It's That Time of Year: The Annual COG Pseudo Christmas Celebrations

COG News has this about how UCG, COGWA and LCG have their pretend non-Christmas Celebrations.

2016 will be the 20th year for the Annual Winter Family Weekend, to be held at the Griffin Gate Marriott Resort in Lexington, Kentucky, December 23-26. The event is open to all.

Three Church of God groups in the USA have taken up the tradition of holding a very large social gathering over the Christmas period.

Church of God a Worldwide Association members will be in Louisville, Kentucky, December 23-27, where the Galt House Hotel will be offering a range of seasonal activities for its young guests.

The United Church of God Family Weekend, will be at the Great Wolf Lodge in Mason, Ohio, December 23-27.

The Family Weekend for members of the Living Church of God will take place at the Renaissance Charlotte Suites Hotel, North Carolina, December 22-25.

“Activities will begin on Thursday evening with a casual themed dance at the hotel. Friday morning there will be a number of targeted seminars followed by an afternoon activity. Friday night and Saturday morning there will be special Bible Studies for everyone. We plan to again live-stream the Saturday afternoon Church service over the Internet. Saturday night there will be a formal dinner/dance for all ages. Sunday we will have the increasingly popular Sports Day with basketball and volleyball tournaments, free play, kids’ games and lots of free food! Sunday night we will wrap things up at the hotel with a Games Night. Last year we had over 800 people join us for the events and we hope that this year even more of you will attend. So grab your dance shoes and your tennis shoes and come join us for an exciting weekend of physical and spiritual rejuvenation!”—Jim Meredith

The Streets Cry Out!

Over the decades there have been various crackpots that have come up with all kids of pet theories, wild speculations and outright lies.  It is this same legacy that has allowed Bob Thiel and James Malm to flourish and find a few gullible members to join them.  Liars have always found fertile ground in the Church of God. We have had lying false prophets that knew the exact timeline of prophetic prophecy.

We have had crack pots that claimed the egret found in front of he Auditorium were going to come alive, four of them would pick up the auditorium and the fifth would lead the way as they flew it to Petra. This idiot actually had people who followed him out of the church over this.

One of the crazy things that was swirling around Pasadena when I came to college was the belief by some that God had personally placed his name on the campus.  That belief gained traction because of the street names surrounding the main campus.

Green Street
Orange Grove
Del Mar
St. John

When you take the first letter of each street you come up with this, "GODS," God's campus.  God's church, God's college.  You name it and some idiot claimed God was behind it.

That belief is still in existence today, even though God apparently abandoned the property a couple decades ago.

There is a new crackpot claiming to be God's mouthpiece, just like all the other COG face prophets out there.  This guy is Lee Clark.

The streets cry out!

As long as we're here let's apply the principle of using names to identify who Jesus is talking to in this letter. Notice that in verse 12 the word God is used exactly four times. Now did you know the following interesting bit of trivia? The Worldwide Church of God's Ambassador College campus in Pasadena, California, is bordered by four main streets. On the north is Green Street. On the west is Orange Grove. On the south is Del Mar. And on the east is St. John. These are all names of streets. Streets are places. Now if you take the first letter of each of the streets that border the campus, starting at the north and moving counterclockwise, they spell G-O-D-S. GODS!!! 

Most will say that this is just coincidence. Is it?! I can heap so many coincidences like this on top of each other that after awhile anyone with a converted mind will only be able to conclude that God Himself is so powerful and intelligent and detail-oriented that He planned all these "coincidences" out some time long ago in the eternity that He inhabits and that when Jesus, who had been God in the flesh, dictated these letters to the apostle John, He knew exactly what He would raise up in the future. He knew down to names of the streets that He would have a Worldwide Church of God in Pasadena, California, USA, eighteen-and-a-half centuries down the road. And He named the streets this way to remind us of our destiny!

Living Church of God Says There Is Splattered Blood On Christmas Trees

Requested reposting:

The Living Church of God has another ridiculous article up about Christmas.  This time the personalty cult is claiming that the red on Christmas trees symbolizes splatted blood.  Long red ribbons symbolize the "flowing blood of pagan temple priests who ran around slashing their bodies.

The man-god Attis, after an unsuccessful courtship of the goddess Cybele, mutilated himself, “under a pine-tree, and bled to death on the spot. ... After his death Attis is said to have been changed into a pine-tree … [in worship practices] a pine-tree was cut in the woods and brought into the sanctuary of Cybele, where it was treated as a great divinity … Stirred by the wild barbaric music of clashing cymbals, rumbling drums, droning horns, and screaming flutes, the inferior clergy whirled about in the dance with waggling heads and streaming hair, until, rapt into a frenzy of excitement and insensible to pain, they gashed their bodies with potsherds or slashed them with knives in order to bespatter the altar and the sacred tree with their flowing blood.” (The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer, “The Myth and Ritual of Attis” Chapter 34).

Attis’ bloody act under an evergreen tree, along with—as the historical record points out—subsequent duplications by Attis worshippers, has provided paganism with its seasonal red and green motifs.

When Dave Pack Apostatized From The Mother Church He Took All The Thorns and Thistles With Him

Superfantabulous Dave Pack claims that the ministers who leave his cult take all the thorns and thistle members with them, thus leaving Dave with the delightful fruit.  Of the tens of thousands COG members Dave has been a pastor to over the decades he learned to discern who the "prickly" rebellious members were.

One of the interesting things I have learned down through the years…When I watch ministers leave…It could have been Worldwide; sometimes, it was Global, and certainly, in the Restored Church of God. Mr. Armstrong saw hundreds of ministers leave. To some newer brethren it might be surprising if they hear ministers leave. They have been leaving for 2,000 years. Hundreds left while Mr. Armstrong was alive—need we even talk about what they did after he died? It’s a big subject. I have noticed that when ministers leave, invariably, there are a couple of things about them. They never served much. That’s number one—they never served much, and the people who follow them always had, virtually, no fruit. They were thorns and thistles…

In the Church, there are always thorns and thistles. They practically poke you at socials and different activities, at times. Down through the decades, I have seen it. I have pastored thousands and thousands and thousands of people, and there are people who are wonderful—warm, loving, spirit-led people—and other people, who God just reduces and says they are thorns and thistles. They are, literally, prickly in some cases. You don’t want to be known as somebody who is prickly. But ministers who leave, take those kinds of people with them.

Dave then proceeds to tell everyone that he is a false minister, just like James Malm and Bob Thiel.  Look at the people who followed Dave, Bob and James.  They have attracted the bottom of the barrel from the COG.

One of the ways you know a false minister is look at who follows him. Now, Christ’s sheep know His voice, and they don’t follow strangers. What has been exciting to me…I’ve gone back and looked, over the last three-and-a-half years, at the ministers who have left us. Almost all of them—almost all of them—took nobody. We looked back and realized they were terrible ministers. They weren’t serving. They couldn’t take anybody with them. I watched in the earlier years under Mr. Armstrong, sometimes, men would rise up and they would take large numbers. Most of our ministers take no one but their wife and children. A few take a few, and they were always thorns and thistles…problems. Now that might seem strange to you.

Dave Pack: God's Most Favorite Dendrologist

Superfantabulous Dave Pack is such an incredible man that he also if a world renown dendrologist that has been studying trees all of his life.  Is there any subject that Dave does not know something about?  Of course there is an anterior motive behind Dave's tree study.  He developed this hobby in order to be able to discern good "Trees" from bad "trees.  Those trees are ministers.  Dave knows all about ministers who do not bear fruit.  They are the foolish leaders of the LCG, PCG, UCG, including Bob Thiel and James Malm.

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves…[The Sermon on the Mount is all the basics—so that’s a basic.]…You shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree brings forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree brings forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit” (Matt. 7:15-18).

I wish I had remembered this verse, and also Matthew 3, back when we were studying the trees of Zechariah 11. Christ calls ministers “trees.” They are either good trees or bad trees. Now, the last two Sundays, we’ve had a team working in the upper woods, there, and we cut over 350 trees down (many of them small) over the last two Sundays. I will be here tomorrow, after Mother’s Day in the morning, and I’ll be cutting a lot more trees. There will be three guys joining me who have been very helpful. We are getting a lot done. It’s going to be a very beautiful woods. I am very careful. Don’t worry. I let others use the chainsaws now. I use a handsaw and cut the smaller ones. But I want to be very, very careful exactly how we do this. I want these woods to be beautiful. Everybody knows I have studied trees all my life. I know why that was. God compares good and bad ministers to trees—that’s just what He said. False prophets…and then He goes and talks about trees.