Part Three: The Room

by Ripley Johnson

The Worldwide Church of God only owned a handful of physical properties and church buildings. Its members met in a wide variety of rented facilities. WCG members that lived anywhere too far from WCG HQ in Pasadena, California or the Ambassador College in Big Sandy, Texas had their weekly church services in thousands of different locations over the years.  

I remember lots of different places that the WCG used for church services when I was little. There was my favorite place, The Garden Center, located in Downtown Dallas, Texas very close to the Aquarium. The Garden Center was amazingly beautiful. (I remember lush beautiful plants everywhere, outdoor gardens, water features… oh man it was so perfect. Sometimes there would be a wedding ceremony with a potluck reception and dancing after church services were over. Those Saturdays were the best!) But it for whatever reason, the rental agreement ended and we moved on to other spaces for our unusually long Saturday services. I remember several school auditoriums and/or gymnasiums, a Chiropractic college that was formerly a Baptist church, a few other places that I was too young to identify, and the place I hated the most out of all of them, the VFW event hall.

All of these places were distinctly different and had their own features that the WCG congregation would adapt to their own needs. One feature that you could always find in every rented WCG space around the world was something called “The Mother’s Room.” Even just thinking about the term “Mother’s Room” puts a knot in my stomach and I get an overwhelming desire to crawl under the nearest table and hide.

The Mother’s Room was a place for three specific events. 

1. Changing diapers2. Nursing babies3. Beating children

Imagine a room that smelled like a hundred dirty diapers and was full of the sounds of angry women’s voices, the smacking of wood on bare skin, and children screaming in terror.

If you think it sounds like the stuff of nightmares, you’re right. I still have nightmares about it.

Most of the kids at church got hit with a bible or a hymnal at least a few times. We all knew that we deserved to be hit, although we were rarely clear on why. Making noise during the service, running after the service, or failing to have your Y.E.S. (Youth Educational Services) bible lessons fully completed seemed to be the most common offenses. And if you didn’t shape up after a trip to the Mother’s Room, then your Dad would take you to the Men’s bathroom (if it wasn’t in use by other men) or out to the car for some discipline that was beyond what your mom was physically capable of delivering.

Wives almost always received their “corrections” at home after services. Usually those corrections were related to the misbehavior of the children at church. And then, as if that weren’t enough, there was always a good dose of “gaslighting” for mom and the kids from dads, who got it from the pastors, who got it from HQ in Pasadena.

For everyone who manages to make an exit from Armstrongism there is a time where nothing seems real and nothing can really be trusted. People who get out often find themselves unable to really believe or trust anyone or anything for an extended period. Our lives are an endless series of questions that nobody is able to answer for us.

o Did I see what I saw?
o Did I really live that life?
o What it really as bad as it seemed?
o How could that have actually happened and have been accepted as normal?
o Who am I if I’m not in “the church” anymore?

I think what’s really the most challenging part of it all is coming to accept that not only are the people who did these things NEVER going to apologize for them, but they aren’t even going to acknowledge that they even happened.

My entire childhood was shrouded in secrecy and deception. The only way that I know that I’m safe, sane, and not going to suffer at the hands of an angry and vengeful God is through the stories told by others who made it out and remember what happened to them too.
And again… I was one of the lucky few who weren’t hit with bibles or oversized homemade paddles. I can’t even begin to imagine what kind of hell those kids experienced. What I do know is that the thought of living one day in their houses was both my fantasy and my nightmare at the same time. I always wanted to live someone else’s life, but I never forgot how lucky I was that my mom was so obsessed with staying slender and feminine instead of being strong and independent.

If you were one of those kids and you’re reading this now as a survivor, please know that I heard your screams. I still cry for what was done to you. It was real and you didn’t just make up that story to hurt someone or make them feel or look bad. What they did to you was wrong, they knew it was wrong, and they lied about it to make themselves feel better. Each and every Saturday was nothing but theater and behind the perfect scenery there was the worst kind of darkness and fear. But the echoes of Armstrongism are dying out and with them all the horrors of “The Mother’s Room” are fading away as well. 

See the complete story here, that was published in response to Tonto's comment about HWA:

God's Most Favored Prophet Now Broadcasting From Hotel Bathrooms?

God is doing such amazing work through this man!  I could watch his videos all day! Woo Hoo!
No more crooked bookcases!  Just crooked door frames for a crooked prophet.

A Familiar Experience: The High Price of Letting Others Determine Who You Must Be

Why I Left an Evangelical Cult | Dawn Smith

"Even the hardest day of freedom is better than the best day in a cult"

A Skill Lost on the Leadership of the Never Wrong Churches of God

For all the times the self-appointed leaders of the Churches of God have been wrong about everything from their ideas about how everyone in their spheres of influence ought to think, pray, stay and obey to their prophetic mutterings that come up short and mistaken every time, you'd think just once one might hear  "Please forgive me, I was wrong."

Being mistaken is not something, evidently, a Church of God splinter can admit to. Or at least to date, with much now behind them that was mistaken, they can't.  Herbert Armstrong was never wrong. Joe Tkach was never wrong.  They can ignore it. They can revise it to be wrong again later because God now has mercifully given them even more time to be wrong. But they can never admit they actually were mistaken.  Dave Pack is good at this.  They can blame the people, as Ron Weinland did, for not understanding that it was "spiritual!".  But they can never admit that they simply were wrong.

For better or worse, the Bible itself gives some plenty of reasons to never admit they were wrong. For all the Apostle Paul's sureness that time was short and that he who was still alive and remains would be changed , while admittedly some would die and John's sureness that he wrote of things that must shortly come to pass and that Jesus was coming "quickly" low these two millennia ago, ending up badly mistaken and admitting it never seems to have crossed their minds either. Paul did have time to write that he fought a good fight and he gets his crown, gotta go, but never seems to understand the heartache he may have left behind in his mistaken ideas. As far as I can see, that is simply the norm in the Churches of God to this day..

Later, Second Century apologists came along and simply covered the mistaken idea with blaming those who noticed Jesus was long in coming soon and labeling them scoffers with all the associated threats and put-downs. God does not see time as we mere humans do they noted as if all should have known that from the start and not scoffed at the longness of "shortly". Blame the notice is always more easy and face-saving than the one who was simply mistaken with the inability to say "I was wrong"

Cudos to Ex Pastor Joshua Harris for the guts to admit his sincere mistakes, in his sphere of influence,  and leaving a lesson for the Church of God leadership to ponder which they probably won't.

Joshua Harris: When a Leader Has the Courage to Say ‘I Was Wrong’

“A lot of [my classmates] shared stories of the effect my book had, and a lot of them were negative,” Harris remembers. “I couldn’t just write them off as angry trolls, because these were my friends, and so I listened. And then one day, on Twitter of all places, this woman wrote me and said ‘your book was used against me like a weapon.’ I answered and said ‘I’m so sorry.’

“It was such a simple, human interaction, but that interaction led to a conversation which led to a friendship, and that friendship changed me. She said something I”ll never forget – that her conversation with me on twitter was the first time a religious leader had ever acknowledged getting something wrong and apologized to her.”

From these experiences Harris opened up his website for people to share their unedited experiences—positive or negative—with his book, which led both Harris and a fellow grad student who had also been hurt by Harris’s book to begin work on a documentary that explores the impact Harris’s book had on dozens of people. As Harris has leaned into the fear of saying “I’m wrong,” he says there are three main lessons he’s learned."

"“We talk about wanting to evolve – become a smarter or loving or compassionate version of ourselves. But think about what that requires – there’s a lot of death that takes place,” Harris says. “Evolution is never a painless process. It’s a dying to old ways of thinking and old habits. Maybe old relationships. Evolving personally involves admitting you got things wrong and letting those things die."

“You can’t rush through the pain of being wrong. Often we want to get through it as quick as possible and go back to being right. Or we give these lame apologies: ‘to anyone who was offended …’ as though being offended was their fault. We want to get past it, deal with the tension and messiness of it, and get back to being right. But if you rush past that you won’t grow. It sucks, it really does. But in that tension and facing up to it, that’s the sign that I’m growing.” 

“I wish I could say people will come by and pat you on the back for being humble, but expect resistance. There are people who want you to stay the same … because if you admit you’re wrong and they agreed with you before, then that by implication makes them wrong too.”

Harris doesn’t address it in the TEDx talk, but his decision to step down as pastor of Covenant Life Church was heavily influenced by an in-church sexual abuse scandal the pastoral leadership team decided to deal with internally, rather than contacting the police. According to the Washington Post’s reporting, a former Covenant Life youth group leader was convicted of molesting three boys in the 1980s. Trial testimony showed that the victims or their families had gone to church leaders for help and that the church officials did not call police. Harris said the thinking of the church was that such allegations should be handled as an internal, spiritual issue.

Reflecting on this incident, Harris said he wanted “to get a broader perspective. I want to learn other ways of how pastors and other leaders deal with all these things. We need to learn from the historic church about ways that there is better accountability and responsibility.”

What Harris learned is that when church leaders become too convinced of what they think they know, it inevitably damages their communities, sometimes in life-altering ways. And while this can just produce more sleepless nights for some pastors, Harris believes that when leaders are able to willingly admit their mistakes and choose humility, it actually makes them the safest sort of leader to be around.

https://churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/314664-joshua-harris-leader-courage-say-wrong.html/2

The truth, hidden from HWA, was saved for me to reveal at the end time

Did you know that there is currently a "famine of the gospel" going on in the world?  Our official Chief Pharisee of the Church of God claims there is.  He has been working at his kitchen table for the last few weeks cranking out a new storyline to prove that he and he alone is the ONLY one preaching a restored gospel message.  How many more decades do we need to hear this crap from self-appointed Church of God gurus?

The word famine means “scarcity” and today the true Gospel of Salvation is very scarce, only available at TheShiningLight as the corporate church groups teach an inoffensive business model and utterly refuse to: 

Isaiah 58:1 Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins.  

or to fulfill the duty of a watchman (Ezekiel 33).

And here we go again, ANOTHER watchman.  Oh lordy! How many of these fools have we seen over the decades say this kind of crap?  That makes no difference to the many COG fools saying it today. James Malm is NO watchman and that is a fact!