Low-level prophet asks: Could Tkach, Sr. have consulted with the Bilderbergers about getting an earring before he decorated his Christmas tree and then relaxed with some Sabbath sex? Is there a possibility he did this while chewing tobacco? Prophets gotta ask!

 

Who in their right mind would sit and listen to this trash and think it is godly worship? Once more, Jesus gets dumped on the trash heap out behind the homeopathic pill-pushing low-level prophets' amazing HQ. This shows exactly what a cesspool Armstrongism has turned into.  Does ANYONE in 2020 care about such crap, especially his African followers? These topics are of ZERO concern to his followers or the rest of humanity.

In this sermon, Dr. Thiel answers questions that have been submitted to the Church of God on many topics, such as:

What about making/receiving organ donations?

Should you chew tobacco?

Is there any help to overcome bad habits?

Did Joseph W. Tkach, Sr. have the mantle of succession?

What is ‘servile work’?

Is sexual intercourse prohibited on the Sabbath?

Is a ‘holy kiss’ ever appropriate?

Can you home school your children?

Was it possible for Jesus to be born on December 25th?

Should we fear conspiracy theories involving the Bilderbergers, Trilateralists, Vatican, Council of Foreign Relations, Freemasons, etc.?

Should you force your ‘legal rights’?

Does Daniel 9 help prove Jesus is the Messiah?

Why should the Jews accept Jesus as Messiah?

What about the tribes of Ephraim, Manasseh, and Simeon?

Is it acceptable for men to wear earrings?

Dr. Thiel goes through scriptures, facts, COG documents, and historical information to provide answers.

COG Splintering a Foretaste of U.S Splintering?

Armstrongism is certainly filled with some nutjobs!  

Obviously this poor soul never attended God's College!  

Oh wait, maybe she did and that's part of the problem! 

We often used to say that the nation followed the church and vice versa. One being an indicator of the condition of the other.

I equate Barack Obama with Joseph Tkach. A change has occurred and now splintering of one sort or another will begin.

When the fire or trouble goes out to all Israel, we know it begins at the altar.

If you look further you can see that the Church of God 7th day has it's own J.Tkach in the form of Whaid Rose who says the church is and always was "protestant". He has introduced the cross and pictures of Christ,etc.

Long before the WWCG or Radio Church was in abundance around the country Mr. Armstrong had told his evangelists that they could meet with Cof G 7. That didn't last long and after the WWCG  had more congregations was completely ended. But it does show they were not at that time off the track completely. They are now, however.

There Really Was a Bomb in Gilead

There Really Was a Bomb in Gilead

 

I can't imagine the sounds, smells and sights that must occur when a human being walks into the midst of a crowd of fellow humans and explodes among them.  Those clustered closely to the suicide bomber are gone in a flash never to return much less recover.  As you get further from the source of the blast people survive initially but many will die suffering way to much damage to survive long.  Next, and further away yet, we have the severely injured who will have to suffer though months if not years of healing and recovery never really being able to return to whatever normal used to be for them.  Still further away, we have wounded who can recover fairly quickly and yet emotionally and psychologically have to deal with having been there and yet, "for the grace of God, there go I."

When the bomber is a theologian or Bible expounding organization, a few will literally die in the explosion of scandal and theological error recognized or truths thrown out depending on one's perspective.  Messing with the theological hopes and dreams of a person is probably a more dangerous mistake than a literal explosion.  Reckless change forced upon sincere people of faith, as the Tkach's and Company came up with is almost beyond belief.  Endeavoring to change theological ideas that usually take generations and decades minimum to change carefully as the slowest of the slow catch up is organizational suicide.  The WCG foolishly changed course overnight.  History shows us those kinds of changes take much much longer if one is to be kind and caring about those who will suffer through it , "fall away" from these alleged new truths or adjust in some way. 

The Tkaches and those like them should have simply left the organization, given up the benefits and friends and moved on taking spiritual refugee status with another organization of their choice.  However we know this is not what happened.  They walked away with everything we and our parents and even grandparents invested in and claim it for themselves.  As I was told, "Dennis, we can't help you with retirement because Jesus worked out such a great miracle in the church and we lost support."  To which I said, "That stinker Jesus tricked me into his Church and then changed the game from Hockey which I like to Basketball, which I don't?"  I also noted to this minister, who has proven to me at least that changing as needed to get their own retirement works if you don't mind selling your soul.  Of course, he also was failing to mention the funds just received for sale of everything we and our families had built over decades, but I guess he forgot about that.  

I was told by another illuminary of the church who has reaped great reward for his own part in reckless change that receiving anything to maintain a roof over one's head and food would probably depend on staying loyal to the new organization.  

At any rate, my problem.  I made my choices early in my life and, as all of us on many topics, will have to live with them. 

Back to explosions.  In such explosions as we all have been a bit too close to, the wounded do several things.  They simply recover and disappear into lives lived  quietly, they find others who have not been affected by this particular explosion, join them and go on older and wiser for the experience.  They regroup and start their own version of yet another bomb that may go off in their face at sometime in the future but we hope not.  Finally, we have some who reassemble the original bomb, reload it and gather in the wounded promising them it won't go off again but is indeed the true bomb to hang around until it is no longer needed.....send it in.

And then there is another smaller group.  These are those who survive the explosion, spend a decade or two screaming in pain, lashing out at all bombers, provide a place for others of like mind to process this insane experience having lost all faith in all things.....and then reconvert to an original and yet modified form of  the ideas that went sour in the first place and launch themselves on a new path that seeks to reconvert those they gave comfort to in recovering from it. 

Believer/Disbeliever/Rebeliever     More power to them and I have no problem with that because it is a way and part of the journey some have in this search for truth and how to deal with the problem of death for we who are aware we are aware of this reality.

So I ask myself.  "Why can't I do that?"   I don't think you could have found a more sincere kid wanting to know "the truth" way back when I came to read and hear the way WCG viewed the Bible and its message.  I sneaked my AC college application out under my parka in a NY snow storm to mail it so my parents would not see me do it.   Dad and just about every male in my extended family eventually went on to become members, ministers, elders and deacons in WCG with a few deaconesses scattered among us.  

So before this gets too long, what holds me up or makes in seemingly impossible to become a person of faith again?  Here goes....

The fact is that I have found the Bible to be less than inerrant.  It is full of misinterpretations, misprints, misapplications and misunderstandings.  I have done my home work so if you disagree, don't do so with me unless you do yours. 

The story of Jesus is truly the old old story of previous godmengodmen were born on Christmas of virgins and repeat the same astrotheological story of the journey of the Sun through the 12 signs of the Zodiac each year. That is just a fact.  The heavenly story brought down to earth we call the Gospel Story personified.  In short, all religion originates in some, yet similar form of Sun worship.  Jesus and all godmen truly are the light of the world and are such whose power is from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof.  That's because they ARE the Sun.

There is little or no evidence that the grand stories of a cultic people in the Old Testament are true in history, time or space.  And yet all the grand doctrines of the New Testament depend on them being literally true.

The Bible is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy......   And yet, how easy for a real Deity to simply speak up today in the now as it once did.  We know they can.  We never experience it.  Faith seems work only as long as the facts are suppressed.

There is a heavy political war being waged in the Bible, OT and NT between conflicting views of the faith.  Priests against Scribes, Disciples against Apostles and Apostles against each other. 

James, Peter and John hated and disagreed with Paul's view of Jesus.  Paul hated their view, condemned and mocked it.   John told his group to forget about Peter, who denied Jesus, comparing him to Judas who betrayed him.  Paul did the same through his apologist Luke. 

James and Mark's community restored Peter and forgave him. 

Paul, not Jesus is the founder of modern Christianity.

History has little or nothing that notes Jesus ever lived or that at least, that the Jesus of the Gospels did.

The Jesus of the Gospels is not the Jesus of Paul and certainly not the Jesus of Revelation

Jesus Birth stories don't match with most never hearing of them as told in Matthew and Luke.  Mark has no birth story and even one about his family, including his forgetful mother coming to take him home as he was insane.  Paul just says he was born of a woman. Which is it?

The Bible has been heavily edited at times to reflect the winners. I am supposed to trust the understanding of people who see flashing lights in their heads others don't see.  Hear voices others don't hear and claim to have been to the third heaven but are not willing to tell me about it because only he could hear and see what he heard and saw.  

I'm supposed to have faith in prophets whose prophecies failed and whose personal behaviors look like mental illness at best.  

Many of the books of of the Bible, OT and NT were not really written by those whose names are affixed.

Religion, and especially Christianity seems to make its leaders particularly prone to weakness, sin and scandal.  (Please understand, members are also prone to this. We all have the prones.  But when the member is prone, forgiveness is abundant and just part of the game.  When the minister is prone, he gets eaten alive and spit out in shame and a lifetime of mocking becomes the norm.  

The men who are said to have walked, talked  and lived around Jesus are not the men who get to make up the meaning of Jesus.  The man, Paul, who never met Jesus in real life and for whom Jesus was a hallucinatory experience and voice with occasional light in his head gets to decide just what the truth of Jesus was and is.  That makes me very uncomfortable. 

No one seems to know just what exactly did happen after Jesus death. The Resurrection accounts are muddled, contradictory and unfixable.  In short, they are contrived for whatever reason and by whomever. 

I don't believe it is fair to people to expect them to believe the most important ideas in history as life saving truth when they have not experienced it or known the players personally or else go to hell.   Salvation or damnation by hearsay seems wrong to me. 

Salvation by execution seems unreal to me.

Not being able to forgive without the shedding of blood seems strange to me.

Believing humans who got the story from others who got it from others who got it from others doesn't seem trustworthy to me.

Blaming me for the Original Sin of mythological people and a talking snake seems risky and unfair and a bit bizarre to me. 

The main OT character of Moses, who brought the big ten down from the mountain noting one is not to make images of things above the earth, on the earth or beneath, who then makes the image of serpent to hold up for the people to be healed from snakebite seems odd to me.

It bothers me that after receiving the Big Ten , including, "you shall do no murder/kill," orders "every man to kill his neighbor and in that day 3000 died," for looking to a golden calf for some answers and help after he disappeared into the wilderness for 40 days.  I'd think he was dead by now too.  Golden Calf?  Serpent?  What's the diff?

And a whole lot more stuff like this.  I simply can't dismiss it or just have faith in it as presented. The stakes are too high being wrong one's entire life. Or maybe they aren't.  Maybe it's just how Earth School works. 

I honor the journey of those who get blown up, get skeptical, recover somewhat and reconvert.  It's what humans do to process pain and yet still need meaning.  They are , however, no better a person than those who still struggle or can't reconvert, now or perhaps ever to the story.

People handle the above problems by finding a place where their problems can be addressed or at least not cared about.  I can't physically sit and listen to a man or woman expound on the scripture knowing they have done their homework or have repressed their findings.  

There is seat for every butt in religion and perhaps we spend our lives looking for that perfect fit regardless of whether it is literally true or not. 

I have found that those who are the most sincere get the most damaged when disillusioned by the failure of product specs. For better or worse, faith does suffer when the facts present themselves.  Facts can be faced, denied or tweeked and messengers can be disregarded, made fun of or dismembered, but we still need them both. 

Thanks for listening.  I'm going to endeavor to write less about these things unless they are actually helpful to those of us who have survived the explosion we found ourselves in the varying vicinities of when first we believed. 

Dennis C. Diehl
DenniscDiehl@aol.com

Good Night WCG-Gracie/A Few Final Thoughts

Good Night WCG-Gracie/A Few Final Thoughts

To begin with, this letter is for me and perhaps part of my own life experience and healing after a 26 year run as a Pastor in the Worldwide Church of God. I came to the Church philosophically at the age of 16, having grown up Presbyterian in a very stable and loving family. The teachings of the WCG appealed to me and made more sense if one was to read and take the Bible as a fundamentally true document in all the areas that it claimed to express it's truth. The world of the 60's was chaotic. Presidents were assassinated, politicians were gunned down and civil rights protesters and leaders were being beaten, hung, drawn and shot. The Middle East was on fire as were many American cities. The Bible seemed to say that the end of something was near. I was also young and naive, but with wonderful intentions.

I went to Ambassador College against the wishes of my parents, who simply allowed me to make my own decisions. What a wonderful concept, allowing your kids to make their own religious decisions, even though I recently told my dad, now near 90 and a former elder in WCG, that I wish he had slapped me silly for even thinking of going. Of course, at that time, that would have only proved to me that it was the right thing to do since I was being opposed and at the time, I just knew I had to be there. I had to study and wanted to see the world through the eyes of the Church. It just seemed right to me and any ego loves believing that God himself was doing the calling. I was not drawn by the Armstrong personalities at first. There were many times at college where they annoyed me and I knew that what was spoken so brilliantly and with charisma, was in fact, not actually true, or simply speculation about the times in which were living. The information is what caught my attention. I was a very serious thinker at a very young age. There are reasons for that that I now understand completely, but I spare you.


And so I went to Ambassador. I wanted to be a pastor and even though I heard that God had to call you and, of course, the administration had to choose you, I studied as if it was all up to me. I had a 3.96 grade average. I enjoyed studying the Bible. I simply wanted to know "the truth". I got corrected for hair too long and not enough attendance at basketball games. I didn't care about basketball, but to make me show up, they made me be a flag something-or-other in a white coat and I felt like an idiot. I should have said no, but complied. I complied a lot over the next 26 years over more serious topics, though teaching and encouraging the congregation was more important to me than enforcing silly or reckless rules about various topics.
After graduation I went into "the field". Five states, 14 congregations and 26 years later, in a five minute phone call at 9:30 in the evening, I was terminated. Strangely enough, it was the anniversary of my baptism at 19 years old.


Now is the moment I have to be honest about me if I am to continue. I currently am a skeptic as to the origins and history of the Christian Church. That is my business and the result of my own study and perspectives. The WCG experience caused me to really look deeply into origins and I personally found I was not told near the truth about the matter. They didn't know near as much as they pretended to know. I was coming to some of these conclusions during the last few years as a pastor. I can hear some of this skepticism in some of my last Festival sermons. I felt that if a whole church administration can publicly flip an entire organization's belief system and expect compliance, I can certainly entertain the doubts and contradictions I have seen in the Bible quietly by myself. I could have easily walked off with most of the local congregation if I wanted to have years of local politics and doing what Christian Churches do best... argue, judge and fight, but I was done. I will never lose my interest in theology. I still want to know the truth even if it is not the one I set out to understand. I simply will not join another church again. From my perspective the Old and the New WCG was and is ill informed as is all literalist, evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity. That may not be true for you, but it is true for me. My favorite observation is that most Christians are piously convicted but marginally informed. That is true to me.


Most pastoring years were personally rewarding. I did not have to work in large cities playing games with other pastors who had empires to rule and egos to feed. I simply did my job, love those I met, laughed with them, cried with them, married and buried spouses, children and relatives, along with growing churches. I drove approximately one million miles (really) visiting, being a friend and believing I was doing the right thing.

There were lots of guys and families like mine. It's the narcissists that got all the bad press and still do. Towards the end, when every visit turned into a slug fest over what the Tkach's were doing in the Church, any capacity was a burden and not a joy. It was a miserable experience. Your friend one day became your lost friend the next. On top of that, I was in the American Southeast where being judgmental and critical of others not like you has been raised to an art form. Around here, every third male thinks that if he can read and tell a few stories, he is a Pastor. It's one of the few professions where one with no education or meaningful credentials can claim ultimate authority from God, and be someone.


By analogy, I came to a hockey game and at half time, someone came out, melted the ice, put up hoops and demanded I not only play, but coach Basketball, which if you remember...I don't like. Suffering a personal depression and a lot of regret over having given my youth and energy to the ever-changing truth, I made some mistakes that would be considered unacceptable as a pastor. Outside of the ministry and its neurotic demand to "become perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect," it would just be what it was and a common, oft told tale and theme of what I would help many a member with and through. But as a pastor, I could be criticized and I accept that. No one can live the life, feel the feelings or have the thoughts of another. Not in a real world.


At any rate, I stayed to encourage the local congregation. It did not work. The assault on what we must now think and do was relentless and those who did not participate simply had to go. If you were a minister, you simply lost everything and had to reinvent your life after being "uncalled" if being "recalled" and retrofitted did not make you a good little evangelical, hand waving, "cross" eyed, freak. YOU, not I managed to reduce my local congregation from just under 400 very sincere and faithful people to around 25 now meeting in some hokey storefront giving out Halloween candy with scriptures on the wrappers! Oh barf (it was a printable story on spreading the Gospel in the WN) ...winning converts with Scriptural Halloween candy!! It is simply pathetic to see a congregation and a MINISTER reduced to that nonsense. YOU, not I managed to reduce all my previous congregations by 90%+ Nice work.


Anyway...It simply came down to that five minute call one evening out of the blue informing me that I was done in the ministry and that I could call personnel for the details of the severance package. It was six months pay to get a new life and signing off on any future retirement, unless WCG, which means Bernie Schnippert, deems you loyal enough to support. Of course, I was not so that's quite a savings right there.... Perhaps one can imagine the position that puts one in when in my youth, the church had all ministers sign off on Social Security with the promise that "we will take care of you". Well actually you have taken care of me... but good.


My dad worked for Eastman Kodak, has been retired for years and you know, he once bought Fuji film, and Kodak still gives him retirement. Retirement is not based on loyalty. It is based on years of service.


You can't ask people to be loyal to something that was pushed upon them and with which they had little agreement. Most of the people in WCG came FROM where you wanted to go. You can't ask people to change their minds, hopes and faith just because YOU think they should agree with you. Life, much less the human mind does not work that way. Frankly, those of you who "administer" the church, should have left long ago and asked Benny Hinn, TBN , and the Harvest Crock Church to take you in as spiritual refugees. I realize you could not continue to grant yourselves lifetime income and security by doing this, but it is what YOU should have done and left the Church, whose perspective you scorned, alone. If it was wrong for YOU, then leave it, don't destroy it and drive most to despair, skepticism and in some few cases literal suicide. Instead, you made everyone else leave. Now that's power...stupid, self-serving and egocentric power. Benny Hinn has a rule that he does not want people looking him in the eyes. He makes it a rule wherever he goes. He does it as part of his holy farce, fake and failed prophecies ministry because he believes he is more special than others. Perhaps a similar rule would save you all from seeing the pain, hurt and spiritual confusion in the eyes of countless good people, including former ministers who gave just as much and more in some areas a congregant could not appreciate.


You need to remember that the monies you realized in the sale of the campus which you will now "invest" into an almost non existent "worldwide church" and give yourselves and as few others as possible a lifetime income, is labor from the 1950's, 60's 70's 80's and 90's. I'd say you should calculate how much real giving YOU inspired. Real giving, from the heart during your Sheepling of the Sheep and not the efforts of others, whether you agreed with them or not. And you can't count the guilt or habitual giving types. You can only count the purely evangelical fundamentalist "New and Improved Church of God" giving. That's your money to work with. That's the fruit of your labor in "Him" as some say. I'd also like to ask that when you go to eat out, or take a cruise in the fall to not keep an archaic, and Jesus embarrassing non-festival. Or when you pay a mortgage or get a new car or have your health needs taken care of, and do whatever your good Christian Evangelical heart wan ts, you might remember what others might be struggling with just to keep up. I know my own father was able to survive because Kodak had a plan,


I am not so sure about myself at this moment in my life. By others, I include former members also, but mean former pastors with whom I also have had great experience. Please remember when you are tempted to judge or put people in categories of worthy or not worthy, that you're coming to "know" Jesus and reinventing the wheel of truth, and discovering the "old old story", which is older than you can possibly imagine, has cost others a lot. It cost some who were unable to distinguish between the emotional death of their hope and faith and literal death, their lives. That is not a judgment. That is just the way it has been for some.


Being a hard wired sensitive human being (ENFP-let him who reads understand); I understand that feeling and shock. The depression I have wrestled with is really internalized anger, and the sarcasm I am capable of is simply that anger turned sideways. Neither you nor the previous administration were particularly easy people to reason with or explain things to. You are always right it seems, and to date, a rather emotionally cold and calculated group outside your circle and towards those that have reacted to your administration. I have always said when the common folk simply have had enough and say "NO" to childish posturing and the phony authority ministerial administrative types put on, all of a sudden, God inspires a new and better understanding. But in fact, it is simply realizing one can't dismiss the common sense perspectives of educated people and survive.


We get depressed because people don't listen and we lose our bearings with little or no genuine support. You all need to understand that. Personally, I am still amazed that since that one fateful personal call that my career was over, no one ever contacted me again...ever. This is what I mean by cold. I encouraged the local church in my last sermon to continue to support you. I have since regretted the content and misplaced loyalty of my last sermon. I believe that was back when I had just been assured that "we will not be changing" this or that, and it all changed that month.


The emotions that people direct towards the collective "you" for reckless change and indifference to the spiritual and physical sacrifices made by thousands and which now result in your having more money than you need to "do the work", is quite normal. I suspect, as do others, you knew what your losses would be, but did not care, and still don't. Maybe even you don't know why you do and did what you did. Perhaps that would take a professional to sort out.


I don't know the games you played with your Evangelical supporters behind the scenes but I do know that "the Bible Answer Man" and others you have embraced also show a pattern of financial gain through religious manipulation and theological ignorance. Hank Hanegraaf's perspective on evolution and literal human origins is simply ignorant. He is not qualified to write on such topics as if he knew. His mistake as well as that of the Fundamentalist and Evangelical mind-set is to take the text as literally and historically true from the start without question, but that is another whole topic. I can't tell you how many Evangelical type ministers I have met in my other life now that have said, "I know you are right, but I can't teach that, I'd lose my job." Grab a copy of Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, by John Spong and then try to say the Bible is all harmonious and literally true. It's a very simple read and with your backgrounds, you should be very capable of grasping it's message. The same is to be said of many of the theological articles you now write. Pious conviction with marginal information.


Finally, and I know I will always be able to think of more to say, I wanted to comment on your "Ministry of Reconciliation." While I am all for Black/White reconciliation, it is majoring in the minors at this point. I know how difficult it is to communicate with those you have offended. Or maybe I am only seeing this topic through my own eyes and for you it is not difficult at all. I don't know. I do know that reconciling with races is not your main problem. It is the inability to reconcile with people that has been your undoing.


It may take a few more years, but this lack will leave WCG dead and buried in just about any form. Only a small group of people will have a lot of money. I imagine you can afford to dabble in just about any Evangelical fantasy you choose. You can associate with whoever is the most emotionally satisfying regardless of how anyone left in WCG feels about it and whether it represents their hopes and dreams. I also feel that the new owners of the property are another religious scandal waiting to happen. Men with that much emotion, power, influence and ridiculous religious showmanship wear many masks and cannot maintain all of them all the time. Truly spiritual people don't need others to define them, but Sheeple remember, need Shepherds. I will say that if I hear or see any of you standing with Benny Hinn in the Rededication of the Ambassador Auditorium, to a new and improved God from the last time it was dedicated, I will vomit. It will however prove that the unchangeable God changes often depending on who gets to write the script. It would be a great symbol of everything that is wrong with all those various denominations that know the one true mind of God. God is so often in the image of the men who speak for Him. At any rate, put some thought into who you really might need to reconcile with and see what you come up with. I won't hold my breath.


I thank any and all for listening to me open up and express these things. I realize I can be sarcastic. I realize that I still have anger I don't wish to have and regrets about not speaking up in times past I can only remedy by speaking up now. I also realize I have nothing to loose, which even Janis Joplin defined as true freedom.
I wanted to be a pastor from a very young age. The reasons were probably rather hokey, but they were sincere. The WCG seemed right at the time. I had to be there. I accept responsibility for being there and also for being here now. I simply ask you to reconsider your perspectives and responsibilities. You might be able to dismiss it because " we weren't responsible for the past." I will simply say. I am not talking about the past. That is over and done with. If you can't take some responsibility for the past, then you can't control the money you have now gotten from the sale of the past. It's that simple. I don't expect you take responsibility for the past administration's way of being and doing. But your way of being and doing in the recent past is more than enough for you to take responsibility for and do whatever you really think your new Jesus would do.
Warm regards and thanks for listening,

Dennis C. Diehl
DenniscDiehl@aol.com