For many decades, we have had it ground in our psyche that the Church of God had/has a better way of believing and doing things. We had the answer to everything and knew that there was a world coming that would bring peace and harmony for at least 800-900 years, and then it was all going to fall apart again. Evil and damnation would be unleashed again. What a cruel god!
Yet, despite having a grand vision of millennial peace as our goal, the Church of God has always found the bad in the world and emphasized it in everything they preached and wrote about. Everything is evil and they can't wait for their god to come and smite all the evildoers and make the world into what they think it should look like.
This is how Gerald Weston starts every weekly update to his members. Something bad is always happening. Evil is lurking in the air ready to devour the loyal church members. This was his update on the 18th. He can't even find joy in Passover!
Passover and Unleavened Bread are now upon us. How many more Passovers will we have before Christ returns? The events of the last four years are sobering—a pandemic with all the disruption it brought, inflation, violent crime and demonstrations in our streets, weather upsets of historical and “of biblical proportions” in various places around the world, illegal immigration, wars in Europe and the Middle East. However, there is a positive to all that we see happening. “Now when these things begin to happen, look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near” (Luke 21:28). Some among us are going through severe trials and we cannot minimize how difficult that is for those individuals affected, including family members, but we must never take our eyes off the big picture. God called us and gave His Son on our behalf, and Jesus willingly suffered for us that we might be healed and that through His indwelling Spirit we might have eternal life. May we never forget Paul’s inspired words: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). I wish all of you a profitable and joyous Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread!—Gerald Weston
Compare Gerald Weston's negativity to an article below from Ralph Woodrow. You remember Woodrow, don't you? He wrote the fourth supplemental "sacred scriptures" that most COG members believed fervently in, until the horror of horrors, he refuted it all.
In the Church of God hierarchy of official doctrine setting works, we had the Bible, US and BC In Prophecy, Mystery of the Ages, Hislop's The Two Babylons, and finally Woodrow's Babylon Mystery Religion. Woodrow's works were so popular in Armstrongism that he even started quoting some of our teachings to back up his works.
There are some who tell us in all seriousness that “everything in the world is getting worse and worse!” It seems popular, even in some pulpits, to talk about how bad everything is getting—“and getting worse all the time!” But the evidence is overwhelming that MANY things are better than they have ever been, especially in countries that enjoy the blessings of civilization.
This is not to say there is not a lot of evil in the world. Many things are not as they should be. Nevertheless, progress has been made in the right direction. In harmony with Philippians 4:8, “... think on things of good report”—let’s consider some of the GOOD things God has blessed us with and for which we should be thankful.
Woodrow goes on to discuss advances in travel and technology and how there is progress in the right direction.
He then states:
Was the world or this country better in the days of child labor? Was it better in the days of slavery? Was it better when travel was in covered wagons? Was it better when women could not vote or own property? Was it better when lights burned coal oil? Conditions may not be as they should, but on the whole, many have better food, better clothing, better housing, better health care, better education, better working conditions, better pay and better transportation than in the past.
Today there are organizations to encourage clean, wholesome activities for boys and girls; organizations to aid the blind, the handicapped, the underprivileged, the elderly; organizations to prevent cruelty to animals and provide shelter. Progress is being made in Alzheimer’s research. Such things speak of kindness and progress in the right direction.
Despite all the “good things” the Lord has allowed us to enjoy in this day, there are those who suppose things are getting worse all the time. While the Bible does say that “evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived” (2 Timothy 3:13), this may simply refer to the fact that one sin leads to another sin; one lie leads to another lie; those who head in the wrong direction get further and further away from Jesus and the gospel.
“But the path of the just is like the shining sun, that shines ever brighter unto the perfect day” (Proverbs 4:18). Where sin abounds, grace shall much more abound (Romans 5:20). Let people of faith everywhere look on the bright side, thankful for the progress that has been made! Is there evil in the world? Yes! No doubt about it. But while “everything” is not as it should be, we are BLESSED in many ways!
Woodrow certainly has a better outlook on life than do so many of the miserable professional complainers making up the leadership of the Church of God today. It is no wonder so many in the Church of God today are depressed. Their very own leaders are the cause of this!
When will the church be people of faith? Having a grounded faith so joyful they revel in the joy that grace brings and are thankful for all the beautiful and good things in this world?
13 comments:
Grand Premier Weston forgot to mention the gloom regarding Ms. Montgomery's LCG-sponsored boating "accident".
He rattled off all that hot wind just to sidetrack any shame of what the boaters ignore.
I could make a long list of things that were better in the old days. Just one:
Was it better before we had nuclear weapons?
I think that Gerald Weston and Woodrow here are looking at two sides of the same coin. Both make good points.
The thing here is that there are some people in LCG who lives their lives so incredibly opposite to what the bible says and they know it, and yet they say the right things in church and they do all the church activities, and they take the passover each year with a straight face. Our ministers will exult these people but will give others who live far better lives a hard time, and they even throw some out of the congregations and they just don't clue in to the real troublemakers. So does God agree with what's going on here?
I remember reading about this topic many years ago. I walked away believing that Woodrow refuted his Babylon Mystery Religion book because he concluded that a fake Roman Catholic church is much better than alternatives such as atheism or communism. Sometimes a counterfeit is better than nothing.
Nowhere more negative than this blog.
Well 4:04 you can be smug & keep tithing to hog-wild LCG & Premier Weston. And then sit at the positive chummy chatty potlucks, where no concern is shared for LCG's onetime mailroom Wall Of Shame bullying bulletin board.
Downer syndrome is nearly unavoidable these days.
The psychology involved in bringing people into the mindset that was the Radio/Worldwide Church of God heavily involved the systematic destruction of trust or confidence in every "worldly" institution to which citizens of the USA have always looked as they lived normal stable lives. As listeners to the World Tomorrow and readers of the booklets were groomed, they began to believe that something so devastating and catastrophic was soon going to happen, that there was no way that they could humanly escape the consequences. The government and its military capabilities would be of no value. All the doctors and hospitals would be unable to deal with the powerful epidemics which were just a few short years away. No use in laying away money or making investments, because the financial system was going to collapse. There would be rioting and violence in the streets which the police could not control. The stability of the weather patterns on which we depend for so many of the basic staples of life would be disrupted. The government would devolve into totalitarianism in an effort to control the breakdown of everything on which our daily lives depended. And then a war which for which we were unprepared and had little will to fight would end up enslaving everyone we knew.
On one hand, this "knowledge", the church's "truths", were a daily factor in our lives. On the other, it's human nature to occasionally wonder if just maybe it would never happen. But it was blasted and reaffirmed into our consciousness at every sabbath service, in every issue of the church magazines, on every World Tomorrow Program, and in our fellowship with "the brethren". Yet, we were admonished to rejoice, because we did not need to suffer through this cataclysm with the rest of the world! We had special knowledge and were part of an elite group that watched daily news and knew what it meant. It was our special small group which would be protected. But wait! You might not if you happened to fall into a bad attitude of rebellion or laxity. God might allow you to miss the place of safety if He deemed that that is what you needed to drive you to a more complete repentance, or to be brought back His church! The destruction of trust was complete, because you couldn't even be assured of THEIR solution!
In our insulated little cocoon that was Ambassador College, there were many discussions in the student center, as we dined together. You usually looked around for your best friends, because they kept you grounded and helped you process it all. I vividly remember one discussion we had about the prevailing youth culture of the day. One of the guys commented that because we knew what we knew, we'd probably be some of the most radical, hopeless, rebel outlaws out there, Like our worldly counterparts, our faith in every part of the system, all of its constants upon which most people base a stable and productive life, had been destroyed. It was absolutely Kafkaesque!
And then, 1975 came and went, and along with that came the biggest sense of relief as many of us left and began rebuilding our lives. Renaissance! It is good to be reminded from time to time that there are people who did not accept the lesson of 1975. They hit the reset button, and continued to live their Debbie Downer lives, and to experience the results of what I call the power of suppository thinking. Honestly, I seriously doubt that most of the people remaining in Armstrongism even realize the extent of their negativity and the effects that it can have on their mental and physical health. Jerry Weston probably thinks of his world view, evidenced by his latest screed, as being realism. It is so easy to give up and to be a downer. It requires work to be an optimist. Optimists are not the types of people who have given up. They are active participants in life.
Remember Brethren, THERE IS HOPE --- Nuclear Winter will cure Global Warming!
Pilate correctly understood that Christianity is a branch/sect of Judaism.
You can be "people of faith" without having faith in this present world. Because Jesus said His kingdom was NOT of this world (John 18:36).
One of my most frequent memories of WCG is how deeply miserable so many people there were. It was such a charade at times.
Jerry Weston, you talk too much.
Yes back then or even now in my splinter I visited, if you went to services feeling naturally upset over some heinous news tragedy & mentioned any snippet of it to brethren, they would quickly make you feel even worse by saying "you are dwelling too much on "this world's problems".
And when you thought like that Eagles song they "can't bring you down, cause you're already standin' on the ground", you'd get bummed out even further.
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