Who will lead an apostolic counter-reformation?

Leaving the Message is an excellent, and exceptionally prolific, YouTube Channel run by a survivor of William Branham’s Message cult, John Collins. You may or may not have heard of Branham, but you ought to have done, because his teaching underpins much of what is wrong in Evangelical Christianity today. To attempt a pithy summary of the channel’s aims, it is to prove the direct personal and ideological connections between the heretical Latter Rain Movement of the years after World War II, and the so-called New Apostolic Reformation of Bethel Redding, IHOPKC and so on that fascinates so many Evangelicals in Britain and elsewhere, and has virtually cornered the lucrative market in worship music.

What begins to dawn on one if one spends any time listening to the well-documented content of Leaving the Message is that pretty much the entire Charismatic Movement originated in, and is dependent on, Latter Rain teaching via William Branham, a fraudulent miracle worker and false prophet, to name only the better sides of his character. Branham is, however, a hero to Bethel leaders and other Charismatics still. But Latter Rain is not, as many think, a wacky fringe of the Charismatic Movement, but the whole movement’s wellspring. That is a serious problem, for churches stand or fall on their foundations. Or to use the divine ecclesiology of Revelation, lampstands are removed by Christ for their unrepented errors.

To some extent, to draw a historical line at Branham, or even at the Latter Rain movement from which he came, is misleading, since one can trace all the same doctrinal errors, moral failures and charlatanry back to the beginning of Pentecostalism, and even into the nineteenth century Revivalist Movement in America. To simplify (and probably not unjustly), the overriding doctrinal error, whatever the myriad variations, is to elevate miraculous signs over the pure word of the gospel (an attitude summarised by John Collins in the Lord’s words in Matthew 12:39, “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah”). And the overriding leadership error is the desire for power.

Now, there always has been and always will be false teaching somewhere or other. The big problem with this one is that, as I have already said, the influence of what I shall abbreviate as “Latter Rain” has permeated most of mainstream Evangelicalism, because the Charismatic Movement born from it has permeated most of mainstream Evangelicalism. If there had not been the Latter Rain Movement, it is doubtful that Charismatic teaching would exist in our churches.

Let me try, in all too few words, to demonstrate the depth of this influence through my own exposure to it since (and I can be quite precise) summer 1971. It was then that I got involved, through music, with the nascent Jesus People movement. Some local charismatic Baptists linked in to Musical Gospel Outreach let me play at a free festival involving pioneers like Graham Kendrick, Ishmael and Andy, and Regeneration. It was there, incidentally, that I heard my first “prophetic words,” and they all proved false, which led to my hearing my first of many excuses for unfulfilled spiritual expectations. At the time I thought this was an aberration – fifty four years on I know it as a norm.

Also invited to that event were the Children of God, who had us all singing “You’ve got to be a baby to go to heaven.” Only years later did it emerge that CoG was a heretical mind-control cult led by a sexual pervert, David “Moses” Berg, who had broken away from William Branham’s Message Cult (as similarly had Jim Jones, of “Drink the Koolaid” notoriety – this teaching can kill).

But the reason the CoG were invited to an Evangelical festival is less mysterious when it is realised that it was Latter Rain people who first recruited their members from the drug-crazed hippies of California to create the phenomenon of “Jesus Freaks.” This explains why the Jesus People movement had a Charismatic theology, retained when it crossed the Atlantic into the Musical Gospel Outreach‘s underground magazine, Buzz. Over the next few years I was closely involved as this contemporary expression of Christianity swept up my generation of boomer believers, through events like the Festival of Light in London and Greenbelt Festival. Regarding the latter, I knew most of the first year’s performers personally, and might have blagged a spot myself had I not been involved in a Street Theatre group that went on to become Riding Lights (based at David Watson’s Charismatic Anglican Michael le Belfry church in York).

Very popular as a speaker in those days was Derek Prince, whom my wife, as a very new convert, heard in Cambridge and immediately disliked for his preaching of the Prosperity Gospel still current at Bethel or Hillsong. Prince was always big on deliverance ministry and healing, having been an associate of William Branham. Novel doctrine was his thing too, and I remember him introducing a talk on ancestral demons with “If you haven’t heard this teaching from me, you won’t have heard it from anybody.” This should have been a red flag to his many fans, but wasn’t, and isn’t.

But in the 1980s Prince was leading, with several other Latter Rain people, the Shepherding Movement, which in the following decade or so carried the authoritarian cult leadership of Branham into the mainstream, before spectacularly blowing apart in a welter of spiritual and other abuse situations. The leaders mostly then joined, and influenced, the nascent Vineyard network, which had earlier split off from a Branhamite sect and was now led by one John Wimber, still focused on signs and wonders as the mark of a true church.

Let me here interject the Full Gospel Businessmen International, to whose speakers and literature I was also exposed in the 1980s. Back then they were bigging up a preacher and miracle worker called Kenneth Copeland. But I only found out from Leaving the Message that their origins are completely intertwined with William Branham, whose cult they financed after he was thrown out of the Assemblies of God denomination in 1953. What a tangled web we weave…

In the late 1980s I became aware of the ministry of Dr Clifford Hill, and subsequently (which is another story) was on the editorial board of his magazine, Prophecy Today, for 13 years. This gave me something of an insider’s view of the latest Big New Thing of the eighties, The Kansas City Prophets. Cliff was highly dubious of their genuine status as prophets, and was vindicated in that belief by the later scandals surrounding Bob Jones, Mike Bickle and their leader Paul Cain. I won’t go into the sexual, financial and even political scandals here (was Cain really a CIA agent?), but will note that Paul Cain had long been not only a follower, but a protege, of William Branham, even standing in for Branham on occasions.

During the 1980s, the KC Prophets, like the Shepherding leaders before them, joined the Vineyard Movement, and were enthusiastically endorsed by John Wimber, who deemed Cain the world’s greatest living prophet. Wimber is now seen as a moderate and a good man, and I can’t disagree with that, having heard him speak at Spring Harvest once near the end of his life, his talk being followed by much heavily orchestrated falling over not hitherto seen at the conference. But as Leaving the Message points out, having come out of Latter Rain himself, he can’t have been unaware of the serious problems with the extreme teaching that those like Paul Cain preached to Vineyard congregations, whilst also preaching them in Message Cult churches.

Around 1990 the aberrant teaching of the Shepherding people and the Kansas City Prophets within the Vineyard spilled over into the excesses of the Toronto Blessing. Many of us were appalled, but actually none of the bizarre and even demonic phenomena were new, being much like those seen in early Pentecostalism or, earlier, among the Shakers. But now they were witnessed by Christians across the West, who through Wimber’s Books like Power Evangelism and Power Healing had come to see “signs and wonders” as something their own churches might attain to (but somehow never actually saw). Clifford Hill kept me up to speed on the problems behind Toronto – but meanwhile, even people from my own church trekked across to the Airport Vineyard to “catch the blessing.” Cliff was criticised for being “negative,” or even for blaspheming the Spirit – I read some of the correspondence from magazine readers. Many Christians are happier to ignore the Bible than to question their gurus, or their emotions.

John Wimber also realised the excesses were not from God, and eventually kicked the Kansas City Prophets and their followers out of Vineyard, even apparently retracting much of his emphasis on signs and wonders, and instead stressing the preached word, in a series of pastoral letters towards the end of his life.

But meanwhile the Toronto Blessing he came to condemn had been carried across the Atlantic by John Mumford, who had set up the Vineyard in Britain after being introduced to Wimber by David Watson, and was now pastoring in London. He took the phenomenon to Holy Trinity Brompton (my old church when it was Evangelical in the 1970s), which together with the 1990 preaching of the Kansas City Prophets there under John Wimber, led to the re-writing of Charles Marnham’s Alpha Course to include a whole weekend on the direct experience of the Holy Spirit (rather than a weekend on understanding the Bible).

Incidentally it was in response to Clifford Hill’s critique of the Kansas City Prophets in Prophecy Today that Sandy Millar of HTB wrote:

We believe they are true servants of God, men of sound character, humility and evident integrity…We have no doubt about the validity of their ministry… and encourage as many as possible to attend the conferences … at which they will be ministering.

The letter was also signed by Gerald Coates, Graham Cray, Roger Forster, Lynn Green, David McInnes, John Mumford, David Pytches, Brian Skinner, Teddy Saunders, Barry Kissel, Terry Virgo, Ann Watson (widow of David Watson), and Rick Williams.

Time has proven that they were all dead wrong, and Clifford Hill was right, but nobody ever repented their false discernment of false prophets, and Evangelical churches across the world still use the Alpha Course, whose doctrine of the Spirit came from the experience of the Toronto Blessing, through the Kansas City Prophets, from William Branham. Inevitably Paul Cain’s prophecy of an imminent great revival in Britain came to nothing, as had Wimber’s prophecy that David Watson would be healed of cancer. The real news would be of a Charismatic prophecy coming true. As Cliff wrote in 2018:

David Watson, with whom [Wimber] had become firm friends, had died of cancer despite Wimber’s confidence that he would be healed. Up to that time he had been saying that they were seeing a considerable proportion of healings amongst those prayed for, including the healing of cancer. He has since confessed that that was not true and they actually saw very few healings.

I don’t think the cause of the problem of dashed expectations was John Wimber – it was rather the underlying theology of which he was the supreme exemplar, a theology which appears to include refusal to accept the teaching has any shortcomings. Although the prophesied revival failed, Wimber’s movement is regarded by historians as “the Third Wave of Pentecostalism.” In other words, it is the source of the whole Charismatic thing today – the theology of spiritual gifts, the theology of worship, the emphasis on experience, prayer-walks, breakthroughs, passion… all of it comes ultimately from William Branham and the Latter Rain Cult, not from the Bible. And if it ain’t in the Bible, it ain’t biblical.

To finish my survey, it was those very false prophets evicted from the Vineyard Movement who went on to lead the various Son-of-Toronto movements dubbed by Peter C. Wagner as the New Apostolic Reformation. In this, all the essential ingredients of Branhamism and the Latter Rain Movement are present in spades – including reverence for Branham and the Latter Rain Movement. These ingredients include false miracles, false prophecy, financial, spiritual and often sexual abuse, aberrant doctrine of many kinds, prosperity teaching, and, over all, the marketing of an emotional experience over the saving truths of the Bible, which is never rightly divided, and often sidelined amid accusations of “intellectualism” or “putting God in a box.” Many British Evangelicals seem to love it.

A horrible and shocking thing has happened in the land. The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule by their own authority. My people love it so, but what will you do in the end? (Jeremiah 5:31)

But perhaps one reason for their enthusiasm is that part of the ethos of this cultic network is to cover up its own history. So because Christians have become too lazy to look into it, or even to remember the very public lessons of the Shepherding Movement, John Wimber’s retractions, and a flood of sex and money scandals too long to relate, many of those in our churches feel no sense of disquiet at singing songs from the NAR cult HQs of Bethel or IHOPKC, nor ask themselves whether the lack of true miracles, healings, prophecies or spiritual growth in their churches may be because the whole root of Charismatic teaching is a bad tree. Therefore, if Jesus was telling the truth in Matthew 7:18, the fruit cannot be good. I was always a “cautious Charismatic,” but even so it has proved hard for me to accept just how much of what I believed – and to my shame taught – was built on the sand of a heretical cult, the Latter Rain Movement.

There is a close parallel here with Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. The first battle he had to fight was that of his own mind – that nearly everything he had believed about God as essential to salvation had been wrong from the start, and that he had to begin again. Worse still, he had to think the unthinkable – that the whole Catholic Church across Europe had also been captured by an entirely false gospel that had stood in opposition to the word of God in Scripture, for centuries. Many readers here will have experienced the mental conflict of having to swim not only against the tide of one’s own prior assumptions on COVID, or climate, or rape-gangs, or whatever other lies they have believed, but also against the tsunami of peer-pressure. Only it’s not just that – it’s the enormity of trying to fathom that the whole culture one has grown up in has been captured by lies. Luther was habitually reminded that he was mad in regarding himself as the only one in step, and “tearing the seamless robe of Christ,” by rejecting Roman doctrines as unbiblical.

It seems to me that to cast doubt on Charismatic teaching in many Evangelical churches now – or even to challenge the cultic provenance of popular worship songs – is much like Luther standing up in church and calling the corrupt Pope the antichrist. But if he had not done so, who knows whether biblical Christianity would been recovered even now? You and I might still be purchasing indulgences in the hope of a few years off purgatory. Partial remedies would have achieved nothing (as the Counter-Reformation showed by leaving fundamental errors in place in Catholicism). Root and branch reformation was the only solution, and it was painful.

The New Apostolic Reformation never was a reformation, of course, but simply a reversion to the worst extremes of a Pentecostal cult, even though it has seats at the table in the White House. It is always just the same old combination of stage magic, narcissistic charlatans and spiritual deception that has fooled people for a century or more, and was probably what Simon Magus relied on, too. But it has infiltrated the Evangelical churches so successfully that only a thorough counter-reformation (or counter-renewal, maybe?) of those churches will be sufficient for survival through these dangerous times.

The first difficulty, as in the Protestant Reformation, is to overcome the unthinkability that so much of what we have believed for half a century – and maybe what brought us to faith in the first place – is a house of cards. Once that black pill has been swallowed the antidote is easy – bin the false prophets, weed out their teachings, and go back to studying the apostolic Scriptures in Spirit and in truth. For the gospel is actually very simple.

Meanwhile, prepare to be excommunicated…