When Your Church Awakens to Wokeness

There is one sure indicator that the hour is late, and it is the state of the church. The warnings of apostasy in the Bible are typically to believers, those who have come to faith in Christ and now are departing from the faith. So that's why you see the five warnings in the book of Hebrews.

If you look at the five warnings in Hebrews, he's talking to believers who are getting ready to depart. Welcome to Understanding the Times Radio with Jan Markell. Radio 4 the Remnant, brought to you by Olive Tree Ministries. Today, Jan visits with Pastor Brandon Holthaus about the great end time falling away from biblical truth. Many are watching the church today drift into apostasy as wolves devour the flock. Christ died for the church, and he wants it to be the salt and light of the last days.

Here is today's program. So many churches are checked out. They have no clue what's happening. And when the most prophetic events that are converging, most of the church is sleeping. I call them zombies, Christian zombies.

I mean, Night of the Living Dead, so to speak. They're saved. They got their fire insurance, but man, they are Laodicean-ed out. They are clueless, indifferent, apathetic, and asleep. And it's so frustrating sometimes as the remnant, the Philadelphia element sees all of this. Sometimes what we say falls on deaf ears, man, but there is a remnant that listens, that hears as wanting to know what in the world's going on because all the things point to the sign that the soon return of the Messiah for his church is coming soon.

So glad you can join me for the hour. That was a little tease to indicate where we're going for the hour. And folks, what did you expect the last church before the rapture to look like? The Bible says over and over in the New Testament, so many verses that apostasy will characterize that last church before the rapture, that it will be characterized by wolves among the flock, doctrines of demons. Let me just give a couple of verses here.

There are so many, I could give dozens. 1 Timothy 4, 1, but the Spirit explicitly says that in the latter times, some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons. So falling away from the faith, Christians falling away from sound doctrine. 2 Timothy 4, for the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine, instead to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.

They will turn their ears away from truth and turn aside to myths or fables. And then that classic verse in 2 Thessalonians 2 that says that a great falling away or apostasy will take place right before the man of lawlessness or the antichrist is revealed. And by the way, that falling away in 2 Thessalonians 2 is the apostasy. It is not the rapture, folks.

Please don't buy into that. It's the apostasy. In Laodicea, there was a church that was neither hot nor cold. It was merely lukewarm and God wanted to spit them out as this church was so distasteful to him. It was a church that compromised.

It certainly had no love for the truth. And the Bible says that will be the last day's church. Now I get so many emails telling me that a once solid church and particularly pre-corona pandemic and then that church closed for months or even a year and some might still be closed. But when folks returned to it months later or a year later, it was unrecognizable. What happened?

Here's one email. Jan, I have been a member of my church for 12 years. While no church is perfect, mine addressed the issues of the day, was a staunch supporter of Israel and even would address eschatology from the pulpit, though not as often as I might have liked, the church closed for almost a year.

And when I returned, I didn't recognize it. The writer goes on to say, I think they awakened to wokeness, although I'm not sure what that means. The only current events that have been addressed in recent months have everything to do with race and white supremacy even. Obviously I'm looking for a new church home and I am heartbroken. So many are walking through a nightmare as they realize their church has been waking up to wokeism and it is frankly heresy. Now one more item I'm going to refer to, an article in Christianity Today.

Read two paragraphs. Wokeism is far more dangerous than secularism. The writer says wokeism, which some call the new religion of our day is entirely incompatible with Christian values and left unchecked, will undermine the foundation of American society. If that sounds hyperbolic, we fail to acknowledge that its very purpose is to do just that. Originating out of critical theory or critical race theory, wokeism challenges existing power structures and seeks to dismantle what we see as universal truth.

Major corporations, politicians, mainstream media are capitulating to these demands so they remain relevant and avoid the persecution that comes from resistance. But somehow churches signed on to this new wokeness in the last year to year and a half as they compete to become relevant. The article concludes wokeism is far more effective than secularism ever could be because it fills the God-shaped hole in our culture. It claims its own interpretation of justice, righteousness and sin.

Wokeism at its core wants a war against God and everything he stands for. I hope that adequately sets the stage for the next several minutes that I have with my very special guests. And I'm going to be playing some sound clips throughout the program to reemphasize what Pastor Brandon Holthaus and I are talking about. Pastor Brandon, welcome back to the program.

Thanks for having me again. We need to clarify here before we get rolling for the hour that, all right, I've introduced here, some churches have gone really, really haywire, actually for years, but even more so in the last year. But that there is a remnant of churches and obviously a remnant of believers that are staying the truth course, let's say that they are standing up for the truth, even though they might be in the minority.

Absolutely. The Lord said about the church that the gates of hell wouldn't prevail. And he was specifically talking about that remnant element. And we're seeing that the thing about the remnant element for America, the remnant is here, but they're all spread out. They feel isolated. Their church has betrayed them. Their pastor has betrayed them, has went woke, has went apostate. There is that believing element and it's worldwide, no doubt about that, but it's a smaller element. So if you look at the themes of the Bible, the remnant of Israel or the remnant of the church is always a smaller element that holds fast to the truth.

But we're finding now in the age of apostasy that that remnant is pretty small and there are remnant churches, but there are very few churches that you will find that are that Philadelphia element. Yeah. It's as you said in a message I watched of yours online that we've watched the wolves among the flocks here for years and years and years, but in the last five years, and let's say even in the last one year, at first it was exponential, but now when it comes to the doctrine of demons that seems to be flourishing, we can't keep up. It's happening every hour, not every week or month. Yeah.

And I think that verifies exactly what the scripture said would happen. And you and I talked off air about this, that when I first started ministry 20 years ago, we would have a thing maybe once a month, every two months, some heresy would pop up. Today, it's like three or four things a day pop up. And the cults, from what I understand, the last stats I looked, there are 75 new types of cults that start per month. I can't keep up with it.

People ask me, would you hear about this guy or that guy? Man, I can't even keep up with that. We're now starting to see what Paul was talking about. This apostasy would consume the entire church. Again, I kind of introduced the program talking about this new woke movement.

And of course, corporate America has been racing towards Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, and others, and we've been watching that happen. But it's now entering the church. Here's a few ways it's entering the church. And please expand on my thoughts. But folks are going to start hearing words in their church about equity, tolerance, diversity, Black Lives Matter, critical race theories, social justice.

I want to play a clip or two in just a minute. What would you add to that, Brandon? In other words, when they suddenly return to church, and there's a new atmosphere in the church, what's going on?

And what should people be looking for? Those catchphrases. Now you're seeing the corporate fascism that the corporations are pushing these things of environment, social responsibility, social sustainability, and diversity. Now it's infiltrated into the church. There's several things to explain that. Some of the pastors are completely ignorant about this.

They put their finger in the wind and see which way the fads are going, and they just go with the trends. Then there's pastors that actually have been revealed to be false teachers. They have been hiding their wolves in sheep's clothing, like you mentioned. Now they feel empowered to come out and say what they want to say. We've seen that from the corporations, but we're seeing it in the church.

These guys are not holding back anymore. Some of these pastors, they have been proven to be flat out liberal leftist liberation theology pastors. So there's that element. And then some of them are in the pastorate for an alternative reason. They may have gotten into the ministry for good reasons, but they get caught up in the nickels and noses. And what happens is they adopt a church growth model. That church growth model allows them to grow big and have a lot of money. It came from Rick Warren. It came from Bill Hybels. And that model teaches the pastor that if you want to grow your church big and you want to have a lot of money, then don't say anything controversial.

In fact, go with the current trends and speak that language and you won't offend anybody. Some of them are doing that for nickels and noses. There's that element. It could be one of those many types of things, ignorance. It was a hidden theology that they always had or just nickels and noses.

But that's what this last year revealed. I agree. And I want to play a little clip here to compliment what you've just said. It happens to be Jeff Kinley and he's an author, has written a lot on apostasy in the church. He's on Dave Reagan's Christ in Prophecy TV show here recently.

In this little clip he's backing up what you're saying. He said, too many churches today, it's a light and sound show followed by a TED Talk. Within the church itself, I mean the title of our program today, Apostasy in the Church, how big a problem is this? I mean is it an individual Christian problem, or is it a corporate problem where churches are drifting at an accelerating rate, would you say, in today's day and age?

No, I agree. I think it's more of a corporate thing, more of a global thing actually, because people in churches are really opting for expediency. Because what's happened is we've seen a huge decrease in church attendance, specifically in America. So, that sends many pastors into panic mode saying, we've got to do whatever it takes to get people into this building. Instead of going out and being salt and light, what the Bible tells us to do, because there is not a single verse in the Bible that tells a non-Christian to come to church, but there are lots of verses that tell Christians to go out into the world.

We've got it backwards. We think that there is an event that we put on on Sunday mornings. We've got to make it so exciting, so entertaining, so interesting, that we'll get people drawn in. So, what's happened is, as you said in the beginning, we've began to compromise some of the values and scriptural truths that we see in the Bible, those doctrinal truths, in order for the expediency of getting people in the building. Well, I've noticed too in church services, just as I got older and I realized that we've shifted from being Bible based, and faith based, to being what they call seeker sensitive. And we are all seeking unbelievers to come to Christ. But it is like we turned our church service as an equipping, edifying, and sending organization to send Christians out, to let's go to a 101 level, invite non-believers in and hope they get saved, and it rarely ever happens. And it seems like since we've adopted the seeker sensitive movement we've drifted away from mainstream Christianity. Would you agree?

I would agree. And let's be honest, we love technology. We use technology.

It is a great tool. But as one pastor recently said, many churches today are nothing more than a light and rock show followed by a TED Talk. It is something really to just motivate people for their daily life kind of thing, when the Bible is much deeper than that. The Bible equips us, it gives us everything we need for life and for godliness, Peter wrote. And pastors are opting for entertainment more instead of equipping the saints for the work of service.

And what is the result of that? We are tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine. You're listening to Understanding the Times Radio. Jan Markell here. I have on the line from Southern California, Pastor Brandon Holthouse. You can reach him at Rock Harbor Church in Bakersfield, California. That's rockharborchurch.net, rockharborchurch.net.

He has a great online presence, a whole lot of places from YouTube to Vimeo to Rumble. Best place to find those links is at his website, rockharborchurch.net. I had the privilege of meeting the good people of Rock Harbor Church about a year ago.

I actually ministered on two occasions. So, Brandon, I want to expand on one thing here. I don't want it to get out of our purview quite yet, and I want you to comment. And then I want to play a short clip after we discuss it here, but that's this critical race theory. Whoever would have thought, let's say five years ago, even maybe three years ago, obviously the George Floyd incident that happened less than a half an hour from where my studio is in May of 2020 triggered a lot of this critical race theory. Wants to destroy, abolish everything we've known, focus on race, race, race. I would say focus on defeating capitalism, sowing massive division. How did it get in the church?

And Brandon, also the seminary and also the Bible schools. It started decades ago and probably in the 40s. The Frankfurt School came over here, settled in Columbia University, and then started working to overthrow America politically. The Marxists tried class warfare in America, and it didn't work.

So what they did is they changed their game. They harped on race being the divisive element that they would use to divide our country and bring it down. Hence, out of critical theory comes critical race theory.

So it's thoroughly the brainchild of Marxism. So it starts infiltrating. They knew they had to get into the academics, the media, and any political element, and they've done that. But the last element they knew they had to get to was the church, because the church keeps people in a situation of opposition to what they're pushing. So they started infiltrating the church.

How did they do that? They went through the fountainheads that produced pastors. They went to the seminary, got these guys who were liberal, got them in places of teaching in the seminary, and all of a sudden our seminaries were taken over. And then this kind of theology started coming out. That produced a pastor, and that pastor would go out and take over a church, and then before you know it, he would influence that church in that particular way. So it's been several decades of this going on, but now it's really taken root in the churches. The Southern Baptists have been destroyed by it, and other denominations as well. They started with the key understanding.

You've got to hit the fountainheads, and if you get the seminaries and the Bible schools, then you can take the churches. And that's exactly what they did. That's why we shouldn't be shocked when some of these pastors get up there and say, we need to apologize for our white privilege.

That has been going on for decades. I am a victim, not a perpetrator. I want to play a clip here. It's a little clip from Fox News, but it's featuring a college that many of you know. That would be Northwestern College in St. Paul, Minnesota. They've got critical race theory going on there, and the students, some of them are pushing back. Two students from the University of Northwestern St. Paul, Minnesota, are calling on their faith based school to turn away from critical race theory by launching a petition to warn their community about what they say are deceptive concepts taught in the curriculum. Joining us right now, two of the people behind the petition, University of Northwestern St. Paul student, Joshua Phelan, and recent graduate, Haley Cheddar. Both are correspondents for campus reform. Good morning to both of you.

Good morning. Haley, let's start with you. The petition calls on the university to turn away from the falsehood that is critical race theory.

Explain what that means. As Christians, we believe that our primary call is to share the gospel, and we firmly believe that critical race theory is unbiblical and that it preaches a different gospel, and we love our school and are deeply concerned that the integrity of it and the integrity of our faith be preserved. Our letter followed a lot of private letters written by alumni and parents and current students who were also concerned, but nothing really happened. Joshua, I think you've got something like 2,300 signatures on the petition so far.

The president of the university says he doesn't agree with the petition but recognizes your right to express your view. What exactly have you noticed in your classes that suggests that critical race theory is part of the curriculum? Well, there's been a handful of classes where critical race theory and those ideas have been pushed directly. It's been very discouraging to see. I've been part of some of these classes where ideas like white supremacy and white guilt and implicit bias have been taught and propagated as biblical truth. Ultimately, Joshua, what you're seeing in the petition is CRT, critical race theory, just does not line up with the values, the Judeo-Christian values taught at your school. So why are they doing it?

I don't know. I think it's just a part of the cultural trend, and it's sad to see, but they're succumbing to those pressures of culture. Haley, you recently graduated. Have you noticed that it has gotten worse in the last year, or has this been something going on on your campus for a while? I would say that it's definitely gotten worse in the last year with just how some of the racial tensions have been heightened.

And it's really difficult. And as Christians, we believe that everyone is made in the image of God, and we need to act in that manner. And I don't believe that critical race theory reflects that. It's really discouraging to see a Christian school do this. It's happening at other schools and at secular schools, but at a private Christian university is very discouraging.

Sure. Joshua, you and Haley both feel very strongly about this, but how many other kids on campus feel your way, are politically aligned on your side? Yeah, there's definitely been a sizable response on campus. There definitely been the negative ones calling us racist, white supremacist, but there has been a positive response as well from students.

There've been a couple who've really stuck with us and kind of helped us through. And there's even been some faculty that have reached out to us and said, hey, we agree with everything that you guys are saying, and we agree with everything in your letter, but if I speak out, I will lose my job. And that's really been sad to see. So they're worried they would be canceled. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, we didn't cancel you, either of you. We wanted to hear your story. Haley and Joshua, thank you very much for joining us today and good luck to both of you this summer. Spending the hour talking about some of the more subversive things that have crept into the church, the Bible schools, the seminaries.

Brandon Holtausen, he is my guest for the hour from Bakersfield, California. Your thoughts to that little clip? They're explaining exactly what's happened. Their universities, their colleges have been infiltrated by this.

So you're right. If they speak out against it, and I heard them say, you're going to be canceled, you'll be fired. That's the tactic of Marxism, where we're seeing this cancel culture thing. It's happened to you.

It's happened to me. They've canceled us on our platform. If you go against this narrative by these elites that are being perpetrated into our society, you're the bad guy, and we've got to get rid of you. So that's why we're seeing the erosion of free speech and the erosion of freedom of religion because of this. Those students were exactly right. And the problem is, at the top, they're being ran by those types of individuals.

And these young people were a part of a university here locally in the Twin Cities that has been solid as a rock for decades and decades. Perhaps it's the George Floyd incident, but as we opened the program, now we're seeing the stories break in the news, the apostasy is growing, not just on a weekly basis, but hourly. We can't keep up.

This is just an illustration of that. Again, the words diversity, equity, tolerance, critical race, Black Lives Matter, social justice, things that we did not focus on five years ago, now we're obsessing on. Something happened last year, Jan, and here's why I'm gonna go out on a limb and give my opinion. We all know that apostasy is supposed to happen, but last year somehow became a catalyst for this, to put it in warp speed. And I think what last year did is it gave those who were hidden apostates, hidden false teachers in our colleges, universities, in our seminaries, even our churches, it gave them the boldness to come out. Since the culture was all doing it, okay, I can now come out of the closet with my critical race theory or really what I always believe, which is liberation theology, and no one's going to push back on me because the culture supports me.

I call it the great revealing last year or the great separation. It revealed these people, I think, in these churches and seminaries, who they really were. And we talk about that on a political level, like with Donald Trump, we talk about he revealed the swamp. Well, there's a swamp in Christianity. Here's the thing, Brandon, I think we've always assumed the swamp would be the religious left, not the world of evangelicalism. And that's been the shocking thing to me, not just in the last year, perhaps in the last 20 years, but it's growing exponentially. For instance, I have in front of me from the Christian Post, the World Evangelical Alliance and the National Association of Evangelicals have come out calling for, get this folks, wouldn't you think it'd be about preaching the gospel?

No. Solar panels could be coming soon to a church near you through a campaign project. So and so World Evangelical Alliance has set out to get 20% of its members to convert fully to clean energy by 2025. Then the National Association of Evangelicals says Christians should be at the forefront of efforts to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gases, says Galen Carey of the National Association of Evangelicals.

We also know that these efforts will particularly benefit our most vulnerable neighbors, those whose health and livelihoods most directly depend on clean air. Brandon, what does this have to do with the gospel? I would expect this from the religious left, but the fact that evangelicals are now caving to every leftist cause.

The Bible predicts this kind of end time falling away. It's still shocking. It is because what they're promoting is save the planet type of mentality that comes from wokeism, that comes from the World Economic Forum. They're adopting what I call Babylonianism. This is a different religion. This is the religion of Babylon. In the Bible, it's called lawlessness. It doesn't mean that people run around with anarchy.

It means that people are adopting the Babylonian system of morals and ethics. That's what saving the planet is. That's why the guy's pushing solar panels. Pretty soon, the church is going to be pushing don't eat meat. Yes, you're right. That's another issue. Paul warned about that.

He said eventually they're going to push that. So these people, maybe we considered them solid, but what it showed was they were able to be deceived. Now they've adopted, I call it 180ism, because that's what lawlessness is. If God says something's right, they say it's wrong and vice versa. And it's the opposite of what the Bible says.

Genesis 822 says we were not going to be able to affect the seasons, the hot and cold. They promised that to Noah. Don't these pastors know that that's a promise in scripture?

Apparently not. They have been woke. They've been deceived at the end of it. Satan has deceived them.

And so that's why there's a spiritual element to this that we can't overlook. Folks, let me make one quick announcement here. I want to give a heads up about the Behold, He Comes Conference this fall, Calvary Chapel, Chino Hills. That's Saturday, September the 11th.

I want to clarify that all seats are taken now, but they are offering a live stream package of all speakers, special interviews, backstage conversation and more. And that's just $5. And here's where you need to go. Behold, he comes dot org. Behold, he comes dot org.

Don't call Olive Tree because I've passed the baton of our conference to Pastor Jack Hibbs. Speakers will be Pastor Jack Amir Sarfati, Pastor Barry Stagner, yours truly will run about 9 a.m. to 4 30 p.m. on September the 11th. We'll help you become a watchman on the wall that day. There'll be access to all of the features of that day. And it's a lot of features. If you get the $5 streaming pass at behold, he comes dot org, you can watch it for days afterwards, weeks afterwards. If you get that little $5 streaming pass, mark your calendar Saturday, September the 11th.

And that is all Pacific time. And here's where we're going in the second half of the programming. So how do we find a new church and a good church?

What do we look for? What do we stay away from? We've talked the first half hour here about things that have gone haywire. Not every church is haywire, but a lot of them are.

And it's one of the most predicted prophecies in the New Testament. But we got to have an answer to the dilemma. And we'll talk about that answer when I get back. Just a heads up here that Olive Tree and yours truly are being misrepresented on social media and particularly on YouTube. There are fake channels being posted to YouTube with our radio program. Some are asking for money, which we never, ever do. So if you want to subscribe to our YouTube channel, that would be helpful.

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You can also find us on YouTube, Rumble, Light Source, and his channel. Now, here are Jan Markell and Pastor Brandon Holthouse to wrap up today's program. This one-world religion, like we're talking about, that's forming. Have you noticed how people are saying, look, guys, we just need to drop our theological difference and come together.

Come together. Don't you ever drop your theological standings. Don't leave the Bible because they're saying, look, you're divisive if you won't unite against common cause issues. Then fine, call me divisive. I will be divisive then. If it means standing for the truth, I'm not going to let Jesus' word go.

But see, that's the push now. And so have you noticed this, that if you ever do a search for a church, say you move to an area and you see a church that looks promising and you go to it, go to their website and read their theological statement. The way you can find this out of where they stand on theology is how deep or in depth their theological statement is. If it's like this, we love Jesus and that's it, rest assured that is the church that it's dropping their theological distinctives and doing a kumbaya kind of thing. And we're all coming under that umbrella of unity.

Welcome back. That's kind of what we've been talking about this hour and we'll continue as we wrap it up here. And that is how do you find a solid church?

We're going to get into that here, I think almost immediately. But I've been talking for the first part of the program with Pastor Brandon Holt House. He's in Bakersfield, California, Rock Harbor Church, rockharborchurch.net. Brandon, you told me your church is growing absolutely by leaps and bounds. And is that because other churches were closed or what's happening?

The main reason we've tripled in size is it's twofold. Unbelievers have woke up and they've said, what's happening? Then they try to find a church to tell them what's happening and they come up empty. So somehow the Lord leads them to us. With believers, though, they have been part of churches and then all of a sudden their church turns up woke after the shutdown. And the pastor gets up there and says, hey, we all have white privilege and we need to repent of that. So they're like, we're done. We're going to go find another church that preaches the truth. Some of our growth has come from that. And these people are desperate to find a church now that will preach the truth, talk about current events, maybe talk about prophecy.

Yeah, very, very difficult to find. I don't know what a percentage might be, but if 5% of churches are doing that, I think that would be wonderful. If it would be wonderful, we're 50%, but it's a minimal number of churches that are focusing on the issues of the day. Sometimes a website, Brandon, is not sufficient and maybe it would be better to actually make an appointment with a church leader and sit down and have a discussion with them before investing months, even years. I gave you an illustration on the phone the other day that I had an email from a gal who'd been attending, happened to be a Reformed church for, I think, a dozen years.

Pulpit was very sound, nothing wrong with the pulpit whatsoever. It happened to be Baptist Reformed. But then she said, would you please do something on Revelation? The book of Revelation, pastor said, absolutely, we'll cover it. He started a series on Revelation and once he got to Revelation 4, everything was allegorized.

She'd been there 12 years and didn't know they were a millennial. Wouldn't that be one of the first questions when you're approaching the church leadership of a new church? Are you premillennial, which is good old left behind theology and Jesus reigns and rules on earth, literal thousand years. Are you amillennial or are you replacement theology?

Do you believe the church is the new Israel? You take it from there. I think the mistake that a lot of people are making and that we're trying to help people in doing this is they'll go to a church and listen to sermons. Well, you can sit there, listen, maybe for a good three months and never pick up that the person has all these things that are warning flags.

They could be in a certain book of the Bible, but that's not going to be triggered. Before you know it, people are sitting there and, well, it seems nice. I start getting some friends here. And then before you know it, you're emotionally tied to that church. What you have to do is before you even go, you need to call and make an appointment with the pastor. And then you should have a list of questions that you're going to ask before I attend your church. Are you dispensational? That's got to be a primary question.

Why? Because that controls the pastor's hermeneutic of whether he takes the Bible literally and doesn't allegorize prophecy like the book of Revelation or Daniel. And then you've got to ask him several things. Are you premillennial? Are you pre-tribulation on your rapture view? It's important to know because I want to know what the pastor's hermeneutic is. Where does he place that? Because sometimes when you ask the rapture question, it'll trigger whether or not the guy's replacement theology.

I'm not saying it's all the time. Sometimes these guys put the rapture post-tribulational, and then they believe the church is Israel. Those are important questions. What is their view on Israel prophetically? Does God have a plan for Israel? Are the Jews the chosen people?

Are they going to get saved in the end? Those are questions you've got to find out because what's happened, the majority of churches are replacement theology. They believe the church has replaced Israel. Well, that controls their hermeneutic. Anytime Israel is referenced, it's the church, and that does serious damage to their interpretation. To further probe that, where did you go to school, pastor?

Why is that important? Well, whether the pastor's formally trained or informally trained, I want to know what his educational background is. Did he go to a legitimate seminary or did he say, well, I just appointed myself to be pastor one day?

Believe it or not, there's a lot of churches where the guy has self-appointed himself as a pastor, and he has no training whatsoever. That would be like going to a doctor to say that I'm just a doctor, but I didn't go to med school. So you want to find out, okay, what school did you go to?

Is that school legitimate? Those are the questions, some of them, that need to be asked. Do you practice church discipline would be another question. Whether or not they're going to deal with sin in the church.

Most churches will not practice church discipline. Ask him, what is your view on the LGBT movement? What is your view on gender?

What is your view on critical race theory? If he can't answer those questions, you need to leave. He should know all those things. I think the thing that has come through loud and clearly to me, and that is based on emails and other exchanges I have with people, if a church is going to not be very sound, it's probably ignoring a couple of things. It won't be pro-Israel, it just won't be.

It'll have sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and it will ignore eschatology or Bible prophecy, or just handle that topic entirely wrong. Those are the two things that seem to get immediately compromised. Brandon, and you're basically saying the same thing. We need to look out, make sure you're dispensational. Pretrib would help, though again, that can be a debatable issue, but the literal interpretation of the Bible is so important. Yeah, that goes into understanding the kingdom. I would ask, what is your view on the kingdom? Is it a literal kingdom? Literal, yeah. An all-millennialist doesn't take it literal. That is exactly right. I do a quarterly print magazine, folks.

You can sign up for it online, OliveTreeViews.org. And the summer issue is why many churches today can never understand the times. And I'm going over the theologies that aren't going to make sense of our times. One would be amillennialism. They believe that the millennium began at the cross, and we're in the millennium now.

How is that working out, since that's supposed to be the time of perfection? But that is what they believe. Most denominations are amillennial.

I could name them, but I won't. You want to stay away from that if you really want to understand the times. You want to stay away from the dominionism, kingdom now, post-millennialism, ladder reign. All of those theologies are teaching that the world, with the church's help, just keeps getting better and better. That's dominionism, kingdom now, post-millennialism, ladder reign, and that mankind, and particularly the church, has the ability to improve a decaying, sinful planet. It's utter delusion, folks.

Brandon, your comment on that? I would add to this, if that church is not talking prophecy in the middle of all this going on, that's a red flag. The pastor should be talking about this.

You could find that out on listening to the sermons, what's the latest sermons he preached, and you can see that online. Beyond that, can the guy even talk about current events? So most churches won't even discuss current events. They put their people in a bubble and pretend nothing's going on. They won't explain what's happening. That's the pastor's job, and yet these pastors are acting as if nothing is happening. So that's another clue.

Will he talk about current events? I think there was a study done by Lifeway, and I think you mentioned it one time on your program. This study found that 98% of the sermons that were polled had nothing to do with prophecy. Only 2%. That ought to tell you what kind of landscape we have out there. Very good point, and that's brought out in a lot of the products that we carry. The fact that only 2% of churches are willing to talk about what we are talking about on air here today. One more clip that happens to be Jeff Kinley again, he's back with Dave Reagan at the Christ in Prophecy TV program talking about what we are talking about. We think that the bigger we are the more godly we are. That the more people we attract the more God is pleased with us. Jesus' disciple 12 men. As Charles Spurgeon famously said, 12 men is enough to be accountable for on the day of judgment.

We think that it has to be huge, it has to be massive, it has to be phenomenal. But if we just focus in on the purity of the Gospel, and that is exactly what Paul warned the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians, he said, I fear that you may be strayed away from the simplicity and purity of the Gospel. Well, I think you touched on the fact that Jude even in his epistle recognized that he wanted to write about certain things, but already early in the church believers were drifting away from the truth. And he said, I have to readdress things because you are already drifting, and you need to contend earnestly for the faith. I find it interesting in our day and age so much is about marketing. And so, a lot of products are proclaiming themselves to be new and improved.

And you find well they are really not that new, and they are definitely not improved. And the Church, the Lord called us to be a part of. The Gospel that He called us to proclaim is nothing to be improved upon. It is what needs to be proclaimed as the truth of Scripture. You're listening to Understanding the Times Radio.

I'm Jan Markell. I've been talking with my guest, Brandon Holt House, for the hour about some of the things that have gone haywire in the Church in the last 30 to 40 years. But really, we have been focusing more on the last year, to be honest.

The point we made in part one of the programming is that things are changing and not in the best of ways. Really, on a day by day, hour by hour basis, we can hardly keep up with some of the false teachings and the wolves among the flock that have been ravaging our churches. And particularly, I would say probably around the time some of the churches were even shut down.

And then as I brought out earlier in the programming, they opened up months later or a year later. Folks went back to their church. They did not recognize it. What happened? Well, it went woke. That has consequences. And that's what we've been talking about here for the hour.

And Brandon, you made a good point to me the other day. And you said, people need to be willing to drive a distance. If there's a good church at the end of that destination, be willing to drive it.

Why don't you emphasize that? The people that call our ministry and ask us for churches to recommend in their area, we'll try to do some hunting for them and try to locate some churches. And when we do, some of their responses, well, that's too far to drive.

Some of it being 30 miles, 50 miles, 75 miles. We have to tell them we're in a day and time where finding the truth is going to be like finding gold. You're going to have to be willing to drive. If you want the truth, this is where it's at.

And it's going to take some effort on your part. The days of a neighborhood church of convenience is over. We got people driving to our church. A guy just came from San Francisco as a four hour drive. We've got people from Hollywood, Palmdale, the Central Coast. They're driving two hours on a Sunday to be with us.

That's the mark of the remnant. They will go wherever they need to go to get the truth. I understand some people can't drive that far. Senior Saints can't do that.

But if you're capable of doing it, you're going to have to drive. You're just going to have to put in the time to find a good church. Did you think you would see the explosion? And I think this is one of the biggest things messing up the doctrine today. And I just referenced it a minute ago. And that is the church is going to make the world a whole lot better. Again, that's this Dominionism kingdom now.

That's what's exploded in the last five to 10 years, which I did not think I would see in my life, at least to the degree that's happening now, assuming that mankind has the ability to improve a decaying sinful planet. But that's what these folks do believe. What I have found is that Dominionism, New Apostolic Reformation, Kingdom Now, believe it or not, puts that believer on the same path as if a person was a Marxist. And this is why I think the two are converging and adopting the same principles.

The Marxists, the communists are looking for this Marxist utopia, heaven on earth without God. Here comes the Dominionists and the New Apostolic Reformation, and they have the same mentality too. We're going to make heaven on earth and then Jesus is going to come back.

That's the same mentality. You're going to bring in a kingdom without the king, huh? This is why I have watched over the last few years, those people who believe they can build Christ's kingdom without him adopt the Marxist principles of wokeism. We're going to cure illiteracy. We're going to cure AIDS. We're going to cure racism. We're going to cure all these social ills, which are all nice, but that's not the gospel.

That's not the Great Commission. The church is not responsible to solve all the social ills. I hear Christians say, we're going to solve and end poverty. Well, that's what Marxists say. Jesus, I know, said, the poor you will always have with you.

What I've noticed is that theological construct of building the kingdom actually matches the Marxist utopia of building their kingdom. You need to be catching Brandon Holthaus's online updates. He's on YouTube, Rumble, Vimeo.

Best place to find the links is just go to his website, rockharborchurch.net, and you'll find all the links where you can catch Brandon Like Olive Tree. We get censored all the time electronically. Thank you to my radio stations.

You don't censor me, and I do appreciate that. But big tech likes to censor, so best place to go is rockharborchurch.net and then find his prophecy updates that are usually weekly, as well as the Sunday sermons. Brandon, you told me off air that in some of your travels, you've been actually meeting face to face plus your own church congregation, which is obviously made up of some remnant believers, if they're driving three and four hours. And you're looking into the eyes of some very lonely and even desperate people, believers who want fellowship, who want sound teaching, who reject the false and the various things that we've been talking about that go haywire. And you developed a real burden for them. You kind of came up with a plan. Why don't you talk to us about that?

I have several speaking engagements this last spring, and I just did one with Tom Hughes. Got around the country a little bit and looked straight in the eye with these remnant believers. And what I saw in their eyes was, we need help. We're desperate for someone to help us. Our churches went crazy.

Can't trust the pastor. What can we do? We have no leadership. We have no guide. After I would come home, it would just keep recurring to me, you need to help these people.

They don't have anyone helping them. So the Lord, I believe, put a burden on me saying, let's try to help them as much as we can. What we have done is we've somewhat organized the system in order to help these remnant believers that are caught without a church that needs some guidance. So we've started that.

I did a prophecy update called the Macedonian Remnant Call, patterned off of the Macedonian call, but I put the word remnant in there because instead of these other people calling Paul saying, come over here, the remnant saying, please help us. What we have decided to do is have people call us, email us. We'll try to help them out. Find a church. We'll help them out with Bible study helps.

Some of them don't even know what commentaries to use to help them in their Bible study. So we make recommendations for that. We've even opened our doors, so to speak, to counseling. I'm personally counseling people around the country now, and some of our counselors are as well here. We've opened that up to them.

Theological questions. We have even groups out there now that are forming a church plant. We're helping them to do that and get them off the ground because there's no churches in their area.

They're all woke or apostate. So we say, well, if you have a leader, let's start a church plant with you. And we have groups scattered through the country.

We have even a group we're starting to work with in Italy. I'm starting to see a new paradigm now. This new paradigm is to help these remnant believers. So that's what we're trying to do. How can my audience tap into what you're offering? They just need to email us at our website info at rockharborchurch.net. They'll email us. That's the best way to get ahold of us. I have staff members that will divide the emails up between them and they'll answer those questions as best possible.

I answer some myself. We take it from there. If they'll just contact us and say, what do you need?

Hey, I need a recommendation and commentary or whatever. We'll do that for you. That's been the best way. Now, when I did the Macedonian remnant call, we got flooded. I saw that put this out to everybody that's going to contact us.

If they want help, we probably will get to you in about two to three weeks. That's how backed up we get on emails, but doesn't mean we didn't get your email. It just means that we're backed up. I'm impressed that somebody is in fact reaching out to this group of people, the remnant believer, that they're solid as can be. And I've said it now, this is the third time they came back to their church and didn't recognize it.

Or they may have had to have perhaps left their church 10, 15 years ago because they didn't recognize it back then. But all of this has been accentuated as we move deeper and deeper into the last of the last days, which again is so prophesied in the Bible. You know, Brandon, maybe the good thing about all of this that we've talked about this hour is it's a great reminder that we are in the season of the Lord's return because the Bible says right before the Lord returns, this kind of apostasy and wolves among the flock is going to characterize our day. I kind of take it the way John took it in the book of Revelation when he's told to swallow the small scroy of his bittersweet. The bitterness is, yeah, we've got to watch the apostasy.

That's hard to watch. But the sweetness is the Lord's coming back and all this is signaling that we're close to his return in the rapture. That's exciting to me. Yeah, I'm going to help the remnant and do what I can. And I understand how I've got to deal with the apostasy, but in the end, all of it signals I'm going to be with the Lord soon. So I need to be about my father's business, get busy and get the work done because we're going home soon. Amen. So, folks, you want to be in touch with Rock Harbor Church, go through the website, rockharborchurch.net.

They're offering their services. If you are a remnant believer, you have issues with finding a church or being a part of a fellowship, or maybe you're just tired of having only an online church. I hear from hundreds of people who have defaulted to an online church only. It's better than nothing, but you do need the fellowship. Why don't you speak to that, Brandon, because really the online is great, but it falls short, at least even what the Bible recommends.

That's what so many people tell me. They say, you know, I'm trapped here and all I had was online, but it's not the same as being in the presence of the body of Christ. God designed the body of Christ to have koinonia, to be with each other.

That's why, like I said, we have so many people driving so far because they can listen to me online. They want that koinonia. They want to be around other believers. It encourages us.

It gives us strength. So that's why we're trying to map out all these remnant churches and Bible studies throughout the United States and say, look, here's one in Idaho. Here's one in Florida. Go there at least even once a month if you can drive there and get some koinonia, some fellowship, because it's vital for your spiritual walk. The Bible predicted this in the last days in 1 Timothy 4, but the Spirit explicitly says that the latter times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons.

Brandon, speaking of teaching of demons, and I'm really changing direction here and we're down to just a few minutes anyway, talking about the spirits and the teaching of demons. The World Economic Forum moved their primary meeting to, I think, early in 2022. And that's when they want to institute their great reset and really change the way the world functions. We've talked about the church here for the entire program, but the fact that the world is going to be changed, I think, fairly soon, frankly, that might indicate the church is going to disappear. That's my suspicion.

Don't know that for sure. Your thoughts on where this World Economic Forum is going? I'm down here to about three minutes. I think everything's going to accelerate. I think we're going to see things we never thought were possible because this last year, it proved that they could get their agenda accomplished. And now they have everybody on board.

There's no one giving them any opposition. So my thing about what the World Economic Forum wants to do, they already tell us what they're going to do, and they've set the limit to 2030. They're going to get these goals accomplished even faster, especially with the Biden administration. You're going to see us move in the direction of a digital currency. You're going to see us move in the direction away from capitalism. You're going to see us move in the direction away from owning private property and all these other things that we couldn't imagine happen.

Now, I always put the caveat, we could be raptured tonight and not see anything. But if we stay here in the Lord Terry's, we're going to see a lot of this, and I believe they're going to get it accomplished faster than what we thought. There's nothing standing in their way. The global elites are wanting this. They have the politicians in their back pocket. They had the education in the back pocket.

They have an indoctrination that has happened to our United States where at least half of our country thinks that this is okay. So liberty is eroding. I asked the congregation, are you less free today than you were two years ago?

And everyone said hands down, we're less free. And I said, well, this is what we're talking about. They're going to push these things. Before you know it, you can't walk into a place unless you're vaccinated.

You can't go to the store unless you're vaccinated. And all these other things that they're employing, we talk about apostasy. Well, this is another converging factor is the globalism.

That's in high speed right now. I believe they're going to use other crises to accelerate this. They're going to use the planet, environmentalism, we got to save the planet, global warming stuff. They're going to come out with these other variants with the COVID-19. They're going to be a Delta variant and all this other stuff they're going to use. They're going to create crises so that we will be willing to give up our freedoms for security.

That's right. Brandon, I want to thank you for joining me this hour. We've talked about a lot of things, heavily church issues, and that's heavily weighing on my audience. Because again, both you and I get so much feedback from folks out in listener land, and they are so heartbroken over some of the issues going on in the church.

And I hope we've clarified that for some of you today, folks. Again, you can reach Brandon at rockharborchurch.net, catch his prophecy updates online because they're very cutting edge. I just want to say this about the church because God calls the church his bride, and he's going to call that bride home soon. I think very soon. And then there's going to be a wedding in heaven. I'm hoping I'll see you at that very special event at the wedding supper of the lamb. It could be any day.

It could be even today. And I want to thank you for listening, and we will talk to you next week. We get our mail when you write to Olive Tree Ministries in Jan Markell, Box 1452, Maple Grove, Minnesota, 55311. That's Box 1452, Maple Grove, Minnesota, 55311.

All gifts are tax deductible. Much that is happening in our world sometimes doesn't make sense. Yet we know God remains in control. He has you in the palm of his hand and everything is falling into place.