Azusa Schism - The Man Who Quietly Changed Pentecostalism Forever

Music 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-Brandom.org, where history proves that truth, or at least their version of it, is truly stranger than fiction. In the past few episodes that I have done by myself, connecting some of the dots of research, I've been talking about the Azusa Street Revival, and it's very important because that was the epicenter of where Christianity in America began to diverge from mainstream Christianity into what would eventually evolve into today's New Apostolic Reformation.

If you take Azusa Street out of the mix, you literally do not have a New Apostolic Reformation because you do not have a ladder rain. You do not have a charismatic movement that evolved from ladder rain. You don't have the hypercarous mania that came next, or the New Apostolic Reformation. It was the epicenter.

So, I'm continuing that focus, but I asked this question in the episode, I believe it was the episode where I asked who owns the fire. I asked the question who owns the fire, and I started talking about different figures that potentially claimed ownership of the Pentecostal fire, one of which was William Durham. I do not think that there is enough significance placed on William Durham as it relates to the overall trajectory of Pentecostalism and what exists today in the New Apostolic Reformation because most historians favorable of the movement will point all the way back to William Joseph Seymour as the spiritual father of the Azusa

Street Revival, which is interesting to me because William Joseph Seymour in his first publication of the newsletter from the Azusa Street mission said that Charles Fox Parham was the spiritual father of the movement. I shared that document in one of the previous podcasts and you can go back and you can look through some of that history. But in today's episode, I'm going to ask who was the father of the movement because if you point to William Joseph Seymour and Seymour tells you very openly, very publicly, he's not the father, Charles Fox Parham was the father of the movement. What do you do with this? Historians who are favorable of

the movement would never choose Parham because Parham was spiritually ineligible. He was having sexual relations with young men and young boys according to many, many parents and you can read through that history as well.

I won't get into it. There were things that were happening with their children. They did not like. I'm gonna say it like that and keep it g-rated for the podcast. It was bad. It was really, really bad.

And if you say that that was the father of the movement, now you're claiming a tree that just simply can't bear good fruit. But William Joseph Seymour said he was the father. We've pointed this out.

However, if you look at what happened with William Durham, that changes everything. And what do people do with this? That's one of the questions that I'm really going to drive at in this podcast.

Because you can't really say that today's New Apostolic Reformation inherited William Joseph Seymour's version of Pentecostalism. Yes, there are some aspects of it that they did inherit. But let's talk through this a bit.

William Durham entered into the Azusa Street revival as just a visiting preacher. And while Seymour was a way Durham drew this enormous crowd and began teaching a doctrine that directly challenged the theology of William Joseph Seymour, which would have in turn challenged the theology of Charles Vox Parham since Parham was one of the men who helped train William Joseph Seymour.

So you have this sudden challenger of the core doctrine of the Azusa Street mission, drawing this massive crowd in this massive revival from a mission that is telling the people, there will come a big revival.

So here's all these people in the Azusa Street mission. They're being told through prophets and prophecies and dreams and visions that there will be this coming great revival. William Durham shows up and suddenly it's here.

What do you do with this? Everybody was joining into it, much like they do some of the revivals we've talked about in Karrismat, Karrismatic History, New Apostolic Reformation History, where people joined in thinking, this is it, this is the end, I see the revival here.

And think of this, after this happened, William Durham did not just simply disappear. His theology actually spread faster than William Joseph Seymour's. His followers carried it into new churches, new denominations, there were missionary networks and eventually much of modern Karrismatic Christianity started to adopt some of the theological differences that William Durham had introduced.

So when William Joseph Seymour gets kind of pushed to the side, Durham takes over in this big revival, goes forth with the revival, Seymour comes back in and picks up the pieces. That's really what happened here if you follow the chain of events.

And that really matters today, because most of the New Apostolic Reformation leaders claimed that Seymour was the ancestor of their doctrines. And yet they're, Industries look much more like Durham's than they do Seymores. Seymour was not this extravagant preacher who had these flashy suits and all of the things that they have now, fancy cars, etc. He was just a humble poor minister, probably with good intentions. I have yet to find anything that says he did not have good intentions or he was doing all of this for money. Though I do have on record, we've talked about it in a few podcasts, he did make quite a bit

of money off of this. There were, there's money falling out of his pockets during the revival. But yet Seymour, the man, was not really, he did not appear to be attracted to this. However, when you look at what happens with William Durham's ministry, he sees this onslaught of people for this revival and suddenly he feels big. He feels like he can make something out of this movement.

And so he does it. He starts, you know, spreading the ministry. He creates a network. If you think the new apostolic reformation and how their apostolic networks work and then picture what William Durham built with his ministry and his movement, it's really, really similar.

And in fact, I would go so far as to say when C. Peter Wagner started to take the existing networks of apostolic faith and start to brand them and give them a name, which he did. He called him the new apostolic reformation. I would say that many of those networks seem to favor William Durham's theology more than it did. William Joseph Seymour. So I want to get in that a bit today.

I want to talk to you that because it's a history that not many people are really aware of. And his North Avenue mission is really significant whenever you consider the trajectory of Pentecostalism in Chicago where John Alexander Dowey had already left a footprint, a significant footprint. Remember that Pentecostalism formed because Charles Fox Parham went to Maine to study Frank Sanford and he went to Chicago while to Zion Illinois to study John Alexander Dowey and try to learn how did they amass this fortune that they did when they amassed their fortune and created their cult. Durham was in Chicago and he would have been very, very familiar

with Dowey, the doctrines of Dowey. And some of the things that he taught, though you can't say all of them came directly from Dowey, there would have been a cross-pollination of ideas. And I think that is really important to understand when you understand that most people who joined in Pentecostalism looked at Dowey and his ministry somewhat favorably but looked at the end of his life as though it was not a good ending. And that's the point I want to really hone in on because in the making of a destructive cult, which Dowey's sect was, there's a period of time

whenever people can't discern the doctrines and enough to see that these will lead down the path of destruction. They see some of the elements as good, and they share many themes, and they see them as biblical, and they don't recognize that there's a difference, a strong difference, between New Testament Christianity and what they are teaching.

Anybody who has studied theology and looks at the New Testament and looks what Dauy taught, they would say they're night and day difference. You cannot, they're even incompatible. They would say it like this.

I'm not a theologian, but I even just simply me reading the New Testament and reading what Dauy was teaching. I'm a little bit appalled that this even took a foothold in the United States, but it took a foothold in Chicago.

The key points to take away from here are Durham was already preaching these same themes that came out of the Zeus' street conversion, sanctification, divine healing, fasting and prayer, restoration of New Testament Christianity, all of the fundamental elements of Pentecostal ism before the Zeus' street revival.

So then what happened after a Zeus' street, the missionaries went forth and they said, we have this new thing. We're teaching this new thing that has conversion, sanctification, divine healing, prayer, restoration. All of those key elements that Durham was teaching beforehand, and Durham was just one of many.

Those were not new ideas to the Zeus' street revival, but when you listen to the hypercarsimatic leaders and the new apostolic leaders of today, who are unfamiliar with history, which many of them are, they will point to Zeus' street as the birth of this thing.

It simply was not the birth, history proves otherwise. So Durham was a significant figure, but he was initially cautious about the Pentecostal claims at the mission. These reports were spreading all throughout the United States of speaking in tongues, and they had reached all the way to Durham's congregation, and it was spreading through this network of slowly developing Pentecostalism, but it's really important to understand that he was initially cautious and he was not just diving in head first.

He was not an excitable person who just simply accepted it, and so he went all the way to Los Angeles to see for himself. Therefore, this place is Durham in a different category, some of the others.

He entered into a Zeus' street as an investigator to see, are these claims true? But he left as one of the most effective evangelists of early Pentecostalism. So he is literally preaching the doctrine.

He's one of them, and his experience at a Zeus' street did transform his ministry. Durham had an advantage that the people in the Zeus' street mission did not have, and this is one of the same advantages that John Alexander Dowie had.

In Chicago, in the central part of the United States, he had a strategic location geographically. Chicago was a major transportation center, immigration, publishing, religious networking. People could move through the city and could attend Durham's meetings and then carry his message elsewhere and then connect it with all of the different communities in the United States. He's in the center of the United States, much like Dauy when Dauyism began to spread. They could easily come into Chicago and they could come back with all of the doctrines of divine healing, restoration, all of the the themes that also

Durham shared with John Alexander Dauy. So his mission in Chicago became this crossroads of communities that started to establish a broad network and that network included traveling evangelists and missionaries. You had European immigrants coming into Chicago. You had Scandinavian Pentecostals coming into Chicago, which if you know the history of Latter-Rain, that is really significant because it was spreading through the Scandinavian Pentecostal communities. You had Italian Pentecostals. You had future denominational leaders in Chicago who were cross pollinating ideas across all of the networks, the religious networks in Chicago. And so these ministers traveling between all of the

parts of the United States and Chicago started to become a network to platform some of the ideas that Durham was spreading and his ministry just spread like wildfire. Like Dauy in the early years in Chicago, Durham was becoming a big name among the holiness communities and he's again right there where many of these ideas are being transformed through the cross pollination of other ideas, some of which were Pentecostals, some of which were not. Theologically speaking, Durham also had an advantage as a well-established minister over some of the other Pentecostals who were going to Azusa Street

and then coming back and spreading Pentecostalism across the United States. Most of the Pentecostals who did this were just simply going to repeat what Seymour said. Seymour had the formula, we now need to carry this formula forward. But Durham had a well-established ministry and he was again already preaching many of the core foundational doctrines of early Pentecostalism. So at first Durham was one of the most valuable assets that the Azusa Street mission had.

He had visited with Seymour, he had received the experience, returned home, and he began to help spread Pentecostalism in the flavor that was birthed at Azusa Street. But through his theological background, he began to change some of the core elements of the Pentecostal doctrine. The original Azusa framework was basically this, you had to have three major experiences. Conversion, entire sanctification, and...

baptism of the Holy Spirit. Durham eventually began to reject the idea that a believer had to receive entire sanctification as a separate instantaneous second work of grace. He was arguing instead that Christ dealt with sin through the finished work of Calvary, much like he heard through his doctrinal framework before becoming a Pentecostal or going to Azusa So Durham had received the Pentecostal doctrine through Seymour, but he was about to go back into dismantle the entire bedrock of William Joseph Seymour's theological system. And again, he is one who led one of the largest revivals at Azusa Street right there at the mission. Whenever Seymour

was away, he kind of took over. People were thinking, okay, this is it. This is the doctrine. That's significant because many of those people would have went back and helped to share what Durham was preaching. And Durham's doctrines would eventually start to spread throughout the United States as part of the network. So he was a very forceful and very controversial personality in Pentecostalism. That is something that people began to take notice. If you're controversial and you speak with authority, you will get a crowd and people will listen to you just like Durham did. And when you look at all of the New Apostolic Reformation preachers today,

the most famous ones, the biggest ones with the biggest ministries are the ones with the most controversy. There is a connection between controversy and fame and spreading of the movement. Durham, whether intentional or not, he started to do this. He started to become controversial largely because of his changing of strategy of the fundamental elements of Pentecostalism.

But he was also an intense revival preacher. And he was very confident in his Bible teaching, his doctrines, his biblical conclusions. So he was speaking in the charismatic way. He had a very charismatic personality. This made him highly effective whenever he was attracting crowds and ministers in those crowds to help spread his doctrines. He was not willing to surrender or submit his doctrinal foundation to the pressure of the entire movement. So what happened is his opponents started to view him as divisive. He's coming into divide the people. His followers oddly enough viewed him as coming to correct the doctrine. The Azusa Street Mission was an error.

The fundamental doctrines were an error. Durham has come to correct this. So again, fast forward to the New Apostolic Reformation, Hypercares Mania. Each one of the leaders in today's movements, they believe that they are coming to correct something that was broken. And they believe that they are worthy of the Theravars.

It's far better than the next guy's version of the doctrines, and so people join in thinking this is it This is the group. They're going to bring us this rapturing faith or if they don't believe in the rapture They're going to call down heaven and suddenly we'll walk out on the ashes of our enemies Durham was that type of personality So that tension is very important to understand He was a reformer. He liberated Pentecostalism from his viewpoint from a faulty doctrine And those who opposed him thought he was just coming in to take over and he

He was a divisive preacher coming to divide the body of Christ Here's where it gets interesting especially as it relates to the new apostolic reformation For those of you who have escaped it I had this conversation recently with Jed heartly we were talking about You could view this almost like the janga game when when you have this core foundation And interview who has played janga you have this core foundation of ideas When you leave it you try to pull off just a few pieces at the top And the structure still stands because you still have that core foundation of these ideas

It isn't until you pull one of those bottom pieces out and the whole thing comes crashing down That you realize that the whole thing was built on nothing but Tottering wood that that is about to fall down Well Durham went through that experience And that's a key point to understand if you want to understand why this has evolved and changed And why it has lasted so long When you have a foundation that is built in error Not only doctrinal error, but also just simply psychological human error That it had a structure for creating authority that should have never been

So there were structures in place that in my opinion the movement began in error When people join into this movement they don't want to say that they have been completely duped So what they'll try to do is pull off a few of those Janga pieces from the top and they'll leave the bottom piece Durham did this He began asking questions that some of it did go to the core but not all of it He began to ask if Christ finished the work on the cross and declared it is finished Why do we need another crisis experience before we can suddenly receive everything that God

has promised So he was challenging the core doctrines of the movement Saying that scripture said otherwise But he did not go so far as to question the movement itself And so what happened is as Pentecostalism has done throughout history Somebody will come and challenge something that they find wrong doctrinally And they'll create a new branch and this new branch will eventually evolve and produce fruit Yet the core foundation still remains the tree trunk still remains and those who branch off of it won't ever examine the tree, they just examined the branch that they came from. So, Durham believed that scripture

pointed somewhere different than the Pentecostals that Azusa's tree were pointing, and he began insisting that they need to tweak this one doctrine. In other words, we're going to stay on this tree, we're going to stay on this branch, but we're going to cause this branch to be better than the other branches of the tree. And so, he began to spend the rest of his life developing this view of holiness that was somewhat based off of Pentecostalism, but had changed enough that he had opposition thinking he was creating divisions in the movement. So, he introduced what he called the

finished work. And this doctrine, the finished work of Calvary, the name itself explains what it was, but it simply said the cross wasn't merely the beginning, it was sufficient. The cross that Jesus died on, the work that he did on Calvary was sufficient. And sanctification began whenever a person began to trust Christ for the work that he had done on the cross, and holiness was instead of an instant thing. It was a lifelong process, and that lifelong process was filled with supernatural and spiritual crises that may happen, that may correct and change the trajectory of your life.

Much like I've heard in several modern sermons by charismatic preachers, they will often reference the Pentecostal tree, they'll give it some reverence, but they'll say this is a progressive thing that happens naturally through the course of your life, because they are actually believe it or not mimicking the branch of the tree that Durham came from, rather than the root of the tree that was being founded by Charles Fox Parham. But from a historical standpoint, think of the power of that, because this is not just about doctrine, it is about history, and what Durham did changed ministry itself. Under Seymour's model, people who were taught sanctification

first, and then baptism of the Holy Spirit, and then expected this empowerment that came instantly for the ministry, what about the ministers that didn't get that? Under Durham's model, it completely changed because believers could then seek the Spirit baptism without claiming to have had the entire experience of entire sanctification. In other words, to put it into layman's terms for people who are not familiar with the theology, in other words, you can be a human, you still have sin in your life, God will perfect you as you go, because all humans have sin in their life.

What he was teaching was actually closer to two new testament theology. Many people would argue then Pentecostalism itself. Although there were some deviations and I won't get into that discussion, he dramatically changed the movement. That's the key to understand, because now all of the evangelists who would have openly rejected the holiness theology because of the sanctification, the entire sanctification theology.

While they would have rejected that, now they could embrace Pentecostalism under duarms model. They could say that, yes, we too believe this, we have a connection. And so what happened was because his model was actually closer to New Testament theology, New Testament, theologians and evangelists, they could start to see how their theologies could merge with duarms and they could join into the Pentecostal experience, albeit a different Pentecostal experience than was originally in the Azusa Street Revival.

Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the New Apostolic Reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org.

On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book.

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So it is at this point in the podcast that the comment feeds are starting to fill up. There are people who will clearly identify with William Joseph Seymour's version of the sanctification process and say, no, John is wrong.

This guy's often left field. Modern Pentecostalism today did not follow Durham's model. And they're correct. Then you have this other side of the branch that will say, you know, this is really strange because I thought we came from the Azusa Street Revival branch of Pentecostalism and I'm starting to learn, wait a minute, we more closely match Durham.

Is this history new to us? Is this something that's brand new? And at the same time, they are correct. Both can be correct because both things happen. You had Pentecostals of today, Pentecostal historians that traced it all the way back to William Joseph Seymour.

Interestingly, you had some that go all the way back to Charles Fox Parham who probably didn't think about the fact that he wasn't really eligible as a father of movement because of his thing that he liked to do with children.

You have the other side of the equation. Some people do recognize Durham, but they'll say that this was a, this was a Bible product of what happened at the Azusa Street Revival. So you have both sides that will probably argue in the comment feeds and both are correct. That's the point I want to make. But let's talk about what happened in modern New Apostolic Reformation Theology. Most NAR preachers and teachers, they're not simply repeating what Durham taught word for word. So if you're a historian, you're probably already in the comment feed saying, no, no, no, this isn't right. We don't match

and they're also correct. So even now you've got three parties that are also correct. You have, you know, this progression of ideas from Pentecostalism to latarine, healing revival, so on and so forth. My point is picture it like a snowball rolling down a hill getting bigger. Well, picture it also rolling up the next hill getting smaller as it goes, unloading some of the doctrines. It has changed and morphed over time. So you can't say that it's apples to apples, but you also can't say it's apples to oranges. This is also, this is a tree bearing fruit

and it's all fruit from the same tree. That's the point I want to make. Randy Clark may be the clearest modern example of this. The global, awakened community, if I remember correct, I read through some of their statement of faith and they believe, you know, the Pentecostal type experience, Holy Spirit in dwells, every believer, Jesus baptizes believers in the Holy Spirit. There's a conscious experience that is happening in the believers and it occurs almost always after their conversion. He is talking about a conversion and a subsequent empowerment, whereas the core of Azusa Street was conversion and then suddenly bam, you got it all. And so Durham is more closely

aligned with Clark than Seymour. And yet at the same time, I don't know that Clark would say he traces his lineage back to Durham. It's just this cross-pollination of ideas. But think of the things that Durham is teaching, how close it is aligned, and think of the things he adds. Clark took Durham's subsequent empowerment and started to say, with this, we can expand to healing and deliverance, impartation, the words of knowledge, prophecy, basically all of the things that came in the charismatic movement. Clark has taken that route and that route is a descendant of the

Durham theology. This is something that, yes, they might claim that they go back to the Azusa Street revival, but which revival is it? Is it Durham's Revival? Is it Params Revival? There were two competing revivals, is what I'm trying to say. John Wimber, though, he took Durham's structure of theology, and he made it acceptable to evangelicals. I know that that's the other point where the comment feed will explode. Everybody hates it when I connect John Wimber to this. But as a part of history, you have to understand that this was an evolving, changing set of doctrine.

Wimber is not usually classified with the New Apostolic Reformation because he and Wagner had some key differences, and we've talked about that a few times in the podcast, but if you try to disconnect him from the New Apostolic Reformation, it doesn't work because without Wimber you really don't evolve into the NAR.

So Wimber emphasized doing the stuff, healing the sick, casting out the demons, all of this stuff, and that is essentially Durham's stage, but pushed one or two steps further. He's saying that you get this experience, and now we can appreciate the experience.

We can feel the experience, and then we can start doing things because of the experience. So Durham said that you did not have to have entire sanctification before the spirit baptism, and Wimber's movement effectively said that you really don't need classical Pentecostal identity at all.

You just need to start opening yourself to the spirit to change you and evolve you into these things. That is the Durham branch, that is not the branch that came from William Joseph Seymour.

So it could be argued that Wimber's ministry, this is far out there, and I'm not going to say that this is true, but it could be argued that his ministry was more of a descendant of Durham and the networks that were established because of Durham.

I don't believe that is the case because, again, cross-pollination of ideas, as Durham's ministry is spreading throughout all of these networks, they began influencing people. You have other doctrines coming in. I don't believe that what Wimber brought was anything new.

I believe that he was teaching what other people were already saying within the networks, and many of those networks had already been influenced by Durham. Take it to Bill Johnson, the Bethel Intensity on Power and Prayer.

Bill Johnson openly admitted that he was very strongly supportive of what Wimber did, and there's some key ties there, I won't get into that. That's probably another podcast for another day. Seymour's theology was not so impactful on Bill Johnson's theology as Durham's was.

Bethel does not normally require believers to have a distinct crisis of experience and then suddenly an entire sanctification before pursuing the healing, the prophecy words of knowledge, etc. Instead, emphasis is placed on the believer's identity in Christ.

You hear the sermons about the indwelling of the spirit, access to the presence, all of the things that essentially John Wimber and others were preaching, which was again from the Durham side of the equation.

They believe that this was a process and after the sanctification came, this process continues and come to our church and you can have this big process in our massive mega-church. Oh, there was a major shift.

That's the point I'm trying to drive at. Seymour was a person who would ask the question, has this person who has now come before me been purified and filled with divine love in this moment?

And there are examples in the newspapers we talked about it in some of the previous podcasts where people came seeking that experience and because they didn't instantly have it, Seymour and others were kicking them out of the revival.

No, you don't have it, I don't see it, get out of here. That's recorded in the newspapers, you can read it yourself. The Bethel style would be more permissive of those people. Come, you're welcome.

Yes, join us, experience God, experience this thing that we have, we have this divine love, and we got it because we allowed ourselves to progress towards it. So they're taking the Durham side where the Seymour side actually is destructive to the movement in that it has the potential to reject people from even getting the experience in the more extreme cases.

And ironically, the initial revival at Azusa Street was the more extreme case. In many ways, that is probably why when Durham came and held the revival, most people were more accepted of that because it had the potential to attract bigger crowds of people because more and more people can be filled with the spirit of Durham as preaching.

Whereas Seymour's version, this is just this little tiny group and then we're going to be carried away into the heavens when the earth is destroyed here in the next few days, that's how it was initially preached.

So there is a significant difference between what is being taught in the New Apostolic Reformation today and what Seymour began with the birth of the Azusa Street revival. So at this point, some of you are asking, why does this matter?

What does it matter if there was a division? What does it matter if Durham taught something that is more closely aligned to the New Apostolic Reformation today and Seymour taught something that was overall, it was pretty much rejected by a lot in the movement.

Why does that matter? For me, it matters because of history. History shows that patterns repeat themselves and this is where it gets important because what Durham created is a pattern that would eventually begin repeating itself in this endless cycle.

I don't think that Durham intended to create the New Apostolic Reformation. So if you're looking at that as importance and you're trying to look at this from the Durham perspective, that's not at all where I'm headed.

In fact, I don't think if you go back and study what he said, he could have never imagined a massive mega church like Bethel or any of these places, I hop KC, whatever, where people were coming and getting coffee right before they went in and all of these smokes and lights and all of the things that attract the people and use this...

psychological effect on the people in the pews. Durham would have thought that is from Satan himself. That's the temple of the devil. That's really what he would have thought. But he unintentionally established a pattern that you can watch repeating for more than a century over and over at repeats.

The pattern is this. You have the charismatic outsider. Durham wasn't the recognized authority of the revival. He was the visiting minister who came in. He was the guest speaker. He's the guy who comes on stage that's invited or either just shows up. And he's picture him like the conference preachers of the New Apostolic Reformation. This is the conference preacher that stole the show.

He comes in. He brings a new fresh revelation. And we have seen that time and time again. William Branham did it. Paul Cain did it. All Roberts did it. Todd Bentley, Sean Boats. All of these guys come in as the outsider who stole the show because they have this very very charismatic preacher.

And so when people get kind of tired, the ministry is starting to repeat some of the things that they're saying. Suddenly there's a fresh face that comes into the crowd and the itching ears just perk up. And that's really what is happening here. Durham wasn't the recognized leader, but he came in and he had that personality. And suddenly what he developed was platform over institution. He comes in. He wasn't looking to hold office, but instead he began preaching.

Now suddenly he realized that wait a minute, there's a lot of people listening to this. Let's bring publications. Let's send out invitations. Let's go to guest preach preaching. I don't know that they had conventions back then, but they would often go to the other churches in the revival circuit. They were building up this network of relationships. And with that, they were establishing not only reputation, but essentially a marketing or a branding of the ministry. And that's exactly how the new apostolic reformation functions. That's exactly how hypercarsmatic movements function. You can take that all the way down the line, laterane function the same way.

This type of influence from this outsider who comes in and steals the show, that is what is happening. And when they steal the show, they take a part of the people with them. And if you think back to that tree, they're just growing another branch. And then what happens is another person comes along, they steal the show, they grow another branch. So this tree just keeps growing and growing and turns into this weird tree that I don't know could possibly stand and eventually maybe it won't. But the key out of everything that I just said is the fresh revelation. When people

become tired of just simply hearing the gospel, they have to hear something else. And preachers are trying so hard to captivate the people who are just... hired of their Christians with itching years. I'm going to say it like that. They're not really satisfied with the gospel. That's probably a better way to say it than I just said. They're not satisfied with the gospel. And so let's look for something new. Well, suddenly a new guy comes in with a fresh revelation. Durham did this. He believed that everybody in the revival had misunderstood sanctification. So modern apostles frequently claim that God has restoring truths whenever

these leaders come in with these new revelations. That's why they invite the people to come in and share the platform. Let's hear what the next guy has as a fresh revelation, fresh mana from God, they'll call it. And they believe that this is a way of restoring the church and what they don't realize. It's not only destructive to their own ministries. It is actually destructive to the entire tree. Because if you grow enough branches off of the tree, it's going to get top heavy. And eventually it's just going to topple with the next storm. That's what is happening here. Fresh revelation is

actually bringing in different doctrines in Durham's case. And in many of the cases along the line, some of these doctrines are polar opposite from the core root that is holding up the tree. So these fresh revelations, they're destructive to the movement. And if you really think back to how Pentecostalism began, it began in the same way. It's a fresh revelation. Let's branch off of mainstream Christianity. The other thing it does is really, really odd when you think about it.

Most Christians view the central authority of the church to be Jesus. The work that he did on the cross, it is finished. But when you look through these revival movements, they all point to cities. Azusa Street. They had a big revival. It's so important to us. They hold these conventions there. Chicago. You had the healing revivals that went into United States and Canada. There were many cities along the way. Kansas City. It's a big one. Kansas City prophets, the Toronto blessing, Pensacola, Florida, Bethel, all of these different locations. It is a movement that keeps decentralizing

itself because they're trying to put the authority of the movement into a specific location, into a specific set of God's generals. In other words, the humans own the movement. I asked before in the last few podcasts, who owns the revival? Who owns the fire? It is the humans that owns the fire and the revival. And they have a central location. Or they're just part of the network. Like the healing revival, you could say it's spreading throughout the world. But there are key locations that become central and we had an experience in that location. I heard a person talking

in Branamism and they said, I remember down in Shreveport, I was there. I felt it. That was God's presence. There will never be another moment like that. And I had another lady who was on the podcast sometime back, and she said, same thing in Florida. We felt it. That was it. That was there. And it wasn't until later whenever I escaped, I realized that you can't put God into a revival and say that that's the only time you're going to experience. But the movement keeps decentralizing because they haven't recognized who owns the movement, who owns the revival. So Durham's greatest

legacy and all of this wasn't that he created a new doctrine. It wasn't even that he had adjusted the doctrine that existed. It was that he proved to be as one of the gifted traveling charismatic ministers. He proved that he could permanently redirect the entire movement and he did. So again, I'll ask the question, who is the father? Is it Durham? Is it Charles Fox Parham? Is it William Joseph Seymour? Who is the father? Who led the movement? Did Durham win? That is really one of the key questions because if you walked into most Pentecostal

churches today, who would you actually recognize when you hear those doctrines? Would you recognize what Seymour preached or would you recognize what Durham preached? And I'm not talking about the superficial doctrines. I'm really talking about the core of this. Most Pentecostals, by and large, would immediately answer Seymour. They would say, we are the one that follow Seymour. You look at their literature. He's got his picture all over it. His picture hangs in seminaries for Pentecostal movement. He appears in all these documentaries. His revival is always celebrated how the Azusa Street Revival set the pattern for all of the future

revivals. But that's not really the question here. The question is, which man's theology are the churches in the movement actually practicing? And in doing so, who are they making the father of their theology, the father of their movement? Here's where it gets interesting.

Seymour won the memory. Seymour became the symbol of Pentecostalism. He had everything that you would want in a Pentecostal minister. He was a humble pastor. He was an interracial revival at a time when that was not really widely accepted. He had the prayer meetings, the miracles. He had the famous building that everybody goes to that's like a shrine when you go out to LA. Anybody who tells the story, they will tell their story connecting it back to Seymour. He's the beginning, usually. He is the hero of the Pentecostal story. But Durham won the operating system of the movement.

Movement aren't just built on symbols and heroes. They're built on the theology or the ideologies. And if you examine that ideology that Seymour developed, it's far different from what Durham changed, and if you follow the Durham pattern, you start to realize that his ideas became the normal position within the Pentecostal movement.

So Pentecostal movements today, when they look at Durham, they say, no, we're not like that. He came in and he tried to rob the revival from us. But yet they believe the Finnish work of Calvary, there's almost not a single Pentecostal minister that would argue against the Finnish work at Calvary.

They believe that sanctification is progressive. In most cases, not all, they believe that the spirit baptism may occur after the conversion. That was deeply rooted in what Durham was saying was wrong with early Pentecostalism.

Supernatural gifts are available to even the ordinary believers. And the minister doesn't require this crisis to come into the entire sanctification. Anyone who preaches that, they're actually preaching Durham's legacy. I'll take it a step further because, remember in earlier podcasts, there were people that were being turned away from the Azusa Street revival because they came in wanting to get the experience, claiming that they had already had an experience.

And so they were rejected. They said, no, you can't have it. What you had wasn't real. That was not how Durham taught it. Durham taught you could come to Jesus. You could get your heart right with God.

And then he would correct you as time goes because it is finished. That is the Durham legacy, that is not the Seymour legacy. What Durham created is something that would evolve over time, but what he changed really matters because the framework that he developed for the sanctification process, it became widely spread throughout the healing revival, William Brannum or Robert's, A.A. Allen, T.L.

All of these guys are preaching the Durham side of the equation because it invited people of different types of faith into the movement rather than openly rejecting them because they could not get along with this.

Whenever you think about that and then think what came later, the Laterane movement developed after this and there was this cross-pollination of ideas from people who were Pentecostal and people who weren't Pentecostal. Whenever Brannum died and it started to transition into the charismatic movement, charismatic renewal, you had people like John Wimber who were building on ideas that they probably didn't even take all the way back to, historically back to Durham.

They thought it went back to Seymour, but again it was not the doctrinal framework that Seymour created. They wanted the open door. It was an open door policy, come, God will change you, the work is done on the cross already.

It is finished. John Wimber was teaching this and that, I'll say this, that aligns more closely with the New Testament than what they were preaching in early Pentecostalism. See Peter Wagner, New Apostolic Reformation, same thing, the more you open the door people to come in, get into the faith, and then start to enter into the sanctification process.

The more you're aligned with Durham, and that is the open door policy of the New Apostolic Reformation. Come out of your church, it's cold and formal, come to our church, and we will change you. So the further you move in history away from Seymour, the further the doctrines also shift away from Seymour. And a lot of that is due to the fact that Durham invited people into the Pentecostal movement who could be more aligned with the finished work. That is really what has happened here. So people who are standing on this side of the argument, they're actually standing

on the Durham side. So you could clearly say that in the history that we've examined, Durham was the clear winner of who is the father of the movement. So here's the fascinating part. As I mentioned, it's like a snowball going down a hill, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and then it slightly, you know, rose up a hill, slightly getting smaller, taking some of the things off. Think of it rolling down the hill. Durham says we have progressive sanctification, and that becomes one of the core elements of what spreads throughout the holiness networks that are aligned

with the Durham side. William Branham comes along and he adds to this, the prophet restores the truth. Laterane comes along and it says the church will be mature enough to finish God's work. John Wimber comes along and says we're going to finish God's work. Everybody gets to do the stuff.

Bethel comes along and says everyone can be activated to do the stuff. New Apostolic Reformation says the Apostles are going to equip the church to do the stuff to transform the nations. These are all different doctrines, but as you can see, they're all built on a foundation where the supernatural ministry is available before an experience of an entire sanctification occurs.

In other words, they're all elements of a doctrine that can only exist because of what Durham taught. As I mentioned before, this Jenga game, how you have this stack of blocks in this game and you pull one piece out of the bottom, the whole thing can come tumbling down. Well, there is another way to make it tumble. If you've been, like me, if you have an experimenting mind and you have two Jenga games instead of one, what happens whenever you stack two of them tall? Does the game play the same? If I pull one out of the top of the first game, will not the whole thing fall over? What happens

if I add a third and a fourth and a fifth? Think back to what I said about how this progressed. Durham laid the foundation, laterigned built upon that. You had the healing revivals you had all the way through the charismatic movement to the NAR. Each one of these stack, basically stacking themselves on top of the same types of doctrine. They do change, they do evolve. I understand this, but the core foundation of the holiness movement.

It still does exist, and it existed because of Durham's side of the equation, which most at the top of the stack would say is incorrect. So therefore, if it isn't correct, and you've got this Jenga game, you must therefore pull out the pieces that are incorrect at the bottom of the stack.

And what happens when you do this? I would argue that there is a different father of the movement. The Bible talks about God is not the author of confusion. And whenever you have a movement that says this revival was the epicenter.

And then before the revival is even over, you have an opposing party who's part of the same revival who says, no, that formula won't work for salvation. We need a new formula. You have this immediate confusion, which one is right, which one is the father?

The simple fact that I'm asking who is the father really answers the question. I don't even have to answer it for you. You cannot find a father because it is multiplying confusion. This is a movement that multiplies itself in confusion.

Does that mean it's all wrong? Absolutely not. I will never say that. But if you examine the fruits of this ministry, you have to think back and understand this was confusing from the very beginning, from its inception it was confusing.

And people today, if they were to go back and hear the sermons that were being preached at the original Azusa Street Revival before William Durham came in and changed it, they would say, you guys don't know theology.

You don't know salvation. Have you actually read this Bible you're preaching from? And then the irony of that is there would be people in that building who said, no, I can't read. I'm preaching from it, but I can't read it.

That was literally said that is almost verbatim a quote from the Azusa Street Revival. So to summarize this question of who's your daddy. I'm going to do it like this. William Joseph Seymour gave Pentecostalism its birthplace and he declared that Charles Fox Parham was the father of the movement.

William Durham changed the Pentecostal theology and his finished work doctrine replaced the original doctrine of the movement. Durham's theology made Pentecostalism more accessible and more and more people came into the movement. That same theological shift changed the ministry culture of Pentecostalism.

And the new apostolic reformation inherits much of its framework from that doctrine, progressive sanctification, subsequent empowerment and gifts and doing this stuff, independent apostolic networks, activation of spiritual gifts. All of these things come from the framework.

So think of it like this, William Joseph Seymour gave Pentecostalism its greatest revival. Then William Durham came in shortly after and totally reshaped its theology. more than a century later, we're talking about things in sermons that came from William Durham, not from William Joseph Seymour. So the church today is still living with the consequences of not knowing who its father is. So 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-Brandom.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.