LCG members will be celebrating a festival that they claim is a foretaste of the Kingdom of God and yet there will spend 8 days hearing about the law, commandments, and keeping so-called holy days, with very little about Jesus being discussed (except that he is angry and pissed off and is coming back in fury to destroy people outside LCG).
I wonder how many Feast sites will be doing community charity work for one afternoon to show the local communities a foretaste of the kingdom to come.
Staying Healthy—2022 Feast General Health Guidelines
With the Feast of Tabernacles just a few weeks away, it is not too early to think about health as we prepare for this annual highlight of the year. It’s vital that we don’t push ourselves too hard and compromise sleep and diet in the busyness of preparations. Taking measures to stay healthy and even improve our health before the Feast will mean we are more likely to be able to partake of the powerful spiritual food and fellowship that God is preparing for us.
Also, at the present time, the pandemic has been easing and in most places restrictions are lifting. Accordingly, our guidelines for Sabbath services and Feast services have changed as well. However, this does not mean anyone should approach sickness in a cavalier or careless manner! As Mr. Gerald Weston’s Sabbath services guidance from The World Ahead, February 10, 2022, says: “Those with underlying conditions should feel free to continue wearing masks, but we recommend that they be properly fitting masks of the type (such as the N95) that offer real protection. If someone feels he or she needs to continue wearing a mask for any reason, no explanation is needed. We must not judge one another!”
With that in mind, please take note of our 2022 Feast General Health Guidelines: If you have symptoms of any potentially contagious illness, such as coughing, sore throat, or fever, you should not attend any FOT services or activities until your symptoms are significantly improved and you are fever-free for 24 hours without use of medication.
Well, truth in advertising would be more like, "Come along with us and hear the same old sh!t!", but what kind of disciple of an ancient ad man would that make them?
ReplyDeleteDoes the "Powerful spiritual food" come with "Powerful Pepto Bismol"??
ReplyDelete
ReplyDelete‘We must not judge one another’.
Don’t you bet on it!
See you at Branson--NOT
ReplyDeleteWeston's "powerful spiritual food" is hilarious. In all my years in LCG I have never heard a powerful sermon preached at the Feast or in church, for that matter. All of the sermons are the same canned sermons we have heard for decades. Nothing new, nothing relevant, and most of the time boring as hell. Weston and others at HQ want to know why people are leaving the church, this is why. The number of people joining from the Presentations will never make up for the continual exiting of members.
ReplyDeleteYour picture at the beginning of this article is wrong. There are no African American preachers in the church.
ReplyDelete@12:33 If you are indeed correct, and those who see the picture from a "what's wrong with this picture?" perspective, perhaps it will lead them further down the line to the next question, which is "what's wrong with this church?"
ReplyDeleteWouldn't it just be a gas if all the LCG members took this health admonition to heart and just buried Beto Thiel in orders for vitamin supplements, but much to his chagrin, totally ignored the ministry aspect of his business? What an eloquent statement that would make!
"Powerful spiritual food" is church speak for members being expected to believe the nice sounding words, while ignoring the reality in front of them.
ReplyDeleteIt has to be the same old canned sermons since the aging ministers know that any slip could cause them to be fired. They know that their church is itching to reduce minister numbers due to church shrinkage.
Anonymous Sunday, September 18, 2022 at 12:23:00 AM PDT said, "Your picture at the beginning of this article is wrong. There are no African American preachers in the church".
ReplyDeleteMY COMMENT - I was wondering if this is a true statement. Are there no African American preachers in the Armstrong splinter Churches today?
Off the top of my head, here is a list of African American ministers employed by the Church whom I remember from my days in the Worldwide Church of God:
Abner Washington
Elbert Atlas
Harold Jackson
Ben Wesley
Edwin Marrs
Curtis May
Arnold Hampton
There may have been more, but these are the ministers I remember. I believe Arnold Hampton may be with United Church of God. Are there any in the Splinters today. Can anyone confirm?
Richard
Commercial Break (a term borrowed from Dennis)!
ReplyDeleteSince the topic is Feast related, I thought I would comment that last week I commuted between Florida and Maryland homes by auto. I stopped at Jekyll Island where I attended several Feasts with my family under the world's largest tent between 1968 and 1976. The island is as beautiful as ever.
A rush of memories came to me - 8,000+ brethren in one location under a HUGE tent: Seeing the Armstrongs and many top ministers; the small landing strip on the island where we greeted the Armstrong's arrival by the Church Jets; the rush to get to the hamburger joint in the small strip mall across the street from the Tent before the Church crowds after night services with my brother Bob, Danny Dawson and Debbie Finlay (now Mrs. Clyde Kilough of COGWA); and of course, the hurricane that kept spinning off shore that kept approaching Jekyll Island and turning back. Gary might remember since he also was there that year that it seemed like the height of the storm hit when Garner Ted Armstrong was introduced to speak. It was difficult to hear Mr. Armstrong over the wind and pounding rain on the Tent, and light bulbs were bursting due to water. Satan was blamed as being angry with the Work of the Church. My brother Bob was on tent duty and his one and only suit was soaked which he had to wear for the remainder of the Feast.
Long after I had stopped attending the Church, I remember coming down for the weekend to be with my parents (both in the Church) while they were attending the Jekyll Island Feast site in 1982. We had a wonderful dinner at a steakhouse in nearby Brunswick Georgia. Unbeknownst to me at the time, it would be the last dinner I ever had with my father who died 9 months later.
Jekyll Island hosted 8,000 Brethren for the Feast. Today's Splinters consider 10% of that attendance to be a large feast site for them. It again points to the low wattage works of today's ACOGs.
Richard
I always wondered why them Southerners didn't call St. Simons Island "Hyde Island." Then, you would have had both Jekyll and Hyde.
ReplyDeleteBack in 1965, I got to use my Life Guard credential during the Feast because they decided they needed to staff the beaches during the afternoons when church people were able to take their families to the beach. The thing is, at Jekyll Island, an adult could walk out into the ocean for what seemed to be a half mile and the water would still only be waist deep. Nothing like the rip tides like in the Pacific Ocean, and the sun was nowhere near as intense as in California for some reason. I think the most exciting thing that happened during my stint was when someone saw fins and thought it was sharks until one of the locals pointed out that the difference between the motions of shark fins and porpoise fins. Turned out to be Flipper, not Jaws. Oh, and a hurricane cut the swimming times short, cause the rain drenched us and lightbulbs popped in the tent that year, too! Really messed up the Feast for people we knew who were camping!
The 1960s were interesting times in which to travel to the Feast. Lots of choices. Most boring trip was when a big group of church people decided to take the train together. We flew a couple of years, and that pretty much ran the spectrum. One year found us on an old DC-3 for part of the journey, and we flew on one of the new Electrajets another year. Anyone who ever saw the movie American Grafitti knows that during the early '60s the big four prop engined Constellations were still the main or usual airliner used by the various commercial airlines. My parents even cut loose with some of that wonderful second tithe money to charter a small plane at the Jekyll Island airport to do an aerial tour one year. Oh, and yes, I loved those Piggly Wiggly Supermarkets and DX Boron Service Stations when we were driving through the South. Everyone was so nice to us, but as white people from the north, we had great difficulty understanding the mentality of "Colored" drinking fountains, bathrooms, restaurants, and motels. We'd never seen such things above the Mason-Dixon line.