Raising the Ruins (21 page)

Our membership losses have resulted in a corresponding drop in income. … With dramatically fewer members and greatly reduced income, expenses had to be cut as well. … We were forced to lay off most of our headquarters staff, cut circulation of [and later charge for] the
Plain Truth
magazine, sharply reduce subsidies to [and later close] Ambassador University, end our acclaimed performing arts series at Ambassador Auditorium, and sell off many of our assets [including the auditorium]. …

So you do the math. What do these figures tell you? If the changes in the Worldwide Church of God are some kind of con job—some cynical, conspiratorial plot hatched in secret back rooms—then we’re not very adept at pulling it off.
⁶⁴

Let us then, as he suggests, do the math. First, consider the golden years of Herbert W. Armstrong’s work in the Worldwide Church of God—after he set out to get the church back on track in the late 1970s and through to the mid-1980s, when the church experienced such abundant growth. During the last five years of Mr. Armstrong’s ministry, between 1981 and 1985, this is the annual revenue he had to work with:

1981: $108 million

1982: $121 million

1983: $132 million

1984: $148 million

1985: $164 million
⁶⁵

It amounted to $673 million. Compare that with the
first
five years of Tkachism:

1986: $182 million

1987: $192 million

1988: $201 million

1989: $212 million

1990: $211 million
⁶⁶

Tkachism’s five-year total amounted to $998 million.
Can you believe that?
They had about a
billion
dollars to work with their first five years!

Talk about
golden
years. This was when Tkach’s entourage was living large! It’s when they decided to close the Pasadena campus and pump all that money into Big Sandy. It’s when they changed the commission and slashed spending on numerous programs established to preach the gospel to the world. It’s when they reduced the
Plain Truth
circulation from 8.4 to 2.7 million and
The World Tomorrow
from 382 stations to about 100. It’s when the
Good News
and Mr. Armstrong’s books were retired permanently—
Mystery of the Ages
found to be “riddled with error.”

And it’s when they tricked members into thinking nothing had changed, except perhaps some
minor
things that Mr. Armstrong himself supposedly wanted to change.

Tkach Jr. wrote, “The Worldwide Church of God reached its peak attendance in 1988—two years after Mr. Armstrong’s death—with 126,800 members and 150,000 in attendance. Those figures stayed relatively stable
until 1992
, when a slight dip was noted.”
⁶⁷
Isn’t that amazing? It didn’t even dip
until 1992
. They got the power they needed to do away with Mr. Armstrong’s teachings in 1986 and the additional benefit of a membership and income
on the rise,
thanks to the popularity of Mr. Armstrong’s teachings.

And you wonder why they didn’t tell 150,000 church members
in 1988
that
Mystery of the Ages
was
RIDDLED
with error?
I can give you about one billion reasons why
.

Let’s do more math. Consider the income for Tkachism’s
second
five-year period, between 1991 and 1995:

1991: $197 million

1992: $191 million

1993: $176 million

1994: $165 million

1995: $103 million
⁶⁸

It wasn’t until 1995 that the church’s income
finally
fell below the revenue Mr. Armstrong generated in his last year. Of course, Mr. Armstrong’s $164 million would have had more purchasing power in 1994—amounting to about $226 million. But still, Tkachism’s revenue for 1994, the year Tkach Sr. gave “The Sermon,” as his son called it, was
$165 million
.

Total revenue during their
SECOND
five years amounted to
$832 million
. Where in the world did all
THAT
money go? They shut down the Pasadena campus and the toll-free number in 1990.
The World Tomorrow
went off the air in 1994. The concert series ended in 1995.
Plain Truth
circulation had plummeted. About the only thing going for the church was the college in Big Sandy—and they decided to close that in 1997. Yet Tkachism had $832 million to work with during this second five-year period.

Tkachism is obviously
not
the story of a few courageous leaders who counted the cost and were willing to give up everything for the sake of God’s truth. Between Mr. Armstrong’s death and the year
Transformed by Truth
was released in 1997, Tkachism received
nearly $2 billion
of income. And that’s just the revenue. The book value of all the property and equipment they inherited from Mr. Armstrong was $83 million, according to their 1987 audit.
⁶⁹
And nearly all of that was paid for.

Adjusting figures for inflation, imagine if you inherited an estate today worth $150 million and you could count on it generating another 2½ to 3
billion
dollars over the next 10 to 12 years. That’s the position the Tkaches landed in when Mr. Armstrong died. Yet look at what they have to show for it.

You do the math. How could these men do
so little
with
SO MUCH
? Couldn’t they at least come out of it with a moderately successful college? Or a magazine that was at least popular within Christian communities?

Apparently not. In doing the math, we see that
everything
Tkachism did to “manage” the Worldwide Church of God has turned out to be a miserable failure. Living through it, we heard all about their five-year plans, their big ideas, the amount of money they “saved.” But in the end, everything collapsed. And now they want us to view their repeated failures as validation for how courageous and sincere they were in pursuit of the truth, no matter the cost? These men didn’t sacrifice anything—except the
lives
and
investments
tens of thousands of
others
made in support of Mr. Armstrong’s work.

Had it happened in the corporate world, the
CEOS
and executives responsible for hijacking a corporation and then treacherously robbing its investors of their future would have been
FIRED
, if not
prosecuted
in a court of law.

But in the world of Tkachism, a giant, conspiratorial con job, hatched in the secrecy of back rooms and then carried out by cynical, self-righteous imposters, is hailed as a courageous success story of service and sacrifice for the good of mankind.

Funding the Pensions

In recent years, Tkachism has harshly criticized Mr. Armstrong for never starting an employee retirement plan. “In the past,” Tkach Jr. wrote in 2003, “the Worldwide Church of God in the United States and elsewhere made no provision for the retirement of its employees. This was a decision made by others before the current administration and was inherited by us.”
⁷⁰
Of course, Mr. Armstrong always had a generous assistance program designed to help those in need. But it was funded by
tithe
-payers, and tithing is now bad, the Tkaches say.
So Mr. Armstrong just couldn’t do anything right!

“The results of these unfortunate policies in our past are now being remedied,” Tkach continued. “We are making plans to enroll U.S. church employees in a retirement plan funded by proceeds from the sale of the Pasadena property.”
⁷¹

And they’re to be commended for this new financial model?
They stopped doing
ANY KIND OF WORK
in the early 1990s and wound up with perhaps $100 million worth of property and facilities just sitting there collecting dust. So they sold it all and placed the “bulk of the sale proceeds,” according to Ron Kelly, in a formal pension plan for
current
employees.
⁷²
They
SOLD
everything Mr. Armstrong and his faithful supporters built for doing
God’s work
and then set aside the proceeds for those who stayed through the transformation and remained loyal to
Tkach
. There’s nothing brilliant about that. It’s more like a payoff.

Tkach Jr. called the church’s lack of retirement funding an “unfortunate” policy that his administration inherited. To use that excuse in 1986, when his father took over, or even in 1995, when he replaced his father, is one thing.
But to blame Mr. Armstrong for the lack of pension planning in 2003?

What, exactly, did the
Tkaches
ever do for their retirees between 1986 and 2003? Quite a few of the long-time ministers who stayed with the
WCG
began retiring during the mid-1990s, long before the property ever sold. Couldn’t the Tkaches have taken steps in that direction years earlier, if it was such an egregious error made by Mr. Armstrong? As we have seen, the
WCG
was still collecting hundreds of millions of dollars each year in the early 1990s. They had more than $2 billion in revenue to work with between Mr. Armstrong’s death and when they finally sold the property in 2004. Couldn’t they have carved out some kind of pension plan from $2 billion?

Herman Hoeh, Norman Smith, Dean Blackwell and Richard Rice—all long-time evangelists in the
WCG
—retired in
1996
. But it’s supposedly
Mr. Armstrong’s fault
that the Tkaches never got around to developing a retirement program until 2004—
18 years after Mr. Armstrong died?

Dr. Hoeh was one of the first four to graduate from Ambassador College. Norman Smith was ordained as an evangelist in 1957—Dean Blackwell in 1964. All these evangelists, by the way, were in their 60s at the date of their retirements—Hoeh was 67, Smith was 66, Blackwell was 64 and Rice was 60.

Before the Tkach pension plan could move forward in 2004—contingent on the sale of the property, of course—the
WCG
had a “discretionary assistance program” in place for its former, retirement-age employees. According to Tkach Jr., 240 retired employees qualified for assistance as of March 2003, which cost the church $350,000 per month. On average, that amounts to $1,458 per month for each retiree, or $17,500 a year—not exactly a lucrative retirement package.

Perhaps that’s why Dean Blackwell—an evangelist of 32 years—got a part-time job at a Dillards department store after he retired.

Mr. Armstrong’s Retirement Policy

Retirement was a rarity for
WCG
ministers before Mr. Armstrong died. I mean, unless you are physically incapable of working, how do you retire from serving
God?
Moses never retired. Neither did Peter, John or Paul. “The United States is the only nation on Earth that retires people at age 60 or 65,” Mr. Armstrong wrote in 1979. “In the United States most have come to suppose that people naturally begin to lose their mental faculties even as early as 55.”
⁷³
Mr. Armstrong didn’t subscribe to that line of thinking. He proved by his own work that the most productive years of life can be long after the “normal” retirement age. In fact, the work of the Worldwide Church of God really didn’t go
worldwide
until
after
Mr. Armstrong turned 60.

And had Mr. Armstrong not been brought back to life in 1977, Garner Ted’s liberals would have destroyed the church long before the Tkaches ever did. It was in August 1977, when Mr. Armstrong was 85, that his heart and breathing both stopped. He had no pulse—no blood pressure. A nurse frantically administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and massaged Mr. Armstrong’s heart. After about a minute-and-a-half, he was breathing again on his own.

Seven months after his resuscitation, Mr. Armstrong said this to a group of
WCG
ministers in Pasadena: “Shortly after they’d told me what had happened [heart failure], I felt that if my work in God’s hands were finished and God didn’t have any further use for me in His work, that I would rather have remained dead.”
⁷⁴

Like the Apostle Paul, he had a “desire to depart”
⁷⁵
if God was finished working through him. But God wasn’t, as Mr. Armstrong would later explain:

It is now clearly evident that God brought me back for a vital purpose, by
CPR
, from death by heart failure. Had I remained dead the church of the living God would have been virtually destroyed by the liberal element that had crept in, especially in headquarters administration during my absence from Pasadena.
⁷⁶

And so, at 85 years of age, and in poor health, he took charge and single-handedly put the Worldwide Church of God back on track! Retirement was never an option—even if liberal ministers might have
wanted him
to retire. If God kept him alive, it was to work. “I never expect to ‘retire,’ though I passed the so-called ‘retirement age’ long ago,” he wrote in 1971.
⁷⁷
“I expect to stay in harness as long as I live.”
⁷⁸

And because he did that, even after congestive heart failure, he not only removed the liberal element—
HE LED THE
W
ORLDWIDE
C
HURCH OF
G
OD INTO ITS GOLDEN AGE
! Herbert W. Armstrong’s greatest contribution to the Worldwide Church of God was made
after
God brought him back to life in 1977.

At the time Mr. Armstrong’s heart had failed him, liberals had come close to destroying the church. The
Plain Truth
circulation had fallen to just over 1 million, the
World Tomorrow
program—with Garner Ted at the helm—could be seen on only 50 stations, and Ambassador College had turned into a secular institution.