It is that time of year again and various Church of God groups try to get as close to Christmas as possible as they plan their winter family weekends around the Christmas holiday. Picking resorts decked out to the nines with Christmas decorations, Christmas foods, and delightful holiday music playing all around the resorts, it's the next best thing to burning a yule log in the fireplace. Decry Christmas on one hand and wallow in its observance on the other.
This year's Christmas celebration is extra special for Living Church of God. This is the 30th anniversary of Rod Meredith's rebellious first sermon after he waited for the Worldwide Church of God to defend his libelous ass in court after he lied about Leona McNair to 700 ministers gathered at a ministerial conference. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent by the WCG to defend Meredith and the church against McNair's lawsuit. Delightfully, they lost the lawsuit and the church paid out a lot of money to McNair. Meredith then jumped ship into the New Global Church of God that a small cabal of WCG members plotted in the background to organize while they were all WCG members.
This should be an extra special Christmas for the LCG since this is also the same time that Dave Pack's "christ" is returning. Imagine what a yule buster that will be when LCG has to suck up to Davey Boy as the one true COG. There will be a long line of COG leaders standing there ready to kiss Dave's ring as he sits next to Christ on his throne. Imagine Weston, Thiel, and Flurry having to kowtow at Dave's feet! What a Merry Christmas that will be!
Family Weekends – 30th Anniversary of the Global/Living Church of God
As final arrangements are being made for the first of this winter’s family weekends, it’s good to remember that this coming December 26 will be the 30th anniversary of the Global/Living Church of God. It was on Saturday, December 26, 1992, that Dr. Meredith conducted the first Sabbath service of the Global Church of God, with 19 in attendance. We are grateful for the courage and zeal of Dr. Meredith for stepping out in faith 30 years ago and reviving God’s Work that we are continuing today.
A special, sermonette-length video message by Mr. Gerald Weston is being produced to commemorate this milestone.
24 comments:
Your intro paragraph, so slick!
Weston wants to have it both ways. When creditors come to him asking to be repaid the money Global owes them, Weston says "We're LCG, not Global! We aren't responsible for your debts!" But when it's time to have a party, suddenly Global counts as part of LCG. Hypocrite!
“It is that time of year again and various Church of God groups try to get as close to Christmas as possible as they plan their winter family weekends around the Christmas holiday. Picking resorts decked out to the nines with Christmas decorations, Christmas foods, and delightful holiday music playing all around the resorts, it's the next best thing to burning a yule log in the fireplace. Decry Christmas on one hand and wallow in its observance on the other.”
So true.
COGWA should have distinguished itself from UCG when they split in 2010 by dumping the Winter Family Christmas Weekend custom that someone had made up in a month of their own choosing to compete against the Feast of Tabernacles for popularity.
According to HWA's church eras theory, this would now be the Laodicea era of the church and it is time to get doctrinally loose and put a Christmas BLOT on the record of the so-called COGs.
The X-mass Weekend BLOT is actually a huge warning sign that many of the so-called COG people are really just a bunch of godless idiots who want to do their own things for their own bad reasons.
Since HWA had already come in the spirit and power of Elijah to “restore all things,” there was nothing left for these characters to restore. They cannot come up with any newer, better ideas. They can only come up with bad ideas and re-invented pagan practices.
In January, it seems hard to believe, that both Meredith and Garner Ted Armstrong would be 93 years old, if still alive.
In 2023 , HWA would be 131 years old. It is perhaps odd, how long dead guys, still cast a long shadow on the future and generations that didnt even exist in their time. Ellen G. White, who has been dead for 108 years, still casts a shadow on the Seventh Day Adventists in a similar way.
LCG members do not crave Christmas (at least not generally). They have plenty of celebrations to fill that void.
From my experience, they are more trying to find something else to do on the day that isn’t Christmas. They’re having a “not-Christmas” party.
I wonder if that’s how Christmas itself began. Christians having a “not-saturnalia” party.
It would be ironic.
In my experience talking to ministers, the reason they do these Family weekends during Christmas time is to keep people from the "temptation" of celebrating with their family at Christmas. It's just another cultic tactic to isolate people from their families.
I remember when I got baptized they told me "now the church is your family much more than your physical family", it was so creepy.
They want people to lose connection with their real families and spend all their time and resources on the church, that way they gain more and more control over people.
I believe there is nothing wrong with celebrating Christmas. But even if you personally did believe so, why is it sinful to just join your family for dinner that day since for many it is one of the few occasions their families are all together in one place?
Other groups such as Jewish groups that don't celebrate Christmas don't forbid their nembers from joining their families for a meal on Christmas.
Herbert W. Armstrong used the Christmas season to give meat in due season and offer his free booklet called The Plain Truth About Christmas.
The little LCG, UCG, and COGWA splinter groups cannot do that because it would clash with all their advertising for their own Winter Family Christmas Weekend custom that they would like to get everyone to observe.
These "celebrations" mimic Christmas. There is no getting around that, especially when they gather in hotels that are decked to the hilt. Someone mentioned, and it's correct, that COGWA had a chance to get rid of this after the UCG split.
Here's why they didn't. If they don't have one, they're afraid members will attend one with another group, and that represents a threat that members might go with another COG group.
UCG had serious issues with Jim O'Brien holding his own WFW in the same town at the same time, and that is why they doubled down on people attending theirs.
Another cringe-worthy aspect is hearing all the COG groups refer to them as "mini-Feasts."
The COGS do indeed publish against Xmas and make videos about such.
One does not need to shut down their life because it is Xmas. The various COG Winter weekends take advantage of School and work vacations for many, so why not?
Just because people are having fun and an event while the rest of the world is doing Xmas, DOES NOT MEAN, that you too are doing Xmas.
Paul addressed this type of issue with the "meat offered to idols" question.
Anon1020,
I totally agree; it is a way to isolate cog members from family and friends, which is welcomed by the cog members because they are sure that by avoiding Christmas and others' homes during that time, and therefore they are avoiding paganism.
Christmas is based in the home. The home is harmed through the cogs. In the COGs worship is a corporate thing done on Saturdays and most Cog members leave the teaching of cog doctrine or the Bible to the ministry. Our homes should be spiritual centers in our lives but in the cogs that is not encouraged. This is not to say that the cogs don't give lip service to fathers and/or mothers providing spiritual training in the home. But, going through the Bible will not yield COG doctrine, so most of the time it is just repeating cog doctrine with a few cherry-picked verses. This is not satisfying for most, so, it doesn't happen after kids are 10 or so.
Before the COGs I kept Christmas, and we loved it. There was NO paganism. Why? Well, we were not worshipping or considering pagan deities. That is a requirement of paganism. No pagan deities, no paganism.
There was a reverence about the introduction of Immanuel to the world. People can say all they want about this celebration "occurring in the dead of winter", but the fact of the matter is that this too teaches a lesson; in the cold dark days of Winter, beauty and love and reverence and home are the focus. Just like Jesus came to a dark world to bring His Light and Love.
Christmas is not pagan. Beauty, love, and reverence for Jesus are not pagan. It's amazing that I could have been brainwashed to think so, but, then again, I never fully did.
To me, Winter Weekend is just further information demonstrating that Armstrongism is total crap, and the members know it.
Since church members are in the habit of allocating and spending money on this event, my advice to members would be to take that money and do something that you really want to do. Why allow your church to make all of your decisions, and to rule over every aspect of your life. Exercise your free will, and in so doing, build some extra character for which there is no space to build in your ACOG.
I had to laugh at the prospects of GTA and RCM both being 93, and that apparently someone associated with Armstrongism in the past would even care. Personally, it grieves me every time we lose some of the rock n roll icons who were so much more influential in my life, bringing happiness and helping me to cope with the shitstorm of Armstrongism fomented by people like GTA and RCM. Just this last week, we lost Dino Danelli, drummer for the Young Rascals, and Kim Simmonds, leader of Savoy Brown. Both just awesome performers.
Herbert didn’t like Christmas because families spent money buying gifts for each other and especially their children. He want that money sent to his church so he could live in luxury. To hell with the member’s families. His greed knew no end.
Jim-AZ
Yo ho ho. Merry Christmas to all the readers of Banned.
A couple of years ago my husband and I told our LCG minister that we were planning a beach vacation in December and he told us we shouldn't do that, we should be allocating our resources towards the winter family weekend. He seemed very bothered about it.
They absolutely don't want you spending any of your free time or money on anything that is not them.
Merry Christmas!!!
" now the church is your family much more than your physical family."
That's a frequently told lie. They leave out that the "church family love" is plastic.
It's just the phony Sabbath mask. Many found this out the hard way when they left the church or were disfellowshiped. And even this skin deep love is conditional on being controlled by the church.
That the church is your family is yet another example of the church culture of expecting its members to fake reality and believe childish lies. This is very much school yard bully morality.
When did Christ ever ask anyone to fake reality?
10:20 said: “I believe there is nothing wrong with celebrating Christmas. But even if you personally did believe so, why is it sinful to just join your family for dinner that day since for many it is one of the few occasions their families are all together in one place?
Other groups such as Jewish groups that don't celebrate Christmas don't forbid their nembers from joining their families for a meal on Christmas.”
Agree. Since joining UCG and then even after leaving it I always go to my relatives for Xmas Eve and/or Xmas (even Easter Sunday and birthdays) to see everyone and enjoy their company and catch up over some yummy food. They know I don’t celebrate Xmas and personally believe Christ’s birth was around FOT, but we respect and love each other no matter our differences since “family is forever!”
Eh, most people celebrating christmas aren't doing it to thumb their nose at God, they simply don't know any better.
Their day is coming.
Nimrods testicles!!!
Anonymous at 1:23 PM said...“These 'celebrations' mimic Christmas. There is no getting around that, especially when they gather in hotels that are decked to the hilt. Someone mentioned, and it's correct, that COGWA had a chance to get rid of this after the UCG split.”
“Here's why they didn't. If they don't have one, they're afraid members will attend one with another group, and that represents a threat that members might go with another COG group.”
This year, December 2022, COGWA is expecting to have around 1,000 to 1,200 people at its Winter Family X-mass Weekend event.
Splitting with UCG in 2010 would have been a great time for COGWA to show its spiritual superiority and ditch the WFXW custom and avoid getting stuck with a bunch of these people (that is, the fake church members).
It appears that the leaders in both UCG and COGWA all FEAR the people (that is, the fake church members).
Furthermore, it appears that the leaders in both UCG and COGWA also BLAME the people (that is, the fake church members) for what the leaders feared that they had to do.
UCG and COGWA are stuck in a worldly competition with each other to see which of them can have the best Winter Family X-mass Weekend event to try to attract the most fake church members.
They write and blabber about all sorts of spiritual fluff, but when it comes right down to it they get into shameful things like this Winter Family X-mass Weekend debacle.
They throw in the word “Family” to make it sound like they are doing something good, like the wicked women in the world who claim that they observe Halloween “for the children.”
Can we all say, “Laodice Era of the church”?
LCG and the other COGlets are an abomination for calling what is good, evil, and preferring darkness over light.
Their war against Christmas is a war against God who ordained the celebration of the birth of Jesus, the Light of the World – and all of heaven greatly rejoiced over that event:
Luke 2:13- 14: Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
The COGs have never been comfortable with Jesus but their hatred for Christmas and their mockery of those who rehearse, marvel at, hold dear, and revel in the events described in Luke 2: 1-20 is an act of aggression toward the Light of the World and the joy he brings.
The COGs preach another gospel about the “Germans are coming, the Germans are coming” while hating the good news and joyous celebration of the coming of the Savior, contrary to Luke 2:10-11: But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord.
Merry Christmas and JOY to the World: https://youtu.be/jgAZVgfUxcg
Joy to the world (to the COGs too) the Lord is come!
Let earth (and the GOGs too) receive her King;
Let every heart (the Christmas-hating hearts too) prepare Him room,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven and nature sing,
And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing.
Joy to the World, the Savior reigns (reigns today, no need to wait for the far off COG half-savior)!
Let men their songs employ;
While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat, repeat, the sounding joy.
He rules the world with truth and grace (even while the COGs cannot utter the word grace),
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness (instead of seeking their own righteousness),
And wonders of His love (yes, people of the COGs he loves you).,
And wonders of His love (it’s a wonder that the people of the COGs can hear about the love of the Savior in a Christmas Carol, but not in their churches),
And wonders, wonders, of His love (embrace the love; don’t reject it).
Joy to the World, the Lord is come!
Love your comment! Made me chuckle
: )
“LCG To Celebrate 30th Anniversary During Their Annual Christmas Winter Family Weekend”
Roderick C. Meredith wanted to put his own doctrinal stamp on his own little Living Church of Rod religious business by coming up with a hybrid, or two-fold, gospel message by combining Herbert W. Armstrong's teaching of the gospel message OF Jesus (about the coming kingdom of God) with the world's teaching of a gospel message ABOUT Jesus (such as being born in a barn).
It is not surprising that the barely Living Church of Rod would also try to combine the biblical Annual Holy Day customs that HWA had taught with the world's X-mass custom.
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