5 Red Flags of an Unhealthy Church

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brannum Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannum Historical Research at William-Brannum.org and with me I have my co-host and friend, Jed Hartley, son of a false prophet and former member of the International House of Prayer. Jed is good to be back and to talk about this subject that I have special insight to. There's very few things in life that I can say I truly have a special insight that other people do not have and that is what makes a healthy church healthy and what makes an

unhealthy church unhealthy and the special insight I have is on the unhealthy part which is a little bit sad when you think about it but you and I were both close to people who were in the upper tiers and so we saw all the inner workings of how all of this comes together. The good, the bad, the ugly, we saw people who truly believed what they were saying even though what they were saying is wrong and we saw people who truly did not believe what they were saying and they knew what they were saying is wrong. You saw all of it, right? So

I have, when I left this cult religion, I started going through all of these different lists out there. You can see them 10 signs have a healthy church and you go down through it and you find out that sometimes the 10 signs come from a church who is also unhealthy and it's a little bit odd when you do this but anyway needless to say I started thanking the reverse of that and you and I were talking just earlier this week about it. What about the signs of an unhealthy church? How do people recognize one if they're in one? There's not a lot out

there that's liked that. Usually it's positive because they don't want to point fingers and so I was thinking how can we do this delicately because we don't want to say, okay, you came from Bethel, you came from Aihop, I came from Brandemism. We don't want to point fingers at the organizations but the system that enables the unhealthy atmosphere. I want to target that system and there are key signs that you can look at that you can truly say this practice that you're doing is unhealthy. I don't care which church you are, you should probably stop doing it and with that I'll let you kick it off. Well it's

you were talking about what areas of expertise we have my girlfriend and I watched Jeopardy. She's a huge Jeopardy fan and you know how they have the categories at the very beginning. I mean, not Trebek, but the new, but Trebek used to do, he would list out the five different categories.

And I've always thought about what are the categories that pop up that I actually am going to be able to beat, not even the best people, just my girlfriend, which ones. And anytime Bible categories pop up, I feel like I have the insight track on that.

But if we're getting real specific, if it just happened to be signs of prophetic ministry has become dangerous. If that was one of the categories, man, that would be my expert category, which that's never going to pop up on jeopardy, but it is something that we can discuss here.

And it's been something that I've wanted to discuss. I know that we've probably discussed this a million different ways previously. We've discussed a lot of these signs, but I think just really saliently getting into, hey, these are very specifically the big red flags that I have seen.

I think can be very helpful for people who are either in it or in a church that they think might have some of these red flags, or perhaps they have a family member or a friend who's in it.

Being able to distinguish and understand what is problematic, what is something to raise questions about if you're wanting to advocate for the health of a church, or if you're wanting to advocate for you or yourself or someone else to leave an unhealthy church, I think that being able to identify, this is hard, and unfortunately, I think that too often these things can be talked about only from a doctrinal point of view, and we've discussed this before, and we were talking about this earlier, but the idea that if we're talking about, let's say, from my example of growing up at IHOP, I remember people talking

about the red flags of IHOP when I was growing up, but it was largely from a doctrinal position where it was a question of, hey, what is IHOP believe that is heretical or fringe and doctrinally suspect, which I think there's a time and a place for that, but when we talk about these red flags about unhealthy churches, it's more than just a doctrinally issue, it's about, is it a safe place to be, is it a safe place for you or a family member to find community, and oftentimes no, and in fact, we've had horror stories of it being very,

these churches being very unsafe for people, and so I think that this, getting into this, it's just about, hey, are these places safe, more than just like doctrinally suspect, which I do, I'm not dismissing some wild doctrines can lead to.

unsafe places and unhealthy places, so I don't want to discount that. But I want to come from a more just human perspective of like, is it, if you were an agnostic and you sent your child to one of these churches, are there reasons for you to be concerned? And so number one, like when I was making this list, the number one thing I've seen throughout my upbringing that raises the biggest red flag is supernatural authority manufactured through deception. So this, and this isn't going to be obviously you wouldn't have this just painted on the walls. I say that somewhat ironically because

at the International House of Prayer, they did have their prophetic history, which was very manufactured, literally painted on the walls of IHOP at one point. They have now since painted over it, but

typically you are not going to go into a church and if you talk to the pastor and be like, hey, is your authority here manufactured through deception? They are not going to say yes, of course.

But when we're talking about specifically new apostolic reformation churches or churches that have apostolic or prophetic authority structures, so they have an apostle or they have a prophet or they have a network of prophets who prop up their sort of spiritual authority. One of the lead pastors is talking about prophecies that he has or she has, usually it's a he, but

unhealthy churches can come and all, you know, there can also be women pastors who are unhealthy, but usually it's men in this. But if there is this sort of prophetic authority that's built, I have in my life overwhelmingly seen that prophetic anointing being corrupted by outright deception. And my specific example of my father, I think, is probably the most salient one for me to give, but my father was a minister who or I've talked about plenty of times here before, but would travel to different churches, including he was a big part of the origins of the international house prayer and was very

influential for a period of time at Bethel among several other churches. And he was a prophetic minister who would go to prophetic conferences and who would give specific prophetic words. And he was often, if not every single time, taking information that he had sought out in the natural, and he was packaging that as a divine word, so giving him from having looking up on Facebook and getting different stuff. I've talked previously about how when I was really little, he would send me in to get the registry of, or I think that's what it's called, but the

directory, that's the word, the church directory, because I used to have those, you can get those like little pamphlets where it would just have, hey, here's the people, their information, their address, their phone number, and then he would, or certainly of the leaders of the church, and then he would use those phone numbers and pretend that he got that divinely. So my dad was doing this at Bethel, along with other individuals who had certainly scenes were doing very similar things. The Sean Bowles recently, there has been a lot of discussion about Sean Bowles. Bethel itself has released a statement about how Sean Bowles was manufacturing prophetic words,

and how Bethel no longer is platforming. Sean Bowles, how they knew that some of these red flags were raised to them, and they continued to platform him for a period of time. This was all in a very recent press release that Bethel released about Sean Bowles, and about my father, and a couple others, who Bethel was distancing from and sort of publicly making the statement that they are no longer associated with these individuals. And the reason they were doing that was because of abuse allegations, but also of very convincing and serious allegations of prophetic abuse that all

of these individuals were doing. And to clarify for Bethel, much like Bethel, like they did not, it took them a long time by their own admission to come forward and do this, and they recently was a long video that was released that sort of abused them of a lot of these things. And I think that they probably did this in part to response of that video, to respond to that video. And so this is,

you don't necessarily, you won't have information like this as prevalent as you do with churches like International House Prayer, and Bethel, where you can look up and see press releases about how they had prophetic ministers who were using manufactured prophecies to gain spiritual authority.

But I think that this is something that should be tested. Anytime there's people giving prophetic words, especially words of knowledge that are meant to really address specific individuals. I have just seen so many times people using that to manipulate people and using false information and pretending like they got it from God. And this is extremely dangerous. We'll talk about it more. I don't want linger too long on just one piece of the list that we have here. But number one, I think that's the number one thing. If you're in a, any what, prophetically, you know, new apostolic

reformation church or even churches that don't use prophecy, I mean, there's other ways that you can manufacture spiritual authority. But this is the prominent way that I have seen it done in the churches that I've grown up in. And I think that it's way too prevalent in so many of these sort of non-denominational charismatic communities. It's funny because I have wanted to do this exact podcast for a long time because it actually applies globally. It doesn't just apply to IHOP or Bethel or any of these other groups that people are escaping from it. It'll really

applies to anybody or any church who is taking undue influence over the people. I'll just say like that and keep it light. But I've been wanting to do this and I've been wanting to keep it centered in a, you know, a funny way for people to kind of relate to the stories. And I was thinking about Jeff Foxworthy. I don't know if you know. You might be a redneck guy. Say things like, if your home is on wheels and you have several cars without wheels, you might be a redneck.

And I was going to start off with things like, if your pastor says, don't google me, you might be in a cult. And Bethel publishes this and now you can actually google it, Jed Hartley's father.

And you can see this. But what you're saying is absolutely correct. The only thing that I will add to it, not to get into a doctrinal debate with people. But the Bible does talk about prophets in the New Testament. And people will often tell me, John, you're against these prophets. You must be against all prophecy or gifts of the spirit, et cetera. And they really don't know me. I don't really talk about what I believe doctrineally. But I will say this, the Bible does talk about prophets in the New Testament. And it says, let the prophecies be established by more than one.

And there's a reason for this. If one guy is going authoritarian on you and you have another guy who says, no, that prophecy is not right. I had a different prophecy. Well, now you have something to compare and you have to weigh into the balance what is truth. What these guys do is they will just, they'll come out with the prophecy and then they'll run with it, even if it's just one person.

And that's a clear sign. You need to get out of this place if they're doing this. The other thing they'll do, which this is a sketchy gray area, there are head prophets and subordinate prophets and the head prophets.

is the one that gets all the publicity. They'll say, I had a prophecy and usually goes political. Usually goes something that is current events, something that makes you, wow, this is really for our day.

And then there's usually a subordinate backing profit, which is literally there just to support the main profit. That is really this gray area because technically speaking, they're actually doing what the Bible says. But if you're not careful with it, you can fall into a trap of people who are faking it.

I'm not gonna go too far with that because people, there are people who truly believe both the upper tier and the lower tier, but the Bible doesn't show tiers. That's really the thing that I'm trying to point at.

All of them are equal and you are supposed to, you're supposed to look at it like you're equal to each other as prophets, but you're also equal to me as the congregation. We're all Christians.

We're all one, not a hierarchy or a tier. So the problem for me is once they create the hierarchy or the tier, they can start to people with ill intent can take advantage of you.

And as Jeff Fox already would say, if they're creating a authoritarian structure, you might be in a cult. Yeah, yeah. Well, and I think that that leads into the second one that I have listed, which is very germane to both of the things that you said, which is the second big thing is supernatural claims are protected from meaningful verification.

Now this goes beyond prophecy, but I think we were just talking about how this happens with prophecy. You talk about false prophets, I think in the Bible, if you're reading, there is a concerted effort to talk about deceivers amongst the brethren and about how you have to watch out for false prophets.

And again, I don't want to talk to get too much into doctrinal issues and what the Bible says you should or shouldn't do, but more just the cause and effective of what are the symptoms of a church that has these qualities or not.

But when you have a church or a church community that makes supernatural claims, especially in authoritarian structure where there are specific individuals who can make the highest sort of supernatural claims, and then there is not any verification process.

If there isn't any testing of these prophecies, there isn't any wane of these things, then it can get extremely dangerous. This is a, this one I think is a little bit more obvious that you could go to your church and you could say, you could ask people like, hey, what was the verification process for, especially if there's prophetic words or...

But I think physical healing and different manifestations, like let's say the Gold Dust or Gold Teeth or the Jewels, this was something that was happening, not just that Bethel, but a lot of Bethel adjacent churches for quite some time.

One of the things that was absent from a lot of these communities, at least from my perspective, was any sense of verification and in fact villainized people who tried to verify these things because then you were seen as a cynic.

You were seen as someone who was questioning and just you're kind of, this is not what it was stated, but I remember thinking, well that person's just a vibe killer. Everyone's having these spiritual manifestations, I remember during what was called the Awakening at the International House Prayer, which was during 2010, there were all of these purported manifestations of the Holy Spirit and everybody was caught up in this time of spiritual frenzy.

I was 18 at the time and I remember it was genuinely quite fun and it's inspiring for me, but there was a lot of things like there were young students who were my age or younger who were going up on stage and talking about dreams they had, and then later they would joke about how they didn't have that dream.

And it was just this, oh I just kind of made that up on the spot and it was so weird because it was like well we shouldn't be doing that, but the supernatural frenzy so lifted this desire to experience and to be a part of the supernatural manifestations that the verification even on an individual level was highly dissuaded.

And people were testimonies of miracles were elevated and of course testimonies of non-miracles were pressed down and I think this is something that you can see quite clearly pretty quickly in a lot of different churches.

And I think this is a fundamental flaw of fundamental red flag with several prominent new episodic reformation or just charismatic churches or like you said globally I mean this is not just our specific thread, but certainly with our thread I think that this is very prominent.

And so you know are there people who are asking whether or not prophecies are being recorded and are they being tested when the time has come I remember a huge prophecy right around. on that same 2010 period.

I've talked about this before I'm one of our podcasts, so I won't dwell on it too long, but there is a prophecy by sort of a minor profit in our community. His name is Terry Bennett.

About how in 2015, there would be sort of all of these wars that would break out. And I have it very specifically, like I have a transcript of the conversation that he had with Mike Bickle.

And he talked about solar flares happening that should completely shut down the electrical grid. There were other very specific prophecies that were given. And I've made this resource available. People can see it. I don't know if you have it on your website, John, but maybe that's something that I could give you too.

But I mean, you can read through and look at the transcript that I got in 2010 that was from Mike Bickle in their words, but it wasn't a transcript that was disseminated amongst the larger population of the church.

It was something that sort of only the insiders had. And I watched how that prophecy morphed. And to this day, I don't know. I think that Mike Bickle and Terry Bennett were talking about that prophecy being fulfilled because it so morphed while they were talking about it over the years that they kind of forgot or willingly chose to ignore specific claims about like a solar flare that knocks out 80% of the technology and across the earth, like those are verified things.

And so if there is no sort of system of accountability behind this, the mythos of the spiritual world that these churches grow in can grow kind of unchecked. And you have a lot of people, therefore believing in a world that does not exist because the testimonies were formed around sort of deception.

I mean, this obviously goes with the first point of outright deception, but this is a way that that sort of not even intentional deception can kind of cultivate and run is that there's just no weaving out process.

There's no one who seems to be interested in figuring out whether or not these are false prophecies or these are manufactured healing claims like the whole straightening of legs. This was a thing that was done in Bethel and Todd White has done this before, but it's kind of a parlor trick thing where you have people try to straighten their legs and you pray for them.

And suddenly this leg is now the same length as that one. And it's a very weird thing because people start where they're like, oh, I didn't know my legs were uneven. And then it's just a physical phenomena thing.

There isn't anything supernatural about it, but it feels like if you're wanting to believe it, you feel like a miracle just happened. You were healed of something you didn't even know that you had two minutes ago.

And if that can just go unchecked and no one's questioning that, then you can get into a dangerous territory very quickly. I've been doing this series on examining the early origins of the Pentecostal movement, the Azusa Street Revival, what led up to it, what happened immediately after.

And there's some very weird history that not many people talk about before and after and even during, but in the during the Azusa Street Revival, they had just came into the revival on the heels of the great San Francisco earthquake.

And they thought the world was about to end, because we see earthquakes in diverse places, like the Bible says. And so the prophet started prophesying that the rail system, the railroad system, the railroads become mangled, nobody could ride by train anymore.

And they're given all of these prophecies that are clearly specific to that era. Now in today's world, you wouldn't care if the rail system broke, you just sent freight trucks and you drive down the highways on the interstates, right?

But they believe that prophecy to be true and what happened is over time, when it didn't happen, they started kicking the can. Yes, it didn't happen then, but what we saw was in part.

Now we're starting to see a clearer picture. And then it gets clearer and clearer and with each iteration of pitocostalism and each splinter group that splinters off of it, they have their own clearer version of what's going to happen.

And then when that doesn't happen, they come with their own next clearer version. And in the end, it's very much like, I recommend people read about how cold reading works. In the end, it's prophetic, cold reading.

You have a prophecy and then you can change it and people will believe that and then you change it again. When you're cold reading someone, you're talking to them so that you can learn what it is that they, you know, what it is they're expecting or wanting and you start talking enough to get them to talk so that you can suddenly have special insight into their head.

Well, that's what the prophets are doing. They're talking, they're watching the events happen as the event happens. Now they add that into their prophecy. And in the end, what happens in the prophecies from the later years, like you said, doesn't even match what happened in the original years.

Prophecies of Doomsday today don't even come close to matching what the early Pentecostals had. So for me, this reiteration of prophecies and this kicking the can type prophecy style, it really needs to be shut down.

People just need to walk away and say, look, we've heard that. You've rung that bell enough now and I don't believe that. bell anymore. Because in the end, you're you're basing your entire life off of something that's not true. And if you're going to do this, wrap your entire families, your friends, your entire life savings in some cases, wrap everything that you have own and know into this false prophecy so that they can kick the can and change it later, you are basically becoming a prisoner to the movement. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the

progression of modern Pentecostalism transition through the latter reign charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon and others with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book. You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top.

And as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching. On behalf of William Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. One thing that I think leads into this and this is where going to now the third sort of red flag, I think that when people use the phrase God told me, so casually, it can lead to exactly what we're talking about where you have all of these leaders using God's words to turn their own personal influence into divine command or their personal ideas

into divine command. And that's what we're seeing. You see, like you were talking the splinter groups, you see how can you have a group that is so doctrineally distinct from their predecessors? Is God just changing his mind about everything every 20 minutes and who is to be the four runner church and how that, especially when you, oh, I didn't even do eschatological and time stuff on this list. And this is probably something that I should have done, but especially with the end times things, people can always, their vision of how the world is going to end and when the

world is going to end. I mean, you talk to a pastor in this sort of doctrinal thread, even if you went to my dad and you asked him who his, his, major profits that went before him, you know, Bob Jones, Paul Kane, and then you asked them, like they would all have distinctly different visions of what the end times looks like.

And so you have this sort of like, oh, it's just constantly changing. And I, so I think something that paves the way for this. And this is, I think, another one that is prevalent in a ton of churches and a ton of charismatic churches in general, a ton of just like mainline Christian is people become really comfortable with the phrase God told me, or God said, or God spoke to me. And I understand that. And I don't want to, there's probably people listening to this who will do the same thing. I remember right after the scandal was going on with Mike Bickle,

Alan Hood, who was a former leader at the International House Prayer and has been a very influential voice in speaking up against Mike Bickle and some of the corruption that was going on at the International House Prayer. And Alan has his own, you know, he certainly had some problematic beliefs and was sharing some problematic stuff. I think that he would even grant that and say the same. But I was very proud and appreciative of how Alan spoke up and saw that something was wrong in his community. It took him a while, but saw something was wrong in his community. And

he got ousted for it and received a lot of flat out persecution for it. But he spoke up. But yet I remember going and there was something that he posted online where he shortly after this whole scandal, he was like, this morning God spoke to me. I opened my Bible and I heard God speaking to me. And it was just a very casual way of talking about divine, a divine encounter.

And I called him out on it and I don't know if he, I don't know how much that resonated. Actually, I know personally it did because I spoke with him personally about it, but it just was I think that it's particularly dangerous when people are so just just flip it with talking about God speaking to them. And there is in a certain sense of reverence. And I think this goes into the like spiritual verification. Is this you or is this God?

And I get what people are trying to say. They're not like saying the audible voice of God came down and a burning bush erupted in front of me and I had this sort of divine spiritual experience.

Now that certainly does happen and people You do that. That's not what I'm talking about here. You know, it's, oh, I opened up my Bible and I really felt like God was speaking to me because I read this passage and the Psalms and it pertained to something that was going on, which I think that totally makes sense and that's fine.

But I think that this idea that we're sort of blending that God speaks to everybody all the time in very clear and specific ways. I know, and what I think is the big red flag with this,

is that I know that people then aren't using that to then make their own voice into a divine command. I've had this conversation with a few different co-hosts now about the issues with the God told me mentality and there are several, but the one that many people did not think about after leaving the group.

Usually when you leave the group, you think this guy was saying God told me and God clearly didn't tell me that guy is wrong or girl, you know, if you have a female leader, but it actually goes beyond that and it's something really to watch for as far as a destructive church.

When the leader is doing that, what happens over time, the congregation starts to mimic it. So you're alone in a setting, maybe in their house, maybe at a restaurant and they start telling you their own special insight.

God told me that you need to do X, Y and Z. God told me that you need to get rid of that car, get a new one or whatever it is. People will start to do this because they mimic the pastor.

Bob Scott calls it parodying, which is absolutely true. The people after you hear it over and over and over again, the indoctrination sets in and you start to pair it this thing that they're doing.

And the problem is they don't really think through what it is that they're calling God. Is it their intuition? Is it their personal convictions? Is it just simply their opinion? It will go as far as God told me and they're just voicing their opinion to try to make you adhere to their opinion when your opinion may be entirely different.

That's wrong on so many levels but it goes all the way from the leadership down to the pew, which is a problem for me. In the end, when you have leaders that are saying God told me left and right and it doesn't really edify the body of Christ, especially if it's a personal prophecy, it's another Jeff Foxworthy.

That might be a cult that they're doing this because that's not the way according to the New Testament that's not the way God operates. It's not a fortune teller with a crystal ball telling you who to marry, who to get in business with, this kind of thing.

It's usually to correct the people and bring them into a state of true revival, which isn't the NAR revival. It's basically reviving yourself to be devoted to Christ. So for me, that's a pretty big one.

And I think that using those terms to exert authority I think is where it's, if you say, hey, God spoke to me this morning through my Bible. It's just about your sort of individual spiritual experience.

I think that that's obviously less dangerous, but it's it's when that sort of terminology starts being used to exert any form of control, whether it's on a familial level, on a spouse level, on a mom, just a book, you know, your own sort of bible, house church, or whatever. This is probably the thing that I have seen the most prevalently beyond sort of the very corrupt, terrifying corruption that is at the core of some of these elite prophetic circles, like just in the day to day experience. I growing up, I saw so much prejudice and misogyny, I think that

this is something that masquerades, misogyny masquerades, as spiritual authority a lot, where it was like, hey, God told me this, and therefore, x, y, and z, you can just see a lot of people using it to diminish the voice of women in their lives.

And again, I always say this, it's not like women in authority can't do this as well. I consider myself a feminist and I absolutely believe women can be villains too. This is the, this is 2026, we know that women can be villains too, but I obviously in these communities where I think that misogyny and certain prejudices are a huge issue, I think that more prevalently, that's sort of how I've seen it, but I have also seen it, you know, women and mothers who are controlling their children, like any, any domain in which power can be had, this is something that I have

seen corrupt that power, or perhaps the corrupted power abuses this sort of technique. But then I think that that goes into then our fourth one, which I have listed here, which is that leaders cannot be meaningfully question. And this is a big, this is a big one.

Again, this is something that you might not see unless you start poking within your church. But when you start poking within your church, this will become much more clear. And this is obviously sort of reinforced with the third where when people are talking about using the voice of God to strengthen their sort of control.

This is one of the reasons why leaders cannot be meaningfully question, but even if they're not pulling the God, the safe Lord card, if there just isn't a whole lot of system or structure to question specific leaders. This is a big problem and can happen in non-nominational circles because you don't have the sort of denominational structure to question them. You know, you can't go to a different Methodist church or something or you can't go to it. If it was a Catholic church and there's sort of a structure and authority that they have, which of course has its own faults and

issues, obviously. But when the kings are, you have all of these sort of kings of their own kingdoms situation, which is very much the Wild West New Apostolic Reformation Church setting, is you just have all these kings of their little castles and you have different ministers going and traveling within them. But you have the Mike Bickles or the Bill Johnson's who are just, at least from my perspective and what I have seen are very, it's up to them. If they decide that they are not going to accept when someone's questioning them, there's really just no systematic

way to question them and wait a question or to even like challenge. This was a huge thing with the International House prayer and how when Mike Bickle, who was the authority figure within IHOP, when it came out and where when several individuals who were very prominent within the IHOP community, there were people like my mom and Deborah, who was one of the victims who spoke out and Alan Hood, who I mentioned before and I mean a bit of other individuals who were there from the beginning. Like I remember that I was around from the beginning as well and these were

all very influential people and of course I'm saying that about my mom. She was influential to me, but she was a huge part of the inception of the International House prayer and as was Deborah and as was Alan and these people are speaking out against Mike and had there not been external pressure by going to news organizations, nothing would have happened at the International House I saw how it worked and we could get into that and we've gotten into that in the past a little bit and I don't have the time to fully dive into that here, but the way that IHOP investigated

itself in that manner was from my perspective. perspective, disgusting link negligent, and not in any way concerned with the preservation of truth or people, and these were prominent people within the community. Allen Hood was easily the second most influential person at the International House of Prayer for its entire, you know, 15 years that led up to this sort of falling apart.

And he was so quickly dismissed. There were as rumors and all sort of, people were spreading these manufactured stories of how they heard him and other individuals scheming to take Mike Bickle down to, and that was sort of the motivation of why he was back stabbing Mike Bickle, and it just was, it was, it was really scary, to be honest, to be someone who was so close to that and to see how it happened.

It was just very scary to see that there was a leader or a group of leaders within the community who were well respected, who began to question the central leader and how the whole system was, was built to protect and preserve Mike Bickle.

And this is not, this is not just me saying this, there's an investigation that Firefly did that I encourage people to read the report on that, and you can, you can come to your own conclusions after reading that report of, but they talk about how there was a sort of systematic culture of abuse at IHOP again, that, that is their words, not, not just mine.

I fully agree with that from my own observations. And this, this, I think that that was just a very poignant example of a leader who was on question. And John, if you had asked me seven years ago, even when I was sort of outside of the IHOP community no longer there, if you had been like, hey, is Mike Bickle, a unquestionable leader within the IHOP community?

I'd be like, oh, well, you know, he's a strong leader, but no, there's systems of accountability. I would have, I would have even said that. And so you don't really know how much these structures are ingrained to protect and preserve the central authority figures until it sort of starts pulling apart.

So this is a harder one to be able to look at your church and understand whether this exists or it doesn't, but it's such an important one because it, it can get so dangerous, even if the leader is not the one who is perpetuating the abuse, if they have this sort of unquestion thing, if they are ones who turn a blind eye to others in their it's who are abusing people, which we'll get into that later with some of these other red flags.

That can be so dangerous in itself. So there has to be this sort of external system of accountability, not internal, not one that just goes right back up the chain and goes to the same people. But there has to be an external system of accountability.

And for a lot of these churches, it's just not there. This is a hard one because many of the ministers who are like this, and I've went through examples on the podcast, and in the research videos dating back as far as time goes, you have people who will take authoritarian control of their groups. And many of them that I have heard will say things like we have an open door policy. Anybody can come to me. Yes, that's true. Anybody can, but that doesn't mean they're going to be listened to. There is a difference. So you can't really know

what's going to happen once you do this until you do it. However, you can usually tell by personalities, when a minister is arrogant, that's another one of Jeff Foxworthy signs. You might want to get out of there if you have an arrogant pastor. The bigger thing, and this really applies to IHOP KC because of the prophetic history, if you have a minister who, if you take them away, the church doesn't exist in its current form. Usually they don't have an open door policy like they declare because they have to maintain that image, and that image is part of the group,

and when you separate the two, the church implodes. If you have a church that is training people to be leaders, and at any given day could be replaced by any member of the congregation because everybody is getting the same training, that's more of the healthy view of a church than somebody who's saying, I'm the big guy. I'm the head cheese. When you see that, ironically, that's what they portray in Hollywood and the movies television. When they show a cult, it's usually that personality, and it's always shocking to everybody who's never been in one. How could you join this? Because

you look exactly like the prototype. The movies and television, they all are showing what is exactly happening in a cult, but people get caught up into it slowly and they don't really recognize until it's too late. Usually when you have the questions and you would encounter this problem that you're talking about, usually that's the point. It's too late anyway. You've already wrapped your whole self and everything that you believe and everything that you experience is wrapped into that one bundle. It becomes a problem. For me, asking questions early is a better thing. When you're in a church, go directly to the pastor and just see how they respond. I did this. Whenever I left

the Brannem group and I started going to mainstream churches and some not- mainstream. I usually, I would either take the pastor out to launch and just ask a few questions, and I would purposefully choose something that I knew was going to probably get under the skin just to see how they responded. It's wrong. It's probably evil with me to do that, but I came from this place where I was bruised. I wanted to see how is this person going to react? Is he going to be narcissistic? Is he going to have a personality disorder? And I was glad I did because they didn't.

When you go to the normal church, they're not like this. So ask questions early. Don't wait until it's too late to ask the questions. Well, the idea that you could ask your pastor to go to a lunch and you could ask him questions about what, you know, that could potentially get under his skin.

It's just a foreign notion to me in general because you could never do that with Mike Bickle, or Bill Johnson, or Lauren Cunningham, or some of these other authority figures because this is a mega church problem, too, where there's so much spiritual hierarchy that you have the leaders. There's sort of a holy ground. There's spiritual celebrities thing. And that very much leads into this unquestionable thing because you will have people, even if the leader themselves, I saw this with Lauren Cunningham, who, from every interaction that I had, I really liked Lauren Cunningham, which, you know, no one's coming on here for me to just talk about who I like and

dislike. But I saw Lauren Cunningham show tremendous, like, patience and virtue in a couple situations, like I was once at his house when his neighbor was yelling at him for a silly reason. And I saw just the grace that he handled that situation and made me respect him a whole lot more.

But even though I got to see behind the scenes and see Lauren Cunningham and see how he was patient and stuff, there was a lot of people, if there was a situation at Wylam that was dangerous or you would not, people wouldn't even approach him because he was so unapproachable because he was such this big deal and had such spiritual authority. And I don't even think that that's necessarily malicious or anything like that. It's just a byproduct of this sort of supernatural celebrity mindset that is very prevalent within these communities that we are talking about.

So the idea, I do think people should be able to before they join in church. I mean, that's such an important, I mean, that's probably the second most important decision that you're making relationally in your adult life, outside of who you marry or, you know, who...

maybe some of your best friends or something like that is what church are you going to? Oftentimes what church you're going to help you decide who you marry and what friends you have or if you're going to church at all. And I think that you should be able to ask and get lunch with your pastor and annoy him or her and see ruffle the feathers just to see how they respond because I think it was healthy and being able to understand that sort of hierarchy is system and what is there and what's not is this person accessible to be to be approachable to be able

to be questioned. You have to be able to be accessible and many of these individuals are literally not accessible. You know, if you wanted to join Bethel Church not a chance, you could be like, hey, could I get lunch with Bill? Of course not. Of course not. You probably four steps down probably couldn't even get lunch with his associates, you know. So I think that this then leads into number five for me, which is honor and unity are valued more than truth. And so you have these quite literally with Bethel. You have culture of honor. This is about structures of spiritual

elitism. And I don't, I don't even, I am so sick of this that I'm going to speak, speaking of it critically. Sometimes I can be like, hey, I understand this on a low level. I don't even understand it on a low level. Like I, I just think that this is really dangerous. From what I've seen, like again, I'm Kavie and not Kavie and Kavie having this. I don't know if that's a verb, but I'm saying this as a Kavie. This is all of course from my perspective of what I've seen, but I have seen direct experience with how some of these churches have dealt with really big

scandals. And the culture of honor broadly was something that really got in the way of any tangible system of accountability. And it was less about whether or not this was true or not true. I encourage everybody to read the statement that Chris and Bill put out about shambles specifically, but also they had another one that was about my dad and some others.

But specifically, if you read the one, I think that it's called uh, an important letter from Bill and Chris, uh, and Dan on behalf of Bethel leadership. Um, I think that this one's really interesting because they talk about how they protected people. Um, they specifically talked with Sean Bulls how, uh, there was information that they received about Sean Bulls in 2019 and they privately stopped platforming him. Um, they said they contacted some ministries he was associated with, um, but did not clearly communicate the full problem to the much larger public. Um, and they acknowledged that they had helped build Sean Bulls

prophetic, um, uh, platform, um, and that they should have said something sooner. And it's a little frustrating to me because this was absolutely true with my dad too. Um, I, I spoke with Chris Valetin on the phone, um, when all of the scandal was going on and I found out from Chris Valetin that he had heard stories about, uh, uh, you know, very credible accusations of abuse and and spiritual, uh, manufactured spiritual prophecies and, and deception that my dad was doing way back in. I think it was around 2015 or 2016 is, is when Chris Valetin heard about that.

And I had no idea that Bethel was aware of this. I wasn't even aware of some of these accusations as a son and tell much later. Um, and this is when I spoke with Bill about this, he said that he did not want to publicly say anything about my dad and Chris Valetin also said this because they wanted to honor my dad and they wanted to honor me and my family. And I was like, Hey, you never talked with me about this. This isn't, this isn't honoring to me and my mother and my sisters because you

didn't actually ask us about this and what would be good for us or what not. And like they didn't realize that we were the victims of abuse and and had experienced a lot of, um, abusive behavior from my father that was totally baked into his sort of a spiritual ascendance and everything like that. And so this culture of honor protected my father. And I'm kind of picking on Bethel here a little bit specifically with this example because I saw it very directly. But I mean, this is also the truth with I hop and a lot of the communities around there because

some of the fathers of the faith, the very prominent individuals, Bob Jones, is one of them were marred with really serious scandals. And It was hardly ever discussed because there was this sense of like, hey, we're all fallen.

Short of the glory of God and we need to protect and preserve their legacies and their authority. And so we gloss over and it's we cover them and it's spoken these spiritual terms as if it is a good thing. But in reality, this goes back to the very first one of deception. You have a lot of people in a community who just are not able to have any salient understanding of the reality that they're in because unless you're seen behind the curtain, you don't see that these legacy prophets are marked with like really disgusting abusive behavior or deception or, you know, corruption. And this

it's just sort of all painted over. It feels like, you know, you go into a new apartment and you don't realize that the landlord painted over all of the like mold on the wall because it's just a quick gloss paint over it. And it leads to these situations not being dealt with. And I again, I would love for people to read that letter that couldn't do. I mean, read it from Chris and Bill's all words and see how they even self describe how they glossed over things and weren't able to address clear abuse within their own community because of this sort of protection. I'm wanting to

honor bowls and give him the benefit of the doubt. And you can see how it was done in that situation. And I certainly saw it with my own father. And I mean, those are just two examples that I'd sort of seen quite directly. I think that who knows all of the other things that are happening within not just battle, but just these communities in general because that's a whole point.

Who knows? Probably no one because everybody's glossing over it. No one really has an understanding of what is being hidden and what's actually on the walls there because everybody's sort of painting over everything. And I think that's where it gets really, it can get really dangerous and scary. Absolutely. And that's one of the reasons why I say it's really the system.

Because if you're looking from the perspective of the leaders that this problem is emerging from, every one of them will say, we're doing everything right. We're doing everything according to God's code. We're doing everything according to our Pentecostal code or our heritage, our God's general's code, whatever it is they have. In their minds, they think they're doing it right.

But unless you're in that system and you've been indoctrinated in that framework, You're looking outside from the outside looking in and you're saying, oh my gosh, why is there no accountability and why would people sit under a leadership with no accountability?

And that's really the problem. The system has tainted the views of people such that they can't hold ministers and leadership to accountability. So very, very scary stuff. Thank you so much for doing this.

Yeah, my pleasure. 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-Branum.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 Audible.

Thank you so much. Thank you.