BULLETIN 07/27/76:
RON DART: We Are Not Qualified to Counsel in Some Areas of Sex and Marriage.
YOU DON'T SAY!
submitted by SHT
For decades certain minister stuck their noses into the bedrooms of church member without any fear whatsoever. Just look at what Rod Meredith for decades. Has there ever been a Church of God minister so obsessed with sex than he was? If he wasn't railing against gays he was pitching fits over certain sex acts that married couples chose to do in their own bedrooms. When it wasn't him, it was Herbert Armstrong with his pathetic book on sex, written because his wife was resisting his romantic attempts, as frightening as that is to contemplate.
Most COG ministers were certainly out of their elements when it came to marriage counselling. Almost none of the ministers had any real training in what counselling entailed. The only training they had was an Ambassador College classroom. No hours were ever logged with a supervisor in training situations where counselling techniques were used. To be an effective counsellor meant having empathy, a quality that many COG ministers were/are totally bankrupt in.
22 comments:
It was a joke. It didn't take longer after I started attending services to realise that I should be counselling the ministers rather than them counselling me. They were twits who didn't know what they were doing. It's like children pretending to be adults. They didn't know the way the real world works. I could have randomly picked a stranger on the street, and gotten better advice.
And I didn't asked to be 'counselled.' Rather they forced themselves on me by 'insisting.'
It was just an ego game on their part. Fools counselling the responsible.
Meredith was not obsessed with sex. He just knew the young people he taught always has sex on their brain.
David Rickman,
The answer is no.
D.R. No the mad ravings are in fact mad ravings of lunatics, mentally ill, or just con artists fleecing the gullible. Not one prophecy of WCG or related groups has ever come to pass. The 6000 year reign of man is long over 6000 years. Germany has no effective military to attack the USA. They lack a sufficient navy or air force.
@ 7:40 AM, you obviously weren't listening to Meredith's sermons in the last decade of his life. He sometimes talked so graphically about gay sex that some mothers were afraid to bring their young children to listen to him.
In one infamous Meredith sermon, he went into one of his graphic descriptions of gay sex shortly after he had described how he loved his Joplin boyhood friend Jimmy, with whom he loved to wrestle on the grass, holding each other "like two bear cubs." Older listeners could not help but notice on the one hand the homoerotic undertones of Meredith's intimacy with Jimmy, and on the other hand his fascination with the idea of grown men needing diapers and butt plugs after ruining their anal muscles in gay sex.
One of Meredith's sermons at the LCG youth camp was so graphic that when the young children (not just campers, some listeners were the pre-teen children of mothers serving at the camp) asked their parents to explain what they had heard, it caused serious distress for the families forced to explain gay male practices to their youngsters.
Furthermore, if Meredith was so great as a marriage counselor, we might expect his six children to have exemplary marriages. Instead, we find that both kids by his second wife are unmarried (one of the two is twice-divorced), that his oldest son by his first wife divorced his ACOG wife and is now married to a non-member, and his oldest daughter divorced her first husband before marrying an ambitious minister who is now on LCG's Council of Elders. Out of six children, Meredith's parenting resulted in just two seemingly happy first marriages that have endured. Maybe that's pretty close to the American average, but it certainly does not indicate any special skill in marital counseling.
"Meredith was not obsessed with sex. He just knew the young people he taught always has sex on their brain"
Thanks for the laugh!! That's a circular reasoning if I ever saw it. Young people always were thinking about the horizontal polka, so Meredith plays more music - that'll get them to stop thinking about dancing. Nope! His conversations about sex were certainly not limited to just the young people.
But let's go with your reasoning. One thing that you never do - is tell young people what they cannot do, over and over and over again. You do that, their curiosity + hormones will cause action. There are other "ministerial methods" to the issue of teen fornication than the bully pulpit! Saying "no" is the best way to get a person to say "Oh really?" and go out and do it. Why, they're practically an ADULT, they reason. No one's going to tell ME what I can and can't do. I'm _____ years old, I know what I'm doing." If your reasoning was correct, then the only way Rod knew to correct - young and old alike - was RULERSHIP. DONT DO THIS, DONT DO THAT.
There might have been an element to that regardless. But to say that Rod wasn't obsessed with sex? I'd call that grossly inaccurate.
Probably the best advice in HWA's sex books, the one takeaway, was that a man should always make sure that he pleases his wife. While HWA never mentioned what a woman feels like if she is with a husband who is a selfish lover, there is an abundance of graphic reading material extant today, and women have described "feeling as if they were the man's toilet".
I agree with all of the evaluations above regarding the counseling prowess of most Armstrongite ministers. A handful of the more perceptive ministers realized that this was a deficiency, and actually took classes in counseling, paying for their classes and certifications from their own pockets so that headquarters wouldn't know and have an opportunity to put the kibosh on it.
Rod Meredith would have been much more effective if he had limited his sex rants to perhaps one per semester. If we were to examine all of the topics he covered in the classes he taught, and the sermons he preached, sex was most definitely the predominant one. He was the vulgar shock jock of the WCG ministry. Anyone who would try to tell you different is a whitewashing apologist.
In what area (if any) are AC trained personnel somehow "specialists" in ?
Trust Ron Dart to have the common sense to speak out.
Ron Dart used to teach that church, split hair, winds of doctrine controversies root causes are the Pastors marriages.
'If your minister is getting carried away by this or that and preaching rubbish then the first place you look for the reasons why, is his marriage and not the latest wind of doctrine.'
Armed with GTA's child rearing booklet, I was an expert on child rearing - until we had our first child. We quickly discarded our old child rearing training.
Each child is an individual and responds differently.
The key to remember is your goals are to raise successful adults and a loving extended family.
Now that our kids are grown, we still get together and enjoy seeing them live their own lives.
I'm not 8:28, or 8:35, David. But I'd be quick to point out that there are certain criteria, and logic that can always be applied to verify the voices to which you allude. Sometimes they seem like they could be real, and more time is required to make the determination.
Most of the people who were hornswaggled into joining HWA's church seriously lack the skills to evaluate. And, this is why we see ex-ACOG people drawn to conspiracy theories, and into other cults. They are the ones who didn't learn the greatest lesson from their Armstrong experience, which was caveate emptor, let the buyer beware.
Anonymous 12:48
Rickman said "Should we be so quick to dismiss the voices of those who say they've been beyond the veil ?"
HWA never achieved enlightenment. He was a child rapist. The most selfish, self serving son of a bitch that ever darkened a doorway in Pasadena. If my morals are higher than the god of the bible, what does that say about your god(s)?
The ACOGs are not qualified to counsel. Neither are any of the opinionated loud-mouths on this website.
Where is the proof of any of the evidence against Meredith? Probably just crap that people make up, because that's what we usually get on this web site, and anyone who was ever in the WCG knows how distorted the commentary on here is, which is why this site has very little credibility and has probably never helped a single person leave, unless they were already well on the way out to begin with, and just needed some excuses to justify what they already wanted to do. Such a wasted opportunity to actually help people. Instead, it's all about throwing mud and lies and venting and revenge.
@ 3:35 PM...
There are several people posting to this site who either:
• Sat in one of RCM's Ambassador College classes
• Worked under him while he was WCG's director of the ministry
• Accepted a paycheck from him after he started the Global Church of God
• Went to youth camps with his children
• Ate dinner as a guest in his home
• Had access to his LCG Masterfile (member/coworker/subscriber database)
• Sat in the congregation and heard him speak so disgustingly that mothers left the room with their children.
• Sat in his office after being "counseled" by the lying Rod McNair, and heard him say horrible things
• Read his court depositions in which he slandered some brethren and denied knowledge of matters that he clearly had knowledge of.
Yes, I am sure that some people who post here are exaggerating their experiences because they are still badly hurt by what happened, and they cannot yet look back coldly and rationally at what they experienced with Rod Meredith. Yes, it is obvious that people sometimes speculate stupidly or tell outright lies. However, if you want to defend LCG, you would be better off defending Gerald Weston or Doug Winnail or other LCG leaders who haven't revealed their flawed character to so many people over so many years.
As for me? I spent my first few LCG years aware that RCM wasn't perfect, but sure that most of the stories about him must be lies. Then, as my family got to know him better, I started seeing more things that made me question, but for more years I put those questions out of my mind. Eventually, thank God, I could not deny that RCM simply did not meet the Bible standard for a church leader, which meant that I was under no obligation to support him as the leader of LCG.
As for you? Maybe you are an insider who already has seen much and already has some private doubts, but who feels an obligation to defend LCG even against your conscience. If so, I hope you change before your conscience is seared in defending evil. Or maybe you are an outsider, as I was for a while, sincerely believing that RCM was God's anointed and sure that the stories about him were falsehoods told by bitter ex-members. If so, you will be disappointed eventually, so I hope the disappointment comes soon and does not hurt you too badly.
Whichever may be your situation, ask yourself honestly: Have you seen provable evidence that LCG ministers have any special God-given aptitude for counseling? I have seen marriages ruined that were salvageable. I have seen parent/child relationships poisoned. I have seen careers derailed by stupid ministerial counsel. The people who flourish in LCG are the ones who ignore ministerial counsel until they are somewhat successful and wealthy, at which point the ministry shifts from abuse to flattery as their preferred method of control.
First of all do you know that one of the top signs of a cult is that past members are always wrong,or they can never be a good reason for leaving. Check out any anti -cult site like Jehovah's witnesses observe how members find it hard to believe the allegation of abuse and corruption in their midst. The mouth of two or three witnesses... Ok hundreds of people who never met each other are saying the same thing over And over... systemic spiritual abuse and manipulation exist in these churches of God throughout the years...oh yea another sign of a problemic church they always leave a paper trail of books,articles,websites, films and testimonies that document the abuses of the organisation. These people reporting are not strangers looking in from the outside they have been there so they are actual witnesses. As for leaving the church it was the hardest thing I had to do as most of my friends of several years are still there, so painting everyone with the same brush as to why they leave is a pathetic attempt to create the illusion that people all leave for petty reasons like what Dr. Meredith would say " just getting their feelings hurt",(no wrong on the churches part).They are some nice people in the CoGs no doubt but I know the brainwashing that comes from the pulpit, the subtle twisted teachings and overemphasis on submitting to the leaders, the clever commands to not believe anything negative about the church.. yes I was there. This site may not cause those too deep in to leave, but it might save a lot of people from getting involve in the Cogs,especially the young people that may want to Google LCg,PCG,RcG e.t.c in order to make an informed decision. Many past members can be angry by their experience and the undermining done by the spiritual Zealots they encounter, I just want the posters here to remember you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
According to the body of evidence, it's Herbs ministers who have a doctorate in throwing mud, lies and revenge. And doing so while hiding behind the skirts of 'don't touch the Lords anointed.' They abuse members while hiding under their mothers bed.
Rod Meredith's body language was identical to a psychopath in my workplace. Combined with complaints of mental cruelty by people who knew him, implies a morally challenged Pharisee. It was my experience that many people warmed up to the morally challenged in the church. So I'm not surprised that Rod has his white washers or that people joined his his church.
Many of the Jehovah's Witnesses dissident web sites do a decent job of exposing the deceitful ploys used in their church. It becomes obvious that they are used in the ACOGs as well. Two examples, both Churches hide that Christ leads members directly, instead claiming that God leads the church exclusively through their leaders.
The JWs minimize Christ by claiming that He is a created angel (how can a angel pay for humanities sins?) while the ACOGs sparsely use Christs name.
It amounts to exalting the church leaders over Christ.
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