The Painful Truth has a new article up today on the falsified links that the church has tried to use to tie the church to the Seventh-Day Baptists of Newport, Rhode Island.
It includes the letter from William Voyce of the Church of God, 7th Day refuted the many myths and outright lies that Herbert Armstrong and others promulgated.
William T. Voyce’s June 3, 1985 letter to the Worldwide Church of God is a veritable research paper with a “point-by-point refutation of their interpretation of American Sabbath history.” Mr. Voyce is a member of the Church of God, 7th Day and wrote the 7-page letter to the WCG after reading their article “The Church They Couldn’t Destroy.” Mr. Voyce has not received a WCG reply to his letter, the subject of which he feels is so important that “if the truth about this matter were more widely known, a good share of the Worldwide Church’s membership would never have joined in the first place.”
The article also includes research by Bruce Renhen on the same subject:
I was not alone in my discoveries concerning the Worldwide Church of God’s falsified link to the Seventh Day Baptist church of Newport, Rhode Island. As early as 1968, William T. Voyce of Des Moines, Iowa had corresponded with both the Seventh Day Baptist Historical Society (located then in Plainfield, New Jersey) and the Worldwide Church of God editorial staff in Pasadena.
Miss Evalois St. John of the Historical Society provided several photocopies to Voyce of original church documents dating back to the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries proving that A. N. Dugger (and later Herbert Armstrong) had counterfeited and altered the reading of their original documents. Miss St. John informed Mr. Voyce in her June 1968 letter to him:
A great disservice was done to both Seventh Day Baptists and Seventh Day Adventists by an Elder A. N. Dugger who now resides in Jerusalem. As you must know he was formerly a member of the denomination known as The Church of God (Adventist), with headquarters in Stanberry, Mo. In fact the U. S. Census of Religious Bodies 1926 carries the history/doctrine of this order which a footnote states was revised and approved by Elder A. N. Dugger, of the Church of God Publishing House. In 1934 (or 1933) Mr. Dugger separated from this group – Church of God (Adventist) – and established a new order – The Church of God (Seventh Day) – with headquarters at Salem W. Va. In the U.S. Census of Religious Bodies of 1936, one finds a history of this new order prepared – as the government states by Mr. Dugger. For the history of this group he deliberately “lifted” the history of the Seventh Day Baptists, added some Seventh Day Adventist history, and called it the History of the Church of God (Seventh Day). Because this pamphlet is put out by the U.S. Government – through its census Bureau – researchers and students of Church history have accepted his facts as true. One finds more of this “lifted” history in the book History of the True Church by A.N. Dugger and C.O. Dodd, published in 1936….
Check out the full article here:
Worldwide Church of God’s falsified link to the Seventh Day Baptist church of Newport, Rhode Island
