When Services Are Over On A Double High Day

After listeing to two 1 1/2 hours sermons on the same day.

Photo: SHT

Philadelphia Church of God Hides Behind Slick New Web Sites

The Philadelphia Church of God has a new website up in an effort to legitimize their standing as a church and its Armstrong Foundation.  Like Herbert Armstrong, Gerald Flurry is embarrassed at many times by his Philadelphia Church of God and its crazy teachings.  In efforts to mask those dangerous and heretical teachings, he places great emphasis on his Armstrong Auditorium Concert Series, his Jerusalem dig with Eliat Mazar and its recent Ophel coin find, and his new website called Watch Jerusalem.  The interesting thing is that this site is copyrighted by Gerald Flurry and not the Philadelphia Church of God.

It is a mixture of wild prophetic speculating and pseudo-news beefed up in a slick new formula.

The same goes for their Key to David's City, masquerading as an educational site through the auspices of Herbert W Armstrong College.

It is these kinds of deceptive tactics that rope innocent searching people into the madness, just like the church did under Herbert Armstrong.  The problem with PCG doing this is that it has developed into a dangerous personality cult with an abusive leader and equally abusive ministers.  Families are being destroyed and lives are literally being lost.  This sickness is not unique to Gerald Flurry's Philadelphia Church of God, it is equally applicable to the Restored Church of God, Living Church of God, Bob Thiel's African cult and James Malm bastardization of whatever it is he thinks he is doing.  United Church of God and Church of God A Worldwide Association, while may appear to be more benign, are just as sick as the more dangerous ones mentioned above.

For a church that claims to be the end time restoration of true 1st century Christianity, it is in such a theological and spiritual quagmire that it is amazing that anyone even finds it beneficial.

Two COG Related Books Make List of Top 100 Books On Escaping From Cults

There is a list up of 100 Must-Read Books about life in cults and oppressive religious sects and two books by former Church of God members have made the list and #1 and #90.

The first book on the list is The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult by Jerad Walker.

Amazon has this to say about the book:

A memoir of growing up with blind, African-American parents in a segregated cult preaching the imminent end of the world

When The World in Flames begins, in 1970, Jerry Walker is six years old. His consciousness revolves around being a member of a church whose beliefs he finds not only confusing but terrifying. Composed of a hodgepodge of requirements and restrictions (including a prohibition against doctors and hospitals), the underpinning tenet of Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God was that its members were divinely chosen and all others would soon perish in rivers of flames.

The substantial membership was ruled by fear, intimidation, and threats. Anyone who dared leave the church would endure hardship for the remainder of this life and eternal suffering in the next. The next life, according to Armstrong, would arrive in 1975, three years after the start of the Great Tribulation. Jerry would be eleven years old.

Jerry’s parents were particularly vulnerable to the promise of relief from the world’s hardships. When they joined the church, in 1960, they were living in a two-room apartment in a dangerous Chicago housing project with the first four of their seven children, and, most significantly, they both were blind, having lost their sight to childhood accidents. They took comfort in the belief that they had been chosen for a special afterlife, even if it meant following a religion with a white supremacist ideology and dutifully sending tithes to Armstrong, whose church boasted more than 100,000 members and more than $80 million in annual revenues at its height.

When the prophecy of the 1972 Great Tribulation does not materialize, Jerry is considerably less disappointed than relieved. When the 1975 end-time prophecy also fails, he finally begins to question his faith and imagine the possibility of choosing a destiny of his own.

The second book is Matches in the Gas Tank: Trial by fire in the Armstrong cult by Carla Powers.

Amazon says:

An empowering story of the survival of the spirit, this heart-wrenching memoir recounts a girl's stifled and abusive childhood in the Radio Church of God-a cult founded by alleged prophet Herbert W. Armstrong in Big Sandy, Texas. Rules imposed by Armstrong were arbitrary and unforgiving, covering everything from food preparation and appearance to arranged marriages and earning income for the church. Overcoming a childhood of warped teachings and deprivation, the wrath of narrow-minded, punitive ministers, and a dangerous, alcoholic father, Carla escaped the control of the church and surpassed the legacy of abuse and shame to become a highly successful corporate lawyer.

Gavin Rumney's old site has this about Carla Powers:

Carla Powers was Daddy's princess back in Arkansas in the late 1950s. Then Daddy got religion. That religion, based in the teachings and deprivation of narrow-minded, punitive ministers, tormented her dangerous alcoholic father and her entire family. Growing up, Carla never knew a woman could do anything more than she was asked—or demanded—to do. She definitely never imagined that other worlds would open up to her and she would rise to become a powerful attorney.Matches in the Gas Tank tells the story of life inside the Radio Church of God and the influence of Herbert W. Armstrong, the Church's founder and prophet. Under his influence, Carla's family moved away from relatives and friends to Big Sandy, Texas, an enclave in which everyone lived by strict and unforgiving rules arbitrarily determined by Armstrong. His vision of how to get to the "Kingdom of God" and avoid a sea of flames consisted of unending lists of rules covering everything from food consumption, to financial responsibilities, to sexual behavior. The only way to rise above the poverty level was to become a minister, and the only way to become a minister was to continually police your neighbors for sin. Ministers were allowed to barge in a home any time of the day or night to inspect everything from the cleanliness of a family's kitchen to the contents of their tax returns. 
This is the story of how Carla escaped the control of the church and found a way to deal with the legacy of abuse and shame left to her by her father. As she embraces her difficult childhood, she comes to understand that while those we love have the power to hurt us, they can't destroy us. We can find strength in unexpected places.

Anyone who has had a less-than-perfect family, has struggled with the faith of her fathers or has gone through recovery from abuse, perfectionism, or any cult of personality will connect with the power of redemption in this moving memoir.

The author heads the litigation department of a major multinational energy company (Shell). Before entering the corporate world, she was a trial lawyer in Houston for more than 20 years and an adjunct professor at the University of Houston Law Center.