Non-Denominational Denomination: Independent Cults

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brannum Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannum Historical Research at William-Brannum.org, and with me I have my very special guest, Daniel Bright. Daniel, today is an interesting episode.

I've actually wanted to do this conversation that you wanted to do with me multiple times and in multiple ways, and that is to talk about what does it mean to be non-denominational. I've had multiple guests who tell me we came out of a non-denominational church and we found out that it wasn't what we expected.

And so we went to another non-denominational church and found out that it wasn't what we expected. Some of them just de-churched altogether, but even early in my escape I tried to figure out what this means because in Brannumism we considered ourselves to be a non-denominational church.

Brannum would say inter-denominational in the early years and then later non-denominational. And as I've been studying these groups, as you know, you and I have talked offline, most of the groups that turn into destructive cults, they say, we're not a non-denomination. You're welcome to stay in your denomination, join us and join us as we celebrate Jesus.

And then once they start joining and they become part of the movement, they no longer go to their church. And then once there is enough volume of people coming to the meetings, they say, now we're non-denominational.

We don't like those people you just came out of. And so it seems to be that this term is thrown around loosely. And I wanted to talk through that because I'm not branding all non-denominational churches as inherently evil.

But there is this weird problem that exists with that phrase, which you and I can explore. Absolutely. And when I first messaged you about about a year ago, I wouldn't call myself a prophet.

But I did say, John, you're going to get onto the wireworm stuff soon. And we're in fairly deep now. I hope from what I've been hearing on the podcast. And it was prompted by the split which I foretold, or at least I told you about, like in January, February between wireworm, proper and fire and fragrance.

And I don't know any of the details in those scandals. I don't know if there is a scandal. But I know that in the press release, they said they split amicably. So I think we know what that means. Anyone who start a little bit of journalism and knows about...

the English language, we know what split amicably means. And so that raised the question, how does an organization that isn't an organization that's actually a movement? How can it split if it's not an organization?

So that begs the question, is Y.Wammer an organization? And is that just another way of saying a denomination? I think it is an organization. I think it is a denomination. And prompted by some of your previous episodes in Wyoming, I read through the core doctrines of what Y.Wammer calls itself, or the five points or the five utterances.

One of them was very good, the Christian Magna Carta. But the point is, if Lauren Cunningham, if he wrote these things down, this begins to sound like a doctrinal statement. This is the kind of things that denominations come up with.

At the moment, Y.Wammer has what it calls a global board of elders or the eldership team. This is actually quite good. This is quite healthy. And all of that indicates that it's going to become a church denomination.

It's got global elders who are pointed more or less locally, that's fairly good as well. So despite everything I've said, why are I'm actually looks to be heading in a good direction? Because fire and fragrance has some of the wacky tendencies long before I'd heard of you.

I actually got stopped by some street healers who were trying to heal one of my friends. I had happened to break his left finger when we were playing football together. And they said, well, can we try and heal your finger?

This inevitably was unsuccessful. But they said to him, what else is going on in the life and they tried to share the gospel with him? And I had to kind of pick up the pieces after that.

They said, well, Daniel, what do you think about all of this? Do you think Jesus does heal? Christians can be healed. But I believe what I believe. So the local Y1 base is here in Norway is still hosting fire and fragrance discipleship training schools.

Now for those who haven't really kept up with this story, there's been a split in Kona, which is the main base for Y1. So it's miraculous how many people God calls to Hawaii. And there was a split between fire and fragrance.

And I understand that Y1 Kona said they can't advertise fire and fragrance DTS anymore at Kona. They're still doing it in Norway for good or ill. The Norway bases had huge growth. A lot of people coming to it.

Maybe it is going off in a different direction with fire and fragrance, which raises the question, if you're not a denomination, how can you talk about directions? And these people are doing that. That definite group is doing this.

So I'm just looking at our show notes now because we wanted to focus on non-denomination and I actually read through some of... I listened to my first William Bradham sermon. I loved it. Not because I bought any of it, but it was almost as if it was almost as if someone had said to you, have you heard of fast food?

Yeah, I've heard of fast food. Have you heard of McDonald's? I've never heard of McDonald's. And so, listening to William Branham for the first time, it was like it was the OG, it was listening to McDonald's, it was up front. He had all of the sound bites, even said in that one sermon I listened to spit out the bones.

The chicken, I was like, it all came from him. Love it. It was complete nonsense. He was talking about the dangers of denominationalism. And he was, I don't know when he gave that sermon, so you'll have to help me out in the timeline if it's relevant.

But I suppose it was in his open expansionist stage, where he came up with one line which amused me, he said, we're not in a denomination, no one is going to dominate us. I was thinking, well, he's got a problem with the English language for one thing.

You mentioned just at the start of this now that when a denomination, sorry, when a movement organization is in its early stages, it's very much, yeah, anyone can come in, we're not going to judge if you're Baptist, Methodist, we're doing this for Christ.

You allow anyone in, but I'm more concerned about what sort of people come out. And that's the kind of same thing that I've seen at Y-Wam. It's very unlikely anyone's going to do Y-Wam and come out to convince predestinational Calvinist.

I don't think that's going to happen. A lot of people from Calvinism have gone into Y-Wam, but what sort of people come out? What sort of language are they using? So the calling yourself non-denominational is a bit like a not admitting you have an accent.

A lot of your listeners will be very clear, this guy does have an accent. I've seen a few cheeky comments on YouTube. So we're doing what we can about the recording. Yes, but I can't do anything about the accent. I'm sorry.

I'm aware of that. You're aware of that. Our listeners are aware of that. It would be very arrogant of me to say, I don't have an accent. Everyone speaks like me. I'm non-accentile. That's ignorant at best and arrogant at worst because it might mean that I expect that standard of other people.

And then when I travel out of my tiny bubble in Southeast London or East London at least, I might discover not everyone does speak like me. And I might have an existential crisis, perhaps I might need to deconstruct my accent.

But what I really need to admit is not everyone does think like me. But there are standards of my accent that a lot of people still need to pronounce correctly. So that's the accent analogy with denominations.

When you are in a denomination that says things like the seven mountains mandates or as Lauren Cunningham wrote in his five points. He didn't call it. mountains. He called it the seven something and you've used the analogy with cooking before where you can trace this ingredient and say, right now this isn't this barbecue sauce. Then someone put it in that potluck. You can track the ingredients because often it's on the back of a package and right there, Lauren Cunning, we can say this is not non-denominational.

This came from the seven mountains mandate. We can trace this back. So we can say to your accent in Y-Wam frames what kind of a movement you are and it reveals your origins which is through the assemblies of God etc etc. So that's what I'm interested in talking about there. There's a few more amusing analogies with if you met someone who's coming as an IT consultant and he said, well, I mean, I'm not an IT consultant. I'm just a guy who works with computers.

Right. So why are you avoiding the most common term that people use? I don't want to be associated with them. Are you accredited? No, no, no. I'm an independent tradesman that just happens to work with computers. This is very suspicious language. So when you're doing something that lots of other people do and they're probably paying it for you, that's what you call it, a service, you do want to be accredited. You know, a farmer says, I'm not a plumber. I'm just a guy who works with water and pipes. I want to see on your car on the side of it that little reef, the laurels thing that says

accredited by so-and-so. He's past his certifications. Are we saying that Christians do need to be approved by someone else? Yes, yes, I am. If you're in leadership, if you're starting a denomination off in your own, the best kind of denomination, the ones that got kicked out of somewhere else, not because they wanted to leave, but because the movement denomination they part of got a bit dodgy, like Luther and the Roman Catholic Church, he didn't want to leave.

So when you've been accredited or if you lose a job, you say, why did you lose your job? I was made redundant or, you know, the boss was really annoying, but you are accredited. You do have standards and that's what we expect from Christians as well. Is there anything you want to say on that point is from an IT perspective? Yes, so from my perspective, it's odd because, like you mentioned the language, I know what denomination means. The sad truth of it is most people who are in a movement that is anti-denominational have no idea what the phrase even, what the word even means.

And simply put, denomination is a distinct religious group of people within the larger faith. And denomination is a word that can be used for multiple categories, but within Christianity, it just simply means we're Christian, but we're part of this individual group of Christians within the larger group. What happened was whenever the movement started, they started to say that all other Christians are cold and formal, those churches you're going to, you're not getting anything out of them. Come join us and we're not a denomination. You don't have to be part of our sect to be part of us, but essentially what they're saying is you-

were, because you're coming out of something that you disagreed with to join something that you did, thus creating a group of people within the larger concept of Christianity, the construct of Christianity. So by default, just simply by joining the movement, you have been deemed part of a denomination, where it gets interesting is they were trying to brand specific denominations as worse than others.

So they would say, maybe they're targeting the Baptist in one sermon, they say the Baptist believe this, this and this, we don't believe this. Well, that's creating a line in the sand that is a categorization, Baptist believe this, we believe this other thing.

So just simply in the nature of doing it, they have created a denomination. Whenever I left the movement, I started going through the phone book looking at the different churches because we had no idea where we were going to go and granted, I grew up in the mindset that denominations were evil, they were this entity that I did not understand.

I didn't even understand the definition because I too was programmed like this. So I started going through and I'm trying to find the ones that aren't Methodists, aren't Baptist, all of these different denominations.

That's not where we ended up as the first church, but in my mind, I'm going through this and I'm looking through reading and I go to their website and I'm reading, we are not a denomination.

And literally they say the same verbage that William Brannum said. And I was like, no, I'm not going to do this again. This is just not right. And I came to look at it like this.

If I had an open field behind my house and I built a wall and I told all my neighbors, come visit me at my wall. And they came and the building instructor came and said, you can't have people here, there's a wall that might follow them.

I would say no, it's not a building. And then I had a second wall and invite the neighbors. Start a building, it's just a series of rules. Well, that's just it. How do you try to say something in a way that just totally defies the definition of it and get people to believe it?

That was really where I ended up. How did they get people to believe this in the first place? That's a really good, that's a really good analogy. You gradually build, it is about building boundaries because these new denominations and movements do have boundaries to say you should believe this at a minimum or don't believe that at, at, at a minimum.

When I was thinking about this topic, I was wondering about, yeah, when you start a, okay, well, you might have heard Virgin Galactic, there was a, he was kind of like, tens of the 15 years ago, Richard Branson, he was a whole load of drinks and music, Virgin Records, Virgin Music, Virgin Airlines, and he tried to do Virgin Galactic, where he was going to send space shuttles into space and try it there.

It didn't really work very well. But when it failed, he said, oh no, it's a subsidiary of my company, it wasn't, it wasn't actually Virgin Galactic, it was enterprise, emitted or something. And that's where you get the saying from success as many fathers failure is an orphan. And so whenever you get a failure, you can then disassociate it. So if you're building collapse, it's really never was a building. It was just a series of walls that happened to have a, you know, parallel horizontal structure. You could call it a roof, but we don't use labels.

You look, the roof collapsed on your building. Well, it wasn't a proper building anyway. And everyone knew what they were getting into. So if you're at a church, what would that doesn't say it's a church? If you're in a movement that does not have the sacraments, the traditions, which the church has done for nine or 1900 years, you need to start asking a few questions. What is this thing I'm part of? So some people in the comments have said, we don't talk much about Christianity, Daniel. Well, no, not really. I'm not coming up with a standard of let's preach the gospel here. What we're focusing on is what

did William Brown and do? What did he not do? What can we learn from his mistakes? And how does that translate into what we're doing today? But a church should have standards. I was a minimum communion baptism and, you know, preaching these kind of things, membership lists and generally doing stuff on a Sunday. And I would expect for my movement that people have a job. So they can't actually do that much church stuff. So we might limit them to doing it on a Sunday. What what my second point was going to be is talking about interdynominationalism.

And this is a slight side tracking onto the Roman Catholic church and the Anglican churches because they've had their fair share of scandals recently. And there have been coverups. Yes. And the same with the Jehovah witnesses.

I'm not having to go at them. I'm actually making a point in their favor, saying them, they as an organization said, yes, this is bad. We're going to pay for the lawyers and things. But when you compare it to what Jed Hartley was up up against trying to warn Bethel about his dad, Bethel, like, well, you know, we can't do anything. You know, we're not a church. He's not part of it.

You know, hey, it's a different movement. We're the new apostolic network. They're all too loose. They can all gather together and say, there's millions of us. But as soon as there's a scandal, they say, oh, we're all independent organizations. We're not even a church. We're not associated with each other.

They're only Catholic church and the Anglican church. They didn't play that card. They wouldn't say, well, this local parish is independent. We've never known them. They said, yeah, actually, yeah, we're, we're fighting this.

But they didn't sidestep the issue and say, we're not even an organization. That's a very strange thing to do. That's a bit like Russia in 2014 saying, hey, we're not, we're not attacking Crimea. It's just there's independent people in Crimea who happen to have Russian uniforms, who just happened to be.

There's nothing to do with us. It's not our organization. We're a movement. We're a movement of Russian separatists in southeastern Ukraine. And then you find out for years down the line, well, it was you all along.

You were an organization. You were planning So the same sort of thing is true of a lot of churches when they're in the imperial growth stage They're quite loose about the structures and everyone's hammering nails in and putting planks in every direction But when the bodies start collapsing and we say oh hang on. What are we building here?

What is this structure and then they'll say well? We were never associated with this building guy I mean if if if the 12 this if the 11 disciples were sort of modern day new apostolic Preformation prophets they would say we were we were never associated with anyone called the other Judas He was a fringe 12th disciple, and we don't know who he was But it's about the it's about the association and if your organization is too loose to actually know who was in it You're really setting yourself up for a fail It's like not really having a concise

Star-flist if you're a huge consultancy company you need to know who the consultants are you're sending out to your clients And it's no you're saying well, he was independently contracted in by us. No, he had the van He had the car he showed up with that customer He needs to take ownership of who he is and it means that when I hear about a scandal Local well locally within the hundred yards of me But if there's one of the churches within safe 50 miles of me even if I'm not in the same denomination I would still think well hang on I'm a Christian

They're a Christian in a way reflect badly on me And I should have just as much authority to post into their church and say I was going on here Whereas what William Brandon was doing he was trying to have it both ways He was saying well, we're not a non-denomination anyone can come in but then at the same time he was saying come out of her my people And you think well if if you're if you're asking people to come out of something then that implies what they're in is wrong And if you're asking them to come into you

What is it about you that's specific that they need to do better? So that's the sign of a denomination if you can get in that means it is something and so when why woman has its five words Words of who or in Cunningham that means that you more or less have to ascribe to them as I said earlier They're actually quite good words. They're not all that bad The ones that he came up with himself. I would live by any of those But that's the point you've got a denomination and so I just say to William go the next step

Start a church call it call it whatever you like But but but just a bit that Laura Cunningham started this is not a bad thing John Wesley when he he didn't start the Methodists the methodists only registered themselves as an independent denomination sometime after his death before then It was a reform movement within the church of England And likewise when it comes to a certain denomination in Norway the Lestardians They're an interesting case because there was a missionary who came from Sweden who just Bible bashed all of the Still Pagan Sami reindeer herders Into believing in Christ, but that movement the Lestardians even though they follow they don't follow his writings. They follow

Luther's writings, but they're still in the national state church. It's really strange. But that's an example of a denomination that said, we're not a denomination because they don't do communion or baptism. They still do that in the state church. So for them, I think that's a big mark for Christians today. If they had the confidence to say, we can't be a church because we're not doing communion weekly. That's an interesting standpoint.

That's where a lot of churches draw the line. They say, we're not a church unless we do communion. So for church to say on the website, do you check that we're not denominationable? Oh, sorry, we're non-denominationable. Well, I just have to ask, when did this start?

Was it the guy who's up the front now? Did he do this 15 years ago when he was 28 and got a bit grumpy and didn't like the leadership and started his own thing? And now he's approaching 15. He's not so really sure what he's up to. And he can't do anything else with his life.

Is that the church you're at? Or did they carry on changing their name? So like, you've had a matey from a Kansas City Fellowship, which had a different name. There was Metro, something as well. So these churches change their names, which is always a bit suspicious, which is what would happen with a company that's always selling, it goes bankrupt. The board of directors, they take out their shares, they sell it all. They keep the money. All the employees get sold up the river. Then the directors form a new company. That's nothing to do with the old one. But you're the same guys. Where did you come from? Why is this new name?

So that's why a lot of churches can be a franchise in that sense. But if they're non-denominationable, it's very difficult to track where did this come from? Why did that person leave? Were they kicked out? Was there a scout? Who did they sleep with? Basically, it just comes down to that, doesn't it? Or what's the financial scandal here? So that's the second most serious weakness with a non-denominational church. It's just saying we don't want to be part of an overarching organization which might hold us accountable if there's a scandal. I want to go back to something

that you said you were talking about. They're still part of a movement. And that's where it gets really interesting because if you think of just simply the definition of a movement, it's a group of people who are organized who are on a move. Think civil rights movement. In the United States, we have the civil rights movement. They were saying we're not going to be part of the system where we're being discriminated against. We're going to move to a new system where we're not discriminated against. So they created a movement. But what happens when you do this, your movement has to

organize. So you have, by definition, by sheer definition, you have the very thing that you say that you're not if you're doing this church thing because a movement is going to define interesting part about a movement. There's always people who rise up to be leaders of the movement.

If you look at civil rights movement itself, you can almost name the names of the people who are the faces of the movement. Well, in a church movement, it's the same way you have the faces of the movement, and so these basically become the CEOs of your organization.

They're the leaders, the presidents, right? Well, the movement is going to produce books. They're going to have in Christian settings, you're going to have sermons, you're going to have teachings that basically define your canon.

So your movement creates the canon of its internal scripture, if you want to call it this. This is what defines us as different from the other people who are not part of our movement.

So thinking back to civil rights movement, the civil rights movement defined what they believed and why, and why they believed they were being discriminated against. Those who were discriminating them are not part of the movement.

They're the outsiders, we are the insiders. In the civil rights movement case, they had a good cause, and yes, they do it. In many church organizations, they also have a good cause. So what happens is, those who have a good cause will admit that they have this good cause, and they will say very openly, we have a movement because we are moving from point A, which was very bad, to point B, which we believe will be very good.

And when we get to point B, we may form a church because we want this thing to be really good. They're very open and honest about it. The problem that I have had, and people have contacted me actually asking this question, this is my non-denominational church a bad one.

There's so many thousands of these, man, I can't even answer, I usually say, I'm sorry, I would love to help you, but I can't help you with this. There's just too many of them.

It's because they aren't really being open and honest, because if they were, I think 99% of them would say, we're in this movement, we have a non-denominational church, and oh, by the way, it's like 50% of the other non-denominational churches, why do you even have this, man?

It's like you're part of a movement that should not even be separate. You should not have your own denomination. But because of the way that the language has been presented to the people, this becomes this catchphrase, where we don't define ourselves as Baptist or Methodist or Catholic or whatever, we define ourselves as non-denominational.

We are in the non-denominational denomination. Yeah. They actually have something in the UK called the FIEC, which is the federation of independent evangelical churches, so they've just been honest, and they said, well, if we've got to federate to at least some points, there was a little bit of a strange analogy.

I don't know how it will hit, but progressing on to a more troubling point for people who are wondering about all of this, I think I would give something of a laconic answer, which is very short.

It's an example from history where it was before Christ in Greece. One of the historians and philosophers was talking to Spartan general, and he was going on and saying, what's the... That's the example of a Spartan.

What do they do? What are their characteristics? And eventually the Spartan general just gave up and he said, he that is at least like you. And so I'd say with people wanting to find a church, I would just say, look, to all the people listening, you've been listening and watching for a long time.

My advice to you is to find a church that is the least like what we're talking about here. So if you find one that has the fewest characteristics we're talking about, that's probably a good church.

If you're, and my measure of anyone is if I've ever heard that name said in John Collins, it immutable way of talking, the sort of a slight eyebrow race. I know, ah, that's a dodgy person.

I'm not going to pay attention to them if they've ever been mentioned by John Collins. Don't go there. So that's my advice for you looking for a church. Are they, are they mentioned by John Collins?

Here's a bit of an analogy. I don't know if it will land, but if someone is completely fed up of everything in the US and they happen to live in Indiana, Terahote, for example, and they say, I'm sick of everything in Indiana.

You know, the things they do in Terahote, they have this thing called Fourth of July and they celebrate it with flags and fireworks. It's just such an Indiana Terahote thing. I'm sick of it.

I'm going to leave this state and I'm going to move to Ohio. Well, okay, two things. That's right next door. Secondly, the July the 4th thing, that's not specific to Indiana and it's not even specific to Terahote.

This isn't, this is an American wide thing. And if you're not aware of that, you either don't know anything about Indiana Terahote or the United States. And so when I'm encountering Christians from Wyoming, when I was there on the base in 2019, I heard some people having a very intense conversation about a word.

And I was like, were they talking about the word, the word of God, the Bible? No, no, you know, like a word you receive. And I was like, yeah, sorry, guys, I really don't know what you're talking about.

Do you want to say a Norwegian? But they just said the same thing in Norwegian. I was like, I'm done the wise. So what are you talking about? They were talking about a word of knowledge and I said, well, I still don't get what you're talking about.

And they were saying, well, you know, what a word of knowledge is within the hypercarismatic way of doing it. So my point is what they thought was Christianity-wide was just their tiny little perspective of what it means to be a Christian.

And so I guess it would be like, you know, someone from the US thinking, you know, everyone around here speaks a bit of French and they like to live in cabins. Well, that's describing Maine, the north of Maine.

That's a very small bit of the US. It's not standard at all. And if you think that, it means you don't know anything about the States, you know, a lot about North Maine, but not really much about the rest of everything.

So when these people leave Y-Wam, or if they're still happily in Y-Wam, but then they... go around to other Christian churches and realize them talking about a word and seven mountains Monday and eat the chicken throughout the bones.

A lot of this liturgy and way of speaking and emphasis is pretty alien to vast elements of Christianity. I was very unfamiliar with the way people were talking about Christianity when I moved to Norway because of the Y-Wam base.

The language wasn't an issue because it was kind of Lutheran Anglicanism. That's very similar. But if when people come to deconstruct their faith or try and come to terms with their upbringing, they're going to get a nasty shock when they're trying to understand, okay, this was standard 4th of July.

This was main, everyone speaking French. So one of those two is very normal. We don't get rid of that. I don't like the expression we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water.

I much try and think when you're dismantling a car, some of them have ABS, some of them haven't, but they're all going to have four wheels and a steering wheel pretty much. If they've got three, then it's a motorbike, it's a tricycle.

So in terms of deconstruction, when you come out of these things, it's going to be very difficult for people to detangle. What's the genuine Christianity here? I don't need to drop. And what's the stuff that I essentially just got from Brandon.

And I'd never heard of him. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation?

You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, 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.

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So you actually beat me to one of my punchlines. Whenever we left the group that we came out of, we were told falsely what all other denominations believed, yet at the same time, to get to our, the summation of the doctrines that we believed, we had all of this loaded language that were building blocks of doctrine that brought us to the same place.

So when I left and I actually started going to a denominational church, they were telling us what they believed and I was saying, no, I'm not sure I believed this. And then I tried to explain.

what I believed and they were like, what in the world are you talking about? And the further we got, in conversing, we came to realize that we both kind of believed the same thing on certain issues.

I just had a language that they didn't understand at all. So in your analogy of Indiana and Ohio, it would be like if they spoke Russian and they spoke Swahili in two places, right?

They're just, yeah, it's almost incompatible. Here's the problem with this type of thing. And this is, people have asked me, are you against a non-denominational church or not? I haven't answered that, but what I will say is it is destructive in this way.

When you have all of these thousands of different groups that are saying, we're non-denominational. We are open to the denominations, but we see things differently. And they're not asking what all of the other non-denominational denominations believe.

And they could actually be part of this. Each one starts to develop their own language in different ways, many times, to say the same thing. So at that point, you could have a non-denominational church A, which believes a certain thing that the denominations also believe and don't have the loaded language, so they can't communicate with each other.

And a third denomination, non-denominational group B, who also believes the same thing, but has a different loaded language, and they can't talk to each other. So what you have is basically this Christian tower of Babel.

Yeah. And it's very difficult tracking this thought development where it came from, because it's kind of like a bit of pinball and Helter Skeletive. It went there. It went to this guy called Sean Foyte to learn it through a word of faith movement who's on gospel business men.

You've got to rewind that pinball to realize where it all came from, whereas when you're in a denomination, he says, we are clearly inspired by the writings of Luther. If you want to understand what we're about, read some of his thesis, that will explain to you what we're on about.

But if you go to a non-denominational church, it's called itself the non-denominational. It can be, yeah, as you say, quite hard to get to the bottom of why they think what they think. And when you try and explain, as I've done with some Christians here in Y-Wam, when I've explained to them, well, someone at church, if there's anyone from my church listening, I know who you are.

Someone came up to me and said, I think I saw you on YouTube talking about our church. I was, yes. But when I'm trying to explain to people in my church that that phrase, eat the chicken spit out the bones, came from Brannum.

Who? Okay. Well, in Brannum, Paul Kane, Mike Bick, these are your guys. Why am I having to tell you what your guy's history was, if you're in the Church of England, you'll be able to say to them, well, you know your archbishop, yeah, you know the archbishop before him.

Oh, yeah, I know him. And the same with Roman Catholic. You know your Pope's John Paul II. Even I've heard of him, so if you, you wouldn't need to explain to Roman Catholic what their own church believes because you can read on the website, the, you know, the Council of Trent's, the Council of all of this stuff, and with a Methodist you could say this is the line of where you're going, Presbyterians as well, they would know where everything's come from in their church, and that also means it's easier for people on the outside to, yeah, I guess to judge whether or not it works. I know there's a lot of knocking around in Christian circles against the

discernment ministries, and I mean, I, I speak six languages, and I'm always, I don't want to use a big flowery Latin word when a basic word will, will, will do the job. So we could call it discernment ministries, but I'd say figuring stuff out, you know, that's just another way of saying discernments, you know, are you going to put diesel in an electric car? Are you going to smoke concrete? No, you can call that discernment, but I would just say knowing what works and doesn't. If you take your car to, to, to the mechanic, he's, you could call that discernment ministries, he knows what's wrong with it. So when, when we're focusing on what's wrong, the non-denominational, the, the biggest risk for me is them not being self aware enough to realize what weeks, what week spots they have. So anyone in a Lutheran church, we're very aware that towards the end of his life, Martin Luther wrote some very frankly anti-Semitic things. We know what he wrote. I haven't actually read him. I haven't read it very much. Martin Luther

at all, but we know it's there, but the problem with a non-denominational church is they're just not going to know or remember the links that go back to Paul Cain and William Brannum and Gordon Lins in all of these names, which helpfully for me have been drilled into my mind. They're not going to know the prophetic history, one might say. So it becomes very difficult to track what went wrong, because when, when you're trying to fix something, particularly in IT, you, you know, you go to the code, you can show me your root code. Yeah, you just did control A, control V, control C. You should have done control A, control C, control V. That's why you haven't copied anything. You know, you go back to the code. But if you're in, if you go to non-denominational church, you see, you know, show me the code. What's the error message here that you're getting? There's a lot of loaded language there, error message. So you just want to say to them, how did you get to where you are? Do you know what

do you know what you're saying came from these people? Because I know in my denomination where it came from, but non-denominationalists haven't got that same. Go back and look at the history kind of thing.

Absolutely. Like I said, every movement is going to form their leaders, but a movement that is transparent, usually will document, here's the leader that we had, here are the mistakes that we're made, here's how we corrected those mistakes, so that future generations can go back and say, we're not going to make those same mistakes.

When you're in one of these, quote, non-denominational movements, they don't document so well. Now, I won't paint with a wide sweeping paintbrush. There are some that do, but of the ones that I have looked at that have gone destructive, none of them do.

In fact, as I was going through Brannemism trying to just piece together, what is the real history? I found out that none of the history really existed, and what we had as history wasn't history.

It didn't really match the facts. Interestingly, a milestone in history was this church near Chicago. I was traveling up north in Indiana, near Gary, Indiana. I go into the church, Midway, Tabernacle, I think it was called, and I said, I've connected the dots, and I found in history, Brannemism is at this church, what he describes doesn't fit history. I want to see what happened.

Do you have your history? They brought me boxes and boxes of everything. They even had the meeting notes who was there, who was present all the way down, and they let me scan everything freely. We're open to sharing our history with you, John. They knew that I was somewhat critical of what they believed, but they didn't care because they were being transparent. I came to learn through their transparency that they were a lot more correct in many ways than I was of the things I was skeptical of them. By being transparent, it actually helped me to connect to them better,

if that makes any sense. These movements that don't document their history for the same reason of my wall that I erect, and I tell the building instructor, this is not a building. If that building collapses, I'm still not going to be able to argue, well, that's not a building, even though it killed five people. They're going to come in and say, you're building killed five people. I don't care what you call this thing. Well, that's the same way with the church, man. If you're building a denomination and something goes post, something goes really, really wrong. I'll say it like that.

They're going to come and inspect your movement by the things that you taught. Were you destructive or were you not? Because your segment of people is still a denomination. Yeah, absolutely.

That issue of transparency is very important because I know you've talked about the example of a church that you went through, they started talking about money for a new building project. That set off a few warning bells. But one of the things that's very helpful for a church is, do they publish their financial statements clearly? Do they talk openly about salary? Is that an item, an item-isable number on their account? I'm pleased to say at my local church, it is.

They have annual budget meetings. Whenever they're making budget decisions, the biggest, most expensive one they're trying to do is a wheelchair ramp into the main sanctuary. That's a very good sign that your church is being transparent. At least to, in terms of the point about movements and organisation, I'll...

living in Norway, I speak Norwegian all day, and they make that point very specifically, and they've got an interesting distinction in Norwegian. Is it something that moves independently of itself like a river, or is it a movement of people? They've kind of got two different words there, which I think is quite interesting. So when it comes to union organisational matters, again, they're using that exact flow that you're talking about. The movement is the movement of the working class, but the organisation is the union. That's where it concretises itself, and you know you're in a very healthy church when lots of people show up to the prayer meeting,

for very few people show up to the annual church meeting about the budget. That's good, and that's how it should be, because it's a really boring meeting. The last budget meeting I went to at my church, I said to the pastor afterwards, thank you for doing this. This was so encouraging. It was dead boring, and I won't remember any of it, but there was a few old men in the church who were really going into details about whether or not you can carry over a budgetary intent into the next year, and you know, really into details about the numbers. No one was

prophesying and saying, shall I love a him, but if you've got church budgetary meetings that people don't attend, that's great. That's excellent. That's like a healthy democracy. How many people go to their local town hall meetings with their local government representatives, very few, and only the people who understand it go along, and that's how it should be. But if you're part of a movement where the kind of church budgetary movement that the church budget isn't really brought up, they're not talking about wheelchair access, they're not talking about the private jet that Kenneth Copeland needs. It's 2,000 people, 1,000, whatever, looking at a stage and just getting shouted at,

for hours on end. So if your church has got poorly attended boring meetings about budget, excellent, that's a sign of a good church. Go there. And I wouldn't necessarily say they're more boring the better, but the more it resembles, the more it kind of resembles the society around us, and I'm careful when I say that, I believe the Western society we have around us is built on Christian values, and I respect our democracy and institutions. If it looks quite boring and standard, good. So does our local government, which tends not to fail us that much. There are roads,

there are sewage, there's electricity, all these things function. That's what local town councils talk about. And often your local church, when it comes to the budget, it is the wheelchair ramp access. It is the heating in the building. It shouldn't be your profit, your profit, pastor saying, well, in this budgetary number, 7,0014b, I think I should get a second private jet, actually, he's not going to say those kind of things in a very boring, dusty, half-past 8pm kind of budgetary meeting, there's not that kind of leeway for him to say, God has told me that I need a second private jet

on specifically 7, 0, 0, 0, 4B section 12. That really puts your pastor within a matrix of budgetary constraint, and if you're from a movement like YWAM, which gives an example of sending out the 72, where Jesus says, you know, don't bring lots of money with you, reliant hospitality. Yes, but that was a specific point in Jesus' ministry, because you knew those 72 were coming back, but later on Paul says, get a job, make sure you're working, but YWAM is still very much rely on donations, and you know, I've talked about in previous episodes how if people end up with not really very

much money, but if your movement is too busy moving around, I would almost give, you know, trying to lean on various American comparisons, you know, the pioneers who won the West. Well, I mean, eventually the West is all conquered, you've got to settle down and start making states, everyone can't just circle the wagons, and you know, live in tents all the time. You've got to turn your territories into states, and you've got to set up institutions. So, a movement does have to settle down and organize, and if it's an organization, it's going to become a denomination.

And a point on the word denomination, it means to denominate something, which is to give it a name, and if you can name something, it means you have set up boundaries called it a building, this is a building I'm afraid, and when you can identify a movement, then it becomes a denomination, and so a lot of people in the new apostolic reformation, when they're trying to defend themselves, they're saying, well, you know, when people call us NAR, it's a bit like someone from New York being in Texas, and they say, well, you know, we can have a New York steak. What's a New York steak?

Or we just call it that in Texas, which is not really the same, because if anyone's listened to all of what you've been doing over the years, it is quite identifiable to look at the ingredients essentially, and say seven-ounce mandates, that's where it's come from, that can be denominated, it can be named, it can be traced back to Paul Cain, William Brown, Gordon Lindsay, Charles Parham, but what I would like to reign you in with us is, what I was listening to from William Brown, and where was he on his kind of journey when he was

talking about this, because it's 580927, why we are not a denomination, where was he any sort of journey there? So that's the interesting part, I was actually saving it for the climax, which you helped me to do. If you look at the timeline, there were multiple timelines of the, we're not a- The nomination were open come join us.

That was happening in the early years, right before the latter reign movement. Then what happened was the Asimli's of God denounced the whole thing, Pentecostalism split. And now he's scrambling to get a crowd again.

So everybody's welcome again. Well, this happened again in the, I think it was like 1953, 54. He starts to lose most of his major supporters and for a period of time, even Gordon Lindsay didn't have anything to do with him.

So he started working with Jim Jones. That was about 1955. Jim Jones, the people's temple. And so in the tape index, the 58 at the beginning of that index means it's the year 1958.

So year 1958, Jim Jones himself has denounced Brannum as did many other people because Brannum was teaching the Serpent Seed doctrine, which was anti-Semitic. Even Jim Jones gave up on him. So with the loss of Jim Jones, he's now scrambling again.

I've got to find some more people. And that's kind of how this happened. If you actually searched that phrase, searched by the phrase, we're not a denomination, it starts like 1957 or 1958. Would that, I mean, that might be even precisely on the 27th of September, yeah.

No, that is fascinating. This is what we're talking about. This is why I'm interested in talking to you.

The character of William Brown fascinates me. I think it'd almost be like if someone was trying to research British history, but they'd never heard of Winston Churchill. Guys, this is what it's all about.

This is the source text. This explains it all. So by 1958, yeah, the assemblies of God, that split was in the 1940s. And something which I didn't realize until quite recently was the Hillsong.

If you ask someone, well, how a Hillsong and I hop KC in a way unrelated, they're not related. Well, except that Hillsong's founding father, the father of the guy who currently got disgraced, he was assemblies of God, Australia.

So when Hillsong came back to New York with other disgraced worship leaders, that was a replant that sort of come full circle. So the US is kind of getting reinfected by stuff it's sent out to Australia and the rest of the world.

So it's come back to New York via Hills, assemblies of God, Hillsong, which I didn't know that link. Yeah, so when William Brown and the saying this, why we're not a denomination, it for me, it sounds like a bit of a sulk, really.

But he's in any movement when it starts, a political movement tries to be very open and say we're not going to have any boundaries, but then things start to solidify. And that's when the boundaries start appearing that the message for me isn't not the message, but what I would want to say is to say to any listeners and anyone watching, as a sort of message of hope, really, or something to end on.

This is to reiterate what I said earlier, a church that is leased like William Branham. And would I throw it out there now, any good Lutheran churches, not necessarily, but I would say there is a guy out there who was in the message and laterally, and he's called Chris Rosebrook, he's got a very good channel.

He is Lutheran. I'm Lutheran, give that a go, Anglicanism, because they seem leased like William Branham, William Branhamism, and non-denominationalism. It's about having the self-respect to admit that you do have an accent. I've got an accent, yes, I'm sure a lot of people mentioned in the comments, and you've got to own it, and be aware of how you pronounce things.

I alter how I speak, depending on whether I'm speaking to somebody's British or not. And so it should be the same within our Christian church, is when you're in your Y1 bubble, yes, you can talk about words of knowledge.

But when you're outside, you need to be aware to tone that down a bit, and just realize that Christianity's a lot wider. And not saying the old thing, major on the majors and minor on the minors, but just look at what the entire church has been doing for 1900 years, since it began, and try and match yourself up with that.

And as I think, I haven't been able to come up with any Lord of the Rings analogies today, which is a bit of a disappoint, but I should have got a few out of the bag from that.

For me, it's really this simple. Most of these movements that call themselves non-denominational, as we've discussed, they are a denomination, but most of them who are Christian, non-denominational churches, they profess at their Christian.

But what happens when you're in one of these movements, and you realize that what you thought was Christian wasn't really Christianity? That's really the problem here, because many people, they're sharing our stories every Friday to talk about what they were in, and how much it differed from Christianity.

Well, when they start to deconstruct, how do you deconstruct? You've been taught Christianity is this one thing, but you find out it's actually this other thing. And for me, it's really that simple. You can't be in a group that is professing something that they're not, calling themselves a non-denominational church when they're actually not.

If you're in this type of movement where people are telling you we have the secret truth and they don't, that's a denomination, because they're creating that boundary, they're creating these walls around them. We have the truth, they do not.

Those are the ones, in my opinion, that are dangerous. And like you said, there's many churches that you can go to, and in the broader scope of Christianity, yes, you might not agree with everything they say, but it's gonna be better than somebody that's going to take you, like Jim Jones and People's Temple.

That's one of the more destructive groups. And I'm watching so many of these other groups that are spinning off in the same trajectory. And that really... scares me. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you. 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 in Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.