# John Collins Researcher, podcast host, and former member of the William Branham movement — "the message" — which he left and now documents. He runs williambranham.org and hosts the *William Branham Historical Research Podcast*, *Leaving the Message*, and *Revival Exposed*, whose episodes are the single largest body of source material in this wiki's NAR corpus. Collins's family is inside the story he tells: his grandfather was on the Branham Tabernacle staff and asked "Where is the money going?" when the staff resigned, and his family was cut off by a relative over the movement. He is an ex-adherent advocate and says so on the record rather than claiming neutrality. ## Method Three features distinguish his work from ordinary discernment podcasting. **Archival primary sources.** Named individuals, dated recordings, financial records, and contemporaneous documents rather than doctrinal argument. His account of the movement's 1965–71 expansion — from roughly 35 churches to an estimated 250 — is built from this material. **Stated legal boundaries.** In the YWAM episode (Ep. 697) he sets an explicit limit at the top: legal risk means he will not dig into the organization's accounts, so the episode works from testimony and perception. Naming what he will not claim is what makes the rest usable. **Guest testimony over host argument.** Most episodes hand the analysis to someone who lived it — Chino Ross on deliverance, Kenneth Berringer on Word of Faith giving, [[Bob Scott]] on Kansas City, Joshua Rosinski on the Evangelical Covenant Church, Adriana on a Costa Rican church's drift, two former YWAM staff on base finances. ## The recurring thesis Collins argues that the doctrinal machinery of the [[New Apostolic Reformation]] is Branhamite and Latter Rain machinery under new labels, transmitted through the shepherding movement and the charismatic renewal. The bridge figures he names most often are Ern Baxter, who was "part of the Baxter-Branham campaign" and later one of the Fort Lauderdale Five, and the "spoken word" doctrine, whose practical content he glosses as *I have the power to interpret that you don't have sitting in the pew*. His most portable single contribution is the argument in *Who Owns the Revival* (Ep. 683) that no movement can claim exclusive ownership of what God is doing — the basis for this wiki's [[Restoration Narrative]] page. > [!contradiction] > Collins's lineage claims run ahead of his documentation more often than his growth-and-finance claims do. Resemblance between two movements' practices is treated as descent, and harm is sometimes treated as evidence of intent. The wiki holds his mechanisms with confidence and his genealogies provisionally. His "virus" and "cancer" framing also blurs the line between documented institutional failure and indictment of continuationist theology as such, which the wiki does not adopt. ## Sources in this wiki Sixteen ingested sources cite his episodes as of 2026-09-04, including [[2026-06-20-leaving-the-message-potters-house-escape-ep636]], [[2026-06-20-leaving-the-message-intercessory-prayer-nar-control-ep637]], [[2026-07-09-leaving-the-message-azusa-parhamite-roots-ep650]], [[2026-07-20-churches-become-corporations-pia-hugo]], [[2026-07-24-world-harvest-word-of-faith-machine-663]], [[2026-07-28-leaving-the-message-stage-deliverance-666]], and the eleven-episode batch in [[readwise-branham-message-exit-cluster-2026-08]]. ## Open - Co-host **Charles Paisley** (christiangospelchurch.org) appears across the Revival History episodes and has no page. - The relationship between the three podcast brands — which episodes belong to which, and how the numbering runs — is not documented anywhere in the wiki and would make citation cleaner.