This pretty much sums up how all of the splinter groups formed and still are forming. The thought of losing a paycheck scares all of these men. God forbid if any of them ever had to actually work!
Rod Meredith, like Vik Kubik, Jim Franks, Clyde Kilough and many, many others, all waited in the Worldwide Church of God while they schemed in the background how they would form their new organizations in order to have the perpetual paycheck waiting for them. In the meantime, they disfellowshipped people left and right for not agreeing with the changes. Rod Meredith hung around as long as the Worldwide Church of God was paying his attorney fees and then slammed the screen door behind him as he left. Most of the COG ministry was like Pavlov's dog, flash the dollar sign and they will come, salivating!
From a previous thread on Herbert Armstrong:
HWA admits that his great fear was the fear of losing his job.
That's the WCG/splinter experience in a nutshell. Men claimed to fear God, but when put into a crisis they feared for the loss of a visible paycheck, rather than the loss of relationship with an invisible God.
Even Rod Meredith stayed on with the Tkaches for three years after he knew they were apostates... because he needed WCG's protection in the Leona McNair lawsuit. Within a month of the lawsuit being settled (and RCM didn't have to pay a dime of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that went to Leona McNair and hw lawyers in the settlement), he formed the Global Church of God. The men who formed UCG were even worse, disfellowshipping brethren in March 1995 for holding the same beliefs these ministers would claim to uphold in July 1995.
Yes, the vast majority of men in the ACOG ministry followed HWA's example, living in fear of losing their jobs, and putting those jobs ahead of the brethren they were supposed to serve.
8 comments:
Does it really surprise anyone in any of the splinter groups that these hired dogs Isaiah 56- 10 look at the all mighty dollar for their salvation. Cogwa again is the worst from the standpoint a huge portion of their hirelings came out of UGC which came out of wwcg. It's like as soon as one ship may sink the rats jump to another so that paycheck will keep coming. They want to fleece the flock but make sure they get paid. Go out and do an honest days work like Paul they would not know how to do if their lives depended on it. They sit there in all their pomposity and dictate how everyone else should live but never give a real accounting of where the tithes and offerings go. Cogwa does not do any kind of a work with their income.which is the largest of the cogs.
It doesn't matter (from a money/stress standpoint) whether one is rich or poor. If you live from paycheck to paycheck, you are going to stress out about how to make ends meet. If you have a sizeable war chest, you stress out over things that might happen which could make you lose it all.
BB
Yet for decades, many of these church leaders were viewed by many, if not most members, as junior gods. They put themselves on pedestals using a variety of manipulative ploys, a favorite being verbally beating down the sheep.
And finally exposed as just B grade Hollywood actors.
When I first went to Big Sandy back in the Seventies, I worked with an employee who had dropped out of AC Pasadena after a couple of years. He was native to East Texan. He told me that when he was growing up (he was born sometime in the 1930s) that the standard approach in East Texas, if there was a White foreman overseeing the work of African American employees, was that the White Foreman would wear a sidearm. I was appalled and commented that it was surely just for display. Then I thought maybe he was referring to a prison chain gang. The employee said that it was not just for display and these were not prisoners but private citizens and that if an African American Employee got out of line and became a threat, the foreman would shoot the African American employee. He claimed to know of such incidents.
East Texas has the culture of the Old South. To me it was like a foreign country. I was a Midwesterner. I watched a group of White people approach an elderly African American man on the sidewalk in downtown Big Sandy. The African American got off the sidewalk and stood in the street until the White people passed. I was not used to this.
There was a strange but discernable atmosphere of evil that attached itself to the Big Sandy campus - almost palpable. I think Armstrongism was a part of this. And also the racial prejudice of East Texas society was a factor.
A funny thing happened to my brother and I when we were in high school. We always travelled to the South for the Feast. As anyone who ever attended high school in the USA knows, the athletes pretty much rule the school. One year when we returned to class following the Feast we found that a member of the Football team had started a rumor that my dad was a grand dragon in the KKK, and that we had gone to a KKK convention. That could have been a really dangerous rumor for us personally if the school we attended at that time had been integrated, but that was in the old pre-bussing days of the early ‘60s.
BB
Slow day in UCG HQ office anon 5:18?
Income is dropping/stagnant for all of the COG groups, with an rapidly aging support group, and virtually nil in the areas of new growth and members.
It will be interesting to watch how this evolves over the next 10 years or so. Will they be able to stand together and stay bonded once inevitable layoffs, forced retirements and firings occur? I doubt it. There will be more fracturings and infighting as resources disappear.
"There was a strange but discernable atmosphere of evil that attached itself to the Big Sandy campus - almost palpable."
Funny that nobody else noticed it. Must have been in your own imagination.
" ... the racial prejudice of East Texas society was a factor."
Why does nobody complain about the racial prejudice of the media who think it's okay for blacks to have the NAACP (which was actually set up and controlled by Jews by the way) to promote their interests, but any white group that defends whites from all the slander is automatically labeled a "hate" group even if they don't hate anybody.
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