Church of God Network Podcast On Former Restored Church of God Member

I have mixed emotions about this podcast, but it does illustrate how the old boy's network that runs so many of the Churches of God is irrelevant in their actions and completely out of touch with the younger members of the church. It takes the younger members of the church to start making a difference.

The podcast starts off by making a point that the Restored Church of God, Philadelphia Church of God, and Church of God Preaching the Kingdom are NOT representative of the broader Church of God community and they do not include them in the COG Network links and materials.

Her take on Dave Pack's new sermon series and failed prophecies is interesting in how he confuses everyone. This is also what started her down the path of leaving the cult.

Carisa's story is fascinating to hear.

I am interested in what your take is on this.

The Great Disappointment

The Great Disappointment 

He was only 19 but already a Methodist preacher for two years. He and his mother looked up at the New York night sky and witnessed the great meteor shower of 1833. Moved to prophesy, his mother stated, "Gilbert, the day of judgment is at hand." This was enough to convince him that he had just witnessed the fulfillment of Matthew 24:29 and Jesus was on His way.

"When October 22nd dawned in the Cranmer household, Gilbert was busy preparing to join his Adventist friends at a nearby schoolhouse to await the Advent. His wife, Betsy, had no intention of accompanying her husband. She sympathized with her family, the Heaths, and did not believe Miller's doctrine. When Cranmer was ready to leave the house, he prayed with her. She said, 'Gilbert, you will be back.' He left her with a heavy heart, feeling he probably would not see Betsy and their young daughter, Mary Ann, again. 

 

He and his Adventist friends read Scripture, prayed, and sang hymns while they waited for the great event. Their spirits ran high throughout the afternoon and early evening, as they were sure they were on the verge of seeing the face of their Lord and Savior. But apprehensions grew as midnight approached and no Advent. After midnight, their hearts grew heavy as Jesus' appearance seemed less likely with every passing hour. By sunrise, their expectations turned into bitter disappointment. That is the reason October 22nd, 1844, is called the Great Disappointment. 

 

As the early morning sun began to shine on October 23rd, Cranmer bid his Adventist colleagues farewell and started home with a heavy heart. On his way he was accosted by some non-Adventist neighbors who joked and shouted, 'I thought that you were going up last night.' When Cranmer arrived home, Betsy met him at the door with a smile and reminded him, 'I told you, you would be back.' 

 

After October 22 most Millerite Adventists were harassed in one manner or another but in New England especially some were jailed and others incarcerated in asylums." --The Journey: A History of the Church of God (Seventh Day) by Robert Coulter, pg. 45

Qanon conspiracy theorists and Trump Savior optimists are beside themselves now that their prophecies of a January 20th coup has come and gone. I don't know about you but I got my fair share of links sent to me by folks I know who just a year ago I thought were rational beings. Christians sharing videos from wild-eyed strangers around the country claiming their inside sources are guaranteeing a bloodbath of communists and the jailing of everyone that has been determined to be part of the swamp by Trump, Savior of the free world.

On Inauguration Day, there was supposed to be a blackout. Trump would use the National Guard and the Navy and announce Martial Law through the Emergency Alert System. Make sure you have a CB radio and stock up on toilet paper (here we go again) and food. There would be mass arrests to cleanse our Christian nation of commie scum.

Many across their forums were calling the event "The Great Awakening." Some have resigned quickly to the reality that they have been duped, it was all just a cruel hoax. Still, others are holding on to continued narratives over the following days and weeks.

Intelligence has revealed that since the Capitol riots on January 6th, white supremacists raided Parler and other alternative social media platforms in hopes of recruiting the disenfranchised. One Neo-Nazi recruiter was advising other recruiters to not focus their message on WWII but instead on Democrats and injustice toward white Christians. While many people are angry at Twitter and Facebook for a 'cancel culture', Facebook has pointed out that they removed over 60,000 pages of shit just like this starting in November.

This was such a bizarre year. It makes me wonder if the Churches of God in particular with so many years of pent up yearning and waiting for the end of the age, just finally used Savior Trump as a release. For so many years, duped people have put their whole lives on hold and sent in their hard-earned money to these serpents claiming to be doing God's Work.

It also makes me wonder why it is so much of humanity has sought Saviors down through time. I know there are any number of psychological and sociological explanations. Whatever the reasons, it seems to me that it only harms people and robs them of living a complete and fulfilling life now. And there are no shortage of thieves all too willing to take their money for the assurance that a Savior is surely coming in 'your lifetime.'

I see single people who never marry because they refuse to marry outside their tiny organizations. Smart young people deciding against higher education because they think, what's the use? Struggling families with multiple children who live paycheck to paycheck because after paying three tithes, there just isn't anything left to get their teeth fixed, let alone save or invest for retirement. What will they have to live on in their retirement years when they gave it to a ministry to send their kids to college and retire on?

Ryan Bell is a writer, speaker, and ex-Seventh Day Adventist pastor of 19 years. While I don't necessarily agree with his atheist stance on life now, he does make some poignant observations about Christianity and the need of a Savior:

Popular Christian theology...renders this lifeless meaningful by anchoring all notions of value and purpose to a paradise somewhere in the future, in a place other than where we are right now. Ironically, my Christian upbringing taught me that ultimately this life doesn’t matter, which tends to make believers apathetic about suffering and think that things will only get worse before God suddenly solves everything on the last day.

Without the dependency on a cosmic savior who is coming to rescue us, we are free to recognize that we are the ones we’re waiting for. If we don’t make the world a fair and habitable place, no one else is going to do it for us. Our lives matter because our choices affect others and our children’s future.

I don't think we need to embrace atheism to understand and embrace what it is he is saying. As I pointed out in my last post concerning Wally Smith's response to supporting causes in this world, the Churches of God have a "preach alone" dogma that excuses us from living life in the here and now. It stops us from being neighbors and helping others. That is not what Jesus taught. Matthew 25:31-46 should be the emphasis of any Christian worth his or her salt. The Churches of God are full of priests and Levites, literally stopping brethren from being samaritans. The Armstrong legacy creates an us vs them that dehumanizes humanity from the rest of us. This isn't natural or normal and eventually begins to create individual and group psychosis that pushes us further and further from reality.

As we sit on the sidelines, waiting and waiting and waiting as life passes us by, we get antsy. Something isn't right. We are waiting for a battle that never comes. So now we go looking for it. And maybe some of us find it in politics. And for the first time in a long time, we feel alive. And the next thing you know, you are a Church of God member at the Capitol on January 6th. And like Gilbert, your Great Awakening turns into a Great Disappointment.

I'm not even saying it's wrong to be involved in politics. What I am saying is that Armstrongism and possibly to a lesser degree, American style Christianity, poisons minds in a way that moves people to the unhinged fringe extremes.

This waiting on a Savior and being told that you just have to pay, pray, and stay. This feeds into delusions, distortions of reality. Convincing people to live life on pause seems to me to be one of the cruelest hoaxes in the world. New England arrested and even threw people in the asylums after the Great Disappointment! Maybe it's time we get the authorities attention on these cults so we can get the leaders like Dave Pack, Bob Thiel, Gerald Flurry, and the rest of them thrown in jail and into rubber rooms.

THINK! If Jesus is coming back, it will only be ONCE and probably not in your lifetime. These Adventist peddlers, whoring for money in the name of religion have been doing this for 180 years! Take your life back. Save yourself.

Stoned Stephen Society

See: The Great Disappointment

UPDATED: Sabbatarian Prophet Makes A Precise Prophetic Prediction, Unlike COG Self-Appointed Prophets

A person with a Sabbatarian background has made a prophecy about an event to happen precisely on July18, 2020. On that day a nuclear bomb will be dropped on Nashville, TN.

Now, we all know it will not happen, but my point is, here is a person who provides precise details about what he/she sees happening and actually provides lots of interesting facts to back up his/her statements.

Compare that to all the "true" prophets that have self-appointed themselves in the Churches of God. Not a single one of them will ever step out on a limb and make a precise prediction about something that will happen in the immediate future on a specific day. The few that have tried have all failed.  Every single one of them. Those that failed are labeled by the other COG prophets as fake, while they are right and could never make a similar mistake, just wait and see.

What we get from all of our self-appointed prophets is, "it could be", "it may happen", "it's at least 19 years away, but less than 20", "it might happen on Pentecost of ___, ___,  ___", "the end of the 19-year time cycle ends _____", or my favorite, "a strong hand from someplace is going to spank humanity."  All such impotent nonsense.

Here is what the Sabbatarian prophet is predicting:

This website is dedicated to identifying that there will be a nuclear attack in Nashville, Tennessee on July 18, 2020. This reality is based on prophetic revelations from the Bible. These revelations identify that Islam will be the power responsible for accomplishing the attack.

The message of warning that is derived from the Bible is established on the rules of interpretation that are identified within the Bible itself. For this reason, some time will be spent setting forth those rules so that the authority behind this message is recognized to be fully derived from and based on God's Word.

In conjunction with identifying certain principles of biblical interpretation, we will identify the prophetic players and subjects that are involved with the attack in Nashville. Some of the subjects will be linked to more detailed presentations on this website. Those subjects and players include Donald Trump, the forty-fifth and final president of the United States of America; the USA as represented in Bible prophecy; the Roman Catholic Church; the United Nations; Russia, including its current leader Vladimir Putin; the Seventh-day Adventist Church; Ellen White and the history of the nuclear attacks on Japan in 1945.

You can read the entire thing here.

The Millerite legacy is still alive and still making predictions.

As crazy as it is, it is far more interesting than any of the crap we hear from our current wishy-washy self-appointed prophets in the Church of God, whether they be Dave pack, Gerald Flurry, Ron Weinland or our perpetually whiney Bob Thiel.


UPDATE:  

It seems a newspaper in Nashville actually published two full-page ads from this group of whacko's. Now the paper is investigating why someone allowed it to be published.

Tennessean apologizes, launches investigation after 'horrific' ad runs in print editions
The Tennessean is investigating how a paid advertisement from a fringe religious group was published on Sunday in violation of the newspaper’s long-established standards. 

The ad featured a bizarre, pseudo-religious “prophecy,” including the declaration of an impending nuclear attack in Nashville by “Islam.” 

The ad was immediately ordered to be pulled from future editions by sales executives and the investigation launched. A similar ad, one that did not mention Islam but also contained an end-times prophecy, published in the newspaper on June 17. 

The newspaper’s advertising standards clearly forbid hate speech. Advertisements that do not meet the paper’s standards are routinely rejected for publication. 

Kevin Gentzel, President of Marketing Solutions and Chief Revenue Officer for Gannett, parent company of The Tennessean, forcefully repudiated the advertisement in a tweet on Sunday.

Now watch as Bob Thiel will claim this is one more example of religious persecution. Papers will refuse to print religious prophecy crap from him in the future and it will be a sign he is being persecuted.

Being a self-appointed false prophet is a thankless job. But, there is always some fool who will try, particularly in the Church of God.

See article here

Isn't It Time You Started Questioning Sabbath Keeping?

from The Monty Python Haggadah

If Charlton Heston had never went up that mountain we would not have all the Sabbath keeping controversies today!

Armstrongism is continuing to lose members because they realize sabbath keeping is not required of Christians.  Seventh Day Adventists are leaving too.  In 2005 the SDA church announced that 1.5 million SDA's have left the church in the last five years.  Part of the reason why is the same phenomenon that is decimating Armstrongism: "The Internet has made information accessible to people worldwide who are seeking for the answers to their questions about Adventism."

  

There are numerous web sites out there that have a wealth of information for those who are questioning sabbatarianism.

Sabbath Keepers Refuted

Lying For God

Kerry Wynne is a former third generation Seventh-day Adventist.  William Hohmann is a former Worldwide Church of God member.  The Sabbath “heritage” of both authors goes back to one, single group of believers which adopted Sabbatarianism almost immediately after the Great Disappointment of 1844. Thus, these denominations are truly “sister” churches.   Both authors graduated from the universities which host(ed) the theological seminaries of their respective denominations. The authors have worked in association  with biblical researcher, Robert K. Sanders, a former Seventh-day Adventist who now hosts a comprehensive web-site which addresses issues in Adventism and Sabbatarianism—Truth Or Fables.Com. 

Sabbatarianism Re-examined

Support for Questioning and Transitioning SDA and Sabbatarian Pastors

Journey Out of Legalism

Truth Lead Me Out

Proclamation Magazine: Combating the Errors of Legalism and False Religion

Truth or Fables?

How Proud Should We Be of William Miller?

Armstrongism has always loved to connect it's self to William Miller as proof we are in a continual chain of Sabbath keepers.  But, just how proud should we be of our association with Miller?  The It's OK Not to be a Seventh Day Adventist web site has several postings on it's sidebar from newspapers that had articles about Miller and his cult in the late 1800's.  Like Armstrongism, Millerism is riddled with one failed prophecy after another.  People have died because of Millerite teachings just as they have under Armstrongism.

Instead of bragging about our connection to him we should have been examining what he said and taught.  We should have been reading about how people sold their homes, farms and personal belongings because of his rantings so that our own people would not have done the same thing in 1969-1972. Maybe then we would have been more willing to see the lies and false prophecies that emanated from Herbert Armstrong, Rod Meredith, Herman  Hoeh, Dean Blackwell and Gerald Waterhouse.

How many more need to die in Armstrongism before people finally wake up?

Check out It's OK Not to be Seventh Day Adventist  for more of these articles.

They have also published a book that details the Millerite movement that Armstrongism broke off from.  One interesting thing about the book is the cover. 

It shows someone trying to sew the Temple curtain back together again.  That is exactly what Armstrongism tries to do day in and day out.  Sew the curtain back together by forcing the law on humanity.  It's not gonna work bubba!

Click on article to enlarge

COG/Adventist Phone Alert

Here is a phone app for all of you backsliding Adventists and COGers who love that sausage pizza when no one is looking, or Dungeons and Dragons on the Wii till mom walks in the door and you start trading HWA and Spanky or YOU trading cards.  The parallels with the silliness of Armstrongism with Adventism is hilarious!

Should we design a COG app? Will it set off a tone when you approach another COG member while wearing mixed fabrics, or right after you smoked a great cigar, or had one the best Honey Baked ham sandwiches ever?  Will it have a Philadelphian and a Laodicean sensor?  Will it have  PCG or LCG sensor so we will know whether to speak to the person or not.  Or a disfellowshipped sensor?

It's Okay NOT to be a Seventh-day Adventist (or Sabbatarian)

Those of us that have left Armstrongism know that we have deep ties into other Sabbatarian movements.  HWA borrowed all kinds of stuff from Adventism and William Miller.  COG 'historians' love to link Armstrongism to William Miller and the Rhode Island Sabbatarians.  Even though HWA took a lot from Adventists he conveniently loved to ignore that part.

Teresa Beem has a great blog that is about her journey out of Adventism after 40 years immersed in it.  So much of her journey and her reactions are exactly like what many of us have went through. All we need to do is replaced her SDA names and places with WCG names and places and it could be our story.


She obviously grew up with a healthier version of Sabbath keeping than most of us did in Armstrongism with some of the foolishness that Armstrongite ministers had attached to it.  Like Armstrongism, Sabbath keeping was the identifying mark that kept her in the church.  Like her, Sabbath keeping was used to set us apart from the evil  world around us and to make us into something special in God's sight.  We were chosen, set apart, and special in God's sight.

Her comments in the last paragraph quoted below perfectly describes Armstrongite thought processes.

 "At night I would lay and imagine dancing with Jesus and singing with Him. I pictured the Second Coming. I prayed so hard that I would be able to be alive to see it. I would even go through having bamboo shoots shoved up my fingernails. I would be strong to death for Jesus’ Sabbath-- for I knew that I would someday have to be put in prison and tortured for the Sabbath truth. When our class read something like Project Sunlight, (I’m not sure that was the book) my fear of the last days went from hoping Jesus would wait to come back just until I got my first kiss to something far more horrible. In the last days, the Catholics would drag my family into court and torture them in front of me to get me to crack and go do church on Sunday! That was a pretty terrifying picture to put into a fifth grader’s imagination! Nevertheless, as creepy as that was, I didn’t ever worry about my or my families’ salvation.

 My dad was so liberal as to almost be a universalist. We were not into rules and my parents didn’t guilt us into sabbath regulations. We drank Dr. Pepper, went to movies, wore jewelry, danced--at home for fun. My dad’s music taste was conservative and he wasn’t too fond of the Heritage Singers. But over all, I couldn’t WAIT till Sabbath because I loved church and we would stop and get donuts on the way and go out to eat at a good Mexican food restaurant with friends afterwards. Sabbaths rocked in our house. Our parents made it the funnest of all days!"

 "I was as entrenched as an SDA can be and truly loved being Adventist. You see, I was especially blessed by God, I was an enlightened Adventist. Our intelligent, taboo-shunning version of Adventism was so far superior than those fundamental Adventists hovering around the periphery of truth. You know, those that actually thought Ellen a prophetess and still clung to silly beliefs such as the sanctuary message and the last-day prophecies. We believed in a non-judgmental, non-legalistic Sabbath--a Sabbath that was a blessing! The rest was for--you know--the conspiratorial crowd (we would smile sympathetically but condescendingly.)"

 "What kind of God could be so unthinkably cruel as to allow such nice, sincere people to be so deceived? Everything I trusted in, my whole world and worldview was submerged, steeped, marinated in and permeated in Adventism. My earliest thoughts had been formed around its paranoia, my hopes and dreams shaped by its restrictions and taboos. Liberal SDA or not, Adventism was the warm and fuzzy fabric of my life. My heart was made secure by its doctrines of what was right and wrong. I happily colored within the Adventists’ lines and the picture was really, really pretty (even if my color choice was shockingly bright for SDA standards!)

But then when I checked Adventist doctrine’s accuracy with the scriptures, the foundation of my life was wiped out. When finally I rejected the false doctrines of Adventism I felt like I had jumped off a cliff into a deep, black hole. I had looked down and realized that underneath what looked like the gentle, protective godly fundamentals of Adventism, was the diabolical smile of the Father of Lies.

How could my parents have bought into it? Was I in the Truman Show or in M. Knight Shyamalan’s The Village? Or better still--was that Rod Serling’s voice I heard and am I a part of an episode of the Twilight Zone? (My husband’s transition out of Adventism was a piece of cake because he had never been a part of it. He had always thought it was insanity and had kept his heart protected by being an Adventist atheist--like many of my generation. He--by the way--is now a believing Christian.)"

"All those years of participating in mind-numbing circular arguments with the SDA scholars--like an eternal swirl of a toilet flushing never actually going anywhere! Why didn’t God see our zombie-like devotion to a false prophet and our sincere but total brainwashing and rescue us!! Why did we not matter enough to Him to send an angel or earthquake or something to shake us from the stupor of our imbecility? How embarrassing to let such nice people give their lives and hearts over to, to, to such... senseless drivel. And how embarrassing that we actually believed it. Why would a loving God allow that?"

"After all, out there in non-Adventism land it is worse than inside Adventism. You know, they had a little error mixed with a lot of truth which was, of course, much worse--much more evil than.... a little truth mixed ......with lots of error .....like Adventism.... wait? Was that right? That didn’t make sense and yet that is what many Sabbath School teachers had said to our bright, innocent and gullible eyes through the years. They said that it was the 5% error mixed in with the 95% truth that was the most deceitful. Hmmmm....

No matter what, we had the Sabbath truth.... no matter how many babies our hospitals killed in abortion, no matter how many sexual abuse cases were covered up by the conference, no matter how many despicable things happened at the Adventist academies, no matter how much our SDA church school failed in educational standards, no matter how hypocritical, unloving, negligent or abusive our families were, no matter how dysfunctional and historically inaccurate our doctrine---in the end, none of that mattered for we were sabbatarians. Which, if the Sabbath IS the end times test for Christians, would be a very good argument. However, that is just a pure fantasy of the church’s visionary pioneers which takes a bit of twisting of scripture to arrive at."

Read her entire article here:

It's Okay NOT to be a Seventh-day Adventist: Obedience in the Darkness: "I haven’t wanted to do this. In fact I dread it. But perhaps it will be helpful to many former Adventists out there. I am not a big fan o..."