How many years have we been saying here that many of the groups that latch themselves on to various COG's are professional church shoppers looking for easy handouts from the gullible white saviors in America? They go from one Sabbatarian group to the next till they find some sucker willing to give the laptops, seeds, money, Bibles, and anything else they want. The self-appointed COG leaders lap this up because they think their god has sent them these new converts.
Our great white savior, Bwana Elijah Bob Thiel, prophet and Chief Overseer of the improperly named "continuing" Church of god, has insisted regularly that he is able to discern the integrity of his church leaders in Africa. Well, that has come crashing to an end when he had to admit recently that he had attracted men with no integrity and were using him.
Bwana Bob writes on August 29:
As most of you are aware, I left my last church because of repeated integrity issues with its leadership, as well as partially because of how it changed to define itself (for some details, see Why Bob Thiel Left the Living Church of God).It is amazing how Bwana Bob did not have the ability to discern that Rod Meredith had no integrity, to begin with. Most who have been in the church and worked with Meredith understood this for decades! Men of low integrity attract men of low integrity.
After comparing biblical teachings to their actions (and lack of keeping promises they repeatedly made), I concluded that the ‘Philadelphia mantle’ could not be with the top administrative leadership in that organization, and that the mantle had passed as one of its ministers had speculated to me it may have a couple of times.
In CCOG, we have since had to deal with other leaders with integrity issues of various types.
In 2013, we actually had two leaders in Kenya with the same first and last name (but from different towns). The first one turned out to be a complete fraud, while the other one was not. The first leader we started to work with in Malawi, while not a complete fraud, had severe integrity issues, so we stopped working with him. As it turned out, in time, we ended up with many more times the number of congregants in both Kenya and Malawi than those leaders with integrity problems claimed to have.
Recently, I am saddened to say, we became aware of an integrity problem with a leader in Mexico (Ismael Jimenez). So I investigated this by checking with multiple sources. Furthermore, I and a minister from another COG group gave him opportunities to repent and ‘come clean’ so to speak, but as of yet he has not truly done so. So, the CCOG has had to drop affiliation with him and we hope and pray that he repents. We also pray that those who had fellowship with him will one day see the truth about this and again wish to support the work of the Philadelphian remnant.
Working on this matter took up inordinate amounts of time, and more time looks to be required.
The Bible shows that dealing with people who have integrity issues is not new to the Church of God. Even Simon Magus believed and was baptized by the Apostle Philip (Acts 8:13). The Apostle Paul ended up having problems with many he worked with in Asia Minor (2 Timothy 1:15), as did the Apostle John (3 John 9-10).This is a perfect description of Bwana Bob Thiel who is too blinded by his awesomeness to even understand what he wrote.
Jesus had to deal with the false as well (John 6:70). Furthermore, Jesus specifically predicted that Philadelphians would have to deal with false ones (Revelation 3:7-9) and we in CCOG have ended up doing so.How can we fault Bwana Bob and the rest of the splinter group leaders as men of low integrity, considering their own original leader, Herbert W Armstrong, had low morals and integrity. Every single one of the current top leadership of the COG splinter groups are men of low integrity. They all set off on their own in order to ensure a steady flow of income. It had nothing to do with doctrinal purity. They knew they were all getting fired or laid off and had no marketable skills. Stealing tithe money from duped members was more important than doctrinal purity or integrity. All of these men cannot understand why the broad majority of the church never joined up with them. Integrity is the one important quality none of them had and still do not have.
