From the United Church of God Council of Elders Strategic Plan Report:
UCG Positioning Statement:
Respect for One Another
Recognizing Jesus’ command to always treat each other in a godly manner, we believe we have sometimes not treated each other in a godly manner. Therefore, we will dedicate ourselves to:
- Respect each other.
- Recognize our different personalities and strive to understand one another.
- Reconcile and restore/rebuild relationships in the love that God the Father and Jesus Christ have shown us.
These are the critical success and barriers UCG say they face:
Successes:
Good messages, fellowship, encouraging and
uplifting.
• Good meeting facility.
• Being allowed to serve/opportunities to serve.
• Good sermons on doctrine.
• Setting a culture of love and intentional care by
leadership.
Barriers
• Poorly skilled speakers.
• Not passing the baton/lack of trust.
• Lack of focus on doctrine.
• Tired, stressed over pastors.
Distinctions/time management, lack of
willingness to commit.
• Lack of speaking and preparation skills.
• Regional pastors/mentors not having time to mentor.
• Not knowing where resources are (disorganized list).
• Older men not conversant with technology.
• Unresolved issues from the past.
• Lack of communicating improvements to stakeholders.
• Resistance to change internally.
• Reticence to collaborate.
• Ineffective internal processes.
• Misconceptions about Church finances.
UCG’s Council of Elders starts with a positioning statement about respect. They quote Jesus, talk about treating each other in a “godly manner,” and promise to reconcile relationships in the love of the Father and Son. It’s all very New Covenant-sounding on paper. Their track record says otherwise. UCG had no respect when they plotted and schemed their breakaway from the Mother church. They had no respect when their actions led to the huge breakaway group COGWA losing a lot of their ministers and members.
Then they list their “barriers.”And suddenly the mask slips. What they’ve actually admitted is a church struggling with trust, skills, exhaustion, resistance to change, unresolved grudges, tech illiteracy among leaders, disorganized everything, and financial suspicions. These aren’t random glitches. They’re the predictable fruit of trying to run a New Testament church while still operating under Old Covenant assumptions.
Let’s look at the list.
The Trust and Leadership Crisis“Not passing the baton / lack of trust.”“Tired, stressed over pastors.”“Regional pastors/mentors not having time to mentor.”“Older men not conversant with technology.”
This is what happens when you build a top-down hierarchy modeled more on Levitical gatekeepers than on the New Covenant reality that every believer is a priest (1 Peter 2:9) and the Spirit distributes gifts to the whole body. When power is treated as something a small group of approved men must tightly control, of course you don’t “pass the baton.” Of course the few official pastors burn out. Of course nobody else gets properly trained or trusted. It’s not a bug. It’s the system working as designed. In the New Covenant, the Spirit equips the saints for the work of ministry. In the UCG model, ministry is largely reserved for the ordained class. The results speak for themselves.
Skills, Preparation, and “Doctrine”“Poorly skilled speakers.”“Lack of speaking and preparation skills.”“Lack of focus on doctrine.”
They simultaneously brag about “good sermons on doctrine” as a success and list “lack of focus on doctrine” as a barrier. Make it make sense.
When your primary preaching emphasis is proving that certain Old Covenant shadows (Sabbath, Holy Days, dietary laws, etc.) are still binding requirements rather than fulfilled in Christ, you tend to produce speakers who are very good at proof-texting and not necessarily good at actual Spirit-empowered communication. Training people to preach the freedom of the gospel takes a back seat to training them to defend the system. The New Covenant doesn’t need an endless supply of lawyers arguing about which parts of the law still apply. It needs witnesses who know the power of grace.
Resistance, Grudges, and Organizational Paralysis“Unresolved issues from the past.”“Resistance to change internally.”“Reticence to collaborate.”“Ineffective internal processes.”“Lack of communicating improvements to stakeholders.”
This is the greatest hits album of what legalism produces. When your identity is wrapped up in “we have the truth” and that truth includes a heavy dose of Old Covenant observances and a particular view of church government, change feels like betrayal. Collaboration with outsiders feels dangerous. Past splits and hurts (and this group has plenty of both) never get truly resolved because grace and genuine reconciliation threaten the narrative.
You end up with a church that can’t adapt, can’t communicate clearly, and can’t let go of old offenses. That’s not a failure of implementation. That’s what happens when you prefer the ministry of condemnation to the ministry of the Spirit.
The practical stuff nobody wants to admit:
"Ministers not knowing where resources are (disorganized list).”“Distinctions/time management, lack of willingness to commit.”“Misconceptions about Church finances.”“Older men not conversant with technology.”
An aging leadership base that struggles with basic technology while younger people quietly check out? Classic symptom of a movement more focused on preserving a 20th-century restorationist system than on being a living, Spirit-led body in the 21st century. Disorganized resources and finance confusion? That’s what you get when transparency takes a back seat to centralized control. People sense the opacity and fill in the blanks with suspicion. “Misconceptions” usually means “people are asking questions we don’t want to answer clearly.”
All of these barriers flow from the same source: refusing to fully live under the New Covenant.
The New Covenant isn’t just “the Old Covenant with better promises.” It’s fundamentally different. The law written on stone is replaced by the Spirit writing on hearts. The old priesthood is replaced by the priesthood of all believers. Condemnation is replaced by grace. Shadow is replaced by Substance. Control and suspicion are replaced by love, trust, and freedom.
When a church keeps trying to mix the two — insisting the ceremonial and governmental shadows are still binding while claiming to follow Jesus — it produces exactly this kind of dysfunction: exhausted leaders, distrustful members, resistance to change, unresolved conflicts, and practical incompetence dressed up as doctrinal faithfulness.
The UCG’s own barrier list is an unintentional confession. They want the fruit of the New Covenant (respect, love, reconciliation, effective ministry) while refusing to let go of the Old Covenant operating system that makes those things nearly impossible.
It’s almost impressive how consistent the results are across groups that take this approach. The barriers aren’t coming from outside enemies or “the end times.” They’re coming from inside the system they’ve chosen to maintain.
Maybe one day they’ll stop trying to patch the old wineskin and just embrace the new one Christ actually gave us. Until then, the list of barriers will keep growing — and the irony will remain delicious.
24 comments:
Here we go again! Ministers pretending they are on the outside looking in, seeking to embarrass the church. They are the ones that are poor preachers and never inspire anyone.
The biggest problem all ACOG groups have is they're weighted down with the rotting corpse of Hebert W Armstrong. The man was a corrupt, evil, false prophet from the word go. There can never be a way to make a silk purse out of the sow's ear Herbert left behind. The system was morally and spiritually bankrupt from the very beginning. The smart thing to do would be to admit the truth and walk away from this train wreck, but these Armstrong lifers are too vain and stubborn to do so. So they will keep plugging away until the last man dies.
When has church leadership ever respected us as members? It is the "good old boys" network always looking out for themselves first and foremost. Look at how little change there really is with the men at the top. They never leave and assert their power over every decision.
I’m sorry but I am missing something here. It’s been 30 years that UCG has been in existence and they still can’t get their act together? Every year they make the same excuses and craft elaborate plans and they still haven’t figured out their issues. Their top leaders are now in their 70’s and 80’s and are soon going to be dead. The church is in a downward spiral.
Here we go again with more psychobabble and fake bull$hit! When are you stupid asshats gonna give it up and actually prove your contentions by naming names??? You do too much acid as a teenager and get stuck or something???
Quit littering our blog and wasting our time with your insanity and nonsense! If you have to fart, go to the bathroom, just don't leave it here!
It's because Armstrongism is FUBAR, and cannot be repaired or reformed.
UCG didn't breakaway from any "mother church".
They broke away from a corporate entity which took over the church UCG people used to attend, and continued on under a newer name after spoiled brat GCI dismantled things & re-arranged it all without proper polite consensus overall.
Peaceful, pleasant Mr. Victor Kubik & others were fired or quit after the hostile takeover.
Only a portion of the group UCG exited, wanted things re-arranged. GCI now has things the way they wanted, and UCG now has things the way they/we/I want(ed).
GCI neither is, was, or will be a "mother" church...unless of course they follow a "Mother"-led entity who was, is not, yet will arrive again.
You have it spot on here. From the very beginning it was corrupted as you say - merely serving the ego of a man who could not work with others and who spread the lie he had discovered new truths from God (BI and a prophetic false gospel and whole lot of ungodly prophecies plucked from the proverbial and sold as a truth). Indeed, corrupt from the beginning.
Thank you anon 5:35:58…….sick of this sh*t @ 12:13:19 by another anon.
Yeah, put a sock in it or name names for crying out loud.
UCG absolutely did break away from the mother church. Kubik along with a cabal of other men met for months in the 360 apartments on campus where they plotted and schemed to figure out how to take as many members and their money as they could. It was important to have money in place before the soon to be martyrs for the truth could jump ship and continue to live comfortably. Kubik is anything but peaceful and pleasant. He was a manipulative snake in the grass and still is. That’s why he has had positions of power for too long.
Reconcile and restore? That's a hard thing to do in splinterland. Can they reconcile and restore with cogwa? "Unrestored Church of God"
There is no need to rewrite history to satisfy some fantasy or propaganda purpose. These are the plain truth:
The Worldwide Church of God (WCG) changed its doctrines in the 1990s.
Many ministers and members disagreed and left.
They formed the United Church of God (UCG) in 1995.
WCG later renamed itself Grace Communion International (GCI).
Therefore, UCG is a breakaway group from WCG/GCI, regardless of theological claims.
This is how every historian, encyclopedia, and academic source describes it.
Amazing how some like to rewrite history.
What makes you think he left a "mother church"?
GCI was no mother. They morphed from their "roots" and became to be no mother.
It's interesting to post both sides of this issue. Thanks blog operator for allowing many views.
Not 12:13 but bravo to Anon 12:13 courage.
Exactly. GCI's theology is very different to Herb's original WWCG. Rather than doing a honest and clean break, the GCI faction chose to force their particular theology down the throats of all WWCG members. These members bolted, forming today's splinters. The "mother church" of the splinters is Armstrongism, not GCI-ism. All secular articles by outsiders such as wikipedia ignore this.
How is it being brave to make false accusations and when asked for proof, to simply double down and make more false accusations. 12:13 is F.O.S. Even Bob Thiel does better than that!
Someone they believed to be a crucial link in an unbroken chain (HWA), chose a successor, making him the next link in that chain (JWT, Sr). That person corrected heresies. Ministers and members rebelled like the stiff-necked Israelites from whom they claim to be descended, and broke up the church. God has done a "Tower of Babel" on the rebels, dividing and confusing their tongues, and the entire movement lost its wealth, voice, and power. Splinters were spewed from the mouth of God!
A new voice for the end times (not rooted in Armstrongism) will need to burst forth on the scene, when the time is appropriate, to get out a warning message with power. Armstrong was premature in his warning, and based his message on false identities and a false timeline. He proved the Gamaliel precept, yet another time.
GCI is the one who broke away 1st & UCG simply broke away from breakaway GCI.
And Tkach Snr didn't tell outright lies?
Yea, the old timers having nothing more but to run the same game plan from the 1950s and 1960s. Each leader holding on to the old HWA's coattails when they need to put on new garments. Trying to be that leader at the end when the One returns. Their prophetic gospel has them so blinded they wouldn't recognize the actual two witnesses if they appeared in their lifetime.
Cowboy
(I am putting this back on the thread where it belonged)
You wrote: Eh? Are you on crack cocaine drugs or something NO2HWA? UCG left Worldwide in 2005?????!!! Franks and Kubic would gather regulary in 2004? Well yes they did...as part of the UCG Council of Elders.
And you call Kubic an ass ?!! How amusing."
You are right , I had the wrong dates, I was looking at something else.
I don't know what kind of revisionist crap 6:22 and 6:34 are trying to pull but UCG LEFT the Worldwide Church of God in 1995. Prior to that, Kubik, Franks and several others would gather regularly in late 1994 through 1995 conspiring how to start a new breakaway group, take as many members as possible and more importantly take as much money as they could so that they could jump ship right into another paid position as church leaders and ministers. They all worked on this for months while on WCG payroll and saw nothing wrong with doing this. The landscape and custodial employees saw this going down and monitored the group for months. This was less about preserving truth than it was preserving their steady stream of income. In May of 1995, United Church of God officially began,
“The United Church of God was formally established in 1995 following a series of meetings among former WCG ministers. “ https://www.facebook.com/groups/1594333527861537/posts/2025642168064002/
Notice how they admit they met for months while on payroll, as did many of the 155 ministers who were on WCG payroll, and who jumped ship once the money was in place.
The Worldwide Church of God did not change their name till 2009 – AFTER UCG broke away in a spirit of rebellion and refusal to follow church government. While proper church government is important to them now, they had little regard for it in 1995.
Kubik was NOT fired from the WCG, he resigned before WCG could fire him because he knew they had found out he was working behind the scenes while on WCG payroll to start a new splinter group. . He knew his ass was grass and took the easy way. Kubik was and is NOT a “peaceful and pleasant person” Ask many who worked in UCG with him over the years and those that suffered under him when he weas the assistant director of Church Administration for WCG. Ask the scores of men he fired for not believing in WCG’s changes when he himself did not agree with them. He is a snake and that is part of the reason Church of God a Worldwide Ass. broke away. Franks and others knew exactly what kind of manipulative and backstabbing man Kubik was and is. Sure he has a worldwide charity that does good and which’s commendable, by as a church leader and a Christian he lacks many of the quality’s a faithful servant of God would have.
And yes, Kubick and others met for over 6 months in the SOG 360 apartments while still employed by the WCG to plan behind the scenes the breakaway group. I saw them personally gathering as did many others. The traffic coming and going out of the apartment was heavy at times.
So basically from all these comments and the attitude held towards Kubic ect you can easily conclude: a band of Tkachites believers, outraged at the formation of UCG flowed into UCG and have been trying to destroy it, cause division, trouble, drama, chaos, wars ect ever since. Their dream is to re-join the 'mother ' church of GCI.
Interesting but flawed, especially with the existence of COGWA. In the cold light of day i'd say the 'secret Tkachites' have been out chequered by time and God.
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