Raising the Ruins (5 page)

Mr. Tkach announced his new spiritual rank at a regional directors conference in Pasadena, on November 21, 1986,
only 10 months
after he had been in office. Tkach’s announcement cleared the way for Salyer’s piece to be pulled off the shelf. Salyer wrote to the ministry the next month,

During the last several years Christ saw to it that Mr. Tkach was pressed into daily contact with Mr. Armstrong and was directly involved in virtually every major decision. Mr. Armstrong delegated to Mr. Tkach ever-increasing responsibility for gathering facts and implementing his decisions. In the final weeks of his life Mr. Armstrong specifically instructed Mr. Tkach in the responsibilities of pastor general, sharing many personal experiences with him. And before his death he appointed Mr. Tkach as his successor and saw to it that the passing of the baton was legally documented and announced to the church.
²¹

What he failed to mention is that within those same legal documents, Mr. Armstrong
SPECIFICALLY
mentioned that Mr. Tkach would succeed him in every office
except
apostle. Later, Salyer continued,

It has become obvious to the leading ministers at headquarters that Mr. Tkach is doing, as Mr. Armstrong was before him, the work of an apostle. … Christ has chosen him and sent him forth as an apostle to carry on His work, supported and reinforced by the whole church, as co-workers with Christ.

To leading ministers at headquarters, it had become
OBVIOUS
, after only
a few months,
that Joseph Tkach was an apostle. Mr. Salyer then encouraged the
WCG
ministry to explain in sermons Mr. Tkach’s newly established office.
²²

The next month, in the church’s newspaper, there is a reference to Mr. Tkach as an “apostle” buried on the back page of the issue. In commenting on Gerald Waterhouse’s tour of Australia, Robert Fahey said he “showed clearly how God carefully selected and trained Mr. Tkach for the responsibilities he now has as the apostle of God’s end-time church, taking up the baton from Mr. Armstrong.”
²³
In the issues that followed, Mr. Tkach’s new spiritual rank worked its way to the front page of the church paper—splashing across headlines: “Spirit is catalyst of unity, says apostle in Pasadena”; “Christ’s apostle ‘deeply inspired’ by trip to Jordan, Egypt, Israel.”
²⁴

With Mr. Armstrong, it wasn’t until after
17 years
of service in God’s work that one of his top ministers put forward the idea that Mr. Armstrong was serving as God’s apostle. Herman Hoeh, one of the first four Ambassador College graduates, made the suggestion at a fall festival in 1951. Yet, as Mr. Armstrong later wrote, the whole idea came as a complete shock. He shook his head in “astonishment” upon hearing it and rejected it entirely.
²⁵

It was only after looking back on the
fruits
of his ministry—of proclaiming the gospel message of the Kingdom of God to the world—that Mr. Armstrong admitted to fulfilling the office of apostle. “Never in my life had I thought of occupying such an office,” he wrote three years after that 1951 festival.

But in the light of events, the fact of how God has set up His church today has become self-evident to all. It is God’s doing. If one does find, unexpectedly, that God has set him in such an office, there is only one choice—he must accept it with full humility, realizing personal lack, and surrendering the self totally to God as an instrument in His hands, relying wholly upon God for guidance and every power and need.
²⁶

The word
apostle
means “one sent forth.” Once Mr. Armstrong realized that God was indeed sending him forth into all nations with the true gospel message, then his thinking about the apostleship began to change. The “fruits,” as he often would say later in life, proved which office he fulfilled.

Mr. Tkach didn’t care so much about fruits. He just wanted the office. Like Simon Magus, who lusted for the power and authority of the first-century apostles,
²⁷
Mr. Tkach had a burning desire to be one too—even
before
Mr. Armstrong died. “He asked for it and Mr. Armstrong refused,” Dean says. “In fact, he asked several times.”
²⁸
Mr. Armstrong then took the extraordinary step of clearly stating in the final resolutions and directives he left the church that Joseph W. Tkach would succeed him in all his offices and titles,
except
the spiritual rank of apostle.
²⁹

As it happens, that’s the one title Mr. Tkach wanted most. So right after Mr. Armstrong died, he
made himself
an apostle.

“In conducting his studies, however, Armstrong had no seminary training and lacked any disciplined study of church history, biblical interpretation and original languages of Scripture.”

— Michael Feazell 2002

Besides wanting to be an apostle, Joseph Tkach Sr. also liked the idea of having an impeccable resume. “They were trying to create a legend out of him from the word
go,”
Aaron Dean remembers. Ellen Escat, Mr. Tkach’s administrative assistant, even asked Aaron to “make Mr. Tkach look like Mr. Armstrong” when discussing him in sermons or conversations.
¹

If, in fact, Tkach was self-conscious about his qualifications for being pastor general, you can understand why. Mr. Armstrong, in addition to having established the church, was a prolific teacher and writer, a distinguished author, a famous television personality and an unofficial ambassador for world peace who was known among kings, prime ministers and presidents.

Mr. Tkach wasn’t even well known
within the Worldwide Church of God.
He rarely wrote for church publications. Wcg
ministers
knew him because of his position in Church Administration. But most of the church membership had never even heard him speak before he became pastor general in 1986.

Tkach’s Life in the Church

Considering he succeeded someone as prominent as Herbert W. Armstrong, Joseph Tkach Sr. had very little written about his background, even within the church’s vast literature base. With Mr. Armstrong, one could quickly pull together piles of information for a biography. With Mr. Tkach, that task is nearly impossible.

What little background information there is about Tkach was mostly written around the time he became pastor general. The most informative piece is a short article that appeared in the
Worldwide News,
“Passing the Baton,” by Jeff Zhorne and Michael Snyder.

Mr. Tkach was baptized in 1957 and spent his early
WCG
years in the city of his birth—Chicago, Illinois. He became a deacon in 1961 and a local elder in 1963—the same year the church employed him to work full time in the ministry.

His three years as a local elder in Chicago were unusually productive, according to the
Worldwide News
synopsis: “The pastor general established churches in South Bend, Fort Wayne and Indianapolis, Ind.; Rockford and Peoria, Ill.; Davenport, Iowa; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Milwaukee, Wis.; Cincinnati, Ohio; and St. Louis, Mo.”
²
That a
local elder
—and a
new
one at that—would
ESTABLISH
10 congregations across seven different states, is something that just didn’t happen in the
WCG
during the 1960s. My own father started attending services in St. Louis
in 1961
—two years
before
Mr. Tkach even became a minister. So there is no way he could have “established” that congregation. “The only time I remember seeing him in St. Louis was for softball tournaments,” my father remembers.
³

Someone might have alerted the
WCG
’s editorial staff about this attempt to pad Mr. Tkach’s resume after “Passing the Baton” ran in the
Worldwide News
. By the time the information appeared in the
Good News
four months later, it had been revised, saying Mr. Tkach “helped” establish those congregations—which might be closer to the truth, but still seems like a stretch.
⁴

In 1966, according to the
Worldwide News,
the
WCG
moved Mr. Tkach and his family to Pasadena so he could go to Ambassador College (
AC
). The article says “he attended for three years before being assigned to serve with [Roderick] Meredith in the Los Angeles, Calif., church.”
⁵
Tkach Jr.’s book says his father and mother “took classes for three years, intending upon graduation that my dad be sent out to pastor a church. Instead, he remained in Pasadena and eventually pastored a church there.”
⁶

The way Tkach Jr.’s book is worded gives the impression that his father graduated from Ambassador, which he didn’t.

As it happens, my father also went to Pasadena in the late 1960s and took classes for three years. He enrolled in the summer of 1967, one year after Tkach started his
AC
career. Both of them would have attended a small liberal arts college of about 500 students for at least two years together. And like Tkach, my dad was married at the time. And since most students were single, the Tkaches and the Flurrys would have been part of a fairly exclusive married student community between 1967 and 1969.

My father was photographed as a freshman in the 1968 Ambassador College envoy. Because he had previous college credit transferred to
AC
, he was on the three-year graduate program. So the following year, in the 1969 envoy, he can be found within the junior class. And in the 1970 edition, he is included within Pasadena’s graduating senior class.

Mr. Tkach, however, cannot be found in
any
of the college envoys between 1966 and 1970. “I don’t remember ever seeing him in a class,” my father says. He does recall seeing Tkach from time to time around the Pasadena campus, but not as a regular student.
⁷

In fact, Mr. Tkach did not come to Pasadena in 1966 as an
AC
student. The church had experienced rapid growth during the 1960s. It wasn’t like the 1940s and ’50s, when
nearly all
the leaders of the church were young men, in their 20s, who graduated from Ambassador College. During the 1960s, with bigger field congregations, there were more potential leaders, many of them already married and with grown children, who had developed in the local area without Ambassador training. To provide these men with some headquarters training, the superintendent of the U.S. ministry at the time, Roderick Meredith, established a one-year program for their benefit. Approved by Mr. Armstrong, the program called for a handful of local elders to come to headquarters for a year, where they could audit Ambassador College classes and receive on-the-job training in Meredith’s Los Angeles congregation, which had 1,100 members. The idea was for them to get a year of training at headquarters before rotating back out into the field to work as an associate pastor and eventually a pastor.

In the case of Mr. Tkach, according to Meredith, “He was never a good speaker, but Mr. Blackwell [Tkach’s district superintendent] pressured and pressured me to bring him to Pasadena because he was a hard worker.” And he did work hard, Meredith remembers.
⁸
But Mr. Tkach also had his limitations.

“When we brought him out, we found that he was not an intelligent person and he did not know his Bible that well,” Meredith said. As to why Mr. Tkach stayed in California instead of going back out to the field, it
wasn’t
because there was a need in Pasadena. According to Meredith, “We found Mr. Tkach couldn’t really rotate through and go to the field because we couldn’t really trust him to visit [the church members] on his own very much. So we assigned him to visit the widows in just non-threatening type visits. So he got the reputation of being the great loving minister to visit the widows frankly because we couldn’t let him do too much else.” According to the superintendent of the ministry at the time, the reason Mr. Tkach stayed in Pasadena is because he “did not qualify to be sent out as a pastor.”
⁹

As for the Ambassador training, Meredith says Tkach did sit in on some of the Bible classes, but not for credit. He can’t remember if he audited any classes after that initial year, but during his “three years” at Ambassador, according to his boss, he never attended full time, he didn’t take any classes for credit and “he definitely did not graduate.”
¹⁰

So the impression the Tkaches gave, that Sr. went to Ambassador College for three years
before
being assigned to pastor congregations, is not true. Tkach was assigned to Mr. Meredith in 1966 upon his arrival to Pasadena. And for the next several years, he worked with widows so as to not be a liability elsewhere.

He was raised to the rank of preaching elder in 1974, after being a local elder for 11 years. Throughout the 1970s, Tkach continued as an assistant pastor in various congregations in Southern California.

When California’s attorney general’s office tried to seize control of church operations in January 1979, Joseph Tkach was an assistant pastor for the Pasadena
A.M.
congregation. After church members spontaneously descended upon the headquarters property to show their support for a church under fire, Mr. Tkach and a deacon named Joseph Kotora hastily set up the Hall of Administration lobby for a makeshift church service. Dean Blackwell gave a sermon before the “sit in” congregation that day, and Mr. Tkach closed the service with prayer.

Tkach’s involvement in the 1979 crisis did not escape Mr. Armstrong’s attention, even though Mr. Armstrong was living in Arizona at the time. In July 1979, he appointed Mr. Tkach as director of Ministerial Services (later named Church Administration). Then, on September 27, 1979, in Mr. Armstrong’s Tucson home, the church founder raised three individuals to the rank of evangelist—the highest ecclesiastical office in the church (besides Mr. Armstrong’s). The new evangelists—Ellis LaRavia, Stanley Rader and Joseph Tkach—had all played a role in defending the church against the state’s unconstitutional attack.

Besides heading up Church Administration, Mr. Tkach also became associate pastor of the Pasadena
P.M.
congregation—the headquarters congregation Mr. Armstrong pastored. In 1981, Mr. Armstrong selected Mr. Tkach to serve on the Advisory Council. These were Mr. Tkach’s primary responsibilities for the final years of Mr. Armstrong’s life.

Sketchy Education

Besides adding to his exploits in the church, it appears that Tkach’s handlers also wanted to create a legend out of his life
before
conversion—particularly his academic background. In light of Mr. Armstrong’s views about modern education, one wonders why Mr. Tkach seemed so self-conscious about his formal education. Mr. Armstrong viewed his lack of training at an “assembly line” university or seminary as an advantage. Mr. Tkach, however, wanted scholarly credentials, even if he had to invent them.

After becoming pastor general in 1986, for some reason, he wanted the brethren to think that he was born in 1926. “Passing the Baton” gives precise dates for Tkach’s baptism, ordinations and marriage. But no birth date is given—it just says he was 59 at the time he became pastor general.

The
WCG
’s personal correspondence department produced a “Letters Series” in 1989 in which there is a fact sheet about Mr. Tkach’s background for people who requested such information. That letter, prepared three years after Mr. Tkach took charge, says he was “born in 1926,” but does not give the exact day or month of his birth.
¹¹

According to his birth and death certificates, however, Mr. Tkach was born on March 16, 1927, which means he would have been 58 when Mr. Armstrong died—not 59. By the time Mr. Tkach died in 1995, after critics had exposed these birth date inconsistencies, the
WCG
got the date right in a
Worldwide News
article by Jeff Zhorne.
¹²
Tkach Jr. also corrected the date in
Transformed by Truth,
justifying the mix-up this way: “As was common in those days, the doctor didn’t get around to filling out a birth certificate until a
few months
after my dad’s birth.”
¹³
In fact, according to the birth certificate, the doctor filed the information just
eight days
after Tkach was born.

As far as why they wanted him to be a year older, it’s hard to say. With the correct date, he would have finished high school early, soon after his 17th birthday. So maybe they wanted him to be an 18-year-old graduate. In any event, he did finish high school in 1944. He graduated 155th in a class size of 349, from Tilden High School in south Chicago.

The following year, in January 1945, he ran off and joined the Navy as a 17-year-old. So maybe they tried to make him 18 for that reason. But Tkach admitted to
Plain Truth
readers in 1986 that he ran away from home and was “under age” when he joined the Navy.
¹⁴

It’s just an odd “fact” to lie about. But why they stuck with the 1926 birthday for the first several years of Mr. Tkach’s pastor generalship, when they could have gotten the correct date from his driver’s license, is inexplicable.

Continuing with the timeline, according to Jeff Zhorne, Tkach served in the U.S. Navy during World War ii, from January 17, 1945, to July 22, 1946.
¹⁵
Mr. Tkach, however, wrote in the
Worldwide News
that he returned from the war to Chicago on December 21, 1945, which would have limited his service in the Navy to 11 months.
¹⁶

From 1946 to 1950 is when the biography gets real sketchy. In reading what the
WCG
produced, you are left with the distinct impression that Mr. Tkach went to college during those four years. In “Passing the Baton,” for instance, it says that after Tkach received a naval certificate in “basic engineering” in 1945, he then returned home to attend the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he studied industrial management. After that, he was hired by Hupp Aviation in 1950.
¹⁷

Upon searching their archives, however, representatives at the Illinois Institute found no record of Joseph Tkach ever having attended there. His career at the Illinois Institute, apparently, was not unlike his “training” at Ambassador College.
¹⁸

Lack of Scholarship

Writing in 2002, Michael Feazell criticized Mr. Armstrong because he “had no seminary training and lacked any disciplined study of church history, biblical interpretation and original languages of Scripture.”
¹⁹
In his book, Feazell said that “Herbert Armstrong and scholarship did not mix well.”
²⁰
As if it mixed well with
Tkach
. Feazell wrote, “Many of Armstrong’s doctrinal errors sprang directly from his ignorance of biblical scholarship and sound methods of biblical interpretation.”
²¹
In
Transformed by Truth,
Tkach Jr. criticized Mr. Armstrong for his lack of training in “hermeneutics, epistemology, or apologetics.”
²²