You Have Zero Say Over Me
Jesus Christ Personally Appointed Me
A Field Guide to the Oldest Trick in the Hierarchical Flowchart of Armstrongism
Every generation of Armstrongism produces a man who discovers, to his own astonishment, that Jesus Christ has personally dropped him into office. Herbert W. Armstrong discovered it in the 1930s. A long line of successors discovered it after 1986, usually within weeks of printing letterhead. Samuel Kitchen has now discovered it in Keosauqua, Iowa.
The pitch is always the same, and Kitchen recites it with the confidence of a man who has memorized the owner's manual:
Christ builds His Church. Christ chooses the officers. Christ set this man in the body as it pleased Him. Therefore you have zero say over Herbert Armstrong. You have zero say over Samuel Kitchen. Challenge the appointment and you are are questioning man who washes windows. You are denying that Jesus knows how to run a church. You are insulting the King of Kings. Send me more money, NOW!
It is a beautiful system. The claim is unfalsifiable, the critic is already a blasphemer, and the collection plate is a sacrament. If this is not the most convenient theology ever invented by a man who would like to be left alone with other people's conscience and other people's money, the competition is not even close.
Kitchen writes that he did not choose this profession. He was added by Jesus Christ. Most know that is blasphemy. He assures us it is true. He would not be here otherwise. Christ can remove him just as quickly - a modest footnote that somehow never quite arrives.
Notice the magic trick. Ordinary Christians are told to test the spirits, to weigh fruit, to act like Bereans. The specially appointed man is exempt from the exam because the exam itself is rebellion against the Examiner. You may not ask how we know Christ did the adding, because asking is proof you do not see Christ as Head. The circle closes. The throne is comfortable. The beige office wall does the rest.
Armstrong used the same lock. He was God's end-time apostle. The church was the Philadelphia era. Leaving it was leaving Christ. After he died, the corporation he built walked off in several directions, each new captain announcing that Christ had not jumped ship - He had merely transferred the wheelhouse to this address. Kitchen's innovation is to insist the original vessel never sank; it merely became an unincorporated spiritual organism whose earthly mailbox happens to be in Iowa, and whose remaining visible officer happens to be him.
The Levitical Cosplay
The proof-texts are a tour of the old administration. Malachi's corrupt priests. Hosea's rejected priesthood. The covenant of Levi. God setting members in the body. All of it marshaled to prove that a third-generation member with a website and a tithe authorization letter is standing in the same office as the men Christ personally called by the sea of Galilee.
This is where the New Covenant becomes inconvenient, so it is treated like a rumor.
Hebrews does not whisper. The Levitical priesthood is obsolete. The old covenant is aging and ready to vanish. There is one High Priest, and He does not subcontract the job to a man who will declare your departure an act of forsaking Christ. The veil was torn. Access is not routed through Pasadena, then through whatever remnant still has the trademark in its head, then through a PO Box in Fairfield.
Peter calls the whole church a royal priesthood. John says the anointing teaches you and you do not need a handler to stand between you and the truth. Paul says there is one mediator. Jesus says call no man father in the sense Kitchen is demanding - the sense that disagreement with the office is disagreement with heaven.
Kitchen quotes Matthew 23:12 about the proud being abased, then constructs a theology in which he cannot be questioned without the questioner being abased by God. The irony is so thick you could tithe on it.
What This Thinking Does to People
This is not a quirky personality. It is a control technology.
Once "Christ appointed me" is accepted, every ordinary Christian protection dies.
Criticism becomes apostasy. You are not evaluating a sermon. You are lifting your hand against the Lord's anointed. Kitchen says it in italics: if you want to challenge the man Christ chose and ordained, go ahead - you are denying Christ. That sentence is not discipleship. It is a muzzle.
Exit becomes damnation. The people who left the old Worldwide Church of God "had to FORSAKE CHRIST in order to leave." Jesus, we are told, never jumped ship. The vultures came. The body remains. Translation: the institution is Christ, so leaving the institution is leaving Christ. That is how you keep families in a system after the prophecies fail, the campus is sold, and the founder is dead. Fear does the pastoral work the gospel was supposed to do.
Money becomes obedience. Tithes belong in the storehouse. The storehouse is wherever the appointed man says it is. An elder's letter, a Malachi citation, and suddenly Iowa is Jerusalem. Question the address and you are not a steward. You are a covenant-breaker. Armstrongism already perfected this: first tithe, second tithe, third tithe, offerings, and the quiet implication that God is watching the envelope. Kitchen did not invent the machine. He just found a working model in the attic and plugged it back in.
The flock becomes a prop. "Some sought to do good. Some felt they could do better. Some did it for security. Some wanted to get paid." Every motive for leaving except Kitchen's own is rotten fruit from the wrong tree. His motive is divine placement. Theirs is careerism, fear, and the tree of knowledge. How convenient that the one man who stayed - or rather, who reconstituted the brand in his living room - is the one man whose heart Christ can read without remainder.
This is spiritual abuse with a proof-text garnish. It trains people to distrust their own reading of Scripture, to treat unease as rebellion, and to confuse loyalty to a personality with loyalty to Jesus. It is the same software that ran in Pasadena when ministers were transferred like furniture and members were disfellowshipped for asking the wrong question. The offices are smaller now. The doctrine of untouchability survived the downsizing.
The Armstrong Inheritance He Actually Received
Kitchen wants the parallel to Armstrong. Fine. Let us grant it.
Armstrong claimed a unique restoration, a unique apostleship, a church outside of which the rest of Christianity was deception. He built a hierarchy that answered upward and never sideways. He made "government of God" mean "government of this man." He was wrong about 1972, wrong about 1975, wrong about British-Israelism as prophecy, and spectacularly wrong about being the indispensable pipe between heaven and the membership. The organization he called the one true church later repudiated the core of his system and renamed itself. The splinters have spent forty years fighting each other for the furniture.
That is the inheritance. Not the Auditorium. Not the literature, but the method.
"Christ did not jump ship" is what every captain says after the hull is on the bottom. "You have zero say over me" is what every unaccountable man says when the New Testament keeps talking about elders in the plural, about testing, about not lording it over the flock. "I was added by Jesus Christ" is a sentence that should make a Christian nervous, because the men who need to announce it are rarely the men who are living it.
The New Covenant does not need a replica Armstrong. It already has a Head. He does not require a press secretary in Iowa to protect Him from questions. He is not so fragile that a former member leaving a 20th-century corporation counts as His abandonment. He tore the veil on purpose. The project of sewing it back together and charging admission is not restoration. It is a hustle with hymnals.
If Christ wanted a church no man could dispute, He picked an odd way to say so. He left us the apostles' writings instead of an unbroken chain of Iowa appointments. He left us a priesthood of believers instead of a storehouse manager. He left us a warning that many would come in His name. He left us fruit as the test, not letterhead.
A man who must announce that you have zero say over him has already told you the most important fact about the arrangement. It is not about Christ being Head. It is about the headroom he requires.
Christ can appoint servants. He does it all the time. The ones He actually appoints tend to look like servants. They can be questioned. They can be wrong. They do not confuse their mailbox with the temple. They do not treat the New Covenant like a scheduling conflict. And they do not stand in a rented office, under auditorium print, and inform the household of God that disagreement is blasphemy.
That last part is not faith. It is a man protecting a throne he built out of someone else's leadership, then daring you to touch it.
Touch it. The veil is still torn. Hebrews is still in the book. And no amount of "you have zero say" will turn a self-authenticating office into the government of God.
It will only turn the government of God into the government of a man who cannot bear to be one.
