Gospel Assembly Exposed: A Former Member Explains The System

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 very special guest, Justin, former member of Gospel Assembly. Justin's good to have you on and to talk about Gospel Assembly. If you've listened to any of the others that I've done about this particular group, you already know that I'm fascinated with it because in my research as I was studying the creation of William Brannum before he became who he was, he was apparently connected to William Souters and eerily some of the

stories of William Brannum match the supernatural stories of Souters to an extent and I was going through all that trying to figure out what is this and what is the school of the prophets.

So, good to have you aboard. Maybe if you could begin by telling everybody a little bit about yourself. Yeah, certainly. Thank you for having me on first of all. Yeah, so I'm Justin. I was born and raised into the group. I was born in the 90s, early 90s, and from early adulthood to close to 30, it's all I knew. And like you said, once I started studying this stuff on my own outside of the group, I would find, you know, Tethers here, Tethers there, two different groups and different founders and leaders of different religious sects of, you know, one that's not necessarily

one that's Pentecostalism, but just Pentecostal and holiness as a group. You would find names being attached back and forth. And that's how I stumbled across your channel with William Brannum going to the school of the prophets and then making ties to Jim Jones, just multiple different avenues of loose ties, loose connections. They're all unique, but yet all the same. Very much so.

I told somebody one time it was like they made a cookie cutter stamp of, here's how you make a cult and they just started stamping. Somebody put it on a pogo stick. That's what it feels like.

These groups are so similar and the framework, if you've studied Dr. Stephen Hasen's bite model, the framework is just basic complex authoritarian structures. You control their behavior, you control the information, they can have controller thoughts and manipulations.

lay their thoughts and control their emotions, the bite model. Once I learned that and started going back through my own past, I began to realize that it was a little bit unethical what they did to my head.

But I don't yet know that the people who did this did it on purpose. It's like this learned behavior that the leadership has and I know some of the leadership that are really good people, not like they intended to, but when you're trapped in the movement, they get in your head and they stay in your head long after you leave.

It's really, really difficult. Certainly. So I would agree with that. There's plenty of good people, certainly good people in the gospel assembly movement. And the leaders, like you were saying, a lot of them have very good hearts and very good intentions.

But it is such a learned habit where they can justify what they're doing, their method justifies the means, essentially. I think in their mind, they're saying, I'm causing harm in the moment, but I'm genuinely trying to do the right thing and it's difficult.

It's difficult once you're on the outside and you see all the things that are wrong with their methods. It's just simply not Christlike. It's man-made laws, man-made rules, and it's very destructive. It is destructive.

So let's talk a little bit about being raised in gospel assembly. I've talked to a few ladies who came on the podcast, you've probably seen those interviews. I'm interested from the male perspective. What was it like being a man raised in that type of movement?

Yeah, certainly. So growing up, I was fortunate enough. I lived a fairly affluent life. My parents did a wonderful job raising me. I'm thankful for the upbringing that I had. Plenty of play, plenty of happiness in our home.

My parents are both very loving individuals. I do have a younger sister and I will say in our early childhood, if it wasn't school during the summer, it was play, having a good time.

Not really thinking a whole lot about it because it's your entire world. You're kind of in a fishbowl, so you don't see anything unusual. You go to church at regimented times, whether you like it or not, and you stay for four hours at a time sometimes.

You're not really paying attention. You're not engaged in the service you're playing with toys in the floor or something of that nature. Then you mingle with other gospel assembly members and their children. Then I would say through the teenage years, you dig in deeper and you become more indoctrinated or you go my route and start questioning at a younger age.

I had a very curious mind, but you did ask about from a voice perspective. For me, I didn't have to start strictly adhering to... dress codes until I was probably in my early teens, maybe late teens, I was still able to wear short sleeves.

I never really wore shorts or anything like that. That was a definite no-no within the group. But my sister, I will say, she had to start adhering to the dress code much, much earlier than I did long sleeves and dresses.

But outside of that, it was as far as the mentality goes, you look at the men, the leaders in your group, and you aspire to be like that. Man, I wanna be like someone, so I wanna be like brother, brother or someone.

So he testified and he really brought the house down. I wanna be like that someday. And you really try to culture your mindset towards that at a younger age. So you definitely have this mentality of aspiring to be a better speaker, better bringer of the spirit.

And that's a phrase that I've coined, but it drives the point, regardless. You aspire to be that way, because that's your whole influence. I'm so glad that you answered that question like that. That's one of the things that I have learned is common among all of these Pentecostal sects.

If you ask the females what it was like, they go through all of the many rules that was placed on their shoulders. If you ask the men what it was like, well, we didn't have to dress like that.

We didn't have all the dress code rules. It's usually, it's like it's a good old boys club. The men had it really good. The women had a lot of weights on their shoulders. Most of them on necessary weights, if you know the Bible, but the men had it pretty good.

I was the same way I grew up. I actually had a pretty good cult life growing up and I was kind of carefree or at least I thought I was. But the problem is like you said, we were in a fishbowl.

The real problem is the person who's cleaning the bowl didn't clean it properly and it kept getting dirtier and dirtier as time went on. And you start to question, why is this water so dirty?

If this is a movement by God, shouldn't this be clean and pure? And shouldn't we be able to breathe in this water well? And there are people in the movement who are really suffocating because of that.

So having a critical mind, unfortunately, I can speak from experience, it is unfortunately a curse when you're in this type of movement. Yeah, and I'll even add to the fishbowl analogy. If you don't keep it clean, you can't be transparent.

And there's a lot of secrets, a lot of... And I wouldn't say secrets that shouldn't be kept. Some people, the privacy is needed and should be respected. So one thing shouldn't be said about this family and then not kept from this other family.

That's private business. But there's a lot of things like finances. And I know you've heard that before. A lot of finances, where the money is going. I actually had an uncle stand up in church and get very vocal about where the money was going.

going, and he got sat down very harshly for asking such a greedy question. But yeah, so the fish bowl analogies, that's a really good one. I only witnessed one guy stand up and make a ruckus in a church, and we were, we were on a really long service, and he got to be like one thirty two o'clock. He stood up.

He started tapping his wristwatch. Look, man, we got to go eat. That was, that was the extent of it. But, you know, the money is a big problem. I'd never thought about it until after I left the movement. I never studied the tithe doctrine because they want to say we're preaching the old covenant ties. We, we're doing exactly what the old covenant says.

Number one, I never thought that, wait a minute, we're under the new covenant, as new covenant Christians. But number two, if you do the math on it, every tenth person is a salary when you're demanding ten percent tithe. So for every ten people, you're making a salary, you got a hundred people, you get a ten salary income. Where does all of this go? And I look back at people like my grandfather. He, he got paid a salary from the church. It was a little bit different from him. But I would watch people come to his house and give

him money that was above and beyond this. And there's no telling how much money he actually well. I'll take it back. I do know how much he had when he died. I won't say it. But the money is a little bit different than people think whenever they're in, in the pews.

Certainly. And just another quick example in the financial aspect, you know, I'm currently attending a church where, you know, quarterly, they put out a bulletin. It shows exactly where every red cent is going. And it's full transparency, full accountability. And I think that's very important, you know, I, I, I as a steward of, of my finances want to know where my finances are going, whether it be, you know, changing the light bulbs or a mission elsewhere in the country. I would like to know where it's going to decide whether or not this is the right place to be placing my finances. Honestly, the, the,

the direction in which it's going is not so much the point as the accountability. I think when you are capable of hiding your finances or it's no one else's business, that leaves an open door for no accountability whatsoever. The, the, the finances are so fluid that you can spend it on whatever and there's no justification for it. Absolutely. You know, I, I really don't have a problem with how people want to dress or whatever culture they try to say.

You can go wear an umbrella if you want for all I care. It doesn't matter to me. But the problem is when you start demanding it. And while at the same time you're demanding their money, and then you realize that you can control the people by the things that you give them to fear, the things that you hang over their heads, the, one of the big things, I don't know if it was the same in your group, but one of the big things was if you ever confess to the pastor, you'd hear ten Germans on it. They would hang that over your head and you struggled to get back out from

under that. I know people who did and they have thankfully left now, but there's so many problems with the way that they treat the people. And I know that the leadership has to know what they're doing has a power over the people. Whether they are doing it and they think they're doing it the right way or they're doing it in an unethical way, they still know that they have an authoritarian control over the people. The problem I have with this is there's nothing really in the Bible that says that you should ever have that type of control.

And the Holy Spirit is the one supposed to lead and guide you. So in the end, what happens is they're usurping the role of the Holy Spirit. Absolutely. You know, I'm a firm believer that, of course, according to scripture, once you become the temple of the Lord, he makes that intercession for you, not a priest. A priest under the old covenant had to go and make a sacrifice for himself first and then a sacrifice for the nation of Israel. He was the intercessor to God.

And now under the new covenant, Jesus is our intercessor, not a priest, not someone in a clergy position of any shape and form. My repentance goes straight to Jesus and because I have faith in him, you know, that repentance is covered and spoken for through Jesus. Very much so, that is the case at gospel assembly, is you'll come to the pastor with a problem and they may try to help you sort it out. But then the very next service or a couple of services, whether they say your name exact or just allude to it is besides the point. The fact of the matter is it's used as a

congregative lesson for everyone to learn and then, you know, there's no discretion whatsoever. But they absolutely do see the authority in using that and they very much so see themselves as the intercessor for their people. And that's clearly not biblical. And a lot of people don't know much about William Southers in this cult. It's kind of slipped under the radar for many, many years.

I did have one person who contacted me and they were saying, John, you need to dig a little bit deeper than you have because before Laterane existed, they were preaching some of the Laterane doctrine, some of what would eventually evolved into it. And to some extent, they were really a precursor to what would eventually come to be the New Apostolic Reformation. The school, think of the school of the prophets. You have these people who are showing this authoritarian type of control, but they're training other people to do the same thing. And even by the name,

school of the prophets, they're saying that the prophets have a certain power and a gift that's far above what the normal people have. What I don't know, just simply because of not attended one of these sessions. It is how far they went with the profits in the school of the profits. Are you familiar with what they did and how it worked?

No, and unfortunately, that's an area that I haven't dug too deep in. I've come across some literature of William Souther's where he was exalting those people. Again, I know with previous interviews you've had, you've heard the Threshing floor and you've heard numerous times where William Souther's opened up a time for that to happen. However, regardless of what conclusion they came to, those people that he deemed students of that school, they were exalted to be higher than, I guess, their congregation or those that would be under them.

That's the extent that I've researched so far. Yeah, it's just so odd when you think about it. When you're trying to mimic the old covenant system and you're trying to basically put yourself back into ancient Judaism, you try to mimic the structures that existed, but the reason for the structures don't exist today.

And that's part of the reason we're under the new covenant. Without the structures that required the system of leadership that they had, I mean, think about it, we had back in the ancient world, there were the judges and interestingly, there were female judges which kind of defies the whole premise of all of this, but they try to mimic that old system and try to basically put you back under the mosaic law, but only parts of it, which is really odd when you read scriptures like, what is it, James? If you try to uphold the law and you fail it any

point, your guilty of the whole law, how can you justify this? And I know for a fact that there are ministers who are aware of that passage, but still try to apply only half of the rules.

Was that similar in what you came out of? Yeah, so it is very convenient that there's cherry picking involved in the old covenant laws. Yeah, so there was a conversation between a relative of mine while back, and because I'm on the outside now, and there are very much so still in, I was breaking the commandments, and I asked which ones, and they explained which ones they were, and then I proceeded to ask, okay, so what was Jesus' commandments? Are those the commandments that were breaking? Are we talking about the Ten Commandments? Because if I remember correctly,

he completed those laws, like he fulfilled the commandments, and now we live the law through him. And there was no real response for that, but through the church, there was, you know, clearly you adhere to the Ten Commandments, there were Not any eating rituals or dietary restrictions.

We did have a couple of churches. I will say we did have one church that I know of that did impose dietary restrictions. But they also were on the, I have a Richter scale for the group as a whole.

We had some churches that were like a three. Mine was like a seven and then we had some that were full-blown 12s just off the Richter scale. And this one was very much so off the Richter scale to the point where there's been investigations with the head pastor and they since been removed because of some allegations.

And again, we'll skip over that for now, but it definitely varies from church to church, which laws they choose and which laws they'll excuse and the things of that nature. The dietary restrictions, I find kind of funny because most of the people who preach that way or most of the followers who try to condemn people that way, they've not actually read the mosaic law.

Even though they're holding a Bible in their hands, they don't actually read it and they don't really know what's in it. And people will come at you, you know, you're breaking this law, you're breaking this commandment and they're talking about the mosaic law and I'll say, but you eat shellfish.

And they have no idea what I'm talking about, but that was one of the laws. I wanted to say, I didn't do it, but I wanted to say one time, well, your wife, when she has a period, she goes into the temple and that's violating the law.

You can't do that, but the funnier thing is in the New Covenant, they're, you know, it's entirely different, the frameworks different, but they do talk about the sins and one of the sins is gluttony.

Well, the person I was talking with was quite large and so I wanted to go there, but I decided that's probably a bad idea. I'll just say it's funny that you mentioned that. We'll leave it at that.

Yeah. Yeah, so it's, it sounds like we had quite a bit of similarities. What were, whenever you think back and you think of the doctrines that they had, what would you say is the strangest doctrine that Cosmo Assembly had?

Looking back, you know, William Salders was very against, he did not want to teach trinitarianism, he didn't want to teach on this and I'm aware that you've studied this fairly in depth and through the documents that I found, it was worded exactly like this.

He found a compromise so that he could reach both sides of the aisle. So he went down the middle and developed a new doctrine which was, Jesus was a, was God's first and greatest creation and through Jesus he created the rest of the universe.

Unfortunately, that doesn't line up historically because we both know that Charles Tate's Russell, the founder of, the Jehovah's Witnesses, that was his idea first, back in the late 1800s, and William Souther's came to the picture from a preaching perspective in the early 1900s, 1915, something of that nature. So when he developed that, it was not something new, but he was proposing it as a new idea. So that was a very shocking discovery for me, because I was always against the Trinity by habit, and through studying, personally, I do believe in the doctrine of the Trinity just through scripture reading, you know, studying how the divinity has proved

through all three persons. And it's just so bizarre to me to see that. And then I guess another one would be the evidence of speaking in tongues. You absolutely must speak in tongues to prove that you have the Holy Spirit. And again, that's just simply not true through the scriptures at all. And that's one that I've, I've, the further removed I am, the more bizarre it gets. How can you ignore so many scriptural directions? Paul is very explicit on the mode, the means, the thought process behind how the Holy Spirit works and chooses and uses, uses people. It's, it's very, very hard to miss. You have to be ignoring it,

blatantly ignoring it. And a lot of modern Pentecostals or people who were in these types of sects don't really realize this, but the way Pentecostalism evolved, the Godhead debate was a huge problem. In fact, that's why you have so many factions of Pentecostalism. And then you had these, I hate to say it, but they, they sound like scoundrels, but these people who decide that I want to appeal to both sides. So I'm just going to go down the middle and claim that I'm neither one, but somewhat lie in the middle, but yet the same as both of them.

Brandham did this. Brandham had the exact doctrine that you're talking about. He, he said that Jesus was a thought expressed. And then he came to be and he created the world. So he, he got this likely, I want to say he probably got it before sauters, but they weren't connected. So sauters would not have gotten it from him. But like you said, it does go back to Charles Tase Russell. And I do have word from people that knew Brandham that said he had a Jehovah's Witness lady that was helping him with some of the sermon content. So he was, he was basically

just regurgitating whatever was said. But then he would go to some of the Pentecostal assemblies. And if they were a oneness assembly, he would baptize oneness. And if they were Trinitarian, I am told he would baptize Trinitarian. So you had these, these people who really had no conviction whatsoever. They really didn't care. It was just a means to make a living for some of these people. As far as Jehovah's Witness This goes, the doctrine that they have, I would say gospel assembly probably adheres to almost 90% of Jehovah's Witnesses exact doctrine, line for line, with the exception of speaking

in tongues. There's probably a few nuances here and there, however, they will absolutely deny that there are anything alike. They'll say that they're close, they believe similar. And even I've had a relative say, if they knock on my door, all you gotta do is say that you have the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues and they'll run away, which is unfortunate because that's a good counter-witnessing opportunity.

However, that's just the way that they look at it. Another doctrinal oddity is baptizing only in the name of Jesus. They will not baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

And I think there's not a whole lot of scriptural backing for that. So what they say is, they try to justify that by saying, well, the Holy Spirit's an it, not a he. So we can't baptize in the name of an it, we'll baptize in the name of Jesus because he's the one who was sent for us.

There's some sort of justification through ignoring more scripture. Yeah, a lot of them will say that those who are baptized, Father, Son, Holy Ghost, they would say that they had to be rebabtized before they got the Holy Spirit, which is, it's so odd when you think about it.

But that is how I would say a majority of one has been a costalism, believe like that. The willingness to baptize and proclaim obtaining the Holy Spirit or baptizing somebody, there's not a good measuring method.

I will use my son as an example. He's very young and his mind is a million miles away from church, regardless of what he's with us or with his mother at that gospel assembly, his mother still attends gospel assembly.

But he received the Holy Spirit, you know, a gospel assembly one night. And then they baptize him maybe a year later. And I asked him. He said, do you know why you got baptized?

I don't know. Do you understand, do you understand, you know, what Jesus did for you? No. And so it's so unfortunate because we're so eager to, we're so eager to push people into the doctrine and saturate them with essentially brainwashing that they will just proclaim that this happened and this occurred where there's no understanding whatsoever.

And, you know, it's just unfortunate. You know, you're talking about your son's baptism and... The way that the community wants them to be baptized just for the sake of baptism, not even understanding what it is.

One of the things that I've noticed is in a lot of the more doomsday focus groups, they do that. They want you to be baptized early because doomsday is about to come upon us and if you're not baptized, then are you really saved?

That's the question they ask. It really turns into a problematic thing for me because if you understand how baptism works, it's a confession of your faith. How can you confess it if you don't even understand why you're doing it?

But because of the way that the doctrine has been spun in some of these Pentecostal groups, you have to do it quickly because you have to get saved before the rapture comes because the rapture is imminent and if you don't, you're lost to hell.

So they're using it both as a whip of fear but also as a tool to manipulate the children because they're trying to push the children into the same, fit them into the same mold that everybody else is before they even ready to be fit.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, absolutely it happened to me. I was eight years old when I first spoke in tongues and I spoke in tongues many, many times. Had no idea why. It was what everybody was doing and I wanted to be a part and then the older I got and I wouldn't say the wiser that that came later.

But the more I questioned but still wanted to look the part out of fear, I had to dig deep and find an emotional response to invoke that speaking in tongues essentially. So there was never really any understanding of what was happening and why I was doing it even as a young adult.

It's just what you did and if you didn't do it and you hung back, someone was coming to get you to encourage you to the front because something was wrong with you. 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- and brand and historical research, we want to thank you for your support. So let's talk a little bit about your critical thinking and what actually led you to come out of the group.

I remember whenever I first began to open up and critically think it was overwhelming because I'd never really stopped to examine my faith. What do I believe in why? And when I did, it was, I was overwhelmed because suddenly I found out that there are so many things wrong with it.

It's not just one or two, there are so many things how could I have never noticed this? How can anybody who's leading it have not seen this? And I started asking questions. It got me into a whole lot of trouble.

What was it like for you when you first began to open up and what was the thing that really kickstarted your way out of the group? Yeah, certainly. I will say so I was, I was probably 14 when I had my first lights on moment of, that doesn't sound right.

I was traveling with a family member and we were discussing how our youth in the group were kind of disrespectful in public. And it really, I don't want to say that I was a meek or humble kid.

I was definitely a loud and obnoxious individual, very vocal, but I always tried to use respect and show my manners and public to a server at a restaurant or someone in public. And I noticed those around me did not share that same value.

And so I brought this question, what are we doing about our children's respect? What are we doing about them? Are youths showing some respect in public or their manners? And I even said, I feel like that we should be doing some sort of witnessing or mission work, doing a soup line, teaching them how to be servant leaders.

And you know, and I had this great aspiration, this great idea of, you know, we should be being humble and serving the community. And the response I was met with was, that's not our job.

And gospel assembly is anti witnessing. They are very inward, very isolated. They don't, they don't try to spread their message. And they, the ones who will see this will probably respond, yes, we do.

Every time I have a conversation with someone, you isolate moments where you see maybe see an opportunity to speak to somebody, but as a whole, there's no active movement to witness to a large crowd or a community.

That's what really spurned my questioning. And I will say unfortunately, all those questions were going through my mind. Over the years, from 14, probably to 17, 18, I could have taken in the more rebellious route, but I was so, I would say trained to be submissive to leadership and those around me that I kind of developed two lives and I was two me's. The me that they would see at church or around church functions, and the me when I was alone. And that actually ended up being a very destructive path for myself anyway. Made some unfortunate choices, made some

very difficult hard things to wrestle with decisions. I questioned God's existence for a time and for a while I would say, if he's real, you know, he made a lot of mistakes. And I thank God he showed me grace on this side of it, but there was just simply a lot of questions and it started with that when that one sticks out in my mind the most. It's not our job to witness to the rest of the world. You know, it's unfortunate because I've talked to several different people from several different groups. And there are levels of destruction. You cause it your seismic, I don't know how you

said the seismic chart or whatever, Richter scale. There are levels of destructive and those who are somewhat benign, they'll have outreach programs. And what happens is they'll have the outreach program. And they come in contact with other Christians and other Christians are, you know, they many of them know their Bibles. And so whenever they start to question, well, why are you teaching that? When the Bible says this other thing, what happens is it causes a minor disruption in the group. Somebody suddenly has critical thinking and we can't allow this. And so over time, what happens is they start to scale back their outreach. And they do exactly what you said,

when there's an opportunity and they think that they can get somebody, they'll go after them. And you also have, I don't know if you had this in your group, but we have like, I don't know, I hate to use a drug return, but we had some people are just really odd who would go sit in McDonald's and coffee shops and you just knew that they were, they're the crazy ones. They were branded crazy by many of the people here in the group. And they're actually doing the recruiting, or attempting to. They're failing miserably. But usually it's those kind of people that do

and not the main body. There is no coordinated effort to outreach and grow and, you know, it build this group bigger, which is odd when you think about a group whose sole purpose is to reach the lost and save the lost before the end of the world. They should be going to knocking on every door, you know, especially the ones that are teaching the Doomsday is imminent. They should, they should be doing exactly like the Jehovah's Witness. Go knock on every door, bring everybody that you can. And I hate to say it because it's annoying when they come, but I respect the Jehovah's

Witness for that, even though they've scaled that back. They're trying to do what I just said, but those that become really destructive. If they isolate themselves, they grow internally just simply by having offspring.

And then what happens is the fish tank just gets dirtier and dirtier because you're not bringing outside the thought. And over time what happens is you become static. You become static in the way that you dress, the way that you act, your belief sets, what's right and what's wrong.

And if you stay in it long enough, the world around you has changed so much that even the rules that you have to govern your group don't apply it to some of the new things that exist in the world.

Certainly. Yeah, so again, we were so isolated and I would like to add that I think what caused me to ask that question at a young age was we were, you know, I started homeschooling when I was 13 and I had made some friends through the homeschooling community that we were going through.

And a lot of these kids, my age, knew their Bible far better than I did and I could hear them talking in class about certain things and I would listen to it and I would say, well, that's not right.

And then I could tell that they knew their scripture better than I did and I was like, what, is that right? Yeah. I think that's right. No, it's not. And I think that's what started the wheels turning was actually hearing other people just proudly, you know, expressing their faith.

I think I've mentioned this before on one of the other podcasts, but when I was deep in the cult, deeply rooted in it, I had a job where I was, um, I was a director over IT people and one of the, one of the people I was interviewing to become an employee was a Hindu and I was one of the people I was not like the destructive groups.

I would all often engage people and talk about Jesus when I was in it. I started engaging this Hindu guy thinking, I'm witnessing to a Hindu, maybe I can convert a Hindu to Jesus, well, to the cult and he pulled a Bible out of his backpack.

And I was so shocked and I was sitting there thinking, well, what are you doing with this? And he started preaching to me, not preaching, but he was, he was excited that I was talking about Jesus.

And he started talking about things that I didn't know in my Bible. He actually inspired me to go dig and read, read more than I did. And I think I remember coming across a few things that I was reading and thinking that just simply doesn't match what I heard.

But I had heard the Hindus say it. So he knew more about the Bible than the leaders in the cult, which is really odd. And I asked him, why, why are you, why are you reading a Bible?

Isn't that against the Hindu code? And he said, no, the Hindus can have multiple gods and Jesus is just one that I chose. And I think he had, was it Vishnu, the, the elephant God or some weird thing like this.

And anyway, the moral of that story is, even the people who are, who you would not consider to be Christian by Christian standards, often know more about the Bible than the leadership in the groups.

And that's what, that was the fact that I kept in, countering people like this over and over, then whenever I did leave the group and I started attending a Christian church, I'm learning things about the Bible, the reading it and the reading the same Bible that I've read for years, but they're expanding upon the scriptures with other scriptures, making it just come alive in ways that I didn't know that could happen.

And I'm reading through it and I'm realizing that every single thing that I knew about the Bible, I was reading it through the lens of the central figure, what he was saying about it.

And half of what he said didn't make any sense. So once I came to that experience, I think things begin to change a lot really quickly. What happened to you after you started to go to your new church?

For me, so it was a very, it was an interesting slow process. So I had remarried and neither one of us had any interest in going to church. She was raised in a Baptist church and you know, she was from a previous marriage as well and she said, I'll never go back to church.

I've just been to too many churches where I got hurt or something happened and clearly my case was unique amongst the two of us. And I was like, I don't know if I want to go back to church either.

I was very curious to see what a Baptist church or a different denomination looked like, you know, just because I knew what I had wasn't right, but I didn't know what was right. And then Q, two of our friends that we befriended, shortly after we were married, they started pestering us about going to church and we finally went and it was a very apparent that I wanted to go to this church because they were speaking the truth and they were speaking straight from the Bible scripture for scripture and explaining what those scriptures meant.

So when I noticed that, I was like, man, what am I missing here? Because previously when I would read my Bible, it was catch phrases, you know, cherry picking scripture and you may know those scriptures really well in gospel assembly, but what's before and what's after?

What's the context of that scripture? What's the story truly being told? What's happening is we're saying this scripture and then we're telling our own story and then I learned through my current church. No, there's a far greater story being told here if you read, capture the context.

So like you said, the Bible legitimately just came to life reading it and it caused me to want to study more. And as a believer now, I truly know what it means to do the works.

I have a desire to do God's work and it's not because I'm afraid not to, it's because I want to. That's probably the biggest change in me since I started going to a true church is those works have, you know, they've come to life for me.

I want to do, I want to be that new creation that God has prepared those works for me to do, and I have a joy about doing it. You know, the Jehovah's Witness may come to my door, and 90% of the time it's an inconvenient time, but I always make time because I want to tell them about what I've found to be true.

They may have come to me, but I'm going to go to them as well. So I find a joy in spreading the gospel for the first time in my life. So that's a major change since going to my current church.

Yeah, it's much like what I felt and described. I remember sitting down with the minister, not long after we had left, and I was talking about the way that it was, and not just Brannemism, but in Pentecostalism in general, you are trained to read a scripture by reading a verse, but you read it through this other verse.

In other words, you have to know this verse because it locks to this other one. And that verse unlocks this other one beyond it. And pretty soon what you have is you're making books that don't exist.

If you try to combine passages from different books, you end up with a different book entirely. And I remember being just totally dumbfounded at how stupid I was. He looked at me, said, John, when you read, if I were to write you a letter on two pieces of paper and give it to you, how would you read that letter? And I was like, well, I would start at the top, I'd read to the bottom.

These are letters in the New Testament. You know this, right? I'm scratching my mouth. Yes, I knew that. How stupid was I? But that's how the movement by and large, that's what they did.

And I go back to, I've studied this backwards and forwards, trying to go back to the original leaders of Pentecostalism. Why was it like this? Why did they start to pick and choose verses?

And it wasn't until recently when I started reading through all of the critical information that exists about Azusa Street Revival. I found that there were a lot of, not a lot, but there were some ministers who were preaching who'd never read the Bible.

And when I came across that, I'm like, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense. And then there were other people who said that they were preaching from the Bible who could not read.

And I'm thinking, well, how does that work? And what you said is dead on. They are preaching catch phrases. If they can hear somebody else say a phrase. In fact, the newspaper reporter who was in the Azusa Street mission heard them preaching. He said this.

They would say a phrase over and over and over. I can't remember how they worded this. But they were basically just repeating phrases and then everybody would fall into a frenzy. And what it is, if you are a speaker and you feel this, if you are connected with your audience enough that they can fall into a frenzy from what you're saying, you get this rush of dopamine that hits you and you feel like you're in the spirit.

So these people are mentioning a phrase that people... fall out in the Spirit, that was powerful. Let's do it again. And then vein repetitions is what it ends up to be. After that, it seemed to take precedence over just simply reading the Bible for what it says. And I've learned since leaving, I've learned that when you do this, not only does it match, it's actually, in many cases, you can preach something by doing this and preach against the very text that you're talking about.

Yeah, absolutely. And for clarity sake, so most of the ministers in gospel assembly, I would say they very possibly know their Bibles very well. And they're very, very studied on scripture to the point where I do know, for fact, that a lot of them can recall scriptures, whether they be scriptures that they repetitively use or they genuinely know their Bibles as well.

I know the reason they do that, that daisy chaining of the scriptures, you know, this one unlocks this one, this one, it's at smoking mirrors is one way you could put it, but another way is just not a bait and switch really, but what they're doing is diverting you through this maze that their narrative fits because if they expand on that, and they expand through context of those scriptures, it completely undoes their narrative and does the doctrine.

So what they're doing is suppressing whether they know those scriptures exist or not, they suppress those scriptures, champion these because it's a puzzle missing 50% of the pieces. And you don't know what the picture looks like. So it's up to them to tell you what the picture looks like. I was thinking one day, I was watching one of these crimes show, I'm fascinated with detective shows now. And it's watching when these crimes shows and I was watching this defense attorney.

And I can't remember the scenario, the guy, I think the guy killed somebody. So this guy's a murderer, who's on trial, and the attorney is going back and say, but if we go back to this case, and he mentions the case number and he brings in some quote from that case and then goes back and brings this other quote from this other case. And I think the guy ended up getting off of death row.

I got to thinking about it, that's really what they're doing. They're trying to take an argument that doesn't really fit with a Bible context, but they're trying to go find bits and pieces that support that argument because you can't make the text say what you're saying. That's really what it comes down to it. You can't, you got to let this guy get off of death row. That's how it comes down to. And it becomes, what it comes becomes for me is it becomes basically a spaghetti doctrine.

It's all of these doctrines that are weaving through all of these scriptures and nobody can really understand why we believe this, but we believe it. What they will do is, so they'll even take the book of James, because they're a very workspace salvation. It's not faith, it's faith plus works.

They will take the entire book of James out of context, but they only know a specific few chapters in James, and they are completely out of context, because you and I would agree that each book of the New Testament complements one another. Paul and James aren't fighting. They're not having a disagreement of some sorts. They are talking about two totally separate subjects. Paul is describing Faith alone as your salvation through Christ.

James is talking about if you have that salvation through your faith, you will be able to perform the works, or you should be performing the works. They miss that. If you start expounding on some of the scriptures that James is describing to be, if you have this salvation, you'll perform the works that they look at you like they've never heard it before, which is very possible if they haven't. And for those who are unfamiliar, the book of James has only what five chapters. There's not really that many to learn, right?

If you could go back in time, back whenever you were first starting to realize that there's something a little bit off here, and give yourself some advice and encouragement to help you through. What advice would you give yourself? I would tell myself to have a little bit more of a voice, be stern, but continue to be polite and be courteous, and love everyone, but hold your ground. And as soon as you become old enough, if you make that choice to believe, don't let anyone persuade you, that's one piece of advice. The other advice would be study your Bible, study the context of the scriptures, understand why they're saying

what they're saying, who they're saying it to, and when they were saying it from a historical perspective. There's so much context missed by misunderstanding the time period that they were in. There's so much missed in the context of who they were speaking to, whether it be Jews or Gentiles, or a specific individual, all of those things should be taken into account. I would encourage myself to study the Bible more, but that would be the two main things that I would probably tell myself. And don't give up, just because you're stuck in a tough situation does not mean that you will be there forever. I would tell myself

that if you do leave, you might be isolated for a while, but that will be okay. You will find other people that care about you, they love you, and will help you through life, through the awkward growing portions of trying to figure out what you're going to do in the world without gospel assembly. You will be fine, and you will make new friends.

And chances are you will have some relationship with your relatives again, not to be afraid. And I'm going to ask you an unusual question, because I have so many people contacted me who have either been in gospel assembly, or some of them have come out but they're not really, they're not really known to have come out. What encouragement would you give people who are on their way out? Continue to be courteous and studying and look, you know, there's lots of information. There's more and more information on the internet now than there was, you know, 15 years ago about gospel assembly and you can follow the breadcrumbs

through the internet and they're verified documents that show the the fallacies that that are being taught there, you know, just have an honest conversation with yourself

and have an open mind. Look it up, there's plenty of there's support groups that are popping up here and there across different platforms. You know, I know Facebook has quite a few, I would say get plugged in with, personally, because I am Christian, I would say plug yourself into a Christian support group on Facebook. I would, you know, read it YouTube. There's numerous avenues that you can go but actually reach out. Don't stay withdrawn. That does make it harder. I would say, really try to find a support group and be aggressive about it, be vocal about it. And honestly,

don't be ashamed. You know, don't be ashamed that either you were born into it or you fell victim to being loved bond and you've been in there for a decade. Don't feel foolish. There's nothing to be foolish about. It does happen, unfortunately, but just like it does happen, you can make the choice to leave and don't be afraid of being isolated because it won't be like that for long if at all. What's very good advice. Thank you so much for doing this.

Absolutely. Thank you. Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information or to share your story, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-branam.org. From 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.