Dave Pack: Exploiting Common

 

Exploiting Common

David C. Pack tantalized the brethren of The Restored Church of God about the wonderful, mind-blowing things the church COULD do after they got out of debt. This spiritual-guilt tactic gnaws at some brethren withholding Common because if they gave, the Gospel of the Kingdom of God COULD be preached to the entire world with clarity and power.

Part 501 – March 30, 2024
@ 1:47:21 'Cause we could we could drop an atomic bomb on the world.

Part 507 – April 16, 2024
@ 1:17:28 And we're in a position where we can make a lotta noise. We could rattle some teacups in China.

But they won’t.

David C. Pack exploited widows and the dead to get his hands on their money. He exploited the Gospel by promising to preach it “very, very loud,” but now that The Restored Church of God is out of debt, subtlety is the game plan instead of blowing a trumpet.

Part 507 – April 16, 2024
@1:17:40 But there's a giant problem with that. You're directly fighting prophecy, and you're subverting it. Christ comes as a thief.

Part 568 – April 5, 2025
@ 06:22 You’ll be surprised. You’d be you’d be amazed at what we could do. But there not a one of us in this room that wants to do that. And we could almost directly fighting a prophecy where the Work ends in a day of small things.

Oh, well. At least the debt is still gone for the benefit of…reasons.

Pastor General David C. Pack orchestrated the debt removal by exploiting the “sell all that you have” Common Doctrine. It is an artificial manipulation of New Testament Bible verses that applies undue influence upon RCG brethren through theological coercion to extract millions of dollars from them.

The Kingdom of God has not yet arrived, but financial freedom has come to The Restored Church of God and the Pack horses.

Due to the empty sacrifices of two widows and twenty-one other Headquarters congregation members, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit religious organization offloaded $3,115,200 in Campus properties, garnering a $1,124,300 sales profit.

Common built and expanded the Headquarters Campus in Wadsworth, Ohio. Common built the seven private homes nestled in the center of the Campus on Eagle Point. Common got David C. Pack out of balance sheet hot water and The Restored Church of God out of debt.

Despite RCG escaping corporate debt, the brethren of The Restored Church of God are still paying for the houses, and not just by the Headquarters employees living in them. The hard-earned wages of field members continue to support houses along Akron Road and Hartman Road in Wadsworth, Ohio.

The money cycle of life grows.

Pay Gaps Narrow

While pushing for more Common as the malarkey sand passed through the prophetic hourglass, David C. Pack assured members neither he nor the church would benefit from their faithful 11^th-hour financial Hail Mary.

Part 536 – September 18, 2024
@ 32:38 I don’t get your money. I don’t get a pay raise.*

“The Greatest Untold Story! (Part 536)” on September 18, 2024, is the most recent full Common sermon. David C. Pack pressured the entire church to pay Common before Jesus Christ was to return on the Feast of Trumpets. He preached the “sell all” message not for his sake, but for theirs.

@ 44:50 The best you can do if you sell all the best you can do is save yourself. You can no longer benefit God's Work. It's too late.

@ 45:34 I hate to put it that way, but I’m here trying to save your life. There’s no way we’re going to benefit.

@ 50:39 Keeping a home where you can draw out of it, probably too late to do that now, but where you can draw from it and give it to the church and never hafta pay it off till you’re dead. That, I mean, they have these reverse mortgages or all kinds of things that can be to for those who are serious.

If time was seriously running out, what was the point of giving brethren ideas for extracting more assets to surrender?

The answer is the same for why David C. Pack mentions Common a few days before the Kingdom of God arrives to change everything.

He does not believe it. David C. Pack does not believe his own teachings.

@ 1:06:04 If I lost my reward over telling you that, good. I don’t care. Because if it inspires you to go out and have the faith to pull the trigger and potentially save your life. You will not benefit us. But you’ll benefit yourself. I urge you to do it.

He urged brethren to do it, and some senselessly did. Jesus Christ did not return on October 1, 2024, but The Restored Church of God wound up financially benefiting less than a year later.

Funny how those things work out.

With the debt load rapidly dwindling because David C. Pack approached Headquarters congregation members and employees about buying a few million dollars’ worth of their corporate debt, his announced magnanimous generosity later proved to be a little self-serving once you place the pieces together.

Part 565 – March 22, 2025
@ 1:15:03 If time went on, I’ve promised that on May 1^st, the staff will get a sal-ah will get a pay raise, the likes of which they won't believe until they see it.

Part 568 – April 5, 2025
@ 01:33 And to be able to do that and to give large raises and schedule more, if we had to go on.

More raises will be coming because time will absolutely go on. RCG employees are overworked and underpaid. They deserve their raises. It is just funny how the timing of it all works out.

RCG employees who just bought RCG’s houses
received a pay increase right after that.

That is probably just a coincidence.

RCG’s Revised Debt Cycle Summary

1–Members gave David C. Pack their money to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom of God.

2–Instead, David C. Pack used the members’ money to secure bank loans to buy houses, upgrade, and maintain them.

3–David C. Pack asked members to move into those houses and charged them rent. Members paid rent to RCG on houses that were bought with their money.

4–Years later, David C. Pack asked members to buy the houses he bought with their money after they had been paying rent on them.

5–The Restored Church of God escaped corporate debt by putting members into debt while profiting $1.1 million from the increased home values.

6–David C. Pack takes money from the brethren and gives Headquarters employees pay raises so that they can afford to buy houses from the church. One homeowner is not a current RCG employee.

7-Now out of corporate debt, RCG “could” do a big Work, but doing so fights God’s purpose. They will still preach the Gospel, but just quietly.

8–David C. Pack has taught 125 failed dates for the arrival of Jesus Christ, and The Kingdom of God has not arrived, but 1,300 members continue to pay RCG tithes, offerings, and Common.

In effect, the Restored Church of God brethren still pay for the houses they already bought the first time. The sucking up of their money and critical thinking will never end because “The Greatest Untold Story!” Series will never end.

The No Benefit Benefits

If I could get a hold of Carl Houk on the Bat Phone, I would ask him if Dave also personally benefited from members giving Common after he preached Jesus Christ was about to return. Dave gave adamant assurances neither he nor RCG would gain from the frantic donations.

I am also curious how a 501(c)(3) nonprofit religious organization utilizing eternal-consequence scare tactics is not meeting the legal definition of causing undue influence and coercion, thus threatening their tax-exempt status while also being morally unethical.

Carl, Brad has my number. You may also write your clarification to exrcgwebsite@gmail.com.

Part 536 – September 18, 2024
@ 32:38 I don’t get your money. I don’t get a pay raise.*

The critical caveat to that asterisk came 33 minutes later.

@ 1:05:46 I will never take another raise again until the brethren can.

Part 565 – March 22, 2025
@ 1:15:03 If time went on, I’ve promised that on May 1^st, the staff …will get a pay raise the likes of which they won’t believe until they see it.

Based directly on his authorization, Restored Church of God employees received raises on May 1, 2025. Did David C. Pack also “get a pay raise the likes of which they won’t believe” too?

Whether that is self-serving or merely unflattering optics, it is one more Common thing to chew on.

With a loud prophetic clock looming over his shoulder, David C. Pack is a religious time-share salesman using manipulative mind games to siphon resources from members of The Restored Church of God.

This fantastic offer expires in a few minutes, and you must act now or you could lose out on being a part of the biggest, most world-shaking operation God has performed in the last 2,000 years. It would be a shame to let the opportunity of an eternal lifetime slip through your fingers because you lacked faith and hesitated. Remember Lot’s wife. Don’t choose the salt like she did.

David C. Pack is a hypocritical, blaspheming liar, false prophet, false apostle, and biblical fraud. The Common doctrine is just another confidence game to support RCG’s bait-and-switcheroo, sold with false notions that he or the church would not benefit because time was running out.

Only the foolishly ignorant and willfully blind in RCG believed that even for a moment.

But hey, for members hoping to own an authentic piece of Armstrongism church history, The Restored Church of God still has two residential Campus properties available for purchase. Make Headquarters an offer today! One of those real estate gems is the $500,000 Eyesore, and the other has the barn that literally "holds his horses."

Unless Dave gets desperate, he will be stuck with both of them until the vanishing point. No need to act fast, folks.

With no more Campus debt and generous pay raises in Wadsworth, the Work must go on inside the Restored Church of God. The brethren must still pay their tithes, offerings, and Common so the Headquarters employees can busy their lives away preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom of God quietly and in private. At least the secret chambers will be getting new carpet.

The Restored Church of God may be free from corporate debt, but they are still a spiritually bankrupt organization.

This is Part 4 of David C. Pack’s “The Greatest Untold Debt Story!”

Marc Cebrian

See: Exploiting Common

Ai COG: Fear Religion? "We don't preach fear... trust me." -GTA

 

The WCG’s Fear Factory: A Family Business

Garner Ted Armstrong, heir to the Worldwide Church of God throne, had a knack for sounding pious while the cult he helped run did the opposite. In a 1974 piece, he decried "fear religion," claiming most faiths are built on terror—fear of death, spiritual retribution, or eternal hellfire. He painted a vivid picture: childhood nightmares of goblins and haunted hospitals, Eastern religions with beds of nails, and even mainstream Christianity with its fiery infernos. The cult, he implied, was different. God, he said, isn’t about terror but a loving "fear"—like a kid respecting a kind dad, an "awesome awareness" of divine power, not dread. Sounds sweet, doesn’t it? Too bad it’s a load of garbage.

Here’s the truth: the WCG was a fear factory, and the Armstrong family ran the assembly line. They preached a loving God while keeping members in a chokehold of terror—end-times prophecies that never came true, legalistic rules that crushed joy, and the constant threat of being cast out if you stepped out of line.

Painting the Strawman: Everyone Else’s Fear

The article starts with a parade of horrors—childhood fears of the dark, fairy tales about trolls, and grisly nightmares of haunted hospitals with bloody corpses. GTA then pivots to religion: Eastern practices like self-inflicted pain, infant sacrifice, and body mutilation, all driven by fear of spiritual consequences. He doesn’t stop there—mainstream Christianity gets a jab too, with its "ever-burning hell" tormenting souls for eternity. Fear, he says, drives people to extremes, from hiding in wilderness caves to making life-and-death decisions in a panic. It’s a powerful force, he admits, but not what God wants. The Bible, he claims, isn’t a book of fear; God desires love, not torment, citing verses like “perfect love casteth out fear” (1 John 4:18).

This is classic WCG misdirection. By painting other religions as fear-driven nightmares, GTA sets up a strawman to make Armstrongism look pure. Beds of nails? Infant sacrifice? Hellfire? Sure, those sound awful—but they’re not the WCG’s problem, right? Wrong. The cult was just as fear-obsessed, only sneakier. They didn’t need fiery pits; they had the Great Tribulation, a doomsday prediction that kept members on edge for decades. Failed prophecies—like the 1972 Tribulation that never came—didn’t stop the WCG from preaching imminent disaster, urging members to stockpile supplies and flee to Petra when the end came. That’s not love—that’s terror, the exact kind GTA pretends to reject. The hypocrisy stinks worse than a splinter group’s sermon on tithing.

The WCG’s Fear: Same Game, Different Name

GTA tries to thread the needle with a “right kind of fear.” He quotes Deuteronomy 5:29—God wants His people to “fear” Him, but like a child fears a loving father, not a tyrant. It’s an “awesome awareness” of God’s power, a respect that keeps you from evil, not a terror that paralyzes. He leans on Proverbs 14:26 and Psalms 103:11-13 to drive it home: fear God, and you’ll find confidence and mercy, not dread. Sinners, though, should be scared—Hebrews 10:27 warns of a “fearful looking for of judgment” for the unrepentant. But for the faithful, GTA says, there’s no fear in love; God gives “power, love, and a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7), not a spirit of fear.

Sounds nice—until you see what the WCG actually did. The cult’s “right kind of fear” was a sham, a rebranded terror to keep members in line. They preached God’s love while enforcing a legalistic nightmare: Saturday Sabbath, dietary laws, festival-keeping, all mandatory, or you’d be cut off from God. Break a rule—like eating pork—and you were as good as damned, facing the Tribulation without the cult’s protection. Members lived in constant anxiety, scrutinized for every move, from what they ate to how much they tithed, leaving families broke while the Armstrongs lived like royalty. That’s not an “awesome awareness”; that’s a fear-driven cage, the same kind GTA accuses other religions of building. The cult just swapped hellfire for the Tribulation, and beds of nails for triple tithes. Same game, different name.

Fear in the Cult’s DNA: Control, Not Love

The WCG didn’t just use fear—they weaponized it. GTA talks about the “wrong kind of fear”—fear of man, failure, ridicule, or physical harm—driving everything from crime to social climbing. He quotes Hebrews 13:5-6: God won’t forsake you, so don’t fear what man can do. But the cult thrived on fear of man, specifically fear of its leaders. Question a small point of doctrine? You’re out. Didn’t drop an offering into the collection plate on a holy day? You’re unfaithful. Step out of line, and you’d be disfellowshipped, cut off from family and community, left to face the end times alone. That’s not divine awe—that’s human control, the exact fear GTA claims to reject.

He even brings up Jesus’ day, pointing to the Pharisees’ “fear religion” that kept people in line—parents too scared to celebrate their son’s healing (John 9:22), Nicodemus sneaking to Jesus at night (John 3:1-2), disciples hiding from the Jews (John 20:19). Jesus, GTA says, came to free us from this, preaching a message of faith, not terror: “Fear not, little flock” (Luke 12:32). But the WCG was the Pharisees 2.0, using fear to crush dissent while pretending to offer freedom. Members lived in terror of the cult’s judgment, not God’s—a far cry from the “calm, reassuring faith” GTA claims Jesus taught. The Armstrongs built their empire on the same fear they condemned, all while pocketing millions from scared followers.

The Fruits of the WCG’s Fear: A Legacy of Broken Lives

GTA ends with a flourish, claiming Jesus came to free us from fear religions that “lade men with burdens
grievous to be borne,” quoting Isaiah 29:13 to say fear of God taught by men is empty. But the WCG’s fruits tell a different story. Members were burdened with rules, guilt, and end-times panic, driven to give everything to a cult that offered nothing but control. Families went broke paying tithes while the Armstrongs flew private jets. The constant fear of the Tribulation—always just around the corner—kept members on edge, some even fleeing to remote hideouts, exactly the kind of fear-driven behavior GTA mocks in other religions.

This hypocrisy mirrors what we’ve exposed before: the WCG preached against paganism while inventing their own myths, and now they preached against fear while wielding it like a weapon. The result? Broken lives, shattered faith, and, as we’ve seen, a pipeline to atheism for those who escaped. The cult didn’t free anyone from fear—it just redirected it, turning God into a boogeyman to enforce compliance. That’s not love; that’s a con, and GTA’s pious words can’t hide it.

The WCG’s claim to reject "fear religion" is their biggest lie yet. They didn’t cast out fear—they repackaged it, using end-times terror, legalistic rules, and threats of disfellowshipment to keep members in line, all while GTA and his family lived like kings off their tithes. The “right kind of fear” was just control with a halo, a way to make their fear factory look holy. Splinterland, you’ve been sold a bill of goods. Ditch the cult’s lies and see God for what He is—not a tyrant to dread, but a Father who loves. The WCG didn’t free you from fear—they built a prison of it. Break out, and leave their con behind.

Fear Religion? © 2025 by AiCOG is licensed under CC BY-ND 4.0

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