In his latest video, "The Church is Essential For Salvation," Samuel Kitchen presents salvation through a distinctly Armstrongist gatekeeping lens: it depends on belonging to his version of the Worldwide Church of God remnant, remaining loyal to Herbert W. Armstrong's "one man at a time" hierarchy, and taking part in "the work" within that system.
In his video, filmed along the Flint River trail in Burlington, Iowa, Kitchen says the WCG is a spiritual organism led by Christ. People, he argues, were not called merely "to get saved"; through the organized work, they were being trained as kings and priests. He describes those who left after 1986, including GCI and the splinter groups, as having abandoned the true church for "Babylon." He says independent believers have been cut off from the Holy Spirit and will eventually hear, "I never knew you." Kitchen also claims that God works through only one man, or apostle, at a time, under a theocracy to which believers must surrender. He cites Hebrews 10:25 against forsaking assembly and portrays critics as shadowy or demonic.
Samuel's argument breaks down when he puts an organization-and the system created by a dead man-in Christ's place. Kitchen treats "the Church" as the particular historical WCG structure restored through HWA and now carried on by people like him. Scripture, however, calls the Church Christ's body: everyone who belongs to Him through faith (Ephesians 1:22-23; Colossians 1:18; 1 Corinthians 12:12-13). Belonging to a corporation, a mailing list, or an Iowa-based remnant does not determine that membership. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). He did not say, "except through the Worldwide Church of God archives and the current authorized tithe recipient."
It makes salvation depend on loyalty to the organization and participation in its work. Statements such as "independent Christians will not make the kingdom" and "the Holy Spirit is cut off from them," along with the demand to remain in the organized work under the hierarchy, place the group between believers and God. That conflicts with the New Testament's plain teaching: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8-9). Scripture says that people are justified by faith apart from works of the law (Romans 3:28; Galatians 2:16; Titus 3:5). Christ's completed work is enough. To add, "You must belong to this church and submit to this authority, or the Spirit is cut off," amounts to another gospel (Galatians 1:6-9).
The "one man at a time" theocracy came from HWA's authoritarian system, not from Scripture. Kitchen repeats the familiar Armstrongist argument that God works through one apostle rather than through committees or the congregation, leaving members no say in who leads them. That claim supported HWA's control. Nothing in the Bible identifies Herbert Armstrong as an end-time apostle who restored "all" truth after 1,900 years of darkness-especially when his predictions failed, and his distinctive doctrines do not withstand scrutiny. The New Testament instead shows plural leadership, with elders and overseers serving in multiple places under Christ as Head. It does not present one human gatekeeper whose writings must be obeyed for salvation.
Samuel mistakes the result of salvation for its means. Acts 2:47 says that the Lord added to the church those who were being saved. The church consists of people Christ has redeemed; it does not redeem them. Trusting Christ comes first, and belonging to His body follows. No one must join the correct post-1986 remnant or avoid every "splinter" to meet that condition. Hebrews 10:25 urges believers to encourage one another, not to prove that only Kitchen's group qualifies as an assembly. Matthew 18:20 remains clear: when two or three gather in His name, He is present.
Exclusivity feeds the demonization. Anyone who leaves the old WCG structure or voices disagreement can be branded an apostate, said to be in Babylon, influenced by spirits in disguise, or accused of promoting doctrines of demons. The pattern is familiar in cultic groups: once a community declares itself the only true body, leaving or criticizing it becomes proof that the critic stands outside the Spirit. Kitchen's own history-marked by family disputes over channels, control, and claims of "restoration"-makes those assertions about the "one true church" look deeply human and precarious.
Salvation comes from God as a free gift, received through faith in Jesus and what he completed: a perfect life, an atoning death, and resurrection. "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). The New Covenant does not revive Sinai's system of law-keeping joined to loyalty toward an organization. It applies Christ's work to believers through the Spirit (Hebrews 8-10; Romans 8). The church exists because people have been saved; it is not what saves them. Christ saves the body (Ephesians 5:23), never the reverse-not the body, nor any human part of it, saving Christ.
Kitchen's version takes the old Roman Catholic formula "extra ecclesiam nulla salus"-outside the church there is no salvation-and recasts it in an Armstrongist form. According to that view, anyone outside our church, still organized around HWA's teachings and currently operating from Iowa, lacks genuine salvation and the Spirit. But that is not the gospel. It puts one human religious stream, marked by failed dates, unusual doctrines, and internal power struggles, above the sufficiency of Christ.
The video has 14 views, and its repeated calls to "hold fast" to the old structure do not alter what the Bible says: Jesus saves, not organizations.
1 comment:
No need to watch any of the Kitchen videos, because I didn't leave some kind of true church in 1985-86. I left a false church and false teacher in 1975 when God failed to validate HWA, because HWA had crapped the bed with his false math! He tried to know something Jesus said could not be known! But, in the aftermath of that "disappointment" the cult leaders went into emergency survival mode, backpedalled about it all, leading many of the culties in reprogramming themselves to "sometime within the next 3-5 years" as their renewable end times prophecy mantra. Thus, the empire was salvaged and rebuilt. Herbie Madoff died with the most toys and won, not even having cared sufficiently to groom an adequate successor following the failures of his son, Garner Ted. After GTA, HWA had no plan B. His haphazardly chosen successor who drew his inspirations from other resources did!
What we now see was inevitable. A cult teaching bizarre heresies as restored truth makes an initial splash, exploiting the world's first major self-induced existential threat (atomic bomb) in conjunction with the Germans, and Hisloppian fears of the Catholic Church, experiences its heyday in the sun, which slowly sets, and then as it rises the following morning, finds that cult to be impossible to sell in quite the same ways, due to a changing world, one that has changed in quite different and unexpected ways! Armstrongites today act as if the post-WWII news HWA used in interpreting Bible prophecy for us all is still an accurate reflection of world conditions! It is nothing like those conditions at all!
All that is left of the Armstrong empire today is dead seashells on the beach. A grand piano, some bird sculptures, rights to booklets which were clumsily edited in an attempt to shoehorn real events of today into the old Armstrong prophecy model. Draconian, fear mongering church government. A long, unused corporate name, itself brought into existence to replace a hopelessly outdated name which had become laughable as more modern technologies rapidly took over! Archives which had been moldering in church members attics, and somehow were dutifully transferred to the internet. These are trinkets, the things of nostalgia over something that's "Gone like a freight train, gone like yesterday, gone like a soldier in the Civil War, bang bang, gone like a '59 Cadillac, ain't never coming back again, gone, gone. gone!"
Armstrongism was always going to go into decline if we didn't flee in '72, and if Jesus didn't return in 1975.
BB
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