The Global Church Era · 1929-1993 · N. America
Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.
In 1929 Victor Houteff began circulating a reform message inside Adventism that his church rejected, and published it as The Shepherd's Rod in 1930 and 1932; his followers settled at Mount Carmel outside Waco, Texas, in 1935. A Branch group formed under Ben Roden in 1955 and was later led by his wife Lois. David Koresh took leadership in the 1980s. On 28 February 1993 a federal raid began a siege that ended on 19 April in a fire that killed seventy-six people, and Koresh's exposition of the seven seals was left unfinished. What was already an extreme case of authority resting on one person is now known to most people through the fire — and the surviving record of the ending is largely the state's: congressional hearings, and the Danforth Report of 2000.