00:00:00Transcription by CastingWords
00:00:30Hello, and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast.
00:00:37I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at william-branham.org,
00:00:43and with me I have my co-host, researcher, minister, and friend, Charles Paisley,
00:00:48the founder of christiangospelchurch.org, and the author of Come Out of Her, My People.
00:00:54Charles, I'm excited for today. I was excited at the end of the last one, as you know,
00:00:58but getting deeper into Ewald Frank and into the really, really interesting things that we have uncovered with Ewald Frank
00:01:07that are connected to government powers, world systems, world religion.
00:01:12We're getting into some of the weird stuff today.
00:01:17I don't know how far we'll get towards the colonia dignidad, but there are so many things to talk about with Ewald Frank
00:01:25and his spread of the message, and I was doing some research right as we began to talk through this episode today,
00:01:34and it is becoming widely known now that some of the more extreme sects of the message are producing some of the more heretical doctrines.
00:01:43So, from this tree that Branham created, all of the branches are bearing fruit that even some of the mainstream research
00:01:52has been able to detect that this was a rotten tree.
00:01:56Yeah, we're picking up today, John, where we left off,
00:02:00and we have been just gradually working our way through each of the major sects of the message,
00:02:06you know, that broke away from the main sect.
00:02:08Yeah, and we're, we've been, what, I think we've been doing about two episodes on each one.
00:02:13Oh my God, we could do a whole series on each one, but we are just kind of trying to hit the highlights for people
00:02:18to, you know, touch the bits that'll be useful for people just to have a basic understanding,
00:02:25at least, of what these different sects are like and kind of their distinctives.
00:02:28And, you know, as we look at Ewald Frank's group today, you know, within the message community,
00:02:34his following is often derisively referred to as the two soul people.
00:02:40And we're going to finally explain today why they have that label.
00:02:44But a lot of it goes back to the big event that led to the schism of Ewald Frank's sex scandal,
00:02:51which led to his division from the, you know, the main sect of the message.
00:02:54Well, as we kind of left off in our last episode, Ewald Frank, in 1979,
00:03:03there was this massive explosion in his church where his sex scandal came to light.
00:03:09And in order to hold on to power and control, he basically torched his congregation,
00:03:19destroyed, you know, and ran over everybody he could in order to hold on to power.
00:03:25That's exactly what happened.
00:03:28And he just, he basically destroyed his church in order to hold on to power.
00:03:33Over 90% of the people left.
00:03:35He went from hundreds and hundreds of people in his church down to 30 people left in his church as you come into 1980.
00:03:41And the way he did things and handled that situation,
00:03:46he did it in such a way that the mission network that he was a chief figure of and the broader message community
00:03:53had no awareness that the sex scandal had happened or that his church had even had the massive explosion at the time.
00:04:01And so at the very first, he had successfully kept all of this under wraps, John.
00:04:07And it's really shocking.
00:04:10And, you know, the people in that church when those things happened,
00:04:14a lot of them were very badly impacted by that situation.
00:04:17I know in some of the interviews I conducted and different people I talked with to ask questions about some of these things.
00:04:23You know, all of these years later, you can still, I mean, we're 50 years beyond, close to 50 years beyond some of this stuff now.
00:04:31People are still, you know, badly impacted.
00:04:34You know, it's like something they all wish they could just forget that even happened, you know,
00:04:39this event when he destroyed his church and all of the people he harmed.
00:04:45But, you know, as we went through that, you know, as you come out to the other side of that,
00:04:51the way that this thing starts to break out and become known to the broader community,
00:04:56as you come up to the year 1984, Ewald Frank finally decides he's going to divorce his wife
00:05:03and marry his secretary, who is a woman that he had been having an affair with.
00:05:10And so at that point, when he goes to the step that he's finally going to divorce his wife,
00:05:15you know, he's torched his church, he's burned it to the ground, he's going to divorce his wife,
00:05:19he's going to remarry.
00:05:20At the point that that happens, his wife, whose name is Helen, travels to Tucson, John,
00:05:27and she has a meeting with Perry Green, and she tells the whole story to Perry Green.
00:05:34And this is how the story finally leaks out to the broader message community.
00:05:40And it's really 1984 when it starts to really spread far and wide,
00:05:44and the whole message world starts to wake up to the reality that Ewald Frank has had a sex scandal,
00:05:50he's divorcing his wife, he's marrying his secretary, and he torched his church in the process in order to hold on to power.
00:05:58It's such a mess, man.
00:06:00And to think that, again, this is the fruit that we see that is blossoming from William Branham's base theology.
00:06:07What's really interesting is a lot of these ministers, they will do things like this to kind of erase history.
00:06:13When you torch the church after you've had something like this, whether it's an affair or you've done some kind of money scandal that the church is aware of,
00:06:23if you split the church and divide it, your faithful will stay with you.
00:06:26Those who are not faithful, who would otherwise create a problem for you, they leave.
00:06:32And so you've just had this big cleansing of your church.
00:06:34And suddenly, because you're faithful, still stuck with you, they just kind of forget it over time, and they produce offspring.
00:06:42The offspring have no clue that this really was a big deal back in their parents' day.
00:06:47And they do the same thing with doctrines.
00:06:50I've seen some of the doctrines that these ministries have produced.
00:06:54We had a comment recently.
00:06:56A person was commenting on one of the videos that you and I did,
00:06:59and they said that the year 1977 wasn't such a big deal.
00:07:04They were there in the church during 1977 and were exaggerating that.
00:07:09Well, they weren't aware, apparently, that entire books were produced that had the title 1977.
00:07:16Entire churches moved continents because of 1977.
00:07:20It was a massive deal for the message cult because that was William Branham's most famous doomsday prediction.
00:07:27It wasn't his only one, but it was his most famous.
00:07:30And so, across the vast expanse of the message, and other countries included, it was a big, big deal.
00:07:38And you mentioned the Two Seed Doctrine.
00:07:40What's really interesting is, again, if I go back to some of that research,
00:07:45it is limited in scope to the message extremist sects.
00:07:49However, if you go back in time during latter reign, Christian identity had birthed this notion of celestial souls and celestial bodies,
00:07:59and we were humans seeking out that celestial being.
00:08:04If you follow that doctrine out to its logical conclusion,
00:08:08Ewald Frank was preaching exactly what all of the big names were preaching in that era.
00:08:14Not all, but many of them.
00:08:17Jim Jones was going out to, I can't remember the guy's name out on the West Coast,
00:08:21but he was frequenting a church that taught the Two Seed UFO Doctrine.
00:08:26And if you do a search for latter reign UFO doctrine, you'll find some examples.
00:08:30But the UFO doctrines were a big deal because of Christian identity.
00:08:35Branham taught it.
00:08:36Branham claimed, in one instance, he went so far as to say that
00:08:39these flying saucers we see, that's the way the rapture is going to be.
00:08:43One flying saucer is going to come down, and it's going to pick up this little tiny group of people,
00:08:49and then the UFO will take us to heaven.
00:08:51I can't remember his exact words.
00:08:53I can probably throw it up on the screen.
00:08:55But it was a widespread doctrine because in Christian identity,
00:08:59you were marrying your earthly soul to the celestial body and celestial being.
00:09:05Those two were merging together.
00:09:06I don't believe that it went so far as to say that there were two separate souls.
00:09:11But Ewald Frank just built upon this and followed that doctrine out to its logical conclusion.
00:09:17Yeah, it's a fairly common belief in the message.
00:09:19I mean, it was still preached by the preacher at our church before I left the message,
00:09:23you know, just immediate months before.
00:09:26UFOs are angels.
00:09:28Like, that's what is generally believed.
00:09:29The UFO is some sort of an angelic being, and its appearance in the heavens is a sign of the end,
00:09:36you know, of the angels doing God's work at the last days, which is pretty bizarre.
00:09:44Really, to be quite honest with you, that is a bizarre idea.
00:09:48But that is a very common held belief in the message,
00:09:51because William Branham taught that UFOs were angels in the heavens at the last days.
00:09:57But Ewald Frank, he started to develop a doctrine on the backside of this sex scandal.
00:10:04And, you know, up until then, up until the sex scandal happened,
00:10:08Ewald Frank stayed very close.
00:10:11If there is such a thing as message orthodoxy,
00:10:14Ewald Frank stayed very close to message orthodoxy up until his sex scandal, right?
00:10:20I mean, he kind of played it down the center, you know what I mean?
00:10:25And he did it in such a way that he could be very ecommunical
00:10:28and work with most of the other sects of the message.
00:10:31But when the sex scandal happened,
00:10:34this is what kind of precipitated him to come up with his first unusual doctrine,
00:10:40and the doctrine for which all of the rest of the message community labels him and his followers.
00:10:45And here's the thing, you know, whether it's 1977, whether it's the Two Souls stuff,
00:10:50whatever it is, the thing is, you know, we don't have to guess about all these things.
00:10:53All of these guys recorded all of their sermons.
00:10:56They all thought they were the continuation of God's voice,
00:10:59and every single one of these guys recorded just about everything they ever said.
00:11:03All the tapes are still around.
00:11:05I mean, I have hundreds and hundreds of Ewald Frank's tape,
00:11:07just like I have Lee Vales and Joseph Coleman's and all the other guys.
00:11:11But there are all of their tapes are still around, right?
00:11:15And so, you know, people can say what they want about the past,
00:11:19but, I mean, the truth is all of the recordings still exist,
00:11:21and anybody can just go listen to them, right?
00:11:24And hear for themselves the things that they say.
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