There have been loads of crazy rumors spread though out the church since the death of Herbert Armstrong and the dissolution of the Worldwide Church of God by the Tkachs. Many wild and crazy stories have been floated trying to explain what happened during those tumultuous years. My favorite is how the Tkachs hatched.a plan that involved all the men currently leading COG splinter groups. They were all in on this since day one! Who knew! LOL! Oh, and they tried to wipe out the Kitchen clan because they and they alone were the preservers of the "truth once delivered".
Samuel Kitchen writes:
The UNITED CHURCH OF GOD, AN INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION, doesn't represent the Worldwide Church of God.The LIVING CHURCH OF GOD INC doesn't.The RESTORED CHURCH OF GOD INC doesn't.GRACE COMMUNION INTERNATIONAL doesn't.The PHILADELPHIA CHURCH OF GOD doesn't.The CONTINUATION CHURCH OF GOD doesn't.The CHURCH OF GOD ASSEMBLY doesn't.The INTERNATIONAL CHURCH OF GOD doesn't.Etc.Etc.Etc.They represent their own membership. And that is great.But where did that membership come from? That is the fraud that has taken place. They targeted membership from the Worldwide Church of God, and claimed to be teaching what had been taught before.They didn't go out, and start a preaching campaign and gain membership that way. No they went to the people they knew in the Worldwide Church of God, and brought them over and used their support to establish a new church.But as we find out, it was a fraud and a huge deception. Many of the ones who started these organizations are working with GRACE COMMUNION INTERNATIONAL.I know one minister in LCG whose wife was(and may still be) the assistant to Joseph Tkach Jr! I met her!Tkach Jr talked about "Church planting" in his book "transformed by truth". The people who've tried to shut my family down, is working with GRACE COMMUNION INTERNATIONAL!It was probably GRACE COMMUNION INTERNATIONAL who was involved in the death attempts against my family in the 1990's, and probably involved with my parents and grandmother's death too.In the 1990's while our family was going through a huge ordeal bigger than the movie Eric Brockovich, Tkach formed a local task force, and put out local minister(John Bailey)in charge of it. John Bailey told us this!So it's pretty clear to me, it's all connected. Tkach Jr wasn't a lone man in this, there were others.They had to TRANSFORM an existing membership into a COG Landscape that we see today.
One thing is for sure in Armstrongism, it is never dull because you never can anticipate what looniness will be said next!
21 comments:
Bob will have another hissy fit when he sees this! The Kitchen noodles got the name of his tiny little personality cult wrong! Closer to grammatical, but still wrong. Too funny.
I have no doubt Armstrongism will get still crazier, but it is hard to see how. Who will win the race to be crowned the craziest off shoot cult of all? Photo finish between RCG and PCG. Sorry, Bob. You lose again!
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In business, one of the primaries is the law of supply and demand. If you can run a business in keeping with this law, you will be successful! With the Tkach doctrinal corrections came the realization that a vacuum had been left in which there was a demand for places in which one could participate in the original doctrines. One of these doctrines was three tithes, so filling and superserving that vacuum would also be very lucrative. If that isn't the law of supply and demand in its most basic form, I don't know what is!
The Tkaches were not dummies. They had to have feared that people not going along with the changes might start their own groups, hoping that the changes would be well received so that the numbers of people leaving, and the new-starts would remain relatively small. But I doubt seriously that they worked in league with those who started up the splinters. If they had, the splinter-starters would have been much more unified, and they would have insisted on retaining the intellectual properties and resources produced by the original doctrines.
In the aftermath of 1975, when I left, I decided that only a fool anchors his life on unprovable theories. To my horror, I have watched the demand for conspiracy theories escalate wildly, not only amongst Armstrongites, but also in the mainstream. Sam's best interests would be served by rooting out and purging conspiracy theories, and only dealing in factual materials. The original gospel was rooted in truth. Jesus did not deal in conspiracy theories. He even refuted some of the ones which were being spread about Himself.
This whole planet is so crazy and full of lies that hardly anything can be ruled out.
A little background on my statements.
In around 1998 our local minister John Bailey came to our house to talk with my dad and my mom.
In that conversation it came out that he was leading a task force "Mr. TKACH" had put together in our little area in Iowa, and their purpose was to have my mom separate from my dad with us three kids. My dad asked why and was told it was because my dad was "lost in armstrongism", he said TKACH told him. And since they couldn't convince my dad, they wanted to convince my mom to leave.
He said, "it was too bad we didn't get the job done".
So as to breaking up family's, I have personal up close witness of what TKACH Jr did to those who still believed in what the Bible says.
My dad asked how long had they been trying, and John Bailey told him 3 & 1/2 years.
During this same time, my family went through an ordeal. My father had uncovered a cover up locally in our hometown, where the EPA and a defense contractor was cleaning up a superfund site, and using a deepwell injection site to dump waste materials into underground aquifers.
Local water testers kept saying water was clean, and we found out Mcdonnell-Douglass(whatever the spelling) had paid for the water testing.
We found out every well had been capped off, and only our well was left open.
My dad found papers that had our names listed under a study to see the progression of damage these chemicals going into our water supply via our well water would do before death. He found our local family doctor had been trained to "observe without treatment". My dad went to the doctor. I remember because I was there with him when he confronted this doctor. The doctor left and the nurse came back asking my dad to leave and that the doctor would no longer be seeing us.
My dad in 1996 was given six days to live, because his body had gone into septic shock due to the chemical exposure. My dad unplugged himself and walked out of the hospital with doctors and nurses screaming at him that he would die in the parking lot.
My dad told them he had already given orders to his wife that if he dropped dead to take his body, because "they wasn't getting that". He drove off and he went to detox and praying. We drove down to my mom's family in Fort Worth, just in case if he died wed be near family. But God began to heal my dad. We had a friend in Arizona who invited us to stay for a month. We drove there and my fifth birthday was at the hotel there.
God healed my dad.
Continue to part 2
Part 2
We asked for an anointing cloth but was denied.
We asked for church assistance but was denied.
A local member Bob Brown gave us $5,000, saying it was a shame the church couldn't help. The church had helped so many others with roofs, and buildings and movings, and such, but he found it evil that they wouldn't lift a finger to help us move away from our situation! He said don't worry about the money. He talked to the minister and the church did a fundraiser and paid the man back. They would help him but not us. Do you know why? Because we still believed what Herbert Armstrong taught! We didn't go with the changes! They tried to lock us in a place that was killing us!
We had people following us and breaking into our home to steal medical records because my dad had the only medical proof of the atrocities!
I remember waking up one night with a man in ski mask walking into my bedroom! I screamed for my dad and my dad chased him out of the house.
We got phone calls telling my parents that us kids were going to be taken out something bad is going to happen to us.
A lot of strange things happened.
We talked to some people in the church, and outside of the church, and they had some security clearance in Washington DC.
We needed answers for what we was going through.
They all came back with "stay away from me and my family."
My dad had a file only three men in the USA had authorization to access. They were told to get far away from "the Kitchen family" or their life and their family's lives were in danger too.
So several people told my dad that. I was witness to those conversations too.
We went through hell. And it was because we were targeted for our religious beliefs!
And I could go on through the years, and tie back and back to the reason of our religious beliefs and how the persecution was religiously charged!
It ain't a theory when you lived it!
Paranoia runs deep. Into your life it will creep.
From personal contact with two of the those who I consider the principal forces behind "the changes", I have concluded and by the admission of one, now close friend, it was done in a naive ignorance of how things really work in the real world. The program running in their background dictated that when we are wrong, we change and everyone wants to do the right thing. I noted that change in relatively small things can work. In WCG it was "which day is Pentecost", "make up back and forth depending on the politics and female pressure of the times and a few "it's about time" changes like how to view divine healing and doctors and Divorce and Remarriage.
Most were never convinced, but knew not to speak up, that the D and R approach was nuts and cruel and just getting anointed would take care of everything was dangerous and deadly...as well as naive' and stupid.
Both grew up in the church from childhood. One has been very open with me about the "how could you do that?" The other is in denial of a lot of things it seems to me which again, reflects the program running deep as slapped into them by the parent.
I never heard of the Kitchen family, but I know the type and the problems of a tight knit clan that is sure they know everything and until you believe and know what they do, you aren't quite up to parr with them. Ego centric nonsense.
Yes yes, the Kitchens were soooo important in the 90s that a "local task force" was formed to enact "death attempts" against them.
Tell me another one about the Zeta Reticulan Illuminati Muslim Communist Lizard People while you're at it.
APOSTATE and FALSE PROPHET Working Together in Harmony Like a Team
Satan the Devil got an APOSTATE and a FALSE PROPHET to work together in harmony like a team to accomplish the objective of deceiving and destroying Worldwide Church of God people.
The Devil's APOSTATE Joseph Tkach, Jr. sold the copyrights to some of the old Worldwide Church of God literature (including Herbert W. Armstrong's last book called Mystery of the Ages) to Satan's FALSE PROPHET Gerald Flurry so that Gerald could edit and change it while pretending to be faithfully holding fast to everything that HWA had taught.
What a nasty thing to do!
I guess the Kitchens just had to top "Almost Arrested Bob Thiel" , with the "Almost MURDERED Kitchens"!!
Well, I appreciate the additional background information from Sam. It explains his family's great fervor for original Armstrongism. In many cases, when force is used in an attempt to change the beliefs of individuals, it just drives those individuals deeper into their beliefs. This is just a general observation, not a sudden endorsement of toxic beliefs and practices which poisoned much of my own life. Just saying that I understand a little more, never having known the Kitchens or their back story as we read of their activities here over the past several years.
All of us could use a little healing.
Kitchens,
You sound to be in your early 30s and have had some tumult in your life. As much as we love them, our parents can deceive themselves and then more easily deceive their kids.
It seems some of the stories your parents/father told you are self-aggrandizing and delusional. There are many that hung on to Armstrongism and were not considered a threat even though they had a far greater platform and greater inside knowledge.
We grew up thinking it was us against the world while in wcg. And we were taught of a falling away and the battles in the spiritual realm regarding Armstrongism and how dark forces were set on stopping Armstrong based religion. It just is not true.
Our parents can have many fine qualities, but this belief you have is almost assuredly borne out of your father's desire to be extra-special and have greater significance. Recognizing the significance we all have in Christ is part of the cure for this delusion. You can still honor your parents without believing (and being damaged by) the delusion.
Well, this isn't something my parents told me, but my personal witness. When I was in my teens I remembered a lot more details and I told a lot of people about what happened. I've come across people with your same reaction. No, it's real and not a delusion.
There are many more instances my family went through, and I personal saw and my parents didn't skew any of it, because I was there.
I know what I saw, heard and experienced.
But I know your reaction and I'll just reply with my testimony is not something given to me, but my own.
And it's not about me, but of the persecution against my late father and mother, and second hand to me who was there. I remember the Bible study groups that we went to in WCG and how they argued for hours trying to convince my parents of heresy. My dad sat there and went to scripture after scripture and one by one each demon went out and the people left
I experienced similar things online. Just wrong attitudes come out and try to assassinate and destroy and bully.
I am smiling now, as I recall my first encounter with a false minister and a lot of encounters over the years. My dad seems to be blamed for a lot of things. That minister accused my dad of writing my letter.
But I want everyone to note. I'm not my dad who had more patience and more mercy. I've gone through some things and I have proven to myself that the Bible and A relationship with Jesus Christ is very important to me. I'm not perfect but I'm growing in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ I hope.
As for deception and corruption. As my grandma would say, 300 years after they bury me my mouth will still be moving.
Having to argue in a Bible study group is persecution? Calm down, snowflake.
No, son, its not a theory. That sounds more like a steaming pile of bullshit, cooked up by someone who is still afraid of the microwave.
RSK you need help.
Don't know Kirchen clan but ministry interfering with married couples is well known and STILL goes on to this day.
It's about power and control. Power and control.
When people go to AA meetings, do you make fun of their need to be there? If people at the meeting is abusive to others, which side would you be on? The abusers or the victims?
What TKACH and those involved with "the transformation" did, was abuse. They targeted members who was adhering to what Herbert Armstrong taught, aka the Bible.
"The CONTINUATION CHURCH OF GOD ... The INTERNATIONAL CHURCH OF GOD"
Are these two new churches I have never heard of? What is Kitchen referring to? Did he just create two new ones?
The Continuing Church of God is what it was supposed to be. That was a typo. Bob Thiel runs it.
The international church of God was an organization Garner Ted started.
Garner Ted Armstrong started the Church of God International. After he got kicked out of that for his sex crimes, he started the Intercontinental Church of God, as well as the Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.
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