Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God

 

The Church of God has a horrible track record of not helping those in need outside the church when tragedy or sickness hits. The excuse the church has always used is that preaching about some "soon coming" kingdom that is going to correct all of the wrongs is far more important than feeding the poor, providing shelter to the homeless and the sick, and providing assistance during natural disasters. The biggest factor in why the COG has never helped these people are that it would take money away from the church mission or cause a money drain on financing personal jets' providing personal homes for the ministry, and funding extravagant headquarter campuses.

One of the Bible verses the church loved to use as a reason to NOT help others outside the chosen frozen was Luke 9:59–60:

59 To another he said, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” 60 And Jesus7 said to him, “Leave tthe dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

So people of the world are dead to Christ. They do not see His beauty, nor do they hear His voice or desire to follow Him. Only His “sheep” will do those things (John 10:27). The people of the world are those whom the Savior describes here as the (spiritually) dead who should bury the (physically) dead. Let people, He says, who are not interested in My work, and who are “dead in sin” (Ephesians 2:1), take care of the dead. Your duty is now to follow Me.

The problem in using this scripture to bolster their argument is that most of them have hardly anything to do with Jesus Christ. They worship Moses and the law while ignoring Jesus unless they have to reluctantly drag him out once a year at the local Masonic Hall or high school gym to crucify him all over again, and then leave him there for another year. 

Granted, there are some in the church, like Kubik's LifeNets who do help people but very few others ever lift a hand to do anything.

Contrast the lack of concern in the church to those around us in the "world" who see a need and step up to the plate and accomplish great things.

A reader here noted this article the other day and sent it in as a sharp contrast against the lack of COG concern compared to those in the world.

Paul Farmer Public-Health Pioneer Dies of Cardiac Event at 62: Partners in Health co-founder who called healthcare a human right brought modern medicine and treatment to Haiti, Rwanda, West Africa

"Paul Farmer, a Harvard University physician, anthropologist and global public-health leader, spent decades bringing first-rate medical care to people in the poorest corners of the world.

Dr. Farmer, who was 62, died on Monday of a sudden cardiac event while sleeping in his apartment on the campus of a university he had helped to establish in rural Butaro, Rwanda, said Sheila Davis, chief executive officer of the Partners in Health nonprofit he co-founded.

He had been in Rwanda for about a month, teaching Rwandan medical students at the University of Global Health Equity and caring for patients on rounds at a nearby Rwandan government hospital that Boston-based Partners in Health built, Dr. Davis said.

Training a new generation of medical professionals in countries with poor healthcare resources was the epitome of Dr. Farmer’s dream of bringing high-quality medicine to the world’s neediest, Dr. Davis said, a pursuit he started four decades ago in Haiti. The University of Global Health Equity was recently cited by Unesco as a model for global health education." 

 

"He worked directly with the governments and people he aimed to help, living for years with his family in Haiti and then Rwanda. He gave lifesaving AIDS drugs to HIV patients in Haiti in the 1990s, helping make the case for global programs like the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief that later spent billions of dollars on drugs for patients in African and other developing countries. He cured drug-resistant tuberculosis patients who others in the field said would be too difficult to treat." 

 

"In earthquake-battered Haiti, Partners in Health built a 300-bed solar-powered public teaching hospital at the request of the government in 2013, and it now trains medical residents. In Rwanda, scarred by genocide in the 1990s, Partners in Health constructed a hospital with a cancer-care center in Butaro in 2012 and founded the global health university in 2015."

Imagine what this world would be like if the Church of God actually believed so much in that kingdom that is constantly horizon, so close yet constantly moving in the other direction. Imagine if they believed it with such fervor and moved them so much that they wanted to give a foretaste of that kingdom to the world around them. Talk about a boom in membership for the church! People would see real Christianity in action and not some pipe dream of a maniacal COG leader who preaches endlessly about damnation, death, and destruction, which sadly is the focus of the COG instead of sharing a grace-filled world.

 

Trouble At A Texas College

 

Screengrab from Collin College Youtube video

From a reader:

I don’t know if you have seen this, but a former COG member and Ambassador University faculty member, Neil Matkin, is in the news. My niece is at this college and this isn’t the first time Matkin has been in the news at this college.

 

At a Texas Community College, the Attack on Free Speech Is Coming From the Right
BY BRANKO MARCETIC 

Community college professor Michael Phillips spent the past year speaking out against a right-wing “purge” of progressive faculty at his college. Then he was fired.

For the past year, history professor Michael Phillips has been warning about a right-wing “purge” taking place at Collin College, led by administrators angling to remove progressive voices from the Texas school. Then he himself was purged.

 

Further down the article, there is this about Matkin:

Phillips had been clashing with administrators for some time before he was fired. Phillips immediately butted heads with now president H. Neil Matkin when he was a finalist for the position in 2015. Concerned that Matkin had received degrees from an unaccredited college run by the Worldwide Church of God (now known as Grace Communion International) — described by one former adherent as a “white supremacist doomsday cult” that taught that God approved of slavery and wanted white people to rule the world — he recalls confronting Matkin privately, asking him about his attitudes to matters like interracial dating and evolution. 

 

According to Phillips, Matkin got upset. For Matkin’s part, he’d later complain that Phillips had “come to the conclusion the church was racist and that therefore I was racist.” 

 

In 2021, Kera News of North Texas said this concerning issues at Collins College over students begin sent back to class for face to face class in the midst of the pandemic: 

Amid controversies over COVID-19 and fired professors, some blame Collin College's president
Over the past year, several controversies have been swirling around the college system in Collin County, north of Dallas.

Some faculty say morale is low because of continued concerns regarding COVID-19 safety protocols. For a long time, the college didn’t post COVID case counts online. Matkin once wrote that the pandemic’s effects “have been blown utterly out of proportion.” Meanwhile, over the summer, the college’s dean of nursing died from COVID-19 complications.

National organizations have berated the school, blaming Matkin for speech and academic freedom violations. Professors who’ve been fired have sued the college.

Further down this article: 

Tensions began to bubble more than a year ago, after some faculty, like longtime professor Audra Heaslip, wanted the college to consider online-only classes during COVID-19.

“The board of trustees made the decision for the college to go back face-to-face during the pandemic. I did not merely accept that but I questioned it,” Heaslip said. “They told me that I put outside pressure on the college to go completely online, which is not accurate.”

Heaslip was fired. She wasn’t the only one. 

 

There’s history professor Lora Burnett, whose contract wasn’t renewed after she sent a negative tweet about then-Vice President Mike Pence. 

 

Burnett's Twitter post led to complaints from State Rep. Jeff Leach, a Plano Republican, who tweeted that Burnett should go. He also sent a text message to Matkin asking if Burnett was paid with taxpayer dollars. Matkin responded, saying he would "deal with it."

Burnett said her free speech rights were violated. The school denied the accusation and said it doesn’t talk about personnel issues. 

 

In October, Burnett sued the college. 

 

The school fired another professor, Suzanne Jones, who taught at Collin College for 20 years. She told KERA it was because she questioned the college’s COVID health protocols. Jones, too, has sued the college. 

Matkin then got into trouble for mocking a Jewish member of the faculty by putting a bowl on his own head when talking about the faculty member mocking the yamalka he wore: 

The high-profile firings grabbed the attention of investigative reporter Michael Vasquez. In preparing a story for the Chronicle of Higher Education, he sought out former Collin College employees, and ran into problems. He learned many had signed nondisclosure agreements or NDAs. They’re rare for universities, but not Collin College, Vasquez said. 

 

“There were a number of former employees who I talked to who mentioned, 'You know, sorry, I wish I could talk to you, wish I could dish dirt or whatever, but I signed an NDA and I can’t,'” Vasquez said. “So I don’t have a firm grasp of how many, but I can tell you it’s not three, it’s not five, not seven. It seems like it’s considerably more.” 

 

Vasquez confirmed a story about the time Matkin put a bowl on his head, as if he were wearing a yarmulke. He was impersonating the college’s previous president, who’s Jewish. 

 

Matkin told Vasquez he was "going for a couple of laughs." 

Collin College history professor and writer Michael Phillips was shocked.
“I wonder how comfortable Jewish people feel at this institution where they think a symbol of their faith is a punchline?” Phillips said. 

 

Matkin, who’s not Jewish, told Vasquez he made a mistake, and would never do that again.

 

D - Lets Make Even Better had this to say about Matkin in March of 2021:

At Collin College, a Collision Over Free Speech

Matkin says he was caught off guard by the opposition to aspects of the reopening. “What I underestimated was that there are people who are scared beyond anything that I could imagine,” he says. “And they weren’t wanting to hear somebody talk to them about operating in the new normal. What they wanted to hear was the college is closing. And I didn’t say that. If I had to go back and do it over again, I wouldn’t try to bring logic to an emotional argument as I did.”

At the time, Matkin told faculty members in an email that the effects of the pandemic were “overblown,” and that Texans were “one hundred times more likely” to die in a car crash than from COVID-19. His math was wrong, Matkin now admits, but he stands behind his point that it was possible to mitigate the risks of the virus.

“I think early on it was hard to get good information. I do not believe [the effects of the pandemic] were overblown. In fact, it’s proven to be a worldwide tragedy,” he says now. “There were things that I did say early on that—would I say them today knowing where this thing was headed and what was going on? No. What I was trying to do was calm fears and trying to help, but I wasn’t terribly helpful at that point.”

News reports citing members of her family say that Iris Meda, the Collin College nursing instructor who died in November after contracting COVID-19, first thought she would be teaching online. Matkin disputes this.

“Iris Meda was planning to teach face-to-face nursing classes from the day that she was hired, and she knew that and had been excited about it, according to folks that knew her,” he says.

Matkin says that Meda and others in her classroom were wearing masks, and administrators do not know for certain whether she contracted the virus at Collin College. One of her students did test positive for the virus shortly before she began experiencing symptoms.

“Her death is tragic,” Matkin says. “It’s unfortunately become a symbol for some [faculty members]. My response to them just recently was, ‘Friends, we have a lot of faculty members that pass away for a lot of reasons.’” (In response to calls that the college memorialize Meda, Matkin has suggestedhonoring “all of our fallen colleagues.”)

Matkin attributes his seemingly callous announcement of Meda’s death—deep in an email about other college updates and news around Thanksgiving—to something of a clerical snafu. He intended that another email with more information on Meda, including details on funeral services, would be sent out first. But it was held up while he waited for word from her family, he says. (The Thanksgiving email did not include Meda’s name.)

One of the most damaging articles about Matkin came from The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

‘That Man Makes Me Crazy’ How one president shattered norms, played down Covid-19, and sent his critics packing.

There is a lot more out there about Matkin, almost none of it flattering.

Academic Association Opens Investigation into Collin College over Fired Professors

After four months of stonewalling, Collin College reveals the ‘contacts from legislators’ over Pence critic

Collin College doesn’t renew contract of noted historian, author who was critical of school

Collin College Settles With History Professor Fired Over Tweets

Dennis, please come back!

 

Dennis, please come back!

A few days ago, I read the following statement by Mr. Dennis Diehl with some dismay: “I realize I am pretty much done with posting.” Now, while I realize that that statement is not definitive (and that he has indicated this sentiment on previous occasions), I wanted to publicly state that the quality of this forum would decline without the voice of Dennis. Yes, I have arrived at very different conclusions from him about God, the Bible, and the value of Christianity; but I believe that he brings a unique perspective to these discussions that would be sorely missed here.

We all need to occasionally hear from people who do not share our views. In fact, I would say that it is essential to anyone who would even pretend to have an open mind or to be intellectually curious. Unfortunately, most of us tend to live in self-reinforcing bubbles these days. We surround ourselves with people who share our opinions and sustain our prejudices. This is the path to stagnation and ignorance. Moreover, even when a different perspective does not persuade us to change our opinion on some subject, it almost always makes us better informed and clearer about why we believe what we believe.

Dennis’ perspective is unique in several ways. He is one of the few former ministers of the old Worldwide Church to publicly comment here. As anyone who regularly participates here also knows, Dennis is a representative of the agnostic/atheist perspective. As such, Dennis tends to present an analytical and scientific approach to most topics (and we should all be able to see value in that). It is certainly helpful for people who are emerging from the fog of Armstrongism, and who are often in the process of reevaluating their belief system, to be exposed to the kinds of questions and observations which Dennis contributes here. It is naïve to think that many of these folks are not questioning just about everything – and there is value in validating their right to have questions!

Although I am a theist and a Christian, I appreciate Dennis’ sincere desire to help people to emerge from the trainwreck of Armstrongism. His journey led him to a different set of conclusions from my own, but it has endowed him with the same compassion and need to help others that motivates most of the rest of us here. Hence, even when we challenge his conclusions (or take him to task on occasion for appearing to be condescending), we should all strive to appreciate his journey, perspective, and desire to help others. Social media sometimes has the unintended consequence of dehumanizing our responses to each other, and occasionally makes us say things that we would never dream of saying to each other when face to face. So, while I am confident that I will feel compelled to challenge Mr. Diehl on some occasion in the future (if he chooses to return to this forum), I would like to express my sincere desire that he decides to do just that!

 

Lonnie Hendrix/Miller Jones