Click image to enlarge to see COG organizational splits
Not from Barrett's book.
David Barrett is coming out with a new book this December about the fragmentation of the Worldwide Church of God in the late 1990's into the numerous splinter groups that exist today. Barrett's earlier book, The New Believers is an extraordinary look at the growth of new religions. He wrote at that time about the rise of Scientology, Moonies, and a large section of the book on the Worldwide Church of God and it's evolution away from Armstrong teaching towards "mainstream" belief.
Description
In the mid-1930s an unsuccessful American advertising executive, Herbert W. Armstrong, founded a millenialist, Sabbatarian Christian sect with a heterodox theology. Over the next half century, despite a number of setbacks, scandals, criticisms, and attacks from former members and anti-cultists, Armstrong's organization, the Worldwide Church of God, grew to around 100,000 baptized members with a world circulation of between six and eight million for its flagship monthly magazine Plain Truth. In January 1986, Armstrong died. His successor changed most of the Church's distinctive doctrines, leading it towards an increasing convergence with mainstream Evangelical Christianity. This revision created a massive cognitive dissonance in ministers and members: should they accept or reject the authority of the Church leadership which had abandoned the authority of the founder's teachings? Groups of ministers left the religion to form new churches, taking tens of thousands of members with them. These schismatic churches in turn faced continuing schism, resulting in over 400 offshoot churches within little more than a decade.
In this major study David V. Barrett examines the processes involved in schism and the varying forms of legitimation of authority within both the original church and its range of offshoots, from hardline to comparatively liberal. His book extends the concepts of rational choice theory when applied to complex religious choices. More important, he offers a new typological model for categorizing how movements can change after their founders' death, including schism, and explores the usefulness of this model by applying it not only to the Worldwide Church of God, but also to a wide variety of other religions.
To preorder: The Fragmentation of a Sect: Schism in the Worldwide Church of God by David V. Barrett
5 comments:
Interesting idea, although it's a bit like technology; by the time you come out with this edition, there will be enough new offshoots to render it almost immediately obsolete.
Meanwhile, there's that spurious claim again: The notion that the Plain Truth had a "circulation of six to eight million" is a laugh riot. The Flurrys and Packs of the world use such inflated numbers to intentionally misrepresent the magazine's effectiveness or relevance.
There's a difference between printing and distributing that many copies, and what people commonly think of when they hear "circulation." Subscribers were another story, nowhere near that number. The rest were put out on newsstands, in waiting rooms, etc., and largely ended up unread and in dumpsters. That, in effect, was a waste of the tithes and offerings people scraped and scrapped to send in.
Pack and Flurry are chief among those who seem content to perpetuate the error of HWA's ways when it comes to "circulation" claims.
The books costs $55.
The real question is, are there any other cults which have had so many splinters so quickly, ever?
Meanwhile, have you heard about the new book from an LDS'er which apparently cites Herbert Armstrong as a source of information?
I'm told the author is going to be among the "stars" at Glenn Beck's big summer rally in Dallas-Fort Worth.
Check the Amazon comments on The Covenant: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1937735206
Hey there Assistant Deacon. The Plain Truth in its heyday did indeed have a circulation of 6-8 million. I know this because I was one of the Circulation Directors and had access to subscriber information. Newsstand distribution is considered part of a magazine's circulation according to the ABC and the waiting room "distribution" consisted of mailed magazines.
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