THE TESTIMONY OF
BRANDON BARTHROP

“I was born in the furnace of chaos.”

Brandon Barthrop was born August 6, 1981, in Friday Harbor, San Juan Island, Washington, to Brian and Theresa Barthrop. His father, Brian Barthrop (of blessed memory), served as a Forward Observer with the United States Marine Corps in Vietnam in 1966 and later as Marine Corps military police. Military-related family circumstances necessitated relocation across twenty-four states during Brandon’s childhood. By age seventeen, he had attended three high schools, the last being Whitefish High School in Whitefish, Montana.

In mid-August 1999, two weeks before the start of his senior year, Brandon cried out to Jesus Christ in desperation and was genuinely converted. Help came two months later when, after expulsion and arrest, the Flathead County court in Montana charged him with one gross misdemeanor and seven additional misdemeanors. Rather than jail, the judge ordered him into the Minnesota Teen Challenge adult program in Minneapolis.

On October 15, 1999, during a chapel service at Minnesota Teen Challenge, he experienced a sovereign encounter with the manifest glory of God. He was paralyzed on the floor for two and a half hours, carried out by four Assemblies of God pastors, and fully delivered from demonic possession. In the aftermath, he heard the audible, thunderous voice of God the Father declare:

“I will make you more high than all the drug addicts,

and I will make them jealous of how high I get you.”

This encounter constituted his new birth and apostolic commissioning.

He completed the sixteen-month adult program and served an additional six months as an intern (twenty-two months total, October 1999 – September 2001) at Minnesota Teen Challenge. From 2001 to 2006, he earned a degree in pastoral studies from North Central University in Minneapolis.

The West Bank Assignment – Cedar-Riverside (“Little Mogadishu”), 2006–2008

Immediately upon graduation in spring 2006, the Holy Spirit directed him to begin full-time street ministry in Cedar-Riverside on the West Bank. During this period, the area underwent a rapid influx of young, predominantly male Somali refugees and secondary migrants, producing a sharp rise in gang formation and violent crime. From 2006 to 2008, he conducted open-air preaching, midnight prayer walks, one-on-one evangelism at Hard Times Cafe, and mercy ministry seven days a week without institutional support or salary. He was personally stabbed at, shot at, and carjacked twice. The assignment was maintained without interruption until the Lord spoke one word in 2008: “Northside.”

The Twelve-Year Territorial Occupation – 21st & 6th, North Minneapolis, 2008–2020

In 2008, a supporter purchased The Crack House at a Hennepin County sheriff’s auction for $20,000, the former fortified trap house of Tre Tre Crips / Low End shot-caller Duke “Puky Duke” Johnson (federal life sentence, 2007–2008), and gave the property to Brandon Barthrop. The house at 21st & 6th, directly behind the former Kemps milk plant in the Hawthorne neighborhood, sat in the exact rectangle (21st–22nd, Penn to Oliver) that had been solid Gangster Disciples territory since the early 1990s, claimed primarily by the Low End / 22 Boyz faction with heavy overlap from Tre Tre Crips, Taliban(street gang, non-Afghan), Ham Crazy, and Vice Lords sets. That block was ground zero for years; some summers it absorbed more gunfire than half the city combined.

The house was found boarded up with crack pipes, hidden ammunition, and bloodstains. RLM immediately occupied it as the global headquarters. For twelve consecutive years (2008–2020), it functioned as a house of prayer and, more decisively, as the world’s foremost broadcasting supercenter for the highest level of Christian prophetic revelation and drunken glory movement, beginning on Ustream, moving to YouTube, and even attracting a full-length VICE documentary crew from London, England. The building sustained gunfire on more than ten separate occasions; bullets were recovered from every room, and drive-bys were frequent. For twelve years, it felt like living inside his father’s Vietnam War.

Independent crime-mapping and neighborhood watch documentation recorded a 41% reduction in violent incidents on that specific block in the first full year of occupancy (2008), a decrease sustained throughout the period and publicly attributed by residents and former gang members to the unbroken glory broadcast from that address.

Present Apostolic Mandate – 2025 and Forward

Today RLM TV LLC operates as a global apostolic broadcasting network with three world-class studios:

RLM TV Africa in Nairobi, Kenya, under Revivalist LA Shadracks

the remodeled, upgraded world headquarters studios in North Minneapolis

and the Uptown Studio.

The same fire that fell in a Minnesota Teen Challenge chapel in 1999 turned a condemned Crip trap house into a global glory transmitter in 2008. From 2008 to the present day (17 continuous years as of December 2025), the same property at 21st & 6th has never ceased operation. Since 2020, the original crack house has been completely gutted and rebuilt into a world-class broadcasting supercenter with multiple professional studios, control rooms, and 24/7 live-streaming capabilities. What began as a boarded-up stronghold of death is now the upgraded world headquarters of RLM TV, daily releasing the highest level of prophetic revelation and drunken glory to every nation on earth while still standing on the exact same blood-bought corner in North Minneapolis.

Seventeen years of unbroken apostolic occupation and broadcast from the very ground the enemy once owned.

That is the testimony, and the fire is still burning brighter than ever.

The mandate remains unchanged: go where the darkness is thickest, plant the flag of the Kingdom, broadcast the glory, and hold the ground until the Lamb prevails.

Brandon Barthrop

Apostle and Founder

Red Letter Ministries / RLM TV

Minneapolis, Minnesota

December 2025

www.RLM.TV 

For the nations and for the coming generation.