Wes White: There Is a Lack of Love Within Too Many COGs

     

                                    

There Is a Lack of Love Within Too Many COGs

By Wes White

Suppose you lived during the founding of Jamestown in 1607 and you suffered from hypertension (high blood pressure).  You were basically screwed because back then the medical professionals had no cure for this disease.  In fact, they didn’t know this disease existed.

            The invention of the sphygmomanometer (blood pressure cuff) by Scipione Riva-Rocci in 1896 was perhaps the greatest breakthrough in diagnosis of this disease.  The development of oral diuretics in the 1950s was perhaps the biggest breakthrough in the treatment of this disease.  

            In medicine, accurate diagnosis and correct treatment are both required in order to cure a disease.  One without the other will not allow for beating the illness.  

            It’s the same in religion.  If a church suffers from a sin and doesn’t know it, then all the cures listed in the Bible are not going to enable these Christians to overcome that sin.  That group must first understand they are suffering from the illness.  

The malignant disorder of mistreating people is still rampant among many Armstrong COGs. This contagion is still as epidemic today as it was at any time since the creation of Armstrongism in 1933.

And this religious pathology is not going to go away as long as the leaders and the brethren refuse to recognize there is a problem.  Like any medical disease, it is only after recognition of a sin that removal of the sin can begin.  Again, you’ve got to have both diagnosis and treatment. 

            The Bible can help Christians who need to do better in their treatment of others.  The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5, 6, and 7) is the perfect antidote for the spiritual malady of lacking proper love for others.  But this cure is no good if the afflicted church doesn’t understand that it has an illness.  

Your bathroom medicine cabinet can be filled with the wonderful drug Lisinopril.  But it does your hypertension no good if you don’t know that you need this medicine.   After all, how can you know to pop one of these pills into your mouth every morning if you have not been properly diagnosed?

            This is the problem in so many of the Armstrong COGs today.  The very Bibles that sit on their laps during church services every Sabbath have the perfect cure for what ails them, but they have no idea they are infected. 

            And infected they are!

            In addition to the typical maladies that bedevil Armstrongite churches (headline theology, setting or implying dates of Jesus’ return, racist beliefs against interracial marriage & interracial dating, 2nd & 3rd tithes, church eras, judging another’s heart, love of revenge, authoritarian church government, end-time apostleship, humiliation thru marking & disfellowshipping, harsh D&R administration, one true church, condemnation of non-Sabbath keeping Christians, banning members from voting, anti-doctor/anti-medicine/anti-science teachings), many COG people also suffer from either possessing insufficient love for others or a total lack of love for others.  

We see this particular Armstrong illness demonstrated in the following ways:

n  Inability or unwillingness to resolve conflict;

n  Showing interest and loyalty only to those who are in their own organization;

n  Imputing motives;

n  Falsely accusing others;

n  Name-calling of those they disagree with;

n  Unwillingness to tolerate even the most minor of doctrines differences;

n  Refusal to acknowledge the sins or errors of their leaders;

n  Undo loyalty to fellow elders within a ministerial brotherhood;

n  Denial of any responsibility to help those in need in their communities.

            

And it gets worse.

Alongside of their inability to recognize their lack-of-love illness, many of these folks work from the faulty premise that, the more biblical knowledge of certain doctrines you have, the more morality you possess.  They then assume the converse must be true which is that, the less biblical knowledge of certain doctrines you have, the more immorality you possess.  These Christians don’t understand that atheists and agnostics can indeed possess honesty, kindness -- AND LOVE!  Further, these misguided Christians don’t understand that people who are irreligious can actually live their lives being more in line with the loving precepts of the Sermon on the Mount than many Christians! 

History has shown us that understanding truths like the Sabbath and unclean meats is no antidote to the affliction of lacking love.  The hard-headed Pharisees were the perfect example of this principle.  Like the Pharisees, love-lacking Armstrongites seem to have this problem within their very DNA.  

A COG leader once confessed to me that his church needed more of Matthew 5, 6, and 7. At the time, he was trying to place emphasis on these Gospel chapters in his sermons.  That was several years ago.  Today, I am convinced he has not succeeded in that mission.  And I fear he has given up on the whole idea.  Lack of love may very well be too deeply embedded within the DNA of that congregation.  

            For those of us with faith, it becomes more and more incumbent on us that we pray daily for those who claim the name of Jesus, but fail to have love for their fellow man.   Those of us who follow Jesus and embrace God’s Law have a responsibility to reach out to the spiritually ill – even those with the very disease that inspired them to run us off or write us off.  

            As one who has had to overcome the disease of lacking love, I can speak about it candidly in the same way that a recovering alcoholic can speak of the disease of being addicted to liquor.  I don’t bring up the subject to condemn others. I am discussing it only because I want my brothers and sisters in Christ to know that they can overcome it.  But you can’t overcome it until you have admitted you have a problem. 

            And just because your church organization refuses to overcome this sin, it doesn’t mean you as an individual can’t.  If a Christian has this problem, his first step is to admit that there needs to be more love within himself and the COGs. Only then can he truly follow the admonition, “Come out of her my people,” and have healing.  And it is only then that Jesus will be able to truly say, “By this will all know that you are mine.  That you have love for one another.”

            Make yourself a committee of one which has been tasked with the job of promoting Christian love for all other people. 

-->

            Wes White is president of the Ronald L. Dart Evangelistic Association (RLDEA.com), a Sabbath-keeping Christian ministry which preaches the Gospel of Jesus thru the works of the late Ron Dart.