Certain ex-WCG Facebook pages have been really down on a video made by The Network of Evangelical Women in Ministry - NEWIM that they posted a year ago on their site where they interviewed TammyTkach.
What really set people off were the comments about church finances and not knowing it was a cult:
Some comments from Facebook:
"I never seen or heard her before but still had to stop it."
"How could you not know it was a cult!"
"she knew. She benefitted."
"Hilarious that she says at the beginning that they were considered a cult......so she KNEW what she was in.At 16:01 she said Joe Jr says he doesn't condemn him (HWA) and that he was sincere?!Yeah, ruining people's lives is sincere.....but what would he know, we know good and well that he and his family didn't live like most of us so it didn't effect him."
In reference that it was a cult:
"I think the bigger reason is that when inside one we rarely see it as is. Brain washing. Dulling down of independent thinking and risk of losing everything (my entire family were members) will keep a person from even looking to see if something is off"
"i agree... my whole family was also in it and I was also born into it."
Where the situation baffles me is, at what point does an individual :-First : decide to adhere to such an organization.-Second : realize the unorthodox, questionable, illogical teachings;YET, decides to stay.-Third : Even after that realization, agrees to give a huge part of their revenue to said organization.-Fourth: Gives up on all logical reasonable thinking; totally accepting to be subjugated by the cult leader.AndI would add a last one :Fifth : Reproduce within the cult and teach the newborn human baby totally incoherent, false and absurd information about life and it's meaning.
""Joe jr says he doesn't condems (HWA) and that he was sincere"??!!Can you believe that LIE?What about the myriad of accusations of fraud and sexual misconducts, assaults and exploitation?Was he sincere about those accusations also?"
What do you think?
40 comments:
The usual bullshit you'd expect from a WCG/GCI mucketymuck, I guess.
My father was a Pastor in WCG, then United, and now COGWA. I myself have followed this same path.
What was not mentioned here is how someone who sincerely believes in the older WWCG beliefs was treated. If you did not align with the “new doctrine” back in the mid-90s you were pushed out, and not given ANY GRACE. You were expected to align with the new doctrine even if you did not agree. I know of a phone call with Joe Jr. and Mike Feasell with a Pastor with extreme pressure to conform to the new party line.
I now think that there are many things that the old WWCG was wrong about. However there has never been a reckoning with how we treat each other.
If we go by Jesus Sermon on the Mount, you are to love your enemies. Your enemies include those who do not agree with you about the Trinity. If you have been a Pastor in a church for 25+ years and are suddenly told you must conform with Trinity, Sunday, all these other things how do you respond?
Maybe not perfectly by Jesus standards. However those who disagreed with the “new doctrine” were not given much of a choice either. Everyone here thinks that those not on Joe Jr. side are just plotting. Maybe they were just standing up for what they believed God’s Truth was? Even if they were wrong, they may sincerely believe they were standing up for the truth.
I am not trying to justify some of the awful things the splinter groups have done. Just trying to say that many people and former Pastors were treated with disrespect because they didn’t follow the now GCI hierarchy. They don’t deserve the derision they received from GCI. They sincerely believe they were standing up for God’s Truth.
I found myself wondering how I might react to this if I'd still been around in, say, 1995, and had witnessed the changes. Had I heard them explained, would I have done additional study, opened up, and gotten into the New Covenant? Would I have welcomed the loss of my culture, and embraced the new? Or would the changes have angered me? Dealing with that conundrum must have been a mighty tall order. And then, I realized, the '90s wasn't my time to deal with all of that. I was meant to awaken as a result of the Disappointment of 1975, and to have the educational experiences which resulted from that trauma. I walked away from it all, and for the first time began making my own decisions, rather than switching guidance systems. These forced gurus hadn't really worked for me. It was time for a little DIY!
Honestly, though, this interview with Tammy is one of the most inspiring things which I've ever seen here. There was an aura of truthfulness and sincerity to it. Of course people from one of several differing mindsets will have their things to say on the Facebook group. After all, there was a lot of hurt associated with our past experience, and some people are still hurting. It becomes complicated because that hurt comes in several distinct varieties, largely depending upon the particular perspectives of the individuals involved. The cycle is, first you get hurt, then you get mad, and unfortunately depression is anger turned inside out. Depression can be the longest lasting part of the cycle. It's much better to receive healing, but we all know that some will not experience that in this lifetime. Thinking positively, even those folks can learn to manage, or compartmentalize it. You just gotta try.
Great testimony from Tammy. I hope Joe is enjoying his retirement!
Tkach Jr should never have been considered for leadership role as he wasn't "the husband of one wife"(II Tim). His glamorous, younger 2nd wife had seemingly been given "jobs" like "Womens ministry", writing...begging the question had Tkach put her on big $ecret $alary? I put this question to Schnippert in an email stating that "no answer would be construed by me as an affirmative": This got his Irish up, as he responded with a stern warning that I should "be careful". What a horrible, horrible organization!
"How could you not know it was a cult!"
When I joined the church, and my ministers behaved like abusive tyrants. I viewed them as rebels who were knowingly ignoring the bible and the "good" church government. I thought surely those higher up in the church would be indignant if they discovered these ministers misbehavior. Only much later did I realize that these ministers were in fact faithful to the church cult culture. The church leadership taught and sanctioned every manner of abuse since that's what they believed really works.
I believe many others reacted the same way. There was no internet back then to inform newbies of the plain truth about the church of HWA.
If I inherited HWA's multimillion dollar operation, like the Tkach's did, I wouldn't condemn him either.
But since my family gave everything they had and lived in poverty to fund that crook, I do condemn him, and everyone associated with him.
The view is different depending on where you're sitting.
In the real world when you disagree with your church and cannot abide their teachings and beliefs, YOU LEAVE. Only in an authoritarian setting can the few even think to change the many and turn the Church on its head for their own sakes, remaining in a position of power or at least income.
I recently had lunch with Joe Jr and despite the niceties, he does not get it.
Growing up in WCG and under his father's authoritarian personality, I don't see how he ever could. What was so "new" to that small influential cadre', most, if not all, of whom grew up in WCG and "educated" in Imperial Schools, with little if any outside understanding of other more stable Christian denominations and why they are stable, and abiding was simply reinventing a very old wheel for themselves.
What was so "new" to the few, was what the vast majority of members had grown up in and come out of believing WCG was more Biblically correct. Of course it wasn't and it's errors were held firmly in place by the authoritarian leadership and one or two man show.
(Personal Note: WCG was a Jewish Christian Church in the same mindset as the first century Apostles in Jerusalem. Modern Christianity is Paul's gentile version that won the fight between the two clearly seen in the NT.) IMHO You can't have Jesus, James, John and Peter along with Paul. You have to choose. As well, the early church had not concept that it would go on and on and become what we see today. It was all suppose to end soon, shortly and quickly never having to consider all the controversies to come over the next 2000 years)
I was told that "Jesus worked a miracle in the Church", to which I replied "Then He is a trickster and could have prevented a lot of heartache and confusion if he had spoken up a bit sooner, say in the 1930's." Of course, personally, no Jesus did anything. It was all people.
There were plenty of places for them to go and leave others not of their persuasions and views alone. That's how it works in the real world.
THE SITUATION
Some people in the Worldwide Church of God were simply trying to obey such biblical laws of God as the weekly Sabbath (which is commanded in one of the big Ten Commandments) and the laws about clean and unclean animals (since people eat all the time throughout their lives) as well as other laws that show how to live right in God's sight.
The apostate Tkaches rejected God's laws and rebelled against them openly with their Great Apostasy of January 1995. They wanted to go back into the world and return to its unbiblical, man-made, pagan-based, demon-influenced ways such as Sunday-keeping and ham-eating, etc. Sincere and decent people tried to hold on to what they had been taught in the WCG under HWA. Many of the insincere and indecent fakers in the WCG got exposed for what they were really like at this time.
The testing was not over yet. Extremely deceitful and vicious false prophets like Gerald Flurry and David Pack used HWA's name and photograph to attract his followers but then went on to teach all sorts of outrageous and perverse heresies, wasting people's money and their lives.
Old-timers like Roderick C. Meredith that some people looked to for doctrinal stability actually turned out to be in competition against HWA with supposedly better so-called “doctrinal upgrades,” since the apostate Tkaches had given doctrinal changes such a bad name.
All sorts of formerly unknown people tried to start their own little “works,” which did not work out very well.
Even the largest (but still relatively small) UCG splinter group was full of too many godless and wicked unbelievers as well as ministers who were just there for the paycheck. This helped to lead to the big UCG-COGWA church split in 2010.
Dennis and Unknown, I enjoyed what you wrote and it brought back memories of that day in Big Sandy. It was the day that Dr Duke was to give the sermon in both Big Sandy AM and PM about the changes (1995). In the AM Dave Havir blocked Dr Duke from speaking and gave a sermon about the faith once delivered. By the PM service Havir was disfellowshipped. Using what Dennis said it was like a Peter against Paul moment in church history. Church history now is more about what the group does.
How do you think pastors treated those in Armstrong days who came up ideas, like a diff calendar computation or saw significance in the Didache or whatever?
No grace afforded in the subsequent disfellowshipping.
I hate when someone says Armstrong was sincere. He was deluded. Herbert Armstrong was deluded. He thought he was special...special enough to have grievous sins and still believe he was the primary instrument God was using in the world.
Dennis, even in the real world, it's not necessarily easy to leave one's church. Members form close friendships in their church. Some spanning decades, so leaving a church typically means taking a huge lose. This is a trap.
The other inhibiting factor is family entanglements. Leaving a church puts enormous strain on those with attending family members. Which is the real reason why the ACOGs forbid marriage outside their group. Contrary to their claims, this policy is not biblical.
So there are now a couple hundred women pastors in the Graceless Community of Iniquity (GCI)? Ugh! That explains a lot.
This "HWA was sincere" thing was actually in the literature supporting the WCG reformation. When I first ran across that, I immediately recognized it as an attempted PR tactic. They would not have gotten very far in advancing their cause by writing that "Mr. Armstrong was a flaming asshole!"
I also disagree with the contention that if the Tkaches disagreed with the doctrines they should have left. So many have chronicled the abuses which resulted from obsessive compulsive adherence to the doctrines and HWA's managerial style of "Government from the top-down." Once the Tkaches' eyes were opened, it was their responsibility to God and the members to kill off the old ways which had produced the abuses. We certainly take the Flurrys, Dave Pack, Jon Brisby and others to task for perpetuating the abuses. Somebody in those organizations needs to grow a pair and kill the abuses as well.
Finally, I really don't know what the leaders could have done to help or handle the "members of the circumcision party". They were an example of believing in unity, until suddenly they understood that there can be reasons to be disruptive. I believe the circumstances made the witch hunt nearly inevitable. One must wonder how they like the splinters, though.
Well, the Tkach clan has many "skeletons in the closet" going way back with Joe Sr. as well. They play nice about HWA so that fingers that are almost as bizarre as HWAs dont come back pointing at them.
"How could you not know it was a cult?"
I can't really speak for adult members in that sense as I wasn't one, but when you're born into it and have no experience with anything else I imagine you just don't know. Plus, there was the internal counterprogramming about that...
"...but what would he know, we know good and well that he and his family didn't live like most of us so it didn't effect him."
I hate when people use "effect" (a noun) in place of "affect" (a verb), but regardless, yes. This is why I take a dim view of that "the holy spirit guided us" line. I would argue that they were likely afraid of the prospect of having to go out and get real jobs, and this colored their judgement.
(from Dennis) "What was so "new" to the few, was what the vast majority of members had grown up in and come out of believing WCG was more Biblically correct."
Well, that'd be correct, I think. Joseph Tkach Senior was (reportedly) mostly irreligious until a WCG minister anointed him for a health ailment and he found himself "cured" afterwards. I doubt he had much knowledge or grounding in any other form of religion. Joe Jr went to Imperial Schools, AC, blah blah, and I suspect he really had even less knowledge about anything outside of the WCG paradigm. The form of Protestantism they accepted would have been new, even exciting to them, especially after years of cartoonish portrayals from the HQ writers.
(from the resident COG comedian) "The apostate Tkaches rejected God's laws and rebelled against them openly with their Great Apostasy of January 1995."
I would not credit it as "great". If anything it was rather ham-handed and comical in retrospect.
(from "Unknown") "Everyone here thinks that those not on Joe Jr. side are just plotting. Maybe they were just standing up for what they believed God’s Truth was? Even if they were wrong, they may sincerely believe they were standing up for the truth."
I don't totally disagree with that. Look, assuming good faith for ten seconds here, let's say you are the head of an organization (be it business or a church) and you become convinced that so many practices and tenets of the group are simply incorrect, maybe even harmful. Now, as Dennis pointed out, the proper thing to do usually is to LEAVE. But... when it's a church, now its a question of whether simply leaving is the right thing to do. Are you now responsible for the ultimate fate of all those souls you left behind because you didn't even try to show them (what you believe to be) the eternal-fate-saving truth? Add in the general fear of starting over with nothing that I mentioned earlier and you can begin to see the conundrum. No wacky theories about Jesuits and murder and blackmail are needed to provide additional motive - its already established.
(from Dennis) "I recently had lunch with Joe Jr and despite the niceties, he does not get it."
Oh, he might. He might always have gotten it. He's not going to admit that, though, to you or himself. It would tarnish whatever credibility he has with former and current members, not to mention those on the outside who lauded him as a great hero. More importantly though, he likely had to convince himself he was doing it for a greater good and not also because he was scared of being a nobody and having to find a new source of income.
Now granted, when I walked away, it would have been 1992 or 1993 (I think). Whatever the year was, the REALLY BIG "changes" had not yet occurred, but things were leading up to it pretty rapidly. There was so much pointless turmoil and negativity going around that affected people so disproportionally that there was no need for me to be in the mix too. Many ministurds were in the awkward spot of learning along with their members, which meant that their illusion of control over the members was harder to maintain. And I knew some who, shall we say, overcompensated in trying to maintain it. I dropped on services a couple of times afterwards, just to see some of the things I was regularly hearing about, and it was a sorry sight. You had weirdos who were parking their butts in seats just because they wanted to stay loyal to the organization, but they were full Armstrongists who were just sitting there waiting for their god to smite all the idolaters at the "golden calf" so they could participate in the slaughter. Then you had other weirdos avidly embracing everything just so they could lecture others about it in hopes of being elevated by the ministurds. Somewhere in the middle you had the realists who were just trying to make sense of things after driving three hours to the rented hall on their off day after a 40-60 hour work week, and they probably suffered the most!
How quaint, 8:01! Do you make your wife wear a hijab and burka?
1995?? My minister was in the vanguard. Within a year of Herbs death, his Sabbath mask was off, and he declared war on anyone with a sense of morality. Which means that many ministers had information about the true state of headquarters shortly after HWA's death. They knew what was coming way before 1995.
Did anyone actually like their ministers? Or, was it still fear as usual?
Well, the biggest reveal of reveals came at the end of 1994. Not sure what event you are referencing in 1995, but yes, i imagine by that point many knew what was coming.
My bad, I went back and listened to the video again, where she references 1995. I guess shes starting from "The Christmas Eve Sermon".
JANUARY 1995 was when the apostates openly wrote up in the Worldwide Church of God's own Worldwide News newspaper that they were throwing out virtually everything that Herbert W. Armstrong had taught.
Some people needed to read it in print for themselves in order to really believe that it was actually happening.
Wow, 2:43, That had to have been exciting! It almost reminds me of something Bo Diddley said. He said, "When my record came out in 1955, all the white teenage boys and girls went home and threw Beethoven in the garbage!"
The apostasy began in the 1800s.
I scrolled down to this post and said.... "THAT'S Tammy Tkach?!?!?"
I admittedly had not seen her in decades. But compared to the late 1990s, she has aged quite a bit.
I know - "Judge not according to appearance." But her appearance is quite different.
Anon 609Am… Bro all you do is comment on the splinters and diss them.
Why do they exist?
Their corruption takes you straight back to WCG. How can you be on this blog for so long and not consider that HWA was the true charlatan from which we get all the mini ones.
Is it the failed prophecies, the pleas for the building fund, or the hypocritical stance on divorce and remarriage and doctors that keep you coming back?
Ahhh the 'three fingers pointing back at you' saying...a well worn elite and wannabe elite saying designed to shut down any truth being spilt.
No church member ever uses that saying "Tonto" ....
ACOGs do NOT forbid marriage outside their group. Extreme isolated group such as Restored and Philiadelphia may but not the others.
Hah, 11:05! Goes to show what you know! First time I ever heard the expression about the three fingers was from Herbert W. Armstrong at a Friday night Bible Study in the AC 'dena gym in 1973. It became one of the church shibboleths. You know how they hung on his every word and made his opinions their own.
And, 11:08, original WCG during the Armstrong era forbade dating outside the church, let alone marriage!
11.08, I asked my WWCG minister to marry me to someone outside the church. The Holy Spirit led me to this person, so it wasn't even my choice. But the minister refused my request on the spot. The minister put following man before following God.
The bible both in the old and new testament forbids adding or subtracting to God's instructions, but on the issue of marriage, they definitely have.
According to Jehovah's Witnesses dissident sites, if it wasn't for family entanglements and their shunning policy, their church would collapse. To the ACOGs, marriage is a survival issue, so they have no hesitation in throwing members under the bus to this end. They don't give a crap if this means members marry into a living hell. Ministers only care about church-world and their Marie Antoinette lifestyle.
The reason they don't leave, is because of a tactic Bob Thiel now uses TO EXCESS...that of instilling a fear of "losing their crown" if one "leaves".
Some keep coming to ACOG services to stay spiritually afloat. As lousy as the sermons are, the overall church experience gives them their weekly lift.
There are others who have spiritually fainted, but find it too painful to make a complete break, so they still attend. I suspect most of Dave Pack's remaining members are in this category.
5:12PM
Correction the apostasy began in the 2nd century at the very least!
Every time I hear or read about Tkach senior and junior and their roles in the coup d’etat of WCG I I think yeah I bet they were thinking of all the “kash” they’d be rolling in and (T)KACH-ING…laughing all the way to the bank!
Nope, the apostasy began with Satan and his minions.
This is actually the first time I ever saw a picture of Tammy Tkach. Comments seem to indicate that she was some kind of "Hottie" back in the day?
Is there a Joe III?
You people are so far gone.
I remember seeing Tammy in an interview back in the deathly 90s, sitting beside her husband while Joe was being questioned about the changes in WCG.
He droned on about his nonsense while Tammy sat beside him cold, expressionless and numb, the way many members were during that time period when one would expect warmth, joy, liveliness and gladness, if you were discovering something terrifically valuable.
Eve thought she was getting a good deal from the devil too.
But like the Simpson case that followed, the innocent one gets killed along with the adulterer.
Wow anon 12:27, I wish I had your insight into knowing what is going on in the mind of someone who is sitting quietly AND to know which people “are so far gone.”
Dan misremembers a little. Dave Havir was aware that many members in Big Sandy were angry, and there was a group that was allegedly going to lead a walkout if Russell spoke. Dave decided to give the announcements and go right into a sermon and didn’t inform Russell beforehand. Dave spoke about being peacemakers, not about the faith once delivered, so it was no Peter/Paul moment. Dave said his hope was to prevent a scene, and maybe it was, but he had to know where it would all lead. (He was prepared, and started a new fellowship group within a week or two.) As Dave began the sermon that day, Russell got up and went to the side hallway where there were stairs to the stage, but Dave had a man stationed there. Russell knew him and asked if he was there to prevent him from taking the stage and the man, in a civil tone because they knew each other, said yes. So Russell said ok and went to his office in the administration building, where he called Pasadena to let them know what had occurred. Dave was disfellowshipped after that and people began reaching out to him to worship separately. That group continues to this day, almost 30 years later.
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