Living Church of God's recent debacle with Sheldon Monson has created quite a few job openings in Charlotte. Of course, Gerald Weston is claiming this is because of a dramatic rise in new people interested in joining the church thanks to a new way of doing things with prospective members. For decades the Church of God has made it almost impossible for new people to check out the church and attend services. If you made it past the Gestapo agents of the church then you had to deal with overzealous deacons and deaconesses making the life of new members horrendously awkward.
Now Gerald Weston wants to put on a new face for the public and stop grilling interested people. Too little too late, buckwheat!
Church of God News had this up:
Gerald Weston reports a big increase in the number of people wanting to attend services, as a result of a change of approach, no longer vetting new people so much.
“In the last quarter, July-September, we had more people request to come to Sabbath services than any quarter since the Living Church of God began – that exceeded our 2015 record by 36%. Now there’s a reason for that. It isn’t just the normal situation. We have changed the way, what we require of people when they ask about Sabbath services. For example, when they go online, we used to ask a lot of questions that were unnecessary. And so we’ve cut it down to the bare minimum … We want to screen them a little bit. We don’t want some nut out here coming to services, someone who’s going to be causing a disruption, but we want to be a little bit more friendly and, for those people who are more shy about giving out information … We don’t want to scare them off before we have a chance to engage them. We do ask them about why they came to the decision to attend services, but that’s optional, and that comes after we already have some other essential information.”
Later on the COGNews site, it had this little bit which I saw in LCG's announcements last week, and we had fun with it here. Weston also wants us to believe that there is such a huge influx of new members that they need to hire new employees. However, the real cause may be that Charlotte has lost employees and ministers to the Church of God Assembly. If so, it is freakin hilarious!
Gerald Weston writes: “We have significant personnel needs and are working to fill some of those positions in the field ministry and in understaffed departments here in Charlotte.
Beginning in 2021, the Tomorrow’s World English-language magazine will increase from six issues (one every other month) to ten issues per year. This is a major step forward! This will give subscribers more regular contact with the Church. We will drop four pages, from 36 down to 32, and make some other alterations, but overall there will be more content each year.”
Why has such a large proportion of ministers and HQ staff left (for Church of God Assembly?) that LCG now has significant personnel needs? Disquiet among employees is not recent but goes back to the time of Roderick Meredith, who employed members of his family in positions which appeared not to be merited. He also showed partiality toward people he knew and liked, such as the three who joined from David Hulme’s church, and were immediately employed as full time ministers – and exactly one year later all three were promoted, much to the dismay of long-time ministers.
