Hearing God’s Voice: Faith, Fear, and Spiritual Authority

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org and with me I have my co-host, researchers and friends, Jenny McGrath and Shelby Hauffer, former members of Y-Wam, youth with a mission. Shelby, Jenny, it's good to be back and to talk about hearing God's voice. I actually just had this conversation with somebody yesterday. We were, I was doing an interview with somebody who escaped and this was one of the big problems for them.

People would come up to them and say, God spoke to me and told me that you're doing something or whatever it is wrong. And they're scratching their head thinking, God really say that. I don't know that what I'm doing is that wrong. And I got to thinking about it's widespread throughout the Pentecostal Charismatic Movement. The leadership has claimed just almost in a blanket statement that God speaks to them continuously from behind the pulpit. And because the crowds are parroting what the ministers are saying, they start saying it too, whether God spoke to them or not. And I got curious because as you both

know, the new apostolic reformation, Y-Wam, all of these different entities, they're all interconnected through this apostolic network. And I was wondering how much the God spoke to me, God's voice to you, theology, spread into youth with a mission.

Thank you so much, John. Yeah, it's definitely an integral part, I would say. And I think Jenny can agree. And it is their sort of third foundational value. So if we have to know God and then to make him known, their third foundational value is hearing God's voice.

So they talk about that Y-Wam is committed to creating with God through listening to him, trying his prayers and obeying his commands. It matters great and small. So we are dependent upon hearing his voice as individuals together in team context and in larger gatherings as an integral part of our process for decision making. So there you can see really the spectrum that it covers in terms of the ways that they believe it is important to hear God's voice as an individual in your team context from matters great and small. So that can be something as big as, you know, who should I be marrying or where should I be moving to and surfing

to what sort of outfit should I wear today? In case I go out. into the world and someone believes that they should talk to someone who's wearing a green sweater and if I'm not wearing my green sweater, then I will miss that opportunity to potentially connect with someone. So I would say it's very widespread.

I would agree. I'm just thinking about my own experience and so many experiences of people I knew and even as you talked, Shelby, I feel like the same paralysis in my body. Like I was so afraid that I would be mishearing the voice of God and I think it's also, it's half of the coin and the other side of the coin is this strong emphasis on spiritual warfare and demons talking to you. And I recently reread Dan Bowman's book about being imprisoned in Iran and he shares this really devastating story about trying to commit suicide and

then says I knew it was Satan trying to tell me to do that. Not, I was in a really difficult place, you know, and like normal things that would happen that would make someone struggle with going on to live. And so I think that feels important to touch on as we talk about hearing the voice of God because it's so coupled with this frenzy of spiritual warfare and then how spiritual warfare gets used as justification for dominionism. Because if Satan and evil and dark forces are taking over our minds or spheres of society, then we have to

Christianize those and Christianize government to fight evil. I'm glad you mentioned the Satan's voice type theology because that's really, for me that's the scariest part of all of this. When you get in this mindset where there are continually angels and demons infesting your world, and I'm using infesting, I guess, on the demon's side, not the angelic side, but you're looking for an angel and a demon when they're not there. You start to see them when they're not there. People will become in that mindset and I watch enough of the crime documentaries to know how dangerous this can be, but the

moment you start to see demons talking to you, that's the point you probably need to go check yourself into a hospital because bad things can happen. But yet, that dominates the movement. I went to several churches where I heard people saying that they were either hearing a voice of God or they were hearing a voice from Satan and they had to be careful watching what was being said to them. And I look back now and I think how close were we to all just having another Jonestown. It's really that scary for me. And whenever I think about this being indoctrinated into younger people, that's one of the reasons

actually why I started looking into youth with a mission. When you can get that mindset into a young person and develop it from an early stage, that starts to change their They start to look for angels and demons when they're not there and it's really really harmful. They're more The younger you are the more programmable you are, I guess I would say and so I wanted to explore How much of this is getting into youth with a mission and like I said in the last podcast the deeper I dig the worst this Picture looks. I'll just say it like that

But yeah, so God's voice speaking to you from the ministries from the people who are in charge The other problem that I think I want to address in this podcast is whenever a person who's in leadership starts to feel like they're empowered with this they Start to feel like whatever is the word that God is allegedly speaking through them now becomes an authority over that person The people they're speaking to Branham was one of many people who did this but he would say God is speaking to me I have the spoken word I have the frame of whatever it is then towards the end of his life

He's saying things like I am God's voice to you. Yes, I think it's really important to acknowledge of course that there are going to be people who will believe that they're hearing from God and they will be intentionally trying not to Use that power over others. You know, they want other people to hear for themselves and things like that And that's great and those people certainly exist in the Y1 sphere and There are a lot of people who will take that sort of power and authority and Use that either over the or covertly to Manipulating control people behind the scenes now that might not be in a an intentionally

malignant way but It can be like well, I think I know what's best for this person and so I'm going to encourage them To pray again, you know, this was something that's in my member care work With the clients that I worked with I saw very often is an intense amount of stress Put on people because their leadership had, you know, they're these these that my clients were burning themselves out in Service to Y1 but for God, you know, via Y1 and They would reach a point of of recognizing I can't keep going I have to slow down or I have to take a break

And they would be met with another request, you know, well, we really we were praying about it We think that you should lead the next DTS or you should lead this next school or you should join this You know, you should lead the media team or you should lead the communications team or or something else And go pray about it and then you know the people I was working with they have gone and prayed about it quote unquote prayed about it and Come back to leadership and said I feel like this is not the right time. I shouldn't be taking on something else right now

I'm not doing well or even if they were doing well just I feel like I'm not supposed to be taking something else. And then the leadership would kind of say, well, we really felt like this was genuinely what God had for you. Like, would you go and pray again? And to me, that was always a massive red flag of their, then that, that tells me they believe that they're hearing from God more clearly than you were hearing from God and your own relationship with God or your ability to quote, unquote, hear God's voice for you was not as strong

as theirs. So that's sort of a more covert way that I think that is used very often. I've seen it used very often in the organization. And that's really sad because that that creates an immense amount of self-doubt for someone because you can't argue with someone saying that they've heard from God. How do you argue that? I mean, now I believe, you know, as I'm studying theology and things like that. I think there's plenty that you can argue about.

But when you get your whole life is sort of built up into these systems, it feels very dangerous to try to argue against someone else hearing God for you, vision casting for your life. You know, these are, these are things when we talk about high control religious groups.

These are the signs that we're talking about. Someone else trying to take a certain spiritual position in your life. Yeah. And I'd like to come at it from another angle as well because I've, I absolutely could speak to the abuses of power that happen. And they certainly do. And I have my own stories to share about that. And I really love this book called Religious Religious Affects by Donovan O. Schaefer. And it talks about affect and basically how our emotions get manipulated by really high technology and media in certain environments.

And what it means to question how our bodies get manipulated. And I find that too in terms of things that I felt really passionate about. But I didn't question, you know, I was introduced to Uganda via invisible children and this documentary style film in the early 2000s.

And it was one of many, many, many, many young white women that then felt we were called to Uganda without questioning the racial and gender socializations and implications that tugged on our heartstrings and socialization in the first place. And I say that because then I put myself in extremely dangerous situations. My very first time I was in northern Uganda without a computer without a way to contact people without a place to stay after someone who had been paying for an in that we were staying in came back to America.

She literally left and I was like, well, God's telling me to stay in Gulu, which really I just wanted to stay in Gulu, but by then I had so known, if I use this language, no one can question it.

And I just walked down the street not knowing where I would stay and because of white privilege and a many other things I ended up finding safety in places to stay, but I also continued to put myself in very precarious situations.

And I think that missions in itself can kind of be this addictive pattern where you get so used to these very scary, very intense, very emotionally driven experiences that you then keep putting yourself in riskier and riskier situations and saying, well, God is telling me to do this.

God is calling me to this country where it's illegal to proselytize. So I'm gonna go do that without questioning the socialization that's playing into why and what are the emotions and sensations that you are saying are God's voice.

And I know you've talked a lot about just the healing of music and I really love bird talker. They have clearly come from very high control religion and their music speaks a lot to that journey, but they have one song where their lyrics say, tell me again how you can talk to God and how he tells you what to do and how you know it's not your own thoughts disguised as something absolute.

And I just feel like that's such a poignant distillation of what we're talking about. How do you know it's God and not you? Before we get too far in this podcast, I think we should define what is the difference between this version of God speaking to you and what the Bible says.

And I'm gonna tread very cautiously because I have to go into theology a bit to do this. However, this is actually historical in that the movement from the lettering movement on as it began to develop, they started to change what the Bible really said about God speaking to you.

Usually when you're reading the Bible and you read about God speaking to a human, it is an exception to the rule, it's not the rule. There are exceptions, there are exceptional stories God speaking the Moses of the burning bush, for example.

That was Moses, can you say that every single person that God speaks to is also Moses, right? You've got Samuel in the temple, you've got the prophets, you've got Joseph with the dreams and I'm going off memory, but you've got these examples that are really exceptional stories.

But whenever you start to read about the way that God speaks to normal humanity, not the exceptions to the rule, it's usually just simply wisdom. Give me wisdom to make the right decision. It's prayer for wisdom, it's counsel.

Let's put our heads together and let's figure this thing out. It's knowledge, let me understand. the problem, so that I make the right decision. Desornment is a funny thing because they actually, in the latarine movement and beyond, they twisted what the word discernment meant to, instead of spiritually discerning good versus evil, that type of thing.

Instead, it's like fortune telling, forecasting, knowing the deep secrets of somebody's heart, that's how we would say it, in the Brannum religion. But in what I'm trying to say is, in general, Christians who hear God's voice according to the biblical structures, it's not something that's fantastical.

But the movement wanted it to be, you too can have this fantastic experience. You too can be just like Moses at the Burning Bush. And the problem is, nobody really sees a Burning Bush and has an audible voice of God speaking to them.

And usually the ones who say, I have an audible voice, they're either scamming the people or there's somebody who probably should take some meds for their psychological issues. Yeah, I think it's really attractive to think about the fact that, you know, we all can hear God's voice for all of these things, but I think what drives it even more, at least in this organization, or maybe in this sort of movement, is a fear of missing something that God has for you.

So again, when we're talking about sort of signposts towards what is spiritual abuse or what is high control groups look like, especially religious groups, there's threats of spiritual consequences. Now, Dr. Lisa Oakley, Justin Humphries, have written a really accessible book called Escaping the Maze of Spiritual Abuse.

If that's something that you're looking for more accessible definitions, she's also written a very academic book that was very big and, you know, very hard to read, but the threats of spiritual consequences is a really driving factor because if you miss hearing exactly what it is that God wants you to do, you risk getting outside of his will, which has other consequences of, you'll miss something amazing that he has for you, you could miss your spouse, you could miss a direction that you need to go, you know, he wants you to go over here and you've gone over here and, oh no,

how is he gonna get your attention back? How is he, oh no, like it's this sense of like, and the panic can really creep up. And so there is this drive to enter into this sort of process of needing to hear God's voice for, for, you know, all these sorts of really little things.

Like I said, even down to what should I eat today, what should I wear today? Now not everybody goes that extreme of course, but I have spoken with too many people where that is sort of the natural consequence of this sort of teaching and of the, like you, said, John, the institutionalization of this belief system, where discernment is no longer, like what you said, you would describe as a biblical discernment, but instead is this sort of secret knowledge. They even talk about, you have words of knowledge for someone, you can read someone as you're praying for them and hear God about them or for them.

A plenty of podcasts have talked about that, how that happens in Bethel and IHOT KC. It's a very same sort of thing. There was a lot of connections between those three organizations. So I think that's where we begin to talk about that unhealth or that historical connection to the movement of like Latin Rain, word of faith, this sort of thing which turned hearing the voice of God into this practice that had really dire consequences if you got it wrong.

So therefore, if someone is coming to you and saying, well, I heard God for you. Of course, you're going to be so much happier to maybe receive what that person has from you because well, they feel so certain, right? It's a certainty. It's a search for certainty, I think, is what actually drives this practice. When I was, you know, probably 19 years old, Slumdog Millionaire, the movie had come out and I really liked the soundtrack and I was like, I think it was in Whole Foods or somewhere random and I was so afraid that I think there was

cuss words and I also thought like I'd be opening myself up to Hindu or Muslim spirits because of the movie that had Hindu and Muslim people in it. But I really liked it and I was like, God, do you want me to get it? And I felt like God said no, but I bought it anyways. And I was a wreck forever and I was like, should I take it back? I shouldn't have this. And I just like, was so distraught over just a CD and listening to music. And it just, it makes like beam so far

removed from it now. It's like not silly because I take it seriously, but it's almost laughable because it's so difficult to understand unless I think you're in that world and you know what that fear taught, that fear feels like. And I was thinking, John, I think, I don't know if Shelby, you experienced this, but the language I used for that was like, or I heard for that was someone reading your mail. And there was then like no sense of privacy. I think that that's what feels really important to is hearing the voice of God feels like a surveillance and like a constraint

because if all of these people around can hear the voice of God and if I've lusted or if I've stolen or if I bought a CD, I shouldn't have like whatever, you know, benign or not, like someone, God is going to tell someone. And I think it leads to such a self-policing where those who don't hold positions of power kind of take in that surveillance because you never know who's going to read your mail and it leads to just such a constriction of humanity and living and vitality and making mistakes and learning and growing and all of the

things that come with being human. That's such a good point that I have wanted to bring up in a podcast but I didn't know how best to do it and actually you did it far better than me.

It is surveillance. They turn this hearing God's voice into this thing where I those say things like I can peer into your very soul and I grew up with men who claim that they could do this or maybe they didn't outright claim but they led you to believe they could do this and everybody was scared of them. Everybody was scared to do anything because they might they all seeing I might see you that one of the statements that we had and later I learned that they were doing things like checking people's social media to see how they were doing what they were doing what

they were suffering with struggling with. There was intel that was coming in and so when you went to these men who could you know have God speak to them allegedly they already knew everything about you anyway and the funny part about it is those that don't have the intel they'll go to just very common basic moral codes that every human should have. Love your neighbor forgive others flee immorality, you mentioned the sexual sins. They will in blanket statements say that I see somebody's really struggling with the sexual sin. Well in a building of 300 people you're gonna

have somebody that's doing this right you're gonna have this because we're all humans there are humans that make mistakes but the other thing that I'll put with this which is problematic is and this ties to another conversation that I recently had. What they consider to be God's voice and what they're telling you the way that they're framing it are two separate things they're framing it as fortune telling which the Bible condemns and they and the Old Testament under Old Covenant law they would stone you if you were a sorcerer or if you were a fortune teller but they will

say they will they will put it out that they can see into your future basically. So people before they get married they'll go see is this the right person that I should marry well that's what you would do with a fortune teller not a Christian minister what city should I live in we we had this often here people would come to Jeffersonville they would seek counsel with the leadership and say should I move to Jeffersonville tell us what God says and in the end they're just basically offloading their decisions to the fortune teller and that is anti-Christian. That's certainly something that you

see throughout the movement and this is worldwide there are the people who are known as those people right like you go to a conference or if they come to your base to teach on a school or something it's like Oh, whoa, like that guy's coming.

Like, oh, I want to word from him. Or like, ooh, scary. I got to go sort of get myself right with the Lord because they're gonna read my mail, you know, sort of thing.

And I remember sitting in some of these, you know, instances and like desperately wanting a word from the Lord, you know, from this prophet or from this teacher. And I would just be like, Lord, like, please like see me, you know, like pick me like if this is you, like let him like, you know, just reach out and say, like God has a word for you, you know, sort of thing.

We had this one person who would come into our staff meetings and just like read people's mail. People were like, oh, you know, so shocked about, oh my gosh, but when you think back on it, you're like that could really be applied to like many different things or, you know, you make it make sense.

Like as human beings, we have such a deep need for sense making. And I mean, that's a whole other psychological, you know, topic that you can get into. But yeah, just this, this honor or this like power that is given to those people who everyone knows, like they're the people who hear from God.

I mean, there was even like one of my former leaders here, like people would say like, oh my gosh, like, all this person, all this leader has to do is hug me and I just start crying, like it's just, you know, that's the spirit of the Lord in this mail leader.

And I don't even want to go and like, hug that person because I know I'm going to just start crying and they're just going to like start saying things to me, turns out this person was a massive abuser.

So there's just this very, and a power that, and everybody knows it, right? Everybody knows those people in the organization. That person is coming to teach or that person who's speaking at the conference and they're giving, they're given an inordinate amount of power over others because they quote unquote, hear the voice of God better, faster, more clearly, more specifically than you do.

Which ultimately leads me back to Lauren Cunningham because he was like the pinnacle in that organization of who heard the voice of God and the implications of that. So I'd love to actually read just a little excerpt from this book, The Seven Mountain Mandate by Matthew Bodie.

It's a beautiful book. It talks a lot about Lauren Cunningham, Bill Bright, Francis Schaefer, all the way up through more present day examples. But it says, in the summer of 1975, Lauren Cunningham was praying and thinking about how we could turn the world around for Jesus.

He wrote that Satan's authority over the world needed to be deposed. This kind of spiritual war rhetoric was growing in some evangelical circles and the strategies to meet the moment we're changing. Evangelicalism, Evangelicalism, remained important, but it was also meant that the gospel should capture entire societies in a broader institutional fashion, especially the most influential areas of culture. Cunningham immediately put the list of seven areas, that's the Seven Mountain Mandate, to use in his organization, sharing it as early as September 1975 with British youth with a mission staff. And then in 1978, he started a mission training center in Hawaii to equip the next generation of leaders in this

cultural transformation. And well into the 21st century, the list has remained part of the organization's training. And so again, I think we can't talk about hearing the voice of God, and who hears the voice of God without talking about the Seven Mountain Mandate and Dominionism.

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Seven Mountain Mandate is something that really interests me for multiple reasons. If you've studied the podcast or the books that I have, I focus heavily on Christian identity and Christian nationalism, all of these different themes. And whenever I discovered Seven Mountains Mandate was actually recently, just a couple of years ago, I was reading this thinking, they did this back in the early 1900s, and it didn't work. And it was usually the bad guys that were doing this kind of thing. They wanted to basically change religion, politics, and attainment.

They wanted to mold it and shape it and control it. And that last word is the big one. We must control it because other people have other opinions and other views. And not everybody has our Christian mindset. And on the surface, that sounds good, because if you're a Christian, you want people to do Christian things and you want a moral code. But I got to thinking about it, which mindset do you choose? There's different varieties of belief sets that are still within Christianity. And some of them are on the more liberal side.

some of them are on the more fundamentalist side. And usually it's the hardcore fundamentalist that say we want to control it and make it fit our hardcore fundamentalism. For example, in movies, you've got one of my favorite movie types is a detective story or a crime story.

We've got somebody who gets killed, you've got a murderer and they're violating the 10 commandments. They murdered somebody. Do you go so far as to say that that's anti-Christian because this is portraying somebody who violated the 10 commandments?

And then you take that away, well, what goes the murder mystery if there is no murder in it? It just, it gets crazy because they want to control it to the levels that the political environment of their teaching reach during a certain specific political event or political horizon.

And they want to focus on that specific element of politics. And I'm saying this, like homosexuality is a big one right now. It wasn't always, you go back in time and they had a different political issue.

And whether you agree or disagree with homosexuality, you must agree that in this world, there are people who are living homosexual lifestyles. If you portray this in a movie and exclude all of that category of people, now you have a city that's not matching the actual city that you're in.

So Chicago, for instance, if you take away all of the homosexuality of Chicago and put it into a movie, the movie's not quite accurate. So for me, I started looking at it much differently.

If they want to control it, my fear is how far will they go with it? And usually the types of people that want to control it are people who I wouldn't want in control of what I'm watching anyway.

Because these types of people don't really align with my Christian theology at all. So I took a step back and I said, that's just the entertainment side. Now what about all of the others?

Can I say that I want them to control my business, my politics, all of these different seven mountains? And suddenly I realize everybody needs to run screaming from this thing. I have found in my research around understanding high control religious groups or dangerous authoritarian groups or even cults, often what is a needed element is an us versus them mentality and understanding.

So there has to be a villain or there has to be a goal to accomplish in some way. And I think that you see that, even as Jenny mentioned earlier, the flip side of maybe hearing God's voice is the sort of spiritual warfare, the satanic spirit world out there.

And so you need to have some sort of us versus them to keep people there, to keep people coming, and to keep people engaged. And so I think the seven mountains, mandate is a really helpful tool to continue to keep.

people engaged in coming to WebM's training to engaging with their quote-unquote unaccredited university because if you continue to talk about the things that need to be taken over or even if you soften it to the language of influence, you know, we should be going out there influencing.

Again, from my 18 years experience globally working with the University of the nation's arm as well as just, you know, other, the other regular adult every day, a Y-WAM situation. There is not as much turnover like that you would expect if this is actually the goal, if the real goal is to send people who are called, quote-unquote called, into those quote-unquote spheres, to go back out to come receive training and then to go back out into those spheres and to have just a healthy Christian influence, you know, be a good Christ follower, bring sort of love and peace and hope

and goodness and gentleness and faithfulness, you know, the fruit of the spirit into those spheres, you would see more of a turnover, people coming in and then people going out back into those places.

And while I'm sure that that happens on some level, again, the vast majority of people who come in for training in Y-WAM are often recruited to stay in Y-WAM. And Y-WAM around the world, while there might be various places that are engaged in a real local way, again, we're talking about sort of the real vast majority of places that are not, they don't have any meaningful connection into their local community or they will advertise like we specialize in reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants and that's absolutely not true, the only work that they're doing is going and

praying around the border. So there is this, I think, sort of use of the Seven Mountain Mandate and the language around wanting to influence the spheres or even, as you said, to some, there's those extremes of wanting to take the minion over those spheres is a really helpful tool to keep people engaged because it keeps them on this level of an us versus them sort of situation, we have a job to complete, we have a goal to fulfill and Y-WAM is very happy to be the vehicle that allows or invites those people to use Y-WAM as a

vehicle to try to do that, but the actual influence or impact that's made, I think, is questionable. Randall Balmer is a Christian historian and he has this distinction between what he calls Christianity and Christianity.

and dumb. And to me, it's like I will be the first person to advocate for you and your faith as a Christian and what that means for you. That is very different than Christendom that says that that faith, whatever that particular brand is, should dictate what other people do regardless of what faith or non religious identity that they have.

And I recently saw, it's funny to quote a meme, but it was very poignant where it said, I can't do that. That's against my religion is religious freedom. You can't do that. It's against my religion is fascism.

And I thought that was just a helpful way to break it down. Like that's what we're talking about. It's like imposing this very, and this to me feels so related to what we've already been talking about.

With the other Y-Wam values of knowing God and making God known, it's a very, very, very, very specific white male, you know, like all of these things that are this image of who the God of Y-Wam is that don't include large populations.

Like you were talking about like the queer folks, John, like this image of God does not include women. It often does not include people of color. It does not include people that aren't white, straight cisgender men saying, how has God created me in God's image?

If the Bible says, let us create mankind in our image, then wow, there must be a really multifaceted God that has created so much beauty and diversity, but that's not what is being promulgated through this ideology.

And the key word there is diversity, and I don't mean it in the political terms that is being used right now, just diversity of human opinions and thought. Anybody who has ever been on a committee who makes decisions will look at the Seven Mountains mandate and say, are you guys crazy? What are you thinking? When you get a bunch of people together, you're going to get a bunch of different ideas.

But more than that, the situations aren't black and white, they're complex situations. Like I mentioned with the movie The Murder Mystery, that's just a basic example. But look at things like murder itself. There are cases where there are people who will go into a nation and they will start to kill women and children.

And it's better to go take out a leader than it is to let wide swaths of population die. And you have to make these kind of decisions on a committee, broaden that to just governance.

You've got different people with different ideas on how they should be governed. But what the Seven Mountains mandate and those who are advocating it for pushing is a dictatorship where we elect a leader and he tells everybody what to do.

And I'm not to go too far with it. In this podcast, I actually may never. But if you look at some of the examples of what's happening in the news right now, there are leadership who are in that mindset who are doing things and going too far. And that's really the problem. What happens whenever the person who's not using the body of the committee to make a group decision goes to the extreme and goes outside of what the general committee would do. Well, how do you stop them?

What do you impose to make it where it's actually a godly thing that's happening? Because humans will go, humans given ultimate power will go too far with it. I'll just say it like that.

Take that back to the conversation that we had earlier. Many of the people advocating for this are also of the God told me mindset. And there's a key phrase, I don't know if you had it in use with a mission or not, but we had this phrase that was thrown around by leadership thus say at the Lord. In the Bible, this is a huge thing. This is literally the audible voice of God speaking and whatever is said is the ultimate decree because it came directly from God. It wasn't the prophet. It was the prophet was a mouthpiece. It would be like holding a megaphone. The prophet

is the megaphone for God's voice to the people. But they started using it in the laterane movement post-war war two healing revival like it was anybody could do it. In fact, I think there's a quote out there where one of the leaders said anybody can do it. And everybody started doing it. They started saying, they'll say to Lord, this, this and this, and then what they said didn't really happen. So you had to question, well, was that really God or not? But they're using it for that controlling weight. If God told me, then you must do whatever it is that I say. Combine that

with seven mountains mandate and putting somebody in in a monarchy like they're actually advocating for, this is the recipe for disaster. Again, in my experience, and I want to say I've certainly read stories, particularly in like early days of YOM where there was very much that this is God speaking, thus say at the Lord, you know, sort of language and sort of use of hearing God's voice. And I would say in my experience over the last 20 years, it was softened to I feel like God is saying X, Y, and Z, right? So there was trying to be this

like, we're like, I don't really have peace about that. Like this is one of my pet peeves is this like I prayed about it. I don't really have peace about it or I'm going to do this completely insane thing because I have peace about it. I didn't hear clearly from God, but I have peace about it, which I just do not think is a great way to be making decisions for all sorts of reasons.

So I think there's been a softer tone in that because if you say, I feel like God is saying to me, then you're able to sort of pull it back if it... turns out that it was wrong, or something like that.

Again, it's in the past, and potentially even currently, there are people out there. I can think of several genuine, like what anybody would be able to say. This was a cult's situations in Y-Wam that are just now being shut down in England and in America.

I can think of at least three right now that I know of that are being told you can't use Y-Wam's name any longer, and so there certainly was a lot of that going on, that very concrete, very directive, very, let's say, at the Lord sort of mentality, and it's really hard.

You can't argue with that. Yeah, I think it's making me think of an episode you and I did John around like the branding of Y-Wam, and it is usually more of this positive spin.

It's not this, like, thus say it's the Lord, like more liturgical, almost brand. It is this very like whimsy and like, you know, globetrotter, like this light, light and breezy branding that that was my experience too, where it would often be like, well, I had a dream that you were doing this.

And it was said in a way that doesn't recognize the person telling me that was the base leader's wife and who had a lot of power over me and who was my mentor. And it was like, well, if you had a dream about that, clearly that was God telling you that I should do this, regardless of the fact that I have no training or desire to do this and my body is completely shutting down with overwhelm and burnout.

But yeah, I think that I would agree with Shelby, like at least in my experience in Y-Wam, it was much more like light and airy in a way that

hid the impact of what was actually being said. Yeah, and that's one of the more subtle ways of doing it. We, in what I came out of, we had both. We had people that were doing exactly what you said and we had people that say just directly, I was praying to God and He told me this, this, and this.

The problem is in both cases, it's edging towards prophecy because if God is speaking through you, then you must be a prophet. That's how this works. Biblically, that's how this works. But yet in the New Testament, it says, let everything be judged through the mouth of two or three prophets.

So you can't have one single person telling you to do something and telling you God said it without having somebody else to back it up. And I get to think about it one day.

There needs to be people who will rise up and say, well, that may be, maybe God is telling you this. God also gave me a brain and my brain says, I don't agree with what you're saying because that also is Biblical as well.

More Biblical than the one prophet versus the mouth of two or three. Yes, but if you do that, then you get ostracized and rejected from the group. And so I remember when I was in Perth, Australia, and there was thousands of stories out there about Perth and the craziness that goes on there.

We had an intercession every week as we all do in every web of base, it's sort of required. And we were going through the nine steps of intercession. And there was an immense pressure to manufacture

something that you heard from God because you were being watched and there was always a staff person in the group, in the intercession group. And so if you were not consistently coming up and hearing God's voice for something, then you would sort of get a talking to, by like, hey, what's going on in your life?

What sort of sin is blocking you from hearing God's voice? And so there was an immense pressure to create something. And when you add that sort of pressure to gather with the power dynamics that exist, like Jenny said, okay, if this is the, my leader or my leader's wife or someone in some position of power over me who's coming to me and telling me this thing, that can even be someone who's been invited into the inner circle of leadership or the people of power.

So maybe they wouldn't identify themselves as someone in position of power over others, but there's proximity that they have and so they do have this inherent power, that it's just the pressure and the consequences and the fear that surrounds that, I think makes a really unhelpful cocktail to lead people to quote unquote, hear things from God that keep them safe in those spaces.

And I think it's really important to pay attention to that. So for every story out there that someone really genuinely believes that they heard something from God, that they saw God move, I certainly know several of those.

I feel like there are things that I have experienced with God in my life that I cannot deny that God exists and I would never try to do that. However, I also know that when I was swimming in those waters, there was plenty that there's plenty of pressure to perform this sort of spirituality.

So for everybody, everyone that someone has said, I genuinely believe I've heard God's voice on this and this was a real thing and this was tested, like you said, with two or three voices or however that worked out, however that person came to that, conclusion themselves, there are 10 that someone is out there feeling afraid that if they don't speak up, if they don't create something that they've heard from God, then they will be punished in some way.

And I think it's really important to pay attention to that and to not just dismiss the concerns that we're highlighting here around these things to say, oh, well, that's just some people's experience. But to say it, if people are having that experience because of this teaching, we need to be paying attention.

into it. We need to get serious about it because so many reasons, but go listen to previous episodes to find out what those reasons are. It was this like apostolic, charismatic, pentacostal movement. And so there was almost this hierarchy. Like if you are a prophet, that's a great thing. You are like on fire, you're filled with the spirit. If you're an apostle, even more so. And so even, you know, all the way down to, can you speak in tongues or not? And all of these pressures that you feel to perform that you have the voice of God. And I was thinking about a funny but also tragic story.

I was talking with a friend years ago about these experiences. And they were, it was not in why, I mean, I don't think they were in some kind of other charismatic circle where they were like required to speak in tongues before they went out and left for dinner. And she was telling her friend this afterwards. And her friend goes, well, don't you know that you just need to say bodhahanda should abadakia really fast? And just like, I think that's so like hilarious and sad.

But how many people just find these ways of performing that they're speaking in tongues? They're hearing the voice of God. It doesn't take that much intuition to say something about someone that they might feel is like, oh my gosh, you wouldn't know that if God wasn't telling you. And it's like, really, I just read your body language and can tell you probably have a lot of shame or, you know, like X, Y, C that that are all these little hacks. I think that exists in that world.

Well, that's just it. People often mistake conscience for God speaking. Whenever they feel this inner voice, though mistake the inner voice for God's voice, not knowing that yes, it is the voice that God gave you. And if you read the scriptures, you might even say that that's the Holy Spirit speaking to you in a way, but it's usually a way of guidance. It's helping you to make a decision and informed decision sometimes making you want to become more informed so that you can make that decision. You feel this inner thing, but they mistake that for God's voice. But sometimes

they will hear that voice or that feeling that tells them, I need to get more information and make this decision. But without getting the additional information, they'll just say, I had God speak to me and you must do whatever it is that I think. That's that's just totally wrong and it's not biblical. They have turned it into such a thing where they must have impressions, visions, dreams, prophetic words. You have to have all of these things or otherwise you're not holy. You're you don't have the spirit if you don't have these things. But what about the people who don't

actually have those? You can't really conjure those things up and yet there are people there were people in the Bible who didn't have this and so they had prophets to go to. right? So you have this wide variety of Christians. And if you put them on to the same box, you're trying to say that every person must become a clone of the leadership. And that's just not the way life works. Yeah, a really good friend of mine was on the leadership team with me. And they were very more reserved, you know, slower to speak and more listening

and sort of sitting back. And they were told it now because they're on the leadership team that they should be speaking up more in terms of what they're hearing from God. So in intercession, they need to be sharing what they've heard from God. They need to be hearing from a God quote unquote every single time and sharing that because they're leaders and people will follow their example in worship. They need to be more expressive because people will follow their example because they're a leader now. And it was so detrimental to this person because there is, again, that sense of surveillance of being watched. And I have to perform something

that does not feel true or authentic to me. But there's a pressure because I could be removed from my leadership position if I do not act accordingly. And certainly for myself, like, and this is maybe a little bit niche, but I think former wives owners will get it because, you know, you have to have your intercession every week. And it was like whoever's job it was to lead intercession had to come up with a topic for intercession. And so you are supposed to just pull something ideally out of God's mouth to pray for a topic. And it was always this like

thing of like, okay, how long can we take for the hour that's intercession by like presenting the topic like with the PowerPoint? Or we're going to be praying for this so that in the end, there was maybe only like 15 minutes left to actually pray for it because every week was this pressure. This pressure of someone would bring a random topic. And now we have to magically hear from God what is his heart for this. And the thing is that it wasn't just in maybe the small group that you were having intercession because you could, for instance, be like, okay, me and John

and Jenny, we're in a group every week. We sort of get together and we're like, let's just talk about what we did this weekend, you know, like we don't just to take off the pressure, but know you're supposed to report back. So it's like, okay, who from your group is going to come up to the front and say what God told you about this topic. So it can't just the the pressure and the stress that exists to perform this action in front of everyone else and the judgment that can result from that the real consequences that can result from that if you're not doing it well enough.

It's just their real their real pain and real consequences are real shame to the way that this is lived out and played out. And again, like if you look at the foundational value, you might might be like, this is great.

Like, this sounds great. Like, I don't understand what the problem is. The problem is how the implications of that get lived out in real people's lives and the consequences of self-doubt, the consequences of choices made that weren't actually your own and lives changed like from who you're gonna marry into where you're gonna move to where you're gonna serve, it's their real, real, real world consequences.

Yeah, I feel the heaviness as you talk about that. And I just know how many people I know personally and how many more I don't know who have given years, decades, half centuries of their lives to this.

And a book I really love is called Sensuous Knowledge. It's by Mina Salami and she writes in it that tyrants have always understood the more robotic people are, the more easily manipulated they are.

And I think about that when you talk about this pressure that it forces you to be robotic and go through the motions and not chitchat with your friends about what you did this weekend and just like live and breathe and be human and things that I think Jesus had a very good example of doing and taking naps and eating good food and not being too bothered by this sense of urgency and this pressure to be robotic.

And so I'm just again grateful for these conversations and hoping that we can continue hoping and growing and building a world that is more kind and gentle to our bodies and to the world.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you. It's always a pleasure to get to chat with you guys, to get to explore some of these things together and to hopefully try to help other people who maybe have been part of Y-WAM or curious about Y-WAM to think a little bit further than maybe what they've just been told.

Yeah, thank you both so much. Well, you've enjoyed our show and you want more information you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Branum.org. For more about the dark side of the new Apostolic Reformation you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.