Obedience Unto Death

For any Church of God member who grew up as a child or attended as an adult, the chances of you ever receiving medical assistance were slim to none.  To do so was to let the church know that you had no faith that God would heal you.  Back then children could get out of school immunizations if they provided x-rays and other form-letter statements from the church.  Some parents were sensible enough to ignore the directives for their kids and some adults sought proper medical treatment as needed without feeling the need to get ministerial approval.  However, many did not get proper medical treatment and suffered all kinds of consequences, even death.  All because they thought they had to be obedient to COG ministers and fearful of losing their salvation.

This idiocy was all due to Herbert Armstrong's booklet published in 1952, Does God Heal Today?

In 1952 a small booklet written by Herbert W. Armstrong officially inaugurated a doctrine which brought suffering and death to the Worldwide Church of God for more than thirty years. The booklet was entitled, Does God Heal Today? Some of the subheadings of the booklet are: "Medicine Condemned as Idolatry" and "The Pagan Origins of Medicine". This doctrinal pronouncement was issued under the same threat of loss of eternal life as were many of his other writings.

In Does God Heal Today?, Armstrong leaves no doubt in the reader's mind as to the seriousness of seeking medical help:

"We take the broken bread unworthily if, and when, we take it at communion service and then put our trust in doctors and medicine instead of in Christ, thus putting another God before him." (p. 14)

Receiving communion after going to a doctor invalidated the symbolism of the communion service?  Wut?

Armstrong admonishes his followers to be obedient to James 5:14-15 which instructs a believer to call for the elders who will anoint them with oil and pray the prayer of faith. He then adds: "He does not say, call the doctors and let them give medicines and drugs and God will cause the medicines and drugs and dope to cure you.... Instead, God says call God's ministers...," (p. 19).

"Don't pay any attention to how you feel, or what you see, after you have called on God for healing. Just know you are to have it -- and that's that!" (p. 20).

Then to scare members even further, we were warned that to seek medical assistance was equivalent to sorcery, witchcraft and idolatry! To do so would ultimately result in EXCRUCIATING DEATH in the second death which was the lake of fire! Seriously, who would go to a doctor after reading that kind of crap?

This doctrine was emphasized by other Worldwide Church of God writers through the years In The Good News magazine of October, 1959, there appeared an article by Donald G. Wofford entitled, "The Origin of Medical Science."

Wofford stated: "Either we trust God to heal our diseases... or trust in medical science -- which won't help us and which God terms `sorcery,' `witchcraft' and `idolatry' -- and suffer agony now and an excruciating death -- the second death in the lake of fire," (p. 8). 

The writings by Armstrong and Wofford were considered "God's law" because God supposedly channelled those words into their minds,  who then put to them to paper as "God inspired" and commanded "law" for the membership.

These writings were accepted as God's law by the members and resulted in many cancelling their health insurance policies, refusing to vaccinate their children, and denying themselves novocain when attending dentists. Dental visits were acceptable, but not the use of pain relievers. Even aspirin was shunned by many as the devil's medicine.

Thankfully we have the Ambassador Report to document the lives touched by this absurdity:

The real extent of this tragic obedience can be seen from the stories of those who followed Armstrong's teachings to the death. In an article in the 1977 Ambassador Report by publisher and editor John Trechak entitled, "Modern Moloch: Human Sacrifice in the Armstrong Church," a number of examples are cited. Trechak gives this account:

"I recently asked a former high-ranking minister of the Worldwide Church of God if he knew personally of any cases of church members dying as a result of the Armstrong healing doctrine. This is what he told me:

`Yes, absolutely. Many. I can specifically recall one case that plagues me even yet and that's (of a) little boy, five years old, who had spinal meningitis.

`Dr. McReynolds, the Seventh-day Adventist doctor who worked with the church, was advising them to take the child to the hospital and try a new treatment that was 90% to 100% effective.

`The people asked me what they should do, and I kept saying, "Read the booklet (Herbert Armstrong's healing booklet), follow God, and have faith."

`So they did. They remained faithful to the doctrine of the church. I didn't tell them to do it, but I sure encouraged them. And the little boy died.

`I remember it so well because it was such a tragic incident, and Dr. McReynold's was so angry. `He just flailed at me and said, "That's just an absolute waste of human life, and there's no reason for it," and he just let me have it.

`I know of literally scores or hundreds of cases like this. There's no way to determine the exact number of people who were affected. We're talking about a forty-year period. I think thousands actually died over the years as a result of this doctrine.'" 

Thanks to Ambassador Report word started spreading that Rod Meredith and other ministers were actively going to doctors and seeking medical treatment.  The cat was out of the bag and yet they still scrambled to cover it up.  All the time they were still pushing this non-medical malarkey, Herbert Armstrong was receiving medical treatment and was taking all kinds of medications

In the mid-1970's it became known that high ranking members of the Headquarter's staff had been seeking medical assistance. Rod Merridith had had eye surgery and Herbert Armstrong had seen doctors abroad. Many ministers and members began to question the healing doctrine.

The failure of Herbert Armstrong to deal with the problems with this doctrine and others culminated in several dozen ministers and five thousand members leaving the Worldwide Church of God in 1974. Although the booklet Does God Heal Today? was discontinued in 1968, the members were not immediately given any new doctrinal paper to guide them into a sane approach to health care.

It has only been recently, in the late 1980's, that such a booklet has been published. Published by Watchman Fellowship

The really sad part in the above quote is that the membership overall, still believed they should not go to doctors and waited, like frogs in a pot of slowly heating water, for the church to tell them what to do!  They did so because it was an understanding ingrained in all sermons and booklets that the members were too stupid to know what to do unless a minister or "God's apostle" told them what to do.

Sadly, this perversion is still being promoted today in various COG's.  The leadership get proper medical treatment, but the members are afraid to.

When will they learn that the lake of fire is NOT the destination of anyone who goes to doctor?  Even worse is the hundreds of lives of babies, children and adults who needlessly died because of this belief!

United Church of God: Why do so many UCG members stand by criminals in their midst?

If you watched the video about Stephen Allwine (Web of Lies: The Murder of Amy Allwine) that was posted earlier, you would see mentioned several times that the courtroom was filled up almost every day with United Church of God members who were there to support Stephen during his murder trial. You will also hear the prosecutors surprised by this large show of force. The video even shows them showing up at the trial with their faces obscured.

Many years earlier than this, United Church of God members showed up in force at another trial for a stalker that was harassing COG women. They too showed up to support the stalker and essentially were blaming the victims as the cause of the problem and not the stalker.

Several years ago, in Bluefield WV, a UCG woman who was a bank manager, embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from the bank she worked at.  She essentially stole the life savings of hundreds of elderly people and bank account holders. She bought her husband numerous motorcycles and cars,  that he paraded through the town daily on, they also built a fancy house.  They built a permanent church building for her local UCG congregation which was alter repossed by the govenment. At Feast times she passed out envelopes filled with money in them to help the less fortunate UCG members.  UCG members flocked to her trial and supported her like she did no wrong.

This does not include some of the other court trials that I have heard mentioned over the years where UCG members were on trial and regular member supported them, regardless of their crimes.

Why are they so supportive?

Dave Pack Denies He Was Ever A Source Of Controversy

"Who? Me?" should really be Dave's mantra.  He has never done anything wrong in his entire life.

Some today assert that Church Administration, and later Ministerial Services, perceived Mr. Pack as a source of controversy in his pastorates, and that there was a necessity to frequently transfer him through the years to alleviate problems he had supposedly created. Had this been the case, and this should be obvious, he would not have been systematically promoted in 1976, 1977 and 1981 (and other times later).

On the contrary, he was viewed as a pastor who could reorganize and stabilize injured congregations.

The expanded Rochester/Syracuse/Buffalo pastorate spanned five and a half hours east to west, and three hours north to south, from Dunkirk to beyond Utica, and from the St. Lawrence River (Canadian border) down to Cortland, New York, below Syracuse.

Now pastoring almost 1,100 brethren, the Packs drove almost nonstop to attend three Sabbath services each week, on top of giving Bible studies and directing Spokesman Clubs and youth programs, as well as also making many visits each week. He did have two unordained, but full-time, ministerial assistants to help.

Dave Pack takes credit for turning HWA against Stan Rader

Is there anyting in the COG that Dave has not stuck his nose into and taken credit for?

Three months later, in mid-April 1979, Mr. Armstrong’s chief legal counsel was interviewed on the popular CBS television news program 60 Minutes.

At a point, after a heated argument with reporter Mike Wallace, the man stormed off the set, warning before the camera, “You’re on my list!”

Mr. Pack was far from the only minister who was terribly disturbed by what had happened on national television. A month later, at a regional youth track meet in Hershey, Pennsylvania, three field pastors vented their frustrations to him.

“If Mr. Armstrong doesn’t do something about this man, the Church will be destroyed,” they said with one voice. “You’ve got to say something.” Of course, many other ministers felt the same, but these three actually urged Mr. Pack to speak up to Mr. Armstrong. Their request was formal.

Convinced he had a duty to apprise Mr. Armstrong of the damage being done by the Church’s attorney, Mr. Pack called the Pastor General the next day.

“Mr. Armstrong, we have a major problem brewing with [name],” he warned.

Mr. Armstrong became angry. (He had been satisfied with the interview, not knowing he had been given an edited version of the program! He had no idea that all of America had witnessed a representative of the Church engage in an emotional outburst and seem to threaten a prominent journalist.)

“Dave, you just have to understand that he has a temper,” Mr. Armstrong said, “and when he shows it to me or raises his voice to me, he always regrets it and apologizes. You need to extend him the milk of human kindness.”

Unsure of how to get his point across, and very much now on the “hot seat,” Mr. Pack simply stated, “Mr. Armstrong, I just don’t understand how he is allowed to scream at you. People know that he does this. I would never dream of even talking back, let alone raising my voice at Christ’s apostle.”

His words stopped Mr. Armstrong in his tracks.

“You’re right!” the Pastor General said with some volume as he made an instant 180-degree turn in thinking. “If he ever screams at me again, it will be the last time!”

Mr. Armstrong’s perspective was the same as most others. He had grown accustomed to things a certain way. However, when someone presented him with the reality of the situation, he realized, “That’s right…That can’t happen. What is being tolerated here?”

Gerald Weston: Says Mothers with Children Out of Wedlock Are A Terrible Embarrassment To The Congregation.

A comment from another thread:

"I understand, everybody has a double-life to some degree."

What Weston seems not to understand is that LCG (and Armstrongism in general) encourages people to maintain a double-life, and to be more and more two-faced as they continue in the church, unlike many other churches that allow people to feel that they don't need to put up a false front of near-perfection.  

There are of course a few brethren who for a while try not to live a double-life, and who try to admit their weaknesses honestly and sincerely as they repent and strive to be better Christians. Before too long, these people either run away from the falseness of ACOG spirituality or learn the two-faced ACOG standard and become twice the sons of hell they were before they joined their ACOG (Matthew 23:15).

In his sermon today, Weston made it clear that he is going to set a standard, and if you can't fake it you won't be allowed to make it in LCG. Does he not realize that this won't actually make the brethren holier? It will just make them more fake. Weston would rather have a church filled with people who know how to fake a certain level of Godliness, rather than a church filled with imperfect people striving honestly to reach a greater level of Godliness.  

Perhaps the saddest part of the sermon came when Weston attacked innocent children and their mothers. He mentioned that when he was pastoring one large WCG congregation, there were perhaps 14 young women who had children out of wedlock and brought their babies to services. To Weston, this was a sign of scandal and liberalism. Other pastors might rejoice that a woman had learned a hard lesson, and that instead of aborting the baby or abandoning her responsibility she had repented of her damaging sin and was now seeking to live a better life. But that's not what Weston said today. Instead of praising the women for their repentance and desire to grow in difficult circumstances, he described them as if they were a terrible embarrassment to the congregation.

How will repentant sinners thrive in LCG, if they know deep down that Weston and their pastor see them as embarrassments and failures because of prior sin, instead of seeing them as God's children striving to atone for their earlier mistakes?  

All in all, it was a sickening sermon that I would have expected from a man like Pack. I was one of the many who thought LCG would become more balanced after Meredith's death. I was wrong.

Dave Pack Takes Control of Degenerate Liberal Youth In The Church

Even the youth of the church could not escape Dave's self-righteous judgement!

As was the case with brethren in the Church during the 1970s, the youth programs in Buffalo and surrounding areas had become liberal, and mirrored the permissive leanings of the Church and a deteriorating society. Larger youth activities in the Church degenerated into breeding grounds for bad attitudes and unacceptable behavior before Mr. Armstrong directed radical changes be made. Sports programs had become overly competitive, with spectators sometimes hurling insults at opposing players and stomping wildly on the bleachers, as would happen at a worldly high school game.

As doctrines were watered-down, youth constantly pushed the limits of tolerable behavior. Without guidance and clear standards, their behavior, as well as their appearance, soon became almost indistinguishable from teenagers in the world.

In many congregations, teens and preteens ran wild, giving themselves over to inappropriate music, underage drinking—even drug abuse and fornication. The situation became so appalling that Mr. Armstrong temporarily shut down the Church’s regional youth activities and national tournaments, as he prepared to doctrinally straighten out the Church.

From 1978 forward, the Pastor General worked to re-insert God’s Way back into youth programs, starting with new leadership at Ambassador College, and reorganization at the S.E.P. summer camps. Next was the introduction of a groundbreaking youth magazine (called Youth 81, 82, 83, etc.), which taught teens how to strive against the pulls of the world and attain their full potential. It also provided instructions to the ministry on how and what to teach young people.

Along with removing teens who clearly did not belong in the Church, the introduction of new activities with the right focus caused young people to once again bear the fruit of living God’s Way.

“I came to understand that the spiritual health of the youth was directly connected to the focus of the local minister. Congregations in which the minister looked to God—and Mr. Armstrong’s direction and example—for guidance brought huge rewards. Conversely, ministers who allowed permissive attitudes to permeate their local youth programs reaped what they had sown—and previously (before Mr. Armstrong’s course correction) so had the entire Church.

“The Church as a whole was not performing its God-given duty to its young people during these years. Teenagers are incredibly perceptive. They immediately notice hypocrisy when leaders allow certain behaviors in one congregation, but not another.”

The field pastor stressed holding to God’s standards and insisted that parents train their children properly. This was a big reason some viewed him as too strict.

Much to the chagrin of some youth, Bible studies were also held for parents on the trends of the day regarding rock music, dress, alcohol and drugs. These candid discussions gave parents the assistance they needed to teach their children properly.

Mr. Pack remembered countless times when he nicely, but firmly, told teenagers, “I do not care what’s going on with your friends outside the Church or who is allowed to attend, and what is permitted, in other congregations. You are here. If you want to hold to right standards of conduct, wonderful. If not, you will be happier elsewhere, meaning outside the Church.”

While some may think this harsh, obeying God is always a choice—for adults and teens.

Along with explaining to teenagers what they were not to do, it was always a priority to show them the right way to live. Campouts, canoe trips, talent shows, sports programs, special group trips and other activities were held—all with the correct focus. A tremendous amount of effort was exerted in reviving the youth programs to God’s standards.

Dave Pack: I became the "field" advisor to HWA while he was in Tuscon

Everyone in Pasadena has said that this is absolutely not true when Dave started spouting this years ago.  HWA never considered Dave an advisor of any sort.  Dave as considered more of a tattle-tale than anything else.  In those conversations he did have with HWA his glorified himself as HWA's true supporter.  This is just one more of Dave's tall tales.

It was during this trying time for the Church that Mr. Pack’s relationship with the Pastor General grew much stronger. On many occasions in the summer of 1978, the men spoke on the phone, sometimes at length, and discussed an array of subjects.

These long, detailed discussions laid the groundwork for more extensive talks about liberal doctrine and other wrong ideas permeating the thinking of certain senior men in Church Administration and many in the field ministry. The subject of these talks slowly rolled into reorganizing the Work “post-Garner Ted” and the Church’s overall condition from a field minister’s perspective.

That Mr. Pack was a field pastor was helpful to Mr. Armstrong. At the time, the Pastor General was surrounded by administrators at Headquarters who seemed to have their own agendas, while he was at the same time somewhat isolated living in Tucson. (A recent heart attack, plus a second marriage, had temporarily taken Mr. Armstrong to Tucson to live.) 

It was through these phone conversations that Mr. Pack slowly began to realize his relationship with Mr. Armstrong had changed. He had become an advisor from the field perspective.

“Many will dispute this, and our enemies will call this characterization false, but this is what our relationship became. Only many years later did I understand why God engineered circumstances as He did. But this description is the truth of the relationship—and many knew it.”

Mr. Armstrong expressed that he appreciated frankness and honesty, even when it meant respectfully disagreeing. It stood in stark contrast to the usually sugarcoated, self-serving political anglings he often received from those at Pasadena. These were people who either shielded him or told him what they thought he wanted to hear (generally, because they had their own agendas).