I don't remember.

But how ridiculous it seems now, I thought it was ridiculous then. It really surprised me, but she's in my face. And she's telling me that demon, you come out of her, you come out of her and made me cough.

I knew if I told her, I'm not doing this. It would, she would have been yelling at me, yelling at the demon in me because it would have been the demon talking to her.

And so I just coughed. I just coughed it up, wailed a little bit and walked away. Why didn't I walk away from the ministry at that point? I lighted slide even though that was so bogus, and I knew it was bogus.

And isn't it odd? She never dealt with any of the real issues in my past. It was all strange demons on witchcraft, and to me, that is the danger of a deliverance ministry. Most of the time recipients don't learn to deal with trauma.

Instead everything is a demon, and you can just rebuke it. You can't rebuke trauma. So I'm just going to give you a few more examples. I like growing plants and I grow herbs and so I told her because I tell her everything, I was going to make some tinctures and some saves.

Well, she called me back and she said, God said, you can't do that because of the witchcraft in your background. Now, I was never a witch. That's something I never was. And contrary to that threat, I've been making herbal tinctures the last several years. And you know, amazingly demons have not constorming into my house and taken over me and caused me to buy spellbooks and start practicing witchcraft. It was bogus. She had us do strange missions like bearing a Bible in a hole somewhere.

And there were times I didn't do these things because I didn't want to, but I didn't tell her because she expected me to do them. At the time, I thought it was just kind of quirky.

But there was no arguing with her. If you argued, you had a spirit of rebellion. If you got angry, you had a spirit of angry, of anger. You could, you can't argue. And over this period of time, and it was a period of time four years, she was getting more paranoid and more irrational.

And my relationship with her was a seesaw. I was always guessing and I was always so off-balance, but I kept trying to get in her good graces and sometimes I'd be there and sometimes I wouldn't be there. It was up and down and all around. And what's really interesting to me is I never told my husband everything that was going on. It's, she didn't tell me not to tell him. I don't understand this. I don't know if I was just accepting all of this as normal or whether I was avoiding telling him because I knew it wasn't. I don't know. He and I have talked about this recently and he's

a little disturbed to find out the extent of what I experienced. One of the problems that people have when they're in the state of mind, they're trying to suppress what emotionally is trying to bubble up because that might be seen as a demon. And also the things that they're telling you that are evil, you need to stay away from those. That's a demon. What's happening essentially from a mental standpoint, you are suppressing your thoughts, which will eventually come out into an explosion. But before it does, there are people who sometimes disassociate. So you may have been

in a mental state where you didn't even, you didn't even recognize some of the things that you were doing because mentally, inside you're crying out, you needed help. But you couldn't get that help instead, what you had is somebody who kept suppressing your thoughts even further. Thank you for saying that because actually that helps me a lot. And I'm going to, I'm about to say this during, I was losing myself during this time. I stopped writing. I stopped music. I, and I didn't see what was happening. I lost creativity and I simply didn't have the energy or the

brain bandwidth to do the things that I really wanted to do. It was like I was being sucked into this black hole and everything was about her in her ministry and deliverance and demons and witchcraft. There was a really bad confrontation. Not that the others weren't bad but we had one really bad one. It was as a result of a phone call that I had had with another, a lady from another deliverance ministry. I had known this lady just by phone for a little longer than lady deliverance minister. So we would just periodically talk about life in general. However, I happened

to mention to lady deliverance ministry that I had talked to this woman and nuclear. She went it was terrible of all of the abusive confrontations that I had experienced with her this top the list. She accused the other ministry of stealing things from her. She said I didn't need to talk to them about her which I was not and she kept emphasizing that I didn't know enough to be talking to them and she went on and on and ran it and raved. That conversation left me so traumatized.

It was like all I could see was white. It was the strangest thing and it took me days to recover from that. I couldn't even do banking. And yet I didn't leave. Now in the last few months of her life her paranoia and her rational behavior peaked and she began to accuse people publicly on her podcast by name. Not just once because she would do that on occasion, accuse people of things but she would accuse people of for weeks on end, talk about one person over and over for weeks.

And looking back I'm kind of amazed nobody sued her. They probably all felt like I did but it instilled fear in me because I didn't want to be called out like that and it was irrational because the reality was I only knew one other person in that ministry and that was somebody I had been at the healing home with. The rest of those people don't know me from a hill of beans. It wouldn't matter what she said about me. Then the thing happened that made me realize how deceived she was becoming and this was a wake up call for me and I'm glad. She told us on the podcast that

she started getting daily morning visitations from an angel. The angel was coming and just talking to her every day and giving her sometimes messages to give to us on the podcast and twice she said it was Gabriel. Now I knew enough at that point thank god to know enough about biblical behavior of angels in the Bible and angels don't do that.

They don't come and talk to us every morning like let's have coffee together and certainly not Gabriel, certainly not Gabriel. I mean you and I both know that Gabriel spoke to three people and one of them was Mary and the other one John the Baptist father and then Daniel, as she wasn't important enough for Gabriel and I'm not, nobody I know is.

So personally, my opinion, looking back now, many people who claim angelic visitations like this are really caught up in pride. After all, they have an angel. In my opinion, it is absolute deception. This was not an angel of God and whether it was a hallucination or a demon manifestation, manifestation, manifestation, manifesting, whatever it was, it was demonic and I want to know part of that because I didn't want to listen to what something like that said.

And so that was the kind of, it kind of slapped me and I stopped listening to the podcast. That's a lot to go through and you and I, we share a lot in what you talk about in your history, not just with the, you know, we talked about the dark places that we went but even though I was not in word of faith, we were in something that was very, very similar.

So I relate to almost everything you said, how were you able to come out of this? Well, you know she died and it was an interesting thing because when she died, my very first reaction was I had a great deal of relief and then I went through a lot of emotions but that began my opportunity to slowly recover and I started to realize very quickly how, how deceptive it had all been.

And like I said, last year was when I really started to wake up to from the word of faith. Now I am learning how to read scripture in context and I am learning to question things, everything. I'm allowed to question things. I don't have to be afraid and I'm working on getting past that unrealistic standard of perfection in word of faith, meaning my life has to be perfect towards rotten because the fact is there's nothing perfect and often life is good and bad at the same time. So I'm learning to be able to see the good even when things aren't going right

and I'm not panicking because the bad is my fault somehow or there are demons or there is witchcraft and I need to just change everything by faith. I am moving past that and I'm just very grateful for what God is doing because I haven't thrown away my belief that he does miracles or that he moves in supernatural ways, but we can't control him and that's probably the biggest thing that I have learned coming out of the word of faith. I can't demand that he do things just because I quote enough scriptures to have enough faith. He's sovereign and I'm not.

And also remembering just how good he's been to me. I'll never forget he didn't walk away from me when I backslid and he's given me a new life really, a new start and I'm very grateful.

I'm also grateful to be on this podcast because preparing for this has clarified so many things in my mind. I am very appreciative. Well, thank you so much for coming. This is a fascinating story.

Like I said, I really wanted to have you on because of the Christ for Nations Institute Paul of that history, but what you got into is so much more interesting. So thank you so much for doing this.

I'm welcome. And again, I appreciate everything you do, too, because you really have helped me. That's awesome. Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information or to share your story, you can check us out on the web.

You can find us at William-Branum.org. From more about the dark side of the new Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian identity to the NAR, available in Amazon, Kindle, and Automore.