How To Recognize a New Apostolic Reformation Church

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brandham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brandham Historical Research at William-brandham.org, and with me I have my co-host and friend, Jed Hartley, son of a false prophet and former member of the International House of Prayer. Jed this is one of those episodes that probably I should have done a long time ago. I get so many people that contact me and they either give me one of two things. The first one is, is my church, a new Apostolic Reformation church, and should I be scared? Or they'll

give me feedback, our church is not an NAR church and they're actually in one of the big ones. So it's kind of funny, there's this broad spectrum of comments that we get, but I think really it's important that we address it because people really need to understand what it is and why leadership would want to deny it. I don't know if you have seen this, but there's many NAR people who outright reject this idea that there's a new Apostolic Reformation, and yet they're in the system that's the very thing that they're saying that they're rejecting. So maybe we could talk through that today and hopefully give

some people some tips on how to recognize, is this thing healthy or is this one of these extremist new Apostolic Reformation churches? I think that what you identified with people wanting to or pastors or leaders of the church wanting to not identify with the new Apostolic Reformation, which they are clearly associated with it. I think that's what makes it so tricky is that there really is, like I didn't know that Iop was involved with the new Apostolic Reformation to well into, you know, my 20s because obviously it wasn't a part of our conversation or vernacular, but I didn't even know what

denomination we were a part of. I didn't even know we came from like a Pentecostal tradition or charismatic, whether I mean there's a lot of different terms that people use and in a lot of these church communities in these new Apostolic Reformation communities, they will be explicitly called non-denomination which I think causes a lot of the confusion, confusion because a lot of other denominational churches want to associate with their denominations so you can know what you're getting when you join that church. If you move from, you know, Texas to Oklahoma, mom or whatever and you're moving up and you're like, well, I want to be a part of this same

sort of Baptist community, but I need to find a new church. Well, it's like, okay, well, great. I've just see that this one's labeled also Baptist. And so I go there. But with the New Apostolic Reformation churches, it's not as clear cut as that. So I think that it's a very legitimate question.

And then I get it all the time too of like, hey, is my church or is my friend's church or my loved ones church or this new church that just popped up in my small town. Is it a part of the New Apostolic Reformation community, which because the lines aren't clearly drawn, I mean, it's kind of hard to answer that question. And so I think that it's good that we have an actual podcast where we can talk about some of the red flags of whether or not a church is associated with New Apostolic Reformation because it's just isn't clean cut. I literally before

coming on to this episode, I was thinking about it and I picked a church that I know is deeply associated with the New Apostolic Reformation. And I tried to Google what other people. So I picked the Pasadena International House Prayer, which Peahop, which is just down the road from where I live in Los Angeles. And I know for a fact that it is directly a part of the New Apostolic Reformation stream. And we'll talk about some of the main things that cover it, but like it is directly from the International House Prayer. It doesn't even try to really even hide

that because it's called Pasadena International House of Prayer. So many of the people who founded it just came straight from the International House Prayer. They have prophetic conferences. There's a bunch of different things that associate it with it. But one, I looked it up to see, hey, what are the associations? And I was shocked by some of the things that I saw on, like I saw a red thread of people talking about it. And I just think that people are really ill-informed about the origins of a lot of these different things. And I can get into the specifics of

Pasadena International House Prayer in a second. But I think the larger point is that people just don't know. And the red thread that we're talking about it were horribly ill-informed. And I looked on chat GPT or I was like, wait, if someone just used one of the AI's to ask, is it a part of it? And I felt that answer was not great as well. And so if for a- the organization as clearly a part of the New Apostolic Reformation stream as one of eye-op or its subsidiaries.

For that not to be easily identifiable as New Apostolic Reformation, I mean, you know that you're in complicated territory when even the clear churches aren't getting immediate red flags. Yeah, exactly. Not every charismatic church is a New Apostolic Reformation church.

They can believe in healing and prophecy and spiritual gifts, modern miracles, all of this stuff, and not be an NAR church. And I know I've read through some of the feedback. People get the sense whenever I'm talking about miracles and healing, etc.

They think that I'm associating that with the extremism. It's not so much that as it is the fake miracles and the fake spiritual gifts and all of this trickery that's happening, that's where this really, where I really draw a line.

When I was growing up, I was a pretty easy-going kid. I liked, as you can tell, my favorite music. But I would also, even though it wasn't my favorite thing, I'd go play baseball with some friends.

I'd go do, you know, sport, everything from sports to music to who knows what all else. Because I was easy-going and I could get along with people. But I always remember, there's always that one kid that would come in the group.

And he would only do the things that he wanted to do. And he wouldn't do any of the other things. And so we're in this weird world where we're all kind of flexible and then there's this one kid that says, no, I'm not going to do your thing.

Anytime somebody says, hey, I go to a non-denominational church, would you like to come with me? I run screaming and I think of that kid because that's really, that's exactly what it is. People say, no, I do not want to play by these rules.

If you go play by the rules, I'm going to go do my own thing. And what happens is they do their own thing long enough and then they become a denomination themselves. So what you're saying when your non-denominational is actually, we're going to try to create a new denomination, but it might fail.

We might just be this isolated group. If you're isolated, then it turns into the isolation extremism and it is very dangerous. So for me, if you're a new, not a non-denominational group, you've left because you're bitter.

If you're a long-standing one, you've left because you're creating a new denomination and eventually you probably will. And there are those who proudly say, we're non-denominational because we're non-denominational. But yet they've got all of the differences that they write out in sand and draw this line in the sand between them and everybody else.

It's exactly like that kid. Now I have, I've tried out a few denominations myself and I can say that there are some that I agree with parts of it, but not all. But I'm still that easy going where I can go and I can listen to the things that I like.

It can as long as it's not outright heresy or dangerous, it really doesn't have any impact on me. And so I try not to be that kid that's the obnoxious one. But when you ask him, is this a new apostolic reformation church?

It's actually more like spaghetti. I have seen, I don't know if you've seen these, my kid had some of these things, but the shoelaces that look like a string of spaghetti, it was around it, you know, I could play a trick on my wife and I could stick it into the part of spaghetti that she's boiling it.

And the kids might have a plate and say, is this plate shoestring? Well, no, it's not, you've got noodles and you may have a shoestring. And you go around the table and it's kind of the same thing.

Now, if Stephen King put the shoestring in and wrote a book where it morphed into the shoestring that replicated shoestrings and took over this spaghetti and it became a shoestring monster and you put that on the plate, that's new apostolic reformation.

That's the best way to explain it. It is something that it was a cancer that metastasized into a big problem, these big tumors of groups. And we can go through some of that, but the point I'm trying to make here is not every church who shares similarities as new apostolic reformation, but if you get really, really down deep into it, you're probably gonna find some parts of shoestrings that are left over from latirane or any of the things that came before it.

Yeah, finding the threads that are and are there enough of those shoestrings, enough of those threads that are clearly new apostolic reformation associated that the whole meal becomes this. I think that's a great analogy.

And I think that one to just when I am talking about new apostolic reformation, I really, it's a common defense of people who are clearly associated with the new apostolic reformation to be defensive and say, hey, we're not, we don't call ourselves that or this is not, Jed doesn't get to define, John doesn't get to define us as new apostolic reformation because we do not say that we are.

And I think that part of the, what I personally, what I think in regards to that is that if you are non-denominational, you are choosing to exclude yourself intentionally from these sort of denominational roots.

For I think that you put it very well that you are trying to create something new and you're sort of hedging your bets. And I think that that's what we've seen a lot of these churches do is that they're trying to have their cake and eat it too.

They're trying to not be associated with this other iterations of this organization because there are really clear examples of fraud throughout it. And so you don't want to be associated with these other failed churches or these other cults that have been easily identified as cult movements.

So you're not fully claiming, hey, we're a part of the William Brannum, you know, Denomination Church or the Bethel Denomination Church or the IHOP Denomination. You have these all sort of separate streams and you kind of intentionally label it ambiguously so that you can avoid scrutinization, which is 100% the tactic that people are using when they label their church non-denominational.

And I know that and you can pretty easily defend that statement because it's not a multi-denominational church. You couldn't go there and have a teacher, a prominent teacher in the leadership who's a Methodist and one who's a Baptist and one who's, you know, a Orthodox Christian.

Like it's not this sort of, hey, we're non-denominational so we don't have these denominational boundaries and that's what it's built as sometimes. I think I've talked about this before on this podcast, but it's worth re-mentioning.

It's not, it's not, you know, we just love Jesus and that's all we care about. And if you believe in this, you know, if you believe in X, Y, or Z, that's whether you're believing the Trinity or don't believe in the Trinity.

Like we are just about uniting the body of Christ and it doesn't matter. These doctrinal differences don't matter what matters is that we love each other and we love Jesus. And that's definitely how it's built,

but then very quickly, if you are a part of that organization you realize, nope, that's not at all. There might be non-denominational churches that truly are like that, but when you are getting into these new apostolic reformation non-denominational churches, there's like very specific doctrinal allegiances.

And I know that we've talked about this because we've talked about the invisible boundaries before of these churches where you don't realize that your church even believes this thing and tell you bounce up against it and you start realizing, oh, we have this like eschatological framework.

We believe that the world is gonna end in this particular way and not agreeing with that is gonna get me sent out of church leadership and all of a sudden, you're like, oh my goodness, we clearly have very specific doctrinal boundaries.

So anyway, all of that to say is that I think that it's very fair for you and I to get on here and start identifying. and labeling particular churches or particular church threads as deeply associated with the New Apostolic Reformation because it's the only way to sort of demystify some of the intentional spaghetti, some of this like intentional, let's call it all of these different things so that we cannot be critiqued, so that people in our church don't even know some of the things that we believe until it's too late and they've already sort of ingratiated themselves

within the community and so that we can always say that there's some prophet who was very critical in our sort of formation like Bob Jones or instant, you know, for instance, we can later distance ourselves from that. This is something that I think Bethel does. Bob Jones was absolutely critical in the formation of Bethel Church. I doubt a bunch of people who go to Bethel and certainly a lot of people who listen to Bethel music have any idea how influential Bob Jones was on the course of that church and they're able to do that so that when all of this information

about Bob Jones comes out, Bethel can stay out of the limelight and say, oh, well, oh, man, he fell and we were associated with him, but no one really knows how deeply associated they were.

The discussion kind of reminds me ironically of the Beverly Hillbillies. I don't know if you're seeing this show. I used to love it when I was a kid. During the times we could watch television, I should say, but there was this episode where there it was a continual theme that there were people who were in the Civil War who did not know that the Civil War had ended and they were always, it was always a comedy trying to say, no, you guys can't, you got to stop fighting us, right?

And then in one of the episodes, there is a Civil War reenactment right on the front lawn and Granny comes out with a buckshot. She's got a shotgun filled with flour and she chewed them in the butt and they would jump and scream, but the Civil War people who are engaged in Bethel and they become isolated from the broader group and still think they're in the Civil War. That's specifically what I'm talking about here because the problem with identifying the groups involved with the New Apostolic Reformation is that we're talking about a bedrock that encompassed many different

denominations, some of them Pentecostal, some of them not. And what happened was it became so popular leading up to the assemblies of God rejecting it that it started to enter mainstream churches and even some of the Southern states had mainstream denominations that were joining into this thing. And then they did not know that they were supposed to exit it. That's where it gets funny. In Kentucky, for example, I've had multiple people call me who said, we were in an assemblies of God church, and yes, the assemblies, the broader assemblies rejected Latter-Rain.

We weren't part of the independent that split off. We were the main body of assemblies of God, but we were also Latter-Rain, and we just didn't know we were supposed to reject it. So you have that scenario playing out, right?

That makes it really difficult, because if you connect all of the different movements that are the bedrock for this, you've got Christian fundamentalism, you've got the United Pentecostal Church are working directly with Brannum for a period, or leaders of it, I should say, assemblies of God, I mean, a wide swath of the Pentecostal movement is joining into this thing until they're supposed to reject it.

And then when they're supposed to reject it, only half of them did. I actually went to a mainstream church that just purely I could tell was infected by different negative aspects of what I came out of, was it New Apostolic Reformation?

No, but it had that shoestring I'm talking about. You just didn't wanna eat it. So that's kind of the problem here, but the way that it developed, as I mentioned, you had all of these various Pentecostal groups and then in the height of Latter-Rain, there were statements being made by Brannum and others that were saying things like, we welcome all the denominations.

If your denomination draws us out of their circle, we'll draw a bigger circle and draw them in. In other words, we're supportive of denominations. But then when the denominations said, no, what you're doing is wrong.

It's heretical and it's dangerous. And they started separating, well, that's whenever they said, come out of the churches. We don't want to participate with your churches. We want to isolate ourselves. We want to create a non-denominational group.

And that's what they did. They formed what would be a nodded denomination, but it evolved into a denomination that they called non-denominational, which is the whole thing's just so funny when you think about it.

And when that happened, by that point, it had spread all throughout all of these different mainstream denominations, Pentecostal denominations, separatist groups, movements, et cetera, cults, all of these different things. And it was really hard to identify other than there are threads of doctrine that weave them together.

And where they have this phrase that comes out of the Bible where two or three are gathered together in my name, they will take that phrase to mean where two or three are gathered together with the same doctrinal unity.

And that's where this turned dangerous. Because now if your church who is not of my denomination or is independent, if you are aligned with me on the specific doctrine that the mainstream denominations reject, you're my brother.

And I'm going to welcome you to my church, even though you're not even part of my denomination or I may not even have a denomination. So it created these bridges. that existed only in the doctrinal framework that was not mainstream, and they began over time, they began to identify themselves with doctrines specifically that, yes, the mainstream churches don't believe this, we have the secret truth, and that's where it got out of control.

Well, and so I think that a natural progression then would be for us to identify, what do you think are those central doctrines that the new app, so you and I, John, we go to a church here in California, we just walk down the road and we walk into the church, and you and I are trying to see the spaghetti and the shoe strings and identify which doctrines might be, you know, new apostolic reformation ones.

What are some of the big ones that you are looking for it to begin with? I actually take a different direction. When I'm trying to identify something that's new apostolic reformation, I don't start with doctrines because that can lead you into years of trying to untangle the mess.

I instead look to see, is this a healthy church? Is this a church that takes the people in the congregation and tells them we're all equals? There is no central authority. We don't have a apostle or prophet who's dictating to you.

They might even have a prophet. I'm not gonna say that they don't that some of the healthy churches don't. Some of the healthy churches might have a prophet, but they handle it in the biblical way.

There are rules given for people who prophesy in the church, you can read them in the Bible. So they may have a structure that leads towards authoritarianism. And for me, that's simply the aspects of a healthy church.

If you go to a healthy church where leaders are training people to become leaders, there is a balance of power there. And that is one of the healthy aspects of a church. If they're demoting you, do not question, do not touch not God's anointed.

If they're throwing that phrase out in every sermon, they're probably infected. They probably have a Stephen King version of the shoestring, whether it's metastasized or not. But this is one of the big things that you first do.

But it goes beyond just simply identifying a new apostolic reformation church. You should ask that question before you start attending any new church. Is this healthy or is this destructive? Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good point to make because not all cult churches in the unbrella of Christianity.

So cult Christian churches, not all of them are going to be new apostolic reformation churches. So I think that this is that that's a really good sort of first red flag is looking at the structure of how the authority of the churches is.

is structured and whether or not certain individuals are given ultimate authority. And whether that is specifically a sign of the New Apostolic Reformation Church or just a sign of an unhealthy church that is leaning towards similar cult-like structures, you know, that's an important red flag.

Would you say, though, with that, I mean, what I have seen is the use of apostles and prophets has enabled that structure

of authority to be corrupt. So I think of the churches. I mean, I'll stick with just the international house prayer because although I've been involved in a lot of different churches, it's seen like that's obviously where I grew up and I saw that.

And I think that it is a good sort of test case because we now know a lot of how corrupt it was behind the scenes, but with the international house prayer, the rhetoric around prophets and apostles was so

inundated into the culture. I mean, one of the things that you had at the school which is sort of separate and sort of not separate from the international house prayer of church, but at the school, there was a requirement and for staff members, there was a requirement to take courses in the international house prayer's prophetic history.

That was a huge thing that Mike Pickle always emphasized and he would explicitly say if the prophetic history, I can't remember exactly how he phrased it, but essentially it was if the prophetic history falls apart so does the entire church.

Like we don't have this church without the prophetic history. And I think he was right in that regard. And I think that this is kind of the question that I have with some of these subsidiaries like the Pasadena International House of Prayer.

It's like, why is this still a thing? Like the prophetic history fell apart. So like you can't, what do we do? It's sort of like the Civil War analogy that you were given. It's like the war is over with like this side loss that this was very clearly proven to be have some rot at the root.

So we gotta get away from this. And yet the beat will still go on for International House of Prayer and hence many of its sort of network, house of prayer network. But anyway, all that's going back to the point that I was making was that, the emphasis on the prophetic and the apostolic.

And basically what I saw this do was that there was then

a chosen select group of individuals who basically became the mouthpiece of God within these communities. And when they became the mouthpiece of God, the doctrine might change or whatnot, but the structure of authority within that community was always such that these individuals were gonna be continuously elevated to near God like status.

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

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

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I remember when we first got married, I was about 20 years old, and we had these two guys from the church of Latter-day Saints come into our house. They came knocked on the door, and most people would turn them away.

I'm not the kind of guy that turns anybody away, so I let him in, and my wife was like, what are you doing? And it was kind of funny, because they saw me as this 20-year-old who probably knew nothing, not knowing that I study things quite a bit, I always have.

And they always come with a Jedi master and a Padawan learner. I don't know what the terms are, but there's one guy who knows a lot and one guy who's training usually. And I knew enough that I started towing with him, and he got out his Bible, and he was reading, and he was trying to convert me, and I said, you know, I got a Bible too, let me go get it.

And I went and got it, and I said, turn with me to the very last chapter. And I read where Hussu ever adds to or takes away from this book, his part will be taken from the book of life.

And I said, now let's go read the first page, and they turn to the first page of Genesis. No, no, no, the very first page in your Bible. And I saw the guys I asked get this big, because he knew where I was headed with this, and they had to go to the book of Mormon.

And I said, well, that's funny, that's not in my Bible. The Padawan learner's eyes got like this piece. Oh my gosh, we added to this book and I probably de-converted him, but the point I'm trying to make is when you are in a movement and not a church, there's always this history that has to exist to explain your movement's existence. And the sad understanding that people don't grasp is that Christianity was this way. For Christianity to exist and survive as a movement, we had to have the Gospels. I mean, that had to exist. So people went around and they carried the Gospels,

this is our movement, we are Christian, and that separated them from the other religions. If you're in a movement that has a prophetic history or something that is required for your church to exist, you have created a separate thing that is not Christianity. I don't care how you spend it. You can say that it's built on Christianity, whatever you want to say, but for your group to exist, you have to have something separate, you are a separate thing. You're not Christian.

In my opinion, and I'm saying that I said that probably wrong, there are Christian groups who have this, but their focus is not Christianity, their focus is themselves. I think that's a better way to say it. So for that to exist, you have to have exactly what you said, people who are claiming to be apostles and prophets. Here's the problem. The word apostle simply means, and we've talked about this. It means one who is sent out and a biblical apostle means one who is sent out with the authority of establishing the church because they had seen Jesus face to face. Whenever you have to have a

prophetic history to explain that away and create a new version of an apostle so that your movement has a different apostle than the biblical apostle, what you have done is you have created the idea that the prophetic or the apostle leaders, whatever they claim to be, they can rewrite your life's direction by their prophecies. When you get into that level of complexity for your group to exist, either you're in the New Apostolic Reformation or you're in something that is very dangerous because you're going outside of the Bible to create a new movement and you saw where Jim Jones

went with his movement. It can go everywhere from we're going to go worship a flying spaghetti monster to we're all going to go drink cyanide lace school aid. You just don't know where that's going to go. For me, that's dangerous, but more to the point, which is kind of circling back to answer your question, there are specific doctrines that you can identify the framework that is used to develop the New Apostolic Reformation. One of them is the fivefold ministry. If your group reads the passage from Ephesians where it talks about apostles, prophets, pastors, and teachers,

but then to explain it in the way that they teach it, have to combine it with their prophetic history. to make them change into something that the Bible doesn't say they are, you've created an authoritarian structure.

And so, regardless of whether you're in the New Apostolic Reformation or not, you are in an authoritarian church, and it's not a healthy church. However, I would say a vast majority of the New Apostolic Reformation churches do believe in this fivefold ministry in the authoritarian way.

Yeah, yeah, authoritarian fivefold ministry. I definitely was thinking about that as one of the red flags as well, which I think goes usually hand in hand, at least now, with a lot of the Seven Mountain Mandate stuff, because you have not only these sort of apostles, sorry, it's apostles, prophets, teachers, pastors, pastors.

So you have the sort of structure and authority that's established and that heavily leans on your apostles and your prophets. I wonder if this feels different in different countries, but in the United States, I think that that is now coming hand in hand what the Seven Mountains Mandate, where there is now all of this language about Christians taking dominion over and having sort of from the authority of the apostle flowing down, there is now we are going to invade every sphere of society, every mountain of society in order to gain influence over the American culture.

Again, I think that this might feel different in different countries and I am very familiar with the way that it is now manifested in sort of this specific stream of the NAR that I have seen and I know that this is another huge thing that I am personally sort of raises a red flag for me, is that this big emphasis on dominionism, which again, it doesn't, the language of it is not always easy to identify unless you know what you're looking for and then it's very easy to identify but you can have, you can go to a church and if you haven't heard this language before,

it sounds pretty benign or it can sound very like, okay, yeah, like we want Christians in every sphere of society, we want Christians who are an education who are in the entertainment industry and we want to hear the voice of God in every echo in every aspect of life and you're like, okay, great, yeah, I'm on board with that.

But then when it is attached to this sort of apostolic network, You see that there's this branching authority structure that is very like authoritarian. It's very like we are trying to implement our new vision of what Christianity is supposed to even look like and what American culture is supposed to look like.

And while you, it might just be about Jesus on the sort of broader paintbrush strokes of it, that's what is, it's being labeled as. As you get more specific into it, it's like there is a very specific vision of what it means to be a Christian in the entertainment industry or to have these fears of society influence.

Like that is a very specific thing. And the dominionist vision is one that is very specific and I have only seen that lead to further like coercive

abusive and authoritarian sort of stretchers be established. Well, it goes back to the Stephen King version of the spaghetti book. And I hope the guy is listening so he can write a book on this.

I would love to read it if he does. But so in the spaghetti book where the shoe string is dropped in, you just have simply that. It's a shoe string. It's somewhat harmless. If you bite into it, you spit it back out.

But in the Stephen King version where it's metastasizing and it's taking over the other strands of spaghetti and they all become shoe strings, that's what we're talking about here. And what you're specifically talking about because I was listening as you were talking to the keywords.

What you're talking about essentially is there are loaded language but there are actionable keywords in New Apostolic Reformation churches. You talked about seven mountains mandate, think of the word mandate. It means you have a mission and that mission's not really described in the Bible.

This is a mission that we have created for our movement. You can use, there's different languages that you can, different words you can use in the language. But think of it like this. If the word means you have an assignment.

If the word means you need, you need alignment. You need covering. What you're talking about is we're going to give you our revelation of something new that doesn't exist in the Bible. You must get it through our prophetic history but it's going to give you your encoded message of a mission that you must be a part of.

Nine times out of 10, if you're in a group that is telling you that there's the secret loaded language and you have a special mission, you're in a destructive cult and you might die.

That's how bad this is. It's widespread. There are groups that aren't as destructive as Jim Jones and people's temple but they can get there eventually if you stay in long enough. A healthy church is going to say things like you belong to a local body, you're one of us.

New Apostolic Reformation Church is going to say, you must be properly aligned to belong with us. You need to be under our spiritual authority. You need to be under our covering because we're going to teach you about our mandate, our mission, whatever the language is.

So what they're going to do is they're going to make you conform and adopt much like the spaghetti. They're going to take the ordinary spaghetti and the shoe strings going to invade and replicate.

That's what they're trying to do. And the Seven Mountains mandate is essentially that. Not only is it going to replicate in that bowl of spaghetti, we want to get every other bowl of spaghetti to conform to our mission and so they can be aligned with us.

And it goes back to what I said at the very beginning. It's the kid who says, I'm not going to play your way. I'm only going to play my way. I'm not going to have this denomination participate with this denomination.

And what's really weird about that, because I grew up in this environment too, we would reject another denomination's offer for fellowship because we were isolationists. And at the same time, we would listen to sermons about how they were doing that and how they did not align.

And after I left, I'm shocked and amazed that I could go to one denomination church and I might meet people from another denomination because they had open fellowship. They were actually fellowshiping with one another.

They disagreed on certain aspects of doctrine, but the two that I'm remembering are healthy churches where they said, you're part of the body and you other people, you're part of another body, but we're all one in Christ.

We're all one in the same. Think of the difference in that in, you must conform to our spiritual way. You must need our apostle spiritual covering. Otherwise, you're destined for hell or whatever they teach.

So it's always about those activation words. We want, I hate to use this, but think of a, one of the guys that straps a bomb on his chest, they get activated because they have that programmed language that at a certain point in time, you have a mission, you're gonna be activated, you're gonna go do the thing.

The Christian, the Protestant Christian church has the same thing, it's just not as deadly yet. It's this mix of activation language that is this sort of culty, okay, here's the words. And a mix of just like branding of because you have these mega churches and we've talked about this too of how there's like, it's almost like franchise, franchise churches that have all of these different pop-ups that are a million different iterations of Y-WAM or the International House Prayer or Bethel or something like that.

And they're able to maintain that because these words work, these term analogy, like they work to activate people and radicalize people, especially when it is, is conjoined with some of these other doctrines, or these attitudes towards Christianity and towards just worldviews in general.

But you can see how people get radicalized. And I think one of the things that you said that really struck me as true is when growing up at IHA,

there was always this idea that everybody else was rejecting our church that may not everyone else, but that there was hostility towards the international house prayer from all of these different churches, like the church down the road.

And I knew we were different than the church down the road. Like if I went to the Methodist church down the road, that they would not believe the things that are true. That's how I interpreted it.

And because we were the ones who are speaking truth, they rejected us. That's the perspective that I had. And it was this very adversarial

elitism, isolationist mentality that I didn't realize was isolationist, I thought. And the way that it was even marketed was we were the forerunner church. We were the church that was going to lead the brought body of Christ.

In some ways, we were going to then be separated from the rest because any good leader leads so far ahead that the rest will follow, but it takes time for them to realize that we were the pioneers.

We were the ones who saw it first and we invited everyone else to follow. But in functional reality, we were the church that was going in and taking other communities and pulling them out and sort of cannibalizing the Christian communities that were already a part of the city and then radicalizing those groups of individuals and saying, hey, if you still have allegiance to these particular beliefs that you had or to the people that you had that no longer works, like you must submit to our authority.

I don't think people realize how much early the international house of prayer and even pre-international house of prayer. Mike Bickel was like a mob boss figure in Kansas City specifically, like the Kansas City Fellowship community, most of the red flags that were raised about KCF back then and or Southern, I'm forgetting now what the name of the church, there was many different church names.

There was Metro Christian Fellowship, Kansas City Fellowship and then Southern Kansas City something, but those different iterations of Mike Bickel churches. A lot of the 1980s, 1990s, a lot of the sort of uproar that was in Kansas City against these communities was less, some of it was doctrinal, but a lot of it was just, hey, they're stealing our congregation. Like they would come in, they would radicalize people in the congregation, and Mike Begill was like, very mobbassy of, you cannot, you have to submit to me and to my authority, and to, and he used Bob Jones as a sort of prophetic figure to gain, gain credibility himself,

Mike Begill, and as sort of like, he used them as a tool for sure. And all of this early language surrounding Kansas City Fellowship was this just like, I don't know if you've watched righteous gemstones, but it was this righteous gemstones sort of feel where it was like there's just this community coming in and taking over sort of power and control, and then isolating the new community members from their previous Christian communities, because if you are still connected with your Methodist church and your Methodist pastor, then you get to question Mike Begill at times because there's other authority structures, but Mike Begill only wanted a singular authority

structure that led back to him or led back to Bob Jones who he could could kind of manipulate and control. So, and I bring that up for a couple of different reasons, but one of the reasons too is when I was looking up and just out of curiosity being like, hey, how is Pasadena International House Prayer talked about and its association to the International House Prayer? So, I very quickly, I'll just I want to read some excerpts from a Reddit thread that I found because I think it gives a good representation of how you would see people talk about these things. So the Reddit

is just my church has ties with the International House Prayer in Pasadena known as Peahob is that a cult? And then there's more in the actual body of the post, but they're asking this question, and this is five years ago. So, there's before a lot of the information that about Mike Begill came out. So, I will say that some of these comments are naive to what was going on at IHOP and that makes sense because a lot of people were naive to what was going on. But the the main response in there is that the International House Prayer is not a cult, but the Kansas

A Prophets are no more. People send and instead of it being led by the Holy Spirit, they started making it up. It goes on, but essentially the response is like, oh, well, you know, it started out good.

God's revelation was there, but then there was people who sent, and now the Kansas City prophets are no more, and it sort of fell away. It's not a cult. This is sort of the rhetoric that surrounds it. And that's largely the rhetoric that I've seen with a lot of the criticisms towards the international house prayer throughout my life, is that for the people who are criticizing it, it's always sort of caveat of like, well, it's not really a cult, and there was good people who had

God really was speaking to them and was really using them, and then somewhere along the way it got messed up. That is not how it is. That just is not not the truth. You were talking about something I want to circle back to because it's actually important. It is the major point that I wanted to build up to. It's really easy to recognize a new epistolic reformation church by whether they're living in reality or whether they're living in this fantasy world of spiritual warfare.

And I want to clarify that because I'm not saying that spirits and demons are not in the Bible. You can read the Bible and you can find these things, right? Their passages that talk about it, but there are people who don't actually live in our world, yet they're here, and they think that everything around them is not another human, not another sickness of the body. They think, this is spiritual warfare, and I'm engaged. I am an active participant. I'm activated. That's another way to look at it. I am activated for becoming a spiritual warrior. When you do this,

when you get the people to believe this mindset that the whole world around me is against me, it's all angels or demons, and we're in this battle. What happens is they start to point at the others who they've taken the people out of the churches, and they say the others are the churches that have been infected by those demons. And so the reality, it's one step away from reality, because they're starting to think, okay, that's not a human that I see preaching in that church.

That's a demon who is infecting other demons, and those who stay in that church, you're living in a fantasy world that is, I hate to say it because people hate Harry Potter, but you're a little bit worse than Harry Potter when you're like this, right? You're living in a world where you are demonizing other humans, and go back to the church example, the healthy church example that I said were one denomination fellowships with another. They don't look at each other this way. That's not how the real world works, but once you reach that level of

program, of activation, you've actually become radicalized to the point where if the leader starts to tell you to do things that aren't legal, there are people in the church that will do it. And for me, that is, that's highly problematic, I would say if you're looking for a sign of is this new apostolic reformation, just listen to the sermons.

Are they talking about spiritual warfare, run screaming if they are? I'm so glad that you made this point and it makes it feel like we intentionally were leading to this final thought because which we were not, but the Vance Bolter, which we did a whole episode on Vance Bolter who was the Minnesota shooter and I won't get into too much of the details on that.

But I remember, and I'm sure you remember some of this too, John, when his name came up, I didn't know anything about him. And I just on a whim knew that he had spoken at some churches in, I can't remember if it was Kenya, or he had spoken to a church in Africa.

And I pulled up one of his sermons, just sort of on a whim, because you and I at the time had been talking about Christian dominionism and violence associated with Christian dominionism. And I, and no way thought that Vance Bolter was going to be connected to the new apostolic reformation community at all.

And then when I watched his sermon, it was exactly what you were saying. It was his language about, he spoke a lot about churches being infected, other American churches being infected by demons and about the spiritual warfare between churches in the actual, it wasn't sort of the speaking about the church as a whole.

It was this sort of separated thing. And he talked about some of the political reasons why that was the case. And talked about homosexuality and abortion and how those were demons infecting the church.

And anyway, he just used a lot of this language that to me, someone who had grown up in the new apostolic reformation community, I was like, man, a lot of these, he's using a lot of these trigger words, a lot of these activation words.

And then I was like, man, this feels familiar. In a way that wasn't, you know, I've heard charismatic Christian speak before and there's a sense of familiarity, but there was a very specific like, man, this is really close to some of the stuff that I remember having be taught to me and how I grew up.

And then lo and behold, I go to investigate and realize that he was heavily influenced and radicalized by someone who was on the same. The same like, oh, I can't remember what they called it, but there was this Christian farm in Zimbabwe that IHOP had funded, well, actually it was pretty gone up, but Kansas City Fellowship had funded that my parents were on.

And there was like, so there was this direct connection between Bolter and my parents. And you could see, oh, I can see how he could have been indoctrinated by some of the same rhetoric. Now, if people want to go back and watch that actual episode where we go into it more detail and you can see sort of the line's drawn. And then there was articles in papers about him that were before this about how some of his family had, he had gotten sort of radicalized by this version of Christianity that sort of isolated him from the rest of

his community. And they started talking about that. And it was this very fascinating parallel of what I had seen so many times happen in the very community that was raised in where it was this sort of activation language that separates Christians from other Christians in this radical, we are a part of the select few who are fighting the demonic influence of the world that is permeating through these other Christian churches. And we need to be set apart. We need to be different. We need to be the bride of Christ. We need to be the ones

who are the four runners for God and separate ourselves. And we will do so by using this sort of Joel's Army spiritual warfare methods that can clearly blend into actual literal violence at times. So I'm going on this thread that is now probably much larger, but I think the point is, is like, yeah, I remember having this experience where I heard someone and I was like, this is ringing bells with some of this new apostolic reformation language and followed that thread to see, yep, nope, there actually was this direct connection to the new apostolic world, which again,

it's the spaghetti analogy. It's where how much it has metastasized and how it's been influenced by other things, it's difficult to identify this is a new apostolic reformation belief and this is not, but you can certainly see the sort of trends of it. And it's sort of the fruit of the trees situation where you can see a lot of the ways that church communities and individual people are factored by some of this belief system and a corrupt authority structure that is very endemic within New Apostolic Reformation Communities.

I think what you're trying to say, and this is a point that really, I should have made as my primary point, when I look to see as a group of New Apostolic Reformation Church, I immediately go to the labyrinth of networks that are connecting it.

Whenever a fan's belt or all of that stuff happen, I went to the website to find any information about them and there's just nothing that you can find, news sources. I actually started to trace his church that was in the United States, and interestingly, I think they have to pull all the sermons off, but there was a point in time that I was able to read some of the sermon transcripts, and they actually mentioned Mike Bickle in those.

So what I did was I tried to think this spaghetti bowl. So once it metastasizes, it takes over your spaghetti bowl. Well, next it's going to go take off, take over somebody else's spaghetti bowl, where you can trace that trail and see how it's connected.

And really, that's the big thing. If it's trying to spread and grow like a virus, it's probably New Apostolic Reformation. If you combine it with all of the other things that we've said in this episode.

So hopefully, if we've said something to help somebody identify, thank you so much for doing this. Yeah, my pleasure. Well, if you've enjoyed a show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web.

You can find us at William-Brandom.org. For more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR. Available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.