Poor Rod Meredith. Try as he might he just CANNOT keep his shrinking personalty cult under control. The Living Church of God tries to present itself as the most unified and loving COG to exist in this dispensation, yet it is constantly rocked with strife and upheavals. LCG members love to get on here and call us liars every time we point this out.
This is from a COG news site:
In November all congregations were commanded to play a sermonette by Rod McNair on Ministerial Authority and a sermon by Rod Meredith on God’s Government.
(These two audios have been removed from this independent website. In each case: “The item is not available due to issues with the item's content.”)The audios explain that LCG’s doctrine on church government gives the ministry rulership over its church members, some of whom have been expressing disagreement with various doctrines and distrust of even the leading ministers.
Roderick Meredith says, “We found that some of these people we’ve had to put out (of the church) ... they often lie and lie, and they’ll twist and turn, and turn things around ...”
“I’ve asked Mr McNair and Mr (Bob) League - they’ve been working as a team to get all the information on many of these things - and I’m working with them and other leaders ... We’re trying to keep God’s church clean.”
18 comments:
Stalins purges are about to begin.
Stalins purges are about to begin.
Speaking of purges, Christ will vomit Meredith out of His mouth when the time comes.
Maybe RCM is being misunderstood here.
He said "We are trying to Keep God's Church Clean".
Having sat next to a few smelly folks and "pigpens" myself over the years, then I would have to agree with RCM about people going to church improving their personal hygiene! ;-)
Dear Charlotte brethren,
We wanted to let you all know that Mr. League is not doing well. He is still in ICU and is on life support, most of the time heavily sedated. Given the state of his heart and lungs, the doctors do not think he'll pull out of this without a dramatic turnaround. We all certainly know God can heal him instantly. And that's what we're praying for, if that's God's will. Please continue praying for Mr. League's healing and comfort, and for Mrs. League's encouragement as well, as they deal with this very difficult situation.
Warm Regards,
Rod McNair
hahahahahaha!This is funny as hel.p.
Meredith is beginning to say things that you would expect to hear from Flurry!
This seems to be a new thing for LCG (and the recent splinters), people thinking for themselves, and actually being brazen enough not to keep it to themselves. And, then, denial and lying. Well, I've seen this all before! WCG had been rocked by both liberal and conservative dissent during the mass exodus following the disappointment of 1975.
Normally, when conservatives leave, someone rises up in self-righteousness, and other conservatives follow them as a new splinter group is secretly formed. They say that it is necessary to preserve "the faith once delivered".
What is happening in LCG is different. Individuals, and groups of individuals are beginning to think for themselves, and to no longer respect the authority which they had once accepted so willingly. These free thinkers are not going to self-identify, or to leave voluntarily en masse. They will stick around and attempt to persuade friends to see things from a different perspective so long as they are able. As they are detected and elliminated by the ministry, others are going to be carefully watching to see how the church handles them. Any unfairness witnessed will cause some of the watchers to leave as well.
It's a splinter without a splinter. LCG appears to have a mess on their hands. They find themselves in a position where they feel a need to be able to herd cats!
BB
It is amazing how much information is available if one really wants to know. There are so many questions about subjects to which same ol’ - same ol’ answers are no longer satisfactory. Those questions have become more numerous from more people over the years. About ten years ago a few questions came to mind. A purposeful study became my quest to gain better understanding. Better understanding leads to truth. Two questions came to mind. “What does it REALLY mean?” and “Do we REALLY want to know?” It was no longer important to do as one minister (?) said in a sermon, “We have men who have studied all these things, just believe what we tell you.”
We do not need nor should we want to be taught. We need to be educated. Maybe we should consider the meaning and origin of those two words.
Teach: Old English tæcan was "show, declare, warn, persuade"
Educate: Latin, educo or educe was “to draw forth from within.”
Based on the above, the things we need to understand are already within us. But maybe we just don’t realize what they are because we have been taught rather than educated.
Two quotes from Galileo became important in my quest for better understanding.
1. “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
2. “You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him discover it in himself.”
Oh, Biker Bob, don't you wish your keyboard interviewing was reality. It's not. The much promised collapse of LCG you hope for will not happen.
Priam,
I think we're probably looking at a long-term slide into nothingness. It usually requires a series of events to sink an ocean going vessel, or cause an airliner to go down. There are a lot of "eggs" besides Humpty Dumpty in the LCG basket. I realized when Armstrongism failed to disband in the immediate years following 1975 that there would be no silver bullet.
The problem the leaders are forced to ponder and address becomes that these negative incidents, whether spawned by the liberal or conservative camps, happen at a virtual plague level amongst the splinters, and overwhelm any growth that otherwise might be experienced. You could almost refer to this phenomenon as the Armstsrong curse, or jinx.
I knew the LCG would shrug off Wisconsin. There was also the Bryce splinter, the on again off again problems between Raymond McNair and Rod Meredith, the conservatives who left because Meredith seemed to be taking a more mainstream view towards Jesus, and towards accepting non-sabbatarians as fellow Christians, the mini-drama surrounding Bob Thiel, and now it seems there are problems with liberals. I have a number of mainstream Christian church groups as clients, and for them, perhaps one of these types of incidents would be relatively rare, let alone a cluster of them compressed into a decade.
Some of my family members are with a different splinter, not LCG. But at their advanced ages, and the fact that their entire lives have been tied up in Armstrongism and the worldview and expectations which that brings, I have come to realize that leaving might cause more harm than good at this point in their lives. In other words, insofar as they are concerned, the major damage was already done years ago, and is not becoming worse.
My concern with all toxic cults is their potential to ruin younger victims' lives. I'd like to use my experiences to help prevent that, if possible.
BB
"We’re trying to keep God’s church clean."
"Stalins purges are about to begin."
What's next? An LCG kristalnacht? Yes, brethren, it's time for a little ethnic cleansing, but it's spiiiiiritual ethnic cleansing. Time for a good old-fashioned pogrom. Who will the rats and vermin be this time around? This time, what, it will be those who fancy themselves to be spiiiiiritual "Jews" (and even more literally, fancy themselves to be British Israelites) dispensing "justice" upon those whom they deem to be spiiiiiritual "non-Jews"?
But then again, isn't this what every church split has always been?
☠ Achtung non-Juden! ✡
☹
Herding cats?
My experience (and you should listen up, because I've had a lot of experience) is that if you want to herd cats, you need to form a personal relationship with them: They will be aloof until you win their trust.
The LCG and Roderick Meredith need to learn from this and form personal relationships with the members.
Oh, and, if you want to keep your church clean, empty the litter box every once in awhile.
It's been piling up in the LCG and has gotten pretty disgusting.
These people use inaccurate molds to attempt to explain the state of their shrinking empire. One is the small group, or Gideon mold. This may be appropriate when we are discussing a physical battle amongst nations, but it doesn't work when we try to apply it to getting out a mass "end times" message. Numbers and resources are required to reach the world. When it really falls apart, is when we look back to the work another "small" group, the WCG was doing 30-40 years ago. That same job is simply not getting done today, in fact, nothing at all on anywhere near the same scale. They focus on a suposedly small elect group rather than on whether a noticeable, measurable work is still being done, let alone actually expanding on what WCG accomplished.
They also use the Laodecean mold, taken from the extrabiblical theory that the Gentile churches mentioned in the early chapters of Revelation were actually eras that we can supposedly identify today. The problem is that scripture does not indicate that these are intended to be eras. That started with one man's interpretation, centuries ago, and different teachers have attempted to apply it as real to various groups at various times. This is another part of a foundation in sand, just as elusive as trying to come up with a specific date for the return of Jesus has been.
Records mean things. Various cultures and faiths have maintained detailed records of what transpired during their times. Ancient Sumerians kept records, the Jewish/Israelitish people kept records, as did the Catholics, the Moslems, and the Mormons. This is the way we learn from history. The fact is that HWA and his successors do not have a history to support critical areas related to their faith. There is no history to support the idea that the Assyrians spawned the modern day Germans, or that the descendents of those two half-Egyptian, half-Israelite sons of Joseph, Manasseh and Ephraim, wandered around in central Europe for centuries, eventually settling in England.
Further, the Dugger-Dodd history of the church, adapted by HWA, and further embellished by his staff, has proven to be totally bogus, complete with embarrassing errors which have been known to, and exposed by genuine scholars. There is no history that has been maintained and passed from generation to generation, through the so-called eras, available to us today. Mind you, there are Catholic and Jewish records covering the same 2,000 years, but nothing other than theories to cover the history of "God's True Church". Because we have a book known as the Bible, and because the history of Israelites and Christians was considered important enough soas to have been recorded in that collection of documents, it is absolutely ridiculous to presume that there would be no history to cover a 1900 year time period today. That is simply a theory to excuse the emergence of a bogus church, without pedigree, concocted by an aspiring mogul schooled in the advertising world.
I don't know how many times and different ways we have to say this stuff before it will eventually sink in. Fortunately, there aren't huge numbers of people lining up to sign up for Armstrongism these days, and the so-called message has been largely curtailed and muffled by all of the splintering. But, it would be nice if the splinter members who are suffering the types of intrusive authoritarianism in their lives that we read about every day could be made to realize that there is no biblical or spiritual reason to accept this type of abuse. It doesn't even develop a human resource in such a way as to produce Kingdom skills. It is purely exploitation.
BB
I'm going to delve into a little satire here...
Brethren, as you know, God's end-time Elijah, the apostle Herbert W Armstrong, restored at least 18 vital truths to God's Church in his day. Our mission since his death is to "hold fast" to those truths, that no man take our crowns. Therefore, since both Gods endtime Elijah and apostle is gone AND those truths were already restored through him, it behooves you and me, brethren, to STOP ASKING QUESTIONS. We will hold fast to the truth and we will make sure you do so as well.
For years I couldnt quite reconcile the "prove all things" mantra with the outsiders depictions of WCG members as "brainwashed". It was only when I realized our "proving" was limited to the "proof" provided only by WCG that I realized how the apparent dichotomy existed.
They took it down because it was fully loaded with lie after lie and people were calling them out on the lies. They must have realized that what was recorded with the intent to further assert their authority over members was in fact, causing them to lose credibility because of the personal attacks therein and the repeated lies which were easily proved as lies making them look even dumber. They refer to a ex-member running to Thiel aka "some bad guy" with false information about the church. I'm sure that didn't sit well with him. The sermon/ sermonette were recorded on the same day that several members were marked so everyone in LCG knew who they were directed at. Obviously Roddy boy didn't learn much from the Leona McNair incident. Vanity (he is number 3 in all the universe you know)and lies. Lies and vanity.
"It was only when I realized our "proving" was limited to the "proof" provided only by WCG..."
Yup. My first Bible study without a COG booklet or sermon in mind was an eye-opener..."Hey- those mainstream Christians are right after all!"
Paul Ray
well, I was a child then and couldnt really prove anything one way or the other. But my parents thought they had... and, looking back, they had "proved" this or that by looking up references provided by WCG, as far as I know. Maybe those who went to outside sources fared better, maybe not.
I soon discovered that the book of Romans, if taken at face value, was incredibly simple; yet in the COG it was considered incredibly difficult. Taken together with COG commentary, I suppose it was.
Much of the COG explanation of Romans boils down to "This verse doesn't mean what it says. It means the exact opposite. To understand this simple verse, please turn your Bible to The Torah, and open your booklet entitled 'Law or Grace?'
Paul Ray
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