JEZEBEL: Yearbook ‘69: Attack Of The Futurist Christians!

Here is a great blog that has taken an old Ambassador College ENVOY from 1969 and posted  photo's from it and then goes into great sarcastic comments about the vision it (the college)  was attempting to get across.

Yearbook ‘69: Attack Of The Futurist Christians!

 In 1947, a group of Evangelicals founded a private college in Pasadena, where they imagined they could educate their children in a wholesome, Christian environment, free of the wider world's corrupting influence. Naturally, the 1969 yearbook is pure gold.

It gets worse. "Fashion has brought us the mini-skirt and the micro-mini, 'topless' bars and restaurants have sprung up — and even a few 'bottomless' and 'nude' have attempted to emerge. Now comes the "see-through" fashion for women. A whole new type of society has emerged — the Hippie movement, rejecting and rebelling against the 'Establishment,' putting a premium on slovenliness, filth, 'free sex,' and drugs. [...] The Social Order today is acutely SICK! It supplies no PURPOSE for human existence, knows nothing of the TRUE values, has no knowledge of THE WAY to real peace, happiness, and abundant well-being."

Except for at Ambassador College, where all the students dress like they're going to a John Birch Society social in 1953, and they live and learn in their own little palatial, green oasis of traditional, Godly Education and Values.

Looking through the pictures of all these smiling, perfectly posed, carefully lit, healthy-looking young white people, I couldn't help but think of Joan Didion's essay "Good Citizens", the third section of which gives Didion's account of the 1970 United States Junior Chamber of Commerce Annual Congress. The essay is kind of about how these men and women were prepared for a world that, thanks to the agitations and upheavals of the late 1960s, no longer exists:

"At first I thought I had walked out of the rain into a time warp: the Sixties seemed not to have happened. [...] this resolute determination to meet 1950 head on was a kind of refuge. Here were some people who had been led to believe that the future was always a rational extension of the past, that there would ever be world enough and time enough for 'turning attention,' for 'problems' and 'solutions.' Of course they would not admit their inchoate fears that the world was not that way anymore. Of course they would not join the 'fashionable doubters.' Of course they would ignore the 'pessimistic pundits.' Late one afternoon I sat in the Miramar lobby, watching the rain fall and the steam rise off the heated pool outside and listening to a couple of Jaycees discussing student unrest and whether the 'solution' might lie in on-campus Jaycee groups. I thought about this astonishing notion for a long time. It occurred to me finally that I was listening to a true underground, to the voice of those who have felt themselves not merely shocked but personally betrayed by recent history. It was supposed to have been their time. It was not."

Girl Priest: I grew up in an apocalyptic, utopian, socialist, Christian cult.

In surfing around the Internet tonight I found this interesting thread on Reddit.  It is  a pretty long thread of different comments by different people who have been tainted by Armstrongism. I grew up in an apocalyptic, utopian, socialist, Christian cult. 

I see that the fine folks at SILENCED, Escaping Eden and IRONWOLF also found the thread.

Both joined before I was born. They met at the Church sponsored Ambassador College.

My Dad joined when he was 14 because of HIS dad. Why his dad got into it, I have no clue. I guess I could ask my dad that one of these days.

My Dad's dad got cancer when my Dad was only 17. The church was not supportive of conventional medicine on the whole (I wasn't vaccinated until the school told my mother I couldn't attend unless I got my shots) so my Grandpa died fairly quickly.

After he died, my grandma went a little ape-shit and left her grieving 17 year old son alone in their home in California while she ran off to Montana.

My family has a big problem of running off to Montana when things get tough.

My grandma never bought into the church. She liked to smoke. Wouldn't quit Christmas and stuff. And interestingly, after the death of her husband, who was a fire Captian in LA, she slept with a good chunk of the Los Angeles fire department. I guess she had a type.

The key thing is that The Church really took care of my dad after his dad died. A church family took him in. And he went to the church's college, Ambassador College. That was where he met my mom.

My mom was born and raised in Nova Scotia. She is the middle of 7 children. She was a shy, anxious child and, from what I hear and understand, being the middle child, she was often sort of pushed to the side. She started listening to Armstrong on the radio in the early 70's when she was an early teen. I know she found Armstrong's prophecies and interpretation particularly fascinating. There was a lot of End Times stuff. Very sensational. He was always interpreting news with the Bible and vice versa.

I remember her telling me that, when she was 13, she stopped participating in holidays because of Armstrong's teachings. So imagine a 13 year old staying upstairs on Christmas morning and refusing presents.
When she was 18, she left home to go to Pasadena to one of Armstrong's colleges. Ambassador College

Church of God International Continues To Promote a COG Lie

I had a blurb a while back about the Waldenses and how they were NOT Sabbatarians or a remnant of the 'true church".  You would think that the various COG's would do some actual research before they write their articles.  CGI apparently did not feel the need to do so and relied upon illogical research of past COGers.

CGI's magazine Armor of God had this to say:

Extreme and excessive persecution was used to wipe out every historical trace of the Sabbath-keeping, Feast-keeping Church of God, which stood up for the doctrines left by the Apostles. As the Church of God struggled to survive, moving from place to place, it took on various ‘nicknames’ in different territories.

Names like the Paulicians, Waldenses, Leonists, Vaudas Cathars, and Albigensians were all attached at some time or another throughout the centuries, describing
these people and their movements.

Who does CGI rely upon for this information?  An outdated and poorly research book and a COG members' research:

For example, Orthodox Christians date the Waldenses as originating in the twelfth century and named after a wealthy French merchant Peter Waldo, who was founder of a radical ascetic Christian movement. But much information has come to light proving the Waldenses existed as early as the second century.

The recent work of Andrew N. Dugger and Clarence O. Dodd, titled, A History of the True Church, and Richard C Nickels’ Six Papers on the History of the Church of God, have done much to preserve some of the earlier writings about these groups.

In another bold claim, they said that England was a sabbath keeping nation until Ethebert, King of Kent converted to Catholicism in 597 AD.

“Catholicism was not established in Britain, until the conversion of the Angles in the 6th century by Augustine of Canterbury. According to Butler, Ethelbert, king of Kent, was converted to Catholicism at Pentecost 597AD with some 10,000 subjects baptized at the pagan midwinter Christmas festival of 597. The Christians of Britain were up until that time, predominantly, Sabbath-keepers, who kept the food laws and the Holy Days.”

Being the Anglophile that I am and in the collection of numerous books I have back several hundred years, there is no mention in any of those books that the nation of England was a nation of sabbath keepers! Even my extensive collection of Celtic books never refer to the English or Saxons as "sabbath keepers."  Sure, many of the traditions of the Celts were carried north to England as they travelled across Europe and Asia as the people migrated, but, sabbatarianism is not one of the traits that is ever mentioned.  Of course, there is a reason for this in COG lore.  It is not mentioned because Satan was seeking to destroy the true remnant with intense persecution and those evil Catholics stopped the truth from being published.  Ho hum......