Samuel Kitchen has issued another urgent fatwa from the front lines of Armstrongist anxiety. Half the Church was supposedly destined to quit the Sabbath (Aaron Dean heard it from Herbert himself-and then gave out Aaron's phone number and said to call him). The faithful remnant (now numbering between 5-10 people) is the true Philadelphia Candlestick still burning inside the Worldwide Church of God, which is not a human organization but a "spiritual organism." Anyone who starts another group is polluting the temple whose foundation HWA already laid. Love God more by staying put; love the leavers less. Exit the other churches. Pour everything into the approved channel. Listen to HWA so Christ's voice gets louder. Otherwise your crown is being stolen, your bags have holes, and Satan's smooth-speech system is winning. It's a familiar sermon. It is also the exact opposite of the New Covenant. Kitchen's entire case collapses the moment you stop treating Herbert Armstrong as an untouchable apostle whose organizational shell is the ongoing spiritual temple. The Church is the body of Christ. Christ is the head. Believers are members. Paul did not write that there is one body, one Spirit, one faith, one baptism-and one true candlestick that must remain inside the corporate structure HWA built in the twentieth century. The foundation is the apostles and prophets with Jesus Christ Himself as the cornerstone. Kitchen's move is the classic one: redefine "the Church" as "the people who still agree with me and my preferred leader," then brand everyone else an apostate for refusing the redefinition. That is how you keep people inside Sabbath-keeping, tithing, and hierarchical control long after the New Testament declared the law's role as tutor finished. The authority Kitchen wants to rest on HWA does not hold. The 1975 prophecy failed. Later date-setting and place-of-safety claims failed. A second-hand recollection that "half the Church would quit the Sabbath" does not become binding revelation just because Aaron Dean remembers hearing it. The scattered groups Kitchen condemns are what happens when a legalistic organization fractures. They are not proof that the "Philadelphia elect" must now reassemble under his particular banner. The New Covenant does not require anyone to keep the Sabbath as a covenantal obligation, tithe to a specific ministry, or remain inside any post-HWA entity in order to be "spiritually organized." Believers are free. That freedom is not compromise. It is the point. Kitchen's love language is especially revealing. True love for God, he says, means staying put and pouring everything into the approved channel, while following people who leave is loving them more than Christ. That is inverted. Loving God under the New Covenant means resting in the finished work of Christ, not performing the old-covenant calendar and financial obligations as proof of loyalty. The people who walked away from Armstrongist groups did not "start loving Jesus less." Many of them discovered that the real Jesus is not the one who needs an exclusive twentieth-century foundation laid by HWA before He can return to His own spiritual temple. The temple is already the people of God. It does not get polluted because someone starts a new congregation or simply reads Galatians and stops worrying about which corporate name still holds the candlestick. The fear tactics are standard issue: crowns being stolen, voices growing weaker, families destroyed, bags with holes, Satan's system of smooth speech. All of it is designed to make ordinary believers feel that exiting the system equals spiritual death. New Covenant Christians do not have to manage that anxiety. They are not under the Sinai administration. They are not required to "speak the same thing" HWA taught in order for Christ's voice to grow louder. They already have the Spirit, the Scriptures, and direct access to the Head. Kitchen's demand that people exit every other group and reorganize their households around his vision of the continuing WCG is not humility before Christ. It is another round of the "one true church" claim that has produced the very fragmentation he now decries. No New Covenant Christian needs to lose sleep over Kitchen's apostasy alarm. The real departure is the one that adds HWA's foundation, Sabbath-keeping as identity, and exclusive organizational loyalty to the gospel of grace. Those who have left that system are not polluting a temple. They are refusing to treat a human movement as if it were the temple. Christ is sufficient. The rest is optional religious infrastructure-and optional is exactly what the New Covenant makes it
24 comments:
Yet you've never left.
You're the Tkachite version of Kitchen. Both sides putting out much hype but there is no substance behind the hype.
Anyone who dares pull the curtain back to reveal the truth gets bombarded with abuse and untrue insults. You don't live the life you write about and neither does Kitchen. Both sides are smoke and mirrors.
Can you explain more about your thoughts please
Where does that leave you, 10:59? Do you have the answers to all the deep philosophical questions that plague mankind?
The people we hold accountable are ripping people off for their tithes while deteriorating their quality of life. Hell, they did it to us!!! Double pronged damage, all while pretentiously behaving as if they were spiritual guides and demanding respect and obedience. Screw 'em!
My belief is that people have the right to seek out and to choose their own solutions to the Armstrong problem, without all the fear-mongering and coercion. Too many people presume to speak for God while claiming authority over our lives. We don't. We simply discuss.
BB
Sam wants people to worship Herb's corporate creation rather than the Creator.
While I attended services, it was obvious that some members, including ministers, were worshiping the church . The giveaway was that they pronounced the word 'church' in reverent tones.
Sam's problem is his faith. My friends with faith basically say: do not confuse me with facts, my mind is made up. Or: why should I stop believing, I would lose my salvation. You will not lose your salvation. Or your 72 virgins. It is an empty promise. Might as well believe the Great Pumpkin will give you 100 virgins. It's a better offer. Nobody will lose their salvation for believing stuff nobody can prove.
Your comment doesn’t touch a single point made in the post. Declaring it “hype” isn’t an argument; it’s just a way to avoid engaging the New Covenant critique. If you want to defend Armstrongism, you’ll need more than dismissive one‑liners.
If you spent your whole life checking out religious charlatans you would die of old age before you could get through them all.
Why would anyone in their right mind want virgins??? Give me a good woman with lots of experience any day of the week! One who really knows how to please a man!
Sam's problem is chasing ghosts of the past. Is God stuck in 1970? Kitchen is stuck chasing the ghost's of WCG. Same mentality applies to this blog they too are chasing ghosts of the past.
Armstrongism always seemed to attract a higher proportion of people who were mentally unstable, or whom they then made to be mentally unstable, and then to treat them as if they were perpetual children. Canadian Psychiatrist Eric Berne wrote about "The Games People Play". One of them (I'm paraphrasing here) was "I will help you so long as you never get better and continue to need me." I read that book among many other self help books in the aftermath of my Armstrong experience, and immediately recognized the mental state that HWA and the ministers had put us into. And then there were church members who aspired to be part of the authority structure (that was their damned culture!!!) and began acting out just like the ministry, unleashing a secondary, pseudo-layer of hell upon us all. Armstrongism was a very repressive religion. Some actually revelled in that represiveness! To them, our hell was home!
By the way, it was an act of rebellion to read a book by a psychiatrist, or to seek therapy so far as the church's outlook on outside assistance goes. They actively tried to pre-destroy those experts in our minds, leaving nobody but themselves for us to rely upon. It takes a while, and much work to recover from the mind control which a cult exerts, especially when one's family remains koo koo for cocoa puffs, but I did manage to get most of the damage repaired and to become functional amongst my fellow humans. It's like the church's favorite metaphor regarding leavening. You never truly get rid of it completely. Some of what they took from us never comes back. But, somewhere along the line I realized that the damaged warriors who came back from the various wars, and those in recovery from different addictions had a much harder road to travel than we did. But, it is especially grievous when those who aspire to be spiritual guides mislead and enslave one. I was very fortunate in that I had a firm grasp of reality from the years prior to my parents' baptisms, and had then recognized the significance of 1972-75. Didn't end up serving a lifetime sentence. I built up a firm mental and physical resistance so that no one could ever do that to me again! As those of us who were part of the 94.7 KMET FM radio culture back in the '70s and '80s used to yell, "Whoo-Aw!" The music was a profound antidote! No wonder that HWA hated it!
BB
And the glue that binds the God and the "church" are the tithes and offerings. "If you give to the church, you are giving to God." Okay, but what happens to when a church has an apostasy? God has no division and there is no apostasy with Him. Even to this day, some members worship the church or org.
BB You mentioned your parents did they remain in the church?
Yes, 7:16, they did, right up until they drew their last breaths. Which leads to my further thoughts. My experiences are somewhat dated. I was part of what the ministers at Ambassador College referred to as second generation Christians, a group which they defined as those coming of age in the time era in which Armstrongites originally believed would be the end times. We were the ones raised by HWA's original converts, some of whom were to be the ones who would be taking leadership rolls in the soon coming end times. The official position of the church was that nobody knew who the two witnesses would be. Some of the parents thought they knew, or hoped they knew! It was us, their children. Some of the kids even bought into that themselves. Or at least to having a vital part in spreading the final message.
As history unfolded, what the parents (HWA's "first generation" of Christians) envisioned did not take place. At All! Something very different, something they never saw coming instead happened. They died, not having been the Olivet discourse's generation! Israel was reborn as a nation in May 1948. People born in 1948 are now in their late '70s, and are also dying off. Many are past their prime, have been retired for years, and are no longer in most senses viable.
I can't speak for those who have already died. They watched their church break apart, and lose all the strengths which had originally attracted them to it. It largely laid fallow for the last decades of their lives. I would further imagine that in most cases, those church members who did die had hoped to their last breath that someone from the next generation would come along and "be used" to revive it. Again, another thing which did not happen. I am sure that in the near future there will be new excuses for their understanding of the Olivet prophecy. And a revision. Sam is of the age of some of their grandchildren. With him having been raised in the Armstrongite culture, I believe he is making the same mistake as were made in 1960s era families in which parents thought their children would be one of the two witnesses. It's got to be related to that! Maybe it's another thing similar to British Israelism, something that refuses to die out in spite of all the new facts and information. It is just very difficult to imagine this ending well for Sam. It is something he is going to need to find out for himself.
BB
Does he really believe that some form of Worldwide is going to somehow re-assemble and come back together? I can tell you that there is really very little growth of new members in any of the spin off organizations and it take a miracle like parting the Red Sea to get meet them to agree to meet together for a very short interval. Plus with the modern internet and social media, all the information about HWA and the founding of Worldwide plus all his failed predictions and shady behaviors, there is not going to be a revival of new proselytes meeting in rented halls like the 1960s and 70s.
Whatever 7:40.
“And then there were church members who aspired to be part of the authority structure (that was their damned culture!!!) “
BB, this reminds me of a story years ago, after Sabbath services our particular congregation went out to eat at a nice restaurant. And I was a young adult in the church, but I happened to see a childhood friend who happened to be a waiter there (although he wasn’t our waiter). Anyhow I spoke to him and gave him a compliment, because I had known him since we were 8 years old through high school and now we were young adults. But I hadn’t seen him since before college so it had been 5 years since I last saw and spoke to him. We were happy to see each other as we're friends.
So later this older adult member (not a minister) in the church starts to scold me about the compliment that I gave my friend just because of his appearance at the table. And my friend’s appearance didn’t square with this guy’s belief system. This “member” didn’t understand that we were childhood friends and I hadn’t spoken or seen him in 5 years, as I was just trying to be cordial to an old friend. He was judgmental not understanding the situation. The psychology rubs off on the members.
whatever 6.18 - another dismissive one liner - you seem a master of it.
I often wonder what Revelation 19:7 has in store and how it will be fulfilled. Some of the COG "leaders" seem to think that at some future time all of God's people will come under their particular banner and that'll be that. I do not know how Revelation 19:7 will be worked out, but it is more than likely in a way that these leaders of their corporate churches do not foresee.
I believe that he honestly does believe exactly that, 2:07. It seems obvious that he totally bought into what his parents taught him was the family calling or destiny, and that may possibly have even been what his grandparents taught his parents! If you listen to one of Sam's videos, it is obvious that he constantly studies his Armstrongism. It just pours off his tongue, with ease, and in great detail.
If you have ever watched a Mark Armstrong presentation, you'd have to admit that he has become his father's son! Same skill set, same mannerisms. He just does not have his father's immense listening audience! And, Mark was one of the most outrageous rebel outlaws that ever lived! I suspect the same is true of Stephen Flurry! These are people who were not dissuaded by the failed prophecies! Something bit them, and it took! I have great difficulty understanding this because when "1975 in Prophecy" was read to us one summer sabbath on our front porch, I believed it but hoped that it would never come to pass in my lifetime! And, it didn't! 1975 did not happen in 1975, or in the 50+ years since. Yet, how many kids heard it, revelled in it, thought they had a special calling, and have never cut that loose in spite of the continued failure? And now, the human genome? Incredible! It's like HWA in the aftermath of World War II, "No! This can't be! It has to come back! It's in prophecy! Hitler is surely still alive and in hiding. The Beast must finish the job!"
People cling to their delusions! Neither a 3 foot steel crowbar can pull the twain apart, nor impeccable factual material and logic!
BB
Yes, 7:06, church people had no respect for personal space. There was a lot of misguided unsolicited advice. Some would even check back with you to make sure you had applied what they told you. I had to restrain my middle finger from becoming rigid and menacing many times.
BB
True, 8:30. Reading "Dianetics" by L. Ron Hubbard, checking out Edgar Cayce, studying up on the Yoganamda Paramahansa, and listening to Dr. Gene Scott were sufficient for me to realize that these are all clothes made from the same fabric. They were all attempts to bring flawed human beings up to speed, to a higher level of functionality, just as the work of the great philosophers, teachers, and psychiatrists. They were no better or worse in providing credible and practical answers than Armstrongism, although some were less soul warping! "Siddhartha" by Herman Hesse was a fun read with some usable nuggets.
BB
If Sam Kitchen were dyslexic, then would his love of HWA give him a "spiritual orgasm"?
No lessons learnt.
Could be, Avoura. Could be. The reason I shared so much this time around was that I hoped it would help Sam to see and understand what has happened to him, and to help him recognize a different approach. Wouldn't it be nice for him if he could actually get a life, and not have the one he has ruined by a false calling? What has happened to him could very well have happened to numerous of the rest of us, had we not realized what was going on and refused to be victims of HWA and our parents. I am so thankful for whatever lcommon sense still remained deep within me in spite of all the brainwashing.
BB
Post a Comment