One thing the church of God has always been good at, particularly regarding numbers pushing, is how well they could miniplate numbers to make them look better than they actually are.
Before the great apostasy of the mother church and the birthing of hundreds of harlot daughters, the accounting department manager admitted that they could take any number and make it look good and therefore beneficial as propaganda for the church.
With all of the splinter groups, it has been a numbers game from day one. Each has to be the biggest and best COG doing a work as the world has never seen. Just look at Bob Thiel's blustering about his group. No one in any COG has a one-eyed monster as sueprfantabulous as his. It's the biggest and bestest COG to ever exist in human history! No COG can ever compare to his nor can it ever do as big a work as he is.
That blustering, particularly by a heretical apostate of the Living Church of God has to frost their butts at times, which leads Weston and others to whip theirs out and claim they are bigger and better.
Dear Brethren,
On November 12, 2021, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Churches Changed During the Pandemic and Many Aren’t Going Back.” The article discussed declining attendance in mainline churches. “The number of churchgoers has steadily dropped in the U.S.… Covid-19 and its lockdown restrictions accelerated that fall. In-person church attendance is roughly 30% to 50% lower than it was before the pandemic, estimates Barna Group, a research firm that studies faith in the U.S.”
The article went on to say, “Barna Group’s research suggests that tens of thousands of churches are at risk of closing because of membership declines and other long-term problems that the pandemic made worse. A dip in tithes and offerings is forcing some to prepare for permanently smaller budgets, with less real estate, fewer staff members and smaller programs.”
This is not the case everywhere—and we are happy to report that the Living Church of God has bucked the trend. God has blessed us with far more than mere survival. We continue to see the Work of the Church going forward at an increasing pace. One might have expected that finances would drop off with many out of work—preventing us from expanding—but just the oppositetranspired! Regular tithes and offerings increased, and special donations gave us a real boost. Instead of laying off employees, we took on several new ones, including ministers. We also increased the number of issues of Tomorrow’s World Magazine each year from six to ten, and our subscription list increased by more than 230,000 from January 2020 to January 2022! How encouraging it is that the Work shot forward with ever-greater impact during the last two pandemic-stricken years.
This is good—no, wonderful—news. But the world around us has also changed dramatically in the last two years, and most of those changes are not so wonderful. Quite the contrary—our world, whether we look close to home or more broadly, is angry and fragmenting.
The only problem with all these COG groups is that when you get past all their blustering and chest-thumping, the vast majority of humanity has never heard of them. They have no real presence anywhere and the readership of their propaganda rags is minuscule. None of them have a real presence in their communities nor take part in their communities to the extent they let their lights shine magnificently. The COG has always been great at hiding their light under the bushel basket.
The only thing one needs to examine a COG group anymore is this:
