UCG has always been known to be dysfunctional, but a comment on a Yahoo group proves that further. UCG members are avoiding their own church like the plague. On top of that, UCG is being out preached by the Seventh Day Adventists and Church of God 7th Day. Unlike UCG, Adventists and COG7 make no excuses for what they believe, UCG and most other COG's are embarrassed about themselves and are constantly making excuses for hiding what they claim to believe.
Church of God 7th Day and the Adventists are putting the regular Churches of God to shame. Both preach what they believe and are active in their communities and around the world. The Church of God is not.
UCG pays thousands of dollars to hold campaigns around the country. One of their latest attempts they are bragging about had around 145 in attendance. Of that number only 25 some "new" people showed up. The rest of the audience was padded with 120 UCG members. The COG message is shallow out out of touch with 21st century life and issues. The Adventists and COG7 get it, the Church of God does not.
Even till today I know UCG people who if they have to visit Sydney on business. They will not attend the Sydney UCG. On the Sabbath.Which is voting will your feet.One other thing that I have noticed. Back in the 1970s HWA had a great interesting broadcast.Where now days hardly any of the cogs stand out.He in NZ the SDAs have there own Full time TV station plus one part time Station.As for preaching Gods laws they are spot on.Regarding prophecy and Gods laws they are now very close to what HWA taught.Those who preach on the SDAs TV stations have an excellent grasp on gods laws. They all preach the same.There is a new big boy on the block.
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"Regarding prophecy and Gods laws they are now very close to what HWA taught."
As far as prophecy goes, HWA started out as in adventism, and even though HWA had other oddball ideas about the meaning of the names of churches, thus crowding the word "adventism" out of the name of his church, he remained an adventist throughout his days, using it as a powerful fear-based recruitment tool. So, yeah, pretty similar ideas on prophecy.
However, regarding the rest of what HWA taught, in my experience, SDAs and COG7D are prettymuch mainstream Christians, doing all the mainstream Christian holidays and not the Jewish ones, not observing the Jewish food laws, not doing literal old testament 10% tithing, etc., any one of which would be a total dealbreaker for the average Armstrongist, or vice versa, for the average adventist.
The Tkachs gave us a laboratory experiment demonstrating exactly how Armstrongist churches and mainstream doctrines cannot even mix well, yielding something too odd, and seemingly without even a reason to exist, for nearly all mainstream Christians.
UCG is giving us real market research data with its KOG seminars showing just how unappealing Armstrongism is to the average mainstream Christian. UCG top brass would love to do what the Tkachs did, but they know they would need to do it more successfully than what happened in WCG in order to remain viable, but they don't think they could do it any better. So they're trying to bring in a new mainstream christian power base in advance with the KOG seminars, but they're discovering that's not gonna work.
If other adventists have better traction, it's got a lot to do with the fact they aren't saddled with so many core doctrines considered to be embarrassing heresies by the rest of Christendom.
So, no, what HWA taught is not at all close to what regular adventism teaches in areas outside of prophecy.
The Church of God Seventh Day does NOT celebrate Easter or Christmas. The SDAs do.
There is a vast difference between CoG7D and SDAs.
The Seventh Day Adventist Church is the most cultlike of the cults and its practices are Draconian to an extreme. If you're SDA and don't believe in just one little thing that E.G. White taught, you are so screwed. They are not mainstream.
If you are talking about Jesus, the CoG7D is actually more mainstream, although not believing in the Trinity, keeping the Sabbath and the clean and unclean meats thing doesn't exactly scream MAINSTREAM!
It's well, though, to remember the provenance of the Bible, or the lack of it, in considering alternatives to the Cult of Herbert Armstrong Mafia (move along, this is not the cult you're looking for).
Adventist and COG7 Day are stagnant in the developed world, as is the rest of the COGS. The growth that has happened for all of these groups has been in the third world and emerging markets.
The problem with this is that when you have organizations that have measured growth and influence in terms of money and assets, such growth does not seem "real", and the new membership from the third world does not pay for itself, but instead is an expense.
“Those who preach on the SDAs TV stations have an excellent grasp on gods laws.”
I have an SDA book that talks about keeping “all ten” of the Ten Commandments. By “all ten” it means to observe the biblical, weekly, seventh-day Sabbath, rather than observing the first day of the week called Sunday. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, the SDA book also contains several hippie pictures, including a full-page, head-and-shoulders portrait of the hippie. SDAs are obsessed with helping to spread Catholic hippie pictures around the world. SDAs just have to put Catholic hippie pictures in almost all their books, magazines, and calendars. Some SDAs even sell large, framed, hippie pictures to be hung on the walls in people's homes.
SDAs fuss about the commandment to observe the Sabbath, but totally ignore and reject the commandment against idolatry. SDAs seem to think that just about anything could possibly become an idol (such as your car, especially if you take care of it and wash it and, worst of all, wax it.) Anything, that is, except for the idolatrous, Catholic, hippie pictures that they have made it their self-appointed mission to spread everywhere.
Another craze in the SDA church is the idea that people should be vegetarians, which in recent years has gone even further and been replaced by the idea that people should be vegans. The motto of the vegans is not to eat anything that has a face or that was made by anything that has a face. Interestingly, this idea cuts out such things as milk and honey. You might recall that God called his promised land “a land flowing with milk and honey” to describe how good it was. The early SDA, plagiarizing, false prophetess Ellen G. White was a big pork eater who became interested in health matters and became a vegetarian after the death of one of her sons. Notice that Ellen White went directly from ham-eating to vegetarianism and skipped right over the biblical middle ground of obeying God's laws about clean and unclean animals.
Ellen G. White made a remark in one of her books that there is not necessarily anything wrong with having a fragrant evergreen tree at the front of the church with gifts to God on it. This basically stuck the SDAs with Christmas trees. Since the SDA church does not teach people to observe God's annual festivals, most SDAs tend to be ignorant of them and end up observing customs like Christmas and Easter instead.
I know that tribal religions developed rituals and taboos as a way of unifying the members with practices that made them feel special: rituals that everybody in the tribe performed and taboos that everybody observed. Outsiders could be identified and (depending on the tribe's rules for relating to the Other) scorned or attacked for violating the group's norms. Undoubtedly, such rituals and taboos helped our ancestors band together for mutual assistance and fend off threats, and thus survive to engender our forbears.
I also know that those ancestors bequeathed us an inborn hunger to keep on behaving like villagers or members of small nomadic troops. On the scale of our nation-state, however, hostilities thus aroused between subsets of the population disrupt smooth operation of the body politic. Maybe the best we can do is this. If we can't rid ourselves of the urge to scorn and persecute the Other, we can at least squelch that urge. We can grit our teeth and welcome (or at least tolerate) those who wear clothes different from ours, hold their feasts on different days, refuse to eat the foods we prefer, and so on.
If we step back from the situation and take a long jaded look, it is easy to laugh at the silliness of all those taboos and rituals. Maybe too easy. The silliness may tempt us to take lightly the danger that this morbid tribal focus on the minutiae of worship diverts the attention of believers from what really matters on the human scale: our moral duty to treat the Other the way we would like the Other to treat us.
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