Physical and Sexual Abuse In The Church

This appalling first hand account of physical and sexual abuse in the church is just the tip of the iceberg.  COG leaders have covered up sexual and physical abuse for decades.  Every single one of them to this day still do.  Oh how they scramble and pat themselves on the back that they are far beyond this now in 2018 because they publicly claim this was only an issue from the past.

This was a comment on the LCG Member Has A Question For Gerald Weston entry.

My father was a fulltime paid minister in WCG, and an elder in UCG. The stories from others passed on about sexual abuses in the church are staggering. There are many written about online as well.

It seems that if you had to "personally witness" every act to be considered the truth, then I guess you can't believe many of the books of the bible either, as many stories are written by people that weren't there.

To my experience. The most recent was a friend of mine was kicked out our local congregation. The minister told the congregation one story (I recorded it), when I asked him on the phone what happened and why was my friend kicked out, he told a different story. (I recorded this as well) and when I asked my friend what the minister told him, it was again, a third different story.

To many people they wouldn't care about being kicked out, but this has been hard on many people, and it was done with lies and deceit.

My personal experience has been my child was attacked by a sexual predator, and the minister and elders supported the pervert over us, so we didn't attend there anymore. I regret this, and if I could have done things again, I would have stood up and accused that man in front of everyone and shamed the ministers and elders in front of everyone.

I personally suffered physical and sexual abuse at home, having a minister for a father didn't protect me from this, I think it even made it worse, as the physical abuse was based on "tough love" and the common teachings from HWA on parenting. I was told by my father "you have to break a child like you break a horse". (I think this is a quote he got from GTA)

I have personally talked with people that had sexual advances made on them by the minister. Another (a child in the church at the time) experienced witnessing incest at the ministers house between their children, with multiple witnesses. There were even worse beatings in his house than in mine, and his family members are more disturbed than mine.

I was a suicidal young teen with no hope for the future. "the world can't go on for even another 10 years" was the refrain I heard my entire childhood.

Read the stories online about a UCG elder sexually abusing the members in a congregation in the east coast some where in the last 10 years, and nothing was resolved because head quarters sided with the elder. ("I know this man, he'd never do anything like that" from Richard Pinelli). Finally almost the entire congregation just left.

I have relatives that were at Ambassador college that knew about the sexual escapades of GTA, their friends had slept with him. GTA bragged about his conquests.

I knew about HWA's incest issues when I was a young child, when I was a teen I asked my father (again, a full time minister running a congregation) about this, and he didn't deny it. He simply said "If Mr. Armstrong repented of it, God will forgive him".

To top it all off. I had multiple family members that were full time paid ministers. One was a paedophile that died in prison. Guess who he preyed on, church kids.

I met more perverted and vile kids at the feast than I ever did at public schools. And my own experience pales by comparison to many others.

The corporate based churches of God are on a foundation of sand. Those that follow God in truth and seek him and his kingdom, and his righteousness will eventually wake up and find others of like mind when everything falls apart around them. And if not, I hope God has mercy on them in some way.

R. Roberts

February 27, 2018 at 8:59 PM

Is Salvation Only Accessible Through Your Particular COG and Its Appointed Leader?

Lenny Cacchio has an entry up on the 7th Day Sabbath Churches of God site. I usually don't agree with a lot of what he has to say, but I find his comments below to be spot on.

He asks why church members feel the need to have an organization or particularly a leader of a church as their mediator between then and Christ.  Far too many feel the need to allow men like Flurry, Pack, Weston, Cox and others be the conduit to salvation. Through them, church members seem to feel that they have access to Jesus because they are in a particular COG and therefore have access to God.

No Church of God leader, from Herbert Armstrong to Gerald Flurry, from James Malm to Bob Thiel or even Rod Meredith to Gerald Weston, has the authority or power to grant access to Christ or to separate anyone from Christ, even when they do in outlandish manners from time to time, with their vile disfellowshipment policies. These men all seem to think salvation is available through their organizations as they sit in judgment of their members.

Over the past 20 years or more, I have changed my mind about a few things Biblical. A big one is my understanding of I Timothy 2:5: “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”

This Scripture might seem clear enough, but I brought a lot of past baggage to my early theology. I believed from my earliest years that God really works through an organization, and more particularly through whatever man was leading that organization. I bought into the myth that the church is the Mother of us all. (The Scriptures never say this about the church. You can look it up).

Even when I reached adulthood and changed my religious affiliation, I ended up in an organization that claimed the very same things regarding church authority as I had been taught in my youth, accept more so. The only way I could reach the Father was through the Son, I was told, but reaching the Son could only be through a particular church organization headed by a particular man.

That dangerous theological view implies shifting responsibility for salvation to the organization and its leadership, giving them a dangerous degree of control over your life and thinking. This, in spite of Paul’s admonition to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling”, in spite of Jesus’s teaching about the truth setting us free, and in spite of Peter’s statement that we, i.e., we Christians, are a royal priesthood and therefore by definition have a direct private line to God without the need of a physical priesthood over us.