How Three Cousins of 1844 Treated Doctors

Millerite descendants spent more than a century arguing with the stethoscope. Some of them built hospitals. Some of them built doctrines that treated hospitals as a lack of faith. A few of them did both at once, which is the most American solution possible.

The family tree is simple enough. William Miller's 1844 disappointment splintered into Adventist streams. From that soil came Seventh-day Adventists, the Bible Students who became Jehovah's Witnesses, and later Herbert W. Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God. They did not share one medical creed. They shared a habit: reading James 5:14 ("call for the elders... anointing him with oil") as if Luke, "the beloved physician," had never existed.

Adventism

In 1849 Ellen White told believers not to "dishonor God by applying to earthly physicians," but to apply to "the God of Israel." That was not an eccentric footnote. Nineteenth-century medicine was often heroic, toxic, and useless. Bleeding, calomel, and guesswork made prayer look comparatively scientific.

By the early 1850s she walked it back. Prayer of faith, yes; fanatical refusal of "simple remedies," no. The 1863 health-reform vision then gave Adventism its signature package: vegetarian emphasis, no tobacco or alcohol, suspicion of stimulant drinks, hydrotherapy, fresh air, and a moral duty to treat the body as a temple. The point was prevention and "rational" treatment, not a vow to die of appendicitis for Jesus.

Then they did the unfashionable thing. They built institutions. Battle Creek Sanitarium. Loma Linda. Today the Adventist health network is routinely described as the largest Protestant healthcare system on earth-hundreds of hospitals and clinics, millions of visits a year, a flagship academic medical center that does heart transplants and Alzheimer's trials. Loma Linda, here in CA, is a town which has a population of 24,000 where close to 1/2 of its residents are Adventists.

The stereotype that "SDAs avoid doctors and just don't eat meat" is half true. Official Adventism endorses evidence-based care and whole-person lifestyle medicine. Vegetarianism is strongly encouraged, not a substitute for antibiotics. Some members still lean harder into natural remedies than their oncologist would like. That is a tension inside a church that also employs armies of surgeons. Holistic is not the same as anti-medical. One of those built Loma Linda. The other built obituaries.

Jehovah's Witnesses

Jehovah's Witnesses did not inherit a general ban on physicians. They seek hospitals. They do not market themselves as faith healers. Their distinctive medical wound was blood. From 1945 onward, "abstain from blood" (Acts 15) was read as a ban on transfusions. Whole blood was forbidden. Over decades the policy developed the texture of a tax code: fractions became conscience matters, some procedures were permitted, others were not. Children died. Courts intervened. Hospital ethics committees learned to diagram blood products like rabbinic food laws.

In 2026 the Governing Body moved again. In March, use of a patient's own stored blood became a personal decision. On September 18, 2026, red cells, white cells, plasma, and platelets from a donor became matters of individual conscience. Whole-blood transfusion remains prohibited. Official language is careful: the Bible "does not comment" on components, so conscience applies. Blood is still "sacred." God is not described as having been wrong. The teaching is described as an adjustment.

That is theologically tidy and historically late. For eighty years the same texts were treated as clear enough to risk excommunication and death. After enough funerals, lawsuits, and clinical workarounds, the four main components of blood discovered they had been matters of conscience all along. Members may still refuse everything. Doctors are now warned not to assume a Witness will refuse components. The practical result is that most modern transfusion medicine is suddenly compatible with remaining a Witness in good standing-except the one product labeled "whole."

If that sounds like a revelation that arrived after the bill came due, that is because it does.

Armstrongism

Herbert W. Armstrong taught the hard version. Healing was included in Christ's sacrifice. James 5 was the protocol. Doctors existed to teach diet and "nature's laws," not to heal after you were sick. Trusting "doctors and medicines instead of Christ" was putting another god before Him. Medicines were spoken of as poisons. Members heard, in print and from the pulpit, that calling the elders-not the ER-was obedience.

The doctrine had a body count. Former ministers have described members, including children with treatable infections, who followed the booklet instead of the hospital. The church did not always publish a formal "you are expelled if you see a doctor" statute. It did not need one. When eternal life is hanging on whether you trusted Christ or "dope," most people get the hint.

Headquarters was less heroic. By the 1970s it was an open secret that leading men used surgeons and clinics. Armstrong himself wrote about physicians visiting his home, recuperated in European clinics, received CPR when his heart stopped, and in December 1985 discussed his doctor's advice about transfusions while describing daily medical visits and angina. He died in January 1986 after months of intensive medical management. The man who told the church that healing was already paid for spent his last chapter surrounded by doctors.

After his death the parent church reversed course. Joseph Tkach's reforms said seeking medical attention and having faith "need NOT be OPPOSITES." God had nowhere commanded Christians to avoid checkups, medicines, inoculations, or surgery. Split-off Armstrongist groups still argue about how much of the old booklet to keep. The pattern is familiar: the rule is fiercest when it is applied downward.

Faith

Faith can steady a person in a hospital bed. It cannot culture bacteria, type blood, or reduce a fracture. The Bible's own cast list includes a physician as an author. Israel had midwives and wound care. Jesus spit in dirt and also told people to show themselves to the priests-the public-health officers of the day. None of that reads like a command to treat insulin as idolatry.

The recurring failure in these movements was not prayer. It was the claim that using the brain God allegedly issued was a rival sacrament. That claim is easy to preach and expensive to live. Leaders who can fly to Bucharest for a clinic stay, get penile implants, or parse blood into fractions until the ban is mostly a slogan, are not living the same risk as a parent told that a spinal-meningitis protocol is a test of loyalty.

God, if one is being theological about it, also allowed germ theory, anesthesia, vaccines, and the training of people who can stop a hemorrhage. Calling that "man's wisdom" while swallowing the fruits of it in private is not holiness. It is Bible pettiness at its worst

Prevention, diet, rest, and refusing to worship the pharmaceutical industry are not crazy. Adventists got some of that right early, and epidemiology later caught up in places like Loma Linda. What does not follow is the leap from "the body is a temple" to "the temple must never admit a surgeon." Temples in the ancient world had maintenance staff. Modern ones have attending physicians.

The honest synthesis is boring and adult: pray, then take the child to the hospital. Anoint with oil if desired, then consent to the component that keeps the brain from dying. Eat the vegetables. Do not confuse a leader's "new light" with a refund for the people who died under the old light. God may or may not heal. Doctors, at minimum, show up.

Dave Pack's Avoiding Accountability Master Class: Minimizing

 

David C. Pack's Avoiding Accountability Master Class: Minimizing

Anyone who thinks that David C. Pack of The Restored Church of God is not diabolical needs to watch this video. During "The Greatest Untold Story! (Part 650)," given on September 19, 2026, he ridiculed members who left because they got "hung up" on him falsely preaching dates for the coming of the Kingdom of God.

The Pastor General equates the knowledge of his made-up 7.5-year kingdom to be a blue whale and the concern over him setting false dates 145 times since 2013 as a minnow. And a gnat. And a fly. In addition to him minimizing his own actions to avoid accountability, he also blames those who have concerns by accusing them of disbelief in God's Kingdom.

Part 650 is a Master Class in brainwashing manipulation.

Marc Cebrian
exrcg.org

Why Different Races: Crackpot Bob Takes Another Lap Around Herbert’s Favorite Rabbit Hole

God's most highly favored prophet had these words of wisdom today in an article where he talks about race. Never in my life have I read anything as astounding as this! God truly worked miracles when he created Crackpot Bob's brain. This dude is supercharged with intelligence!

• Many people live in countries where their race dominates. They learn various lessons.
• Some people live in countries where their race is highly discriminated against. They learn various lessons.
• Some people live in countries more accepting of multiple races. They learn various lessons.
• And there are variations among those scenarios, which partially result in learning various lessons.

On September 28, 2026, while the Churches of God were at the Feast sites and while most of the planet was busy being a planet, Crackpot Bob of the improperly named "Continuing" Church of God published "Why different races, different hair colors, etc.?" It is not new. It is the same "Mystery of Race" lecture he has been giving for years, now re-upholstered for the Feast of Tabernacles season like a motel bedspread that has seen one too many self-appointed prophets.

The argument, boiled down until the bones show, is this:

• Evolution is a lie because a suntan is not heritable and Jeremiah 13:23 says a Cushite cannot change his skin.
• All humans come from Adam, Eve, and then Noah's three sons and their conveniently color-coded wives.
• Cush means "black." Some of Phut's kids are also black. Ambassador College said so in 1968, and 1968 Ambassador College is still the gold standard of physical anthropology if your laboratory is a Pasadena basement and your peer reviewers are already dead.
• No race is spiritually superior. Salvation is for everybody. Variety exists so that in the Kingdom we can all love each other more creatively. Different heights, hair colors, and melanin levels are God's way of assigning unique homework before eternity.

It is the theological equivalent of saying "I'm not racist, I have a Black friend who will be in the first resurrection too, just not from the same tribe that got the birthright."

Armstrongism did not invent racial taxonomy. It inherited it when it co-opted British-Israelism - the 19th-century parlor game that decided the lost tribes of Israel packed up after the Assyrian conquest, wandered around Europe, and eventually became the British, the Americans, the Canadians, the Australians, and whoever else needed a prophetic participation trophy. Herbert W. Armstrong turned that parlor game into a multimedia empire.

Old Worldwide Church of God teaching held that God "does not want the different races to mix socially or to intermarry." Social mixing starts in school, they warned. Ambassador College was late and reluctant to admit Black students. Congregations were often de facto segregated. Black members in Chicago and elsewhere recalled being told, as children, that whites sat at the top of a biblically ordained hierarchy and that even heaven would keep the seating chart. Herbert himself wrote that Jesus had to be of "the original pure racial strain, even as Noah was." "Perfect in his generations" was read as a genetics certificate. Our minister in Dayton mentioned many times that when the millennium started, everyone would go back to their ethnic nation of origin, which meant blacks would return to Africa and ethnic South Americans would return to South America, and Asians back to Asia.

None of this required shouting slurs. It only required a prophecy chart that mapped physical blessings onto specific modern nations and then treated everyone else as supporting cast. You can love the extras and still write the script so that Ephraim and Manasseh keep the best lines.

Crackpot Bobl has spent years insisting he is not that. He is "predominantly Gentile" himself, he says. Salvation is not a racial issue. He is not Christian Identity. He just happens to still publish an entire book called Lost Tribes and Prophecies that assigns the English-speaking world the starring role in end-time catastrophe and, later, in the Millennium's administrative class. He still quotes the 1968 Ambassador College race booklet as if it were a primary source instead of a period piece. He still needs Cush to mean black so the Table of Nations can do the work that genetics and archaeology refuse to do.

The spiritual-equality paragraphs are the insurance policy. The tribal identification is the product.

Today's article performs the familiar two-step:

• Deny evolution with a verse about skin color that was never written as a genetics paper.
• Affirm that God likes variety the way a collector likes different stamps - then immediately sort the stamps back into Shem, Ham, and Japheth drawers.

"You cannot change your race," Crackpot Bob writes, as if anyone in 2026 were trying to file an amendment. The sentence is doing pastoral work. It reassures readers who grew up being told that certain unions were "against God's law of kinds" that the old categories still have divine backing, even if the pastor now adds a disclaimer about the Kingdom being a big, loving potluck.

The purpose of racial difference, we are told, is so that people learn different lessons in this life and can therefore contribute unique flavors of love later. It is a charming thought until you remember the institution that produced it once taught that some of those "lessons" included knowing your place in a hierarchy that just happened to look like the American 1950s.

Armstrongism has always been better at announcing that racism is over than at noticing the architecture it left standing. Thiel's version is the polite remodel: same floor plan, new paint, a plaque that says "All Welcome" next to the genealogy chart that still has the good parking spots reserved.

The piece is not really about hair color. Hair color is the decoy. The real subject is continuity. A tiny church that claims to be the Philadelphian remnant cannot admit that one of its founders' central interpretive keys - the physical identification of modern nations with ancient tribes - was a racialized 19th-century hobby horse that caused real harm to real people in the pews. So the lecture returns, year after year, like a relative who will not stop bringing the same casserole.

Critics have been calling this out for decades. Former members, Black and white, have described the quiet ranking, the intermarriage panic, the Millennium as a place where the nations stay in their lanes. Crackpot Bob's response is always the same: those people are scoffers, the Bible is clear, and anyway he has a video.

The video is 22 minutes long. It asks whether one race is superior and answers no. It does not ask why a church that spent fifty years acting as if some nations were prophetically more important than others still needs a 1968 booklet to explain why some people have darker skin.

Armstrongism's racial problem was never only the occasional ugly sentence. It was the system that made ancestry destiny, then called the destiny "prophecy," then called the prophecy "love." Crackpot Bob has sanded the edges. He has not replaced the machine.

The latest post is not a breakthrough. It is a man standing on a stack of his predecessor's books, pointing at the same wall chart, and announcing that variety is beautiful - as long as you remember which branch of the family tree you came from, and which blessings were promised to which branch, and which branch is currently being punished for forgetting the Sabbath.

Some things, as Jeremiah might have said if he had a blog, a Cushite cannot change. And neither, apparently, can a church.

Why Are So Many COG Leaders and Members Who Claim 1st Century Christianity Tend To Be Such Abusive Bullies?

Anyone who has attended a COG for any extended period of time has come face to face with bully ministers, elders, deacons, deaconesses, ministers' wives, and regular members. There are several reasons for this appalling behavior. 

• The corrupt teaching of church government, top-down control
• The complete lack of confidentiality when members counsel with ministers
• Ministers' wives who gossip about members' problems
• Ordaining incompetent and/or unworthy men
• That church members are somehow more special than the rest of humanity, especially other Christians
• The complete inability for restoration if a person had "sinned" due to gossip

I am sure many more reasons can also be listed here (add to comments).

I think the main problem arises from the "proper" church government that all of the splinter churches use as a distinctive mark for pretending they are practicing 1st-century Christianity- which, incidentally, is not a single COG group's practice. There has never been a COG that has practiced 1st-century Christianity. Not one single group, and especially those that crow that they do. They are liars to claim they do so.

It is easy to do research on 1st-century believers and how the church operated. While they were Christ followers, they were still Jewish. That is why so many COG groups pretend to be Jewish, in name only.

First-century Christianity, we are solemnly informed by various Armstrongist groups, has been faithfully restored. The Sabbath is kept. The holy days are observed. The "true gospel" of the coming Kingdom is preached. And, most importantly, the government of God is once again operating on earth through a single, specially chosen human channel at the top of a very tidy pyramid.

How convenient that the primitive church of Acts just happened to look like a mid-20th-century media ministry with headquarters, ranks, and an apostle who needed to be obeyed in matters ranging from makeup to medicine.

First-century Christianity emphasized local, relational communities with servant-oriented leadership, voluntary mutual care, and a restoration-focused process for discipline-not centralized control over members' personal lives.

Armstrongism claimed to restore "true" primitive Christianity through Sabbath-keeping, holy days, and other distinctive doctrines, but its top-down "government of God," extensive lifestyle rules, and fear-based discipline produced patterns of control that do not match the New Testament or earliest extra-biblical sources. This became fertile breeding ground for bullies.

In Jerusalem after Pentecost, believers shared possessions voluntarily so that there was not a needy person among them. Property remained theirs to keep or give; Ananias and Sapphira were judged for lying, not for failing to surrender everything. Deacons were appointed when widows were neglected. People ate together in homes. Later letters assume collections for the poor, not a mandatory multi-tithe system flowing upward to support an expanding headquarters and an apostle's lifestyle. The Didache told communities to appoint humble bishops and deacons who were "not lovers of money," to reconcile before gathering, and to test itinerant apostles: don't let them stay too long or solicit cash. When have you ever seen a humble COG leader? 

Reproof was to be done "not in anger but in peace." Itinerant apostles and prophets were tested: they were not to stay long or solicit money. When have you ever seen correction or reproof done lovingly? Anger fills the hearts of the leaders and ministers who lash out at members for perceived faults. In Armstrongism, church leaders and most ministers are for life (though more and more tend to be retiring). The church leaders solicit money and remain in place until hell freezes over or they die.

Leadership in the New Testament was local and plural. Apostles appointed elders in churches. Those elders were to be gentle, hospitable, able to teach, not violent or greedy, and they were explicitly told not to lord it over the flock. By the time of 1 Clement, there is concern for orderly succession and not casually deposing appointed men, but nothing resembling one man in Pasadena (or Edmond, or Cincinnati, or Grover Beach, or Charlotte) directing every congregation's finances, dating rules, and medical decisions.

Jesus outlined a graduated process: private confrontation, then one or two witnesses, then the church; if unrepentant, treat the person as an outsider (Matthew 18:15-17). Paul applied this to grave, unrepentant immorality (1 Corinthians 5) and to factious people after two warnings (Titus 3:10). The stated goals were protection of the community, shame leading to repentance, and eventual restoration (2 Corinthians 2). Members were also told to test teachings (Acts 17:11) and to correct one another gently (Galatians 6:1). Excommunication existed, but it was not the first or default tool for disagreement with leaders.

The members' job is to submit to "the government of God" as represented by whoever currently occupies the top office. Humble service was apparently optional once the organizational chart was laminated. Once it was laminated, the bullies had a field day.

Armstrong taught that God governs the church through a pyramidal hierarchy. Armstrongism solved this inconvenience by discovering that God prefers a pyramid: Father → Christ → Apostle (Pastor General) → evangelists → pastors → elders → members. 

Question the hierarchy, the extra-biblical distinctives, or the apostle's unique role, and the process often jumped straight to disfellowshipping. Discipline in the first century followed a process: private conversation, then witnesses, then the church. The goal was restoration. Grave unrepentant immorality or persistent divisiveness could lead to treating someone as an outsider, with the hope they would be ashamed and return. Members were also told to test teachings and correct one another gently. Home inspections, family authoritarianism modeled on church structure, and a climate of fear around being "put out" became familiar features in many accounts. Restoration took a back seat to protecting the organization.

After Armstrong's death in 1986, the main Worldwide Church of God (now Grace Communion International) publicly repudiated many of these practices, including British Israelism, legalism as a test of fellowship, and the most extreme forms of one-man rule; a small number of leaders issued apologies for spiritual abuse. Numerous splinter groups (United Church of God, Philadelphia Church of God, Living Church of God, and others) retained core Armstrongist distinctives and hierarchical structures. Reports of high-control dynamics, financial pressure, and trauma among former members continue through support networks and published testimonies. The New Testament churches had real authority, moral standards, and expulsion for unrepentant sin. They did not, however, feature a single human leader claiming unique end-time apostolic restoration who regulated members' medical choices, family details, or private questioning under threat of being cut off from God. Early sources stress humility in leaders, voluntary generosity, local plurality of elders, and a process aimed at winning the person back. That combination is the clearest available picture of how first-century communities treated their members. Bullies did not exist.

Armstrongism's record of control is not an unfortunate implementation detail. It is the predictable result of grafting a top-down "government of God" onto a claim of primitive restoration. For those who still want to keep the Sabbath and holy days, those can be observed without turning the church into a pyramid with fear at the base and money flowing to the apex.

Bullies exist in Churches of God for a simple reason: the system was built to produce and protect them. Top-down "government of God" is not a minor administrative preference. It is the distinctive that many splinter groups still treat as proof they are practicing first-century Christianity. It is also the distinctive that no first-century church actually practiced. Once a man is placed above question because he occupies an office in a laminated pyramid, ordinary safeguards collapse. Confidentiality disappears. Ministers' wives and inner circles become rumor mills. Unworthy men get ordained because loyalty to headquarters matters more than character. Members are taught they are a special class, so outsiders-and even other Christians-do not count. Gossip then makes restoration almost impossible: the "sin" is no longer the original offense; it is the fact that everyone already knows the story.

That is not an accident. It is what happens when servant language is kept in the sermon and lordship is kept in the structure. The New Testament told elders not to lord it over the flock. Armstrongism told the flock that resisting the man at the top was resisting God. Reproof was supposed to be done not in anger but in peace. In practice, anger, public humiliation, and the threat of being put out became tools of control. First-century discipline had a process and a goal: win the person back. Armstrongist discipline too often had a different goal: protect the organization and the office. Question the hierarchy and the process skipped Matthew 18 and went straight to exile. Friends were told to shun. Leaving was sold as leaving God.

The New Covenant does not authorize this.

Christ is the head of the church-not an apostle in Pasadena, Grover Beach, Edmond, Charlotte, or anywhere else. There is one mediator between God and humanity. Every believer is a priest. The Spirit was poured out on all flesh, not reserved for a ministerial caste. Leaders exist to equip the saints, not to own their consciences, their doctors, their marriages, or their friendships. Jesus explicitly rejected the Gentile model of lording it over others and told His followers the greatest must be a servant of all. Paul told the Galatians to stand firm in the freedom for which Christ set them free and not submit again to a yoke of slavery. The Bereans were commended for checking even an apostle against Scripture. Galatians 6:1 says to restore the one caught in a trespass gently, watching yourselves. None of that describes a system in which a handful of men can end your fellowship, isolate you from friends, and call it the government of God.

Members have allowed this because the doctrine trained them to. Fear of being "put out" was made larger than fear of enabling harm. Tithes kept flowing because withholding them was framed as stealing from God rather than refusing to fund unaccountable power. Silence was called humility. Endurance of abuse was called loyalty. That bargain is not faithfulness to the New Covenant. It is surrender of the very freedom the New Covenant created.

No Church of God group today practices first-century Christianity. Keeping the Sabbath and the holy days does not require a pyramid, three tithes traveling upward, home inspections, medical control, or a climate of fear. Those are later Armstrongite inventions wearing primitive clothing. The earliest communities were local, relational, and restoration-minded. Their leaders were to be tested, humble, and not lovers of money. Their members were expected to examine teaching and correct one another without a headquarters veto.

Members no longer have to pretend otherwise. Stop treating office as immunity. Stop confusing one man's authority with Christ's. Stop letting gossip replace the Matthew 18 process. Stop funding structures that punish questions and then claim to be the church Jesus built. If a leader will not be accountable, he is not exercising New Covenant ministry; he is exercising control. The New Covenant already named the alternative: one Head, many priests, servant leadership, gentle restoration, and freedom that no bully is entitled to revoke.

Based upon this Exit and Support Network letter on COG bullies:

Beware of Anyone in Authority in These Offshoot Churches:
September 3, 2026
Deacons and deaconess were hypocrites in my church area. A new couple came to me complaining about our deaconess. She organized camping in a wilderness area and the couple found it hard to cope camping with five young children. When the mother told the deaconess about her difficulties, she replied, “You have to practice for the place of safety!” I realized then that she had an unhealthy obsession with the place of safety.
So I told the couple what happened to me about two years before the couple started to attending services. The deaconess had organized another camping trip to another wilderness area from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon. This particular spot was very popular with trail bikes so on Sabbath morning they roared up and down the steep hill next to the camping site. The deaconess was very unhappy with the “heathens” disturbing the peace on the Sabbath day. So I told that couple with the five children that the deaconess complained all weekend and they never went camping with her again. This happened 50 years ago so we are still waiting to go to the place of safety. 

 

As time marches on, it shows what I believed in was all nonsense. From the first day I met her I always thought she was very strange. Many years later she had to be put in an intensive care facility because she had dementia. 

 

My WCG church area had two deacons and both were proud bullies. I watched one deacon for years wash only the local ministers feet at Passover until that minister transferred to another area. Over the years I grew a healthy dislike for ordained people in my area. 

 

One by one when each of them died I never went to their funerals and it was a great relief to never see them again. 

 

If you are thinking of attending any of the WCG offshoot churches, beware of anyone who is in authority, they will make your life a misery. I still have trouble trusting other people because of my experience in WCG. –B. S.

It's the First Day of the Feast of Tabernacles and Guess What The Most Important Message is that You Need to Hear...

 

The first day of the Armstrongite Feast of Tabernacles has arrived, and the improperly named "Continuing" Church of God wasted no time identifying the most important theme of the day: your wallet. Of course they did!

James Martenet gave the offertory. 

Giving an offering is an act of worship. Give faithfully and you honor God with your resources. Walk by faith, not by sight. The Feast pictures the millennial kingdom, when God will dwell with humanity. Also, here is the mailing address in Grover Beach, California. PayPal works too.

Nothing says "walk by faith and not by sight" like a street address and a donations page dropped into the same paragraph as the coming Kingdom of God.

This is not an accident. It is straight from the Armstrongism playbook. Holy days in this tradition are not merely commemorations. They are collection days. Deuteronomy 16:16-17 said males were not to appear empty-handed three times a year at the pilgrimage feasts. Armstrongism stretched that into seven annual holy-day offerings, plus first tithe, plus a second tithe saved to spend on yourself at the Feast, plus (in the classic system) a third tithe in certain years, plus building funds, plus member letter appeals, plus tithe of the tithe. The Bible never commanded seven cash extractions nor all of these extra money grabs. Convenience and revenue did. Even some former insiders have said the quiet part out loud: more holy days means more offerings.

New Covenant Christians do not need any of this.

The festivals were shadows. The substance is Christ. Paul said so without embarrassment: "Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ" (Colossians 2:16-17). You do not keep camping in the shadow after the Person has arrived. You do not send the shadow a check.

Galatians 4 is even less polite. Observing days, months, seasons, and years after coming to Christ is not "restored truth." It is turning back to weak and worthless elementary principles. The Galatians were congratulating themselves on seriousness. Paul called it bondage.

The old covenant is obsolete (Hebrews 8:13). The Levitical calendar, the pilgrimage requirement, the "do not appear empty-handed" rule, and the whole sacrificial apparatus belonged to a covenant made with national Israel at Sinai. Gentiles were never parties to it. The Jerusalem council did not add "and keep Tabernacles and mail an offering to headquarters." Jesus kept the feasts because He was born under the Law. He fulfilled them. He did not commission the church to reenact them with hotel ballrooms and PayPal."

God will dwell with humanity." That is already the Christian confession. "The Word became flesh and dwelt [tabernacled] among us" (John 1:14). The Spirit already lives in believers (1 Corinthians 3:16; 6:19). Revelation 21 describes the final dwelling of God with man. None of those texts instruct you to picture it by taking a week off, sitting through sermons about Herbert Armstrong's 1981 feast message, and making sure Grover Beach can process your card.

Giving is not the problem. Cheerful, voluntary generosity is New Testament Christianity. Scheduled holy-day offerings framed as worship, tied to a calendar God never bound on the church, and immediately followed by an address and a donations URL-that is a different animal. It turns the first hours of a "spiritual" festival into a fundraising opener. The Kingdom of God is coming. In the meantime, please honor Him with your resources. Faith, not sight. Also Venmo.

A New Covenant Christian can rejoice that God tabernacled in Christ, dwells in His people by the Spirit, and will dwell with redeemed humanity forever. None of that requires a booth, a second tithe, a holy-day envelope, or a reminder that the most important theme of the first day is cash. The substance already came. The collection plate for the shadow can stay in the museum.

Jesus Appears Like a Cloud: Wovoka, the Ghost Dance, the Native Encounter with the Returned Christ and Armstrongism

Updated with missing Dean Blackwell info.

Wovoka, the Northern Paiute prophet also known as Jack Wilson, received his defining vision during the solar eclipse of 1 January 1889. He reported dying, traveling to heaven, speaking with God, and returning with a commission: live morally, work peacefully, and dance a traditional round dance so that the dead would return, the land would be renewed, and a new age would begin. In the letters he sent to visiting delegations he wrote that “Jesus is now upon the earth. He appears like a cloud.” Many of those delegates—Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho and others—took the words literally. They understood Wovoka himself as the physical return of Christ, the long-awaited Messiah who would restore the ancestors and sweep away the catastrophe of reservation life. Some later accounts describe him displaying marks on his hands and feet. Wovoka himself, speaking later to the ethnographer James Mooney, presented himself as a prophet rather than as Christ incarnate. The distinction mattered less to the people who had traveled hundreds of miles to hear him. They needed a Messiah who spoke their language of loss and renewal.

Wovoka’s message was already a synthesis. Raised after his father’s death in the household of the Presbyterian rancher David Wilson, he absorbed English, Bible stories, and millennial expectation. He also knew the earlier 1870 Ghost Dance associated with the Paiute dreamer Wodziwob, Great Basin round-dance ceremonialism, and elements of the Indian Shaker Church. The resulting religion was neither a simple borrowing of Christianity nor a purely Indigenous revival. It was a Paiute response, in Christian vocabulary, to the collapse of the old world. The dance spread because it addressed immediate hunger, disease, and dispossession, not because participants first consulted a table of nations.

He did not always claim to be Jesus. In later interviews with ethnographer James Mooney he described himself as a prophet who had received a revelation. However, he spoke of Jesus being “now upon the earth” and appearing “like a cloud,” referenced resurrection of the dead, and in some accounts allowed or encouraged stigmata-like marks on his hands and feet. Visiting delegations from the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and other Plains tribes frequently interpreted him as the physical return of Christ—the long-awaited Messiah who would restore the ancestors, renew the land, and remove white settlers. Some accounts quote him identifying with the Jesus who had earlier been rejected and killed by whites. This tribal reading turned a relatively pacifist Paiute teaching into a more apocalyptic hope among groups facing reservation confinement, buffalo collapse, and cultural pressure.

The resulting Ghost Dance spread rapidly. Participants danced in circles, sometimes for days, often around a central pole or tree representing the Messiah. Among the Lakota it acquired “ghost shirts” believed to offer protection, an intensification Wovoka himself did not originate. U.S. authorities viewed the movement as a threat; the tensions contributed to the Wounded Knee massacre in December 1890. Wovoka later expressed sorrow that his message had been reinterpreted in ways that brought violence.

This episode sits inside a much longer pattern of Christianity among Native American peoples. Catholic missions began in the Spanish and French colonial periods; Protestant missions expanded in the 19th century. Conversion was sometimes coerced, sometimes pragmatic, and sometimes sincere. Over time many communities produced hybrid forms rather than simple replacement of older ways.

Examples of blending include:

• The Ghost Dance itself, which used Christian millennial language and ethics inside an Indigenous ritual frame.
• The Native American Church (Peyote Road), which treats peyote as a sacrament given by the Creator, often compared to Communion, while teaching a moral code that overlaps with Christian commandments and emphasizing prayer, family, and sobriety. Some branches explicitly call it the Native American Church of Jesus Christ.
• Indian Shaker Church, another 19th-century movement that combined shaking/healing rites with Christian elements.
• Local practices such as Native-language hymns, powwows dedicated to Jesus, dual participation (attending both church and traditional ceremonies), and Catholic or Protestant services that incorporate kinship values, generosity, and land-centered spirituality.

Today a majority of Native Americans identify as Christian. Recent surveys put the figure around 63 percent—roughly 46 percent Protestant (a large evangelical share) and 12 percent Catholic—while about 31 percent are religiously unaffiliated. Many of these Christians continue to honor language, ceremony, family structures, and connection to land as compatible with, rather than contradictory to, their faith. The result is not uniform “assimilation” but a range of Native Christianities that keep tribal identity visible.

Armstrongism for some strange reason had never made any attempt to recruit native Americans, though the church had many in the Arizona/Utah strip. It certainly would never have had any historical or organizational tie to Wovoka, the Ghost Dance, or widespread Native messianic movements. Armstrongist literature did occasionally mention native Americans in the British Israelism mythology. In our literature Native Americans were instead identified as descendants of Tiras, son of Japheth (Genesis 10), not as Israelites.

Dean Blackwell promoted and identified American Indians as descendants of Tiras, a son of Japheth listed in Genesis 10:2 and 1 Chronicles 1:5. The 1957 WCG reprint article “Where Did the American Indian Come From?” argued that Tiras’s descendants migrated from Asia Minor through the Black Sea region and eventually reached the Americas. It linked tribal names such as Tarascan, Tinné (Thyni), Amazons (near the Amazon River), Mayas, Dures, Turas, and others to Tiras. Physical descriptions from ancient sources—reddish-brown skin and long black hair worn in a crest—were said to match Native American features. Some traditions of an eastern origin across water were cited in support. Blackwell’s presentations aligned with this framework rather than originating a separate theory.

Blackwell worked within the narrow myths of Aremstrongism that treated Genesis 10 as a finished ethnographic map of the post-Flood world. In that framework every people must descend from one of Noah’s sons. The American Indian, whose presence in the Western Hemisphere seemed to leave a blank in the Table of Nations, was assigned to Tiras, the last-named son of Japheth. The argument, circulated in The Plain Truth and Ambassador College materials, ran as follows: Tiras settled in Asia Minor and along the Black Sea (the river Tyras/Dniester); his descendants appear in classical sources under names such as Tauri, Thyni, Carians, and Amazons; those same names, or close variants, reappear among Native groups (Tarascan, Tinne/Athabaskan, Maya, Amazon); therefore the main migration into the Americas came east-to-west across the Atlantic rather than west-to-east across Beringia. Skin color on Minoan frescoes, the Nahuatl root atl (“water”), temple names like teocalli, and traditions of bearded white culture-heroes were offered as supporting links.

In a 1979 Bible study on Acts 17, Blackwell referenced Psalm 74:17 ("Thou hast set all the borders of the earth") and explained that God designed different groups for specific regions: "God really made the Blacks where they were best to dwell on the rich continent of Africa and God made the Orientals by their features, they're the best qualified to dwell in Asia; and God made the Shimites whereby their features, they're the best able to dwell in the territory that He put them in." Native Americans were implicitly placed in the Americas under the same principle of divinely assigned borders. 

Blackwell presented WCG's racial teachings to many congregations in the 1970s. According to accounts of those presentations, the church's oral tradition (shaped by British Israelism) placed descendants of Ephraim and Manasseh-identified as the British and American peoples-at the top of a hierarchy that would rule other nations eternally "for the good of all humanity." Other groups, including people of color, occupied lower positions. Blackwell cited Deuteronomy 32:8-9 as support: God divided mankind and set boundaries "according to the number of the sons of Israel." Critics of the teaching have noted that the verse more likely refers to "sons of God" in older textual traditions and that Blackwell's application extended it into an eternal political arrangement. He also applied Isaiah 19 in ways that emphasized service to Israel. Afro-American members, he claimed, accepted the explanation once given. Native Americans, as descendants of Tiras (Japheth), fell into the category of Gentile nations under this scheme. 

These views were part of WCG's mid-20th-century interpretation of prophecy, the Millennium, and the Kingdom of God, in which converted members of "Israelitish" descent would serve as rulers and teachers. The teachings treated racial and national differences as God-ordained rather than purely cultural or environmental

The method is characteristic of Armstrongist ethnology. It privileges name resemblance over systematic linguistics, treats isolated classical notices as tribal genealogies, and assumes the Bible’s silence on the Western Hemisphere must be filled by the one remaining Japhethite. Daniel G. Brinton’s 1891 The American Race is quoted for the Tarascan god Taras, yet Brinton himself was recording surface similarities, not writing a migration history. “Amazon,” “Maya,” and “Tinne” belong to unrelated language families (Tupi-Guarani, Mayan, Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit) and are not demonstrably the same words as the classical ethnonyms. Nahuatl teocalli (“god-house”) and Greek theos are coincidental. The Atlantic takes its name from the Greek Atlas, not from an indigenous atlan. Limited pre-Columbian contacts—Norse in Vinland, possible Polynesian traces in South America—do not account for the founding populations of two continents.

Modern evidence points the other way. Archaeology, craniofacial studies, and especially genetics place the primary ancestry of Native Americans in Siberian and East Asian populations that crossed Beringia in the late Pleistocene, with later Holocene movements and modest extra-continental admixture. Mitochondrial haplogroups A, B, C, D and X, and Y-chromosome haplogroup Q, form a coherent New World pattern whose closest relatives lie in Asia, not the Aegean or Thrace. Josephus identified Tiras with the Thracians; later commentators linked the name to Sea Peoples (Teresh/Tursha) or Tyrsenians. None of those Mediterranean groups match Native American genomes or the deep time depth of American linguistic diversity.

Wovoka himself sits awkwardly inside the Tiras scheme. A Northern Paiute of Mason Valley, Nevada, he inherited Great Basin ceremonialism, the 1870 Ghost Dance, and Christian language absorbed while living with the Wilson family. His 1889 vision spoke of the return of the dead, the restoration of the land, and a moral code that mixed Paiute ethics with images of Jesus and coming judgment. The dance spread because it answered the catastrophe of the 1880s, not because dancers believed themselves descendants of Black Sea Tauri. Armstrongist writers who later mapped all Indians onto Tiras were doing, in reverse, what Wovoka had done: folding a living Native prophet into a closed biblical genealogy so that no people would be left outside Scripture. The difference is decisive. Wovoka's synthesis grew from Paiute experience and the crisis on the ground. The Tiras identification grew from a mid-twentieth-century need to complete Genesis 10.

The contrast illuminates two different afterlives of the same vision. Across Indian Country, Christianity took root in many forms-Catholic missions, Protestant churches, the Native American Church with its peyote sacrament and Christian moral language, Indian Shaker practice, Native-language hymns, and dual participation in both church and traditional ceremony. Today a majority of Native Americans identify as Christian while continuing to honor language, kinship, land, and ceremony. These living syntheses, like Wovoka's dance, grew from particular histories of loss and endurance. The Tiras theory, by contrast, was an attempt to make that history fit a table of names.

In short, Wovoka's movement is one vivid late-19th-century example of how Christian ideas of a returning Messiah, resurrection, and a renewed earth could be received and recast inside Native frameworks. Many Native people have since made Christianity their own while retaining heritage; Armstrongism remained a separate, Europe-focused interpretive system with only passing ethnographic interest in Native origins.

Wovoka's letters still speak more directly than any later ethnology: Jesus is now upon the earth. He appears like a cloud. The dead are alive again. Dance, live cleanly, and do not be afraid when the earth shakes. That message was heard, reinterpreted, and danced by people who already knew who they were.

Is Your COG Group Your Golden Calf? Junior Crackpot Prophet #2 Says So

 

Samuel Kitchen has discovered the oldest trick in the Armstrongist playbook: every Church of God except his is a "human organization," and is a golden calf. The Worldwiders in UCG, LCG, CCOG, RCG, COGWA and the rest of the alphabet COG's, must COME OUT OF HER, touch nothing unclean, and stop sending those ministers the tithes that belong to God. The Worldwide Church of God, he insists, is not a corporation. It is a spiritual organism, organized by Christ through His apostle. The converted will line up. Everyone else is "blind as a bat."Then he hands you the address.

Herbert Armstrong did call the Church a spiritual organism. He also ran campuses, magazines, jets, and a three-tithe machine that treated "God's tithe" as something that arrived at a specific desk. Kitchen quotes the poetry and keeps the cash register. "Have nothing to do with them" means stop funding their ministers. It does not mean stop funding a man who emails Harvest Rock as a "representative of the Worldwide Church of God" to talk about buying Ambassador Auditorium. 

The rest is the usual successor playbook crap. Christ worked through the apostle; preparation for the Kingdom runs through that pipeline; denying it is antichrist; therefore the living groups are unclean and the Iowa inbox is the inner court. Flurry, Pack, Thiel, Meredith, and the councils already ran this play. Kitchen's innovation is doing it with 43 YouTube subscribers and a permission slip from an apostate church hopper in the Philippines.

If their corporations are human because humans collect money, so is his. If their ministers misled the flock by taking tithes, so does the man telling you the tithe is stolen unless it travels to Keosauqua. "Come out of her" is the altar call. "The money belongs to God" so send it to me, I sone of the biggest lies in Armstrongism.

A spiritual body does not need your resignation letter and your first tithe. That is just another calf, with worse marble and gold with pretend apostles, chief overseers and Pastor Generals.