A comment on "Same Old Yoke, Same Old Excuses – Must Be the Members’ Fault Again"
It is truly ironic that a dynamic movement which in its heyday warned the world of the end times would end up fizzling out and decaying right along with the world it once warned. One once expected this voice to rise to its highest crescendo as surrounding conditions evolved to their worst and became intolerable. So effective would be this message that we were supposed to be persecuted and expelled for this! And, it is so easy to get deported today!
It seems perfectly obvious that the splinters are clueless and have lost the gift of messaging. With the proliferation of "the influencer" on the internet, how is it that nobody has been able to tap into and exploit the old Armstrongism in such a way as to go viral? It's really kind of mind-boggling, isn't it? If God were truly behind them, all it would take would be a divine nod, wink, or smile, and they would be everywhere! Instead, we find them waddling in their paranoia over a few well-placed termites or strategically released farts from Satan, who most likely could care less their so-called work! Cowabunga!
You people who are out there making Banned part of your sabbath AM studies realize that my comment this morning is not wrong!
In an era when any teenager with a ring light and a TikTok account can command a global audience before breakfast or a twenty-something guy can expose massive fraud of taxpayers' money, the heirs of Armstrongism cannot make their “urgent” end-time warning travel farther than the next church basement. They have the internet, the algorithms, the free platforms, and a ready-made catalog of dramatic prophecies. What they lack is the ability—or the will—to package any of it in a way that anyone outside their shrinking circle actually wants to hear.
If God were truly behind them, all it would take would be a divine nod, wink, or smile, and they would be everywhere. Instead, they are nowhere. The absence of that viral breakthrough is not a mystery; it is the evidence. A message that cannot spread even when the tools for global distribution are handed to it on a silver platter is a message that has already been weighed and found wanting.
Rather than adapt, the remaining groups have retreated into the safest possible activity: paranoia. They spend their energy hunting termites in the walls and detecting strategically released farts from Satan while the actual work of reaching the public is left undone. The result is a collection of tiny, self-referential echo chambers whose loudest noise is the sound of their own mutual suspicion.
That is why none of them are known around the world for their message. World leaders have no idea who they are. No magazines or video productions influence large audiences. Not because the world is too wicked to listen. Not because persecution has silenced them. But because the message itself has become unhearable—clumsy, outdated, and delivered by people more interested in guarding the last remaining vestages of 1970/80s Armstrongism than in speaking to anyone outside them.
Cowabunga, indeed!
9 comments:
TraditionalACOG‘s have to keep tight control over their messages, because they know that if people look into the history of their churches, they will find the truth about them. The Internet influencer style is too open to interaction from people who don’t like them.
I do have to give LCG credit for being fairly loose on the comment section on their Tomorrow’s World YouTube channel. Just don’t say, “Armstrongism.” Say, “Armstrong faith tradition.”
I'm here in LA and no one here knows anything about UCG, PCG, LCG, CCOG, RCG, COGWA, etc. Their message faded the day Herbert Armstrong died. Even in Pasadena, HWA and the WCG are unknown to the vast majority. All that is left is some aging buildings and some bronze plaques scattered around the campus. You cant turn on your tv and find any of these guys spreading their message. Magazines can never be found. No public warning anywhere. If no one remembers the church it is ludicrous for people like Sam Kitchen and Bob Thiel to think anyone cares about what they say.
If the internet had somehow materialized during the lifetime of HWA, he would have said the same things about it that he had said about the invention of radio, commercial airline flight, and television. He would have flapped those hog jowls of his and thundered that God had made these things possible specifically just so that he, HWA, God's Apostle, could use them to get the gospel out and to warn the world. And. a certain number of people would have believed this, because Herbert and his people would have figured out how to maximize his work on the internet!
Meanwhile, his place holders, aspiring possessors of the mantle that they wish they were, are so lame that they are barely phoning it in! And that, folks, is good news indeed.
I found some photos from last year’s feast from a ucog site a few weeks back online. Very small gathering of around 100 folk. Recognised a few faces from my old wwcog days. A few youngsters there, but mainly old retired people, a number in wheelchairs and walking with support trolleys. It may have been a retirement home or village. This is the future of the Armstrong movement. Which like us all, will fade away into oblivion and obscurity. With perhaps one or two still clinging too and yearning for the old glory days. There is no going back.
As time goes on science factors in. God is the God of science as well as "life science." Life goes on for some and ends for others. Also the math ain't matching. Armstrongism didn't do the math post "apostasy." The only thing I can think of to get the numbers that they want with an impact are the miracles aka gifts of the spirit. It would take an attitude adjustment. But they holdin on, holding on to the past. They're like that weekend at Bernies syndrome.
I understand that a handful of the UCG local congregations own or lease their own buildings . Other than that most of the splinters meet in rented halls. They all have a stealth like existence in their communities.
That no buildings policy does provide a certain level of immunity from attack, 2:59. Unfortunately, there are Nazis living amongst us, who spray paint swasticas and antisemitic grafitti on Jewish temples. The historic WCG approach is based more upon fear than on the benefits of having a building as center of one's community in a way that Seventh Day Adventists or Jehovah's Witnesses exist. Totally appropriate! Fear had a ginormous ripple effect throughout the entire Armstrong movement. Some say fear was, and continues to be its very bedrock basis. The old HWA hook was deliberately and unashamedly antithetical to the classic Christianity which was handed down through the ages.
Looking at history, it would have made perfect logical sense not to have your own buildings if your teachings indicated that you were only going to be using them until fleeing for Petra in 1972. In fact, this was one of the whispered critiques of HWA as ground was broken for the Ambassador Auditorium as a sort of in-your-face defiance of that belief. Did HWA really believe his own schtick? As the perrennial master of words, he framed this auditorium as "A House for God", comparing himself to David and Solomon, and stating that Christ, upon His return, would be well-pleased to find him "so-doing". As we know today, it ended up being just a place for Lucille Ball to put out her cigarettes, and was ultimately taken over by Maranatha people who spray painted the David Wynn sculptured egrets white, and now Sam Kitchen wants them to short-sell it all back to his MTV version of a WCG! "Yo! MTV keeps the Sabbath!"
Local buildings would have been very beneficial to the growth of WCG if the founders had been interested in being an integral part of the local communities in which they were built, as are Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, SDA, or JW churches. We were elitist separatists, based not upon taking an active outreach approach to evangelism, but upon HWA's construct of people coming into his church exclusively by being "called", through late night radio broadcasts, and the relative security of requested documents advertised in that broadcast being sent upon the listener's request through the US Mail. Who needed their own building for that? All that was required was a broadcast studio, and a central printing facility which looked like any other nondescript industrial facility. Oddly enough, the press facility was located in a neighborhood vivisected by a freeway that would be blocked for decades, delayed in court by the City of South Pasadena which claimed that the freeway would ruin its historic neighborhoods.
In these days of winking and then kicking the prophecy can down the road every 3-5 years, theoretically there would be no prophecy-based reason for a local church not to have their own buildings. Economic reasons, in most cases, now preclude this. There has been a violent contraction, exacerbated by the continuous ego-driven splintering of the splinters. Even if there were suddenly an upgraded expansion of HWA's "Radio" concept to emerge as the "Internet Church of God" (as opposed to "Cyber Church of God" which might encroach upon Bob Thiel's chosen CCOG acronym, and be labeled as an attack by Satan), buildings other than a headquarters hub would not be necessary. This hub would include a data center which would serve as an AI based "Letter Answering Department". There would also be a digital printing operation to generate hard-copy literature. The question regarding local meeting places will thus continue to be moot for the foreseeable future..
From owners to renters. Had they paid for their own buildings back in the day, then they would own so many places and have safe spaces to worship. The offerings would be for the upkeep. But it went to jets and things that wouldn't transfer for the next generation.
Cowboy
Would the last one to leave please turn off the lights! The splinters might as well have that as their moto!
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