When Church Leaders Fall: The Side Nobody Wants to Talk About

Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Browns, I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brandham Historical Research, at William-Brandom.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, Christianity today is in a dumpster fire, and I don't mean that loosely. If you go look at the news and look at what's happening, it is a dumpster fire, and I'm going to try to delicately tackle something with you that we both probably should have tackled from the beginning, but I'm picturing a dumpster fire where there are people like us who are standing up with our hands up saying, this is a dumpster fire, stay back, and there's people that keep throwing fuel into that fire, and it gets bigger and bigger, but within that problem that exists,

people throwing fuel in the fire, it takes two, it takes the fire, and it also takes the fuel. And what I want to tackle today is going to be a little bit delicate, it's probably going to fin half the audience, but the half who stays for the remainder of our podcast, we're going to talk about the flip side, and I'll introduce it like this, and we're going to go all kinds of directions, but Bethel, I had a conversation with Jed Hartley, and we were talking about Bethel's final admission that Sean Bolts, his prophecies weren't quite real.

And the question that really came up between Jed and I is accountability, and we discussed it like all of the other personalities like me online, we're talking about the leadership should have corrected this because the leadership knew, but that's just the fire.

I want to talk today about the fuel that goes into that fire, because there's more than just the leadership at fault here, and I want to tackle this in such a way, I don't want to offend people, but it really takes two to tango, and it's a problem today that we have to address, and so I want to address it openly, honestly, respectably, and hopefully in a way that people can understand that it's not just the leadership that holds responsibility for holding people accountable, but it's also the rank and file member.

Something that I say that a fence, I want to say that naive, or the ones that kind of will live in a fantasy world that I live in the sewer of the church.

And let me explain that. I know some people are like, oh, that's gross. And I'm like, yeah, it is. It really is. So let me give some context of where I'll be coming from just so we can set this straight. When I was after bioschool, I became a youth pastor. And I'm 18 years old. And I'm you know, overseeing this youth group. And I have one of the fortune, you know, guys in the group come to me and go, hey, he was very effeminate. And I said, hey, or he came to me and goes, hey,

can you teach me to be a guy? I was so confused. Like, I'm 18 years old with one year of bioschool. I'm like, what do you mean? And he tells me this story. He goes, I'm the youngest of a family.

I can't remember how many, but I have a bunch of older brothers. My mom wanted a daughter. And when I came along, she was so frustrated that I was a boy that she decided to raise me as a girl.

He goes, I was put in dresses. I would play with dolls. I was put with girls. I spent my whole life that way. And of course, I'm sitting there as an 18 year old, listening to something that is so outside of anything in my life that I had ever heard or seen. I was just spinning, right? I'm like, oh my god. Fast forward seven years later. And again, everybody be gracious about this, but I'm trying to explain how I got into this. Seven years later, KCF starts, Mike doesn't want to do any counseling. Bob, you counsel. I'm 25 years old. Okay. I'll do it. No experience.

A couple comes in with their teenage daughter. They walk through the door. My impression is, oh my god, I so got this. I know all about teenage rebellion. Bob, Bob, Bob, Bob. That was my assumption, right? They sit down. Nobody says anything. I look to the mom because the mothers tend to, the wives tend to be the ones that are really good at, you know, explaining the problem. So I asked her, what's going on? And she looks at me and goes, he likes sleeping with her better than me.

I'm like, huh? Like, I just had not sure what she was getting at, right? I go, who is? And she points to her 16 year old daughter. And him, the dad. And I am sitting there. I'm telling you, John, I just didn't know like, I felt like it was an out of body experience. I didn't know, heard of any of this stuff. I was so unbelievably naive, right? Even had 25. I had never heard of all this, right? So I find myself.

certainly being thrust into incest, husbands beating their wives, multiple affair. Like, it's just a sure of rope in humanity. And I'm 25, 26, 27 years old, right? Then what starts happening is that we have high profile athletes, people on the arts and entertainment world, people on the geopolitical world, other guys, right?

And they all start coming. And I end up finding myself in a world of elites who have all the same problems. And I realized that the sewer just extends through the whole of society.

We're really broken. And of course, what this forces me to do is I end up reading profusely. I go to every seminar I can. I have got to figure out human behavior because this stuff is so outside anything that I grew up in or had any understanding of.

So I've been in this world for 50 years to put some perspective. I have lived in this sewer for 50 years. I have a front row seat at brokenness and broken humanity as it relates to the Christian community.

And I don't mean just on the congregational side on the ministry side as well. Now my dilemma is, and I know because people always like to know who. And here's the problem in my world.

If somebody pays me for counseling, I am legally bound to not say anything. So I can tell you situations and circuits that you're like, I can do that, but I'm not gonna name names and get into it.

But I have seen the brokenness up close and personal. Why is this an issue to me? And the issue is, and it goes back to a TED talk that was done in 2009 by a Nigerian author, Chinamonday Adamiti, or something was her name.

And her, the talk she gave was the danger of a single story. And one of the things that has been bothering me

to be quite honest with you, it's, and I've just kept my mouth shut for the last couple of years, is that there is a single story out there. And the single story is, church leaders abuse people in their congregations.

That's true. I wrote a book about it, right? I understand that. What people won't talk about is, what people in the congregation will do on the other side of this to help create those dynamics.

And in particular, I don't know if it's because of girl code or whatever they want to call it, but I have women sitting in my office who know firsthand what other women will do to get what they want and how ambitious and driven they are.

But nobody will talk about it publicly. So right now, nobody wants to really talk to me about this problem because they only want to tell a single story. That concerns me. And the reason why is to your point, if we're in a dumpster fire or we're in a sewer, how are we going to put out the fire and how are we going to clean up the sewer?

The only way to do this is to have honest conversation. I am not here to preach at anyone. I am not here to stand on a soapbox. I am here because I deal with hurting, broken people on both sides of the equation.

It's the brokenness in the church isn't always because of men in power abusing naive people. In the situation in IHOP, you have Mike taking advantage of young teenage girls or young 20 year old girls.

That's a very real story. That same situation, which I didn't write a lot about, I also watched a woman try to seduce Mike. I could tell you hundreds of stories about how people in the congregation driven by selfish ambition and greed, something going on, what they will do to manipulate and get what they want in unscrupulous ways.

People don't want to talk about that. And yet I have a counseling office filled with people that watch this happen all the time. But yet right now, you can't really say anything because it's not PC, right?

So you get in trouble. That's why this conversation we're having is explosive only because people that don't want to see the whole 360 foot view of this issue get unnerved, right? And I think part of it, again, I'm rambling here, but I think one of the problems is that women have felt for so long that they've been on the powerless position that to admit that they have any power or any influence to create problems is not something that anybody wants to talk about, right?

We want to stay in, we're victims and yes, that's true, but there's another side to this. And all things out in the open, I had this exact conversation with somebody that's relatively famous and we were talking about the complex.

of it. And the advice I was given is don't do this on your channel, John. You'll just go on your channel. I know. And that's partially true, but my channel is not not one of these apologist channels. It's looking at doctrine and all this. I'm focusing on history. The sad truth of it is this is a consequence of the history that I've been examining. So I'm not going to attack this from a ginger standpoint. It's not a male or female problem.

In my perspective, this exists because of one reason. And that is the system has been designed such that the accountability is lacking. And normal human interactions, like you're talking about, they occur. I don't care if you're in the most holy righteous sect that you think you're the closest thing to God or you're in one that you consider apostate. You still have humans in it.

And these humans have human interactions. I, one of the problems that I see, and I see it by a few of the different podcasters out there that I've listened to and websites, etc. Whenever there's an issue, such as you're describing the issue with Mike Bickle or there's hundreds of others if you look out there that have the same kind of thing. The problem is they want to make it where it's newsworthy. And how do you do this? You say, this is a story. This person go back in time and look at when this began. This was a pattern. This was a history. And they don't come out and say

it all the way some of them do. But most of them won't come out and say, but they're trying to lead you to the conclusion that this person did this whole movement for that one reason. But for me, that's problematic because what it's doing is it's distracting from the system that enabled them to do this in the first place. Think back to how Laterane began. Laterane began with a bunch of complete scoundrels. I'm not going to say they all are, but you can look through the ones I've identified. These people had a motive and an agenda that wasn't really aligned with the gospel.

But you had really, really good people who also came into this that their one intention was to bring people closer to God. And they truly believed they were doing the right thing. So you had this mixture of good and evil in the movement. Well, even among the good side, these are people who have normal human hormones, normal human interactions. Take somebody who got their hands laid upon them and they suddenly were in dude with this power that they never anticipate, never expected.

Take me as an example in business. I've mentioned this in a recent podcast, but when I was jumping through the tears of leadership, I went all the way from an entry level developer up to CIO at some firms. I made the leap way too fast. And sometimes I knew it when that happened because I was out of my element, and I kind of had to learn my role, well, there's that period of learning where you're uncertain, and then suddenly you get certainty with the experience.

But I had leaped forward in ways that I probably shouldn't have, because I didn't have the experience. After I got the experience, I did fine. So I was able to do it, but not everybody can do it, and that's on the business side.

Now take that from a religious standpoint. Like a religious leader who suddenly said to them by one of the other leaders, you are a leader of this movement. You're going to govern people. You're going to be a leader leading people to Christ.

Well, what if they're uncertain about even their own faith? What if they're uncertain about, like you mentioned, there are people that have problems in just simply their raising and their maturity that lead them down pathways where psychologically they're a mess.

I have known people that were that kind of mess in a leadership position in the church. So what happens when a person who's got psychological problems encounters somebody who's opening up to them more than they should, because they see them as a church leader, they're confessing their sins, and what if that person has a particular problem with one of those sins?

That's the point I'm driving at here, because psychologically they're going to be vulnerable to the church leader, while the church leader themselves is also a vulnerable person, and then that connection is made. Who's fault is this?

Who is held accountable for this? Number one, the parent of the person who might be opening up should take a step back and say, really is that, is this the person I want my child around?

But then you also have leadership that is enabling this, did they get the proper training? Are they psychologically fit for the ministry? So many questions that I have, and none of them in this type of movement can really be answered.

One thing for me that was kind of eye-opening, and again, it's my naivete was that when I got in to the NFL NBA, eventually baseball, and I saw what these guys had to deal with in terms of the onslaught of female attention.

Women who saw wealth, saw stature, whatever, and went for it, right? And what they would do to get that, right? Then I'm in the music world, and I might, I see it again, I'm like, oh my gosh, what people will do to get close to power is wild, like, it's really wild.

I mean, everything from subtle to aggressive, right? I've seen the whole spectrum of this. What's crazy, and this is sad in a way to me, there's no difference. I'm telling you, I have a front row seat, there is no difference between what happens out there in these other sectors, athletics, arts and entertainment, geopolitical and business that doesn't happen in the church.

It's the same exact thing, and I can say that now after 50 years of working in all these different things, I've seen the same dynamics, why, to your point, because we're all broken. The reality of it is, is that the Christian community is filled with broken and dysfunctional people who are only saved because of the mercy and grace of God.

It has nothing to do with how great we are, right? So again, to your point, one of the things I point out in my book is that when Harvard Business School is analyzing Fortune 500 companies, CEOs, and people in high profile positions they discover something.

A huge percentage of these people are psychopath narcissists, or sociopath narcissists. And this was just a shock, right? It's like, wait a minute, from a psychology point of view, this is a dysfunction, like this is a problem.

Well, how is this problem suddenly so prevalent in a certain type of role, right? Well, guess what? That same thing carries over to mega church pastors. And I know, because I have been in these circles.

In the same sociopathic narcissism that you see in guys leading big organizations, you see in the church role. It's not any different. You can put words on it, right? You can put religious terminology on it.

You can create an environment around it, but I'm going to say something at all, and people. You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig. It's an old, you know, what do you call it, idiom or whatever.

But that's, it's underneath it when you strip away the verbiage and the culture underneath. It's the same thing to me. It's just, it's not any different. So I think sometimes because of the fact we want it to be different, we know it's supposed to be different, right?

We in our brains kind of want to live like it, that's what it is. But it really is. It's not really like that. It's kind of like there's a fantasy in our minds. Now, we're at a point right now at a crossroads here where there's a lot of decisions got to be made in terms of why this is happening.

why are we seeing this? Well, one of the things that is causing this dynamic is why do we have mega churches? I mean, this sounds funny to think this through, but the very concept of an institutional mega church means you got to have a dynamic personality, right? You can have smart guys, right? Well, they go to theology school and they're boring as heck, right? They might be really smart with theology, but nobody really wants to listen to them unless you're a seminary student and then you're forced to. We don't want to listen to that. We want to listen to somebody that's

dynamic. Well, guess what? With that dynamic personality and I come some serious issues behind the scenes, to your point, right? One of the things I realized is that ministry for certain

broken human beings is like a mothalite. It is like this is low hanging fruit for me to get a position of power and authority and influence and be somebody because all I got to do is talk.

And the business rule got to produce, right? I have to have a bottom line. On the football field, I got to make plays, right? In music, I'd better produce songs, right? So in the ministry, I guess you got to have good sermons, but I'm just saying it's a great place. It's sort of like radio personalities, right? If you're really good at talking, you know, you get an audience, right?

But it's shallow. It's super shallow. But what I get concerned about it is then that type of personality attracts, if you're male, a certain kind of female because there's, and again, close your ears if you don't want to hear this, I'm just going to go there because it's my world.

But that kind of guy is an afrodigiac for a lot of women. They get very stirred up about it. And I have watched this and in the same way that the guys may have an addiction to this. There are females that are addicted to that and it becomes a giant crash show. And I see it all the time.

It's sort of like, you know, some sort of a game where everything's crashing into each other. That's my front row seat of the church role. A lot of dysfunction and brokenness, like crashing into each other. And the reason I want to have this conversation is because we don't talk about it.

Therefore, it just continues. to be covered. You know what I mean? It's like we don't want to talk about it. It's always those guys fall, right? It's always the guy in the pulpit. Well, yeah, they bear probably most of the responsibility. But there's a whole lot of stuff happening on the congregational level towards that. That's also creating these scandals. And again, I've seen it up close and personal.

I have seen the hunt. I have watched it. I have watched situations because of my six sense about things. I have sat back and watched whole scenarios that I knew were going to happen and just watch this whole thing take place. And I knew that these two things come together over here is going to be a problem, right? And again, once you understand the nature of something, it's easy to begin to kind of extrapolate out where this is going. And unfortunately, it just takes age to get there.

You know, you get older and wiser and you see the some of this stuff. So my whole point here is is that we just need to be careful here and telling a single story. There's not a single story.

Yes, some of these guys were predators. Some of these guys were prey. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation? You can learn this and more on William Brannum Historical Research's website, William-Brannum.org. On the book's page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins, Charles Paisley, Steven Montgomery, John McKinnon and others, with links to the paper, audio and digital versions of each book. 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. I'm not giving an out for people who did something horrific. You look at each one of these people, yes, they did something horrific, yes, they should be held accountable, yes, they were in the wrong.

But think of it like this. So I've done a lot of things in my life. I've done everything from auto mechanics to construction to IT. I don't know if you've ever done this, you probably have Bob, but in construction, there is a concept when you're building something that needs to be erected that could cause damage, you create restraints. And I have seen cases where you're leaning something really, really heavy up like this and you create multiple constraints so that are restraints, so that when it begins to fall, if one restraints breaks, the next one.

and holds it. And if that breaks the next one, the next one, the next one, I have been in situations where I've watched it go, snap, snap, snap, snap, and the whole thing comes tumbling down.

Well, what they're trying to do in this type of church environment, they're trying to erect something that is all powerful, but with only one single restraint at the top. When that one snaps, the whole thing comes tumbling down.

That's a problem for me. And this is the same movement that is built on these restorationist themes that says, the mainstream church is apostate and all of their rules of governance and man's laws that they have created, we reject them.

So we're going to build this massive tower of power and we're going to put one restraint at the top and ignore everything else. Well, everyone who allows this is like me trying to erect something without the proper restraints.

If one breaks, think of the accountability layers that you should have in place to go from the point of somebody's being elected to be pastor to, oh my gosh, look what they're doing to our children.

Every single check and balance that should be in place along the way, every step of accountability is missing. And for me, that is a historic problem. That's not even a... I think you're right.

It's not a Michael problem. It's not any of these other guys that have been in power. If you don't put those restraints in place, you share the responsibility. That's the point I wanted to make.

Well, it's something, again, I'm speaking from my heart and as things are sort of popping up at my soul, but I've noticed that proximity is a problem. And what I mean by that is I can't tell you how many guys in the ministry have edifers with their secretary.

You'd think by now we'd have figured this out right, it's not always, but so many times it's either the church secretary or the choir leader. And I've seen them both sides of this, depending on what's going on.

Why is that, right? Because they're working together. You know how much, what we call it, out of bound sexuality happens in the workplace because of proximity? I'm just saying there's just a dynamic that happens, right?

And it happens outside the church world. It happens inside the church world. And you see this all the time, the traveling secretary, right? She's in the mic situation, right? Oh, let's go to Europe, right?

Let's do these trips, right? Well, the wife's at home, taking care of the kids, guess what happens, right? This happens over and over again. Probably the group that I think, and again, there may be stories that I'm not aware of.

But the group that I noticed that seemed to handle the best was the Billy Graham Association. I mean, it was a different generation, right? It was the generation above us, but they had, to your point, very strict boundaries about what was allowed or whatever.

But when they... a traveled, it was just the guys, right? It was Cliff Barrows and Billy and, you know, and the team, right? They, you know, it, you know, probably back in, you know, in the modern world, they'd be going, they're misogynists, right?

They don't let women in. But they, I think they understood that there's problems, right? It's like just things happen. And so they were protecting their integrity, right? Because again, everybody, and so there's, you know, we talk about predators and prey, right?

The two-piece. The reason I bring in a third-piece, which is proximity, is because it's not always predator and prey. Sometimes it's just proximity, right? Two people having, you know, difficult situations in their marriages or their own brokenness, and you put these two things together and boom, it happens.

So not, again, this is what I'm saying. There's not a single story here. There's a lot of things that are behind these scandals. And I feel like, right now, there's a single narrative about there that, you know, church leaders are bad, therefore it's all their fault and everything that's going on right now, let's all dump it on them, right?

And I'm like, okay, I can see why I understand why. I just, I had three constantly meetings this week and everybody's angry at the leaders, right? And it's not just angry, they are evil.

Like, I mean, I am, you know, they are evil. And I get why you feel it that way. I understand when you've been disillusioned, when you've been betrayed, when you've been stabbed in the back, but your world is crashing down, but it's emotive, right?

These are emotions. They're not necessarily the full story here. And that's where I kind of hope today we can kind of expand our thinking. I would, you know, I don't know if you're out there, but if there's a female out there that's willing to have this conversation who's had experiences, you know, dealing from the female side of this, it would be interesting to have that conversation on here because it's right now, it's just you guys doing this.

But I know because I've had many conversations with many of you women in my counseling office and there's whole things out there that you don't talk about. It's like you'll talk about it with your girlfriends, you know, but you don't, it's, and I understand why, right?

There's a sense of we're betraying, you know, girl called we're betraying the other women, but man, you know, you know these stories. You watch them hunt your husband down. You watch them, you know, you saw what was going on.

And so that's all I really, I think if you guys can hear my heart and then it's like, hey, can we just have an honest conversation? say, we are really a broken community of dysfunctional people that got a lot of problems and it's not just one group of people. I think we all have issues that we need to deal with. And if we can be honest about it, I think the non-Christian community would actually have more respect because they're having honest conversations in graphic manner right now. One thing that's kind of freaking me out to be quite honest with you is this whole podcast world. I've been listening to some of

these podcasts that are out there and the graphicness of these conversations are freaking me out a little bit, right? Because again, you and I were caught between two generations. My grandparents, you never brought this up there. I mean, money section religions were three things that did never get discussed in public, right? That was, if you're German verboten, right? It was like, in my German family, I was like, verboten, you do not talk about those three things in any public setting, right?

Then our generation came along and we kind of loosened up a little bit. But man, the kids now, it's just all like out there. I mean, I'm like driving in my car getting embarrassed. You know, it's like, they're my brain starts going, is this too much? What's the balance here? Because what's the word TMI? I don't know if I want to know this, right? So we're kind of having one of those conversations right now, except for the thing that I'm doing is I'm not, I've shared two stories, I could share a thousand more stories. We're staying away from the graphic,

our rated actual stories of this. But I think everybody that's been around a little bit can read between the lines. We don't need to go into all the details. You all seen it. You've all witnessed it. You've all experienced it in your own life. So I don't think we need to go into the details, but we got a problem. Houston. So let's talk just a moment about cultural shell shock, because this actually is part of history. And believe it or not, it ties what you just said on the tangent to the rest of the overall story. Okay. Just to remind everybody who's unfamiliar with me,

I grew up in a sect that was literally stuck in the 1950s. We dress like the 50s. We listen to sermons that were recorded in the 50s. We listen to preachers that were preaching about those sermons as though they were today's fresh mana. And we were stuck in the 50s. Literally, when you walked in the building of the Brannem Tabernacle on right there on the bulletin board was a photograph of the Beatles and says, we do not make our allow our men to cut our hairs like this literally stuck in the 1950s. That's the word that I grew up in. I love

this world. I started attending mainstream churches and I had shell shock. I really, really did. I'm in Sunday school. I just to give you a taste of my shell shock. I'm in Sunday school and which was the most amazing thing ever because we always had Sunday school talking about Doomsday and weird things but they're walking us through the historical context of the Bible and suddenly the lady next to me, she starts talking with excitement about what she had read in the Bible the last night, how it applied to this, that and the other and I'm thinking

your women are supposed to keep silent in the churches because that was the mentality of the 15th, right? Now that's the church. Let's for a moment separate the context. Within what you're describing with Billy Graham and the men's meetings, the men's movements, it was a man's world in the 1950s.

That's why part of the shell shock existed for me. In the 50s you go to the workplace and it was male dominated. It was male lead and there was this glass ceiling for the females and that was wrong. I'm not going to say that it was right. It was wrong. But what happened over time is they started to make women more equal. Women started getting rights and there's a huge problem that exists when you do this. You have the personality thing that we talked about earlier. Men are attracted to women. Women are attracted to men. What do you do with this? Well, it had to adapt. So eventually

you had an HR department. We're going to govern how you interact and if something goes out of line, we have, if you go back to my tower of constructing something huge, we're going to put all of these checks and balances in place. So if one rule breaks, the next one will catch it and we're going to basically provide accountability. That's your HR department. Take the flip side of this.

Laterane emerge. Started to claim that all the religions are apostate. We don't like the rules. We don't like their man-made governance. We especially don't like the fact that there's a committee over groups and regions of people. We don't like their HR department. That's essentially what's being said here. So all of these groups began to develop and in Pentecostalism, it was kind of weird because Pentecostalism itself was not progressing in the same rate of speed as the traditional church because of all of this. But then along comes John Wimber, C. Peter Wagner. We're going to bring this to an explosive thing. We're going to bring church mega churches. We're going to

cause the church growth movement. So suddenly all of these people who were in maybe not 50s, but a lot slower mindset, were now suddenly thrown into this big realm of, oh my gosh, we've got men, we've got women, we've got all of these things. And they didn't yet have the time nor experience to put all of the things in place that the traditional church Church had.

So where the traditional church had all of these straps that are holding the leaning tower of whatever you're building, suddenly the Pentecostal Charismatic Church, all we have is this leadership at the top and they really don't have any accountability.

So culturally they had culture shock and they did not know how to handle it. I remember having a conversation with Paul Cain about this and he's the word man of God model. That's the Pentecostal world, the man of God model, right?

There's a single person who has the anointing, has the calling, right? And they were given unprecedented power and authority over everyone else. And to your point, that just opened Pandora's box because it became the, you know, it's kind of like the fox in the henhouse, right?

It's like suddenly you've got a guy who's got this dynamic personality who underneath has got his own mailness and his own brokenness and his own insecurities and whatever, who's got no one around him that can hold him accountable.

And so therefore when temptation or these opportunities happen, they're all over it. And we know based on Delani Frisbees and the Augustina Colas and all these stories, the amount of sexual abuse that went on wasn't just strictly with women.

It was meant to, right? There was that dynamic. And so I think you're right. I know that the more established denominations have an accountability structure. I mean, this happened in England with a soul survivor in that whole world.

I mean, it went through the Anglican church, right? But that was after it happened, right? It was after, while it was going on, there wasn't, right? Any, any checks in Balesons, I, I had this conversation with somebody this last week about my Bickel situation because I noticed, um, kind of mid, it kind of how do you call it?

The penny drop, I guess is the phrase I'm thinking about the mid 2000s when I realized that every time that my God in trouble, he got a word from God he needed to leave and go start something new in it in a different part of the city or in another city.

And every time a group of people tried to hold him accountable, he constantly came up with a new word from God or a new calling to go do something, whatever, like he resisted. And the reason was is that he had gotten, and this is what was so sad is the prophetic guys.

This is interesting, again, this is my observation, so this is my perspective. The prophetic guys. is thinking that they were encouraging Mike, to press into what God had called him to, didn't realize they were feeding the ego of a sociopathic narcissist, who then believed he was at a different strata at a different level than everyone else.

So therefore, no one can hold him accountable because no one was his equal. You see the trap here? So I don't think they realized what they were doing, right? They thought they were encouraging Mike.

What they were doing was feeding his brokenness and creating a monster in a way, right? Cause they were feeding this side of him that most people didn't see. And it just got worse and worse and worse.

To finally, I know, I mean, you know, it's explaining to someone this week again that the whole reason I came to be was because the leadership at his previous church at Metro Christian Fellowship was trying to hold him accountable.

And suddenly boom, no, I gotta go start my own thing. So that's a telltale side. When you see that suddenly, he's gotta leave, gotta go do it, right? That's a telltale side. Somebody does not want to be held accountable.

So, you know, how that looks like for the future? I don't know, I gotta be honest with our audience in that I blame my cards on the table. I have a real problem with institutional Christianity.

I just, I'm not saying it hasn't been helpful, but it's the institutional side of it has created so many problems. And one of the things you have with institutional driven Christianity is you need money, right?

To keep the machine going. And then that creates all kinds of compromises and structures and hierarchies and all these things that end up feeding into the worst of us, right? They feed into our brokenness.

And, you know, where the early church model where it was there, meaning at homes and it was, you know, it was smaller groups of people, right? That were relating and caring for one another.

You didn't have all this. And so this is, I don't know where I stand. I just, I'm just being honest here. I just, I look at it and I can see, you know, you know, some benefits on the one side, but I also see some huge vulnerabilities, right?

And so when I hear everybody cheering on the new mega church in town and look how many people were going to church, I'm not real excited about that. That doesn't really fault my boat because in my brain, I'm going, yeah, but now you've unleashed a whole bunch of vulnerabilities because of the brokenness in people, not only on the ministry side, but on the congregational side.

It's like you've opened those mega churches, your opening Pandora's box. So in full transparency, if you read through the comments, people will say, John is so heavily against the charismatic church that he will only defend the mainstream or the say things like John is, John is against the gifts.

John has actually never said what he is against. I am against things that cause people to become victims. If you want to, if you want it all out in the open, that's what it is.

Yeah. I'm not in any way defending reform theology, for example. That's another one of the comments, John, John is a reform theology guy. I don't know that I am, but that's what they say.

It's because of this. I like to go to the specific doctrines that put people at risk and say that here's why they're at risk. I like to go to the specific things that are missing from Pentecostal Charismatic Movement that mainstream church does have and it is kind of working, but it's not that I'm saying you need to leave this and go to a mainstream church.

The point is there are ways to fix this mess that you have created. Here's a better way. One of the things is this, which actually brings us in full circle back to the very beginning.

I know it seems like Bob is with this direction and I've gone the other, but to bring it back to a close, it's this. There are people who, because of the way the movement has been structured, get a hero complex and worse for there to be a hero, there have to be people who regard them as such.

It takes two. The way that the movement has been set up, these people can quickly rise up into leadership roles who never should have been there in the first place. Look at some of the leaders that have recently fallen.

Some of these people, all they had to do was get on stage and some mega church and say, this is our new apostle. Well, who's the one who checked those apostles credentials? And I know everybody who heard me say that are thinking, okay, these leaders, these apostles who are electing other apostles, they're in the wrong, but what about every single person of the thousands of people that's in the congregation?

Which one of those stood up and said, okay, show me his credentials. Show me where he's fit to be an apostle. And number one thing that's missing of an apostle, show me where they're doing the role of an actual apostle and show where they meet the biblical qualifications.

To your point, this has always been one of my problems with that whole apostolic thing. What does Paul tell us in Corinthians about his experience as being an apostle? How many times does he don't?

How many times does he beat? How many times was he rejected, right? In other words, there's this whole side of this story that somehow has gotten so sanitized in our modern world, but again, this is the root of institutionalism, right?

In other words, we've got these big institutions and we look at it like the structure, but if you go back to the original apostoling, these guys die, they all got martyred. They all got killed.

They were in the situations where, and I talk about this and I'll actually, I've got some more books I'll have to come out with and where I kind of talk about some of this stuff.

But every time these guys preach the gospel, you either have the political community, you have the business community or you have the religious community all attacking them. And the reason I bring this up is because I went through the book of Acts and asked myself a question, whenever the Holy Spirit moves and their signs and wonders, what's the result?

We go, oh, 5,000, where? They get thrown in prison, they get beaten up, right? They get rejected, they get run out of town. Like, where's that part of the story, right? So when I see a guy that invading a secular culture,

and putting his life on the line, that's where I might go. Now that's an apostle, right? But somebody that's making $250,000 a year sitting in a cushy office, going to big conferences where lots of people are cheering them on, that's a star.

It's not an apostle. I'm sorry, this is just me being blunt here. I'm looking for the guys who are laying their lives down that that would be my first credential of an apostle. Well, and not to go too deep in theology, I'm not going to preach to you, but if you go to, what is the book of Acts?

It says, when Judas was being replaced, for you to be an apostle, you had to witness the resurrection. Which one of these apostles today have witnessed the resurrection? You can't really go down that path.

But the point I'm trying to make is this, apostle becomes a hero status in this type of movement. If you're in the new apostolic reformation, that's the hero. In the movement I escaped, the prophet was the hero status.

But each one of these groups that have developed, they have a hero status and the hero gets up there without checks and balances and they don't have the restraints. But there are people, to your point at the very beginning of this, there are people who are just so wired to seek after a connection with the hero.

They will do anything to make that connection. Male or female, this is not a gender problem. All sectors, that's just a church thing, right? It's all sectors in life, right? Exactly. But to the point you made at the beginning, which everybody's gonna say John's politically incorrect in saying this, I'm gonna say it.

Whenever somebody has that attraction to a hero, and they're of the opposite sex, male or female, I'm not gonna put a gender qualification. You can be a man who's attracted to a female hero.

When you have that attraction, and then you're put in close proximity with the people, and you don't have all of those restraints, like I mentioned, that keeps you from doing something you should not, and both sides are vulnerable.

There's all of these things that is the perfect storm. When you have all of those things happening, suddenly there's a fall, and the leader is fallen. He's fallen with a person who's a vulnerable or a male or female who is vulnerable.

The problem is that there are all of these things that when they all come together, when the stars and planets align, you suddenly have a leader who's fallen, but who's the one who checked all of those restraints to make sure that they never got to that position in the first place?

I try to address this in my book. One of the dynamics that creates this problem is the insecurity and people in the congregation or in anything else, in other words, when you need a hero, it's because you're missing something inside you.

In other words, you're looking for someone to give you something that you don't have. I'm sorry, but I've been doing this for a long time. So I've seen it, again, across all these sectors, just because we're insecure people.

I mean, it's part of the brokenness of humanity. So we're looking for these leaders to give us something, oops, sorry, that we don't have. In the case in my book, I talked about Mike's transaction was, I'm special, therefore if you associate with me, you can be special too.

So he was selling significance. That was the trade-off, right? Other people that's selling success, right? You know, join us. I'm successful, you can be successful, right? In other words, you're not successful on your own.

You're not special on your own. You're not any of these things on your own. You're a big vacuum inside, therefore, come hang with me and I'll fill that need in your soul. So this is where I was trying to go with this whole thing, is we are creating our own brokenness in the congregation is creating the environment for a lot of this, where we then end up falling all over ourselves and idolizing these heroes to your point, right?

We went heroes to fill something that we don't have. If we were all actually on our own journey with God, if we all went on our own journey with God and we were getting our needs met from Him and we were at a...

place in our lives, we were felt, you know, I know who I am. I know God. I have a relationship with them. Great. You don't need somebody then to keep feeding your insecurities, right?

So that's my whole point here is that we're, we in the congregation have to take some responsibility for our own spiritual health and quit creating these heroes, right? Because we're feeding broken men and women, right? We're feeding their brokenness by us needing them, right? And or what we, we end up doing is there's, there's that side. So we're feeding from them, right? It's almost like we're leeches, right? We're, we're emotional or spiritual leeches. We're trying to, or what happens is then you get into the other side of this, what I've seen is that I want something. So therefore, I'm going to seduce whether

again, male, I'm not making this a male or female thing, but I'm going to seduce or manipulate my way to power because I want that power. So some of it is in, is filling a need for significance. Some of it is just greed, selfish ambition, greed. I want, I want status and stuff, right? And order to get status and stuff, I need to position myself. And that's where it all gets so weird. And we get into these situations where you have the emperor with no close scenario where everybody's telling the leader, how wonderful they are, even

though we all know, you know, and buck naked, right? It's like, this is all these little dynamics that you see. Well, when you see that, it's because somebody wants something. And we've all seen it, right? You get to the point where you get to be our age and it's kind of like, I'm sorry to say this, but I'll be sitting in meetings and I'm watching it. I just started to go, oh, gag me. It's so gross. You know what I mean? It's just, you know, and everybody else is just kind of sitting there. And I don't know if they're

oblivious to it or what, but I'm just sitting there going, oh, this is so gross. So there's a part of me that I go, this is gross. There's another part that makes me mad because I'm going, oh, my God, this is a wolf like, or this is a wolf. So this person is like, they, you know, because I've seen it all, like I have seen whatever, or then there's the other person who's just naive. And it's like, just a little less than what I'm like, come on, guys.

Well, in full transparency, I would love to have status and stuff. But, thankful to you and podcasts like this that are so controversial that you actually work as a constraint to keep me from getting my status and stuff. Hopefully our controversial podcast has helped somebody. I hope so. And again, this is just the beginning of a topic that's got layers to it. And so, forgive us if we didn't say things properly or we weren't...

Balanced or whatever because this is just a conversation to flush something out that I hope we can have more conversations and Honestly, I would really love some of you women because I have talked to some of you and I think you have some stories to tell that I think the audience would very much value so Dr. John Absolutely and this is Bob and John completely uncut

This is that raw raw Untamed and unbalanced. Thank you so much for joining us totally

Well if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information you can check us out on the web You can find us at William-Brandom.org from 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

You can read weaponized religion from Christian identity to the NAR available in Amazon Kindle and Audible