Inside Calvary Chapel: A Former Intern Tells His Story

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 very special guest, Joshua Bell, former member of Calvary Chapel. Joshua, it's so good to have you on. We've tried to connect and hit and miss a few times, but we finally get together. You are among several others who are contacting me from Calvary Chapel. Some people who are still inside, some people who are no longer inside, but I think you may be the first who've

actually come on the podcast, and it takes some bravery to do that. I'll be honest, I'm still digging into Calvary Chapel and the history, and if you've watched any of that, there are deep ties between Calvary Chapel and my research, and we may get into that, we may not. But anyway, very good to have you. If you could just tell everybody a little bit about yourself. Hey, my name is Joshua Bell. I back in my late teens, so that would have been like 2005 to 2006, so 2004, 2006 I was an intern at a particular Calvary Chapel, which

at least for the moment, I won't say the name of it, but yeah, I've been walking with the Lord since I was 12, and through many ups and downs, seeing a lot of different things. As you can tell, I like music. I also enjoy just nerdy stuff in general, and when you combine that with me being going through the things I went through at the Calvary I grew up in, and being research-oriented, yeah, that's how I kind of ended up at this point where I'm talking with you, because there was a point where I'm like, this happened to me. Like, I know it,

this can't be an isolated thing, I just don't buy, because when you've been in the Calvary moment long enough, you just, yeah, you put things together. So, but yeah, I've got a bachelor's in counseling and human services, so I'm not like a therapist, but I'm not like a doofus either. So I have some idea of what I'm talking about, and I don't know, anything you want to know. Yeah, it's all the people who are in Calvary Chapel and in favor of an highly critical of me, I'll admit, I am the doofus, as it relates to this. I'm still learning, and

there's really a lot to learn. I will preface this entire podcast with something that I say frequently in the, in the podcast that I've done. I don't really have anything against Calvary Chapel. I don't have a dog in the fight whatsoever. I'm just more interested in the history, and there is a history. And one of the components, which I've mentioned a few of these, uh, through Chuck's myth and the laterane, one of the components was Chuck's myth's Moses model.

And it's not even that I really want to focus on the Moses model so much as I do the system because this is not Calvary Chapel specific, but it's something that deeply, deeply impacted Calvary Chapel.

And I know you have an experience we'll get into that, but how did you first encounter Calvary Chapel? What brought you into it? Back in, shoot, it would have been like 1998 to 1999, my parents came to faith.

And then, um, we went from being, you know, I guess you could say, and probably an agnostic family to a Christian family in the, you know, and you know what I mean by that, I'm sure.

Um, but, um, they decided they were going to start going to the Calvary that I attended growing up because he's recommended by my aunt. And, um, pretty much between the ages of 12 and 20, my spiritual life was formed by everything that was taught by, uh, the main pastor at the church I went to.

So, yeah, I'm very familiar. In fact, I have a few people who have either worked with me often on or are still to some extent working with me who were attracted to Calvary Chapel for various reasons, some of which probably similar to your family, but it is a very attractive church if you're thinking coming out of a fundamentalist, pinnacle, hostile environment and trying to find something that's not quite that rigid.

Calvary Chapel is a good midway type church, I guess, is how I would, how I would pitch it. Um, what was the church like whenever you first joined it? What, what was the size, the culture, the worship, described the church?

I believe on average, uh, that church has maintained around 1,500 to 2,000 members. I remember hearing through a friend that had spiked to 3,000 for a while. Um, and as far as church culture, um, I would say very yes, man.

And also even, uh, clicks, um, in fact, I had one friend back then, and this was when I was in the internship, but at the same time, he sat down and he was being kind of tiny cheek about it a little bit, because he knew that I wasn't like that type of person, but at the same time, he's like, so you are aware there are the canites in the benights, right?

Which is the two, two pastors and they're, you know, some people follow Ben and some people follow Ken and, um, so there's a little bit of that yes man culture and the, um, schisms in the grouping and they infighting, um, you didn't hear about it too much because everybody kind of like kept it under wraps in a sense, it's like, I mean, even you'd have situations where like, there was the homeschool group and then the homeschool group would do something to offend another group and then like, it's just, yeah, so, and, um, I mean, as far as churches go, it's probably not the worst in that regard, but it still

wasn't great. And then, of course, it always got worse during times of crisis for the church. I am more familiar than you know. I think I've mentioned this on the podcast, but in the brand of tabernacle, my grandfather was the head pastor.

William Brandham's son, people wanted him to be the head pastor, and they kept fighting to get him in, and my grandfather kept fighting to stay. It's a weird, weird story, which I won't go too deep, but anyway, I grew up kind of away from there, and I would visit the family from time to time when I moved here.

I never really had caught it until I moved here that right straight down the middle, you had the Josephites, which was William Brandham's son, the followers of them, and you had the calling sites, and there were, I guess there were three categories of people, the people in the center left and right.

And I'm one of the people that I like everybody, so it took me about, gosh, I was probably here five years before I really caught onto it. And then suddenly I started noticing, wait a minute, there's a strong schism between these people.

And eventually my grandfather was pushed out in the rest of his history, but it's odd how that develops. Now, that's in a small church. My grandfather's church, compared to what you're describing, was relatively small.

So I'm trying to picture being in a big church like that, how that would even play out. It's a little bit odd to think about it. But along those same lines, we were an independent church, we viewed ourselves as an independent church, though we were Brandham might through and through, but we would say we're non-denominational or some people might have said inter-denominational.

How would you have categorized the church back then? Would you say it's independent or a denomination? Back then for sure, excuse me, it was associated with Calvary Chapel Proper, and so it was only, I think it was, I think it was like 2014 or 2015, Ken Disapiliated.

There's rumor that supposedly they're reaffiliated again. I don't know if that's true for sure or not, I haven't dug into it, but the way I am in non-denominational still is, and I always joke, it's a non-denominational denomination.

I remember you said that once, and I came over that long before you'd get it. That's some of the reason I've really appreciated you, because it's like, oh yeah, we've been through, I can tell, we've been through some similar experiences.

Yeah, and I would say overall culture has always been more on the conservative side, and even on the extreme conservative side, I definitely, I remember back in COVID, I tried to reconnect with someone that I knew a youth group over Facebook, and she got very angry, very quickly.

When I even just said something as simple as like, Jesus loves you, because she started, she was already getting adversarial, and a lot of Trump this, Trump at USA, USA, and I'm like, I don't know, I'm not necessarily against Trump or anything, it's just, yeah, it was interesting, so there's a lot of, there's almost no, uh, a liberal representation in that church, for sure, because liberalism of any flavor is deadly and dangerous.

And I'm just sticking with the culture part still a little bit more, because I feel like I could share more on that. But like, another part of the culture is excommunication in like a very, very bad sense.

Like, don't get me wrong. I believe that there are times when someone's in and you should be like, hey, listen, you're in saying you're not repenting. You're not doing what you're supposed to do.

You can't be, you know, that's one thing. But we're talking like, justifying things, our parents justifying things like kicking their kids out of the house because they made friends with a weekend and brought them to youth group.

And the kid said something at youth group that made the parents uncomfortable and blemished their reputation. And so their son got kicked out. Like, this is actual, like, yeah, stuff that's happened. And I know the, I guess she's probably, he's probably like in his like 20s now.

But anyway, yeah. So that's kind of the norm and then just not just a culture of not dealing with actual problems when they arrest. Yeah, it's odd. I was thinking actually just this morning, I was watching the news and I, I don't talk about news or politics very much.

I avoid it at all costs. But as you know, there are wars and all kinds of political turmoil. And I was thinking, I was thinking this as I was brushing my teeth. I thought if some newspaper editor were to publish some great life changing publication and then suddenly everybody reads it and they get overwhelmed and think, why are we doing this?

And they stop all the wars and he gets the Nobel Prize. Most of the people that I talked to on the podcast would celebrate, hey, this guy won the Nobel Prize and there's no more wars.

If, if the Pope were to do the same thing and the Pope were to stop it, they would be up in arms and say, we don't like this. The Pope has done it and I was thinking, you know, it's like the, you know, you read in the Bible about their following the letter of the law and not the law of the things that they must do.

Well, Pentecostalism, charismatic movement has shifted to the letters of the law of who they must not like and it's so odd when you think about it. But anyway, back to, uh, back to Calvary Chapel, I don't want to skew this by my own opinion.

So I'm going to let you actually introduce Chuck Smith into this. But if you've watched my podcast, you know the research in the Chuck Smith, the Moses model, all of this and you know, you're familiar with some of this.

So it's not quite unembiased from my research. But I do want to hear from your side what you feel, Chuck Smith, brought into Calvary Chapel, both good, bad and ugly. Yeah, let's talk to good.

Um, I think the first good thing that he brought in, um, is, and unfortunately, I don't think even a lot of the pastors that he immediately discipled, right, at the beginning of Calvary Chapel actually really took to it in completeness, but He brought in that idea of healthy tension between what, you know, a lot of the extremes are in the Bible in the sense of like he would say, well, you're not, it's not just predestination or just free will.

You know, there's this tension between these two things and what God is doing is somewhere between those two spaces. Which I thought was a good thing. He had a lot of this theology that was more in that direction.

Now that I'm, you know, much older, I realize that's not as new as it sounds, but or it sounded at the time. But so that's one good thing. I think another good thing is especially based on like looking at some of the stuff that you have on your YouTube channel.

I haven't dealt too much into your website, but another good thing is that he tried. He did, to his credit, try to break from Brandon Mism and he was aware of the problems with lettering and the developing NAR and all that stuff.

Just theologically in general, there's, it's relatively healthy. Theologically, I would say he did a good job with that. There's not a whole lot of like other than the Moses model. There's not a lot of like directly off theology.

It's just that letter of the lot of thing that you were already talking about. I think it's go wrong. As far as the bad, and if I come up with other good things as we go, I'll bring those up. But as far as the bad, there was a real retention of the adversarial culture.

I guess you could say from like Brandon Mism and the well, if you're not going to do it my way, then you know, you're at kind of the thing or no Jesus told me the right way to do it.

And therefore you have to do it that way too. And the other bad thing is from the very beginning, there's been a lot of just general sexual misconduct. And I mean, if you go on the Roy's report and just search up Calvary Chapel, you will see scores and scores of Calvary Chapel pastors with sexual misconduct.

And you know, while I don't know the statistics of like how many sexual predators are in the Western church at large or the American church at large, it still feels really strange to me.

And I don't think it's just a coincidence that that's been a problem for Calvary Chapel as a denomination for a long time. And then there's the cover up culture, which is something you've talked about before in a lot of your videos.

Calvary culture is totally normal. If a pastor fails, they do a lot to hide it or mitigate it or push victims under the radar or out of the church. So I have a method to my madness.

I did this actually purposely. I wanted to mention the Pope in that example first because to the... Calvary Chapel people, I am their evil Pope. And the irony is, everything that you just said, which they would probably agree with because it's all documented history.

There's nothing you said that's not already documented. That's exactly my position on all of this. I've never really said anything differently. The only difference is I actually do go to the documentation. Now there is an error that was made some time ago.

I was dealing with many, many moving parts to the business, the website, the podcast, etc. And I have custom software that helps me arrange things on the website. It was indexing some of the references, and it got some of them just vastly wrong out of order.

And so people were looking at it saying, this is incorrect. But if you followed all of the references, it's actually documented historical material. I don't... I have very hard not to bring opinion into it.

I just say, here's what a source is saying, here's what I agree with it saying, and here's maybe something I disagree. But everything that you've said, if I were to form a research paper, I would probably say exactly what you said in a different order, because I would tie it back to also, I think, a big key component, which I will mention for this podcast, is Lonnie Frisbee and his connection to the guys in the Shepherding movement.

Just through Lonnie Frisbee, you have a bridge into Paul Cain, into Derek Prince. He actually lived in Derek Prince's apartment in Florida. So that ties to the Shepherding movement, and the Shepherding movement laid the entire foundation for the spiritual control and spiritual covering that developed in the New Apostolic Reformation, not so much in Calvary Chapel.

So you've got all these bridges of people, and I like to connect the dots. So that's where Chuck Smith came in. Not so much that I even really was saying anything bad about Smith, but all that aside, he also did, to some extent, get into the mindset of developing these big churches, which nothing really against him.

It was a good idea if you frame it that you're trying to build Christianity bigger. Maybe that makes sense. But the problem is, like you have just mentioned, and again, anybody can read through the Royz report and see this.

Sometimes when you transition too quickly to a size that you can't maintain, you bring in people who really shouldn't be in the positions that they are. Also combined with that is just simply the human element.

The people who are mentioned in Royz report that have done the bad things, and you can read through them. I'm not accusing anybody. It's all out there for somebody to read. Many of those might have been good people if otherwise not put into the position that they were.

I know people in the Brana movement who are really, really good people who did really, really bad things, and they just should have simply never been in there. It all comes down to this for me, which is another point that I want to get into.

and to now is just simply the accountability aspect. When I left this movement, I went to churches where they did have accountability and it was a very rigid, we're going to check you every sermon, we're going to make sure that you don't go down the wrong path because people are people and people have people problems.

But Smith came out of this environment where there was zero accountability in Laterane. You just laid your hands, you prophesied on somebody and Jim Jones was the prime example of this. People's temple, Guyana, he was one of the people who really didn't have any guardrails and his group spiraled out of control.

Chuck Smith didn't go that same route, but the system was there that he built upon. And I don't see if I were to say something negative about Smith, I would say he didn't strive hard enough to change that system.

I would say that his biggest fault, if he had one, was that he really did not bring accountability into the picture. So with all that background, what was your experience with accountability in Calvary Chapel?

I mean, the hard thing is is when I was in intern, that was when, you know, just recently, a lot of things have kind of come to light that the church had grew up in.

But when I was there, a lot of things are still under wraps. And so I think the best example I have is where there was just like a lack of accountability is when I was in intern, they hired a guy from the congregation, good guy, but it's like you were saying not entirely ready for the position he was put in, and he was expected to give counseling in a sexual abuse situation, essentially, which I mean, at least in the state I live in, I believe it's illegal for a pastor to even counsel on that anyway,

but that's a whole other thing. But essentially the whole situation blew up in this new pastor's face. He messed a lot of stuff up, and then he started getting blamed for it by the family he was counseling.

And then on top of that, the lead pastor came at the time basically just threw him under the bus and said, yeah, like you screwed up. And then I guess you could maybe argue there's an attempted accountability there, but it was more like the real problem was that this guy was given a task that he wasn't ready for, and even he admitted that much later.

So now that we have the background, we've talked about Chuck Smith, Pentecostalism, Lateran, all of those things and your experience in being in there. I want to dive deeper on what Calvary Chapel means to you.

Like I said, I've got friends who are researchers who are very favor, look at Calvary Chapel very favorably. Some of them I think may have even joined or at least they're experimenting with joining.

So what does it look like? Whenever you think about Calvary Chapel, what would you say are their core beliefs and how does that differ from what you... I would say mainstream might believe. Certainly, church structure and accountability of pastors is different.

I would say that mainline is much better at the accountability piece.

And so when something goes wrong in the Calvary movement, there's just not much of an attempt to, I guess, really take that person out of ministry and restore them and restoration doesn't always have to involve going back to ministry, right?

But that's always the trajectory is, you know, all where we're storing them. But usually what that means is like taking the guy out or the, I don't know, there's no women pastors really in the Calvary movement.

But, but taking that guy out and just basically hiding him for a year, wait for everything to die down, then you bring that person back is by then you got the new crop. So back to my Pope example.

I am a big fan of studying history and understanding what history means. And one of the things that C. Peter Wagner said, when he saw all of these networks that began to emerge, he had Pentecostal networks, you had different holiness networks, laterane people, he was actually referring to parts of what came out of the intersection between Chuck Smith and various others, John Wember, et cetera.

And he called this brand of this the New Apostolic Reformation. Now, we know years later, New Apostolic Reformation today, when you think of it, there's certain highly political themes that you look at and you say that must be a New Apostolic Reformation church.

But that's not really what Wagner was referring to. He was referring to all of these networks that eventually developed into that. So according to Wagner's point of view, he would have looked at the emerging of Calvary Chapel as just simply one of the networks that is in this vast array of networks.

I'm curious what you would have thought being in that, looking backwards in time. Now that you know what the NAR is and what they stand for and you mentioned Trump. So I'm assuming you have seen the photos of people who are NAR leaders standing behind Trump and all of that.

I don't want to get into the politics of this. But when you consider Calvary Chapel, would you consider it what Wagner was terming the New Apostolic Reformation years ago, or would you say it's leaning more towards what they would call NAR now?

It's definitely the case that there are churches within Calvary that lean very heavily towards NAR type systems and there are ones that don't. And then you get ranges in between. And I would say on average, you're gonna end up, if you just went to a random city and walked into a random Calvary, you're probably more likely to run into a church system that's being run more like NAR rather than less.

So. If I would include the Moses model, lack of accountability or leaders, a lot of like group schisms. So like in the church that I grew up in, Benites and Kennites, that sort of thing.

So yeah, I think the way that I would frame it is there are multiple varying ways in which these connections can happen through these networks. Some of it is within, but some of it is just simply historical.

I tend to gravitate towards just simply out of curiosity, what was the historical lineage. And usually I go actually through the Shepherding movement. I mentioned Chuck Smith and his connection to Lonnie Frisbee, Frisbee to the Shepherds.

When the Shepherding movement they created this pyramid-style hierarchy of what you would call today a spiritual covering or it was called discipleship back then, but essentially had guys at the top who were discipling the leaders, the leaders down to the churches, down to the people, etc.

And so I usually, I don't evaluate it 100% as it nor is it not nor, but I look at it as one of the, I would say that was probably the most destructive hierarchies that you can go through, through history.

If it goes through the Shepherding movement branch, it gets to very, very destructive tones. And usually there's one criteria that I go by whenever I do this. I will ask the question, which I'm actually going to ask you this, in Calvary Chapel, who disciples a senior pastor?

If you can find a clear definition of this, usually they did not go through the Shepherding pathway. They went through a different one. Who would you say disciples to senior pastor? So as far as pastors within the Calvary movement being discipled, it's basically not existent.

Yes, in the church that I grew up in, Ken, the main pastor would occasionally go back to Costa Mesa and talk with Chuck about church matters and those types of things. He would meet with other pastors like at pastors conferences and stuff, but generally speaking, as far as I could tell, and as far as I knew, and as far as I've been able to tell pastors in the Calvary movement don't generally have someone who's discipling them, or if nothing else, they don't have like that one person who's a Christian that's an accountability partner for them.

So I was actually going to go two different pathways with this podcast, depending on how you answered the Shepherding question, because I'll say it like this. Again, I'm the evil Pope, so I'm trying to give examples where you're leading me there.

I'm actually trying very hard not to lead you. In the Brannemism example, Brannem set the standard. He said that we follow the elect seed is what he would say. We're all part of the elect seed and he was referring to the biblical, there's passages that you can go through to find this, but what he would say is this.

The Spirit is giving the spoken word to the messenger of the day. And that he was saying this all during Laterane, this is what Chuck Smith would have adopted in his Laterane years, not that he continued this by no means.

but he was part of a system that was teaching this. And Branham went further to say that he essentially laid down all of the groundwork that would eventually lead to the shepherding movement. Many of those people were part of that same framework.

But what he was saying is this, the leadership is led by God, not by man. And so you shouldn't question the leader was the theme that was pushed. And he had various ways that he would say it and touch not God's anointed as one of the phrases that was thrown out very randomly for all kinds of scenarios.

But essentially you could not question a leader. And it flowed from the top down, there wasn't any, at least to my knowledge, there wasn't any real structure to disciple a leader. The leader was instead believed to be discipled by God.

But what happens when he's not? That was the question I begin to ask. What happens when he's not? So I was surprised whenever I first learned two things. The first one I learned from another researcher that Chuck Smith actually had a end of day's prediction, which follows the pattern that I have seen in the Moses model. Many of the leaders that came out of the Laterane movement, they were in time focused.

And so they were always constantly thinking of ways to calculate when the end shall be. So that mindset clearly stuck with him. You can't say that it left him. And also the Moses model.

I was really surprised point number two. Whenever I read the newspaper article where he publicly declared, we follow the Moses model. And he's referring to a situation you can read it in the news.

I'm not, you know, this is not even my opinion. He's referring to a situation where there is a serious allegation against ministers. And he's saying we follow the Moses model. The ministers judge the ministers.

In other words, the ministers are not accountable to the people as what happens with mainstream churches. We're following the Brannum structure as essentially what he's saying. Essentially, if you look at the church governance chapter in in the cover chapel distinctives, which you can find in the PDF on the internet, it's out there.

And then you go to the on the wrong finger. And if you go to the church governance chapter towards the end, Chuck is talking about an experience he had before he started Calvary with another church if I remember right.

But the quote that I'm going to read is from that experience. He's talking about what happened with him. I felt that it was led by the spirit, this group, and was very dynamic. I mean, it was exciting.

There were fellows that might who let out in prayer who had never prayed publicly in their lives. So many of them were really touched and moved. However, the board members got together afterward for a special board meeting.

They called me in the next morning and wanted to know just what I thought I was doing. And they let me know that they didn't want me to do that again. The time I thought, well, I thought this might be my wise ministry, but it won't be.

I'm not going to be under these kinds of restrictions. I must be open to be led by the spirit. And that is kind of just the example of how a lot of the same ideas from the Nahr and Latter-Rain and all those things were still in shock before he started Calgary.

He didn't like the idea of being under someone else's thumb. And so that sort of, I guess, attitude filtered through him and got trickled down to anybody he discipled as well, where it's like, well, no, I'm led by God.

I know how to leave this church. I know what I'm doing. You don't have the right to question me. So in the church that was founded by Chuck Smith, who they, by the way, called Papa, you never saw a Board of Elders.

The board? I guess you could say the Board of Elders is more like a suggestion rather than an actual Board of Elders. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism, transition through the Latter-Rain, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new Apostolic Reformation?

You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book.

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Yeah, the Pope example for me, it's a little funny because we were so adamantly against the Catholic Church. We saw them as the serpent seed. We had ways to frame it that we were just giving them these insulting terms.

But essentially, we thought that the Antichrist would emerge and he would be the Pope. That's in a nutshell what we believed. And I'm finding that's actually a common theme because many groups spun off of the Latter-Rain Movement.

Now, here's the funny part. Well, two funny parts. The first funny part is if you read Matthew 23, Jesus says explicitly, call no man father on earth. And you find that people do this, but many groups will condemn the Catholic Church for doing similar structures of hierarchy.

And the reason I wanted to go there is we call a certain name. I won't name him. We call the certain individual in the Brannum circles. We call him the Pope. And it wasn't that we called him papa or anything like this.

We didn't call him Pope outright. But we would jokingly say he's the Pope of our group because the hierarchy and structure was much the same. You could not. You could not. hold a leader accountable for what they did.

That was part of the structure. So that leads me into the part of the story that I want to really get into your part of the story. I wanna talk about what made you suddenly decide or gradually decide that this was not the church for you.

How did you come to that conclusion? So what made me decide to leave was what started happening when I started to pick up on the manipulation and the tactics that were being used on me when I started to assert my autonomy.

And also when I tried to assert my relationship with God over there, I guess their belief their belief of what I should have been doing.

So there was a point where I realized that whether I was right or wrong, whether God wanted me to stay as an intern at Calvary or not, I couldn't do it anymore. I was pretty depressed by the time that started to dawn on me and life just sucked and I was being crap-holded into doing janitorial all the time.

So basically I went to Ben and I said, listen, I don't wanna do this anymore. I'm ready to leave the internship. I don't think I'm called to be a pastor. I don't think that I'm even supposed to be here on staff and that sort of began this, I guess, back and forth of him in that first time that I went to him.

All of this love bomb came out and was like, oh well, but if you just stay, you know, you'll get to be this great man of God, you'll get to be a pastor, you'll get to do XYZ.

All this stuff will open up for you, all these opportunities. And then I said, even so, I don't want it. I don't feel I'm called to it. I don't, you know, I don't want to do something that I don't even, it was even just like a matter of conscience too, like my conscience just couldn't do it.

That I didn't want to violate my own conscience. And that began this process of him every month, once or twice a month, he checked in with me like, so have you prayed about it?

Have you prayed about it? And I'm like, yeah, prayed about it some more, still in the same place. And then this process of him getting more and more perturbed because during that time also, he was increasing his indirect pressure of manipulation through like other people, regulation, all these other things.

And he just wasn't working. And then, you know, after about the six month period it finally culminated in me leaving. And, but it was that seeing that pressure get, or experiencing that pressure ratchet up on me to obey and to follow his directive.

And then, if you add in what I saw going on, someone else who was officially on staff at the time. His name was Alex. He ran the Russian ministry there and one day he suddenly just out of nowhere was telling everybody on staff that he felt God had called him to take the Russian ministry at Calvary in a certain way or more like that Calvary in a certain direction and like as soon as he started saying that like you saw the the the thread in the morning meetings before a church work day would start where

Ken and Ben would be preaching at this guy praying at this guy and in every way that they could trying to bring this manipulative pressure to bear on him and again similar to me he just he didn't cave and so slowly he started to get pushed further and further out of the staff circle and people started talking to him less and less you know and then there was a point where one day it had been you know three weeks since I last seen him and I was just like wait where's Alex like what's going on with that and started asking around and found out from various staff

members that he's he's gone he was fired he just he's out and of course they have all sorts of I say fired it as much as that's what I would call it now but the way that they would turn it and of course shortly after I started asking those questions there was another one of those staff meetings where it was like oh so and so's gone because their vision didn't align with what God's doing here and all that type of thing and and stuff you're familiar with I know so but it was that that mirror of like what was happening to me it was happening to him

and it kind of helped everything just makes sense for me so and back to the genres the evil Pope example that I gave there are certain things that I'm I'm trying very very hard not to say but I'm watching you say some of them there are there are criteria that I use whenever I'm evaluating what direction the group is headed I'm gonna say it like that and be very cautious and one of the criteria is how hard is it for a person to leave when we left Brannemism we went to several different churches I wanted to try out different ones and the first one that I left I was a little

surprised at how easy it was to leave we went we left and they they really as open as they were in walking welcoming us they also were open and saying we hope that God lead you in the new church I mean it was that pure plain and simple it was it was a good experience actually it was a very good experience leaving and then we have experienced that with every church that we've tried and left and I'll say it like this in Brannemism it was the single most difficult thing that I ever did in my life was leaving and I just heard you say that it was a little bit hard for you to leave talk

about that a bit what made it hard for you to leave the thing that made it hard to leave was when I had the realization that not only did I not want to be a pastor, but I didn't want to be a part of the staff at the Calvary I grew up in, I took some time to pray, didn't necessarily get any clear confirmation from God one way or another.

What he wanted me to do, I just knew that I couldn't do it anymore. And so within that week I went to Ben and I said, hey, I'm done, it's time for me to go.

I don't want to do this anymore. I don't think I'll call to be a pastor. And that first meeting with him about that was when he kind of did the standard love bombing thing where you would say things like where he said things like, you know, if you just say you'll become, you know, a great pastor and love this opportunity and that opportunity and you can do this and that, and I told them, well, even if that, I don't want to be here anymore.

And that began a cycle where he would say, well, let's just wait a month or let's wait two months and he would check in with me, you know, during that time once or twice and say, well, have you prayed about it, brother, like how you feeling about it?

What's going on? And I would just say the same thing. And it's like, no, I don't, I don't want to be here and I don't think that's calling me to be here. And it was sort of like this weird, I mean, I was only 19.

So I didn't really like understand that he was manipulating me and disdain by essentially saying, well, let's just give it a little more time, let's give it a little more time. And during that time, he was setting up my work days at the church so that you weren't getting to do the tasks that were privileged.

You were under more oversight. And then I mean, there was always, there was always triangulation going on to one degree or another. So there's that part two and just realizing like he would always make it clear that somebody was keeping an eye on you somehow or another to make sure that you were, you were told in the line.

And after about six months of this process of him trying to put the pressure on more and more, and then checking in again and again, you know, over the course of about six months, the thing that made it difficult was just that he was trying to take advantage of that power dynamic to create guilt.

There's also another criteria that I use. And this one is odd because if you are on the outside looking in, this is just common sense. It's a no brainer. But if you're on the inside looking out, you can't really see this.

So when I say this, I'm going to have listeners who disagree with me and I'm going to have listeners that agree with me because it depends on which side of the fence you're in.

Church is meant to be for the people, not people for the church. And the church is meant to be on operated, voted, uh... Whoever is elected for the church is to be elected by the people.

It is a people-centered thing. It's a community thing. In Christianity, that's how it's supposed to be, I should say. What Branemism and not just Branem, but many others who were doing this kind of thing, when they created the Moses model, what ended up happening is they started creating family dynasties.

The Moses became the key figure when Moses needed to pass his throne to Aaron, Aaron took it over. And it turned into that type of model, and so people became servants of the church instead of the church servants of the people.

Which of those two models would you say describe Gallery Chapel? It was definitely people are for the church, and not churches for the people. Everything there is about what you can do for the church, and how you can support the church, and more particularly how you can support the vision of your pastors, and using a lot of that to justify horrible treatment of congregants and staff members, and just a way of justifying a lot of the behavior that they were doing.

Because if you're there for them, if you're there to enact their vision, the end of it is there's just a lot of things that were justified with the Moses model and manipulation and control, and all these things, and just there's going to be stern words.

There's going to be stern words from Jesus for a lot of Calvary pastors at the end. Well, let's leave the stern words, and if you could give yourself some encouraging words, look way back in time whenever you were in this, and you were struggling to make sense of it, and also struggling to leave.

If you could give yourself some encouragement and advice, what advice would you give yourself? The biggest encouragement and advice I would give to my younger self back when I was 1819 and stuck in the internship like I was, is your relationship with God is not filtered through these men, they don't get to decide what God has spoken to you or not spoken to you.

Yes, you might get things wrong because you're human and you're imperfect, but that is not the same as someone controlling your spiritual life and what you're calling is and how you serve God. God gets to tell you that because we all have access to the Holy Spirit, and there isn't some kind of guaranteed special knowledge that your pastor has over you that you don't have, and if you trust God and you stick with God, he's going to show you the way out.

So don't give up, and there's more to your relationship with God than this one moment in time. And I'm going to ask another question because whenever I began my research, I was literally the pushing towards trying to prove that what I was in was true, not false.

But the problem was as I uncovered critical information and I publish both sides, as you start to publish the critical, people start to brand you. They say this person is just, they're out to get us, this person is disgruntled, you can't listen to this person.

So I wanna ask you the opposite question. Looking back in time, whenever you are in that same period, I myself came through many of the things that you described. And it was very hard for me to leave.

I understand exactly what you're saying. But I can also look back at things that I remember that really formed the character that I am today. Many of the good aspects of my character did come from this environment because I was essentially raised in it.

What would you say were the good things that came out of Calvary Chapel? What would you say that you retain for the rest of your life? The good things are still are just an absolute trust in God because part of being stuck in that moment in the internship was God bringing me to a place where it would really shape, it would really shape Ken and Ben to know.

But through their own preaching, where like, and this is coming to memory this time around of basically God asked me, who are you going to obey? Are you going to obey me or are you going to obey now?

And realizing that if I was going to obey anybody, I was going to obey God and God was like, okay, well then no more 10 chapters a year for you. You're reading the Psalms and the Proverbs over and over until you're tired of it.

Like that's what I want you to do. And I want you to learn as much as you can from that. And so there's that part of it that's good that I learned here God's voice.

The theology was overall pretty good as is off in the case with the Eglistic churches. You know, the letter of the law is usually right. They get that part right, but then it's the orthopraxy that's wrong.

And then the other good thing I would say is the ability to see what our to know what a healthy church looks like because when you've been stuck in an unhealthy church for most of your life and then you finally leave and then you go to another church, that's healthy.

You have no doubts about what you went through after that. Like you're not confused anymore about what to look out for when you step into a church. And I think the other good thing would be the difference between being able to memorize passages and knowing the heart of the word if that makes sense.

Because like I've read the Bible a lot from being in the internship. And I would easily be able to tell you that's in the Bible, that's not. Bible. That's the heart of Jesus that's not. And that's because of that ten times a year through the Bible, where I may not have a specific scripture memorized, but when you bring the combination of God, God, discipling me, and that me just reading the word of town, you're never going to make me confused on what is the Holy Spirit, what isn't. And I'm going to ask a couple more questions,

but do it in the same balanced way, because I want to show people that this is reality, this is not something that you and I are making up. When I left the first church that we left, again, I left, and it was the easiest thing ever. They were just so excited for us in our new church, and I think it was so shocking to me. But one of the things that they did right, they, I can't remember if it was formal or indirect, I think it might have been indirect, maybe casual over a dinner. They gave me an exit interview, and they were asking for feedback,

which every church should do. I don't care what church you are, I don't care what denomination and non-denomination you are, you should want to have feedback to make yourself better. So I'm going to ask you, did they give you an exit interview? That's the first question, and the other half of it is, if not, what would you say in that exit interview to give them feedback to help them in their church growth? Yeah, I think the overall thing with just the culture of

the, the cavalry that I grew up in, but like unhealthy cowards in general, is there's a very,

there's a very manipulative, a manipulative, secretive, cover culture in a lot of them where pastors, failings get covered up, hidden, or, I mean, there's also the classic tactic that a lot of unhealthy churches do in general, which is, oh, well, this pastor sinned, and they fell, well, we're going to take him out of the pulpit for a while, we're going to go through a restoration process, and then a year later, they're back in the pulpit, but they're still doing the same behaviors, they're still doing the same thing. It wasn't really about restoring that pastor to fellowship

with God, or even fellowship with congregation, it was about taking them out of the limelight for a while so that their behavior gets forgotten, and a new crop of people comes into the church that aren't aware of this pastor's behavior, and then the people who were aware and tried to say something about it, they get hurt, they get ignored, they leave, and then it all starts over again.

And the last question I'll ask again, trying to keep it balanced, you gave feedback that hopefully helps them to build their church in a healthy way. Now let's talk about the other side of the equation. If somebody is thinking about joining Calvary Chapel, what warnings would you give them? Um...

The warning I would give them is be aware that at least as far as I've been able to see from the outside looking in over many years now, so in the 40 now. And so when I generally left Calvary, I was 1920.

And so over 20 years of my life, essentially, from what I've been able to see on average, Calvary is lean more towards NAR tendencies and lateral rain tendencies than they don't. You will definitely get ones that are really healthy. They're out there. But I would say be very careful and be aware of that take your time to do your homework and go over John's material that he has talking about NAR and the patterns that are there. Go to feedexpreacher.com and look up the Calvary or Calvary Chapel Chronicles there to get some more information on what the patterns look like. Go to the Roy's report and

just search up Calvary Chapel and look at all the different pastors who have fallen that are documented there. Look at the patterns that you see in those articles and make sure you're aware. I get this point in my walk with God. If I just walk into a random church, any church doesn't matter what denomination, what I guess what political eating anything, I'm not even going to be looking for doctrine right away. I look for, is there a culture that encourages manipulation of the congregation and staff? Does the pastors say things that remind me of the kind of manipulative

tactics that I experienced when I was an intern? Is there anything there that, especially now that, you know, I've gotten some education in counseling? Is there anything there that strikes me as dysfunctional family dynamics? Because you'll see a lot of similarities with dysfunctional families and dysfunctional churches. Be looking out for patterns and trends rather than just whether or not the doctrine is right because a lot of Calvaries have pretty good doctrine.

Their theology is fairly accurate, but it's the orthopraxy rather than the orthodoxy that's the problem, the practice. Well, thank you so much for doing this and thank you for being, I believe, again, I believe it is the first to actually come on until a critical story about Calvary Chapel. I thank you for doing that and hopefully you've said something that can help both Calvary Chapel and people who are either in it or thinking about being in it. So thanks again for joining me. I'm glad to be here and I really appreciate you having me on and I would love to come

back and talk some more because in a way like we've only scratched the surface of what there is to talk about. We could get really into the weeds in my own story and talk more about details because I mean there's more than one incident I could talk about there of examples of the kind of cover-up culture that's on staff at a lot of Calvaries and then I could talk about some of the ways that like Ben and Ken would manipulate the congregation. There's a lot of general trends in the Calvary movement that we could talk about. That get...

swept into the rug or kind of hidden by the, I guess you could say less bombastic spiritual language that kind of hides and covers up a lot of the things that go on. So Oh, there will definitely be more. I will ask. I will have you back again. Thanks again.

Yeah, thank you for having me on and looking forward to coming back. Well, if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Brandom.org. For more about the dark side of the new Apostolic Reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.