Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Ron Weinland: If You Live In LA Your Car May Not Work When Jesus Returns




Armstrongisms' biggest certified fool and false propeht is Ron Weinland who has predicted Jesus is returning in the wee hours of the 27th of May.   Just as the sun is setting on Saturday night May 26, Jesus needs to return to usher in Pentecost and the wrath of God on this earth.

His acolytes have apparently asked him if they could meet together to see Christ return.  He has not encouraged it and has told them that if they do, they need to be aware that their car may not start when Jesus returns. If you are in a big city waiting for Jesus you need to haul ass out as the city starts rioting and destruction reigns. If all hell is to start breaking loose what use would a car be? Will they need it to return when they see Ron is an epic failure, yet again?
 
Below is an excerpt from his sermon on the 19th than Bob Thiel has posted.

A lot of questions keep coming up because of where we are in time, and again, it’s an incredible thing thinking about where we are…

But questions have come up about the 26th and the 25th…and the 27th is pretty well set.  But we think of different times. We know that what’s going to happen is going to happen at Jerusalem time; not Australia, not New Zealand, although the day starts there as far as the world is concerned. As far as God is concerned it starts in Jerusalem and when Jesus Christ begins His return it’ll be at the end of the Sabbath before Pentecost comes, right at the very end. Don’t know exactly how it’s going to transpire but we believe those things, we understand those things. And so questions come up about different ones, because in… I don’t know what the time between here and Jerusalem is – one hour. So what is it, 7:30ish before Pentecost begins in Jerusalem, it’ll be 6:30ish – somewhere around there – on the Sabbath. You’ll be almost to the end of your Sabbath. In the States, in the eastern time zone it’s around 12:36. So anyway, people are thinking about what do we do on that day? And I’ve made some comments about whether or not to get together and as I had mentioned in the United States, we’re not going to have services in our normal locations, we’re going to have people pretty much stay in their own home areas. If some want to get together in some areas I’m not going to say you can’t. You have to decide for yourselves because wherever you go, as one example here, someone was asking about getting together on the 26th and wanted to ask about it, they said that some live 40-50 miles away and they were planning on getting together even that night of the 25th, and that’s fine. But please understand, those who live 40-50 miles away you may not get back… that’s Los Angeles. Your car may not work. I don’t know what’s going to happen and where it’s going to happen. It’s not going to be a nice time. We thought this could have started at the very beginning of what’s referred to as the ‘great tribulation’, understanding that’s about the Church now, far more so, which we’ve always understood, but as far as the world was concerned we haven’t understood fully because it’s in God’s timing, how He does it. And what’s going to take place, especially with Russia and China and what they finally do, it says they destroy a third of the earth. That’s very clear language. They destroy a third of all the earth. And the United States is not going to escape that, Great Britain is not going to escape that, Europe is not going to escape that. So there are some cities in some places that aren’t going to be a great place to be in some respects. That’s just the way it is. I don’t know where they are – God hasn’t told me those things – I’m not a fortune teller. Sometimes people think I should know everything – No, I don’t. God has given me an outline of prophetic things as far as the Bible is concerned; we have that outline that we’ve had for so long. How it’s going to all transpire…? We understand some of that as far as tribulation and what that means for us now. It’s going to be right up to the end. I understand. I understand more deeply now than ever before it can be in the last hour of the day!

Why don't any of the leaders of the hundreds of COG splinter cults speak out about this liar and fraud?  Why don't they expose his as the spiritual deviate he is?  They know for a fact that Ron's predictions will not happen, yet they sit by and do nothing.  Is it that they still consider him and his followers to be  part of the Church of God and are afraid to say anything bad about him?  Or, are they afraid that if they speak out publicly that their absurd predictions will be exposed?  By sitting on the sidelines and doing nothing  as he spouts these dangerous lies they implicate themselves. This is just more proof that there is no accountability in Armstrongism.  Never has been and never will be. 

Ron Weinland Exposed As Fraud On TV





Tuesday, May 22, 2012

New Book: The Fragmentation of a Sect: Schism in the Worldwide Church of God by David V Barrett

Click image to enlarge to see COG organizational splits
Not from Barrett's book.

David Barrett is coming out with a new book this December about the fragmentation of the Worldwide Church of God in the late 1990's into the numerous splinter groups that exist today.  Barrett's earlier book, The New Believers is an extraordinary look at the growth of new religions.  He wrote at that time about the rise of Scientology, Moonies, and a large section of the book on the Worldwide Church of God and it's evolution away from Armstrong teaching towards "mainstream" belief.

Description

In the mid-1930s an unsuccessful American advertising executive, Herbert W. Armstrong, founded a millenialist, Sabbatarian Christian sect with a heterodox theology. Over the next half century, despite a number of setbacks, scandals, criticisms, and attacks from former members and anti-cultists, Armstrong's organization, the Worldwide Church of God, grew to around 100,000 baptized members with a world circulation of between six and eight million for its flagship monthly magazine Plain Truth. In January 1986, Armstrong died. His successor changed most of the Church's distinctive doctrines, leading it towards an increasing convergence with mainstream Evangelical Christianity. This revision created a massive cognitive dissonance in ministers and members: should they accept or reject the authority of the Church leadership which had abandoned the authority of the founder's teachings? Groups of ministers left the religion to form new churches, taking tens of thousands of members with them. These schismatic churches in turn faced continuing schism, resulting in over 400 offshoot churches within little more than a decade.

In this major study David V. Barrett examines the processes involved in schism and the varying forms of legitimation of authority within both the original church and its range of offshoots, from hardline to comparatively liberal. His book extends the concepts of rational choice theory when applied to complex religious choices. More important, he offers a new typological model for categorizing how movements can change after their founders' death, including schism, and explores the usefulness of this model by applying it not only to the Worldwide Church of God, but also to a wide variety of other religions.

To preorder:  The Fragmentation of a Sect: Schism in the Worldwide Church of God by David V. Barrett