Raising the Ruins (20 page)

It is also interesting to note that during the trip, Mr. Armstrong completed chapter 5 of
Mystery of the Ages
,
as well as a letter to the church membership. He met with the president of an advertising agency working on behalf of the church in Asia. He met with the church’s regional director over Australia and Asia. He had a private meeting with the Japanese foreign minister and later hosted a banquet for 200 government officials, diplomats and Japanese business people. The night after the banquet, Mr. Armstrong addressed the managers at Japan Life, whose chairman had visited Ambassador College earlier that year. Before ending the trip, Mr. Armstrong discussed, with a number of Japanese government officials, the prospect of supporting a project in China.
³⁶

Compare that with Mr. Tkach’s first trip aboard the used
BAC 1
-11—a three-day trip to Washington,
D.C.
, in early December 1988. He attended two services on the Sabbath of December 3, giving the
announcements
at both the north and south churches in Washington. The two sermons were given by evangelists who accompanied Mr. Tkach on the trip. On Sunday, Mr. Tkach attended the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony and toured some of the sites in
D.C.
with his entourage. Traveling with Mr. Tkach over the weekend were the five-man flight crew, including a steward and a chef, Michael Rasmussen, David Albert and his wife, Richard Ames and his wife, Dibar Apartian and his wife, Leroy Neff and his wife and Wayne Shilkret.
³⁷

It seems like plenty of “fat” could have been trimmed from that weekend trip.

Eight days after returning from Washington,
D.C.
, Mr. Tkach took the
BAC 1
-11 on a 13-day trip to the Philippines, Hong Kong and Malaysia. Besides visiting church congregations, Mr. Tkach and his entourage toured war memorials, museums, shopping districts and a floating village. Traveling with Mr. Tkach were the five-man flight crew, the three-man
TV
crew and Michael Rasmussen, Ellen Escat and Esther Apperson.

In July of 1989, for a 13-day trip through England, Belgium, Italy and Greece, Mr. Tkach took Michael Feazell, Joseph Locke, Michael Rasmussen, Julie Stocker, Mr. and Mrs. Apartian, Mr. and Mrs. Hulme, the three-man television crew and the five-man flight crew—17 in all.

To spend that much money for his traveling entourage—for hotel reservations, limousine rentals, food and incidentals—even as he repeatedly stressed trimming the fat and working more efficiently, didn’t seem to phase Mr. Tkach. The way he saw it, he saved the work millions by trading the
G-III
for the
BAC 1
-11.

The 1989 Income “Dip”

Three months before the European trip, Mr. Tkach excitedly told the brethren about the church’s new five-year plan, which had been completed in April 1989. After highlighting key points from the plan in a
Worldwide News
article, Tkach wrote, “Our current income dip would be even more difficult for us if we hadn’t already been putting into effect cost-saving measures planned last year.”
³⁸
Who knows
what
would have happened to the work without Tkachism’s financial model.

He told members that if the dip continued, “severe cutbacks” would have to be made, perhaps in television. He said that if stations in their area stopped carrying
The World Tomorrow,
their pastor could arrange for video cassettes to be mailed to the congregation for a local viewing.

“We must avoid waste,” he wrote. Then finally, “At this point normal reserves have disappeared to take up the slack, and we have now begun to dip into the reserves from the sale of the
G-III
aircraft.” They sold the
G-III
in
January
and by April they were already dipping into proceeds from the sale!

That’s how bad the “crisis” was in 1989.

In May, Mr. Tkach wrote, “With an annual budget of $160 million, a shortfall of even a few percent is significant.” Then later, “I was disappointed to learn of some few who had simply become complacent and careless about tithing, not seeming to realize that one who is careless about tithing is robbing God.”
³⁹

I’m not sure why he would have used the 1985 budget figure. Income the year before Mr. Tkach addressed the “shortfall” was actually $201 million. At any rate, he kept pounding away at the budget “crisis” throughout 1989.

Later in May, Tkach wrote, “I know we’d all rather see growth than cutbacks. But as I’ve said many times, God does expect us to live within our means, and we will certainly do that.”
⁴⁰
It was beginning to sound like a broken record.

Later that year, in September, Mr. Tkach admonished the brethren to brace themselves for additional cuts. “If God wanted us to step out in faith in order to grow as fast as possible, there would never be a need to count the cost, or to worry about being prepared to handle the growth,” he wrote. “The church has done that occasionally in the past, but we have always ended up having to slash severely because the budget simply could not keep up. Like anyone, we should be able to learn from our past experience.”
⁴¹

It was yet another way to put down Mr. Armstrong and his supposedly poor managerial practices.

“I wish we could have a 10 or 12 million
Plain Truth
circulation right now!” Tkach exclaimed. “But I have to realize that we just can’t afford it now. I am instead having to face the fact that we may need to trim the circulation slightly to afford what God has given us.”
⁴²

By the end of the year, the total “dip” for 1989 actually amounted to another all-time high: $211,777,000.
⁴³
True, that only represented a 5.2 percent increase over 1988. But as Mr. Tkach himself admitted, with a budget as large as the
WCG
’s, “even a few percent is significant.”

That same year, Larry Salyer told the church that
Mystery of the Ages
was “among the most expensive pieces of literature” the church had produced. Years later, Tkach Jr. said the book was a financial drain and implied that their income was not sufficient to sustain the project. Yet they announced the book’s removal right as the church had reached its financial peak!

More Massive Cuts

The 1989 budget “crisis” triggered many more cutbacks in programs Mr. Armstrong established. In January 1990, Mr. Tkach announced the decision to remove the toll-free number from the television program, which would save the work $3.2 million per year. Besides the cost savings, Mr. Tkach said the work would benefit from the decision in other ways too: “The small amount of extra effort that it takes to write instead of to call means that the seed (in this case, the
Plain Truth
subscription) will be falling on more fertile ground. This would mean a somewhat smaller
Plain Truth
circulation, but a higher-quality one.”
⁴⁴
Impeccable logic!

In March, the
Worldwide News
reported that the number of stations airing
The World Tomorrow
had fallen to 123.
⁴⁵
Just one year earlier, according to the article, the program had aired on 232 stations. At the time Mr. Armstrong died, the number of stations totaled 382.
⁴⁶

In July, Mr. Tkach told the membership, “
Plain Truth
circulation, which we have had to trim from last year’s level to stay within budget, stands at a strong 5 million!”
⁴⁷
The year before, it was over 6 million.
⁴⁸

In September, Mr. Tkach announced that it was time for
The World Tomorrow
and the
Plain Truth
to take on a more religious tone. He had come to see that with the old “more secular tone,” the church may have been fishing in waters “where the fish have stopped biting.”
⁴⁹
And since the
Plain Truth
would now be more religious, he explained, they no longer needed the
Good News
magazine! “The new
Plain Truth,”
he explained,

will replace both the current
Plain Truth
and the
Good News
(which will no longer be needed with the new
Plain Truth
format). … This revised approach will enable us to maximize effectiveness with less expense in the publishing, editorial and mailing areas of the work.

Since Mr. Armstrong believed his God-given commission was twofold, he established the
Good News
in 1939 in support of the church’s secondary mission—to “feed the flock” spiritual meat.
⁵⁰
While the
Plain Truth
was primarily used to preach the gospel of the kingdom to the world as a witness (the church’s first mission), the
Good News
was intended more for church members and co-workers, although later in his ministry, Mr. Armstrong made it available to anyone who wanted to study God’s word in greater depth.

But when the Tkaches changed the commission after Mr. Armstrong died, they lost interest in the whole concept of proclaiming a message to the world. So they made the
Plain Truth
more like the
Good News
and then nixed the
Good News
altogether, describing the move as a better, more efficient way to do the work.

By the end of 1990, Mr. Tkach reported, “We have reduced the circulation of the
Plain Truth
by changing its format to a more clearly religious, gospel-oriented approach.”
⁵¹
The worldwide circulation had dwindled to 2.7 million.

Thus, 1990 began with a
Plain Truth
circulation around 6 million and
the Good News
at 1.1 million.
⁵²
By the end of that year, the
Plain Truth
had been cut by more than half and the
Good News
eliminated altogether.

Yet, despite this staggering series of cuts, the church had a worldwide membership of 97,000 in 1990
⁵³
and finished the year with virtually the same amount of revenue as it did the year before: $211,243,000. That amounted to 29 percent more than Mr. Armstrong’s best year—and at a time when they were making a staggering serious of cuts.

One wonders, where did all that money go?

Ambassador College

As noted previously, Mr. Tkach altered the course for Ambassador College within months of Mr. Armstrong’s death, beginning with the decision in April 1986 to keep the Big Sandy campus open. In 1987, Mr. Tkach wrote, “Ambassador College is perhaps the most visible and high-profile representation to the general public of what God’s church teaches and believes in.”
⁵⁴
Mr. Armstrong, while he placed a high value on the example Ambassador set for the church and the world, continually stressed that the college’s primary purpose was to help
support
the work of the church.

When Mr. Tkach decided to pursue accreditation for the college in 1988, he wrote, “[W]e must recognize that Ambassador College now serves a greater and broader purpose for God’s work than it did in its earlier days.”
⁵⁵
So they began pouring money into the college.

In Mr. Armstrong’s day, the annual spending on the college had been about 10 percent of the overall budget. In 1989, that figure increased to 14 percent: Of the $210 million the church spent, $30 million went toward the college.
⁵⁶

In 1990, the church spent almost $222 million ($10.6 million more than it received)
⁵⁷
—
17 percent
of which went toward the college. So in the same year they slashed just about every program due to the budget crisis, they upped their college budget from $30 million to $37 million
⁵⁸
—a 23 percent increase. “During 1990,” according to the
Worldwide News,
“the church funded approximately $15,663,000 of construction costs for needed dormitories, classrooms and offices to accommodate the consolidation [of both campuses in Big Sandy].”
⁵⁹
That same year, the
Plain Truth
circulation
had
to be cut from 6 million to less than 3 million, they
had
to “trim” at least 122 television stations from the budget
⁶⁰
and the
Good News
and the toll-free number
had
to be cut
entirely
.

Here is a simple comparison between budgets for 1987 and 1990. In 1987, Tkachism spent $180 million. The budget breakdown looked like this:

Publishing—24 percent

Local congregations, field ministry—23 percent

Broadcasting and proclaiming the gospel—18 percent

Management and general—18 percent

Ambassador College—10 percent

Member assistance—4 percent

Ambassador Foundation—3 percent
⁶¹

In 1990, after spending $222 million, the breakdown looked like this:

Local congregations, field ministry—26 percent

Publishing—19 percent

Ambassador College—17 percent

Management and general—17 percent

Broadcasting and proclaiming the gospel—14 percent

Member assistance—4 percent

Ambassador Foundation—3 percent
⁶²

Spending on Ambassador College in 1987 amounted to $18 million. Three years later, after huge cutbacks in preaching the gospel, the college budget had more than doubled.

Ambassador College had become Tkachism’s baby.

Counting the Cost

In his book, Mr. Tkach Jr. piously compares himself and his fellows to the Apostle Paul, who “suffered the loss of all things” in order to “win Christ.”
⁶³
He wrote,