For sixteen years, Samuel W. Kitchen would not touch the tithe. Not a dime. Not a widow's mite. Not even a spiritually significant Amazon gift card. He labored with his own fingers, as Isaiah apparently requires, and he did this because he believed a man cannot handle the holy tenth without proper authorization from Jesus Christ.
Then last year Christ worked through an ordained elder in the Philippines who was between COG church-hopping jobs at the time, who issued the missing paperwork directly channeled from Christ himself. The windows of heaven opened. The windows of Iowa, regrettably, did not.
Kitchen's latest pastoral update explains the situation with the calm of a man who has just discovered that declining personal revenue and rising ecclesiastical privilege are the same miracle wearing two hats.
"This last year, since receiving authorization from Jesus Christ, my personal labors has been shrinking," he writes, "but at the same time God has replaced it with tithes and offerings from the Church!"
One can almost hear the squeegee hit the bucket.
He is careful to insist this is not panhandling. Panhandling is when a man asks strangers for money because work dried up. This is different. This is when a man asks followers for money because work dried up and a verse in Zechariah now points at his household. The distinction is doctrinal. Also postal. Checks may be sent to P.O. Box 126, Fairfield, Iowa, in the name of Support Services of the Worldwide Church of God, or simply to Samuel Kitchen, who is not making himself anything.
For sixteen-plus years he denied himself the tithe. Christ dispatched Jonathan Dicen, an elder who authorized the collection of Tithes and Offerings in the USA and then, in a plot twist worthy of the Book of Acts, took another position with another COG and severed the connection. Does a departing co-signer void the note? Kitchen has thought about this. No. Otherwise, marriages would be null, ordinations would be null, and more importantly, the P.O. box would be empty.
He is not ordained by any man. He is merely authorized to receive the money that ordained men receive. The difference will be explained after the deposit clears.
Kitchen's credentials are otherwise airtight. In 1991 his father held him up like Hannah with Samuel, which in Iowa is how one applies for end-time employment. Nineteen years later - a complete time cycle, naturally - the work came online. A demon-possessed woman once shrieked at his father in a Wisconsin Dells restaurant. Gerald Waterhouse once implied a special job. Kitchen originally assumed Dad was one of the Two Witnesses. He now realizes Satan was after the children the whole time, which is convenient, because the children are the ones with the website.
Zechariah 6 involves his family. Josiah-Hen is the household where the tithes go so Joshua may be plucked from the fire and given crowns, which is the completion of the Philadelphia era, which is to say please stop funding the other groups. Those groups exist, Kitchen explains, because the devil does not want you protected. He wants you dead. The practical application is that your first tenth should not go to them.
Isaiah 17:7-8 is pressed into service as a business plan. Do not look to the altars. Do not look to the work of the ministry. Do not look to your own labors. Do not respect what your fingers have made. Look to God. God, in this rendering, looks a great deal like a small online fellowship that just decided it needs an office. Kitchen's trips were personally funded until God wanted square footage. God also wanted him to stop respecting the work of his own fingers at approximately the same moment those fingers were bringing in less work.
This is called faith.
The operation remains "small" and "very weak" compared with Herbert W. Armstrong, a comparison Kitchen loves to make. A response is building. Phone calls have come in from around the nation. He gets nervous imagining growth. God will provide what he needs to handle it. What he needs, at present, is for the Church to stand up in Jerusalem by standing up at the mailbox in Iowa.
People have asked the obvious question: if you can handle the tithe, are you ordained? Kitchen's answer is a masterpiece of remnant logic. No man ordained him. Therefore, he must already be ordained, because otherwise he would not have authority to handle the tithe, which he now has, which proves the ordination he does not claim. The Oregon Conference laid hands on Armstrong as a sign they recognized what Christ had already done. Perhaps the remnant can do the same by recognizing Kitchen. Perhaps he is going off the deep end. He allows the possibility for one sentence, then returns to the fruit test. Either he is a wicked tree or a good tree. The good tree accepts checks.
He has undergone severe health trials this year to get the point strengthened in his own mind. The point is: stop looking at side work. Start looking at the storehouse. The storehouse is his. The tares are everyone still sending money to the other ninety-nine continuations of the one true church. When tribulation hits, golden oil will flow. Until then, oil is expensive and so is an office.
Armstrong, Kitchen reminds the flock, was not ordained by a Sardis minister either. Christ ordained him. The church merely caught up. Kitchen is offering the same courtesy. You may lay hands on the arrangement by laying a tenth on the envelope. You may also ignore him and be laughed to scorn in the wrong direction. He is willing to be kicked for the elect's sake. The elect, if they are paying attention, will notice the kicking goes a lot easier when someone else is covering rent.
For over sixteen years the family received no tithes to fund this work. He himself labored to provide personal funding, because he believed in authorization. Now he has authorization. Now he is viewed as wicked. The timing is unfortunate only if you are still looking at the work of his fingers. God says don't. God says look to Him. Him, in the current fiscal year, has a building fund, a website, AI-assisted hymn demos, and a growing sense that the Philadelphia era cannot finish itself on window money.
Bring the tithes into the storehouse. Try Him now in this. See if He will not open the windows of heaven. The other windows have already been washed.
In Jesus Christ's name, and in the name of whoever is still holding the letter from the Philippines.
20 comments:
Panhandling is when a man asks strangers for money because work dried up.
If you want to offend a man asking for money, call him a "panhandler." Many of them deny that title. They're just "people asking for money."
Armstrong’s writings show he was ordained by Oregon Conference of the Church of God; that he accepted their authority.; used their credentials; and never claimed Christ ordained him. Kitchen has invented a myth claiming otherwise.
Remember that we are talking about the ACOGs. The squeegee isn't the only thing in the closet.
Anonymous person at 2:16 PM: Armstrong in later years did speak of being ordained by Christ. Elder Kietz Expressed great concern with that statement.
Evolution can explain why men have nipples. The bible cannot!
Herbert was baptized by a Baptist. Not by a CoG minister. Total fail! Would any CoG accept that as a legitimate baptism today?
Panhandling is what people do when they have spent all their government money on drugs and gambling. Did Jesus give money to such people?
Sam blocked me on Facebook last week for calling him a low rent grifter.
Health issues and now he can accept tithes. I wonder if there is a connection?
Apostle Matthew was a hated tax collector.
"Grifter" is a bit harsh. Sam was deprived of a proper education, having grown up in a cult within a cult (the Kitchen family). He is an obese man with serious health issues, yet his only semi-professional skill is window-washing. Considering his laziness and his family-cult-fed delusions, it's no surprise that he has developed his current mentality. His only alternative would be to admit that his cult and his family have bequeathed to him an empty life devoid of meaning and purpose, and have given him no skills to cope with it.
Anon at 9:14 pm Thursday:
There is a very serious report that Armstrong was rebaptized by CG7 Elder Stith in 1930. Armstrong would’ve covered it up so it’s not to look like he was a member of that church.
It puts them in a bad place. If somebody tries to make a point like you do about his Baptist baptism, they can’t dredge up the 1930 baptism without admitting that Armstrong was a member of CG7. That opens up a whole can of fraud in other ways.
When washing is actually a reasonably lucrative endeavor. A lot of companies don’t want to do it themselves, so they will hire people who can do it. It actually has a bit of skill to it. Plus, for Sabbatarian it permits them to work Sundays, and late at night.
I actually had the field suggested to me by a friend in my congregation, actually near that area where he is. It was actually suggested I try to apprentice with that family.
The financial difficulties have been a long time coming. I remember he got a part-time job as a fry cook. Then on Facebook, he complained about something or other on the job. I think he just had difficulty being a regular employee, rather than being the owner and self-operator.
As for there being connection between his health and his willingness to take tithe money, it would be sort of like how Armstrong got older and sicker, and loosened up some of the restrictions on medical care. They could both play it as God using circumstances to make reality clear. Of course, it’s really just self-serving.
Men having nipples, supports the idea that Adam was originally a hermaphrodite. That is, he was able to reproduce on his own. Then, for some reason, God got the right idea that like the animals, humans should be split between rational creatures and women. So the “rib – the term mean “chamber“ – was removed from Adam and put into a different body. Because that body would be just stating and ultimately, most directly caring for child, that body also developed memory glands. Meanwhile, the male body retained nipples as a vestige.
Believe it or not, I had to study into this over 20 years ago when I was still a Bible believer. It actually helped open my eyes to a lot of things about scripture. It sounds like an explain-away. Maybe it is. But that was a lesson I learned. You can never be sure exactly what something in scripture means, at least not to the level of divine certainty. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t an answer in there.
My nipple post is in response to the anonymous post 9:12 PM Thursday.
Slapped so hard, you don’t even remember your name.
The more discussions we have about Armstrongism the more I realize the extent of what cannot be known. And, that is one of the benefits cults falsely dangle to attract members: The ability to know the unknowable. The "We have all the answers" mentality.
In the end, nobody human does. Upon death, we become gnostic. Or not.
LW said: “There is a very serious report that Armstrong was rebaptized by CG7 Elder Stith in 1930.”
I’d be interested to see the evidence for that specific claim, because the evidence I’ve found does not establish it.
Armstrong wrote to A. N. Dugger on May 8, 1929—contemporaneously—that while Stith was in Oregon he “would not be baptized again by Bro. Stith,” and that pressure was being put on him to be baptized “all over again.” That seems difficult to reconcile with a rebaptism by Stith in 1930.
There is later testimony from Alice Henion, recorded by Rex Sexton in the early 1980s, that Stith baptized Armstrong when she was 13. I wouldn't dismiss that recollection, but it is retrospective and, importantly, does not establish 1930 as the date. What is documented is Stith's involvement with Armstrong during this period and Armstrong's subsequent ordination by the Oregon Conference of the Church of God in 1931.
So it seems possible that later recollections may have conflated Stith's involvement in Armstrong's early ministry and ordination with his baptism.
Unless there is a contemporary record showing that Stith baptized Armstrong in 1930, I think “Armstrong was rebaptized by Stith in 1930” is too strong. The contemporary evidence points much more clearly to Armstrong's 1927 baptism by a Baptist minister and his subsequent 1931 ordination into the CG7 ministry.
So has Samuel Chick-hen now collected enough tithes to buy the Ambassador Auditorium yet?
I'm having difficulty wrapping my mind around this Adam as an hermaphrodite theory. For one thing, recreational sex between these creatures would have been a horrible perversion of the laws later enumerated in Torah. But, also, we've often discussed fossils of the human-like creatures which predated mankind, apparently extending backwards 200,000 years. I am certain that if any of these creatures had been hermaphrodites, this information would have great prominence in today's climate.
I've also seen theories that in the tale of the fall of Adam and Eve, the serpent was a metaphor for a black man, who seduced Eve in the garden. It seems there is no shortage of speculative theories about that era in time, no matter how offbeat.
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