Inside The Way International: Fear, Healing And Control

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Bram, I'm your host John Collins, the author and founder of William Bram historical research at William-bram.org, and with me I have my very special guest, Andrea Ball, former member of the Way.

Andri, it's good to have you on and to talk through your story and the way, I'll never forget whenever I first began researching Bramism. I was going through all of the recordings, not knowing exactly how big this mess had grown, and I was looking during this pass of looking through the sermons, I was looking specifically to identify all of the names that had not yet been cut from the transcripts.

And this is one of the names that came up, Victor Wehrwell, and I was just reading it, I didn't hear the pronunciation, but I did a short video talking through this and he was just one of the many cults that spun off of it, so I slaughtered his name and people were in an uproar, you pronounced it wrong, it's Victor Wehrwell.

But anyway, I'm glad to have you on, it's shocking to me how many different people have contacted me about this small little group. It apparently exists and thrives, so I'm very glad to have you on if you could begin just tell everybody a little bit about yourself.

Well, I'm totally blind, I have been blind since I was born. One thing I remember as a little girl is that I always loved Jesus, I was drawn to him, I was drawn to his teachings in the sermon on the Mount and about love of neighbor and of enemy, I was drawn to his parables, all the miracles that he did to help heal the blind and raise the dead and heal the lepers who were outcast to society.

To calm the storm and I really needed that comfort when I was at home. Home was a turbulent place sometimes, I lived in terror of my dad who I don't think ever really accepted my blindness and so I wrestled with that and I was taught about a very rastful God.

I was taught about Jesus' love too, but I was taught about a rastful God, so it took me years to wrestle with who is God. And so when I was a teenager, I was taught about a rastful God, a rastful God, a rastful I was an avid reader and I loved to read history and so when I was a teenager I went through kind of an existential crisis in my faith. I began to question a lot of things especially as I began reading about the horrors of the Holocaust.

I've always loved history and I think what I wrestled with because we were one of these churches where you walk the aisle and you come down and you say the sinners prayer and all of that and I was like what about these poor people who were killed in the gas chambers or the euthanasia program and so I had nobody to talk to in the church. I just kind of kept quiet and said churchy things and wrestled with things alone as a teenager. When I went to college at Marshall University I tried going to a free will Baptist church there and we clashed, we clashed right away because

I didn't agree that you had to go along with Jerry Falwell. Let's put it that way in order to be a Christian and I also didn't like that they patronized me because of my blinded oh honey just play the piano and sit down. I was so mad that I told my mom I said mom I hated I'm never going back there again and I never did either. So in the process then I met a young man actually he was several years older than me at university who was an atheist and I flirted with atheism for a while.

He was my boyfriend but he also isolated me from my other friends and this is important because when we come to talking about the cult later we'll go into a little bit more of how that happens and so we had a nasty breakup. He was very controlling and I woke up one day and said you know what he's no different a fundamentalist than what I grew up with. So I was at loose end when I met the the members of the way international. I was standing at a reference desk at our library at the university and these two women nice kind of middle age I would think came up to me at the desk. I was

looking for the book by Howard Fast called the Jew's Story of a People and so we got to talking and they said we are part of a biblical research and teaching ministry we're a non-denominational group and we meet in people's homes. Well I've always loved history and I've always loved languages and this sounded interesting to me and it seemed like a very loving group of course. They seem like they weren't as judgmental maybe as what I grew up.

up with, they seemed very positive. They were affirming in the way that sometimes word of faith teaching can seem to be affirming. And so I signed up for the PFAO class. That was my next step, but in the fellowship, we went to our twig fellowship.

That's quite a journey. If you don't mind for people who are unfamiliar with the way, let's talk a little bit about that and specifically this twig fellowship as they call it. The way is a hierarchical structure.

The twig fellowship is the small local group and the members are leaves. So you go up, the branch is your state, your branch is like a region and then your limb is your state and then your tree is the whole nation.

So it's very hierarchical. Of course, I was not told that. I was just kind of led to believe it was an informal group. Like a house church, like what you would imagine that the early churches were like in the first century.

Got it. Yes, it is very hierarchical. I'm curious, whenever you joined, what was it first like, whenever you first came on board and you're meeting all of the people, you're meeting the way, what was it like for you?

At first, it was very loving. Like I remember when my seeing eye dog, Coco, I had a chocolate lab. She had developed canine hepatitis. And one of the women in our twig fellowship did a very thoughtful thing.

She bought me a can opener, which I needed because my dog had to go on this special, I'm science diet of canned food. Of course, she thought she was an heaven because it had egg and fish and liver and all that good stuff.

So anyway, it was a family and I was missing that in my life at that point. So then in January, after the holidays, we started with the PFAO class. Now, the very first thing you learned in PFAO is John 1010 is their foundational text.

I come that you might, well, actually starts out the thief come with but to kill and to steal and to destroy. But I come that you might have life and have it more abundantly.

I mean, who doesn't want an abundant life? Fear, fear and worry. And I had plenty of things on my mind at that time and I thought, boy, I want that. And so the first night of the class, we learned the foundational law, the law believing.

It is a law that works like the force of gravity. It works for saint and sinner alike. Believing equals receiving is what the law is. So John, if you have heard in the Prosperity Gospel, positive confession, it's kind of the same thing.

And it sounds really wonderful if I want to believe for health and healing and happiness in my life and a happy home for my family. I can have that. All I've got to do is believe and say it and confess it, but it has a dark edge.

It has a very dark edge. The first night, Dr. Rear will tell this awful story about this mom who was very protective of her little boy. And she was so afraid that the little boy was going to get hit by a car.

So, but what happens? The little boy goes out and gets hit by a car and the moral of that story, according to where will is, he got hit by a car because the mom believed that into her life.

Can you imagine what kind of guilt that leaves people with? It doesn't feel that way at first till you really stop and think about it. But as we went on in the class, we learned a lot of novel biblical interpretations.

Now keep in mind, we're well taught that he was teaching us that God had told him that he would teach us the word of God as it had not been taught in the first century.

So, we were hearing some novel interpretations. One of those was ultradispensationalism, which he got as I found out later from E.W. Bullinger. And according to him, we are now in the church administration, there are seven administrations and we are in the church administration.

And but what he did with that too was to say, okay, the Old Testament, the New Testament and Revelation are there for our learning. All this is coming back to me now after all of these years, right?

So, for our learning, so none of that really applies to us. The only things that apply to us in Scripture are the seven church epistles of Paul. So basically, he did a cut-and-paste thing with the Bible and just took out what he didn't want.

I was like, where is Jesus in all of this? Because what I was drawn to was Jesus and I wasn't really seeing him. Exactly. That's the same question that I was facing whenever I came out of Branemism.

Where is Jesus in all of this? It's like Jesus had become a side show in Branemism. And yes, they mentioned the name Jesus, yes, they asked that you be saved by Jesus. But Jesus was a side story that really, he was so far off to the side that your focus was solely upon the leader of the group.

And for me, that was a problem. I didn't worship the guy who was the central figure. Some people did actually outright. But I started to learn that all of these groups that spun off were much the same way.

They had such weird beliefs that... it was really their core doctrines that was the main focal point and Jesus was just off to the side. We had some really odd views of God too and of the Godhead. For instance, he doesn't believe in the Trinity. He adopts a lot of the belief that a lot of oneness, penicostles do. But he takes it a step further. It's more like the Jehovah's Witnesses that Jesus was a thought in the mind of God.

He was not created. He was not like a son of God from the very beginning, not like what John one teaches us. So anyway, but he also had this teaching that Holy Spirit, small H, small S, is an impersonal force that you activate. And in the last day of the course, in his book, receiving the Holy Spirit today, he actually talks about this. He taught us how to speak in tongues. Now, I at first thought this was a teaching that originated with him, but it didn't. It originated with two post-World War II healing revivalists. You may be familiar

with these guys. They were BG Leonard and J.E. Styles. And I'd heard other people, I'd heard John Jude's, who's written extensively about it, say this. But just to be sure, I went on yesterday and I looked up J.E. Styles and looked up some YouTube video of him. And what we'll tell us to do is almost verbatim J.E. Styles. So what they have you do is you sit in a relaxed posture, no praying, no tearing necessary. You sit in a relaxed posture and you breathe, you know, take deep breaths. And then you breathe in because you're inhaling the Holy Spirit. If this

seems like hypnosis to you, it is, I think. And so you breathe in and he borrows this, he takes the scripture from Psalm 81 10 where Jesus says, or where the Psalm says, open your mouth and I will fill it. Okay. And it's taken out of context. And it was a quote that actually Jesus was talking about on the last great day of the feast where he was talking about that he would, we would have within us a river flowing up of living water out of your belly would come rivers of living water.

And it was kind of a referring to the Holy Spirit. Well, here he's kind of doing that too. And then he says, but now you, you must move your lips and your tongue. You must form the words.

And so he's teaching you how to speak in tongues. Now, speaking in tongues functions in several One, according to we're will, was that it would renew the inner man, and it would renew your mind.

So, when you needed your mind to be renewed and to be more in love with God and on fire for God, you just speak in tongues or SIT as they used the acronym. But the next thing is that when you start to have a negative thought or fear or worry, SIT, okay?

And so, you can see how this would work, right? It's a thought-stopping technique. It's kind of like if somebody uses a phrase that's meant to end all conversation, that's what happened here. So, this is some of the things that we were taught.

It was just so interesting to me whenever I was looking up this particular name because this is a group that's not really considered with the core Laterane post-war war two healing revival movement. Yet, there were connections, and there were, you know, in fact, Brannum mentions him on recording.

So, he was at least at some of the conventions. But you don't really consider this group as part of that revival, but at the same time, they're adopting some of the core belief sets, the word of faith, you mentioned, you actually described one of the views that Brannum had on the Godhead.

So, there were some elements that were copied and carried forward with werewill in his movement. Why do you think it is that he decided to copy and start teaching some of these things rather than become one of the core revivalists?

Well, I think part of it is, may have been a quest to be original, and I also think, with werewill, have you ever, like in the old days when your mom was looking for something to make in the kitchen, and there was a little hodgepodge of this and that in the refrigerator, she would make what you might not so affectionately call gulash, and whatever went in the pot, that's what you got.

That's how I explained to people what he did. He came up with this concoction of stuff, and then he added a few of his own little herbs and spices or whatever to it to make it original.

That's what I think about why he did what he did, because he wanted to create something that had not been seen since the first century. I've mentioned a few times that this group is really odd, and those that sit adjacent to it, I have all kinds of questions, because at the core, you had people who were strongly tied to Christian identity, and that included everything that came with it.

That was the anti-Semitism, that was the some of the racial identity stuff. This was a problematic movement, but at the same time it was connected to faith healing, and it was just so odd.

You had these weird key figures, Gordon Lindsay, he's speaking at Christian, I did any conferences. And then he's platforming all of these healing revivalists and some of them you have to wonder were they really healing revivalists or were they more on the Christian identity side and they were just using this as a platform But nevertheless he was platforming them and then you have the groups that said adjacent to this like victor were well on the way I'm curious from your perspective focusing on the faith healing side of this what that was like I know that in branimism there are several people who have chronic illnesses

Some of them who now have died of you know with their chronic illnesses And the whole time they're teaching that salvation is mixed with the healing divine healing And so when you have that merging of the two Well, that's that's fine if you're healthy But what if you're not healthy?

And that was the problem that some of the people I know face they wondered am I even saved because I'm not healed And that was the false gospel that the movement was teaching I'm curious with your blindness what that was like in the movement. How did that make you feel?

Well, not so well and and actually I mean there there were some Reasons I left now some of them didn't really have to do with Divine healing some of them were ideological because We're will and the way I found out we're very right-wing and I have always been I'm a Christian first And I've never been comfortable with being pigeonholed into either a liberal or conservative box I've always been a little bit left of center, but this Basically what I found out about their ideology didn't fit well um That for instance I found out that we're will was anti-Semitic that he denied the Holocaust and

If you go and you look it's I think it's New York Jewish post, but it's an article That he wrote they quote from it extensively from the Saint Mary's evening leader and it affirmed that for me He said the nasty parts out loud um That one of my twig members said because I was commenting one time I said yeah, I'm reading this novel about the Holocaust I think it was Schindler's list or something like that he said oh you need to stop that you know the Holocaust is a hoax You know that six million didn't really die and I'm sitting there going wait a minute

Uh No, thank you way international. This is not what I signed up for and I just kind of pushed it back so like you push back red flags. I kept it in my mind and thought about it and Then I also You know when I read the we're will quote the other day it confirmed for me and then what he does he does a bait and switch Oh, yes, I have the Arthur Kessler book the 13 tribes and and the hoax of the Holocaust and did see million, really, libraries have them too. Well, then I guess they're anti-Semitic. So you know,

that's a rhetorical switch and bait thing that he does that a lot of people do, by the way. And so anyway, there was that. They were just way too far to the right for me in a lot of ways.

Yeah. I mean, it's just so odd when you think about it. I'm convinced that this was a political cult disguised as a religious cult. And when you look at all of the different people that spun off of this, the people that were leading it, the people like, where will that was adjacent to it, you see those connections. And like you said, it is the racist right. Whenever you connect, what Michael Barcoon wrote in his book Religion in the Racist Right, you start to see that, wait a minute, there's more going on here than meets the eye. And to the people who

truly came because they needed healing or they knew somebody who needed healing, they come devoutly to God, thinking that this was a movement by God. The problem was they didn't get really the comfort and help that they needed, especially those who never received their healing.

That was what was so hard for me. I would watch people who desperately needed just assistance from other people and never really got it because the movement, again, had combined the salvation with the healing. And if you didn't get healed, well, that's somebody I don't really want to associate with, or that's somebody that God's dealing with them. I'm not going to deal with them. And to the people who are needing the assistance, needing the help, you just never really got it. I would call it a godsend, although it didn't feel like it at the time. In March,

I was on my way to class. And my seeing eye dog was trying to tell me that there was a step coming. And of course being the idiot that I was and wearing high heels, I didn't listen.

So down the steps, I went and I broke my arm. And so for about six weeks, it was a green stick fracture, but my arm was in a sling. And so I got illustrated for me just exactly what you described.

I was left alone by these people that I thought had been so loving. They were nowhere to be, you know, they did not want because I think in a way they might have thought that my falling and breaking my arm was something that I had believed in in my life. Believe me, I would never have done that. It was painful. And I had to go through physical therapy. But the blessing was that I had plenty of time to think. I had plenty of time to reflect. And to ask myself some questions, is this really what I want? Is this the kind of group I want to be in in the

meantime with all of that going on? We had gone to a biblical research meeting. And

The end of the meeting, they left me alone in the hotel lobby, which scary enough of being a totally blind person because they were having a meeting with their branch coordinator that I was not supposed to be at.

So I nodded off. I mean, I literally went to sleep in my chair and I woke up crying. Well, one of the local twig coordinators found me and took me into the room of the branch coordinator was he was just terrible.

He said, stop that crying immediately and sit down now and speak in tongues. What do you, you know, you're acting like somebody possessed a devil spirit, okay? And there's a little part of me that's going, whoa, this is the way my dad talked to me.

This is the kind of voice he used. And as I'm reliving this for you right now, I'm thinking, well, at some instinctive level, I knew that something was wrong about this. And as I was listening to this meeting, I had a boyfriend that I had made in the call.

And as I was listening to this meeting, he was berating my boyfriend and he was saying, mark not his real name. Mark, because he was a, Mark was a wow ambassador who had come there from across the country.

He said, Mark, if you don't get a part-time job 20 or 30 hours a week, that we don't run a welfare state around here. If you don't get a 20 or 30 hour week job within 10 days, then you'll have to leave.

I mean, he said this right out in front of everybody and that poor boy, I'm a young man, it was just, it was just heartbreaking. And the thought I had, and the thought I got to reflect on while my arm was healing was, well, this is worse if anything than what I grew up with.

This is not the loving, accepting group I thought I had joined. And in that loneliness, in that wilderness wondering time that I had,

I just, I prayed a lot and I will tell you, I'll tell your listeners too is, I don't know where any of them are, but it's like if you're going through a cult experience or through a wilderness experience in general, God goes behind you and before you.

And I really, from my Wesleyan understanding, I really find comfort in that. And so God was there in that moment, even though it didn't feel like it at the time. 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 Brannem's Historic... Research's website, William-Branum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon, and others, with links to the paper, audio, and digital versions of each book.

You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements. If you want to contribute to the cause, you can support the podcast by clicking the contribute button at the top.

And as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching. On behalf of William-Branum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support.

You mentioned the anti-Semitic books that were well-was-pushing, and I'll never forget the surprise that I had when I came to realize that many of the books that Branum was also pushing had themes that came from Christian identity.

The Fox Book of the Martyrs, for example, was one that was heavily pushed by those who were in the anti-Semitic crowd. I had no idea of this. Whenever I was young, I read it, you know, I cried for the Martyrs, but I didn't realize the themes that the anti-Catholic themes, the false Jew themes that were in that book.

And then I came to know, through my research, that there were significant figures that were embedded in Christian identity or adjacent to and supporting Christian identity that were a fundamental part of this movement's creation.

I've mentioned several times Gerald Burton-Winrod, who was working as one of the directors of the fundamentalist league, fundamentalists of the world, I guess it was. He was a director at the same time, Branum's mentor, Roy Davis, was a director in this, Davis, the second in command of the clan.

And I mean, you had all of these weird connections that had political themes. And so the movement got created. The movement started heading down this weird political Christian pathway that it was heading. And then, whenever you got into the mid-50s, 60s especially, you started to have the communist scare.

And so they platformed many themes within the movement that was intended solely for the purpose of convincing people that the end of the world was coming through this communist scare. We need to get right with God today because the world will end tomorrow.

That was kind of the theme that was spreading to the movement. It was problematic in that that focus never really left. And Branumism today, we still fear the communist scare. And every time that Russia does anything, it doesn't matter what they do, suddenly this is it.

This is the big one. This is the end of the world. And yes, that may happen. I'm not going to say that it's not. But the movement was more about the fear than it was about the comforter.

For me, that was a problem. And like I said, it... continues today. I'm curious within the way. This was a movement that's sitting adjacent to all of this that we're describing. They apparently had many of the same themes. That was probably why they were connected. I'm curious today. Did they still have the communists threats, the communists scare within the movement?

Yes. When I was involved, I loved, and I would list, actually, at the time too, I was listening to a biography of Martin Luther King, and I had actually listened to some of his sermons. I made that comment, and they said, I don't know, you can't have that. You shouldn't listen to that. Martin Luther King is a communist. This was exactly what they taught. I think there were a lot of cold war fears that they had that they taught. I think there were some doomsday elements too, because we're well, you know, basically encouraged people to be prepared, to have your car full of gas, to do all of these preparedness things.

I know at one point I didn't see them do it, but they were really pushing that movie red dawn, and they were encouraging their members to watch it. Now, I have read a lot of history about communism, in the Soviet Union, and in China, and like Ann Applebaum's gulag, a history, or solzenites, or anyone, or Neon Cheng's life, and death, and Shanghai, so I know about the history, but using it as a weapon, using it to instill fear in people, I think, is just a misuse of the discipline.

I had this conversation just yesterday with the person I was interviewing on a podcast, and we were talking about all of the people who have escaped. I've worked with hundreds at this point who have gone through the process of deconstructing, finding their footing, going down the pathways, and some of those people who do come back into the Christian churches, they contact me, they're John. This Bible reads differently than I ever read it when I was in the group, and they start mentioning some of their favorite new passages. Many of them go to the passages that are talking about peace and comfort, because Jesus is the comforter. He'll send you the

Holy Spirit that's the comforter. And whenever you think about this, whenever you think about the core of Christianity is that it will give you peace, there is no fear. It says there are passages like perfect love, cast out all fear, but the movement heightened the fear. They focused on the fear. They really wanted to drive the fear because that was driving people into the movement. I think that's really what it was. It's not that fear sells, but fear contains. So once you got into the movement, they would use the fear as a whip to basically keep you in here. But the problem is,

it's really hard to keep up that fear. You have to turn it into the staying where or any recent news, doesn't matter what it is. If you can find negative recent news, you use that, capitalize it to bring fear back into the movement and it creates this invisible boundary around people, around their minds.

So for me, it's really odd when you think about it because there's no way to do that without turning out, turning it into some sort of a conspiracy theory movement. Every single news item that hits the newspapers or the news media, you're going to take it, you're going to say, look at this conspiracy.

This is something that it proves. I'm right, the end of the world is coming. That's what it was. It was a movement of conspiracy theory. It's interesting about the conspiracy culture to back during the pandemic.

Since I left, it's kind of funny because I get called on whenever there's a question about a cult. Back during the pandemic, I was talking to a lady at my church and she said, say, I was wondering if you could answer a question.

And I said, sure, I can answer a question. What do you know about QAnon? And I said, oh, well, what I know about it is that it started with Pizzagate and the way people are attracted is through these Facebook memes and who doesn't want to help children who are being trafficked, right?

But there's a whole nother dark layer to that. So I was describing to her what it was. And she says, well, I thought you would know. You know, I think once you have lived or something like that, I would not wish that whole experience on anybody.

But I can tell you that having gone through that, it's taught me a great deal of empathy and humility. It's taught me that anybody can be vulnerable so you don't judge somebody and say, oh, well, if you knew your scripture better, you'd never get involved in a cult false.

I think one of the things that I've learned is once you experience that, I think, you do start to develop more discernment and more ability to think critically and to ask questions, questions like, what is this group?

Where did it come from? Who is your leader? What is this background? Now the internet can help a lot. It can be a blessing in a curse, but it can help a lot in that area.

And that's another conversation that I had recently, why a leader? Think of a normal Christian church if something were to happen in the pastor needed to be replaced. The church continues on. But in these type of movements, if you take the leader out, the movement really ceases to exist.

You almost can't have the movement without the leader. That's why in Brannemism, even though he's dead, they still focus on what he said, his recordings, they play these recordings constantly. He is the movement.

And if you take him out of the movement, what are you left with? there's really nothing. But in a Christian church, you don't need the leader. And at the same time, the leaders, it's just really odd because they're trying to come up with these conspiracies and claim that they have divine knowledge or intellect. I guess in werewolves, in werewolves circles, it was a little bit different than Brannemism. They're supposed to have the special knowledge that nobody else has. And so therefore you have to come to the movement. They become the guru, I guess, is the best way to say it. And at the same time, they're bringing in elements of

narcissism, which is perfectly fitting because narcissism is the noses or the secret knowledge. They bring in elements like this to create something that really isn't Christianity, but yet at the same time they use the name Jesus, they use the word Christian and make it appear like it. It would almost be like if you took some mud out of the ground and smeared some icing on and said, here, this is a birthday cake. That's what they did with Christianity.

Another thing that they also do is try to make themselves appear wonderful. Like, who doesn't want to be an instrument of healing in the world? I'll never forget it. In 2005, my pastor at the Baptist Church, I grew up when I was little. He was dealing with the situation in Logan County, West Virginia, where I'm from with the new apostolic movement in the early 2000s. He was dealing with the God chasers, Tommy Tenney and the God chasers. And I'll never forget it. My grandma was talking about it.

I said, ma'am, I said, you know, I think I can find you some information about that. And so I did, I found some, there was deception in the church. There were some discernment websites that did have some pretty good information. And so she told my pastor, she said, you know, my granddaughter can help you with this. So it was kind of an interesting full circle moment of me going from, when I was a teenager, I would never have talked to my pastor about the doubts I was facing to now here we are in 2005. And I'm looking up stuff for him and helping him. But what would happen?

And this is what cult do, I think, is that this particular group within the charismatic movement were going into the local schools, supposedly offering an anti-drug program. Like who doesn't want a program to keep your kids off drugs, right? So they were going into the schools and they were also going into the churches and they were taking the best and brightest from all the denominations in the area, whether it be Methodist, Baptist, assemblies of God into their movement, into their church. It was very sneaky and very covert. But this is what they do. They start out, they seem

well-meaning, but there's a- Always, always, always I hidden agenda somewhere. The other thing that all of these groups have in common is the way that people who have questions or who just simply have doubts are treated.

I'll never forget whenever I first started to come to terms with the fact that there might be a problem with branimism. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep. I really needed help. I needed, I went to my grandfather to get some of my questions answered.

And suddenly, I watched my grandfather change because I had a question. And it just, it really bothered me because if you have something that's true and something that's defensible, you would defend it with actual truth, right?

But instead, what they want to do is silence the questions. And this turned into a problem for me. Carry that forward. Now, whenever you leave, your entire world is wrapped up in this group.

You have made all of your connections, your strong personal ties to people who really, you felt like they were strong bonds, but as soon as you leave, you find out they were all paper thin.

Everybody really put more focus on the group than they did the individuals in the group. For me, that was a problem. What was that like for you? Whenever you first started to leave, what was it like for you?

What did you experience? Well, it was a little different for me. I'm what they would call and call parlor to walk away because I was there for slightly less than a year. So I didn't have what you had, which was the extreme, this has been your whole entire life.

For me, it was more, I think falling and having that time to think really helped in an odd way because I did have a little bit of wiggle room to distance myself from it.

But I do think actually what happened with me was more of a feeling of numbness like nothing really happened anyway. And it took a while for it to really register. Yeah, something really did happen.

I really was exposed to this environment and I wasted a year of my life in it. But I also think what did help me in coming out was that I did reach out to people.

I tried first going to the library and seeing if there was any information. And at the time there was just a derp of any kind of, all I had was a little article in a Ronald Enroth book called The Jesus People, Old Time Religion in the Age of Aquarius.

And I didn't find much that didn't tell me anything. I didn't already know. And so anyway, I reached out, actually it was a peace group on campus that I was in. And me and this guy, who he was naturest, once again, here we go with that.

were ranting about, I mean, I was really mad. I was venting, I have to say. I was telling him about my experience in the way. You know, I just came out of this and it was terrible and I was telling him some of the things that happened.

And this girl came up to us and she was an angel. She was overweight, she was dyslexic. And remember, she threw a shot put. And, but she invited me into something different. She said, well, it doesn't have to be that way.

And she was telling me about a Presbyterian group that met and she said, would you like to try it? And I said, well, yeah, but if there's anything that I don't like, I'm running away, I'm out of here.

So I tried it and really found comfort there. It took a while. I went through some stages where I was even praying. God, I don't even know if you exist. I don't know if you're real or not, but if you're here, help me.

So that was my experience. I did have some trauma reactions though. I had nightmares and I didn't know at first where the nightmares were coming from. I had difficulty trusting people, I even like going to a church.

I asked a lot of questions and thankfully, God did put some people into my life. I guess my prayer would be too that I could be that person in somebody's life that if they're struggling to leave a group like that, that I could be the person who would let them vent, that would not come up with, oh, well, you know, this scriptural reason you shouldn't be in this group is and you're a cult.

No, I wouldn't use that kind of language. I would listen to the person and gain their trust first. And then if they expressed an interest in joining a group, I would walk through that process with them very slowly because it's painful.

It's very painful for a lot of folks. It's extremely painful. It's something that many people share who have left these types of groups. It's one of the hardest things that they've ever been through.

What advice would you give to people who are impacted by these types of groups? And they finally make their way out. They try to escape. They try to mentally detangle what happened to them.

What advice would you give to people who are struggling? Number one, learning to forgive yourself a little bit because one of the things that I went through was, I thought I went through several stages.

And one of them is you think, first of all, there's the, how could this happen to me? That's the first one. And then the second one is, how could I have been so dumb?

And so you go from being angry at the... called to being, to feeling that way about yourself. And so I think that is a first step.

I do think at least for me, and it's maybe not true for everybody. Some people like Charlie and Edge did, she walked away from God altogether, and I understand that. But I think one thing that spirituality has helped me a lot to recover.

And I think recovering some of the love of Jesus that I had from my childhood, and recovering aspect of myself as a person. For example, my love of reading, and getting back into the books that I like.

These are little things, but I think those little things really help you, along with self-care, self-care is so huge. Making sure that you get plenty of sleep, that you get exercised in addiction circles, they talk about being a good parent to yourself.

And so I think all of those is good. And for some folks, they may have to rebuild bridges, which is, it can be tough, because you may have alienated some family and friends. Fortunately, I had friends who were patient with me, and who knew what I, they knew what I was going through, and they were able to just talk to me about it later, and say, you know, we knew something was wrong about that group, or we knew they had some weird views about sex outside of marriage, which is a whole leather story, that there was rampant sexual abuse within the way,

beginning with we're well on down. Yeah, it's just so sad. I mean, you look at the news today, and you see time after time, there are these leaders who emerge from this movement who are falling to exactly that, and yet at the same time, the movement is touting itself as being not only Christian, but a divinely inspired led by God movement, where these apostles and prophets and teachers and other leaders are appointed by God, and yet this happens, and this continues to happen again and again, it shows that this is the fruit of something that's not quite Christian,

there's something else going on here. Let's talk about that a bit. What would you say, what you have now, the Christianity that you understand now, what would you say is the biggest difference between what you have now, and what they were calling Christianity when they were in the movement?

Well, there are several things. I think, first of all, we accept that Jesus, in the beginning with the word, in the word was with God, and the word was God. You know, it isn't pitting God against Jesus, or Jesus is a separate being, or anything like that.

that are elements of gnosticism, it is that Jesus and that God too, that God loves us. He's not that wrathful father I grew up with and neither is his spirit and impersonal force. His spirit is with us every single day when we're going through the valley or on the mountain top.

And I also think that there is a difference in the health or the lack thereof. Like in the way, the church that I was in after I left had I decided, you know, I don't want to go to my current church anymore. I want to go somewhere else.

They would not have disfellowshipped me and said, Mark, and avoid this person. No, I mean, like my church now, if I were to say, you know, I would feel more comfortable in X, Y or Z church.

They would say, well, we'll miss you, we love you, but we'll always, they're always my friend. And when I see them out in the, in the store or outside or I'm going somewhere in the community, because I'm very active in my community, they would say, hello, they would give me a hug.

That is an emotionally healthy church. An unhealthy one or what we had was that if you left, you would be shunned like completely. And I don't know if you've seen it, it's an old article about the shepherding movement that's a few years old, but it is still worthwhile to look at. It's called, they told me that if I left, and it is heartbreaking and it is sad because in an unhealthy structure, like we were in in the way, if you left, your best friend wouldn't speak to you.

And that is emotionally and spiritually unhealthy thing, but in a church that is emotionally and spiritually healthy, they don't have those kinds of closed systems. It's just so different. I mean, it's wrong really when you think about it.

When we left, we attended several different churches. And in fact, one of the churches we watched a change in leadership and the old pastor's ministers went out, the new ministers came in, and the church didn't miss a beat because they weren't focused on the human.

But yet in the comment feeds, I can mention any central figure of any different group, and you'll find members of that group come in and say, well, if this isn't the leader for our day, who is?

And they get really violent and angry, like they're defending the guy who were showing that has clear issues. It just shows that they're not able to critically think and that they have... on the leader, not in God. So you can't really call it Christian if they're followers of the human, they're followers of the human more than they are God. It's just such a different mindset and it shows that there's there's a huge problem. People really need to critically think.

We owe it to our people to teach them how to think critically and ask questions. I will never forget it. I had these moonies came up to me and had me just cause a pamphlet one day in a paper where they go with it. And so I thought, well, this is good for something. So I had some fundamental list friends and I said, oh, I would like to introduce you to this anti-communist group that you may like. So they sat down and happily signed the paper or not a word, not a question, none of them.

And after they were done, I said, oh, by the way, you've just signed your life over to the Unification Church. I mean, it wouldn't have gone no further than me. But the point of it was it made me sad that these people didn't even stop to say, who is this? Where does this come from? What is this cause? And so that, I think, is the most important thing. I would rather prevent somebody from joining a group like that than from going through some agonizing experience at last 10, 12, 17, 20 years takes away a huge chunk of their lives. So I would say prevention, learning to ask

questions, information is crucial. So the more information that you have about the group, the better, that is that's a huge one right there. And so, and I also think creating an environment in our churches where if people have questions or they have doubts or they're wrestling with something in their faith, creating a safe space to talk because a lot of people end up gravitating or end up being introduced to these groups because of a lack of community and family and a sense of something lost in their own environment. Well, that's very good advice. Thank you so much

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