The Corporate Apostle: How Business Culture Reshaped Church Leadership

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org and with me I have my co-host and friend Bob Scott, former co-founder of the Kansas City Fellowship and the author of three books the latest is some said they blundered breaking my decades of silence on Mike Pickle the Kansas City prophets and the international house of prayer. Bob is good to be back and to talk large corporations. Whenever you think of NAR, New Apostolic Reformation, really that's where your mind should go but it doesn't which is really odd to me

because if you go back in time go back to C. Peter Wagner who's he didn't really come up with this idea he just put a branding on something that existed but literally what he branded was we need massive church corporations we want big business church if you follow everything he said out to its logical conclusion that's that's really where it came from and the really odd part about it if you piece all of these things together I've traced this history all the way back to Parham and before we've actually talked about movements before this and there's just so many different weird things there's the

occult there's Nosticism last week we talked about numerologies and weird numerologies that people just you know they're sitting in the pews and they don't even really think about the things that they say or as said behind the pulpit they just say I'm into it and they go home and they'll use ones fives and sevens and all of that mesh that network created the platform that enabled C. Peter Wagner to say let's take this thing that we have that's all of these disparate organizations these tiny ones let's build a massive corporation and that's what they did and oddly it's a corporation stuck in

time which I don't know if you've thought about that part but we'll get into it today I've been in business for a long time myself and I have watched iterations of business strategy change and evolve especially in the IT world and what they had in the 80s doesn't at all match today but what they have for corporate leadership roles and structures in our it's like they're stuck in the 80s so anyway good to have you back and talk to all of this mess for those that listen to the last episode when we talk about numerology one thing that I never

got all right for God I should say to mention is one of the things that really struck me for people who are numerology fans or, you know, like types and shadows. I thought it was really interesting that the group that surrounds Mike Bickle decided to do this fast May 1st to May 7th with ending on May 7th, you know, praying for God to move in a mighty way and show himself.

And of all the crazy ironies, Joni Lamb, the head of Deistire, which has been

mired in controversy and scandal along with everybody else, dies on May 7th. That was kind of like a huh, right? And my brain sort of had this moment where I thought if I was living in 1980s, Kansas City Fellowship with Bob Jones driving this whole numerology and types and shadows thing, how would I interpret what is God saying, right? And the fact that she would, you know, somebody who's running a major giant corporate Christian entity, right? That's filled with all kinds of underlying sewage. And I'll just use that word underground, which is all kind of

bubbling up to the surface now happens to die on the very end day of the fast. There's a lot that someone could do with that. And I'll let the listeners kind of go down their own journey with that, but I just found that really fascinating. But getting back to your point about the corporate world, and again, I don't want to get overly philosophical here, but I know even in the formation of our country in a lot of other times in history, there's always been this battle between consolidating our resources and our power under a single entity versus keeping it all

separate and smaller and relating to each other relationally and not institutionally. Right? I mean, that was how our 13 colonies got started. You know, that was the big battle early on in our country. How do we keep our identity and yet become one thing? And there's always been this battle. And part of something else that drives this constant philosophical struggle is that is human nature. I mean, one thing I think we can both agree on is as far back as we as historians can go, there's always been the same dynamic. The few want to control the many, right? It's like

and even if that's on a local town level. Oh, whether that's a larger regional or national or international, you see the same thing. You see all these guys from Alexander the Great, the great, the Julius Caesar, the Ginghis Khan, empire builders, Napoleon, this thing, particularly men who want to be seen as the emperor, the ruler over math, swaths of humanity, right?

And it seems like there's something intrinsic in us, again, predominantly males, where we want to control the masses, you know, we want to be seen as the head of something. And so one of the big confusions, I guess would be the right word, I'm trying to think of the right word to describe this for me, has been as my consulting business has grown over the years into all these different sectors, whether it be athletics, business, government, you know, arts and entertainment, over the church world, I find the same dynamics in all these sectors that I do in the church world, and that bothers me.

I've really, I've got to be honest with everyone, it's really bothered me. And the reason is is that everything that I see about Jesus and what he taught seems to be counterintuitive, seems to be going in the opposite direction, right?

He doesn't like the Romans, not only because they're un, I don't say he doesn't like them, I guess that's the wrong word because he's obviously has compassion on them. But as an institution, right, and he sees it as oppressive, you know, that big government kind of, it's, it's oppressive, right?

He then sets up this whole dynamic where he pours himself into 12 guys and creates no institutional structure. There's, there's no hierarchy, there's nothing, right? There's because all of his teachings have to do with transforming the human soul, right?

He's a guy who works from the inside out, so you're talking about what we're struggling with is where you work from the outside in, using power to, you know, to force people under a certain thing.

And I look around what's going in the church, and I go, huh, this doesn't look anything different than what I see in the corporate world, you know, whether that's in business, arts and entertainment, whatever, it's the same kind of thing if you want to control the money.

You know, we've talked about it before, but an apostle just simply means one who's sent out. It's like a missionary, but it was a missionary. who had seen Jesus. That's the biblical definition of the Apostle. So, Apostle today, really, in my opinion, it doesn't really make any sense, but think about this. I'll take it a step further of not making sense. I don't know if you remember this, but after the .com crash back years ago, there was this big problem in the IT world because nobody wanted to invest in IT and everything had grown kind of stagnant after this for a period of time. And so, all of these companies were

rebranding themselves. And I'll never forget, this is the first time I ever even noticed or even cared about a CEO back then. I was not at an executive level. And out comes the CEO and he is doing things like, now I'm going to describe what he's doing, but think about how the Apostles behave in these narrow churches. The CEO comes out and he's defining the new organization's vision. He's establishing the culture of the company, which is something that was kind of unheard of before this. And in many companies, I should say, they were describing the strategy to the lay people,

to the workers like me who really didn't, you know, I was there for my paycheck. I didn't care that much about strategy, but we were getting involved because of this. So, we were becoming part of this new culture that was being created. And we were starting to, I was starting to notice there were these strategic partners being established between other companies. And it was very visible. I could see it as, you know, even as just a rank and file peon employee, I could start to see these things opening up. And I thought about it right before we started recording every single

thing that I have mentioned is an aspect now of these, especially the mega churches, but the larger church corporations, they have the same strategy. And years ago, they did not. And I've tried to put, I've tried to pinpoint in time when that change happened. It seems to happen about the same time that the culture changed. Some of it could be attributed to just simply their business leadership, especially when you think full gospel business been bringing in business people.

But to a large extent, to grow according to Wagner's church growth strategy, you almost had to do this. If you did not do these things that they're doing as a CEO and a corporation, you really can't grow a church like a business, which is what Wagner was proposing. And so the whole corporation structure would have just crumbled. Picture the apostles of today coming out trying to create one of these massive church growth strategies and says something to the effect. Now, we are leaders by teaching you to become leaders just like us, which is the biblical definition of how

this is going to work in Christianity. They can't have this. They have to have the organizational structure. Fast forward to today, they've realized that what they tried to do way back then in creating that hierarchy.

really doesn't work. And now you have instead the crowd sourcing type strategies where everybody's flat, everybody's equal. You have these standup meetings where everybody is taking ownership of their piece of the puzzle. They're actually reverting back to the biblical model in the IT world, but they're stagnant in the church model.

I'll throw something in that's kind of interesting. You know, John Wimbler was very good friends with John Maxwell. John Maxwell for people that don't know is probably one of the more famous conference speakers.

He was a pastor, you know, but a lot of, he speaks to a lot of Fortune 500 companies. He's a big consultant. And why that's intriguing for me is at least from my perspective where I saw the shift that you're talking about happened in the 1980s.

I had become a Christian in 1975 in what the Bible school blah, blah, blah, blah. And sorry, I was young in it all, but I remember very specifically this push from older guys in the ministry to come to these pastors conferences that were being taught by guys coming from, again, they were Christian guys, but they were coming from the corporate culture.

They were guys like John Maxwell, right? Who was basically a pastor who had, you know, got his niche and consulting. And a lot of those guys, what they did was, and I don't know how much it influenced that was.

I don't know what Peter Wagner's relationship was with John Maxwell. I would be surprised if they didn't know each other quite well given that John Wimmer and him knew each other real well, right?

So, and that's a small little circle of guys. So I'm just saying there's a pretty high probability. Well, all of us young guys are dragged to these business seminars. And the whole shift that I saw was away from the, what is your message to more, what is your presentation?

And what I mean by that, it was not only just the way your church looked when people walked in the door, but how you greeted them. That's where the whole, I mean, before the 1980s, nobody served coffee at church, right?

That was like a non-thing. You did that after church, if you had a get together, like if you, you know, maybe in your Sunday school class, right, it was not a thing in your church lobby with greeter saying hello and welcome and you know, making them.

Visitors all feel welcome, right? The concept of a band in front with three hit songs, right? I mean, it used to be in a lot of churches, you know, you'd have an hour-long worship.

Well, then the consultant guys went in there and went, no, no, no, no, that's way too long. You're losing people. You got to get them in and out in an hour, you know, blah, blah, blah.

Like there was all this stuff, right? Then it became all about your corporate structure, right? And how you're set up. Well, what I saw over the course of time was typically that was the emergence of a then guys like me that, you know, actually, I kind of functioned in this role, the role of an administrative pastor, right? You actually had a business manager now as a pastor on church, right? That was, that's a new thing from the 1980s, right? So you see what I'm talking about?

These things never happen suddenly. It's like they just, over the course of time, it's this thing, this thing, right? Well, then a lot of those business managers, they're put on staff, not only to protect the wellness, you know, the financial wellness of the corporate, or the corporate, and I mean the church body, but they then become the business advisor to the lead pastor.

Who now suddenly is getting paid way more money because, like in the NFL, Patrick Mahomes gets $50 million a year because he's the star player, right? So suddenly, now salaries are all based on what? How many people, you know, how famous you are, what, you know, how big your star is in the pulpit, right? And then there's all this stuff about how do we market this guy, right? So,

I mean, no slam on John, but John didn't write any of his books. He had ghost writers. None of these guys write their own books. This is another little ticket, right? So we hire somebody who's a ghost writer, whose name, nobody ever knows, but he makes the star look good, right? I'm just saying, I could go on and on about this, but I saw this shift, right? And so that's where we suddenly get into the mega church culture. And I can honestly say, I do not see any difference the way mega church, these big, you know, 10,000 member congregations, or really, it's anything over 5,000, you know,

how they're all run. They run just like big corporations, same structure, same everything. Yeah. And that shocks me a little bit, because there's something inside of me that goes, but I thought we were supposed to be different. Exactly the point that I was trying to build up to.

So picture of the 40s, 50s and 60s. You have these large corporations. but they did have to some extent the star of the show and you can even see that all the way down into the television show.

Think Jetsons. I was watching Jetsons this morning. You've got Spacely Sprockets. Without Mr. Spacely, you don't have Spacely Sprockets and Cogswell Cogs, you don't have, you know. So the business strategy of long time ago was you have a person who built a business and everybody comes to follow that person.

And so you've got this top-down level structure, this top-down management. And that was the exact problem that was in existence whenever this calm thing happened. You had all of these tech geniuses who created a calm and then suddenly when you pull them out of the picture, their business disappears.

And they're watching these businesses just fold one after another, right? So where did that transition take place? And you know where it was? World War II. What happened was during the Second World War, the vast majority of guys that were in the military were rural farm boys, right?

Because they were picking, right? Or they were young 18, 19 year olds. What happens? They go to war and they're young. And what do they learn? The military model, right? Top-down, authoritative structure, all of it.

After the war, my dad's generation, they all got to go to college. They would have never got to go to college. I could have never afforded to go to college. But suddenly now the government's paying for all these guys to go to college.

They all go to college and what do they taught? They're taught how to build businesses. So what did they do? What is the corporate model? The corporate model that comes out of the Second World War is the military with different aims on it, right?

They migrate towards what they were familiar with, right? So that's why you had that hierarchal top-down. Nobody talks back to the CEO, right? It's just like the military. That's how my dad grew up.

My dad, even though he ended up not being going the military because he had some physical thing wrong with them, was like a military guy in his corporate world, right? So I'm just saying to your point, it came from somewhere and it came out of the Second World War.

And then that migrates into the church world, right? It's just, it's like each generation begets the next one with things that are assumed as normal. Oh, there's a way we always did it. No, we didn't do it like this.

The Second World War is what unlocked this in our society. And the problem is, like I said before, instead of teaching people to become leaders, you have leaders who are controlling people. So the question becomes really, whenever you have one person who's defining the vision, the culture, all of these things that I mentioned before, And the future of that ministry and I'm talking about the CEO Apostle here, right then you have to ask the question Is that really an Apostle is that some sort of a apostolic service that he's doing for the people or is it just executive control?

And in my opinion when you look at what was created after all of this happened you have literally created like you said It's an army type military type control But it goes even beyond that because think of the privates who step out of line You're going to just come down really hard on those people which they did in the church They they executed everything in that top-down strategy Well, and you know one of the struggles I had with my dad in my adolescence was I was that kid that all was asked why?

in my dad's military corporate world That was rebellion In other words me asking why was seen as rebellion you did not do that in the military You know my kids had to learn that they both my kids were in the military They had to learn nobody cares what your opinion is in fact if you open your mouth and give it you get to do 50 push-ups In front of your whole unit right they you mean you are not allowed to challenge authority And that got pulled into the business world so that's changed obviously over as the generations have

Changed but here's here John. Here's the collision for me if you weren't really know Is what does the word where does the word ministry come from? It comes from the Greek word document the archimists right which means table waiter Servant right so here's what confuses me is when you go back and you look at the Genesis of What ministry is?

The ministry that Jesus was talking about the thing that Jesus was promoting Was your leaders were your greatest servants right and then to to magnify this you know to the Enth level the last evening before that he's on earth when he's having a meal With his students what does he do?

He gets down on his hands and knees and washes their feet as they come in Which is the custom when you wear sandals and you're on the dirty road and you come in as somebody saw us again Mill you wash the feet right because you don't drag does he is Is washing their feet their rabbi their teacher right their authority figure the guy that they're under and what is he tell them?

Follow my example All right, so this is where I get this you know, this isn't still my really struggle with that Sorry, I'm just gonna be invulnerable here. I just really struggle because I'm going wait a minute We have the main guy Jesus the Christ, the founder of Christianity, explains to us in black and white what ministry is giving us an example of it.

And yet we have now in 2026 a ministry model where the guy at the top has everybody waiting on him. We've literally done a 180 degree flip on what ministry is. And I just struggle with that. I got to be honest with you. I really struggle with that.

And nobody seems to even challenge it. It's like we're all like, what do you mean? That's normal. That's what we all do. And I'm like, but that's not Jesus. I've been done that. Jesus didn't see it like that, right? He said, what? There's no greater love than laying your life down for someone else. This is where my like, it's all upside down like it's like the antithesis. I feel like in some ways it's like black and white, right? It's like the shadow.

It's like we're over here and he's over here. And yet we somehow have so disconnected from our roots and we're off here now wondering why we're so ineffective in influencing the world around us. And it's because we're miles away from our roots. It's like we've become untethered in a way. And so what's happened is we've bought into the philosophy that bigger is better and is bigger better. Let's go a little bit deeper in the comparison between a CEO and an apostle because this actually answers a question that I think Jed has been trying to get a grasp on for a long time. And other people too, Brantley has the same conversation.

Literally every cult that exists, you have this type of conversation. But especially now after the New Apostolic Reformation created this organizational structure culture, think about this. Almost every one of these groups, IHOPKC included, they have to have their backstory.

You've got to have the prophetic history and Brannemism, we called it the life story, is you can go right down the line, each one of these groups. There's a narrative, right? There's a narrative, you have to have the narrative. Well think of what a CEO does. Even whenever a new one comes on, I don't know if you've seen that transition, but old one goes out, the new one comes in, I've got a vision for where this company is headed. And he'll tell you, and he'll tell you the backstory of why he believes this, the story of where it's going in the future, all of this stuff.

Well, the vision for a CEO becomes the way that you're going to create a revolution in the company. You're going to be something more than everybody, every other company out there, right? Well, these apostles, they come out and they do the same thing. Here's my backstory, here's where we're headed. We're going to do this great thing that usually never comes, but we're going to be different from every other church out there because we have the vision. They don't have our vision.

we have it. And that's really what it's all about when it comes right down to it. If the guy who's presenting all of this stuff to these people can convince them that his vision is aligned with their inner being and more to the point, make them believe that the vision is actually aligned with God. And that's really the catch here. Then the people will join into the vision thinking that this vision is of God. And it's literally just to CEOs, I'm going to rebrand this church.

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. 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-Brannum Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support. Something else that really got me. And again, this is just me flipping from sector to sector. In the business world, a lot of the guys that I've worked with that are Fortune 500 guys, guys that aren't even in the arts entertainment, athletic guys. They're narcissists, very driven

narcissists, right? Part of the course. I just thought it was normal, right? Then, as I became more and got older and older and began to start doing consulting and counseling in the ministry world, I started going, wait a minute, all these guys that I'm meeting that are pasturing these giant churches, they're like narcissists. I don't know if they're narcissists, but they certainly act like narcissists, right? So it was sort of like, okay, what is going on here? And of course, the deeper I got into it, I was like, okay, they're narcissists. Like, at first, there was just

I was suspicious of it. I didn't realize it was. I watched how they interacted with people in the head. They were really good between the door to the stage and the pulpit. They were dynamic. But after they got off the stage, other than to a few people close up, there's cold as ice to everyone else, right? They were just at no time for anyone. In fact, a lot of them would just go literally from the pulpit off the stage into an automobile and leave. Like, just do their show, do their 45-minute thing, and then they're gone. And I was like, wait a minute, that's what the singers in

songwriters do, like, they go up and play their beer, wait a minute, right? It's like I started going, wait a minute here, I mean these different worlds and I'm seeing this same thing. Well then, and I mentioned this in my last book, I discovered that Harvard Business School had done this study on 4 to 500 liters and found out that the vast majority of them were not only narcissists, they were sociopaths.

And that was like, huh? Like that was a real big shocker for Harvard, until they realized that this relational dysfunction actually works very well in very large corporations where you're more interested in the corporation's success than individuals, right?

You don't really, you know, the individuals are cogs in a machine, right, and these kind of people are very good at keeping the corporation on purpose, on task, right? And a lot of it's driven by their own ego, so they've got drive, that's what moves the thing forward.

So they're looking at it, going, wait a minute, in this situation, narcissism and sociopath, you know, sociopaths are actually assets. And that was a head spinner for me. But then I go over here and I go, well, but that shouldn't be an asset in the church world, why is it?

Oh, the reason it's an asset is it's a giant corporation, right? And I was like, ah, now I see what's going on here. This wouldn't have flown 40 years ago because we didn't have big corporations.

So you might have had the Billy Graham Evangelical Association, right? You had a few things like that, but you just didn't have the big corporate church like we have now, right? That's out of control and the secret stories of how much wealth is getting plundered from these churches into the pastors, you know, retirement accounts and his other real estate that he has, you know, his vacation home and the Bahamas and all this kind of well stuff, right?

And of course, this is where it really gets even more interesting for me is when you talk to these guys and you start bringing it up, they look at you like, what do you mean?

I deserve this. I made this money again, what's the mentality? That's the business corporate mentality, right? You see what I mean? Every which way I turned, I started realizing, wait a minute, we are so indoctrinated from these guys that came in the 1980s that brought this whole corporate mentality into the church world that we're now 40 years down the road and we just think that's all normal.

Nobody is actually comparing it to Jesus, right? We're not going back to the author and finish our of our faith, we're not looking how he thinks it, we're just looking at what's all around us.

But everybody else doing, okay, this is normal then. When I started doing executive level consulting with my business, there was this really sad phase that I went through. It was really sad to watch because I was coming in as a temporary CIO for higher, CTO for higher, in cases when they were trying to transition from their existing leadership to a new leadership.

And they would always send this person in. I don't know if you've seen this or not, but they would send in the chopping block. And the chopping block is going through trying to figure, okay, we're going to cut these people, we're going to keep these people.

And you could literally tell who was going to be cut and who wasn't based on their alignment. And when you mentioned the word narcissism, I got to thinking about that. There's a trait in narcissism.

I don't know if you're familiar with this, but they want you to be aligned. That's narcissism, 101, you must align with the leadership. But also they live in constant fear that people aren't aligned.

And so they will do tests to see, are these people aligned or not? And they'll often, they'll divide the crowd. They'll put people against other people to watch what happens and see who they're going to cut off.

So they themselves become the chopping block, right? Well, in the CIO corporate world, there is after the chopping block comes, then you have the new corporate strategy that's coming in, the new culture. And then there's this idea of alignment.

Those who are aligned with the new strategy, the new culture, those are the people they keep. Those who say, no, I've done it this way for 50 years. I'm going to continue doing the old way.

Those are the people that they get rid of. So you have to be aligned. And it turns into this thing where the corporate vision becomes the ultimate. It is, there's nothing more powerful in the corporate world than this vision.

In the CIO church world, the leadership creates the same type of vision, whether it's the prophetic history, whatever it is, they go through all of these steps to see who's with them, who's against them, and they'll cut those people off and shun them or whatever.

But in the end, they do the same thing. They want to create this concept of alignment. But interestingly, it is a church and where they should be aligned with Christianity or the Bible, being a Christian group, a Christian church.

It's not so much about that. You may cut off people who are Christians, believers in Jesus Christ, if they're not aligned with your vision, because they're not a member of your, they're not aligned with your vision.

They're not under the same spiritual alignment they call it. My family witnessed this firsthand whenever my grandfather cut us off. I asked questions about the history, this thing that I'm talking about. And my family was cut off my wife and my kids, everybody from the flock.

They didn't even know if my wife had a single question. But because of this alignment thing, she's part of the risk that people... the church might be misaligned after learning whatever evidence John has, so let's cut those people off.

And again, in the end, what are you aligning to? If it's a Christian church, it should be alignment with the Bible, with Jesus Christ, your Christian, so your follower Christ, but that's not the case, your follower of the leader and his vision. Well, one of the things that I discovered in my consulting practice is you know what the number one fear of people that have status and stuff is losing their status and stuff. Yes. It consumes them. It's very interesting. It's something that most people that don't have it ever don't think about. The reason I bring this up is there's another

dynamic going on here that drives a lot of this need to control, right? And it's based in fear, right? Survival instincts kicking in again. And so the need to control, right? The need to keep everybody in line is that a lot of times driven by the leader's fear that he's going to lose control and therefore loses status and stuff. It becomes in their mind a warp sense of survival, right?

And what people will do when they're in that space in their head is vicious. You know, people will kill other people to live. And I've been involved behind the scenes and things, things that I can't really talk about because they're professional. But all I got to say is the length of which men will go to keep their positions of power blow you away in the ministry. I'm not talking about in the business world. I'll talk out of the ministry. This is what I'm saying. This is, you know, I've had people say this to me, you know, friends that know my story like,

are you still a Christian? After what you've seen and experienced doesn't, aren't you like depressed? Aren't you like completely disillusioned? And I go, no, because I'm not going to hold Jesus responsible for human behavior, right? In other words, it's not Jesus fault. He didn't do anything. In fact, he made it pretty clear what his value system was. And any what we got now, right? The hierarchy of values, as we call it, right? And this is important for people to understand, but whether you realize it or not, you have a hierarchy of values. And you make all your decisions in your life based on what those values are. Most people

just have never stopped to actually think about what is my number one value? What are my top 10 values? And then what are they? Because, you know, I could tell, you know, in talking you over a course of time and how you act what they are, right?

It's very obvious, because you make your decisions based on them, but just most people don't really think it through, right? And so you see this a lot in the church world. I'm like, okay, our values are really warm.

And I'll give you an example. You saw this in the last couple years with all these scandals. With all these scandals, what was the number one value? What was everybody trying to hang on to?

We can't let the corporation go down, right? It's all about keeping the institution humming. I mean, whether it's day stars, we just talked about, which has just been one thing, whether it's been IHOP, whatever, right?

You know, what happened at IHOP, where now I drive past empty buildings, lots of empty buildings, right? And a church building that sits empty every Sunday, that's everybody's worst fear. That is Armageddon, that is Hiroshima, that is the nuclear, whatever, right?

It's just devastating. And why is it so devastating? You know why? Because there's a whole bunch of people whose livelihood was based on the machine, the corporation, right? So for people that may not be historically literate, one of the things that's happened through church history, is you'll see this over and over again.

You have a person who is very, very gifted, a John Knox, a John Wesley, you know, or whoever, you know, John Whitfield, right? You have all these guys. And around them, because of their gifting, they gather people.

And then there's these kind of, you know, relationships that develop and they do these big meetings and blah, blah, blah, blah. What happens every time one of these guys dies? Who's left forms an institution, right?

They form the ministry or a denomination, right? Presbyterian comes out of John Knox, right? Methodism comes out of John Wesley. You can go all the way down the list and you'll see that what ends up happening is while the guys are alive, because it's a living and breathing dynamic living entity.

You don't need an organization. It's moving, right? You're just administrating what God's doing. But one that guy goes, no one has that gravitas, right? That that person had. So now everybody then kicks into preserving it.

I watched it with the vineyard, right? Once a John went, they tried to preserve it. It's gone through all these different... iterations, you know, and different leaders because they're all, and none of them can be John.

Right? And it's sad, but what do they do? They're all trying to hang on to the vineyard movement because in their mind, the vineyard movement is the sacred cow. That's what we got to do. Or the methodist, you know, or the, right, we've got to save the structure, save the corporation.

And I'm thinking, huh, why? Because of branding. Here's, so here's the funny thing. I have this friend who lives in another state. He's not that technologically savvy. I'll just say like that. And he and I like to watch the same old television programs. And so he'll call me up and say, hey, on my channel, they're going to play such and such and such and such. And I keep telling him, I have the same channel. It goes to the same satellite. I'm what we're literally talking about the same channel here. Every conversation, but he can't get it in his head that it's the same thing

because he doesn't, he can't grasp that. Right. Think of these ministries. They're all brands. Right. And think of the people they're looking in that same way. They can't see outside of their brand to the extent that if you take the corporate vision for each of these state, take iHOP.

We're all going to meet in Kansas City Stadium. And we're at this end of thing, end of day's thing is going to happen here in the Kansas City Stadium. Well, that works great for the iHOP KC brand. What about the Bethel brand? Are they going to travel all the way to Kansas City and sit in the stadium? They have a different brand. And what's interesting is they network each other's brands as though the brand has something significant and the brands don't really fit with each other.

The visions don't really align, but this is the funny part. There is no accountability, no institutional accountability with the networked authorities and their branding. So we've got company A, company B, company C, none of their visions align. Here's what's even more crazy is, is they get together at conferences. Why? Because they bring their brands together. They can attract a large audience and they make a fortune and they all walk away with $100,000. But outside of the conference, they're all competing with each other underneath. I watch this, right? It's a weird kind of dynamic because it's like, when it's economically viable, we'll all get together and

bring our brands together, right? And do the big thing. Because that's, in fact, if you want to know how the game's played, those conferences, the reason why you see the same guys at the same conferences is they all make big money, huge money. I mean, I know for a fact that guys have came into case, I mean, this is IHOP, right? This is insane. You have kids at iHOP who basically are eating one meal a day because they can't get enough money, right? And then they bring in speakers and they're writing of $75,000 checks for speaking

for two or three days, right? Now the kids don't know this, right? Because they're like, wait a minute, you know what? $75,000 or two for all of us. But no, the guy that came in there, right? He gets that, right? And so they all, they, it's a game that they play, right? It's how, and of course that money doesn't go to the church. Where does it go? To their private ministry fund, right?

Yeah, it doesn't go through iHOP or it goes to Mike Bickle or it goes to Rick Jiner, it goes to whoever else, right? And that's how it's played. And then that money gets run through the local church.

It gets run through their private ministries. So they can buy their big speed boat down at their lake house. So it's, it's a whole corporate world. I remember, you know, to your point about branding, I remember the first time I got dragged to a full gospel business men's thing, right?

And this forcing everyone to speak in tongues, like it was like their thing, right? And it's like, I thought at the first one, it was an odd thing. And then after about my third or fourth, one I got dragged to and it was the same thing, right? And I'm sitting there watching very distinguished business guys being made to do things that were so embarrassing, right? It was like, but it was their brand, right? That's what you do. We bring you here to our meeting so you can speak in the Holy Ghost and speak in tongues, right? And that was their brand, right? And I was like,

it's like, if we didn't get a guy speaking in tongues, we failed. It's a tarnish on our brand. And so there was all this pressure. You know what I mean? It was like, I did the vibe in the room, which is so thick. And I felt so bad for guys that were cornered, right? And it's just like making them just these, you know, to this day, I still, I mean, I'm sorry, but I mean, it's just, you know, at our age, you know, we all got buddies that been through it, right? And I get phone calls all the time. I'm like, remember back, what the heck was that?

You know, it's like a butch-gassing Sundance kid. Who are those guys?

And so we have a lot of those conversations. And of course with KCF was just, you know, like the gift that wouldn't stop giving up, what the heck was that? I forget all the time, because I was in the middle of it, but I have friends that would come in for different meetings, right? And then still just, remember when that, like, what the heck was that? We just bust out laughing.

in hindsight, now 34 years later, it's just bizarre. It's like, but at the time, everybody thought it was normal. I have always wanted somebody to try to force me to speak in tongues, because I would start saying, Kierotakos, which means I want tacos.

So anyway, so yeah, to your point though, this is the thing about NAR, I look at, NAR isn't really the root, they're a fruit, right? They're the fruit of where this thing goes, but the root, you got to go back 40, 50 years is where it starts, right?

To the point then, where these guys that have all these independent men and you've noticed how all of them are way bigger than a local church, right? There are people who want to have itinerant ministry as well, right?

So not only do they want to have authority over their own, or they live, they want to have authority over places they don't live, right? And they want to be treated with this respect, right?

In this honor, right? Was it, isn't there a parable about the guy who sat at the end of the table and Jesus brought him up and put him in the front? Is there something like that?

There's a story about that, right? The first shall be last and the last shall be first, right? Again, Jesus, thinking completely contrary to our sense of normal, right? You know, Jesus is focused on the least of, everybody else is focused on who's the most influential, right?

I think that's part of the reason why, honestly, he ends up getting killed by the religious leaders who are driving it because he's a threat to what? Their institutional power, right? He's empowering the poor.

He's telling them, take your life back. There's no reason, like these guys living in, you know, and I think you know this, based on the recent archeology around the temple, they're discovering that the high priest and all the dudes that worked at the temple all live in mansions.

Like, here it is, that's 2000 years ago, and nothing's changed, right? The same institutional dynamics of the first century with, you know, the rich and powerful religious leaders all living large, you know, while they're telling the poor people, hey, what little bit you got, give to us, you know, because, you know, we'll talk to God on your behalf.

And Jesus comes along and goes, wait a minute, you ain't need them to speak to God, you can speak to them directly. I mean, what a threat that is. You know, we can't have a show about corporate apostle leadership without this one weird thing.

I'm gonna end on this one. Let's go for it, Dan. This is the weird thing. This is the weirdest thing. thing that, and I've seen it, it's not just NAR, I've seen it in Pentecostalism, Charismania.

Once I rose up the ladder, and the first time I was working as a CIO, working with the CEO and the CEO, oh, watching how it worked, changed my life. Because as a worker, you're seeing all of the corporate vision, you're seeing the strategy, and it says fine-tune machine. But I'm literally sitting in a restaurant, I think it might have been Cracker Barrel, and we're sitting there, and one of the guys is drawing his vision on a napkin, is what turned into the corporate strategy. In these meetings, often you have the leadership of your business, but sometimes

there's this outside guy, and this is just your entrepreneur who has an idea, he's going to bounce it off these guys and see, well, you take my idea, and usually they're hair-brained, and usually you find a nice way to say, I like that idea, but I'm not sure it's a fit for our company.

Well, this was the entrepreneur in the business side. Think about NAR, think about Pentecostalism, think about Charismania. You have the entrepreneurial apostle. This is a guy, he don't have a church, he doesn't really have anything, and they bring him to the stage and say, we're going to ordain this guy as an apostle. He's not being sent out as a missionary, he's not got a church, he's literally just that guy that we don't like any real thing about his vision, but we're going to give him a apostle status and you can go to his conventions if you want to.

Well, see, in my world, he's nothing different than an entertainer, right? It's the same dynamics I saw in the music world, right? You pay the guy to come on and do the show. That's what troubles me is, to your point earlier, it's like you get into these different sectors and you realize this is like not any different, right? See, here's what I, you know, what's really kind of bothers me, to be honest with you. I sometimes find myself wondering if Jesus just isn't a product.

He's a means to an end, meaning that as much as guys get up and they say all the right words, everything I see is about growing their corporation. You see what I'm getting at? It's like so much of it is driven by by my book, by, you know, this, by that, you know, get, you know, follow my podcast or whatever, you know, it's all corporate driven. And I'm like, huh, there's something wrong with that in my mind, right? It's like, wait a minute here. This seems to me that Jesus is suddenly now a product. He's a book sale, right? He's a draw. It's verbiage. But everything is about

signing up, you know, you know, in the corporate world when you're in the sales side, you know, one of the big things I want to do is They want to make relationships sticky, right?

In other words, meaning that we watch we sell you one thing. We want to start selling you other things. So pretty soon your whole life is tied up where you can't do anything without using our website or we've got the hook in you.

And now we're just going to keep putting more hooks in you because your whole life now is controlled by us, right? Instead of setting people free, we want to bring them in and tie them up in a way, like make them prisoners of our corporation.

And I see that same dynamic, or I saw that same dynamic creeping into the church world as well, right? How do we keep, you know, what do we do to keep people, you know, you know, because there might be another entertaining guy that happens to show up in another church.

How do we keep them at our church, right? So that's where, again, we're the consulting world, the business consulting world that came in the 1980s, pretty much institutionalized a lot of their corporate sales, management, stuff.

They just changed the verb it. They just, I call it Christianized it. Basically, they took a lot of these principles, right? The problem is, is that they didn't really go back and compare what they're doing to Jesus, you know what I mean?

Because now you have a problem. You have a real big problem. And that's one of the chapters in my book. I kind of talk about that because of my mind, you know, people kept asking me all the time, well, how do we solve this problem?

And I say, it's very simple. And they're like, what? I go, just take the money out of it. The minute you take the money out of the church world, everything changes, you know? The minute guys can't get rich being in the ministry, you know what you're going to find?

They'll go find another field to go plow and make money. They'll out. You know who will stay there? The guys that actually care. The real pastors, right? The real guys that genuinely care. The real deaconis guys.

The real servants. See, I remember years ago, I don't know, I think it was one of the vineyard guys out of Cincinnati, Steve Shogre, and he had a whole thing about servant ministry, which I thought was so beautiful, right?

You know, they would go to events, and on the summertime, and hand out water bottles, like just give, be kind, right? You know, being a servant. Servant leadership disappeared. The minute the corporate culture entered into the church world, right?

Now it became hierarchical, and we all kissed the ring. You know? Well, it's the same problem in business, right? If you have a company that is top heavy, meaning you're all... vision and no results. Right. The whole thing crumbles. Well, hopefully we've been helpful. I mean, I don't want to just pick on things, you know what I mean? But I think it's important that, you know, people have eyes to see and ears to hear and trying to understand what's really going on.

And again, figure out what your values are, what's important to you, and then make the citizens accordingly. If relationships are important, then find people that want relationships. I mean, there's a reason why Barna is basically called our generation the DUNS. And the reason is the vast majority of our generation doesn't go to church anymore. But they haven't left God, and they haven't let what they're doing is they're doing house church stuff with their friends that they've walked through life together. And I've seen this as I've traveled around the city, visiting very, many churches. I finally, I find it hard to find people my age in any of them. I think our

generation's pretty much got done with the show. You know, we're kind of done with corporate church. So we'd rather go back to the relational dynamics. Yeah, there's a lot of people who are realizing that they don't want the corporate Jesus. And that's really what it comes down to. I agree. Thanks again for doing this. Been a fun topic to talk about, though, kind of depressing in a way too, but you know, 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-Branum.org. For more about the dark side of the new

episodic reformation, you can read Weaponized Religion from Christian Identity to the NAR. And for more about Mike Pickle and IHOPKC, you can read some said they blundered, breaking my decades of silence on Mike Pickle, the Kansas City Profits, and the International House of Prayer.