Dave Pack's Sickening Ability To Destroy Families In His Cult

We have reported many stories here over the years from people who have been abused by Dave Pack and his cult. In spite of literally THOUSANDS of documented lies, Dave, in the eyes of his followers has the "sure word of prophecy" and as a result, they fall for his endless lies as if they were true. Whatever he says is directly inspired by the creature god he follows. Members have been bankrupted, marriages broken and families ripped apart all due to Dave's lies.

Exit & Support Network has a letter up today from a former child survivor of the Restored Church of God cult. Another life has been appallingly ripped apart and family relationships destroyed because of Dave Pack.

On several Facebook pages, there have been hundreds of stories from people who have shared how their lives had been ripped apart by Armstrongism over the decades, with many lamenting childhoods lost. From sexual abuse by pedophiles in the church, physical abuse from daily beatings and spankings, to spiritual abuse, the stories are deep and painful. Exit & Support Network, The Painful Truth, this blog, and hundreds of personal blogs have documented these horror stories over the years and yet people still sit there week after week letting this megalomaniac control their lives.

Life Has Been Full of Turmoil After Being a Child Survivor of RCG:
August 3, 2021 

 

I only found this site Friday evening. I left RCG at 16 and since then life has been full of turmoil, counselling at 18, sleeping issues, moments of deep self condemnation and so on. And now I’m 20 and still have moments where I feel overwhelmed with thoughts of what I witnessed and went through along with my younger sibling. Even to this day I find it almost a mental tug of war to accept a shift on a Saturday (even when funds are running low). Not to mention the flashbacks of abuse and domestic violence that I experienced and witnessed first hand. I really wish to find others who left RCG (or other splinters) because funnily enough I still consider so many as extended family. It saddens me when I think about all those who “died in faith”; all those who turned their back on their blood family for the “spiritual family.” 

 

I remember my [parent’s] word “If you leave this, I want nothing to do with you, you are excommunicated from Christ and His government,” etc., etc (bear in mind this all began when I was approximately 7-9 years old when I was just starting out as a child in RCG). I completed all the children’s Bible studies, fasted from my first Day of Atonement (as other children and some adults ate), gave up all my worldly dreams all for the sake of acceptance by my [parent]. How is that in anyway shape or form the love of Christ or God? 

 

As well as the multiple years of being told to “abase and humble yourself,” “we are dust, nothing,” “we must be spiritually de-leavened,” and then in the next breath be told we are “God’s chosen” and “true spiritual Israel”; “God is a family and He will make us gods too.” 

 

I feel I’ve jumped around from topic to topic quite frantically, but the more poems, child survivor testimonies and even seeing some ex-ministers for example speak out about things over 8 years ago, it’s just back to back making me feel stupid for the childhood lost and desperate for my [parent] to finally see sense. 

 

I just wish I could rekindle some type of faith again in something because in all honesty RCG not only destroyed my idea of religion but God himself. I’m no atheist but the thought of the Christian God or the Islamic God (any form of so called Abrahamic faith) just makes me lose hope.
I managed to have good dialogue with [a relative] and they explained that they came across this site but didn’t tell me because they felt I would react negatively. But, in fact, it’s just made me feel better, that I’m not the only one, and just from the poems I read in the evening have eased my mind and heart. 

 

Thank you ESN for making this site.Thank you very, very much. I feel that finally I have answers that make sense and I accept my role as a child who was in a cult. –Child survivor of RCG in UK [name withheld]

Will Men's Colored Dress Shirts Keep Your Out Of The COG Kingdom?

Satan's choice for mens dress shirts…colors!

 

One of the hallmarks of cults is its extreme desire to control every aspect of its followers lives. Much of the time this includes how people are to dress in the presence of the Dear Leader. Armstrongism has had a convoluted history of doing this over the decades. The pendulum has swung in both directions over the decades, much to the chagrin of fundamentalists in the various groups. When leaders crack down the fundamentalists celebrate and then when it swings the other way there are laments of liberalism creeping in. And then, If you were Rod Merdith, it was always those pesky homosexuals who were leading church men astray.

Who can forget Meredith's tirades about mens shirts and dress socks during  the 1950's, 60's, and 70's. Only homosexual men wore black socks with their suits. Real he-men (like Rod Meredith) wore white socks anytime they wore a suit. God forbid if a man wore a pink shirt! Oy vey! He was ranting one time in the early 1970's about men wearing pink Izod shirts to class. Again, if was those pesky homosexuals who were leading men to wear pink. The class was so disgusted by Meredith's words that everyone wore pink shirts to the next class.

Yet, here we are in 2021 and we still have splinter cult leaders in the Church of God who are telling their men what to wear. Dave Pack has all the men at his HQ in white shirts and power ties. Look at any picture of his staff and followers and there will be no men wearing a shirt of any other color. Recent Feast films of Dave's cult has his men all walking in the hot Ohio outdoor sun, in their long sleeve white dress shirts and manly ties, to look at Dave's trees and gardens.

Dont forget the women either. If COG leaders had their way all women in the church would be in mid calf length dresses with long sleeves and high necklines on their dresses. Some COG leaders would not even allow women to wear jewelry if they could get by with it.  We already have men telling women to not wear make-up or color their hair. Mansplaining has always been the hallmark fo the COG when it comes to women.

Like most things in Armstrongism, it has the ability to major in minors and ignore the important things in life and with God.

From Exit and Support Network:

July 30, 2021
One of the traits of a cult is controlling everything in the person’s life. This is the reason people who leave have a lot of trouble making their own decisions, because they have been treated as children. In the July 23 Friday Philadelphian men were reminded of the ruling about white shirts as it says: “Reminder: Pastor General Gerald Flurry has said that men should wear white shirts to Sabbath and holy day services. A full suit is also preferred.” Preferred means you better do it.

I found an article written by Gareth Fraser (November 16, 2018), “God’s Character in Your Clothing” and in it he says: “The way we present ourselves on the outside reveals much about our character on the inside.” He talks about the “Philadelphian Standard” and reiterates how Herbert Armstrong wrote an article, “The Way We Dress Could Keep Us Out of God’s Kingdom.” 

 

This is why GF is telling the men (and women) how to dress. In a cult everything is regulated and spelled out. This is the opposite of freedom. –[name withheld]

Why Is The COG Always Trying To Provide Easy Answers?

 Why is there no room in the Churches of God for mystery and wonder?

What we all got stuck with was hundreds and hundreds of books, booklets, pamphlets, and letters from the Personal Correspondance Department that sought to answer every single question imaginable. Instead of relying upon church members to engage their brains and develop a personal theology for themselves, the church treated them like toddlers and spoon-fed them bad baby pablum.

Look at Bob Thiel today with the thousands of topics he thinks he has an answer for and of which hardly any of his 3,000 African members and his 299 Caucasians could care less about. Yet, he thinks his followers are too stupid to think for themselves so he provides his own take on things, not God's, but his.

Gerald Flurry and Dave Pack do the exact same thing. They feed their members putrid baby pablum that is so far off base and so far removed from the Gospel message that their members now are just as brain dead as they are.

Followers of The Way were meant to live in the mystery so that they would always be in awe, so much so that they yearned for more.

10 thought patterns that trip up former Christians

 

Mental health expert details 10 thought patterns that trip up former Christians

                                                              By Valerie Tarico

Perhaps it's been years or even decades since you left biblical Christianity behind. You may have noticed long ago that there are human handprints all over the Good Book. It may have dawned on you that popular Christian versions of heaven would actually be hellish. You may have figured out that prayer works, if at all, at the margins of statistical significance—that Believers don't avoid illness or live longer than people who pray to other gods or none at all. You may have clued in that Christian morality isn't so hot and that other people have moral values too. (Shocking!) You may have decided that the God of the Bible is a jerk—or worse.

But some habits of thought are hard to break. It is a lot easier to shed the contents of Christian fundamentalism than its psychological structure.

Here are ten mental patterns that trip up many ex-Christians even when we think we've done the work of moving on. None of these are unique to former Christians, but they are reinforced by Bible-belief and Christian culture, which can make them particularly challenging for recovering believers.

1. All or nothing thinking. In traditional Christian teachings, no sin is too small to send you to hell forever. You're either saved or damned, headed for unthinkable bliss or unthinkable torment, with nothing in between. Jesus saves only because he was perfect. Moderate Christians are "lukewarm."This kind of dichotomous black-and-white thinking seeps into us directly from Bible-believing Christianity and indirectly from cultures that are steeped in Protestantism...
2. Good guys and bad guys. One consequence of black-white thinking is that we put people into two mental boxes—good guys and bad guys. You are either with us or against us, a patriot or a socialist, an anti-racist or a racist, one of us or one of them. Disagreement becomes synonymous with schism and heresy. When we discover the personal failings of a public figure like Bill Gates, we may move them from one box to the other, good guy to bad guy. Christianity offers no mental model in which people are complicated and imperfect but basically decent—we are just fallen ("utterly depraved" in the words of Calvin) and either washed in the blood or tools of Satan.
3. Never feeling good enough. Since we are acutely aware of our own failings, it can be hard internally to stay out of the bad-guy box. Some of us toggle between "I'm awesome" and "I suck." Others have a nagging internal critic that tells us nothing we do is ever quite good enough. After all, it isn't perfect, and that's the biblical standard.
4. Hyperactive guilt detection. Biblical Christianity gives tremendous moral weight to all of this, and the practice of "confessing our sins one to another" turns believers into guilt-muscle body builders. We live in a world of shoulds and should-nots, and in the Protestant ethic, those daily failings are moral failings. A nagging sense of guilt can become baseline normal, with little bursts of extra guilt as we notice one thing or another that we have left undone or goals where we have fallen short.
5. Sexual hangups. For many former Christians, particularly for women or queer people but also straight guys who like sex, it's impossible to talk about guilt without talking about sex, because sexual sins are the worst of the worst. When it comes to the Bible, getting and giving sexual pleasure are more matters of temptation than of intimacy and delight. Idolatry and murder share the top 10 list with coveting your neighbor's wife. Then there's virgin-madonna-whore trifecta. And don't forget God hates fags.
6. Living for the future. Sexual intimacy isn't the only kind of pleasure that biblical Christianity devalues; the consecrated life focuses broadly on the future rather than the moment. The small every-day wonders that comprise the center of joy in mindful living are mere distractions for a person who has their eye on the prize of heaven. As former believers grow convinced that each person gets one precious life, those individual moments can become treasures. But the habit of focusing on the future can make it really hard to center in the moment, breathe in, and bask in the ordinary beauties and delights around us.
7. Bracing for an apocalypse. Even worse than being drawn by the lure of heaven is being braced constantly for some impending apocalypse. We may no longer expect a Rapture or the Mark of the Beast or Jesus riding in on a horse. But the idea of a cataclysmic disruption in history looms large nonetheless. A sense of nuclear doom or pandemic doom or overpopulation doom or underpopulation doom may nudge us to action or be paralyzing. Either way, the experience is very different from being driven by a sense of curiosity and discovery as we face the unknown.
8. Idealizing leaders. Living in a cloud of anxiety makes us more susceptible to demagogues and authoritarians, people who exude confidence we lack, who convey that they know what's right and true and how to solve problems. They prey on our fears and on our desire to do good and be good. They prey on our sense of ourselves as sinners and tell us how to atone. (Sound familiar?) They prey on dichotomous thinking, reinforcing our sense that people who don't share our worldview must be evil and so must be silenced or defeated.
9. Desperately seeking simplicity. Biblical Christianity tells a story about us as individuals and about human history that is clear and simple. Multi-dimensional causality? Moral ambiguity? Conflicts with no good side and bad side—just sides? Problems with no right answer? Blurry boundaries between human beings and other sentient species? No thanks! Fiction from Western cultures often mirrors and reinforces older Christian templates and tropes and specific types of oversimplification. And it's all to easy to project these in turn onto the hard-to-parse and hard-to-solve challenges of the real world. We know deep down that things aren't so simple, but it's easy to act as if we live in a world of saints and sinners, elves and orcs.
10. Intrusive what-ifs. And so we struggle, with new and old interpretations of reality and thought habits competing in our brains. We tell ourselves it's ok; that we're ok. But often nagging doubts persist. What if I'm wrong? Many years ago I told a therapist that I didn't believe in the Christian god anymore, but I didn't talk to anyone about it because I didn't want to take them to hell with me. He laughed and I laughed at myself, but it also felt very real.The journey out is . . . a journey. Along the way people second guess themselves, especially if Bible-belief got inside when they were young. Years after quitting a former smoker may crave a cigarette. That doesn't mean they were wrong to quit. It just means those synaptic connections got hardwired, soldered in place, and some of them are still there.

LCG Claims Disgruntled Members Are Pulling Loose Bricks Out Of The Walls Of LCG

 

It is time boys and girls for the weekly Friday Night Love Letter To The Brethren Smackdown!

This week is about LCG members who are looking for loose bricks in the walls of the LCG that they can pull out when they disagree with leaders, misspoken words, poor understanding of sermons, doctrines, or editorial mistakes. LCG members seem to forget that there are NO PERFECT leaders in the LCG. Instead, LCG members need to realize that God is using the present-day imperfect leaders on the same scale he used Moses, Aaron, Samuel, David, Peter, and Paul in the past. 

Seriously? 

Winnail expects us to believe that today's LCG leadership is on the same level as Biblical leaders of old?

Loose Bricks or Big Picture: Over the years, many have come into contact with the Church and have been excited to learn the Truth. Others have been grateful to reconnect after having been away. Still others who have been part of the Church begin to look for loose bricks. From time to time, some begin to focus on doctrinal teachings or decisions they disagree with, editorial mistakes, misspoken (or misunderstood) words in a sermon, or personal offenses they have seen or experienced. It is easy to forget that no one is perfect and that God has used imperfect people down through the ages to do His Work—Moses, Aaron, Samuel, David, Peter, and Paul. To avoid slipping into this negative trap, we need to stay focused on the big picture. Is there a God? Is the Bible His inspired word? Does God have a Church? Where is it today? Where is the Gospel being powerfully preached? Who has had a more sure word of prophecy? Who is warning the world about sobering events that lie just ahead, before the imminent return of Jesus Christ? Who is preparing a people for the coming Kingdom of God? We need to stay focused on this big picture and not get caught up looking for loose bricks!

Have a profitable Sabbath, Douglas S. Winnail

Notice where Winnail tells us that we need to place our focus:

Is there a God?

Is the Bible His inspired word?

Does God have a church?

Where is that church today?

Where is the Gospel being powerfully preached?

Who has the more sure word of propehcy?

Who is warning the world about sobering events that lie ahead before Christ returns?

Who is preparing a people for the Kingdom of God?

Notice that the focus is entirely upon the physical aspects of who is doing the better job. Nowhere is anyone encouraged to find rest in the words of Jesus. No one is told about the grace and peace that comes from being a follower of The Way. What good is some Mickey Mouse Kingdom that the COG preaches about without Jesus being part of the message?

All any of us witness anymore with the various COG's in a constant pissing battle over who is doing things the best. LCG and Thiel battle over who has the "sure word of prophecy". Each COG claims they are the one true church, above all other COG's. No one is preaching a more powerful message than LCG, Bob Thiel, Gerald Flurry, Ron Weinland, or Dave Pack. People are so sick of this endless pissing contest that most no longer care. Most no longer want to be in the Mickey Mouse Kingdoms they're all promoting.