Lecturing the Sheep on Humility While the Shepherds Build Empires

The Importance of Working Together… Just Not at the Top

Doug Winnail of the Living Church of God recently offered the membership another gentle pastoral reminder:

We are to be humble; live in harmony; be patient; avoid being haughty, conceited, or ambitious; and be willing to yield… Proverbs 13:10 reminds us that pride is a major cause of contention… Are you developing these skills?

Beautiful words. Truly. One can almost hear the soft strains of “Blest Be the Tie That Binds” playing in the background while the faithful nod solemnly and resolve to try harder.

And yet.

For more than nine decades, the ministry of Armstrongism has treated humility the way a cat treats a bathtub. They preach it. They demand it. They weaponize it against the membership. They simply never practice it.

Herbert W. Armstrong did not build an empire of servant-leaders. He built a top-down, hierarchical machine in which the man at the top was “God’s Apostle,” the ministers were his extensions, and the membership existed primarily to tithe, obey, and stay quiet. Questioning a decision was “rebellion.” Suggesting a better way was “ambition.” Leaving was “apostasy.” The entire system was engineered so that humility flowed only one direction: downward.

When the old Worldwide Church of God finally imploded in the mid 1990s, the same men who had spent decades demanding that members “yield” and “live in harmony” immediately began carving out their own little kingdoms. These narcissistic and bitter men went on to form numerous splinter groups. Global, United, Living, Philadelphia, Restored, Continuing, Church of God a Worldwide Association—each new letterhead required a new headquarters, a new magazine, a new Feast circuit, and a new claim that this particular group was the one true remnant. Not a single one of the splinter leaders did this with a humble servant leader attitude. The same scriptures Winnail now quotes were suddenly reinterpreted to mean “unity… as long as it is under my authority.”

Pride, it turns out, is only a problem when the people in the pews display it.

Look at the historical record without the rose-colored glasses. Ministers in the old WCG routinely exercised the kind of control that would make a medieval bishop blush. Members were told whom they could marry, what medical treatments they could accept, how much they had to give, and which thoughts were acceptable. “Government from the top down” was not a slogan; it was a lifestyle. The servant-leader ideal of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet was transformed into the minister washing his hands of any responsibility for the wreckage he left behind.

The post-1986 era simply made the pattern more obvious. Leaders who once sat at the same conference tables, broke bread together at church potlucks, and shared in the broken body of Christ at the Passover now refuse to share a stage. They compete for the same aging membership base while solemnly warning their people against “division.” They lecture about avoiding haughtiness while carefully protecting titles, salaries, and the right to decide who is Laodicean this week. They quote Paul calling others “fellow workers” and then treat every other COG group as a rival corporation.

And when the rank-and-file finally grow tired of the endless splitting, the endless failed prophecies, and the endless demands for more money and more loyalty, the same men who created the chaos turn around and solemnly remind everyone that pride is the real problem. The solution, of course, is never for the men at the top to yield an inch of control or admit they might have been wrong. The solution is always for the membership to become more humble.

This is not servant leadership. This is managed authoritarianism dressed up in Sabbath-keeping language.

Jesus defined greatness as the willingness to become the servant of all. Armstrongism defined greatness as the willingness to demand that others become the servants of the organization. One of these approaches produces the fruit of the Spirit. The other produces a landscape littered with broken families, disillusioned members, and dozens of competing groups each convinced that God is uniquely working through them.

So when Doug Winnail asks the membership, “Are you developing these skills?” the honest answer from anyone who has watched the last forty years of Armstrongist history is simple:

We have watched the ministry model the opposite of those skills for generations. Perhaps it is time the teachers started taking their own medicine.

Until then, the weekly calls for humility will continue to ring hollow—because the people who most need to hear them are the ones holding the microphones.