The Feast of Tabernacles is over. The suitcases are in the trunk, one final check of the hotel room, and the brethren are rolling home on the interstate, enriched and euphoric, already rehearsing the praise they will say at church the next Sabbath.
They will not have to wait long for the official version from HQ. Within days the member letters and magazine articles will arrive, most of them drafted before the last speaker left the podium. This was the Best Feast Ever. Attendance was encouraging. The messages were powerful. The offerings brought in more money than ever. The brethren have never been more united, never more fired up, never more solidly behind the Work. Change the letterhead and the same paragraph will be issued by every headquarters that still owns a mailing list.
This is not a new enthusiasm. It is the oldest liturgy the Churches of God have.
In November 1953 the Good News announced the "Greatest Feast of Tabernacles in 1500 Years." About a thousand people had gathered. The preaching was better, the music was better, the spirit was better, and there was "no friction or opposition or lack of harmony." The article did note, with regret, that only about 650 stayed the whole eight days. God, it was explained, commands the entire Festival, not parts of it. The empty chairs were already being edited into a moral lesson.
By November 1960 Garner Ted Armstrong was telling readers it seemed impossible there could be a Feast better than 1959, "but the Feast this year really WAS the greatest ever." Seven thousand one hundred at Big Sandy. Attendance up 30 percent, exactly as Mr. Armstrong had expected. In October 1962 Roderick Meredith topped it: the greatest spiritual Feast in centuries, the best organized, the most joyous, "with the most POWERFUL sermons given so far in this era of God's Church." Fifteen thousand. Seven ordinations. The superlatives were already on a schedule.
Herbert Armstrong kept the tradition in his own hand. In October 1979 he reported that the Festival "seemed the BEST EVER," sermons and sermonettes exceptional, and closed by looking toward "another even greater Feast NEXT YEAR." A year later the Pastor General's Report ran a piece titled "WHY THE 1980 FEAST WAS THE GREATEST EVER," built from member letters about satellite hookups, unity, and "a return to the joyful camaraderie so characteristic of God's people." HWA himself wrote that reports from around the world showed it was "in reality the greatest Feast of Tabernacles in our time," that division and suspicion had vanished, and that the Church was "once again truly ONE Body of Christ." The sermons, he added, were somehow inspired to be the best ever.
Read those pieces in order and the formula is naked. Attendance must be a record, or at least "encouraging." The sermons must be the most powerful yet given in this era. The spirit must be the warmest. Friction must have vanished. Unity must be declared at the precise moment it most needs declaring. And next year must already be scheduled to surpass this one, so the claim never has to survive contact with the previous claim.
The splinters inherited this liturgy with the hymnals when they split off.
They no longer have Big Sandy or the Auditorium, no longer have Mt Pocono or the Dells Feast sites, no longer meet in Squaw Valley, Tucson or St Pete where 10's of thousands meet together in what WCG's PR Dept claimed made it "largest conclave on earth" which sounded plausible even to the bitter apostates. (The Mormons actually gather more people together in person and online than any other church when they hold General Conference.)
Armstrongism still has the adjectives. Living Church of God closed its 2025 Feast report with the usual testimony harvest: love, unity, answered prayer, and a member in Florida who said every Feast "just seems to get better and better." United Church of God has published under the title "The Best Feast Ever" and has sermons explaining the old in-house abbreviation BFE FOT, Best Feast Ever, Feast of Tabernacles, on the theory that the best Feast is always the present one or the most recent one. That is not a recollection. It is a rule. The Feast is not allowed to have been ordinary.
What the letters never mention is the other half of the parking lot. The family that drove twelve hours and left after the second day. The empty rows in the afternoon session. The minister explaining why last year's timeline was almost right. The second-tithe argument in the restaurant. The quiet count of who still believes the date and who has stopped tithing on the gross. Those details are local. The official memory is national, and it is always triumphant.
By the time the first "Best Feast Ever" email hits the inbox, half the attendees are already back at work and the euphoria is thinning into an ordinary week. The other half will forward the letter to someone who did not go, as proof that the church is healthier than the chairs suggested. Next fall the same letter will be written again, the year updated, the adjectives reused.
It has to be. In a movement that has been announcing the greatest Feast in 1,500 years since 1953, a merely good Feast would be an admission. The myth is not about the eight days. It is about the Work. If the brethren have never been more united, then the splits did not count. If the sermons were the most powerful yet, then the failed dates in last year's sermons did not count. If this was the Best Feast Ever, then the Church is still the Church, and the drive home is not the beginning of another year of waiting.
The suitcase is in the trunk. The letter is already in the mail. Both of them say the same thing, and only one of them has to be believed.
They no longer have Big Sandy or the Auditorium, no longer have Mt Pocono or the Dells Feast sites, no longer meet in Squaw Valley, Tucson or St Pete>>
ReplyDeleteFor many, these gatherings were moments of genuine joy, community, and shared experience. Yet their disappearance is also a fitting symbol of the end of the system that created them.
The festivals were built on the authority claims of Herbert W. Armstrong, who presented himself as an apostle and declared his organisation to be the restored “one true Church'' after 2000 yrs of suppression.
It is a fitting end to the long 50 and more years of lies and hypocrisy by the alleged apostle. In that sense it ought not be missed.