Wait!
What?
Really?!
Well, no. Just no.
The Church of God Seventh Day website reveals that the CoG7D has a worldwide membership of over 300,000 members. This is approximately 10 times the membership of all the Armstrongist churches combined. United, the largest of the Armstrongist churches (the CoGWA lies about their membership count!) would be about 3% of the size of the CoG7D. Many of the other Cult of Herbert Armstrong Mafia sects have something like a fraction of a percent. The Journal basically covers the Armstrongist churches with very few mentions of the Church of God Seventh Day, let alone any of the other Sabbath keeping churches of God, such as the Seventh Day Church of God and the New Life Church of God Seventh Day. To say that The Journal is the “News of the Churches of God” is hype and quite an exaggeration. At best, The Journal is a minority report.
2015 is a significant time for the Church of God Seventh Day, as suggested by the cover of the latest Bible Advocate:
The CoG7D has just completed church conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Did Dixon Cartwright attend? Will we see an article in The Journal covering what the some 1,200 attendees did and said? What were the significant developments? How was this conference different from those coming before it? What impact did Wellspring Fellowship have on church policy concerning ownership of facilities?
For that matter, will The Journal have an article about Shine?
At 10 times the membership of the Armstrongist churches of God, one would think there would be serious coverage of the graduation at Vale Academy and coverage of the Bridge Initiative, including the background of the founder. Where is the coverage of the Super Sabbath celebrations with participation of the CoG7D and other Sabbath Keeping Churches of God?
The problem is that The Journal is a bit parochial:
A street view of downtown Big Sandy is revealing… it’s about what you’d expect for a little town of ~1,300+ people. It’s the sort of town where the people are so narrow their ears overlap, which is about the same description we can give to the membership of the Armstrongist churches of God. They seem to ignore the fact that there is an entire world outside of their immediate sphere which is much bigger than they can imagine. Herbert Armstrong made the Worldwide Church of God believe that it was the biggest and the best, while, at the time, it wasn’t even half of what the Church of God Seventh Day was, but people believed the hype. Herbert Armstrong made every effort to convince his followers that the CoG7D was minor, just a remnant — the Sardis Era, which barely existed and had a name that it is living but was dead — an appellation which justifiably applies to the Living Church of God, if they weren’t so Laodocean. That’s what psychopaths do: They wreck the credibility of those who could be a threat to their con games — it’s the first thing they do after the assessment phase, and Herbert Armstrong was a master of it.
The truth is that in the scheme of things, the Armstrongists just don’t matter and they barely exist. Furthermore, they are growing smaller and blowing away. They generate a lot of noise for such a small collection of small minds, but in the end, no one is much paying attention to them, except for The Journal — the minority report.
And given the circumstances, The Journal — that window into the insane asylum of Armstrongism, written by the patients — cannot possibly by any stretch of the imagination be called “fair and balanced”.
This is too funny! Apparently we were a splinter and never were allowed to know it! We had, instead, the doctrines which were informed by HWA’s mind-warping incest with his daughter.
Using the breaking technology of the day, Radio Church of God was able to temporarily overshadow its parent church, but the easy come, easy go millions of dollars in tithe flow have all come to nought, with barely a whisper to remind us of the message we were told was the final effort to warn the world. At COG-7, apparently the band has played on.
The picture of Big Sandy brings back memories. Back when we were at SEP, if we needed anything, the field trips were into Gladewater or Longview. I love these bucolic small towns from an aesthetics standpoint, but they are a diffficult place in which to live, because everyone knows everything about everyone. Outsiders, or people who have recently moved in are viewed with extreme suspicion. Give me the anonymity of a medium to large city any day of the week!
BB
Yes, Byker Bob, I know because I grew up in a small town half the size of Big Sandy.
We had a town newspaper, published once a week, which was also the official newspaper of the County. There were local stories and ads, of course. It was a large tabloid.
As a lad, I visited and the owner / editor / publisher showed me how the linotype machine worked: It used hot lead which was impressed mechanically with the letter slugs controlled by a typewriter type keyboard. After the Cosmos episode by Neil Degrasse Tyson about the toxicity and affects of lead, I wondered if vapor from the lead affected the editor of the town paper. He was not the brightest of people. I guess we’ll never know, for it was long ago. Fortunately, he never claimed to be a journalist.
Armstrongists are very disturbed about the fact that the Church of God Seventh Day is so much larger than any of their own groups. One person was so disturbed about it that they demanded to know when the CoG7D was going to be honest and reveal how many members it had in the United States. They don’t like to think about the fact that they are irrelevant in the broader scope of things and it makes them angry.
It’s clear that the Armstrongists can’t respond to this fact in any meaningful way.
Wouldn’t it be better that they admit they are in a cult and just leave?