UCG: Will You Be Allowed Into The Top Quadrant On UCG's New "Love Map"

 

And people wonder why so many look at today's Church of God being so confused:

John Miller began the presentation by explaining that a lot of energizing work went into the Strategic and Operation Plans that the committee will present and a lot of people contributed to them. The plans build on what has been done before and add to it. 

 

The essence of what is before the Council came from a spontaneous moment in the August 2021 Council workshop during a discussion about Truth in Love. Truth in Love provides a roadmap to achieve the Church’s vision. The concept is simple enough that a child should understand it. 

 

Turning the Page From Old to New: Aaron Dean said that adding scriptures to the plan would be beneficial to the entire Church. In the plan that is being presented, you will see the same plan in two different forms. The second layout is the recasting of the existing plan in a new light to help the Church to move ahead spiritually. It adds a spiritual scale alongside the existing physical elements. 

 

The new plan format will allow pastors to give sermons based on the strategic plan. We expect significant enhancements and modifications to the proposed format in the coming years. 

 

In the presentation, he demonstrated that markers in the old format Operation Plan show where the same elements show up in the restructured plan. 

 

Mapping the Path Toward Living the Vision: John Miller reminded the Council of the Church’s vision statement and the importance of mapping a path to fulfill that vision. This plan will provide more opportunities for more engagement at a local level so that every member can do their part. There is a lot of pent-up opportunity for people to get more involved. 

 

Truth in Love Map: Aaron Dean said that everyone in the world lives somewhere on the Truth in Love map. God the Father and Jesus Christ live in the upper corner of the top quadrant. Others live throughout the other quadrants. We seek to move on the grid toward a goal to “Be Like Him.” If you are in the top quadrant, no matter where you are in that quadrant, you are okay. 

 

We hope that all elders and members will be in a culture of truth in love. We want to practice servant leadership and make meaningful relationships, practicing truth in love to become more like our Father in heaven. We all want to live in that top quadrant, but there has to be a change in each of us to change the culture of the Church.

UPDATED: United Church of God Draws Up Short List Of Potential Leadership Candidates And Their Requirements

 

Apparently, the United Church of God has named the following men as the potential figurehead of the church.

Aaron Dean

Peter Eddington 

John Elliot

Joe Greene

Darris McNeely

David Morker

Rick Shabi

Steve Myers

Mark Welch

These are the qualifications that UCG wants them to have:

Dan Dowd, chairman of the Roles and Rules Committee, led the Council through a discussion on the information the Council would like to see on resumes submitted by potential candidates for Church president, as indicated in the Process and Timeline for Selection of President document.

Every member was able to weigh in on various items they would like to see.

Mr. Seiglie says he would add something based on 1 Timothy 3, where it describes requirements for a pastor. It is important that a man not be a novice and has an amount of spiritual maturity.

Randy Stiver agrees and says having a pastor’s heart is critical to being a good president. Other technical skills can be hired. Pastoral skills are more important than technical skills.

John Elliot asks if an item could focus on the individual’s ability to teach. The leader of the Church must be very God-centric, focusing the home office staff and ministry on what Jesus Christ is doing.

Jorge de Campos says he appreciates the comments made regarding a pastoral heart. He says the resume should say how a man handles things in a loving way, and the experience he has in that. We should be asking how a person applies concepts on truth in love. He says a person can be knowledgeable on things in the Bible, but have pet ideas that are divisive.

John Miller says the qualifications from 1 Timothy need to be in the forefront, and the president needs to be somebody that can clearly articulate the Bible. If he also has business experience, that will be helpful too.

Dan Dowd says he not sure how 1 Timothy 3 can be quantified in a resume. It can show job history. He says a business background is important for a resume, and that can include projects worked on within the Church. He says we will have questions for candidates that cannot be quantified in a resume.

Paul Wasilkoff says that knowing these candidates are coming from the General Conference of Elders will be an advantage to us. We will generally know these individuals. He says that we do not want to exclude elders, and only consider pastors. He also encourages asking the candidates for background on their international experience. It will be important to learn if a candidate will be able to adapt to serving international areas.

Scott Ashley and John Elliott introduced documents from 2013 and earlier, that were used during previous selection processes. Len Martin suggest we don’t spend too much more time this evening and instead use the existing documents as the basis to proceed. He then asks if the Council is comfortable sending the documents that exist to the Roles and Rules Committee and then discussing any edits by e-mail. There is a general consensus to proceed in this manner. Scott Ashley forwarded the documents to the Council chairman and chairman of the Roles and Rules Committee.

PCG Makes Passover Story About Themselves Than That Creature They Call Christ

 

Leave it to the Edmond Oklahoma cult to make the Armstrong version of Passover into a story about their church, Mystery of the Ages, and the intense persecution it faces daily. I honestly do not think Flurry has an original thought in his alcobol-riddled mind.

Baptized members of the Philadelphia Church of God observed the Passover, a memorial of the beating and death of Jesus Christ, on the night of April 14. Let’s consider the persecution that God’s one true Church has endured to preserve the Passover.

After the PCG beats and kills Christ at their annual ceremony he is left to be swept up with the crumbs and tossed outside for another year.

Flurry leaves his Christ in the dust and proceeds to tell the story of his imagined cult history and warns everyone that there are not many true Christians out there and thus it is easy to prove they are true Christians

Just a few decades after Christ’s death, a dark curtain fell on the history of God’s Church. Concerning this time period, Herbert W. Armstrong wrote in Mystery of the Ages, "Already the curtain was rung down on the history of the true Church. You read of it in the book of Acts, but it doesn’t go much beyond that. But the curtain seems to lift, and we begin to get a little bit of the history in about A.D. 150. There we see a church calling itself Christian, but it’s a totally different church, as different as night is from day, down from up, or black from white. But it called itself Christian." 

 

Notice what Edward Gibbon recorded in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: "The scanty and suspicious materials on ecclesiastical history seldom enable us to dispel the dark cloud that hangs over the first age of the Church." Mr. Armstrong often referred to this time period as "the lost century" because in secular history, as he wrote, "the history of that Church was lost." 

 

The book of Acts ends abruptly, several years before Paul’s death. John wrote his epistles and the book of Revelation around A.D. 85 to 90. 

 

Continuing from Mystery of the Ages: "Scholars and church historians recognize that events in the early Christian Church between A.D. 50 and 150 can only be seen in vague outline—as if obscured by a thick mist." (This is the same "lost century" he referred to in The Incredible Human Potential as occurring from A.D. 70 to 170.) Some Bible authors who wrote after A.D. 50, such as Peter, Jude and John, provided some details of the A.D. 50 to 90 period of Church history. But the primary purpose of their writings was not to chronicle events of the day, so the history of that period remains obscure. And the obscurity grows far thicker after A.D. 90. 

 

Mr. Armstrong quoted from a book titled A Handbook of Church History, by Samuel G. Green: "The 30 years which followed the close of the New Testament canon and the destruction of Jerusalem are in truth the most obscure in the history of the Church. When we emerge in the second century we are, to a great extent, in a changed world"(emphasis mine throughout). 

 

We do have some insight into this obscure time from secular sources. However, an element of caution must be used when studying secular history regarding the first- and early second-century Church. It is extremely difficult to tell who was a true Christian and who was false. As historian Edward Burton wrote, "The fugitives from Jerusalem … while some became true disciples of Jesus, others, as in the case in spreading of new opinions, may have imperfectly learnt, or ignorantly perverted, the real doctrines of Christianity" (Lectures Upon the Ecclesiastical History of the First Three Centuries). From secular history, the one measure we can safely use to determine which people were part of God’s true Church and which were not is the doctrines they taught.