Timothy Kirchen has a post about. "God’s Work Needs God’s Representation". It has a lot of the normal Armstrongist beliefs till this paragraph:
Because the Church is to become the Kingdom of God, it must already reflect both life and government now — before Christ’s return and the resurrection. Christ, as Head, leads His Church both spiritually and organizationally so that when the resurrection occurs, the Church can immediately transition into ruling the Kingdom of God without needing to redesign its structure or reestablish spiritual life.
Can you imagine Christ coming back and immediately unleashing the Churches of God upon the world as the perfect embodiment of church government and spirituality? Seriously?
Looking at these blasphemous church leaders masquerading as men of God today in COGland and how they have set themselves up as God's personal mouthpiece—and watching the pure hell their current churches are experiencing—how could anyone in their right mind see a bunch of COGers elevated by Christ into gods and goddesses to rule the world and expect true church governance and true spirituality?
The Churches of God are filled with spiritual rot thanks to men like Thiel, Pack, Flurry, and Weinland. God is no more going to use these guys than he will Gerald Weston. Where is there any COG doing a "work"? No one even knows who any of them are anymore!
18 comments:
The splinters definition of government amounts to "we own you and you have no rights." People would be jumping into the lake of fire to avoid this government.
Isn't this all becoming a cliché ?
The Armstrong Churches of God are all low-wattage works. They are completely ineffective because God does not work through them. Charlie Kirk may have brought more people to Jesus than all the ACOGs combined. Last weekend, Church attendance reportedly increased significantly nationally and internationally. Did the ACOGs attendance increase as well?
Richard
I don't think that victims of abuse appreciate their complaints being called a cliche. You are free to go elsewhere if you find this blog boring.
I first encountered the idea that the WCG church government would be mapped into the Kingdom of God, with personnel already assigned, back in the Seventies. A graduate of AC Pasadena told me that this had been taught in one of his classes. That HWA would then be at the top with the ministry arrayed beneath him and on the lowest rung would be all the church trash (My deduction and wording.)
This, of course, is an error. This notion requires that fallible humans would manage to create a perfect human organization worthy of being transferred intact into the Kingdom of God. That dog won't hunt. Instead, we find in scripture many places in the New Testament where congregations had governmental problems. The Corinthian Congregation in particular.
There is no evidence that perfection in government was being held out as a goal in the NT church. Church government is just a fallible as the humans who comprise it, in my opinion. Perfection was a stretch goal for individuals who would then be rewarded according to their works. Presumably, this would also determine their position in the governmental structure of the Kingdom of God. Hence, the precise governmental structure of the Kingdom of God is yet to be determined based on God's work with individual persons. Jesus said in Matthew 20, "You will indeed drink my cup, but to sit at my right hand and at my left, this is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father.”
I think the nonsense about mapping the whole WCG government into the Kingdom of God was only a transparent attempt to put gravitas and force behind the WCG leaders and ministry. "Don't mess with us. We're going to be your leaders forever. You have no recourse."
The presumption of the perpetuation of current imperfect church government as the future perfect government of God is way around the bend. It is especially a problem to Armstrongism which approaches government as an autocratic hierarchy rather than as a servanthood.
Scout
That the WCG government would simply be transfered into God's kingdom was frequently explicit and implicit in many of the 1970s and 1980s sermons. This was the ministry exalting themselves and justifying the church's flawed culture. But it went beyond that. They defined reality in the church, and wanted to do the same with God's future kingdom. Which meant that didn't want the type of members who questioned them in the kingdom. And they wanted their moral compromises to be transfered into the kingdom as well. I always got the impression from my first minister that he wanted all the members to lower their standards. The idea was to extort God to lower his standards if he wanted a family. This was a "back door" for the morally challenged to enter the kingdom.
Scout, as I remember things, roving evangelist Gerald Waterhouse pretty much invented the idea of government during the millennium or kingdom being an extension of WCG structure plus key figures from biblical history...Moses, Noah, Joshua etc. He preached that idea in 3 hour sermons around the world in the 1960s and 70s.
My article didn't say these other organizations calling themselves "Church of God" is God's Church. I don't read anywhere in the Bible where the Church is divided into many groups, into many bodies. I read that God's Church is one, united, jointly fitted together. And to operate in the world it is organized. Yet the spiritual body is organized according to how Christ organizes it not men. I don't agree to the author reposting a portion of my article, because Jesus Christ won't send out a divided Church. He doesn't now. If we believe that He does, we're not looking at Christ's Church. Nor to the True Christ.
Timothy, the ACOGs have always taught that the splintering is part of the prophesied falling away. They also teach that this is a type of America economically and politically collapsing and splintering as well.
The scattering of the church is nothing new: Matthew 26:31 “ ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.’
The persecution of the church shortly after its establishment in Jerusalem scattered the church and helped spread the gospel. I also remind you that the splintering gave back to members much of the personal responsibilities that were stolen from them by Armstrong's ministers. God doesn't expect members to be oppressed slaves for the sake of the work. You do, but God doesn't!
Tim, will Gods Church hold to the doctrine of British Israelism?
How can that be so if this most erroneous doctrine, that has been so soundly and solidly refuted by historians, linguistics, archaeologists, scholars both theological and anthropological plus DNA.
Those who hold to this theory as core doctrine are simply in error, and as such we’re not looking at Christs Church nor to the True Christ.
These Armstrong groups that split from the ‘mother church’ in rebellion remind one of Babylon the great and its harlot daughters.
They have no credibility.
If Jesus Christ did not send out a divided Church is that admission that the wwcog was not Gods Church?
But even under HWA, the church was divided. It's just that the divisions were under one roof. Just like the Catholic church with its many internal division. The WCG splintering just made the divisions external rather than internal.
This post isn't about 'victims of abuse'.
Many Protestant and Catholic churches are strongly divided, but their division is within and not noticed from outside so easily. Who's going to walk away from the Vatican and it's riches or a mega church building?
I once heard Roy Holiday remark to a church audience, that in the Kingdom of God the church members will see a flash shoot through the sky, and it will be Herbert and Loma Armstrong going about their work... he must have meant 'the church trash' will see them... I remember being stunned by the whole small mindedness of it.
Yet God's standards for rewards and status differ from humans standards. Matthew 20:16 "So the last shall be first, and the first last".
Too many in the churches have gone down the same path as Salome, the mother of James and John, who had the sheer audacity to ask Jesus to put them at the right hand of God. Matthew 20:20-28 & Mark 10:35, but Jesus humbly replied such a decision 'belong to those for whom His Father has prepared them'.
So Jesus was teaching the is people who the Father prepares.
the ACOGs have always taught that the splintering is part of the prophesied falling away.
Always? Not true. No splinter taught this before 1995. Armstrongite doctrine has changed to fit the world around it. Remember that in the 1930s HWA was teaching that the Great Tribulation began in 1929. Even most of the splinters don't really teach this; they really teach that THEIR group is the one true not-splintered remnant and that everybody else is splintered away from that truest church.
Glenn
I am glad we have a collective memory to rely on. Gerald Waterhouse was enormously influential in creating the "other" church. There was the official church whose theology and policies were promulgated by the pulpit in Pasadena. And then there was the other church of the pews. The latter was a populist and somewhat garish version of the former.
There was no mechanism in the WCG for ensuring that the HQ Pulpit, the Local Pulpit and the Pews all believed the same thing. At least, that I know of. I do know that recordings of local services were made in the latter years of the WCG. And I know of one case where a local church elder intercepted one of the tapes because he disagreed with what another local church elder said in a sermon. I don't know if he ever actually escalated it.
I have the feeling that Waterhouse was a loose cannon, but I cannot establish that. None of what he spoke was documented that I know of. He was long-winded but he was heavy on prophecies and ad hoc interpretations of world events. I think most of the people in the Pews looked forward to his presentations.
Scout
Aren’t all COG’s cliche?
Heard anything new since 1970 in prophecy?
The COG today is a bunch of boomers trying to make the church relevant again when anyone with eyes to see or an internet connection can quickly determine the myriad misleading, derivative, and fanciful doctrines.
But sure that group meeting in a hotel is really going to shake the world *rolls eyes*
Wait till they hear about the lost tribes though!!
Most of the top ministers had homes on Orange Grove or Waverly Drive, kind of secreted away, hidden in plain view. In addition to the well known mansions on "Millionaire's Row", Ambassador College also owned a number of apartment buildings, used for various purposes, in the general neighborhood. One such complex was 80 South Grand, off campus, across from the Vista Del Arroyo Hotel, and near the Colorado St. Bridge. The apartment which faced the street was our dorm during the 1967-68 school year. It was nice living off campus, not under as direct supervision as was the rule in the dorms up and down
Grove. Gerald Waterhouse lived in one of the adjacent apartments, during the times when he was not out on the road. Can't say we got to know him, though. He generally kept to himself as I recall.
I never dug Frank Notsohotra, cause he didn't know how to rock n roll. But, he did do one song with lyrics applicable to this discussion, "Young At Heart".
"Fairy Tales (Armstrongism, British Israelism) can come true, it can happen to you, when you're young at heart" (parentheses mine)
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