Obsessive Defiled Religion And What It Has Done To The Kitchen Family And The COG

Screenshot of Facebook post

Oh Sam why?

Now he is stealing The Worldwide Church of God Archives name.

I have Original Use, and his private messages revealed I had original use.

Brethren PRAY! He believes He is restoring, by stealing from his brother. I heard from Mr. Herbert W Armstrong today in the sermon titled "The Trunk of The Tree" about restoring. What he is doing is far from it. PRAY FOR HIM. I have gone to him about it, But he is convinced he is doing God a service by doing this.

Timothy Kitchen isn't taking crap from his brother Samuel in the recent church website debacle.

Timothy writes:

My brother has publicly said a lot, which has many lies. I was going to post something going through them and the thought came to me that I don't need validation nor justification. Which I believe is God by the Holy Spirit. The truth, which Sam openly does not have, stands alone. God will see to it, I do not have to go fighting these exhaustive battles with someone who refuses to see the truth. Years ago I would have gone through the hours of writing something up to defend myself and the truth. I am not that man anymore. Christ will take care of it.

I had the thought to post all of his and my messages, "to show the truth", but it would drag others, let alone my brother and I, into this pig pit. And Satan is behind those thoughts. I recognize it. And I won't do it. 

What Sam posts reveals the many contradictions and lies, all by his own mouth. God does not want brothers fighting online, or in private at all. But my brother is very angry. All I ask of everyone is to pray for him. Pray for me. God is the solution to these problems. If it is of God, it will grow on into Eternity. But if it is not, it will fail and die alongside everything in this world that is physical. I will not reply to his public postings anymore. I pray God's will be done, and it will be. With my heart problems this is all designed to stress me out. I cannot be distracted from what God says to. This is all a distraction. The enemy is surrounding the Church and Nations, and Satan wants us focused on each other rather than on what God says to focus on. We must be watchful. And Satan is doing his attacks from within, so we can get our eyes off Jesus Christ. So, Get behind me Satan! The Lord rebuke thee.

Sincerely,

Timothy Kitchen Jr

Both Samuel and his younger brother Clint are now attacking Timothy:

My little brother Clint Kitchen, wrote something to my brother Tim.

"Tim, Sam went to you as a brother and I did also, yet you still won't talk to me at all? You have yet to come to me at all, I went to you fled in the middle of the night from persecution from someone who was trying to force me to work the Sabbath and to do me harm! I came to you and the spirit that was there in your house was a high ranking demon, woke up in the middle of the night feeling paralyzed by a demon and had to walk outside and cast out the demon, then you and Kaylee kicked me out as soon as you got back from attending the UCG feast site and completely changed faces when you returned and completely attacked me, leaving me no place to go. You and Kaylee has been hostile to me ever since and honestly I could sit here and write a book on how much damage you have done to me alone. I believe that what you are doing is wrong and you are walking contrary to what God is saying to do. Your motives are not to help God's church but to destroy it, if by means to be in the Chief seat. And I believe Satan is using you to destroy the work of God and causing division to the Church of God. If I had the time before work to write up and give you all of the scriptures before work I would. This is the same formula Satan has used to devide God's church before and we must stand together and rid Satan and his division from among us. Sam did not steal anything from you and his attitude is not hostile, unlike yours to me. I could go through a whole list and when I get the time, I'll sit down and write something out. But as for now stop this division because it is not from God Tim kitchen! A house decided cannot stand. I love you and I don't want to see you lose your crown!"

It is sad to witness what obsessive religion does to people. In reading the Kitchens' Facebook pages over the years, all of the boys look like great hardworking guys until religion enters the picture, and then things go off the charts.

Pure and undefiled religion and faith in Christ is absolutely the opposite of what we see when obsessive religion is involved.

Amplified Bible

Pure and unblemished religion [as it is expressed in outward acts] in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit and look after the fatherless and the widows in their distress, and to keep oneself uncontaminated by the [secular] world. 

Herbert Armstrong did not bring peace to the world, the church, or its members. Enmity has been the name of the game almost from day one. This obscene obsession with all things Herbert Armstrong detracts from the peace in Christ that Christians understand.

John 14:27
The Message

25-27 “I’m telling you these things while I’m still living with you. The Friend, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send at my request, will make everything plain to you. He will remind you of all the things I have told you. I’m leaving you well and whole. That’s my parting gift to you. Peace. I don’t leave you the way you’re used to being left—feeling abandoned, bereft. So don’t be upset. Don’t be distraught.

Trying to recapture the glory days of the old Worldwide Church of God and wallowing in Herbert Armstrong's interpretations will never promote unity, a concern for others, or peace in Christ. The Armstrongist Church of God movement has been all about division and strife from its very first days. That division and strife have carried on into 2024 where we find the church fractured into well over 400 groups now.

Rather than doing things that promote division and strife, Christians should follow this command: “Clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity” (Colossians 3:12–14). 

 

All of these things can be summed up in one command: “Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace” (Colossians 3:15). In this context, letting the peace of Christ rule in your hearts means allowing the truth of what Christ has done for us to dictate our actions. We are not enemies with each other. We should not see each other as competitors for the same resources. We should see other Christians as members of the same team, the same body, and what is good for them is ultimately good for us, too. Christ saved us to be at peace with each other. When we choose to act in love and be at peace with other believers, we are allowing Christ’s peace to rule in our hearts. What does it mean to let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts (Colossians 3:15)?

 

Bob Thiel's Poor Theology Can't Sustain His Collapsing House of Cards

Bob Thiel's Preoccupation With My Posts About the Paleochristian Church

Although "Dr." Bob Thiel has written two posts and produced one video challenging my narrative about the First Century Church, he claims that Banned by HWA has mischaracterized his reaction as a "meltdown." Nevertheless, I am quite content to let my readers decide whether or not the Grand Poobah of the Continuing Church of God is obsessed with trying to disprove the alternative which I've offered to the Armstrong Churches of God's narrative about the Paleochristian Church. It does seem to me, however, that Bob's interest in attempting to refute my claims are related to a realization on his part that their narrative about the transition from Sabbath to Sunday is the foundation of the whole house of cards that is their theology. In other words, I suspect that Bob is smart enough to realize that the house of cards collapses when this particular card is removed.

Many years ago, Herbert Armstrong speculated that there had been a Grand Conspiracy engineered by Simon Magus and the Roman Catholic Church to hoodwink Christians into abandoning the teachings and practices of Jesus Christ and his apostles. According to this speculative narrative (which had no basis in Scripture or history), one of the chief means of leading believers away from "THE TRUTH" was the intentional substitution of Pagan days of worship for God's Sabbath and Holy Days by these evil conspirators - influenced, of course, by their favorite bad-boy, Satan the Devil! With a limited educational background and almost no awareness of the actual history, Herbie reasoned that there must have been a deliberate campaign to substitute Sunday for the Sabbath. How else to explain the fact that Christ and his disciples kept the Sabbath, while Catholics, Orthodox and Protestant Christians all kept Sunday? Completely ignoring the Christian writings from the First and Second Centuries which existed outside of the Biblical canon, he proposed that there had been a "lost" century, and that the Christianity which had emerged on the other side of this mini–Dark Age was completely different than the original - a "counterfeit" Christianity!

To support this false narrative, Bob has discounted and/or distorted all of the Scriptures and historical records which contradict it. For Bob, the Jerusalem Council referenced in the book of Acts did not eliminate Torah observance for Gentiles. For Bob, the Didache, the epistles attributed to Barnabas, and Ignatius weren't really speaking about the Lord's Day or Sunday - the translators had simply gotten it wrong - they had mistranslated the original Greek into English! Likewise, he ignores the fact that for Justin Martyr to have written in the middle of the Second Century that Sunday was the day that Christians gathered for worship, it would of necessity have had to have been the practice for many years prior. In other words, it must have been a long-standing tradition of the Church by that time. Moreover, his failure to understand that Christians would have had very good reason to revere Sunday based on the Gospels and Acts - Christ's resurrection and the founding of the Church both having occurred on that day of the week! Likewise, he seems to be completely oblivious to the impact that the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple had to have had on both the Jewish and Jewish Christian Community of the First Century. Instead, Bob chooses to focus on the Bar Kokhba Revolt early in the next century (which I'm sure contributed to the further suppression of Sabbath observance).

Bottom line, the old Adventist-Armstrongist narrative about Constantine and the Roman Catholic Church changing Sabbath to Sunday is not consistent with the available historical evidence. The Roman Church's authority to set Christian doctrine and practice was NOT widely recognized until the Fifth or Sixth Century. Likewise, the Emperor Constantine's famous decree about Sunday observance is recognized by most historians as an attempt at making religious practice within the Empire uniform and regular. In other words, the emperor could not have promulgated a decree of that nature which would upset what was already the established practice of the vast majority of his subjects, Christian and Pagan. Hence, I would encourage all of the folks in the Armstrong Churches of God to do their own research on this subject, and I would also encourage them to follow the evidence - not attempting to prove what you think you already know about the Paleochristian Church!

For those who may be interested, I invite you to explore the following:

Notice this excerpt from Early Christianity by Gaye Strathearn of Brigham Young University:

Christianity did not develop in a vacuum. The early church leaders operated in a world that was ever changing and expanding. During Jesus’s lifetime, the apostles were directed to concentrate solely on the house of Israel, but the post-resurrection ministry was fundamentally different. Expanding missionary work to include the Gentiles was a difficult transition—difficult to transition away from the law of Moses and difficult to transition into the Roman world. As Christianity grew, its adherents began to be found in all levels of society. Even so, its growth also led to significant challenges. While the Roman Empire was strong, Christianity’s political separatism and refusal to participate in the imperial religion were viewed as little more than irritants. But when the empire found itself in a state of crisis, as it did in the third century, Christianity was seen as the destabilizing force of the peace of the gods that threatened to destroy the empire.

Christianity’s other major challenge arose as it developed competing theologies. Initially, those competing theologies focused on the role of the law of Moses in the fledgling church. As it increasingly expanded into the Gentile world, however, those theologies were gradually replaced by differing philosophical interpretations. The resulting posturing of different Christianities to claim legitimacy became a divisive element that the Emperor Constantine could not tolerate in his realm. If Christianity was to receive state sanction and be the means of uniting his empire, then it would need to be united. In the fourth century and beyond, this led to numerous councils whose primary goal was to orchestrate that unity.

Notice this collection of Early Christian Writings from the early Church Fathers

You can also find many of those same writings at New Advent's The Fathers of the Church

Notice this excerpt from the Catholic Encyclopedia Online titled Sunday:

Sunday (Day of the Sun), as the name of the first day of the week, is derived from Egyptian astrology. The seven planets, known to us as Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon, each had an hour of the day assigned to them, and the planet which was regent during the first hour of any day of the week gave its name to that day (see CALENDAR). During the first and second century the week of seven days was introduced into Rome from Egypt, and the Roman names of the planets were given to each successive day. The Teutonic nations seem to have adopted the week as a division of time from the Romans, but they changed the Roman names into those of corresponding Teutonic deities. Hence the dies Solis became Sunday (German, Sonntag ). Sunday was the first day of the week according to the Jewish method of reckoning, but for Christians it began to take the place of the Jewish Sabbath in Apostolic times as the day set apart for the public and solemn worship of God. The practice of meeting together on the first day of the week for the celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice is indicated in Acts, xx 7; I Cor., xvi, 2; in Apoc., i, 10, it is called the Lord's day. In the Didache (xiv) the injunction is given: "On the Lord's Day come together and break bread. And give thanks (offer the Eucharist), after confessing your sins that your sacrifice may be pure". St. Ignatius (Ep. ad Magnes. ix) speaks of Christians as "no longer observing the Sabbath, but living in the observance of the Lord's Day, on which also Our Life rose again". In the Epistle of Barnabas (xv) we read: "Wherefore, also, we keep the eight day (i.e. the first of the week) with joyfulness, the day also on which Jesus rose again from the dead".

Miller Jones/Lonnie C Hendrix

Bob Thiel Continues To Double Down On His Erroneous 1st Century Beliefs With New Video Whining About "Banned"

This endless shitshow on 1st Century Christianity by Bwana Bob is hilarious. Talk about hitting a nerve! Ho Boy, did we ever. Shame on you Lonnie!!!