You knew it had to happen sooner or later. Meredith started the ball rolling by declaring a Church wide fast to pray for the brethren of UCG and those being hurt by the split. Bob Thiel jumped on the band wagon and urged UCG and COGaWA members to leave their respective churches and join the only Philadelphian church doing the work of God today.
Meredith sent this out today:
“First of all, we need to pray fervently for everyone involved! Pray that God will guide them and keep them in His will. Pray that they may continue to believe the Truth and want to do the Work. Pray that God will bring with us those who should come and would loyally and cooperatively help us “do the Work.” For we certainly need more dedicated members and ministers, and I pray that all of us will wholeheartedly welcome them with open arms if they sincerely and lovingly want to come with us. Right now, as many of you know, hundreds of members are in the process of leaving the United Church of God. Many could go into little factions and end up doing nothing as far as reaching the entire world with the Gospel of the Kingdom. So we do need to cry out to God with all our hearts that some of them would come with us and that He would grant us favor in their sight and help them to realize that we do have a depth of love and unity that many of them have not been told about.
Fellow ministers, I urge all of you to stir yourselves to reach out to these people and these ministers, to visit them as soon as you are able, to work with your Elders and members to make them feel welcome and to help them in every way to become part of the group that is really “doing the Work” at this time. We do not want to pressure or “proselytize” anyone in a wrong way. But it is certainly not wrong to reach out to them and let them know that we love them and would love to have them with us to help us do the Work and get the message out to a very confused world.”
Income is down in LCG so this is a great money making tool to have members come in with their tithes. Flurry's cult is low on income too since they just built a monstrosity in Edmond that is for the purpose of worshiping HWA.
Then the Second True End time Church jumped into the fire. Gerald Flurry and Lil' Junior started a series of articles on their websites telling UCG/COGaWA to join up with PCG.
Our church is better than your church. Who would have thought that in 1,980 years PCG was the only remnant church doing what God requires because only THEY have God's TRUE form of government.
Flurry Junior writes about Meredith:
When Rod Meredith left the Worldwide Church of God to start a new church in 1993, he clearly called into question the way Herbert W. Armstrong had governed the Worldwide Church of God. He wrote in Church Government and Church Unity that the subject of church government had been seriously misunderstood during the days of Mr. Armstrong’s leadership.
Furthermore, Meredith said, God’s Church had rarely ever been governed by one administration, with one man in charge—and Mr. Armstrong knew it.
In actual fact, Mr. Armstrong’s writings flatly reject this revisionist reading of Church history. He wrote in April 1981 that God always works through one man at a time. “He worked through Abraham. He worked through Moses, through Joshua, through one ‘judge’ at a time, through Samuel, through David, through Solomon. He worked through Peter and when Peter had left the Middle East, through Paul. These men had, in greater or lesser number, staff assistants under them, but God’s work was through the one man at a time!” Mr. Armstrong wrote (emphasis mine throughout).
Without a doubt, it was a deceitful and confusing web Mr. Meredith tried to spin after Mr. Armstrong’s death. On the one hand, Mr. Armstrong supposedly knew God didn’t work through one man. And yet, Mr. Armstrong’s own administration was obviously hierarchical, with one man at the top.
-------
According to Meredith, this collegial “New Testament” approach is what they failed to grasp during the days of Mr. Armstrong. This is why, Meredith said at a ministerial conference in July 1993, he didn’t understand the right approach to government during the 1960s and ’70s.
Today, however, he does understand. “I’ve learned the right approach in servant leadership,” Meredith told his ministers in 1993. Later, he added, “Let’s try to do it right this time, as shepherds with a loving approach.”
It is well worth noting that this is the same deplorable tactic the Tkaches used to destroy Mr. Armstrong’s legacy. We’ve made so many mistakes in our past, they often said. And unfortunately, Mr. Armstrong didn’t live long enough to correct these many errors. But now, God has led us to make the necessary changes!
How convenient that argument was for them. And how pitiful and ignorant it made Mr. Armstrong look.
In Mr. Meredith’s case, he implies, If only Mr. Armstrong would have lived long enough to learn the right approach to servant leadership. If only he would have been able to administer government the right way, with a loving approach.
------
Now please—consider this carefully. The reason this history is so critically important is because there are many thousands of brethren—people who once devoted their lives to upholding the teachings of Herbert Armstrong—who now are laboring under the delusion that there are many different branches of God’s Church doing God’s work today. This is why, even if ministers in United and Living choose to ignore us, many of their members do not.
They may not believe the Philadelphia Church of God is the one true Church. But they do believe the pcg is one of many different branches God is using to do His work. In their minds, we may be the branch God uses to preserve Mr. Armstrong’s literature or to proclaim a prophetic warning to this world.
That kind of thinking is a deadly delusion. And as Mr. Armstrong wrote in the article quoted above, it started during the liberal rebellion against God’s government in the 1970s. And six months before he died, he felt compelled to remind the brethren about this history.
“I want you, brethren, to think about and understand what happened to God’s Church in the 1970s lest history repeat itself! I want you to see the ‘fruits’ of rebelling against God’s way and God’s government,” Mr. Armstrong wrote.
Seven years after he delivered that sobering warning, Rod Meredith left the Worldwide Church of God to, as he claimed, faithfully preach “the truths proclaimed by Herbert W. Armstrong.” And yet, in his very first booklet—the battle cry for his church and the framework for his new government—Mr. Meredith said Jesus Christ almost always uses many different co-existing branches to do His work. And Mr. Armstrong, he added, believed this too!
None of it was true. But many people believed it.
And today, many still do, even if Mr. Meredith is no longer one of them. But leaving aside what he might teach today, it is nevertheless true that the minister most responsible for popularizing the many different branches lie after Mr. Armstrong’s death is Roderick C. Meredith.
