Gerald Waterhouse (1926–2002) was the Worldwide Church of God’s premier globe-trotting windbag — a Navy vet who somehow survived WWII and Korea only to inflict four-hour sermon marathons on innocent congregations for the next forty years. Fast-tracked through Ambassador College (class of ’56), he was ordained evangelist by 1963 and spent decades jetting to London, Sydney, Manila, Johannesburg, and every podunk U.S. town that still had metal folding chairs and a pulse. His job? Keeping the tithes flowing and the fear fresh.
The man was legendary for his sermons — not for depth, but for sheer, soul-crushing length. Four hours? Five? Six if he really got rolling? Ex-members still describe them as hostage situations with occasional hymn breaks. One ex-member told about a five hour sermon that include him playing a tape of one of his two hour sermons in the middle of it. He’d pace, rant, repeat the same point until your ass went numb, all while painting vivid apocalyptic fan-fiction pounding the pulpit and sweating like a pig.
And the prophecies? Pure comedy gold. Waterhouse loved reminding everyone that if “God’s Apostle” Herbert W. Armstrong kicked the bucket before the Tribulation, the Almighty would have no choice but to nuke the planet rather than let the Work fail. (Armstrong died in 1986. The world shrugged and carried on.) His signature masterpiece was the Petra Prophecy: the true church would miraculously fly on “two wings of a great eagle” (i.e., chartered jumbo jets) to the rock city of Petra, Jordan — God’s official VIP bunker. Once there, loyal tithe-slaves would camp among the ruins, grow miracle veggies, munch heavenly manna, sip water from a rock, and endure 3½ years of “final training” under Waterhouse’s expert guidance to become Christ’s future middle-management. Miss the flight? You’re Laodicean garbage. Question the timeline? Even worse.
Of course, none of it happened. The 1972–1975 “this time for sure” Tribulation was a no-show. The German Beast never roared. The jets never arrived. The manna never materialized. When doctrines started collapsing under Tkach in the ’90s, Waterhouse tried selling the new boss with the same oily certainty — until he got disfellowshipped in 1995 like yesterday’s false prophet. He shuffled off to a splinter group (United Church of God) and kept flogging the same dead horse until prostate cancer finally shut him up in 2002.
Off the pulpit, Waterhouse was the ultimate perpetual bachelor. A brief Navy marriage didn’t last, and he spent the rest of his life single — while rumors swirled that he was gay. Ex-members noted how clusters of young men always seemed to orbit him whenever he stayed in Herbert Armstrong’s garage apartment on the Ambassador College campus. Sightings of him in the West Hollywood area did not help much to squelch the rumors. Whether closet case, opportunist, or both, the irony is delicious: the man preaching rigid moral purity and end-time holiness while allegedly surrounded by boyish admirers.
Final verdict: Gerald Waterhouse wasn’t a prophet — he was a verbose, globe-trotting, four-hour fraud who built an entire career on a mountain of bald-faced lies and spectacularly failed prophecies. Every deadline collapsed like a cheap tent in a desert wind. Every vivid Petra fantasy — the chartered jets, the miracle gardens, the manna buffet, the 3½-year boot camp for future kings — turned out to be nothing but hot air and desperate tithing bait. He weaponized fear, guilt, and marathon guilt trips to fleece thousands of families out of their savings, their futures, and their sanity The ancient rocks of Petra still stand silent and empty. Waterhouse’s credibility rotted away decades before he did. In the end, the only thing this loud-mouthed doomsday windbag ever accurately predicted was how long he could keep talking before people started questioning everything. Spoiler: not nearly long enough. The man didn’t just get the future wrong — he made a tax-free, globe-trotting spectacle out of lying about it for forty years.
Silent Pilgrim
16 comments:
I remember asking him in the early 1980s when will we be finally witnessing to the Soviet Union. We will be there soon, it will happen was the answer. I also remember our regional director announcing a visit by Gerald and to expect a long message, and the congregation groaning with fear lol. Them was da days. And what a different world we live in today. Armstrongism has disintegrated and split into countless competing groups. Unknown outside of those impacted by this sect, and dying, slowly but surely. It’s theology like BI has been systematically destroyed debunked and is simply untenable. Tis an interesting life as they say.
On a UCG Filipino web site, as a Pastor of that church, he was once asked why he taught the Tkach doctrinal changes. The answer he gave was that members trusting their church leaders was so important that he felt compelled to teach the changes, even though he didn't agree with them.
What happened to following Christ??
I remember every May Gerald would park his ass in Indianapolis and make the local minister take him out to the Speedway. He was obsessed with it. Must of had a secret ambition.
I remember watching my water intake 2 or 3 days before Gerald would come to town to speak, so one would not get up and go to the bathroom, I would see some people get up and walk out to go to the bathroom while Gerald was speaking ( LOL ). he would just stare at that person all the way out...
It's funny. As a child, I found some of the more ridiculous aspects of this "Radio" Church of God, into which my parents had been baptized, to be very entertaining. Most people remember the purple hymnal. I also remember the old gray soft cover ones which contained more of the classic Christian hymns. As children, we had to sit and copy the words so that our family could have something to sing on the sabbath because church was much too far away to attend every week. Not that the hymnal was ridiculous, I'm just framing the era with it. Rod Meredith pounding the lecturn so hard during one of his rants that the P.A. system went out. Walking past the stage during a sermon by the eternally old looking Herbert W. Armstrong and seeing him literally jumping as he emphasized his points in his inimitable animated fashion. Listening to a Garner Ted Armstrong sermon before his basso broadcast voice was fully developed, and he still spoke in a somewhat higher register. It was speculated that God would heal GTA's younger sons who were born deaf and mute, so that they could be the two witnesses. And, then there was Gerald Waterhouse.
We saw him first in Pittsburgh, and the pre-service buzz amongst the brethren was amazing. It was a 4-1/2 hour drive each way, so we didn't get to go to church all that often in those days. A longer sermon made the trip worthwhile. But, in those simpler times, to a child, Waterhouse made the deeply longed for ultimate resolution of Armstrongism come alive. Instead of hearing about how all of our unchurched friends and family were going to be tortured by the Germans, and our country devastated, in one four hour extravaganza we heard nothing but positives. It was an uplifting change! The adults who were seasoned by life may have permitted themselves to question some of his speculations, but if they did, I never heard them. In those days, if we heard anyone say anything negative or questioning what the ministers said, we avoided them, because they had the wrong attitude. They weren't fully committed, and would most likely also be punished by the Germans.
To catch the zeitgeist of that era, for those who have a DVD collection which includes classic TV shows from the '50s and '60s which you were not allowed to watch because of the church, the relatively puerile plot lines of those shows can be an assault to the senses and one's memories. That is to say that Gerald Waterhouse's message also has not aged well with the deeper, and more sophisticated thinking patterns which began to come into play as the '60s morphed into the '70s. The Russians had beat us with Sputnik, this had caused a major upshift in the U.S. education system, a change which really began to manifest itself during the following decade. During the '70s, when I heard him speak at the F/T in Tucson, I recognized the speculative nature of all his material. It was vacuous hype, as were HWA's interpretation of the prophecies, which had fed it We were watching these prophecies fail all around us as the then WCG began to edge past its time and date stamp. That "one hit wonder" Waterhouse was still doing his show into the 1980s and '90s is mind boggling! I wonder if Sammy the K has one of them on digitally remastered recording.
BB
I remember me making wierd faces to my friend in the car when they stopped in front of the theatre for services. When the door opened Waterhouse came out ....as apparantly my friend's dad had been assigned to fetch him from the hotel...
nck
I might have been a little naive about some things when I was an AC student. I knew that occasionally, I'd catch a smoke, listen to rock music, or tie one on. But, I always assumed that the rule givers and enforcers (administration) were living by the code they gave us. Then again, if you are wearing that particular opacity of welders' goggles, you aren't even suspecting that some people, considering the perpetual scrutiny, could be indulging in certain activities. It would have been preposterous, as an example, to consider that GTA might be enjoying such an active sex life. I knew he'd do some 12 oz curls with the student basketball players in the faculty locker room after shooting some hoops, cause we could hear them joking around, as beer cans popped while we changed back into our street clothes after indulging in our own athletic activity, weight lifting.
Gerald Waterhouse had an apartment in those days on Grand Ave, in the building used as overflow dormitories while a new mens' dorm was under construction. He was frequently out of town, but when in Pasadena, seemed to lead a quiet life. I never saw him even talking with any of the guys around the complex. What he did do is play handball with some of the students known to be proficient at that. I saw that in the same light as I saw GTA having a bunch of brewskis with the B-ball players.
In those days, when hetero couples were occasionally being expelled and marked for a single instance of French kissing, it never occurred to us that powerful men in the ministry would be in secret violation of the code we were taught to live by.
Ex-members noted how clusters of young men always seemed to orbit him whenever he stayed in Herbert Armstrong’s garage apartment..
suppose the Pervbert could not have been complaining too much!
I first encountered Gerald Waterhouse when he visited the Odessa, Texas church during the summer of 1967. I had been accepted to AC for that fall and was attending the local church for one of the few times in my life. I remember thinking that he was an angry, very odd man but one who came across as very sincere. His message and mannerisms made me think seriously about dropping my plans to attend AC but I rationalized that he did not represent the "normal" RadioCG minister or church beliefs and headed out to Pasadena a couple of months later anyway. IMO, he was an odd man who led an odd life and probably had a negative effect on many people. The last time I heard him speak was in New York City for one of the DULB services. As he was bloviating away on how things would be set up in the millennium I wrote a note to my wife that said, "You realize he is making ALL of this up and their is NO biblical support for what he is saying!" She laughed. We left the church after the FOT in Norfolk, Va later that year.
I remember hearing him the first time in the early 70's when he came to Birmingham on a weeknight and I was in the 2nd or 3rd grade. I remember he was still going as it went past 10:30 pm, the old guy sitting behind us was snoring loudly. I remember seeing his brother Don at a FOT in Pensacola about 10 years later and he seemed like a really dislikable, arrogant jerk. Gerald always struck me as an eccentric, odd character and heard that GTA had actually warned him to shorten his sermons. I guess this is why he seemed so gleeful after his ouster and he was sent on a campaign to congregations after HWA went on his Stalin purges in 1979 to enforce loyalty
In December, 1968, I received my first doses of traveling evangelist Gerald Waterhouse. At a bible study on December 4, I learned World Tomorrow prophecies such as “Job will straighten out the cities” and “Noah will take the job of solving the race problems”. On December 7 (a date that shall live in Worldwide Church infamy), we had a combined church service with other churches at a dark and dingy old rental hall on Eastern Avenue in Baltimore. Reading my sermon notes from this occasion over 57 years later reveal a manipulative message that I now realize was intended to extend control over the peoples’ minds. Waterhouse preaches “God’s people are different from society. The only way you can be out of a society is for God to take you out….God has to take us to a place (of safety) to mold us into the right society”. Waterhouse later preaches, “There will be no rebels in the World Tomorrow. By the end of the work, all the people who stayed loyal will be taken to a place of safety”.
These were the beginnings of an eight year period of my life which I attended the Worldwide Church of God with my family. During that time, since its local churches did not own their own buildings, I received quite a tour of local rental halls and school buildings in the Washington/Baltimore area. In the early 1970s, the Baltimore Church met at Westview Cinema on Route 40. This meeting place was quite unique by Worldwide Church standards because it was a nice large twin movie house with very plush comfortable seating. My recollection of the Baltimore Church was an attendance of about 600 people at the time.
Richard
Mr. Gerald Waterhouse returned to Baltimore, Maryland Church on July 17, 1971. Here are SOME of my raw notes in my Sabbath Service notebook of the sermon he preached on that day:
There will be one standard in the World Tomorrow (WT). Job will re-build the cities. Imperial Schools will be the hope for young people to get a right education. Mr. Norman Smith will be in charge of television and radio (in the WT). Everything will be in control.
God loves life. Christ came to give us life more abundantly. The Family of God will enjoy life. Christ came to reveal the Father. Life is going to be a joy! God is not going to make it a burden in life in the WT. No one will forget how the family of God was built. God is not going to let us decide how to worship him.
Demonism is the author of hippieism.
God is not great because of his size. He is great because of his strength and power. God is about the size of a normal man. He is about 6 feet tall. God will not save anyone he can’t rule. God names things for what they are: why is this Church called “Philadelphia”? Because that is what we need to be. Why Herbert W. Armstrong? Herbert- brightness; Armstrong – strong arm in obeying God; Why Garner Ted Armstrong? Garner -to gather; noble in guarding; Ted means God’s gift. Why Eugene, Oregon? Eugene – means “good birth”. Why 12 years before Ambassador College? Christ started educating when he was 12. Why Pasadena? Pasadena means “Crown City”. Big Sandy – big helper of men.
God will take his people to a place of safety for further training. Ambassador College is the college for the future. Ambassador College will control everything – athletics, television, radio, books, etc.
Sermon ended with Rev. 3:7-8.
Richard
Well yeah Richard.......Waterhouse was right......God is just a tid bit taller than 6ft....harharhar
nck
Oh, Richard! I had quite forgotten the full depth of Waterhouse's silliness! My brother, who was a teacher at Imperial at the time, had actually walked to the podium at the conclusion of one of Gerald's presentations in Texas to respectfully ask a few questions. Mr. Waterhouse smiled and said "You do realize that was all speculation, don't you?
When my brother shared that with me, I thought to myself, "Thanks a lot, Jer! You preached it as if it was gospel!"
BB
Waterhouse! How can one be omnipresent and be stuck in a body a bit taller than 6 ft??? Double harharhardeehar with whipped cream and marachino cherries on top!
I came along after the Waterhouse days so I never got to hear him speak. I tried to listen to one of his sermons on YouTube and after about 20 minutes of nothing I gave up. I'm glad I didn't have to endure that in real life.
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