Jesus Was Left Running The WCG All Alone And Had The Sads, So I had To Step Up And Help Him Get The Church Back On Track

The Worldwide Church of God, the one and only true Church of God has experienced a dispersion because of satanic forces infiltrating the congregations and the ecclesiastical work of the Church.

Since 1986, Satan and his demons have been attacking this Church, and through human agents influenced by these powerful spirits (called wolves by the the Word of God, 

or the beasts of the field), the Worldwide Church of God has been scattered!

Samuel Kitchen's latest missive is up amd it is a masterpiece of recycled COG mythology: Herbert W. Armstrong as Moses, every other Church of God group as Korah-Dathan-Abiram, the last four decades as Israel's desert wander, and 2026 as the moment the earth is supposed to open its mouth and swallow the competition so the "true" Worldwide Church of God can finally enter the promises. The problem is that the promises already left the building decades ago, sold the furniture, and rebranded.

The old Worldwide Church of God did not go into a noble wilderness. It went through a doctrinal implosion, a membership collapse, a name change, and a real-estate fire sale. Everything else is a constellation of splinters, each claiming to be the one faithful remnant, each collecting tithes, each announcing that this time the government of God has been correctly restored. Kitchen's version is simply the Iowa edition: an unincorporated "spiritual organism," a PO Box, AI-generated hymns, a Filipino pastor who has generously authorized him to receive "God's tithes,"

Now back to the Worldwide Church of God, after Mr Armstrong died, we see the flock scattered by the wolves.

Now the ministry vacated the Worldwide Church of God, and set up tents(organizations) surrounding the Worldwide Church of God, every man feeding in his tent. 

 

This left Jesus Christ alone responsible as HEAD OF THE WORLDWIDE CHURCH OF GOD. 

 

The old WCG did not merely "keep the Sabbath." It packaged the Mosaic calendar, three tithes, clean-and-unclean meats, British-Israelism, and submission to "God's government through one man" as the identifying marks of the true church and, in practice, as conditions of remaining in good standing. That entire system was a 20th-century reconstruction of shadows.

Hebrews is blunt: the first covenant is obsolete and aging (Hebrews 8:13). The festivals, new moons, and Sabbaths were a shadow of things to come; the substance belongs to Christ (Colossians 2:16-17). Galatians calls the return to those regulations "weak and miserable principles" and asks the Galatians if they have lost their minds. Acts 15 already settled that Gentile believers were not to be placed under the yoke of the law. Romans 7 and 10 locate righteousness in Christ, not in law-keeping as a covenant obligation.

They left the Worldwide Church of God to the wolves. It reminds me of Joseph and his brothers story they gave to Israel of how Joseph was killed. Instead they sold him OUT to the Ishamelites.So they now have organizations of their own, outside of Christ! They sell and trade the membership of the Worldwide Church of God as merchants! Just look at their trademarks! 

 

They are keeping the membership from returning and coming together as one man, to do the work of God!

And that's the ministry to blame! They are required by God to eliminate any division! That means shutting down all these cog groups. But some believe they have authority to plant a church of their own liking. But this is reserved to Christ's apostle ONLY. They are merely husbandmen of the vineyard. 

 

A New Covenant Christian is not required to treat 1970s Pasadena policy memos as binding revelation. You do not need Herbert Armstrong's understanding of the holy days to know Christ. You do not need three tithes routed through a restored "Work" to be a cheerful giver. You do not need to decide which Iowa living room is currently the Philadelphia era. The law that actually governs the believer is the law of Christ, written on the heart, fulfilled in love of God and neighbor. Looking over the shoulder at the old WCG package is not faithfulness. It is nostalgia for a covenant that has been declared obsolete.

Deuteronomy 18 is not complicated. If a man speaks in the name of the Lord and the thing does not happen, the Lord has not sent him. The 40-year wilderness clock is a self-imposed prophecy. 2026 has arrived. The earth has not swallowed UCG, LCG, COGWA, PCG, or any of the other "synagogues of Satan." The two witnesses have not stepped into the offices of Moses and Aaron. The "Worldwide" church remains a handful of people on Zoom plus a man who flies to Pasadena, Canada, Italy, and Jerusalem to represent an organization that no longer exists in the form he describes.

Add the family lore: his father was "used as a prophet" to restart the Zerubbabel work; the son was baptized and had hands laid on him under that prophetic authority; he now functions as the remaining voice warning the other groups to repent and come home to Iowa. That is not the New Testament pattern of prophets tested by the church. That is a hereditary restoration franchise. HWA himself already failed multiple dated predictions (most famously the cluster around 1975). Building a new prophetic identity on top of that record does not make the foundation stronger. More importantly, Samule has had to justify why he bleives heis allowed to take tithe money to fund his littlle church.

A lot of buzz has been going around on my announcement of where tithes and offerings shall go. 

 

It belongs to the Worldwide Church of God. 

 

I am the sole authorized representative of the Worldwide Church of God.

Some people do not believe that. They do not believe that Mr Dicen was part of the Presbytery of God's Church. 

 

As God is my witness, after talking with him online, in phone calls, and video calls, and in letter, I found him part of the presbytery. He came to me while going through a severe trial. He felt God was moving him to establish me in the work I am to do, and to authorize me and to eventually ordain me into the ministry. 

 

I didn't seek him out. I didn't seek anyone out to ordain me or authorize me.

But he sent a letter ahead of the planned ordination, and subsequential meeting, saying that Jesus Christ was authorizing me to receive tithes and offerings. He made it clear it was not him authorizing me, but that he was merely a human tool for Christ. 

 

And so while I was preparing for flying out to the Philippines to be ordained, I received news from Mr Dicen, that he had been hired by another church group, and therefore since he was tied to that group, he could no longer be used in my ordination in the Worldwide Church of God. If I was to be ordained I would be ordained in THAT OTHER GROUP, and so he respectfully withdrew contact from me. 

 

Now some have thought everything was nullified by this action from Mr Dicen. They also have called into question whether he had such authority to give! 

 

But remember this....the authority was not the authority of Mr Dicen! It belongs to Jesus Christ! And I believe at the time Mr Dicen was part of the presbytery of the Church when Christ used him as a human instrument to instruct me and give authority to me.

Now there was no laying on of hands, from Mr Dicen. Before that occurred he left.

He announces that the money "belongs to the Worldwide Church of God" and that he is its "sole authorized representative." The entire chain of that authority runs through one man in the Philippines, Jonathan Dicen, another church hopping retrobate, who contacted him during a severe personal trial, felt God was moving him to "establish" Samuel, promised eventual ordination, and sent a letter declaring that Jesus Christ-not Dicen-was authorizing Samuel to receive tithes and offerings. Samuel insists he never sought this. Then, while he was preparing to fly to the Philippines to be ordained, Dicen accepted a job with another church group, withdrew, and made it clear that any ordination would now have to happen inside that other group. No laying on of hands ever occurred. The human instrument left. The letter remains.

Samuel's defense is that the authority was never Dicen's anyway. It was Christ's. Therefore the withdrawal changes nothing. At the moment the letter was written, Dicen was "part of the presbytery," and that is enough.

This is not how authorization works in any functioning church, ancient or modern. It is how a claim survives after the only person who was supposed to confer it walks away. A letter written by a man who then joined a competitor is now treated as an irrevocable act of Christ. The planned ordination evaporated, the "presbytery" connection lasted only as long as Dicen's trial and his subsequent job offer, and yet the collection authority is declared permanent. That is not apostolic succession. 

The New Covenant does not require anyone to send money to a man whose entire ministerial pipeline collapsed before the plane took off. Giving in the New Testament is cheerful, proportional, and directed toward actual needs and actual gospel work-not routed through a self-declared sole representative of a church that exists as an unincorporated spiritual organism headquartered in the conviction that a withdrawn letter still counts. Christ does not need a middleman whose sponsor immediately took a position with another group. The old WCG's three-tithe machinery and "the Work" apparatus died with the institution that created them. Trying to reboot the collection plate on the strength of a letter from a man who then left is not restoration. It is improvisation.

Forty years in the wilderness was supposed to end with the earth swallowing the rivals and the faithful entering the promises. Instead it has ended with a man explaining why an unfinished, retracted authorization still makes him the only lawful recipient of God's tithe. The letter from the Philippines does not change that. It only makes the claim smaller, more isolated, and easier to see for what it is: one more attempt to keep a dead corporation's cash-flow theology alive after every human who was supposed to validate it has already moved on.

Is PCG Starting to Erase Gerald Flurry Even Before He Dies?

When Herbert W. Armstrong died in 1986, the Worldwide Church of God did not immediately torch the empire. It took a few careful years of "clarifications," "updates," and "new understandings" before the leadership finished sanding his name off the furniture. By the time they were done, the church no longer resembled the organization he built. Members who noticed too early were the problem. Members who noticed too late were told they were wrong and needed to believe the new thing. Classic. 

Remember: all of that happened after he was safely in the ground. 

The Philadelphia Church of God appears to have studied that playbook and decided the original version was inefficient. Why wait for the funeral when you can start the renovation while the man is still sitting in the chair?

Gerald Flurry spent decades insisting he was not merely another minister recycling Armstrong's leftovers. He was "That Prophet." He was the "King of Israel." He received new revelation. He received new understandings. He received titles the way some people collect COG literature. The work was not just "continuing" Herbert Armstrong. It was advancing. God was speaking now, through him. That was the entire sales pitch. That is why people stayed. That is why families were cut off. That is why the no-contact policy existed. That is why the books kept coming. 

And now, according to a letter published by the Exit and Support Network, the big closing argument of King Gerry's reign is... HWA WAS RIGHT? 

It's like PCG is erasing Gerald Flurry.

September 16, 2026

With the PCG having "that prophet" and the "king of Israel" all these years, all they can come up with at the end of King Gerry's reign is HWA WAS RIGHT?

"King Gerry" must feel like a fool. Every "new understanding," every "prophecy," every "revelation from God" has been for nothing. It's like they are erasing him and his work. 

 

The current membership of the Philadelphia Church of God is estimated [since 2025] to be around 2,300 people worldwide, with roughly 1,400 in the United States.-[name withheld] 

That is a special kind of comedy. You spend thirty-plus years telling people that God raised you up as the next indispensable office after Elijah, you write booklet after booklet of fresh light, you rearrange prophecy around your own titles, you demand standing ovations for "the throne," and the organization's late-stage marketing slogan is a return to the previous guy. The one who, inconveniently, said he was not a prophet in the sense Flurry claimed to be. 

This is not happening in a vacuum. Stephen Flurry has been moving into the frame for years: Key of David, Trumpet Daily, campaigns, the public face of the work. Recent reports describe language on the program being adjusted so that Gerald's name recedes and the son's presence expands. That is not subtle succession planning. That is interior decorating while the current occupant is still in the living room. Lil' Stevie is making his mark. Total control now prevents other ambitious men from imagining they might inherit the keys. The heir who grows up inside the palace does not need a civil war. He only needs the old king's revelations to become optional. 

The gaslighting potential here is exquisite, even by Church of God standards. WCG members at least had the courtesy of a dead founder before the rewrite. PCG members get to watch the living founder's unique catalog quietly demoted while they are still expected to treat yesterday's "new truth" as yesterday's new truth. Do not notice the shift. Do not compare the old sermons to the new emphasis. Do not ask what all those extra titles were for if the finale is a nostalgia campaign for Herbert Armstrong. If you notice, you have a government problem.

Membership estimates from people watching the group from the outside hover around 2,300 worldwide. Official claims have always been more generous. Either way, this is not a movement so large that it can afford to look confused about which man God is currently using. A shrinking high-demand group that spent a generation insisting its leader was uniquely commissioned now appears to be backing slowly toward the safer brand: the dead apostle whose copyrights they fought a court case to own. 

The irony writes itself. Flurry founded PCG because he said the WCG was erasing Armstrong. The organization that exists to prevent that kind of erasure now looks, to at least some of its own former members, like it is practicing a live-action version on its own founder. Not because the doctrines suddenly became embarrassing in public. Because the succession needs a cleaner story. "HWA was right" is a simpler product than "and also all of these later revelations that only one man received."

King Gerry must feel like a fool, the letter says. That may be the kindest possible reading. The less kind reading is that the people around him have already decided which parts of the catalog are transferable and which parts were just the old man's personal branding. The transferable part is Armstrong. The disposable part is everything that made Flurry indispensable.

WCG waited until the casket was closed. PCG is apparently trying the same renovation with the lights still on. Members who spent years defending every new title, every new prophecy, every new understanding now get to discover that the safest slogan left in the building is the name of the man who died in 1986.

When Prophecy Failed, The Churches Began: How 1844 Reached Herbert Armstrong

The Millerite movement of the 1830s and 1840s was not a denomination. It was an interdenominational millennial revival that formed during the Second Great Awakening, then shattered after a failed date for the Second Coming. From that wreckage came several distinct families of churches. Some kept Sunday and traditional views of the soul. Some adopted the Saturday Sabbath. Some spiritualized the return of Christ. Some later produced new prophetic systems of their own. Seventh-day Adventists, the Church of God (Seventh Day), the Bible Student movement that became Jehovah's Witnesses, and the later Worldwide Church of God of Herbert W. Armstrong all stand, at different distances, in that lineage. Joseph Smith's Latter-day Saint movement was not a child of Millerism, but it grew in the same burned-over religious climate and offered a competing millennial program. 

William Miller and the Logic of 1843-1844

William Miller (1782-1849) was a farmer and Baptist lay preacher from Low Hampton, New York. A veteran of the War of 1812, he passed through a period of deism before returning to the Bible with the determination of a man who wanted chronology rather than mystery. His key text was Daniel 8:14: "Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed." Using the day-for-a-year principle common among Protestant historicists, he dated the starting point to Artaxerxes' decree of 457 B.C. and concluded that the 2,300 years ended "about the year 1843." In his mind the "sanctuary" was the earth, to be cleansed by fire at Christ's visible return. 

Miller began preaching publicly in 1831. He was not, at first, a date-setter in the sensational sense. He spoke of a window rather than a day. Under pressure from a swelling movement, he later narrowed the period to the Jewish year running from March 21, 1843, to March 21, 1844. When that year passed, he admitted disappointment but still insisted the advent was near. A further Karaite-calendar date in April 1844 also failed. The movement did not collapse, because Millerism was more than a calendar. It was a premillennial protest against the dominant postmillennial optimism of American Protestantism-the belief that missions, revivals, and reform would gradually usher in the kingdom. 

Millerites expected a sudden, catastrophic coming. Estimates of adherents at the peak range from 50,000 to more than 100,000, with a much larger penumbra of hearers. They came from Baptist, Methodist, Congregational, Presbyterian, and Christian Connection churches. The movement was never meant to be a new church. It was a warning inside existing churches. That is why its later children look so different from one another: they inherited a prophetic method and an advent hope, not a finished ecclesiastical constitution. 

Joshua V. Himes: Publicist of the Midnight Cry

Miller supplied the exegesis. Joshua Vaughan Himes (1805-1895) supplied the megaphone. Himes was pastor of Boston's Chardon Street Chapel, a Christian Connection minister, and already a reformer with abolitionist connections. After hearing Miller in 1839 he became convinced and asked the blunt question that launched a national campaign: if Miller really believed this, why was the warning not going everywhere? Himes then did what few rural preachers could do. He organized.

In March 1840 he launched Signs of the Times in Boston, the first major Millerite paper, later followed by New York's Midnight Cry. He published editions of Miller's lectures, hundreds of tracts, and the famous 1842 prophetic chart designed by Charles Fitch and Apollos Hale. He arranged general conferences beginning in Boston in October 1840, booked lecture tours into the great eastern cities and as far west as Cincinnati, and commissioned what was then one of the largest canvas tents in the United States. Camp meetings, lithographs, reading rooms, and a network of agents turned a regional curiosity into a mass media event. Historians have called it an unprecedented religious publicity campaign for its time. 

Himes never wanted a new sect. After 1844 he spent decades trying to hold Adventists together, then helped shape the Sunday-keeping bodies that emerged from the Albany Conference. Late in life he drifted away from organized Adventism after factional fighting and personal strain. His historical importance remains: without Himes, Miller would likely have remained a New England itinerant. With Himes, Millerism became a national crisis of expectation. 

The Seventh-Month Movement and the Great Disappointment

The spring of 1844 was already a disappointment. Then, at an Exeter, New Hampshire, camp meeting in August 1844, Samuel S. Snow preached what became known as the "true midnight cry" or seventh-month message. Linking Daniel 8:14 to the typology of the Day of Atonement, and using a Karaite reckoning of the tenth day of the seventh month, he fixed October 22, 1844, as the day Christ would come. Miller and Himes accepted the date only late and reluctantly. Many ordinary believers embraced it with total seriousness. Some neglected harvests. Some settled affairs. Some waited together through the night. 

October 22 ended like any other day. Hiram Edson's later recollection captured the mood: "Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before." The episode entered history as the Great Disappointment. Popular caricatures of Millerites in white robes on rooftops were exaggerated, but the emotional and social cost was real. Believers had been expelled from churches, mocked in the press, and left without a date to organize their lives around. Miller himself lived until 1849, still expecting the advent soon, but his public authority was broken. 

The movement then fractured along three rough lines. Some spiritualized the event and said Christ had come invisibly or that the kingdom was already inward. Some concluded the chronology was wrong and looked for new dates or simply for nearness without dates. A smaller group said the date was right but the event was wrong: something of cosmic importance had occurred, but not on earth. That last path led to Seventh-day Adventism. 

Albany, the Evangelical Adventists, and the American Millennial Association

In April 1845, Miller, Himes, Josiah Litch, Sylvester Bliss, and others convened the Mutual Conference of Adventists in Albany, New York. About sixty delegates tried to define "the original advent faith," reject fanaticism, and keep evangelism open rather than accept a "shut door" that closed probation for the world. They produced a ten-point statement that kept premillennial advent hope but dropped specific dating. They also rejected emerging Sabbatarian claims and claims of special illumination. The Albany body became the institutional trunk of Sunday-keeping Adventism. 

From that trunk came the group later called Evangelical Adventists. In 1858 they organized the American Millennial Association in Boston, associated with the Advent Herald (later Messiah's Herald). They were distinctive among Adventist heirs in holding to the conscious state of the dead and eternal punishment of the wicked-positions closer to Miller's own Baptist inheritance than to the conditional immortality that many other Adventists adopted from George Storrs and related teachers. They formed state conferences and tried to remain a respectable evangelical Adventist body. They did not last. Younger members drifted into other churches; by the early twentieth century the denomination had virtually disappeared from the census of religious bodies. Their importance is genealogical: they show that the "main line" of Millerism after Albany was not Seventh-day Adventism, but a Sunday, immortal-soul Adventism that eventually evaporated. 

Another Albany descendant, organized more firmly in 1860, became the Advent Christian Church. It kept Sunday worship, rejected Ellen White's visions, and commonly taught conditional immortality. It survives in modest numbers. A related Life and Advent Union, associated with Storrs, later merged into that stream. These groups matter because they preserved Miller's advent emphasis while discarding both Sabbatarianism and the 1844 sanctuary reinterpretation. 

Seventh-day Adventists: Date Right, Event Wrong

The Sabbatarian remnant took a different road. On October 23, 1844, Hiram Edson reported a conviction, while crossing a field near Port Gibson, New York, that the sanctuary to be cleansed was in heaven, not on earth. Christ had entered the Most Holy Place to begin a final work of atonement. That idea, developed with O. R. L. Crosier and others, became the doctrine of the heavenly sanctuary and, later, investigative judgment. Rachel Oakes Preston, a Seventh Day Baptist, introduced the Saturday Sabbath to Adventists at Washington, New Hampshire. Joseph Bates, James White, and Ellen Harmon (later Ellen G. White) fused Sabbath, sanctuary, and continuing advent hope. Ellen White's visions gave the small group cohesion after 1844. The name Seventh-day Adventist was adopted in 1860; the General Conference was organized in 1863. 

This was not a simple continuation of Miller's system. Albany Adventists had rejected both the Sabbath and claims of prophetic illumination. The Sabbatarians insisted they were the true heirs because they kept Miller's historicist method and the significance of 1844, while correcting the nature of the event. Over time, they became by far the largest Millerite descendant, adding health reform, education, and a global mission structure that Miller never imagined. They also inherited the movement's apocalyptic intensity and its suspicion that most of Christendom had failed the advent test. 

Church of God (Seventh Day): Sabbatarians Without Ellen White

Not all Sabbath-keeping Adventists accepted Ellen White. Gilbert Cranmer (1814-1903), a former Methodist and Christian Connection preacher who had been a Millerite by 1843, accepted the Sabbath in 1852 through Joseph Bates but later rejected the Whites' authority. In 1858 his Michigan group separated from the circle around James and Ellen White. Independent Iowa Sabbatarians joined them. The Hope of Israel, begun in 1863 and later The Bible Advocate, spread the message. A General Conference of the Church of God was organized in 1884; the body later took the name Church of God (Seventh Day), often abbreviated COG7. 

COG7 shared with Seventh-day Adventists the Saturday Sabbath, conditional immortality or related non-traditional views of the dead, and advent expectation. It rejected the investigative judgment as formulated by the Whites, rejected Ellen White as a prophetic authority, and generally held a more congregational, Bible-only ethos-"my Bible and only my Bible," in Cranmer's slogan. The church later split (notably in 1933 between Denver and Salem conferences). It remained small compared with the Seventh-day Adventist Church, but it became the immediate institutional ancestor of Armstrongism. 

Jehovah's Witnesses: A Later Adventist Mutation

Jehovah's Witnesses are not Seventh-day Adventists, and they do not claim Miller as founder. Their path is nonetheless Adventist. Charles Taze Russell (1852-1916), raised Presbyterian then Congregational, lost confidence in hellfire and election, then recovered faith after hearing Adventist preaching, especially Jonas Wendell, around 1868-1870. He studied with Second Adventists such as George Stetson and absorbed the conditionalist teachings of George Storrs. In 1876 he partnered with Nelson H. Barbour, a former Millerite editor of Herald of the Morning. Barbour taught that Christ had returned invisibly in 1874 and that the "Gentile Times" would end in 1914. 

This was Millerism revised rather than abandoned. The historicist year-day method remained. Failed visible dates were reinterpreted as invisible events. After splitting with Barbour, Russell launched Zion's Watch Tower in 1879 and built the Bible Student movement through books and tracts. After Russell's death in 1916, Joseph F. Rutherford centralized the organization; the name Jehovah's Witnesses was adopted in 1931. Distinctive Witness teachings-no immortal soul, no hellfire, rejection of the Trinity, an invisible presence of Christ, and a succession of revised end-time dates-grew from this Adventist-restorationist soil, not from Geneva or Rome. Britannica and standard histories of Adventism therefore list the Witnesses among the successful modern groups that emerged, at one or two removes, from the Millerite crisis. 

Armstrongism: COG7, Radio, and the God Family

Herbert W. Armstrong (1892-1986) entered the story through the Church of God (Seventh Day). In the mid-1920s his wife Loma accepted the Sabbath under the influence of Oregon COG7 members. Armstrong's own study led him to Saturday observance, rejection of mainstream holidays he considered pagan, and a fiercely biblicist, anti-traditional posture. He was ordained in the Oregon Conference of the Church of God (Seventh Day) in 1931 and wrote for The Bible Advocate. He then added doctrines COG7 did not officially require, especially British-Israelism (the idea that western nations descend from the lost tribes of Israel) and mandatory observance of the annual festivals of Leviticus 23. Credentials were withdrawn. In 1934 he began the Radio Church of God and The Plain Truth. The broadcast later became The World Tomorrow; the church was renamed the Worldwide Church of God in 1968. 

Armstrongism is therefore a grandchild of Millerism through the Sabbatarian Adventist line that refused Ellen White. It kept the seventh-day Sabbath, advent urgency, dietary concerns, and a sense of belonging to a remnant church. It added festival law, British-Israel identity, a strong hierarchical ministry, and a distinctive doctrine of God.

That doctrine is the point of sharpest departure from historic Christianity and even from most other Adventists. Armstrong taught that God is a family, not a closed Trinity of three coequal persons. At present, he said, the God family consists of two beings: the Father and the Word who became Jesus Christ. God's purpose in creating humanity is to reproduce Himself. Converted people are begotten as children of God and, at the resurrection, are to be born into that family as literal spirit-composed sons of God-"God as God is God," in the language his magazines used, while still insisting that the Father remains supreme and that no one becomes the Father or replaces Christ. Critics called this a form of deification or a God-family pluralism. Armstrong presented it as the central "mystery of the ages": man was made in God's image so that God might expand His own kind. After Armstrong's death in 1986, the Worldwide Church of God repudiated most of these teachings and moved toward evangelical Protestantism. Dozens of splinter groups preserved the older Armstrong system. 

Joseph Smith in the Same Millennial Weather

Joseph Smith (1805-1844) was not a Millerite, and Millerites generally regarded Mormonism as a rival delusion. Himes published material attacking it. The two movements nevertheless occupied the same American moment: New York's burned-over district, distrust of established churches, hunger for restoration, and expectation that history was reaching its climax. Early Mormonism was intensely millenarian. It gathered a people to build Zion as a place of refuge before the end. Smith used some of the same long-range prophetic arithmetic circulating in the culture, including 2,520-year calculations, but he rejected Miller's 1843-1844 dates. He said Christ would not come in 1844, nor within forty years, and pointed instead toward a later horizon around 1890-1891 as the earliest plausible season-itself a speculation that also failed.

The comparison is useful because it shows what Millerism was and was not. Both Smith and Miller claimed to recover neglected biblical truth against a corrupt Christendom. Both produced communities organized around imminent judgment. Mormonism built a new scripture, priesthood, and gathering place. Millerism began as a protest inside existing churches and only later generated denominations. Where Armstrong later taught that humans will enter the God family as God is God, Latter-day Saint theology developed its own exaltation teaching-that the faithful may become like God. The resemblance is analogical and cultural, not a direct line from Smith to Armstrong. Both reflect a nineteenth-century American willingness to take biblical language about children of God, heirs, and divine image with a literalism that older Protestant confessions refused. 

How the Family Tree Actually Runs

A clean genealogy would look like this:

Miller's historicist advent preaching, amplified by Himes, created a mass movement that failed on October 22, 1844.

The Albany Conference conserved a Sunday, near-advent, anti-fanatic Adventism. 

From it came the Evangelical Adventists / American Millennial Association (now gone) and the Advent Christian Church (still small).

A Sabbatarian minority reinterpreted 1844 as a heavenly event and accepted Ellen White. That became the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Another Sabbatarian minority accepted the Sabbath and advent hope but refused White's prophetic role. That became the Church of God (Seventh Day).

Second Adventist preachers and papers of the post-1844 world-Wendell, Storrs, Barbour-shaped Charles Taze Russell. His Bible Students, reorganized under Rutherford, became Jehovah's Witnesses.

From COG7, Herbert Armstrong built the Radio / Worldwide Church of God. After 1986, "Armstrongism" survived mainly in offshoot Churches of God.

Each step added or subtracted a doctrine: Sabbath or Sunday; visible or invisible advent; immortal soul or soul sleep; Trinity or binitarian/unitarian God; a prophetess or no prophetess; 1844 as heavenly judgment, 1874 as invisible presence, 1914 as the end of Gentile times, or an imminent kingdom to be announced by radio. The family resemblance is the conviction that mainstream churches had lost the plot of prophecy and that a remnant must restore it before the end. 

Conclusion

William Miller was not a charlatan in the ordinary sense. He was a sincere historicist who treated Daniel as a coded timetable and the New Testament advent hope as an event that could be scheduled. Joshua Himes proved that modern publicity can turn a private calculation into a public destiny. 

The Great Disappointment then did what failed dates usually do: it did not simply refute a prediction. It forced believers to choose among denial, revision, spiritualization, and new revelation.

That is why Armstrongism can be called a distant child of Millerism without making Miller responsible for Armstrong's God-family doctrine. The inheritance is a method and a mood: the Bible as a last-days codebook, the churches as Babylon or at least asleep, time as a line that can be measured, and salvation as entrance into a coming government of God. Seventh-day Adventists solved 1844 by moving the event to heaven. Jehovah's Witnesses solved later failed dates by making Christ's coming invisible. COG7 kept Sabbath and Scripture while refusing a modern prophet. 

Armstrong took that Sabbatarian remnant and radicalized both law and ontology, teaching that the goal of human life is not merely to see God but to become God as God is, members of an expanding divine family.

Joseph Smith's parallel career in the same decades underlines the American pattern. In a culture that had disestablished churches and democratized interpretation, millennial certainty became a form of authority. When the day passed, and Jesus did not appear in the clouds, the energy did not vanish. It institutionalized. Some institutions grew into global churches. Some dwindled into footnotes. All of them illustrate a hard lesson of religious history: a movement organized around a date can survive the date only by changing what the date meant. The children of 1844 have been arguing about that meaning ever since.

Silent Pilgrim

Former WCG Member Named One of 100 Most Influential People In Art

Time Magazine has a new article up about influential people in art, and Amy Sherald, a former WCG member, is named as one of them. We featured her here in an article on July 19, 2019. 

Former Church of God Member Is Michelle Obama's Official Portraitist

Amy Sherald Would Rather Walk Away Than Water Down Her Art

Successful artists are the product of their gifts, but as Sherald proves, they are also products of what they lacked. Sherald grew up in a home that followed the teachings of the Worldwide Church of God, which did not celebrate, among other things, birthdays, Halloween, movies, most dancing, and TV. Her home kept a Sabbath on Saturdays. Not that Sherald minded. “For me as a child who was self-conscious and introverted, I would choose to stay in and draw rather than go outside,” she says. “It was like a safe way to play that was not with other people.” Her father, a dentist, was diagnosed with Parkinson's when she was 7. She would often just sit with him. “When you have a parent that doesn't communicate well and they're also going through something they want to hide from you, it kind of opens up another way of learning about emotion and communication.”

Vogue Magazine article

Amy Sherald, Michelle Obama’s Portraitist, Readies her New York Debut

Crackpot Bob Discovers Frankenmice and Manpigs and Immediately Needs a Nap and a Tithe Increase

Crackpot Bob has once again located a scientific paper, clutched his pearls so hard they filed a restraining order, and declared the end times officially upgraded. This week's horror is "Frankenmice" and the ever-reliable "manpigs." A Stanford team grew cortical organoids from human stem cells and transplanted them into newborn mice whose own cortex had been genetically prevented from developing. The human tissue survived, expanded, made connections, and even produced some rare cell types that are hard to study any other way. The mice remained mice. They did not start quoting Shakespeare, demand voting rights, open a law firm, or start a splinter church. They just sat there being useful models for autism, schizophrenia, cerebral palsy, and frontotemporal dementia. 

Crackpot Bob read the Daily Mail headline "Rise of the Frankenmice!" and apparently stopped there. Suddenly we have "human brain tissues that are part mice," inventors of evil things, lack of natural affection, and a solemn reminder that we must sigh and cry over abominations so God can put a mark on our foreheads. He even dusted off the old half-human, half-pig video because nothing says "I am a serious Bible teacher" like recycling 2010s chimera panic. The research is explicitly not creating miniature human brains. The scientists said so. Crackpot Bob heard "half-human BRAINS" and his prophecy engine started smoking. 

This is not theology. This is content creation to keep his gullible followers whipped up in a constant state of frenzy. Fear is the product. A new "abomination" every few weeks keeps the audience anxious, dependent, and conveniently in need of the one man who is brave enough to "cry aloud and spare not" while sitting in a leather chair in front of a glowing Earth poster. The formula is reliable: take a real (if ethically debated) scientific advance, strip away the purpose and the caveats, slap on Romans 1 and Ezekiel 9, and announce that people who do not share your particular flavor of end-times anxiety have "a form of godliness but deny its power."

New Covenant Christians do not have to swallow this hogwash. The New Covenant is not a never-ending purity-code update service. Jesus did not die so that we could spend our days ranking lab mice on an abomination scale. The old "do not mix kinds" rules were about agriculture and cloth, not 21st-century organoid research aimed at understanding diseases that actually destroy families. God is not sitting in heaven clutching His copy of Mystery of the Ages because someone grew human cortical cells in a mouse so they might one day help a child with epilepsy. The "spirit in man" is not leaking out through a pipette. A mouse with a lot of human cortical tissue is still a mouse. It does not possess a human soul, a human conscience, or a human capacity for covenant with God. Pretending otherwise is just typical COG mythology.

Crackpot Bob's real objection is not ethical nuance. It is that science keeps doing things without first asking him whether they fit his last-days timeline. Knowledge increases (Daniel 12:4). That is not a bug. It is the verse. Some of that knowledge will be used foolishly. Some of it will be used to reduce suffering. Pretending every advance is an "invention of evil things" is how you keep people looking at you instead of looking at Christ. The New Covenant already told us where to look. We do not need a new monster-of-the-week to stay faithful.

The mice are not coming for your salvation. The manpigs are not forming a union or a competing splinter church. Crackpot Bob, however, will almost certainly find the next "abomination" before the organoids finish maturing. That is his actual business model. You are allowed to mock

Prepping for Petra: Armstrongism's Frequent-Flyer Program for the Faithful

God's most highly favored Crackpot Prophet popped his ecclesiastical, self-righteous cork the other day about preppers who prepare for end-time events or natural disasters when the infrastructure breaks down after some calamity. Freeze-dried foods and other prepping foods in giant containers were a black market economy in Pasadena for many years in the 70's and early 80's. It was one of the typical COG pyramid schemes that enriched those above you in the chain of sales while you killed yourself selling products and never got anything but an empty wallet.

For decades, Armstrongism sold a very specific vacation package. Not Hawaii. Not the Feast site with the better buffet. Petra, Jordan: the rose-red city half as old as time, and, if the ministers were to be believed, the only zip code God would honor once the bombs started falling and the Germans invaded the United States. One minister in my church area said that we would be kicked out of the country and forced to fly on DC-10's and 727's which had a string of deadly crashes. They would force us on those planes, hoping they would crash before we got to Jordan. COG ministers could always be found to be such amazing agents of comfort and joy. 

Then, once we made it to Jordan, the Jordanians would welcome us with open arms because God had stopped all military action happening in countries around them from reaching Jordan because of his special people who were to arrive there. The Jordanians were to be spared because we were soooooooooooo special. Then God, with a snap of his godly fingers, would instantly turn every cave into a well-furnished home with proper flooring, electricity, air conditioning, furniture, fully stocked pantries, clothing for everyone, and individual libraries in each cave that had all of Herbert Armstrong's books and articles in it. After all, we needed to memorize that material in order to teach the remaining sinful scum left over after the worldwide annihilation had ended.

Anyway, as Crackpot Bob likes to say, in the 1960s and early 1970s, members were told to keep "Petra bags" by the door-passports, Bibles, cash, good walking shoes, clean underwear, maybe a change of clothes-because the flight to the Place of Safety might come with the suddenness of a fire drill and the logistics of an airline that had not published a schedule. The 1972 date came and went. The 1975 Wonderful World Tomorrow did not arrive on time. Herbert Armstrong himself eventually snapped at the flock to get their minds off Petra, which is the prophetic equivalent of a travel agent refunding your ticket after selling you the destination for twenty years. The bags, however, never quite left the hallway.

Enter Crackpot Bob, scolding American "preppers" for stuffing 50-pound bug-out bags with tuna, flashlights, and a hand-crank radio while Grandma and the kid with the inhaler are somehow expected to yomp into the wilderness like Navy SEALs. Fair point, as far as it goes. Most families are not a National Geographic expedition. Then, without breaking stride, he explains that real prepping is scriptural: watch, pray, qualify as a Philadelphian, and wait to be whisked to a wilderness hideout that is not Montana, not Canada, and-wouldn't you know it-may well be in the general neighborhood of Petra. 

Crackpot Bob's system is the same two-class ticket Armstrongism has punched since the Radio Church of God days. Revelation 12 is read as an airline seating chart. One group-the "Philadelphian remnant," which in practice means the people who accept his particular restoration of Armstrong's mantle-gets eagle wings and a wilderness meal plan for three and a half years. The other group, conveniently labeled Laodicean, gets Satan, persecution, and the privilege of learning the hard way. This is a remarkably useful doctrine if you happen to be the man who decides which congregation is Philadelphia this decade. It turns church loyalty into a survival strategy. Miss the right split, and your bug-out bag is just luggage for the Beast.

He is not even coy about the geography. No American state is the place. No Canadian province. The candidate list still tilts toward Jordanian rock, Sela, Moab, caves, and the same Isaiah 16 / Revelation 12 collage Herman Hoeh was assembling in The Good News while members were packing those bags. Crackpot Bob hedges-Petra may be it, it might be nearby, don't be dogmatic-which is the traditional Armstrongist weather report: 90 percent chance of Petra, 10 percent chance of "God knows," 100 percent chance you should keep listening to this work.

Mocking suburban preppers for unrealistic fitness standards while maintaining a theology in which ordinary families must one day flee, wander between countries, and hole up in a desert tourist site is not "prepping for reality." It is prepping for a sermon on fear.

A Christian under the New Covenant is not a member of a travel club whose safety depends on guessing the correct Nabataean ruin. Christ's promise is not "keep your passport current and join the right era of the church." It is that nothing-tribulation included-can separate the believer from the love of God in Him. The church's vocation in hard times is witness, endurance, and love of neighbor, not a three-and-a-half-year cave internship while the rest of the Body is written off as lukewarm.

The texts Armstrongism tapes together do not require a UNESCO World Heritage Site. "Wilderness" in Revelation is the Bible's old language for God sustaining a people who cannot sustain themselves-manna, not a packing list. Jesus' warnings about flight in Judea were spoken to people who could see armies around Jerusalem, not to families in Pasadena waiting for a prophet to announce the charter flight. Luke 21:36 is about wakefulness and prayer, not about qualifying for the only lifeboat in a sea of "Laodicean" Christians.

Fear is a cheap catechism. It keeps people scanning headlines, rating other churches, and treating tomorrow's newspaper as a boarding announcement. It also happens to be excellent for holding a small religious brand together after the original 1972 departure time was missed and the original apostle is long gone.

God's Apostle and Chief Overseer Has Died!

 

The Ambassador-Apostle Who Couldn't Outrun a Foot Burn: 

Kenneth D. Jackson Sr. and the Endless Armstrongite Assembly Line 

of False Prophets

There have been conversations about this guy for more than a decade. (We reported about him here on Banned in 2014.) Apostle, Chief Overseer, Grand Chief of State, Permanent Minister of Ecclesiastical, Indigenous & International Law & Justice, Special Attorney, International CEO, Traditional Medicine physician, Inventor, and-when the mood struck-His Excellency Ambassador Kenneth D. Jackson Sr. 

Jackson was a former Worldwide Church of God member. In the grand tradition of Armstrongism, yet another man who decided he had special insight from his "god," a wooden seal of authority, and a divine mandate to wear a crown while Africans supposedly paraded him like royalty. 

A young guy who grew up in the group said Jackson claimed he had been on Herbert W. Armstrong's security detail. People who actually spent time around Pasadena and HWA's home never saw him there. Later comments from people who attended the Macon congregation in the old days were even clearer: he was a regular member who led prayers and songs. The HWA bodyguard story was one more elaborate lie. He looked familiar the way a lot of mid-level WCG faces look familiar-because they all sat through the same sermons about church eras and the one true remnant. Then they went off and started their own. 

The group he built was called Sovereign Church of 'ELOHIYM International (SCEI-1BLOOD). They kept the Sabbath, the holy days, the British-Israel flavor, the tithe-until-your-kids-have-no-inheritance model, and the conviction that everyone else was in a false church. Classic splinter DNA. Jackson taught that before HWA died, he was entrusted with one of three official WCG "seals of authority." One stayed with Armstrong, one went to Joseph Tkach, and the third-conveniently-went to him as part of God's plan to raise up the seventh and final era after Tkach inevitably apostasized. During a two-day history sermon, he produced a wooden seal. A high-level member later found a second, half-finished, damaged seal of the same wood and design sitting in the office where the "official" one had been kept. It looked exactly like a first attempt at forging the thing. The finished seal vanished after it was handed to JoAnne Jackson with a strong hint that silence would be wise. By now it has almost certainly been destroyed or buried. That single prop told you everything you needed to know about the rest of his résumé. 

Until around 2003, the sermons were still recognizable Bible studies. Coats and ties. Actual scripture. Then Jackson took a trip to Sierra Leone. The rice farms in the Bo District produced enough of a spectacle that locals staged parades and brought gifts. Adoration has a way of going to a certain kind of man's head. He came back wearing royal clothing, gold, diamonds, and a crown he had constructed for himself. Sabbath services turned into rambling recitals of his exploits, visions, prophetic powers, and ecclesiastical titles. He rarely opened the Bible anymore. Why bother when Elohiym was downloading new testimony directly into the Apostle? The church name changed from International Church of God's Elect to Sovereign Church of 'ELOHIYM International. 1BLOOD International was registered as the outreach NGO that would save West Africa with seed rice and micro-socialism under the single living Apostle who had succeeded Herbert Armstrong. 

The claims grew as fast as the titles. Millions of followers. Vast orphanages. Hospitals where the unlicensed "traditional medicine physician" performed hernia surgeries and then lectured patients about demons. Ambassador-at-Large for The Gambia. Knight of Malta. Bloodline nobility. Venture capitalists from three states and five countries lining up at the Ramada Plaza in Macon-except the raw footage shows him walking into an empty room, greeting an imaginary audience, and filming a scripted interview with Iyel Bey, a longtime member posing as an independent journalist. The entire shoot lasted about ten minutes. 

Former members were less impressed. One young man who grew up in it said the millions were actually thousands, and that more than half of them were abandoned by the church. The orphanages and outreaches were not legitimate. Families tithed until the biological children had nothing left and the "church family" came first. A mother in her sixties had nothing to show for decades of giving; when the father died, the kids paid for the funeral. Jackson's son Smoke ran the Macon operation. People who still liked the family would not speak ill of them even while watching the damage. That is how these groups keep going. 

There were darker notes. In 2013, a member, Andres Rivera-Fuentes, was arrested in Twiggs County, Georgia, after allegations involving a minor in the church; he reportedly admitted the acts. Children were described as being padlocked into trailers at night at one compound. Armed guards. Jackson told congregations that checking his words against the Bible was what only a fool would do, because Paul had no more authority than he did and Elohiym had already confirmed him through healings and interventions. He compared himself to Moses. The charisma was real. So was the demand that members stop thinking. 

This is the Armstrongite production line. Herbert Armstrong claimed unique restoration of truth and apostolic authority. After he died, the church fractured into scores of self-righteous and self-appointed men who each decided they were the next one: Flurry, Pack, Weinland, Thiel, Meredith, and the rest. Jackson simply added a crown, an African rice narrative, and the word Elohiym spelled with an apostrophe. Same playbook. Same one-true-church claim. Same financial extraction. Same allergy to verification. Same habit of declaring critics agents of Satan. He even managed to sound like Buffalo Bill "Ysrael" Hawkins of the House of Yahweh-another man who took Armstrong's framework and ran it into even stranger territory.

Jackson spent his later years in West Africa. In September 2026, family sources confirmed he had died from health complications after a chemical burn to his foot. The man who received direct visions from the Most High, who wore a crown on the Sabbath, who told people not to check the Bible because he was the authority, was taken out by a burn on his foot. Leadership passed to his son, Bishop Kenneth D. "Smoke" Jackson Jr. His wife, JoAnne, had already predeceased him. The compound on Sgoda Road in the Macon area was described by a nearby observer as run-down while the organization continued collecting thousands a month. He was never HWA's security. He was never given a seal of authority. He was never an ambassador appointed by any government that would admit it. He was one more product of a movement that teaches ambitious men they can declare themselves apostles, collect the tithe, and wait for the world to notice. The world mostly didn't. A chemical burn did. The rest of the Armstrongite remnant will keep producing the next one. They always do.

Hat tip to SCEI-1 Blood Cult Watch

Also see: 

The COG's Biggest Chief Overseer; Apostle; Grand Chief of State; Permanent Minister of Ecclesiastical, Indigenous & International Law & Justice; Special Attorney; International CEO; Traditional Medicine physician; Inventor