Exposing the underbelly of Armstrongism in all of its wacky glory! Nothing you read here is made up. What you read here is the up to date face of Herbert W Armstrong's legacy. It's the gritty and dirty behind the scenes look at Armstrongism as you have never seen it before!
With all the new crazy self-appointed Chief Overseers, Apostles, Prophets, Pharisees, legalists, and outright liars leading various Churches of God today, it is important to hold these agents of deception accountable.
Herbert Armstrong's Tangled Web of Corrupt Leaders
The derogatory term "the fringe" says a lot. People hate being different. That helps explain why so many people embraced "the changes". The same thing applies to politics, and everything else. The problem with Herb is that he was wrong, not that he was on the "fringe." Sadly, the mainstream of society is brainwashed in numerous ways. Sometimes the "fringe" is really the leading edge, a new paradigm. The few brave leaders who blaze the trail are often persecuted and on "the fringe." But most people will follow like sheep where they can't get canceled.
While I consider Joe Tkach Jr as a friend as well as others involved in "the changes", my kind of background in what the changes were changing back to is the same. I will always feel that if those in high position come to different conclusions, it was never an option to force an entire organization to go along with them. Those so inclined should simply have left and sought one of the myriads of already competing denominational beliefs that matched their own.
It is only because there was no mechanism in place and there never was to stress accountability or even extreme caution for such an approach. HWA did what he wanted as did those that followed. "In a multitude of counselors there is safety" was never one of WCG's great beliefs when declaring this or that truth, new or otherwise.
Secondly, "What were you thinking?" is my response to it all. And while I now know what the thinking was, it was not good thinking. Any other corporate leadership who intended to enforce companywide changes, without input and forewarning, because they felt they could, would have been handed their asses on a silver plate along with their termination papers.
Churches historically make such leaps over decades if not centuries and not in months.
While I would have moved into my own losing faith in faith no matter, I don't think the good and sincere people of WCG deserved to have the rug pulled out from under them. Had anyone lower than those in charge tried this, and come to think of it, some did try several times over the course of my own ministerial experience, they would have been simply terminated. Well, actually they were.
Personally, when I was told that "Jesus worked a great miracle in the church", my only conclusion was that this kind of Jesus was a trickster. I would have appreciated any Jesus, when I was a teen asking God to please guide me in going to Ambassador College etc, to have yelled from heaven, "NO! It will all be for nothing. You'll make a great paleontologist!" Would have saved a lot of drama and trauma for sure.
I listened to the whole interview, and Joe just dismisses and avoids completely about WHAT HAPPENED TO THE $100 to $150 MILLION dollars that they received in the wholesale liquidation of the WCG.
He claims a humble lifestyle, which may be true, (I looked at his house in Oregon on Zillow, 2558 Sq Feet) and says he drives a 2007 Pickup truck.
Great--- But we still have the mystery of "what happened to all those assets"?. He also laughs about the idea of "gold bars" , however, in the last audited reports , post HWA, there were INDEED a large position in gold bars listed as an asset. Right here on Banned is a large listing of gold silverware, and priceless antiques. There was a jet, an auditorium, and lots of real estate assets.
Also, Mike Feasell is mentioned many times in the interview, and it is a profound twist of fate, that today , Feasell is an AGNOSTIC. Again this is bypassed by Tkach in his testimony.
Also, he tries to use the HWA Imprimatur that he somehow and vaguely wanted to have "the changes". I remember Joe Sr. speaking and saying the same thing, in regards to pork and the Sabbath. This is hog wash.
Armstrong may have said that there would need to be some changes (and like Joe said , perhaps in areas like makeup, D&R, medical , voting, birthdays etc. , but there IS NO WAY that HWA was implying that he would want changes to Sabbath Keeping or Xmas.
Like Dennis said above, the whole "changes thing" was done very autocratically, and dictatorially, right or wrong. This is again due to hierarchical and "top down" governance, something HWA preached against in the 1939 Good News, yet later adopted and thus sowed the seeds of the organization's downfall from the 1950s on.
Denny Luker , who I am no fan of, none the less, tried to negotiate a peaceful divorce , without the disfellowshipments and the drama of 1995, but the Tkach's refused. This was cruel and arrogant IMHO, considering that people were warned that there would be some kind of attack on its basic doctrines at some point in the future, as per Armstrongs own warnings for many years prior.
So the impatience and cruelty of the Tkach pogrom upon people who were faithful to previous understandings , who had been warned that someone like Tkach would come along, tells me that the Tkach's and their henchmen were nothing more than GRACE NAZIS.
What a shallow snow job of an interview! I look forward to the day he makes a public apology for the lives he and his fellow ministers did in destroying members' lives and relationships. He made it sound like it was a gentle process of training the ministers about the changes and yet it was like a rug being yanked out from under us. While I agreed with the changes, the manner in which it happened was not cool at all!
I'd like to say the interview had some depth but it does not actually seem to. Rather generic.
Having just sat with Joe for lunch and understanding him as a person in all this, I asked him about the money from the sale of everything and he said it went to buyouts of employees and ministry that "qualified". They were constrained by legal issues on how it was done whatever that means.
That does seem a lot of money to go to just that and then run out. I am no financial guy so I have no clue how any of it works or would work.
He said he receives no retirement and was bought out according the law which he said they had to abide by in all things. Mike Feazell received virtually nothing and he and his wife are just getting by. I talk to Mike often. He noted his genuine PhD in theology opened his own mind to all the problems with the Bible and he indeed is agnostic at this point.
Frankly I am not sure what to believe. I still don't believe those involved in the changes understand how badly and recklessly it came about. Nice to think one is introducing others to Jesus but that seems to miss the whole point of the damage done in Jesus name.
It is no mystery why people conclude "Screw church and religion". And Jesus ain't sayin' nothin'.
The buyout claim is bogus, or at best a half-truth, unless the employees had contracts which included such a requirement (highly unlikely) or the state of California mandated such a thing. So much depends on how the church was incorporated. If it was set up as a nonprofit then federal law forbids distribution of assets upon dissolution to an individual. Instead they must go to another nonprofit.
The California Secretary of State's website contains some interesting information. The original corporation of the Radio Church of God, which was incorporated in 1966, is still active and under the control of GCI. Furthermore, in 1996 Tkach & Co. incorporated a nonprofit by the name of Ambassador Foundation. In 2009 they filed a name change to rename that organization to -- get this -- the Worldwide Church of God. Like I said....interesting.
It was always about the money. And, like Stanley Rader once said, "it's not what you own, it's what you control". Clever application of nonprofit law can allow someone to own nothing but benefit from the control of millions of dollars of assets. Nonprofits are like most other corporations where governance is controlled by a handful of directors. Those directors have a WIDE degree of latitude to write or edit the governing documents in ways that effectively lock in their tenure and give them long-term control over the organization.....and thus the organization's assets.
I'm just sort of thinking out loud in this post. Someone with lots of spare time on their hands and who knows what they are doing could probably uncover a lot of information just from locating and reviewing public records. I'm certain most of that money didn't go to buyouts for the field ministry and office staff.
I have no idea why certain bygones even continue to be brought up and discussed. When I think of the WCG, HWA, and Ambassador College, honestly the loss my tithes during the period of my membership were a worthy investment in the very poignant lessons in life I learned at their hand about demagogues, authoritarianism, fringe groups, being a pariah, and beliefs that lock up the mind so that it can't function as God intended in His beautiful parable of the talents.
All things considered, all of these years later, I can't even think of classic Armstrongism without remembering (with a twinkle in my eye) the wisdom of Gamaliel. It's gone except for a handful of diehards because it was not of God.
Anonymous said... It says alot that this anti COG website gives Joe Jr such an easy ride. I thought Dennis C Dhiel (Diehl) had enough of blogging ? ==============================================
Some specifics and topics are near and dear to my experience and the desire to enlighten whoever might be thinking of going into a split, splinter or sliver of WCG before they make that mistake is strong in this one. And too, I get sent all kinds of things WCG/COG past and present which keeps the pot stirred it seems as well.
Sometimes I do have had enough of blogging. Sometimes the desire to talk about or make observations about specifics of the experience returns depending.
Joe Junior seemed like a prick charlatan back in the early 90’s. Appears he was, as were his compadres. Though I was deceived in a different way back then, Joe Jr. never deceived me as to who he was.
I agree with Tonto! There has never been an accounting of the WCG asset liquidation re-structuring. Where was/is the transparency?
I am skeptical without a full accounting. It took no talent or business savvy to do what little Joey Tkach Junior did shrinking the Church. As I always say referring to Tkach, it was like stealing candy from a baby. There was obviously no thought or consideration by Tkach as to the adverse impact his clandestine plot would have on the membership. I count the 13,000 or so alumni of Ambassador College as collateral damage as well. A College degree from a defunct College is worthless - almost as worthless as almost arrested for Sabbath Keeping, doubly blessed little Bobby Thiel's mail order degree mill degree.
Since there has been no transparency, we have no idea who and how much each recipient received from the asset liquidation. I thought I had read that Tkach once said that they were funding retirements from the liquidation. If so, then consider this:
If 1,500 WCG employees (ministerial and non-ministerial) received funded retirements from the $150 Million asset liquidation, that would work out to be $100,000 per recipient. Some would get more; others would get less. That would be very plausible and believable IF TKACH WOULD JUST BE TRANSPARENT AND CONFIRM THIS. It would actually be to Tkach's credit and to his credibility if he did so.
The Apostate And That False Prophet Working Together As A Team
If the apostate Joseph Tkach, Jr. really cared about truth and helping people, why did he sell some of Herbert W. Armstrong's writings to That False Prophet Gerald Flurry for millions of dollars?
This helped a gospel-suppressing, family-wrecking, identity thief and false prophet like Gerald Flurry to pass himself off as Herbert W. Armstrong's successor while in fact actually editing and changing Herbert W. Armstrong's writings to totally pervert everything that he had taught.
You wrote a long post declaring goodbye yet reappeared as if no goodbyes had been written. Still didn't justify why this anti COG blog gives Joe Jr repeatedly an easy ride. Same old 1995 apostasy being repackaged to deliberately cause trouble.
$100,000 is nearly nothing so far as a 401K goes, considering that as a nonprofit, employees didn't pay into the Social Security program (which is a shared program involving payments from both the employee and the employer). In most cases, those who worked their entire careers for the church or college, fully expecting the end to come well before they would ever retire, were not able to collect any SS benefits. Who could even begin to live on an $8,000 annual annuity? I can see that as being a nice addition if a person were receiving SS benefits, but with an $8,000 sole annual income, you wouldn't even be able to afford to eat cat food!
Many of the ministers who went to the splinters probably took a cut in pay, but at least had continuing income. And if former employees were also able to continue the job descriptions they had in WCG with a splinter, they would also have continuing income.
That leaves those who remained with the mothership to be taken care of. I suspect the $100,000 figure would be median, and not average. As everything contracted, with donations on the wane, $150 Mil, although it sounds like an incredible figure, really would not go that far. Of course not everyone who was cut would necessarily be of retirement age, and younger workers could easily have found employment in which they were paying into the Social Security system. The church and college also had an absolutely horrible time liquidating the real estate assets. That required years. And, you can blame Rod Meredith for squandering a substantial amount by sticking around just until the new WCG had to pay out the Leona McNair settlement!
The big question is, if an account were given, would all you guys believe it was a true accounting, even if it were independently audited? I'm just asking, as someone who has no dog in this fight, someone who is just glad it's gone, and that the splinters never got it.
Thursday, August 4, 2022 at 11:48:00 PM PDT said, "The big question is, if an account were given, would all you guys believe it was a true accounting, even if it were independently audited?"
MY COMMENT - I would believe it to be a true accounting. If it wasn't a true accounting, then it would be a fraud. Until I did the math, it suddenly made sense to me as a plausible explanation for the use of the liquidated real estate assets and that Tkach might be telling the truth. When people in authority positions aren't being transparent, then we are left to speculate and perhaps think the very worse. I would accept a redacted list of recipients along with any other use of the liquidated funds.
I'm with you. I have no dog in this fight EXCEPT my parents donated a butt load of money to the WCG. I also tithed and gave offerings during my early work years while in the Church.
Agreed! The $100,000 estimate is more likely a median and not an average. Your observation about $8,000 annual retirement income is spot on. I am sure it was meant to be a retirement supplemental income, not a full retirement. It wasn't like WCG employees were working for the government or a private business. They were working for a non-profit Church. One should expect less. For employees who were not eligible to receive social security (which I guess would be all in WCG), they have had a decade or so to work elsewhere and earn social security credits toward retirement.
I have no particular liking for Lil Joe on multiple levels. I think its only fair to recognize that some of his tales about why they did things the way they did back then are simply rationales he spun himself to avoid having to see himself for what he is and to avoid the full weight of what his actions caused for people. He liked to think of himself as a hero on some heavenly scoreboard back then while trying to dodge the consequences.
And I dont think he has fully paid his dues. Yeah, Joe, I said it. You still hide behind self-spun excuses.
But at the same time, all the bickering and factioning that occurred as a result allowed me an easier time escaping that group than those older than me had, so I can't be all mad at the old fool.
"I have no particular liking for Lil Joe on multiple levels." RSK
My first impression of Junior in real time was; how did we just get from Herbert Armstrong to Joe Tkach Sr unto the present. Now we know, he only obtained his position because his dad did not trust anyone else, and on the cusp of being the steward of 86,000 baptized souls, he was calling his former employer to see if his old job was still available.
The trail of unintelligent decisions was long with this group. Throw in the multitude of unintelligent observations that were perceived by this group and you witnessed a predictable liquidation with the the choir singing "what were you thinking", and Junior ended up with nothing but a handful of grace.
RSK, you are right, Joe Jr hasn't paid his dues. That will come when he is still driving his 07 truck ten years from now and a deep pocket Armstrongist buys the house directly across from him and erects a 25 foot statue of Herbert Armstrong.
23 comments:
Uh oh! People still drinking the Kool Aid are going to be indulging in some nasty name calling in their comments.
Yeah, I am waiting for the self-righteous to get all indignant and pitch a tantrum about the "truth".
The derogatory term "the fringe" says a lot. People hate being different. That helps explain why so many people embraced "the changes". The same thing applies to politics, and everything else. The problem with Herb is that he was wrong, not that he was on the "fringe." Sadly, the mainstream of society is brainwashed in numerous ways. Sometimes the "fringe" is really the leading edge, a new paradigm. The few brave leaders who blaze the trail are often persecuted and on "the fringe." But most people will follow like sheep where they can't get canceled.
While I consider Joe Tkach Jr as a friend as well as others involved in "the changes", my kind of background in what the changes were changing back to is the same. I will always feel that if those in high position come to different conclusions, it was never an option to force an entire organization to go along with them. Those so inclined should simply have left and sought one of the myriads of already competing denominational beliefs that matched their own.
It is only because there was no mechanism in place and there never was to stress accountability or even extreme caution for such an approach. HWA did what he wanted as did those that followed. "In a multitude of counselors there is safety" was never one of WCG's great beliefs when declaring this or that truth, new or otherwise.
Secondly, "What were you thinking?" is my response to it all. And while I now know what the thinking was, it was not good thinking. Any other corporate leadership who intended to enforce companywide changes, without input and forewarning, because they felt they could, would have been handed their asses on a silver plate along with their termination papers.
Churches historically make such leaps over decades if not centuries and not in months.
While I would have moved into my own losing faith in faith no matter, I don't think the good and sincere people of WCG deserved to have the rug pulled out from under them. Had anyone lower than those in charge tried this, and come to think of it, some did try several times over the course of my own ministerial experience, they would have been simply terminated. Well, actually they were.
Personally, when I was told that "Jesus worked a great miracle in the church", my only conclusion was that this kind of Jesus was a trickster. I would have appreciated any Jesus, when I was a teen asking God to please guide me in going to Ambassador College etc, to have yelled from heaven, "NO! It will all be for nothing. You'll make a great paleontologist!" Would have saved a lot of drama and trauma for sure.
I listened to the whole interview, and Joe just dismisses and avoids completely about WHAT HAPPENED TO THE $100 to $150 MILLION dollars that they received in the wholesale liquidation of the WCG.
He claims a humble lifestyle, which may be true, (I looked at his house in Oregon on Zillow, 2558 Sq Feet) and says he drives a 2007 Pickup truck.
Great--- But we still have the mystery of "what happened to all those assets"?. He also laughs about the idea of "gold bars" , however, in the last audited reports , post HWA, there were INDEED a large position in gold bars listed as an asset. Right here on Banned is a large listing of gold silverware, and priceless antiques. There was a jet, an auditorium, and lots of real estate assets.
Also, Mike Feasell is mentioned many times in the interview, and it is a profound twist of fate, that today , Feasell is an AGNOSTIC. Again this is bypassed by Tkach in his testimony.
Also, he tries to use the HWA Imprimatur that he somehow and vaguely wanted to have "the changes". I remember Joe Sr. speaking and saying the same thing, in regards to pork and the Sabbath. This is hog wash.
Armstrong may have said that there would need to be some changes (and like Joe said , perhaps in areas like makeup, D&R, medical , voting, birthdays etc. , but there IS NO WAY that HWA was implying that he would want changes to Sabbath Keeping or Xmas.
Like Dennis said above, the whole "changes thing" was done very autocratically, and dictatorially, right or wrong. This is again due to hierarchical and "top down" governance, something HWA preached against in the 1939 Good News, yet later adopted and thus sowed the seeds of the organization's downfall from the 1950s on.
Denny Luker , who I am no fan of, none the less, tried to negotiate a peaceful divorce , without the disfellowshipments and the drama of 1995, but the Tkach's refused. This was cruel and arrogant IMHO, considering that people were warned that there would be some kind of attack on its basic doctrines at some point in the future, as per Armstrongs own warnings for many years prior.
So the impatience and cruelty of the Tkach pogrom upon people who were faithful to previous understandings , who had been warned that someone like Tkach would come along, tells me that the Tkach's and their henchmen were nothing more than GRACE NAZIS.
What a shallow snow job of an interview! I look forward to the day he makes a public apology for the lives he and his fellow ministers did in destroying members' lives and relationships. He made it sound like it was a gentle process of training the ministers about the changes and yet it was like a rug being yanked out from under us. While I agreed with the changes, the manner in which it happened was not cool at all!
I'd like to say the interview had some depth but it does not actually seem to. Rather generic.
Having just sat with Joe for lunch and understanding him as a person in all this,
I asked him about the money from the sale of everything and he said it went to buyouts of employees and ministry that "qualified". They were constrained by legal issues on how it was done whatever that means.
That does seem a lot of money to go to just that and then run out. I am no financial guy so I have no clue how any of it works or would work.
He said he receives no retirement and was bought out according the law which he said they had to abide by in all things. Mike Feazell received virtually nothing and he and his wife are just getting by. I talk to Mike often. He noted his genuine PhD in theology opened his own mind to all the problems with the Bible and he indeed is agnostic at this point.
Frankly I am not sure what to believe. I still don't believe those involved in the changes understand how badly and recklessly it came about. Nice to think one is introducing others to Jesus but that seems to miss the whole point of the damage done in Jesus name.
It is no mystery why people conclude "Screw church and religion". And Jesus ain't sayin' nothin'.
The buyout claim is bogus, or at best a half-truth, unless the employees had contracts which included such a requirement (highly unlikely) or the state of California mandated such a thing. So much depends on how the church was incorporated. If it was set up as a nonprofit then federal law forbids distribution of assets upon dissolution to an individual. Instead they must go to another nonprofit.
The California Secretary of State's website contains some interesting information. The original corporation of the Radio Church of God, which was incorporated in 1966, is still active and under the control of GCI. Furthermore, in 1996 Tkach & Co. incorporated a nonprofit by the name of Ambassador Foundation. In 2009 they filed a name change to rename that organization to -- get this -- the Worldwide Church of God. Like I said....interesting.
It was always about the money. And, like Stanley Rader once said, "it's not what you own, it's what you control". Clever application of nonprofit law can allow someone to own nothing but benefit from the control of millions of dollars of assets. Nonprofits are like most other corporations where governance is controlled by a handful of directors. Those directors have a WIDE degree of latitude to write or edit the governing documents in ways that effectively lock in their tenure and give them long-term control over the organization.....and thus the organization's assets.
I'm just sort of thinking out loud in this post. Someone with lots of spare time on their hands and who knows what they are doing could probably uncover a lot of information just from locating and reviewing public records. I'm certain most of that money didn't go to buyouts for the field ministry and office staff.
Bit rich coming from you 'Tonto'.
It says alot that this anti COG website gives Joe Jr such an easy ride. I thought Dennis C Dhiel had enough of blogging ?
I have no idea why certain bygones even continue to be brought up and discussed. When I think of the WCG, HWA, and Ambassador College, honestly the loss my tithes during the period of my membership were a worthy investment in the very poignant lessons in life I learned at their hand about demagogues, authoritarianism, fringe groups, being a pariah, and beliefs that lock up the mind so that it can't function as God intended in His beautiful parable of the talents.
All things considered, all of these years later, I can't even think of classic Armstrongism without remembering (with a twinkle in my eye) the wisdom of Gamaliel. It's gone except for a handful of diehards because it was not of God.
Anonymous said...
It says alot that this anti COG website gives Joe Jr such an easy ride. I thought Dennis C Dhiel (Diehl) had enough of blogging ?
==============================================
Some specifics and topics are near and dear to my experience and the desire to enlighten whoever might be thinking of going into a split, splinter or sliver of WCG before they make that mistake is strong in this one. And too, I get sent all kinds of things WCG/COG past and present which keeps the pot stirred it seems as well.
Sometimes I do have had enough of blogging. Sometimes the desire to talk about or make observations about specifics of the experience returns depending.
"I'm certain most of that money didn't go to buyouts for the field ministry and office staff"
Yeah, where's the accounting data?
Dennis didn't get 'bought out'!
There's a hundred million dollars missing here.
Joe Junior seemed like a prick charlatan back in the early 90’s. Appears he was, as were his compadres. Though I was deceived in a different way back then, Joe Jr. never deceived me as to who he was.
I agree with Tonto! There has never been an accounting of the WCG asset liquidation re-structuring. Where was/is the transparency?
I am skeptical without a full accounting. It took no talent or business savvy to do what little Joey Tkach Junior did shrinking the Church. As I always say referring to Tkach, it was like stealing candy from a baby. There was obviously no thought or consideration by Tkach as to the adverse impact his clandestine plot would have on the membership. I count the 13,000 or so alumni of Ambassador College as collateral damage as well. A College degree from a defunct College is worthless - almost as worthless as almost arrested for Sabbath Keeping, doubly blessed little Bobby Thiel's mail order degree mill degree.
Since there has been no transparency, we have no idea who and how much each recipient received from the asset liquidation. I thought I had read that Tkach once said that they were funding retirements from the liquidation. If so, then consider this:
If 1,500 WCG employees (ministerial and non-ministerial) received funded retirements from the $150 Million asset liquidation, that would work out to be $100,000 per recipient. Some would get more; others would get less. That would be very plausible and believable IF TKACH WOULD JUST BE TRANSPARENT AND CONFIRM THIS. It would actually be to Tkach's credit and to his credibility if he did so.
Richard
The Apostate And That False Prophet Working Together As A Team
If the apostate Joseph Tkach, Jr. really cared about truth and helping people, why did he sell some of Herbert W. Armstrong's writings to That False Prophet Gerald Flurry for millions of dollars?
This helped a gospel-suppressing, family-wrecking, identity thief and false prophet like Gerald Flurry to pass himself off as Herbert W. Armstrong's successor while in fact actually editing and changing Herbert W. Armstrong's writings to totally pervert everything that he had taught.
Lake of Fire is correct in his numbers.
They could buy life annuities of about $100k for 1500 people, which would have been around an $8000 a year FOR LIFE annuity payment .
I
You wrote a long post declaring goodbye yet reappeared as if no goodbyes had been written.
Still didn't justify why this anti COG blog gives Joe Jr repeatedly an easy ride. Same old 1995 apostasy being repackaged to deliberately cause trouble.
$100,000 is nearly nothing so far as a 401K goes, considering that as a nonprofit, employees didn't pay into the Social Security program (which is a shared program involving payments from both the employee and the employer). In most cases, those who worked their entire careers for the church or college, fully expecting the end to come well before they would ever retire, were not able to collect any SS benefits. Who could even begin to live on an $8,000 annual annuity? I can see that as being a nice addition if a person were receiving SS benefits, but with an $8,000 sole annual income, you wouldn't even be able to afford to eat cat food!
Many of the ministers who went to the splinters probably took a cut in pay, but at least had continuing income. And if former employees were also able to continue the job descriptions they had in WCG with a splinter, they would also have continuing income.
That leaves those who remained with the mothership to be taken care of. I suspect the $100,000 figure would be median, and not average. As everything contracted, with donations on the wane, $150 Mil, although it sounds like an incredible figure, really would not go that far. Of course not everyone who was cut would necessarily be of retirement age, and younger workers could easily have found employment in which they were paying into the Social Security system. The church and college also had an absolutely horrible time liquidating the real estate assets. That required years. And, you can blame Rod Meredith for squandering a substantial amount by sticking around just until the new WCG had to pay out the Leona McNair settlement!
The big question is, if an account were given, would all you guys believe it was a true accounting, even if it were independently audited? I'm just asking, as someone who has no dog in this fight, someone who is just glad it's gone, and that the splinters never got it.
Thursday, August 4, 2022 at 11:48:00 PM PDT said, "The big question is, if an account were given, would all you guys believe it was a true accounting, even if it were independently audited?"
MY COMMENT - I would believe it to be a true accounting. If it wasn't a true accounting, then it would be a fraud. Until I did the math, it suddenly made sense to me as a plausible explanation for the use of the liquidated real estate assets and that Tkach might be telling the truth. When people in authority positions aren't being transparent, then we are left to speculate and perhaps think the very worse. I would accept a redacted list of recipients along with any other use of the liquidated funds.
I'm with you. I have no dog in this fight EXCEPT my parents donated a butt load of money to the WCG. I also tithed and gave offerings during my early work years while in the Church.
Agreed! The $100,000 estimate is more likely a median and not an average. Your observation about $8,000 annual retirement income is spot on. I am sure it was meant to be a retirement supplemental income, not a full retirement. It wasn't like WCG employees were working for the government or a private business. They were working for a non-profit Church. One should expect less. For employees who were not eligible to receive social security (which I guess would be all in WCG), they have had a decade or so to work elsewhere and earn social security credits toward retirement.
Richard
I have no particular liking for Lil Joe on multiple levels. I think its only fair to recognize that some of his tales about why they did things the way they did back then are simply rationales he spun himself to avoid having to see himself for what he is and to avoid the full weight of what his actions caused for people. He liked to think of himself as a hero on some heavenly scoreboard back then while trying to dodge the consequences.
And I dont think he has fully paid his dues. Yeah, Joe, I said it. You still hide behind self-spun excuses.
But at the same time, all the bickering and factioning that occurred as a result allowed me an easier time escaping that group than those older than me had, so I can't be all mad at the old fool.
"I have no particular liking for Lil Joe on multiple levels." RSK
My first impression of Junior in real time was; how did we just get from Herbert Armstrong to Joe Tkach Sr unto the present. Now we know, he only obtained his position because his dad did not trust anyone else, and on the cusp of being the steward of 86,000 baptized souls, he was calling his former employer to see if his old job was still available.
The trail of unintelligent decisions was long with this group. Throw in the multitude of unintelligent observations that were perceived by this group and you witnessed a predictable liquidation with the the choir singing "what were you thinking", and Junior ended up with nothing but a handful of grace.
RSK, you are right, Joe Jr hasn't paid his dues. That will come when he is still driving his 07 truck ten years from now and a deep pocket Armstrongist buys the house directly across from him and erects a 25 foot statue of Herbert Armstrong.
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