It's That Time of Year: The Annual COG Pseudo Christmas Celebrations

COG News has this about how UCG, COGWA and LCG have their pretend non-Christmas Celebrations.

2016 will be the 20th year for the Annual Winter Family Weekend, to be held at the Griffin Gate Marriott Resort in Lexington, Kentucky, December 23-26. The event is open to all.

Three Church of God groups in the USA have taken up the tradition of holding a very large social gathering over the Christmas period.

Church of God a Worldwide Association members will be in Louisville, Kentucky, December 23-27, where the Galt House Hotel will be offering a range of seasonal activities for its young guests.

The United Church of God Family Weekend, will be at the Great Wolf Lodge in Mason, Ohio, December 23-27.

The Family Weekend for members of the Living Church of God will take place at the Renaissance Charlotte Suites Hotel, North Carolina, December 22-25.

“Activities will begin on Thursday evening with a casual themed dance at the hotel. Friday morning there will be a number of targeted seminars followed by an afternoon activity. Friday night and Saturday morning there will be special Bible Studies for everyone. We plan to again live-stream the Saturday afternoon Church service over the Internet. Saturday night there will be a formal dinner/dance for all ages. Sunday we will have the increasingly popular Sports Day with basketball and volleyball tournaments, free play, kids’ games and lots of free food! Sunday night we will wrap things up at the hotel with a Games Night. Last year we had over 800 people join us for the events and we hope that this year even more of you will attend. So grab your dance shoes and your tennis shoes and come join us for an exciting weekend of physical and spiritual rejuvenation!”—Jim Meredith

The Streets Cry Out!

Over the decades there have been various crackpots that have come up with all kids of pet theories, wild speculations and outright lies.  It is this same legacy that has allowed Bob Thiel and James Malm to flourish and find a few gullible members to join them.  Liars have always found fertile ground in the Church of God. We have had lying false prophets that knew the exact timeline of prophetic prophecy.

We have had crack pots that claimed the egret found in front of he Auditorium were going to come alive, four of them would pick up the auditorium and the fifth would lead the way as they flew it to Petra. This idiot actually had people who followed him out of the church over this.

One of the crazy things that was swirling around Pasadena when I came to college was the belief by some that God had personally placed his name on the campus.  That belief gained traction because of the street names surrounding the main campus.

Green Street
Orange Grove
Del Mar
St. John

When you take the first letter of each street you come up with this, "GODS," God's campus.  God's church, God's college.  You name it and some idiot claimed God was behind it.

That belief is still in existence today, even though God apparently abandoned the property a couple decades ago.

There is a new crackpot claiming to be God's mouthpiece, just like all the other COG face prophets out there.  This guy is Lee Clark.

The streets cry out!

As long as we're here let's apply the principle of using names to identify who Jesus is talking to in this letter. Notice that in verse 12 the word God is used exactly four times. Now did you know the following interesting bit of trivia? The Worldwide Church of God's Ambassador College campus in Pasadena, California, is bordered by four main streets. On the north is Green Street. On the west is Orange Grove. On the south is Del Mar. And on the east is St. John. These are all names of streets. Streets are places. Now if you take the first letter of each of the streets that border the campus, starting at the north and moving counterclockwise, they spell G-O-D-S. GODS!!! 

Most will say that this is just coincidence. Is it?! I can heap so many coincidences like this on top of each other that after awhile anyone with a converted mind will only be able to conclude that God Himself is so powerful and intelligent and detail-oriented that He planned all these "coincidences" out some time long ago in the eternity that He inhabits and that when Jesus, who had been God in the flesh, dictated these letters to the apostle John, He knew exactly what He would raise up in the future. He knew down to names of the streets that He would have a Worldwide Church of God in Pasadena, California, USA, eighteen-and-a-half centuries down the road. And He named the streets this way to remind us of our destiny!

Living Church of God Says There Is Splattered Blood On Christmas Trees

Requested reposting:

The Living Church of God has another ridiculous article up about Christmas.  This time the personalty cult is claiming that the red on Christmas trees symbolizes splatted blood.  Long red ribbons symbolize the "flowing blood of pagan temple priests who ran around slashing their bodies.

The man-god Attis, after an unsuccessful courtship of the goddess Cybele, mutilated himself, “under a pine-tree, and bled to death on the spot. ... After his death Attis is said to have been changed into a pine-tree … [in worship practices] a pine-tree was cut in the woods and brought into the sanctuary of Cybele, where it was treated as a great divinity … Stirred by the wild barbaric music of clashing cymbals, rumbling drums, droning horns, and screaming flutes, the inferior clergy whirled about in the dance with waggling heads and streaming hair, until, rapt into a frenzy of excitement and insensible to pain, they gashed their bodies with potsherds or slashed them with knives in order to bespatter the altar and the sacred tree with their flowing blood.” (The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer, “The Myth and Ritual of Attis” Chapter 34).

Attis’ bloody act under an evergreen tree, along with—as the historical record points out—subsequent duplications by Attis worshippers, has provided paganism with its seasonal red and green motifs.