The 21st Century Watch: and its epic blunder.
The Intercontinental Church of God, under Mark Armstrong's leadership, has apparently encountered a technological catastrophe of biblical proportions. No, the Great Tribulation hasn't arrived, and the Beast hasn't taken over the Internet. The church has simply discovered that keeping an entire organization's information on one man's personal computer might not have been such a brilliant idea after all!
According to a recent announcement, elder Murray Allatt recently died, and apparently all of the ICG's information, including its mailing list for the 21st Century Watch magazine, was stored on his computer. Now that Murray has passed away, the church is struggling to recover the information and is asking subscribers to resubmit their mailing details. The announcement even explains that they don't wish to disturb his grieving wife.
First, let us express sympathy to Murray Allatt's family. His death is a personal tragedy, and his grieving wife deserves privacy and consideration. The criticism here belongs to the church leadership, not the deceased or his family.
But seriously, Mark, was there no backup? No second copy? No centralized database? No succession plan? Did the entire Intercontinental Church of God really place its institutional memory in the hands of one individual and one computer? Apparently, the organization that spends so much time warning the world about impending disasters never considered preparing for one of its own.
There is something particularly amusing about this happening to an organization publishing a magazine called 21st Century Watch. While its editors presumably watch world events, prophetic developments, and the coming Kingdom of God, the organization itself appears to have missed one of the most important technological developments of the last several decades: backing up your computer files!
Businesses, charities, small clubs, and even ordinary households understand the importance of protecting important records. Yet an entire religious organization apparently managed to put its mailing list and other essential information in one location, with no readily accessible backup. Now subscribers are being asked to help reconstruct what should have been safely preserved in the first place.
Perhaps the next issue of the magazine should be devoted to a newly discovered biblical truth: the lost doctrine of external hard drives! Maybe Herbert Armstrong simply overlooked that one when he was busy restoring all the other supposedly lost truths.
The larger question is what this says about Mark Armstrong's administration. Religious organizations don't demonstrate responsible leadership merely by publishing magazines, maintaining websites, and issuing prophetic warnings. They demonstrate it by taking care of the ordinary responsibilities entrusted to them. Protecting organizational records, planning for leadership transitions, and ensuring continuity are basic administrative duties, not advanced theological concepts.
Murray Allatt deserves sympathy, subscribers deserve better, and the ICG leadership might want to spend a little less time watching the end of the world and a little more time making sure its own files survive until tomorrow.
After all, if the Intercontinental Church of God cannot preserve its own mailing list from one generation to the next, perhaps its next great restoration should be a restoration of basic organizational competence.
The Kingdom may be coming, but the mailing list isn't coming back unless somebody remembered to make a backup!
Greetings,
The ICG brethren have asked me to assist in recovering their mailing list. As you may know, their elder, Murray Allatt died recently and all ICG information is on the PC. At this stage it is difficult to recover the information and of course, do not wish to disturb his grieving wife.
So, if you are a subscriber to the 21st Century Watch magazine – or would like to be – please send me your mailing details to pass on to them. There is no cost or obligation with subscribing to the magazine. https://www.21stcenturywatch.com
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