The Painful Truth-Herbert W. Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God
Understanding the psychology of religious seduction and spiritual abuse.
For thousands of years, church and/or religion has used the same routine of adopting the name of God into their particular organization in order to gain credible acceptance that they have the almighty “power” of God behind them.
Foreword
Forty years have passed since Herbert W. Armstrong was laid to rest on January 16, 1986. To his followers, he was the end-time apostle, the voice crying in the wilderness, the man chosen to restore the true gospel before the Great Tribulation. To his critics-and there were many-he was a false prophet whose repeated date-setting, authoritarian control, and personal scandals left a trail of broken lives, emptied bank accounts, and shattered faith.
What follows is not history.
It is not biography.
It is a dark fiction born from the shadows of those real controversies: the unfulfilled prophecies that stretched into decades, the splinter groups that still fight over his legacy, the lingering fear among former members that the teachings they once embraced might one day demand everything again.
In this story, the grave does not hold.
The limousine waits.
The auditorium has been transformed.
And the man who once declared himself God’s final messenger discovers that resurrection is not always salvation.
Sometimes it is judgment.
Sometimes it is simply the next chapter of a nightmare no one saw coming.
Turn the page, if you dare.
The prophecy is about to be fulfilled-
in a way no one ever expected.
Welcome to The Apostle’s Unwanted Resurrection.
In a quiet suburban neighborhood, where every December the houses glowed with strings of colorful lights and front yards sprouted inflatable Santa’s and reindeer, there lived a little girl named Emily. She was eight years old, with wide curious eyes and a habit of pressing her nose against the window to watch the world outside.
