Ambassador College Pasadena Reunion - the First 30 Years!

Ambassador College Pasadena Reunion - the First 30 Years!

To celebrate our unique experiences and friendships as AC students

Who: Students who attended AC Pasadena anytime between 1947 & June 1977

When: Friday, February 27 - Monday, March 2, 2015

Where: Pasadena Hilton Hotel

The AC Pasadena Reunion Committee is pleased to announce the upcoming Reunion of students from the first thirty years of the Ambassador College Pasadena campus. It will take place Friday, February 27, 2015, through Monday, March 2, 2015, at the Pasadena Hilton Hotel, only one mile from the campus.

For those of you who have not been back since your college days, you will be pleased that the main campus still looks essentially the same, with most of our iconic structures and landscaping still intact. The only major losses at this time are the Fine Arts & Science classroom structures and the Library. Nevertheless, a stroll from Ambassador Hall past Terrace Villa to Mayfair still yields the same stunning views of sloping lawns, huge trees, streams, formal gardens, and the lower campus structures, including the Auditorium.

Pasadena has changed for the better, including "Old Town," which is now vibrant - even "trendy" - the center of night-life in the San Gabriel Valley. You can still see the Rose Bowl (site of one AC year-end track meet), The Huntington (Gardens/Library/Art Museum - much expanded and improved), Caltech, the Norton Simon Art Museum, the revitalized Civic Auditorium/City Hall quadrant, JPL, and much, much more.

Our Committee currently has six folks (and looking for more!) who are planning this very special weekend. There will be a full range of activities, including visits to the former Ambassador College campus - and, most importantly, the opportunity to become reacquainted with friends from your college years!  All weekend at the Hilton there will be a dedicated Hospitality Room, replete with memorabilia such as Envoys, Portfolios, and pictures, as well as plenty of chairs for informal gathering, chatting, and catching up on the ensuing decades since we last saw each other.

In February 2013, sixty-five met in Las Vegas for the first-ever multi-day AC Pasadena Reunion. The idea had begun with Joe Bauer and Bill Hughes 20 months earlier.  Although, sadly, Joe died before the actual event, Bill went on to organize an enjoyable and successful reunion. At the conclusion, there was enthusiastic support for an expanded reunion two years hence in Pasadena - and Bob Gerringer and Carol Stephenson Taylor volunteered to coordinate that effort.

The Pasadena Hilton (168 S. Los Robles Ave., Pasadena, CA 91101) has set aside a limited number of rooms at a discounted rate of $125 plus tax for up to two people per night (additional $10 plus tax each for a third or fourth person). Penalty-free cancellation is allowed up to 24 hours before arrival, so there is no risk in reserving now, which will also help us determine if additional rooms need be set aside. To book your room at the special rate, you will need to contact the Pasadena Hilton directly. You can email Stephanie Vasquez at svasquez@hiltonpasadena.com or speak to anyone at 626-584-3208, or leave a voice-mail.  In your email or voice-mail, mention the 'Ambassador Reunion', and provide your name, check-in and check-out dates, and phone number.

Also, please forward this email to other former AC Pasadena students from this era, and/or send us their names and email addresses, and, if possible, maiden names and years attended. [Please note: all email addresses will be kept strictly confidential, only accessible by a subset of the Reunion Committee.] We now have over 450 email addresses; however, we need many more to reach everyone from those thirty years. We do not want anyone left out!

We have created a survey which will provide us a preview of the potential number of attendees; this data is vital for our planning efforts, so please Click Here to take the survey.  Thank you in advance for timely responses to the survey and for forwarding and/or sending other students' contact info to us.

   

Please take a look at our website www.ACPasadenaReunion.com. Much more information and features will be forthcoming between now and the Reunion in 2015, however, in the meantime, if you have any questions or comments, please contact us at info@ACPasadenaReunion.com 

We really hope to see you all in 2015.

Warmest regards,

Bob Gerringer (bob@ACPasadenaReunion.com)    and

Carol Stephenson Taylor (carol@ACPasadenaReunion.com)

Reunion Committee members and year each began attending AC:

Cledice Decker (1959)                                  Bob Gerringer (1967)

Jean (Ehlert) Updegraff (1964)                    Roger Hoffman (1969)

Carol (Stephenson) Taylor (1966)              Margaret (Dill) Zola (1970)

Pat Robertson Calls Ken Ham's 6,000 Year Old Earth Creation Myth "Nonsense"

One of the cornerstones of Creationism is that the earth is only 6,000 years old.  Many in Armstrongism have held this view too. Even Cyrus Scofield who brought us the dispensationalist Bible that Armstrongism loves to use says the earth is older than 6,000 years.  Which asks one to wonder why he used the work's of Ussher so prominently in the Scofield Bible when Ussher is the one who promoted the 6,000 year nonsense.

The legendary Bible commentator C.I. Scofield is probably the most well known champion of old earth creationism.This Old Planet - Rapture Ready

Robertson said:

Televangelist Pat Robertson reacted Wednesday to the big debate between Bill Nye “the Science Guy” and Creation Museum founder Ken Ham on Tuesday night. Robertson actually took issue with one of the central arguments of creationism and said it’s “nonsense” to say the world’s only six thousand years old. He brought up the findings of a bishop centuries ago who came up with that figure and said, “There ain’t no way that’s possible.”

Robertson argued that there’s too much scientific evidence in the world to assert the world is thousands, and not billions, of years old. He said, “To say that it all came about in 6000 years is just nonsense, and I think it’s time we come off of that stuff and say this is impossible.”  Media ITE

Is Creationism A Viable Model of Origins In Today's Modern Scientific Era? Live Debate Tonight

For those who may be interested:

Bill Nye (The Science Guy) and Ken Ham (Answers in Genesis CEO) 

debate creationism and science.

Live Stream   7:00 Eastern Time, 4:00 Pacific

There Are Only A Few Hundred Real Christians In The ENTIRE World!

click to enlarge

James Malm is harping today about the horrific status of the Churches of God and most particularly  the apostate filth in COGWA, UCG,  LCG, and  CCOG.  All of these groups are filled with Laodicean apostates who trample the world of God into the ground by their continual law breaking.  Mercy and grace be damned!  The law reigns supreme!

Malm claims there exists today on the ENTIRE earth only a few hundred REAL Christians.

Some are zealous for God and his word now, they are a very small minority of a few hundred.  The vast majority of the COG Groups today are fully Laodicean and are to be judged and rejected by Jesus Christ into great tribulation  That is the stopping of the daily intercession of Jesus for them as an organization; the stopping of the daily sacrifice for them! 

I am so glad that God does not rely upon the stupid reasoning of people like this!

I know more cigar smoking, cussing, pork eating Sunday keepers, who love God and who are better Christians than Malm will EVER be!

Malm is claiming again that the abomination of desolation may be set up by the end of this year.  At that point the following will happen to the various COG's:

However once the COG Groups see how very wrong they were by the reality of what they have fallen into; most will quickly repent and turn to love and keep the word of God to the death, joining the many martyrs of the past.  That is when the fruits of this warning work will become evident.

Dave Pack was not able to do a mass conversion of the Churches of God at the Feast of tabernacles 2013, so what makes Malm think he will do the same?  Thousands will immediately start keeping the law while continuing to ignore Jesus as they already do.  What a lovely world that foretells.....NOT!

Dennis Muses on: Conceiver-Receiver-Perceiver

What if...

Everything We Have and Do Experience is OK

You Can Let Yourself Off the Hook for Your Church Experience?

You Were Never Really Driving the Bus Anyway?

It's Just a Ride...

First, let's be honest.  This site exists and thrives because of our collective experience, the good, the bad and the ugly,  for sometime in the past having "chosen" to affiliate with The Worldwide Church of God, Herbert W Armstrong, Garner Ted Armstrong, and ALL the various religious personalities, both minister and member associated with it.  We are curious group as to what continues to go on with the splits, splinters and slivers of that once minuscule Church in the whole scheme of things. Some take time for thoughtful comments here while the vast majority just read and never say a thing. We assume they are thinking about it at least.  We are at once curious about what else is going on in COGdom  and angry we ever had the experience.  Some seem to grow through as evidenced by their comments and some not so much as evidenced by their comments.  But it is our common experience and the reason this site exists as a place to process our perceived realities. In layman's terms...a place to bitch and moan.

Ultimately, and I can only speak for myself, I want to understand WHY I did, thought, practiced and experienced what I did.   It seems like just a year or two ago I that 18 year old kid  coming on to the Ambassador College Campus to start what I felt in my soul, was my life believing , doing and teaching the absolutely right things about what God, Jesus and the Bible said and meant.  I wanted to know who and what they were, where they came from and what the future would hold.  I was terribly sincere and horribly naive.  I went to AC intending to be a minister when told not to come there for that.  That made no sense to me then but I gave them no choice and ended up being told by powers that be, "for you Dennis, the sky in the ministry, is the limit."   Strange comment to me but I thought I knew what they meant...maybe.  

The kindest and most idealistic years of the experience were the ones in college.  From 1972 when I entered the holo...ministry, to 1998, when I exited the holo...ministry, it was one damn thing after the next.  That was Winston Churchill's definition of history.  One damn thing after the next and so it was all the years of my ministry.  It was NOT what I thought it would be nor ever close to what I thought I had gotten myself into.  In my 20/20 hindsight, I wish I had never heard of it or ever got on that plane to California in 1968 eating my last ham sandwich somewhere over the Grand Canyon in the approach to LAX because, well you know.

Disclaimer:  The Blogmeister, and contrary to what some think it is not myself, can remove this posting if it is not appropriate for the site.   But if left in place, just maybe it can open the hurting and angry mind to a new level of acceptance and perspective and heal.  I know the site is not necessarily about healing from an experience, but it really is because even venting and expressing thoughts is part of the healing process.  Moving past that is an individual choice or maybe not.   I can't imagine anyone that comes to Banned HWA that does not want to heal and get potential answers to:

How could I have been so foolish in my choices?

What was I thinking?

Why did I not speak up when I knew what i was hearing was simply speculation and not fact?

Why did I have to experience this Worldwide Church of God mess in the first place?

Why did I have shit for brains?

Did I waste my life over this?

If only...

I am sure you can add your own thoughts but I believe we get the point.  What's the point in having an experience if you never get to understand what is behind the experience?  Of course, the why is subject to opinion of the experiencer but that is my point in this posting.  

First of all, I know not one in a hundred here will actually watch and consider this series on The Holographic Universe.  That takes an actual investment in time, requires a degree of curiosity about the topic and the absolute need to resist filtering it all through one's past or current perspectives which will manifest itself in sarcastic, cheeky and terribly negative comments which I know never appear on this site.  

"This guy kills me!"

There are really only two explanations that I have for myself over just why did I have to have the Worldwide Church of God experience?   1.  It just unfolded one stupid and ill advised decision at a time in my utter sincerity to know the truth of the Bible and life.  or...  2.  It was and is an experience designed for me and not by me for reasons that can never cross my mind without having had it. Or as I take credit for saying as one my one real life quote:

"Experience is not only the best teacher, it is the only teacher.  Everything else is merely hearsay."

The next level, I am thinking, may not be anymore that I am the one having the experience.  Maybe, just maybe something bigger is afoot here and something else is having an experience through me and through you by the way.   I like that.  It removes a lot of anger, guilt, shame and fear all in one swoop.  You will never understand what I mean unless you watch the whole series and do so seriously and with an unfiltered mind.  I am now 64 years old.  That time from 1968 to the present , as I always heard but never experienced,  passed like a weaver's shuttle to quote the book and then goes out.  I am much seeking the "truth" at this age as as I was at that age.  To think I had found it at 18 and there was no more to know than what was in a Bronze and Iron Age book seems to have been a mistake on my part  TO ME.  To many of you, I know you will say the current view is the mistake or as I was told once..."Your problem Dennis is that you need to give up your intellect, you will and come back to Jesus."   I can't do that.  I am not built that way and to do that would only lead to more anger and depression over past decisions that I now, TO ME, feel are simply no longer necessary to endure and carry around like so many rocks in my backpack.  I'm dropping the whole backpack and going light.  This series on The Holographic Universe has given me a new perspective that was and is sorely needed.  It is not based on myths (though I sense there are some saying, "oh yes they are!), but... whatever.  TO ME means TO ME.  The idea that everyone will ever come to any "oneness" where two or three are gathered together simply is not so in reality.  The concept of "we must all speak the same thing," is equally as ludicrous if one is going to actually seek the truth as that pearl of great price.  We all know "speaking the same thing" merely means that one must agree with the person who encourages that.  Sorry, no can do if I don't.

I found it serendipitous that at some point in the presentation, the narrator says he is was a 62 year old man with this, that and many other things having gone awry in life , sitting in his apartment in Greenville, SC.  LOL...He may have been the guy next door and I never knew.  Perhaps the "Infinite I" is playing with the script to get my attention.  We can hope.

These presentations, (In 5 parts and I will leave it to the reader to find 2-5)  are based on current theories and observations in quantum physics "falsely so called."  I find them compelling and encouraging.  Perhaps you will too and perhaps even produce that rare but very fulfilling "Aha' moment in your own experience that may come only once in a lifetime.   This is truly one of the strangest and yet verifiable "realities" science well done has ever speculated on.  Somehow at a deep level, it resonates because it just seems true to me.  Enjoy, it will take an investment on your part in your time over days perhaps and no one can do that for you. If it threatens your paradigm, ask yourself why and what are you afraid of finding out if it truly is the way things are.

If this topic is inappropriate for Banned, then I'll remove it and we can all sink back down into the mire. However, it deeply inspired me because it is not something that relies on mere faith which is what we use to believe before we get the facts.  Facts seem to trash faith over time.  This seems true to me and has producded a nice shift in my own perceptions about my own experiences in and with the Worldwide Church of God