A Short Public Service Announcement...

I recognize that matters of faith, hope and belief are unique to each of us as is our experience in coming to, going through and passing out of the WCG experience.  We all have our story and the thoughts, feelings and emotions that go along with them for having had that experience.  Once burned, twice smart as we say.

I also recognize there are, or should be boundaries in the topics expressed here.  The purpose of Banned is well stated in the Blog Header.  Each of us, I am sure, only ever wanted to know what is true in life and what is not.  We all come to different conclusions and like it or not, what is true for one is heresy and annoying to another.

I do consider the criticism received here, though please know, I express my own experiences and journey through all this in my own life sincerely. We all think others will "get it" if we just explain it well. But ultimately it is each to their own and we all have a right to the personal outcomes in our hearts and minds for having had this experience.

All that to say, I take the criticism to heart. It is not my purpose to offend, destroy faith or take one's crown.  I only ever wished to share my own perspectives , interests now able to be better expressed and conclusions for myself in my own life if it helped others in some way.  As a former member and pastor, I simply wished to share my own journey out of both.

I  do apologize for straying too often outside the boundaries of the intent of this Blog and will tighten it up to reflect appropriate observations about the  WCG experience and all the reminders out there of why are very glad to be free of it.

And now we return to our regularly scheduled program

Preaching the Gospel in the Internet Age

New Beyond Today TV Studio Set Installed

Preaching the Gospel in the Internet Age

By Jack Oakes

United Church of God (UCG) recently spent one million dollars on a new TV studio. But has this money actually achieved anything? The new studio has not increased audiences.

The UCG TV studio is an example of where most of the Church of God (COG) community are going wrong. Their thinking on preaching is still stuck in the 1980’s or even earlier. They are not adapting their preaching to current times.

To assess the impact of the new TV studio, I tracked its performance on the UCG YouTube station Beyond Today TV. In June 2018 The Beyond Today TV station had 32,000 subscribers. By the time the first programs recorded in the new TV studio were placed on YouTube in January 2019, seven months later, it had approximately 43,000 subscribers. This was a subscriber growth of 11,000 or 35%. In the seven months since January, it has grown by 7,400 or 17% to 50,800 subscribers. The new TV station has had no impact on subscriber growth.

UCG Beyond Today TV Program shows no increase in the growth rate of subscribers since the use of their new TV Studio which started in January 2019. Fig 1 UCG Beyond Today YouTube subscribers.(1)

TV ratings are on the decline, especially among young people.(2) The 4 main US TV networks combined audience declined by 4.8 million viewers or 16% in the 4 years from 2014 to 2017.(3)Popular current affairs programs such as 60 Minutes ratings have declined from the 20’s up until the mid 1990’s to as low as 7.7 in 2015-16 to recover to 12.5 in 2016-17.(4)

To take an old-style talking heads TV format, supplant it into social media such as YouTube, does not fix the problem of declining TV audiences. COG’s need to reassess how they preach.

Let me quote from Professor Peter Horsfield, Professor of Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia who previously worked for the United church (a mainstream Australian Protestant church). He sums it up this way.

“When you look at the history of Christianity, it has been a history of writing based and printing based institutions organised around power structures and sustained by having elite leaders who are educated in writing and printing. Most of the mainline denominations are fundamentally print based organisations. They operate institutionally out of bureaucracies for example.” (5)

Sound familiar? Herbert Armstrong’s background was print advertising. Horsfield goes on to say -

What digital media has done is that they have not only challenged the way in which churches communicate, they have actually changed the fundamental media environment which previously sustained the sort of organisation that Christianity has had. It is changing quite considerably and that partly explains the decline in the number of people in mainline churches now. And the increasing age of members because churches still address a culture that is now a past culture.(5)

Horsfield is writing about mainline Protestant churches, but he could just as well have been talking about COG’s. 

However, there are Christian YouTube channels that are growing very fast. For example, The Bible Project YouTube station(6). The Bible Project was started by 2 individuals in 2014 and has grown to 1.45 million subscribers by August 2019. Good News started in 2006 and has just managed to reach 50,800 subscribers by August 2019.

The Bible Project uses short animated videos to reach its audience; not talking heads.

In comparison to the Good News TV station subscriber growth of 7,400 or 17% since January, The Bible Project has grown by 280,000 or 24% to 1.45 million subscribers.

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The Bible Project YouTube station is growing much faster than UCG Beyond Today TV Program. The Bible Project added 280,000 subscribers compared to 7,400 for Beyond Today between January and August 2019. Fig 2 UCG Beyond Today YouTube compared to The Bible Project subscribers.(1)

Another example of YouTube success is the conservative commentator Denis Prager. 

Prager changed his YouTube format to animation-based mode in 2013. This change resulted in a increase in subscribers. 

“This year [2015] 1we will have more than 50 million views as confirmed by YouTube and Facebook,” Prager says in an email to The Daily Signal, adding that “the largest single demographic of our videos are people under 35 years of age.”(7)

COG’s more specialised message will never have the mass appeal of a more general Bible message like The Bible Project. However, it would have been more effective for UCG to spend their members/donors $1 million on a different format to talking heads such as an animation-based model.

My plea is for COG’s review their media preaching and move into the twenty first century. 

References :

(1) I regularly accessed the Beyond Today TV and The Bible Project YouTube stations on the internet to progressively record their subscriber numbers. I realise this is not the only platform UCG use, nor am I aware of any advertising support they may have used to support their YouTube results.

Subscribers usually indicate an interest in the station. Views on the other hand can be fleeting and hard to evaluate their quality of interest.

YouTube Subscribers
Date	Beyond Today	The Bible Project
25-Jun-18	32,110	878,364
19-Jan-19	43,426	1,174,863
19-Aug-19	50,841	1,454,823

(2)  Why Traditional TV Is in Trouble.  No Choice for Marketers But to Rethink TV Ads. New York Times May 14, 2018 Sapna Maheshwari and John Koblin

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/13/business/media/television-advertising.html [Accessed 18 August 2019]

(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_ratings. [Accessed 18 July 2019]. 

(4)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes. [Accessed 18 July 2019]

(5) The Medium is the Message. ABC Radio RN. The Spirit of Things. 23 August 2015 Professor Peter Horsfield. Professor of Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne, Peter was Dean of the Uniting Church Theological Hall, Melbourne, from 1987-1996 and Lecturer in Applied Theology at the United Faculty of Theology in Melbourne. From 1997-2005, Peter was a member of the International Study Commission on Media Religion and Culture. Author of many books including “From Jesus to the Internet: A History of Christianity and Media (2015)”.

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/spiritofthings/the-media-is-the--message/6703146 [Accessed 18 August 2019]

(6) The Bible Project was started in 2014 by Timothy Mackie and Jonathan Collins  who originally met at the Multnomah Bible College. Their stated goal - ” The Bible is one unified story that leads to Jesus, but we don't always treat it that way. At The Bible Project, we make animated videos that explore the books and themes of the Bible.”

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVfwlh9XpX2Y_tQfjeln9QA [Accessed 19 July 2019]

(7) How Dennis Prager’s Conservative Online University Reaches Millions Madaline Donnelly   November 04, 2015. The Daily Signal

https://www.dailysignal.com/2015/11/04/how-dennis-pragers-conservative-online-university-reaches-millions/ [Accessed 19 July 2019]

Gerald Weston: Bahama's Destroyed Because They Won't Go To The Feast of Tabernacles?

It is Feast time in Church of God land and of course Satan is on a rampage to keep the chosen frozen of the COG from going to their selected resorts.

LCG's god is constantly testing the remaining members to see who is with the program and who is not.  Thus, he lets Satan rampage around the world using hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, volcano's and more in order to keep COG members from going to the Feast.  Of course, the god of Armstrongism always makes sure the Feast sites are OK and COG members can play and have fun while those in Bermuda and else where are suffering horrendously with death and destruction.

This is the kinds of bullshit that comes from Armstrongite cult leaders that refuse to follow Jesus and the New Covenant.

At least there is one positive note to what is written below.  There is no mention of gay sex.

Greetings from Charlotte, 

The big news in the Caribbean and Southeastern United States this week was Hurricane Dorian. 

The destruction the category 5 monster produced by sitting on top of the Bahamas for two dayswas immense. The fear and uncertainty experienced by its residents from howling winds and rising waters tearing structures apart must have been horrific. I’m sure many cried out to God hour after terrifying hour. But, the people of the Bahamas are not the only ones to experience such storms. The Philippines experiences an average of eight or nine typhoons (cyclones) a year, and it seems that every part of the world has some natural phenomenon to deal with: earthquakes, tornados, blizzards and freezing temperatures, or scorching heat. As pointed out in the booklet Acts of God, Why Natural Disasters?, God allows these things to remind us of our need for Him, and the time is coming when He will protect His obedient children from such disasters. However, even at the beginning of the Millennium, He will use the weather to grab the attention of nations that refuse to come up to Jerusalem to worship Him and to keep the Feast of Tabernacles. 

Meanwhile, we held a worldwide online ministerial conference this past Wednesday, in which Mr. Ames, Dr. Winnail, and I updated the ministry on a number of administrative matters. Tomorrow’s World Presentations are scheduled this Sabbath for Montreal, Quebec; Birmingham, United Kingdom; Lansing, Michigan; and Raleigh, North Carolina. I’m scheduled to be in Wisconsin for a Regional Conference. Your prayers for those impacted by these catastrophic weather events and for our efforts to preach the Gospel are much appreciated.—Gerald Weston