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.

David C. Pack's Day of Atonement Regret-O-Meter

 David C. Pack's Day of Atonement Regret-O-Meter

David C. Pack of The Restored Church of God preached during nine sermons, from July 11 until September 12, 

that the Kingdom of God would arrive on the Day of Atonement. 

But...during "The Greatest Untold Story! (Part 649)," given on September 12, 2026, 

the Pastor General fudged on Atonement and taught it would most likely come a little before or a little after. 

Neither was true.

This created 118 instances of regret from Parts 640 to 649. He looked his two sons in the eyes and told them he would never move from that belief. How can anyone believe anything he says?

David C. Pack may find "great joy" in frustrating others, but exrcg does not. The man is talented enough at frustrating himself.

Marc Cebrain

exrcg.org

Please Remember You Are Lights. Some of You Forgot Last Year. So Don't Embarrass Headquarters!

Be Lights at the Feast
The Feast of Tabernacles is the highlight of the sacred year. It pictures the coming thousand-year rule of the Kingdom of God, during which the saints will reign with Jesus Christ and bring peace to a troubled world (Revelation 20:4–6). The New Testament records that Jesus and His disciples kept the Feast (John 7:2–10, 37). The prophet Zechariah states that “all the nations” will keep the Feast under the reign of the Kingdom of God (Zechariah 14:16).
As we rejoice at the Feast, we need to remember Jesus’ instructions that we be lights that “shine before men” as examples (Matthew 5:13–16). How we talk, how we dress, how we conduct ourselves, and how we relate to everyone we meet—in services, in hotels, in restaurants—will reflect either positively or negatively on God’s Church and way of life. We are called to be “ambassadors for Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:20), so let’s strive to let our light shine to everyone around us as we keep the Feast.
Have a profitable Sabbath,
Douglas S. Winnail

LCG sent grown adults-many of them old enough to remember rotary phones-a note reminding them not to act like feral raccoons at the hotel buffet. Imagine needing a memo to tell people how to talk, dress, and not terrify the waitstaff. That's not pastoral care. That's a church that has watched the same movie every September for forty years and still doesn't trust the audience to stay in their seats.

The official story is that the Feast is a "high-visibility ambassador moment." Translation: a few thousand people who already tithe 10-30 percent are about to occupy conference centers and steakhouse restaurants, and headquarters would prefer the reviews not mention "the loud group that treated the pool like a baptismal and the bar like a second tithe." So out comes the annual sermonette: shine your light, watch your hemline, no Speedos, go easy on the merlot, and for heaven's sake stop yelling across the lobby. Matthew 5 gets pressed into service like a tired intern.

This is not because leadership thinks the members are uniquely stupid. It's because leadership thinks the members are predictable. Same people, same hotels, same temptation to treat eight days of "rejoicing" like a sanctioned bender with extra hymnals. The letters exist for the same reason cruise ships print "do not feed the seagulls" signs: experience.

Other churches send similar notes. LCG just does it with the loving specificity of a parent packing a 67-year-old's suitcase: "Don't forget your modest one-piece, your coat and tie, and your dignity. We checked last year. Some of you forgot all three."

So no, they don't think you're dumber than hell. They just think you're human, you're on vacation with a religious excuse, and history suggests a reminder is cheaper than the apology tour afterward. Have a profitable Sabbath. Try not to scare the front desk.

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.