COGWA likes to pride itself as the best of the COG movements as they try to fly under the radar most of them. The problem is, that its higher-up leadership is from the same corrupt group that apostatized from the mother church when they knew they were getting terminated or fired in 1995 and needed to maintain their income level and thus helped start the United Church of God. Then a few years later they pitched another hissyfit in another direct act of rebellion against Church government and took a huge percentage of UCG ministers and members with them to form Church of God a Worldwide Ass.
Here we are now, close to 30 years since the main apostasy, and all of those initial loyal ministers and elders are aging out and or dying off. The younger men being raised up have no real theological education other than church-produced books and articles. Hardly any of them have a real degree in theology outside the COG empire.
They have now reached a crisis in that they have fewer and fewer men to serve and no way to educate them in theology, real counseling skills, or biblical hermeneutics and eschatology.
It is our view that outside the U.S., we have reached a crisis in ministerial leadership. Our church attendance is around 12,000, and it is divided evenly between the U.S. and areas outside the U.S. But when it comes to ministerial leadership, 75 percent of all elders reside in the U.S., and 25 percent reside outside the U.S. That means 25 percent of our ministers are caring for 50 percent of our members. This has become increasingly more difficult in the past several years with the deaths of four pastors, three of whom served outside the United States. The three international pastors were Manuel Quijano, from Peru, who died in June 2017; Norman Julag-ay, from the Philippines, who died in February 2018; and Eriz Dizon, also from the Philippines, who died suddenly the day after Pentecost in 2022. The fourth pastor, who worked in the U.S., was Todd Carey, who died in May 2017. Replacing these men was a major challenge for the Church.
Not only that, but COGWA is having to deal with over 50% of their ministers not trained by an Ambassador education (if that were actually worth something when it comes to theology), they now need to resort to little mini sessions in trying to educate their leadership.
The purpose of the PDP (Pastoral Development Program) is to upgrade the education and development of our current pastors. To date, we have 45 pastors and associate pastors in the U.S. Along with their wives, they will come to the McKinney office for four days of training during 2024. With almost half of our pastors having no Ambassador College training, we believe that these classes are essential for improving our service to the brethren. Our current plan is to hold three sessions of these classes in March, June and July respectively. Each session will consist of approximately 30 ministers and wives.
Not that the so-called training from Ambassador College was a legitimate thorough training in the Bible, but at least those that took classes there had some exposure to the Bible, even though most of it was still insular coming out of booklets and/or sermons by Herbert Armstrong and a few other so-called evangelists.
We are witnessing the death knells of Armstrongism in its slow painful downward spiral.
