The Church of God and Its Dystopian Society

The Painful Truth has a new article up on Armstrongism and the Church of God and its vision of things to come and how none of it has ever come to pass and what happens to people caught up in the deception.

Just what is a dystopian society?

• A dystopia is considered a fictional society usually portrayed as existing in a future time, when the conditions of life are extremely dismal due to deprivation, oppression, or terror. 

Sound familiar? Remember the Good News magazine that spewed out the WCG’s view of what God’s utopia would look like? It was heaven on earth. But to enter into this wonderful time (the kingdom) would require you to do unending somersaults of law keeping, tithing, and blindly obeying those who really did not care for you or your family.  

Remember the Plain Truth? Have you ever read Meredith’s or Flurry’s rag? They fill your mind with a hopeless air of despair. 

The propagating of these ideas and others into the minds of their audience that future race wars are coming, or economic collapse is just a few short years away, are an ideology the ACOG’s place into print within their magazines in order to form opinions, prejudice and to mirror church doctrine. This conditions the membership not to jump ship and chance that they will be caught up in the fray when the projected SHTF moment materializes. Anyone who has spent a decade or more in one of these groups can attest that a SHTF moment is always just a few years off.

What the ACOG’s fail to foresee is the results of their endless negative prognosticating. When a human has confidence and optimism, the very joys of life itself stolen from them, you take away the zeal for life, you squelch the will to live. You destroy the individual. What you have left is a shell of the former and a slave which needs to be constantly managed in order to maintain his or her direction forward.  

The Dystopian standard-bearer (an advocate or champion of a particular cause or ideology) often feels trapped and is struggling to escape and questions the existing social, political, or in our case, religious systems. 

The article is well worth the read: Herbert Armstrong's Utopian Society

Dave Pack: 6,000 pages later and Dave Says, "I’m an okay writer who worked hard and you know, kind of got better."

The most magnificent and most educated Church of God leader to ever exist in human history talks about the struggles he goes through to write his booklets.   His brain is such an awesome machine that it constant is coming up with new ideas and concepts.  It is then initially important o him to add those new revelations to his booklets.  It is an awesome task and only he is the one able to do it.

I’ll tell you an interesting story. When I wrote my literature, I found something. It’s just the way my writing is. If I were like Mr. Armstrong, I probably would not need to do this. He was a great writer. I’m an okay writer who worked hard and you know, kind of got better. That’s the way I would describe myself.

I would write a booklet and then I would come back through and make another pass, and I would see certain things I couldn’t see when I wrote it. I would give the pages to my wife and she would install them. Then she would hand me the booklet again, and I would read through it again and see things that time that I couldn’t see because the other things I had installed blinded my ability to see it. I would continue to read it. It was a lot of work, believe me. Those who think the literature…“How did you write it all?…don’t realize I read and reread…and I am not a fast reader…I read and reread, just in editing my literature, anywhere from 10 to 40 times—6,000 pages—so you can do the math; that is just the books and booklets.

I would, eventually, know that the book or booklet was done when I could not read through and find anything else; then I said, “That is it. Print it!” That usually was six or seven times. The longer ones, I would sometimes add more parts. Whenever I did that, I would read all the way through a book. For instance, Anoint Your Eyes started at two hundred (and I think) sixteen pages and ended up 270, because I would always want to add other things to it. That’s a little different situation.

Some of the earlier booklets I went through many more times, because I just wasn’t a very good writer in my opinion, and you know, Why The Restored Church of God? I edited 44 times. That was the first booklet, but I got better, I had to or I would have been dead soon, or my wife would have been……

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Church of God Leaders Turned On Me After Sexual Assault

The Church of God has had a long history of covering up for abusive ministers, leaders and members who have raped, assaulted, stalked and molested adults and children.  Many in the church stick their heads in the sand and say "well this happens everywhere in all churches so why should we be worried about."  While t his is trues, the those abused int eh Church of God face a double whammy.  The church in its outrageous arrogance claims to be the one true apostolic church practicing true Christianity.  How can the "true church" ever have abuse in it?  That is why it has been covered up for decades.  Church leaders have raped and assaulted women.  Others have stalked members to the point they drive countless miles so they can peer into bedroom  windows.  Others have molested children.

This people have been routinely moved to other church areas, left in leadership positions where they abuse again.  Then moved elsewhere.

The abused usually never receive compassion or help.  Most of the time they've been met with hostility, derision and contempt.  How dare they bring negative publicity to the church!  What did you do to cause the to happen?

The latest Journal of the Churches of God has an article from a woman who was sexually assaulted by a church leader and the shame she received from the church leadership.

COG leaders turned on me

The leadership in the Church of God turned on me. I was stonewalled and not spoken to. Except that I was spoken to, by the church leadership, to call me a troublemaker.

When I asked an evangelist who had intimate knowledge of the offender’s past, spanning more than 20 years of adultery and child molestation in the Churches of God, why the leader- ship of God’s church had recommended the offender to me in the first place, he cut me off and told me he was going to stop me right there because I was attacking the Church of God.

He reduced me to tears and I did not talk with him after that.

When I was at the Feast and tried to talk with another leading evangelist, he said no repeatedly.

I could not understand why he would not talk to me. He put his finger in my face and told me he would have deacons physically put me out of the hall and he would disfellowship me if I talked about the offender.

The offender stalks

The offender stalked me by calling and leaving recordings on my phone and via the Internet and E- mails, and calling me and letting me know it was he and then hanging up. 

I had a crisis in faith because I was being punished by the evangelists and leaders in my church.

I developed extreme PTSD. I did not want to live. I repeatedly begged God to end my life because the shame and pain were so overwhelming. 

The offender regularly moves his membership

My marriage, which I was trying to preserve through counseling with the man who turned out to be the sexual offender, ended. The offender went on to become a leader in another Church of God until it finally acknowledged the nature of the offender and put him out.

The offender to this day has a web- site trying to peddle his sermons to unsuspecting women and young girls.

Then she makes a telling comment about how help is better found OUTSIDE the Church of God.

Non-COG hope for survivors

Hope for survivors of pastoral sex- ual abuse can be found at The Hope of Survivors (thehopeofsurvivors.com). This group provides a support system for survivors of sexual abuse by min- isters that is grounded in biblical prin- ciples and not in protecting the abuser or the name of the church the abusing pastor is associated with.

I have found more hope and heal- ing here than in 20 years of ministers and other members stonewalling me and avoiding me like I was the chief whore in an ongoing whorehouse.

Women sexually abused by pastors are usually not wanton women, but women seeking help from their pastor and the pastor taking advantage of their vulnerability through their posi- tion as spiritual leader.

The woman is clearly not in the same position of power as the minister.