1997 Prophecy on Why the Church of God Movement is Doomed to Irrelevancy

This article has been floating around on the internet this past week or so.  Several have sent it to me.

Why The Church Of God Movement Is Doomed To Irrelevancy
(Written in 1997 on WCGnet))

What is the future of the WCG and its offshoots? Can good fruit come from a bad tree? The history of the Armstrongist movement shows that the answer is no. The current state of the church of God groups tends to confirm this. Fewer and fewer people are attending the WCG as dissatisfied former members stay away. As it turns out, the United Church of God isn't so united after all. Every few months we hear one congregation or another splitting, with one group establishing their own fellowship. The Global church continues to struggle along with its financial difficulties. And the Philadelphia church will not grow as the policy of its ministry seems to be to disfellowship one old member for every new member that joins.

In the future, the churches of God will continue to experience further decline and
fragmentation. Eventually, the large groups will shrink into insignificance, and most church of God members will belong to small, independent congregations. Armstrongism is a heresy built on a foundation of lies. It will not survive close scrutiny. Those whose critical thinking faculties have been dulled from years of mind control will remain. Those who are able to think for themselves will eventually move on as they discover that their belief system is a hoax.

When I say the membership will shrink, I am speaking of the lay members. The ministry is a different story. In society at large, when a group of people receives its support from transfer payments, the recipients are called welfare cases. When you have the same situation in the churches of God, the recipient group is called "the ministry." The church of God ministers are in no hurry to go anywhere. Heavens to Betsy, can you imagine one of them actually working for a living?

The United Church of God, An International Association is a case in point. Scores of WCG ministers left when the New Covenant doctrines were promulgated. What did they do? They formed an organization to collect tithes and redistribute the funds among themselves. Lay members were excluded from the governing body. The "ministers" distribute the funds as theysee fit. This doesn't sit well with some of the members (incredibly, some fully support the UCG governing body and feel the rest of the membership should be submissive. Some people never learn.), as the recent defections show.

The churches of God are doomed to shrink into insignificance. This is a good thing.
Armstrongism will always have a following as lazy individuals will choose not to exercise their minds and fully examine their belief system. But also, the decline of Armstrongism is means fewer will have their lives wrecked by following this pernicious ideology. Here, then, are the reasons why Armstrongism will wither away:

 For Worldwide Church of God (WCG) offshoots that still subscribe to Armstrongism:

1. The theology itself. 

For years the Armstrongist theology was shielded by an official embargo. Members were strongly discouraged from studying religious issues independently. They were to be dependent on the official pronouncements of headquarters, especially from Armstrong himself, and on the teachings of the local ministry. However, Armstrong's theology is so full of holes that it cannot survive close scrutiny.  Because of the fragmentation of the churches in recent years, the embargo on outside religious information has weakened considerably. More and more members will study the Bible independently and, if they are open minded, they will inevitably conclude that Armstrongism is nonsense. They will leave the Armstrongist strongholds, hopefully for theologically sound Christian fellowships.

2. The incompetence of the ministry. 

From the lamentations we've been hearing since the closing of Ambassador College/University, you would think that we were losing one of the world's great institutions of learning. Actually, Ambassador College would be a laughing stock if not for the harm inflicted on the WCG membership by AC graduates. Ambassador was a catastrophe, and the trail of the church of God movement is littered with the human wreckage left behind by Ambassador College graduates. The world is better off for its passing. Most WCG and ex-WCG ministers are nothing more than little autocratic know-it-alls whose knowledge of the Bible is limited to what they learned from Armstrong himself or one of his stooges. In other words, they don't know very much, and most of what they do know is wrong. WCG ministers were taught to fudge answers to the difficult questions they would be asked about the inconsistencies in WCG theology. A really effective minister had to think on his feet and come up with convincing answers in a hurry. Having known many such ministers, I can assure you that they were very, very good at it. Another thing they are good at is turning the tables on you. If you have painted them into a theological corner, they are so skilled in debating techniques that they will have you on the defensive in no time, and will soon have you apologizing for questioning them. Finally, they had to be able to isolate those who were incorrigibly anti-Armstrong. If the malcontent couldn't be defeated by debating techniques, the minister had to isolate him from the membership, lest he poison them with dissident ideas. All this was necessary to keep the tithes and offerings flowing freely through the money pipeline, lest Herbert Armstrong be forced to sell his jet and fly business class like everybody else. While all of this is helpful in ensuring a subservient, unquestioningly loyal laity in Armstrongist groups, these "skills" are of no use in genuine Christianity. They are mind control techniques, not ministering techniques. Which brings us to our next point.

3. Today's WCG and ex-WCG ministers are not as adept at mind control as Herbert W. Armstrong was. 

Nothing is more disturbing to an autocratic minister than a member who thinks for himself. Love him or hate him, if there is one thing Joe Tkach, Sr. did for church members, it's that he made them think for themselves. He forced them to take a stand for or against Armstrongism. For the first time in years (possibly for the first time in their lives if they were born into the church) church members had to make a decision on their own. They had to decide whether to stay with the WCG or leave. Unfortunately, some made their decision and stopped thinking, submitting to whatever organization with which they allied themselves. But some continued to think independently. All WCG and ex-WCG members have been lied to, and there is not nearly as much trust for the ministry as there once was. Today, you'll rarely hear anyone say "If Mr. [fill in the blank: Hulme, Tkach, Meredith] tells me to jump, I ask how high." (Some may say that in Flurry's church, but they'll probably get disfellowshipped anyway.) In the past, the ministers would answer questions like "Is it OK to cook on the Sabbath;" or "What is the proper hair length for men?" Now they have to answer questions such as "Is it true that ministers only paid one tithe instead of three, and they got most of that back as an allowance to keep the Feast;" or "Did Herbert Armstrong really commit incest?" Failure to answer those questions satisfactorily is usually a signal to the member that it is time to move on. The various churches of God may be able to lure church members (or will they? See point 4.), but they will not be able to hold them because they are deficient in the art of mind control.

4. Today's churches of God don't sell their product as well as Herbert Armstrong did. 

The followers of Armstrongism are an aging group, and there are few coming into the churches to replace them. True, some of the church of God splinters report growth in membership. But they will admit that the vast majority of their new members are defectors from other church of God groups. There isn't very much new blood coming into the church of God movement. Basically, the various churches of God are simply passing members back and forth between themselves. Time will reduce their numbers. As the older members die off, and as dissatisfied members leave, the churches will shrink. Once again, this is not a bad thing. The various churches of God embrace one version or another of Armstrongism, a harmful heresy. The fewer Armstrongists there are in the world, the better.

-----Anonymous

On The Current State of the Churches of God

The web blog As Bereans Did has an excellent detailed article up about why the COG's are not growing.  We have long held here that all the COG's are not bring in new members, that young ones are leaving, and that the only exist through splinter poaching.

One thing I have brought up before is that there is not a single COG out there that tried to reinvent it's self when it formed a new group.  It was their golden opportunity to become something new and alive.  Instead every single one of them had to imitate HWA and every thing he did.  They name their colleges after him, they name their magazines after his, they rewrite or plagiarizer his books, they buy his memorabilia and they live in the past.

The article goes over these major points that most people who are critical of the COG realize:

1) Availability of information on the Internet.
2) Lack of novelty.
3) Lack of charisma in leadership.
4) Sheer number of COG groups to choose from.

Some minor supporting points include:
- In-fighting between splinters.
- Aging membership.
- Failure to reach out in today's methods.

To me the one splinter group that had the biggest chance of doing something right was UCG.  They had a golden opportunity to start brand new, reinvent itself, and do a major "work."  However it did not accomplish that.  It now has splint into several different groups since its inception.

The article has this:

Armstrong was an advertising man. He knew the value of product differentiation. He knew what it meant to stand out in a crowd, and he knew what death awaited for any product that was just more of the same. He saw the appeal of British Israelism and the annual holy days. When he failed to really sell these and certain other notions to his branch of the COG7, he set out to sell them to the public. He had a niche and he had the know-how to capitalize on it.

Herbert Armstrong used his advertising experience to take his message to the radio waves. From the 1930's to the 1970's, most of the people who heard of the Radio Church of God, which eventually changed its name to the Worldwide Church of God, did so from radio programs.

What was that niche?

In short, J. H. Allen's British Israelism compounded with a few additional legal requirements created an attractive elitism. Toss on Alexander Hislop's concocted historical narratives to create a secretive conspiracy, and voila! It wasn't just about Protestant versus Catholic, nor was it just about the Sabbath versus Sunday. Now it was about being one of an elite group of people who were chosen by God to be given secret knowledge of a conspiracy stretching back 3,000 years, kept secret until this final hour before the return of Christ. Members of this elect group were called and chosen to fulfill prophecy by spreading the warning that doom and death awaited anyone not vetted into this "one true end-time church". This church superseded all previous churches; none of them would do. This was the final offer and it was only available while supplies last.

What a potent combination! Doomsday and Conspiracy. Fear and Pride.

Eat your heart out, Little Orphan Annie with your secret decoder ring. We have the keys to understand prophecy!

The problem with today's group of post-Armstrong leaders is that they have not learned the lesson of effective advertising.

They were told for so long that they had the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth that now they are in a predicament. No one boards a plane intending to be locked into a holding-pattern. How do you differentiate your product when you are more or less forbidden to change it and make it distinctive, and there are nearly a thousand other people selling the same thing?

The article then talks about the "charisma" of the current crop of COG leaders.  None of them, and I mean NONE of them have the charisma of HWA or GTA. Pack has proven himself to be lying narcissist, Flurry is batshit crazy and Weinland is in prison.

Most of the current COG leadership try to solve the problem of brand differentiation by heaping upon themselves titles and honors. "I am this or that prophetic messenger!" "I am going to train this or that prophetic messenger!" "I have the most pure and unadulterated continuation of the original."

Unfortunately this approach is almost entirely dependent on the charisma of the glorious leader. If you don't have a glorious leader with charisma, as Garner Ted Armstrong had in abundance, then you simply cannot win with this approach.

Herbert Armstrong's personal charisma was high, far higher than any of his remaining followers, but Garner Ted's was higher. It was Garner Ted that was personally responsible for the greatest increases in membership from the 1950's through the 1970's.

There was nothing in the entire organization or any of its competitors who could match him. He was handsome, intelligent, well spoken, had a baritone voice soft as butter, was educated in the areas that mattered, and you couldn't ask for better rhetoric. The women loved him. And through it all, he still seemed down-to-earth and approachable. He was a leader for the people. I tell you the truth if he hadn't been caught up in the church he would have been somebody.

Compare that to the current leader of the Intercontinental Church of God.

"Who?" you ask. Exactly!

Certain ones in the current crop of splinter group leaders have a portion of charisma, but they simply don't have enough. Their charisma is a flash in the pan. It may keep established believers, but gaining new believers is much more difficult. Cult of Personality can only take you so far. As with the Intercontinental Church of God, when the leader is struck, the sheep will scatter.

The universal method to overcome lack of charisma is to spend money. You have to have members to get money, then you have to spend money to get members. It's a catch-22. Not only that but you have to keep spending more and more money, which means you have to keep asking for more and more. There's only so long you can squeeze blood from that turnip. It never, ever lasts. It never truly can replace charisma.

Armstrongist COGs these days are stagnating and declining in attendance because their leadership lacks the charisma of old.

Read the entire article here:   Current State of Armstrongism

Bob Thiel Disappointed That COG Members Are Not Reading His Article About David C Pack

Poor non-ordained Bob, try as he might, he just CANNOT make the impact that he thinks he is making.  Like Pack, Thiel thinks he is reaching more people than any other COG in human history has ever done.  Like Dave Pack, he also is an abysmal failure.

Bob, like most of us, has been saying that there will be no large influx of COG members from the top three COG's into Dave's personality cult.

Bob also for some illogical reason seems to think he is one of the three COG leaders Dave clams will die by August 31.  All I can say to that is, dream on little guy, you are nothing but a pimple on Dave's plans.

Bob wrote an article some time back, Why Not The Restored Church of God in which he hoped to stop large numbers of COG members from jumping ship into RCG.  Bob was trying to influence people into coming into his improperly named Continuing Church of God.  Apparently no one is reading Bob's article and Bob is sorely disappointed.

Since my article Why Not the Restored Church of God? shows up on the first page when people do a Google search of the improperly named Restored Church of God, it would seem that there would be a massive increase in views if indeed, massive numbers were going over to RCG. But alas, that is not the case.