Raising the Ruins

“F
acts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

—U.S. President John Adams

December 1770

Millions of people around the world are familiar with the expansive humanitarian and evangelistic work of Herbert W. Armstrong, even though he died more than 20 years ago.

Tens of thousand
—mostly people affiliated with the Worldwide Church of God, which Mr. Armstrong founded—are aware of what happened to that organization after he died when Joseph W. Tkach rejected his predecessor’s teachings, deserted his worldwide mission and reduced the church to a small, mainstream Christian denomination with practically no work.

Very few,
however, know what really happened behind the scenes during the Tkach transformation.
And there is a scandalous reason for that.

Of course, no one in the church would have suspected the new pastor general of any maliciousness. The reality of the betrayal and how it came about was so stunning that most members of the Worldwide Church of God refused to believe it was even happening.

But the
real reason
most people are so fuzzy on what happened was the sinister fact that the new administration
CONCEALED
its intentions from church members
for as long as possible.

As Joseph Tkach, with the prodding of his staff, set about the business of converting the church and transforming the work that Herbert W. Armstrong had entrusted to him, these men spun an unthinkably elaborate and increasingly convoluted web of deceit. Events detailed in the first half of this book in particular will have a sickening ring of familiarity to anyone who experienced these events with their eyes open. Under cover of “Changes? What changes?” the new leadership systematically dismantled the church’s body of beliefs plank by plank. They destroyed doctrines and deceitfully forced new ones onto unwitting and unwilling members. They changed the church’s commission and gutted its faith. They demoted, deported and replaced the old guard. Those who continued to believe and live the way they always had, the new leaders lied to, abused, intimidated, or—as in the case of my father—excommunicated. They shattered thousands of lives.

And in the process, they presided over the
WORST SPIRITUAL SHIPWRECK SINCE THE FIRST-CENTURY CHURCH SPLINTERED ON THE ROCKS OF APOSTACY
.

But the spiritual Head of the church didn’t go down along with that ship. Beginning in 1989, the same God who raised up His church under Mr. Armstrong went to work raising the ruins. By 1997, the scattered remains of those who held to their original faith had grown in number to support an exciting new phase of God’s work: reprinting and sending Mr. Armstrong’s literature—particularly his masterwork,
Mystery of the Ages
—to the largest audience possible.

Immediately, the same leadership that cut down Mr. Armstrong came gunning for this resurrected work, promising to bury the facts again, saying it was their “Christian duty to keep this book out of print.”
¹

A grueling, life-and-death, six-year copyright battle ensued in which the Worldwide Church of God and the Philadelphia Church of God went head to head over the beliefs outlined in
Mystery of the Ages
. The history of that amazing case and its wondrous outcome shines a stark light on what really happened inside the Worldwide Church of God.

Relying on a wealth of official
WCG
documents and depositions submitted in federal courts, this book reveals the truth behind the shipwreck of the Worldwide Church of God. W
CG
officials
pleaded
in court for many of these documents to be kept confidential and ultimately destroyed after the litigation ended. Why? Because, as their former in-house attorney contended in a declaration at the conclusion of the case, “such documents constitute the private, confidential and internal discussion of underlying religious decisions regarding the changes in church doctrine,” as well as “the discussion and decisions regarding the publication or non-publication of church doctrine.”
²

After years of obscuring their actions, denying their motivations and covering their tracks, that, as it turns out, was their final, desperate attempt to bury the facts about how they went about transforming the church. In this book, we exhume those facts and expose them to the furious light of day, as they should have been all along, for your scrutiny.

“
Ironically, the same authoritarian governmental structure that created the heretical environment in the first place was necessary to correct it.”

—
Michael Feazell

The Liberation of the Worldwide Church of God

The Worldwide Church of God has not been transformed by truth over the past 20 years, as Joseph Tkach Jr. suggested in his 1997 book. The church has been transformed—no doubt about that. But not by truth. Rather, it was one of the most deceitful, treacherous and abusive transformations in the history of religion.

To understand the magnitude of the spiritual earthquake that has rocked this church, consider what it looked like before.

When Herbert W. Armstrong died on January 16, 1986, he left behind a church with 725 congregations in 57 countries
¹
around the globe and a powerful work going out to the world. It had a weekly worldwide attendance of 120,000 people,
²
and another 210,000 outside the church donated money regularly.
³
Serving these many members, prospective members and contributors were more than 1,200 ministers worldwide.
⁴

The church’s annual revenue was $163.7 million,
⁵
a budget bigger than Jerry Falwell’s and Billy Graham’s organizations
combined.
⁶
Religious writer Richard N. Ostling wrote a story for
Time
just weeks after Mr. Armstrong died in which he analyzed the growing popularity of televangelists during the mid-1980s. None of the preachers spotlighted, however—not Jimmy Swaggart, Oral Roberts, Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell or Robert Schuller—generated as much revenue as Herbert W. Armstrong.
⁷

At the top of Ostling’s list of televangelists was Jimmy Swaggart’s weekly
TV
show, which could be viewed in 197 markets as of early 1986. It was followed by Oral Roberts, airing in 192. Jerry Falwell could be seen in 172 markets, while Schuller’s “Hour of Power” aired in 169 cities. These programs were all dwarfed by Herbert W. Armstrong’s
World Tomorrow,
which could be seen on 382 television stations—far more markets than
any other religious program in America
⁸
—as well as 36 radio outlets around the world.
⁹

H
ERBERT
W
.
A
RMSTRONG WAS ONE OF THE BEST-KNOWN, MOST PROMINENT RELIGIOUS LEADERS IN THE 20TH CENTURY
. In fact, when you consider how tiny his work was at the beginning, in 1933, and how its far-reaching influence encompassed the Earth by the time of his death in 1986, one could justifiably argue that Herbert W. Armstrong was the most significant theologian
in American history.

By 1985, Mr. Armstrong’s flagship magazine, the
Plain Truth,
was being produced in seven languages and worldwide circulation had peaked at 8.4 million.
¹⁰
Time
magazine’s circulation that year was 5.9 million.
¹¹
With world population then at 4.9 billion, that meant 1 out of every 583 human beings on Earth received the
Plain Truth
. In the United States, the ratio was even better than that—1 in 48;
¹²
in Canada it was 1 in 27.

Besides the
Plain Truth
, a newsmagazine that concentrated on current events and the fulfillment of Bible prophecy, Mr. Armstrong also produced the
Good News,
a monthly Christian living magazine. Its circulation was 828,000 when Mr. Armstrong died.
¹³
That means the circulation of Mr. Armstrong’s two most popular magazines, when combined, actually exceeded the
combined
circulations of America’s most popular newsmagazines in 1985—
Time
and
Newsweek
.
¹⁴

For teenagers, Mr. Armstrong offered
Youth ‘85
, distributed into 138 countries and territories just before Mr. Armstrong died. It had a circulation of 230,000.
¹⁵
For those interested in studying the Bible in depth, there was the 32-lesson
Ambassador College Bible Correspondence Course.
Over the course of 30 years, between 1954 and 1984, more than 2 million people enrolled in the course.
¹⁶
By the time Mr. Armstrong died, the course had been produced in seven languages and was attracting more than 200,000 applicants for enrollment each year.
¹⁷
In 1985, the church distributed more than 1 million lessons.
¹⁸

Then there were the many books and booklets—more than 40 million of which had been distributed over the course of Mr. Armstrong’s 50-year ministry.
¹⁹
The most requested book was
The United States and Britain in Prophecy
—mailed to 6 million people. The most popular booklet was
The Seven Laws of Success
, requested by 3 million.
²⁰

Between 1980 and 1984, the church distributed 361.6 million books, booklets, magazines, newspapers, lessons and letters. According to the
Pastor General’s Report,
“This huge amount of literature would fill to capacity a train 6½ miles long with 624 boxcars .…”
²¹

Add to those boxcars the record numbers from 1985, which was, in the words of the
WCG
’s mail processing director, “the greatest time of harvest that the work has experienced in this age. Records were established by wide margins in nearly every category of mail and phone calls.”
²²
That year, the church answered 1.1 million phone calls, received 6.7 million pieces of mail and added 2.1 million new names to its database. The church responded to this flood of requests by distributing 85.9 million publications, which represented a 15.8 percent increase over 1984.
²³

And of the millions of requests back in 1985, one title came from the lips of new contacts, subscribers and church members more than any other:
Mystery of the Ages
.
Written during the last year of his life, Mr. Armstrong considered it the “best work of [his] 93 years .…”
²⁴
From September of 1985, when the book arrived from the printer, to December that same year, 740,000 people wrote or called for
Mystery of the Ages
,
making it by far the fastest-moving publication the church had ever produced.
²⁵

All this is what Mr. Armstrong bequeathed to his successor.

The Betrayal

Now fast forward 20 years. Membership ranks in the
WCG
have dwindled by 70 percent. (As of 1997, Mr. Tkach Jr. said the church had lost about 70,000 members.
²⁶
It has undoubtedly lost many more since then.) The income has plummeted by about 95 percent. The
World Tomorrow
program vanished from the airwaves in 1994. Ambassador College, providing liberal arts training to some 15,000 students over five decades, is now defunct: The Pasadena, California, campus closed its doors in 1990; its sister campus in Big Sandy, Texas, followed suit in 1997. The
Good News
was discontinued in 1990, while the
Plain Truth
barely survives with a few thousand paying subscribers. This is a colossal disaster by any business standard.

Then there is
Mystery of the Ages
:
Tkachism took over in 1986 and the book was gone by early 1988, even though more than 1.2 million copies had been distributed—a phenomenal success by any measure.

All the unique doctrines of the Worldwide Church of God have been changed. All of Mr. Armstrong’s literature has been retired. All the operations he established have been either drastically downsized or phased out altogether. Most ministers and members have either fled or been excommunicated for resisting change.

And through it all, a tight-knit band of Tkach loyalists weathered the spiritual storm and the devastation left in its wake, all the while amassing a small fortune by selling off all the goods and property Mr. Armstrong once used for God’s work.

Today, in the
WCG
,
THERE IS NO WORK
—just truckloads of money brought in from the fire sale. They have sold off nearly everything that had any monetary value—summer campsites, fall festival sites, furniture, fine art, business equipment, books—everything. They even auctioned off personal gifts that world leaders had given to Mr. Armstrong. In 2000, they sold the Big Sandy campus for $8.5 million.
²⁷
In 2004, they offloaded the fire sale’s biggest prize: their headquarters property in Pasadena, including the world-renowned Ambassador Auditorium. Church officials were ultra-secretive about the final sum they collected for their crown jewels, but it was probably in the neighborhood of $60 to $70 million.

Whatever the final price, it was enough to make Bernie Schnippert positively giddy. “We are in a very good position financially,” the church’s director of finance told the
Pasadena Star-News
in May of 2004. According to Schnippert, the church now had enough to meet the church’s financial obligations and then some
.
²⁸

“Administrative Nightmare”

In
Transformed by Truth,
Joseph Tkach Jr. is quite critical of Mr. Armstrong’s governmental structure. “It is said that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” he wrote. “Mr. Armstrong may have never wielded absolute power in our church, but by the same token, there weren’t many who would challenge him on an issue. No doubt that is one reason why he earned a reputation ‘on the outside’ as a theological despot.”
²⁹

Later, he wrote that Mr. Armstrong “was most definitely and absolutely in charge of our church. … He was the founder, and he came on the scene as this transcendental figure whom most of our members saw as having all authority and power .…”
³⁰

In another book, written by Tkach Jr.’s right-hand man, J. Michael Feazell said Mr. Armstrong “seemed oblivious to the administrative nightmare his one-man-show style of leadership created.”
³¹

I can’t figure out how a worldwide work that helped millions of lives—through the airwaves, with free literature, international humanitarian projects, a famous concert series, youth programs, two colleges and a high school—could ever be characterized as nightmarish, yet that is the way
WCG
officials today represent that history. In listening to them, you get the impression they had no choice but to remain in this church, as if Mr. Armstrong handcuffed them to the chairs at church services.

“How could the church have lied to me all these years?” Feazell asked in his book. It’s one thing to disagree with what Mr. Armstrong believed and taught—a lot of people did—but to say the church
lied?
“I felt taken advantage of,” Feazell continued, “spiritually and emotionally
RAPED
.” (Emphasis added throughout book.)

Raped?
Because he chose to remain in a church that he could have walked away from at any time? He’s comparing his upbringing in the
WCG
to a woman being
forcibly
raped by a sexual pervert? Feazell wrote,

It seemed as though my life had been robbed from me. I could have gone to a state college and had a real career and maybe even been a real Christian. I was angry. I was confused. I was depressed. And I was disgusted with the seductive assault on the true gospel waged by Herbert Armstrong’s “one and only true church.”
³²

I’m disgusted too, that he would compare Mr. Armstrong’s
religion
to the despicable deeds of a rapist.

One Long “Process”

When Tkach, Feazell and their associates grabbed hold of the reins from a tyrannical despot who forced his subjects to submit, one wonders why the system of government Mr. Armstrong set up in the church wasn’t the first doctrine they changed.

Feazell insists that right after Mr. Armstrong died, one of Tkach Sr.’s “first goals was to dismantle the authoritarian approach to government in the church .…”
³³
Yet, according to Feazell, one of Tkach Sr.’s first courses of action was to tone down authoritative language in a
speech club manual
—not exactly earth-shaking in its magnitude.

Later in his book, Feazell admitted that when Tkach Sr. died in 1995, he “delegated the same unchecked authority to his son, Joseph Tkach Jr., making him the third pastor general of the church.”
³⁴
Think about that—even though one of his “first goals” as pastor general was to supposedly “dismantle” the church’s authoritarian government, Joseph Tkach Sr. died with the
SAME
“unchecked authority” he had inherited from Mr. Armstrong nearly 10 years earlier. And as Feazell noted, the father passed those same powers down to his son, who, at 43 years of age, became
SUPREME HEAD
of the Worldwide Church of God in 1995.

“The younger Tkach,” however, “immediately adopted, voluntarily, a consensual style of leadership and began to act only with approval from the church board of directors,” Feazell wrote.
³⁵
But did he make any permanent
REVISIONS
to the powers of pastor general? According to Feazell, the younger Tkach “began the process” of revising the church bylaws in 1996. Yet, when asked in July of 2002—six years later, during a court deposition—if Tkach Jr. had the same absolute power he inherited in 1995, Feazell said that “may well be true.”
³⁶
That admission was six years after the younger Tkach “began the process” of revising the bylaws—a full
16 years
after his father set out to “dismantle the authoritarian approach to government in the church.”