Raising the Ruins (8 page)

To replace McCullough, Mr. Tkach moved Rod Meredith from headquarters to Big Sandy. Three years later, after Tkach decided to close the Pasadena campus and focus its accreditation pursuit on Big Sandy, he brought Meredith back to Pasadena and tucked him away in an insignificant position within the editorial department.

Weeks after Mr. Tkach catapulted Dr. Ward to vice chancellor over the colleges, ahead of Mr. Meredith and Mr. McNair, Tkach shipped McNair to the New Zealand regional office.

We won’t take space to elaborate on a number of other examples, like Richard Ames, Herman Hoeh, Ellis La Ravia, Leroy Neff and Gerald Waterhouse—but suffice it to say that all of these men, who were prominent evangelists at the time of Mr. Armstrong’s death, faded from view and settled into much less significant roles once Mr. Tkach stepped into office and brought up his staff.

There are a few exceptions, like old-timers Dean Blackwell (who has since died) and Ron Kelly (who was the church’s financial controller until 2005, when he retired), but for the most part, when Tkach Sr. took over, he brought in a whole new administrative team.

It’s interesting now as I look back on this history because one of the biggest criticisms the Tkach administration had against my father, after they fired him in December 1989, was that he was a relative nobody—a lowly field minister who never served under Mr. Armstrong. And while that may have been true, one wonders what Mr. Armstrong would have thought of the upper echelons of the
WCG
administration at the point of my dad’s firing.

Donald Ward over the college?

Joe Jr. in charge of the ministry?

Michael Feazell writing articles for the pastor general?

Bernie Schnippert heading the church’s four main departments?

By the end of 1989, Tkach Jr. and Feazell had been delegated enough authority to fire two field ministers on the spot—my father and his assistant John Amos—ministers who had been serving full time in the church for two decades. Had Mr. Armstrong been present at the firing, he may not have recognized my father and Mr. Amos.

But I’m not sure he would have recognized the two men firing them either.

“The admonishment is now for those of us still living who now have a task that is set before them, a course that has already been charted by God’s apostle. We need to maintain that course and not deviate from it one iota.”

— Joseph W. Tkach

The day Mr. Armstrong died

In his 1997 book, Joseph Tkach Jr. wrote, “Early on, there were some astute members who saw that the first two or three changes we made required that other changes would soon have to be made. They accurately predicted most of the corrections we announced in the following three or four years. Yet
at the time we saw none of this
.” According to Tkach, when their critics predicted further changes, “We steadfastly denied we
were even thinking
about such changes .…”
¹
He said further that
NONE
of the
WCG
leaders even had any of this in mind—meaning the church’s transformation—
as late as 1991
.
²
It was all just an innocent coming-of-age story, we’re supposed to believe.

The problem with that theory is that what happened in the Worldwide Church of God
after
Mr. Armstrong died is what
almost
happened to the church in the 1970s,
before
he died. In fact, it was Mr. Armstrong’s declining health back then which had Garner Ted and others chomping at the bit to transform the church. The imminent likelihood of Mr. Armstrong’s death helped expose the true colors of Garner Ted and his fellows. Indeed, had not Mr. Armstrong recovered from heart failure in 1977, the church’s transformation would have occurred a decade earlier than it did.

Tkach Jr. acts as if they had no clue, even as late as 1991, about what they were doing or where the church was headed.

Yet, what Donald Ward did to Ambassador College between 1989 and 1994 is
EXACTLY
what he
almost
did in 1978 under Garner Ted.
Exactly!

And we’re supposed to believe that Bernie Schnippert’s work on the Systematic Theology Project in 1977—a scholarly attempt to liberalize the doctrines of the church—had no influence on his work 10 years later, when he returned to Pasadena to take charge of the editorial, publishing, television and mail processing departments?

The principal players in the Tkach transformation left their fingerprints
ALL OVER THE CRIME SCENE
during the 1970s! But unlike Garner Ted and a few others,
THEY NEVER GOT CAUGHT
. They fled the scene once Mr. Armstrong showed up physically revitalized and determined to prosecute the guilty. Joe Jr. got laid off, went through a divorce and hibernated in Arizona. Feazell—also laid off—went to Arizona to teach fifth graders. Schnippert settled into a small congregation in Las Vegas. Dr. Ward moved to East Texas.

Then, after Mr. Armstrong’s failing health finally got the best of him, they returned from hiding and
IMMEDIATELY
went to work on accomplishing what they and others
almost
did in the 1970s.

That’s not to say that
all
of Tkach’s fellows were staunch supporters of Garner Ted’s coup attempt. Some of the personalities changed. But in looking at the events from the mid-to-late 1980s, we find many of the same fingerprints that were left on the 1970s mess.

The most significant and obvious difference, of course, is that after January 16, 1986, Mr. Armstrong wasn’t around to restrain the rebels.

Identity of Babylon

The early to mid-1980s might well be considered the golden years for the Worldwide Church of God. At the same time, however, Mr. Armstrong’s overall health was in decline. His eyesight got so bad that, without the assistance of Aaron Dean, he would not have been able to complete
Mystery of the Ages
. Yet even with Dean serving as his eyes and ears those last few years, Mr. Armstrong did not see everything that was going on behind his back.

On December 17, 1983, Mr. Armstrong gave a sermon in Pasadena titled “Mission of the Philadelphia Era.” He read from a three-volume, extra-large-print version of the Bible—and even then, he needed a magnifying glass. During the sermon, he listed a number of truths God had restored to the Worldwide Church of God over the course of his ministry. Toward the end of his message, Mr. Armstrong discussed
RELIGIOUS DECEPTION
and the
IDENTITY OF MODERN
B
ABYLON
and its daughter churches (Revelation 17:5). He said, “Well, brethren, all those things have been
restored
.…”

The following year, on March 10, Mr. Armstrong reiterated many of these restored truths in a sermon he gave in Chicago. He also discussed the list at a ministerial conference over the summer. Then, in
Mystery of the Ages
,
he wrote in 1985, “At least 18 basic and essential truths have been restored to the true church.”
³

But Mr. Armstrong never produced a written list himself. That task was left to the church’s editorial department. Richard Rice, who managed the church’s mail processing center, was the first one to compile a written list of the truths. It appeared in the
Pastor General’s Report
a few months after Mr. Armstrong died. Although the list wasn’t numbered, it included 18 points. The list church members are much more familiar with appeared five months later in the
Worldwide News,
with a short introduction by Mr. Tkach.
⁴
According to Tkach, Editorial Services had prepared the list—and for the first time, it was numbered—there were 18 points of restored truth.

But there is
NOTHING
in Rice’s list or the one introduced by Tkach that says anything about the
modern identity of Babylon
. That’s because editors had been hard at work,
even before Mr. Armstrong died,
REVISING
and
OMITTING
much of the church’s teaching about ancient Babylon and the development of the modern Babylonian religious system.

The biggest revision in church literature appeared as early as 1982 in
The Bible Story.
Basil Wolverton, a nationally known artist and
WCG
minister, began work on the project in 1958. Originally appearing in the
Plain Truth
in monthly installments,
The Bible Story
was converted into a six-volume set of books during the 1960s. Mr. Armstrong assigned the project to Mr. Wolverton because of the tremendous need to properly teach children the truths of the Bible. “Bible stories up to now,” Mr. Armstrong explained, seemed to have “no mission but that of providing exciting entertainment. Biblical incidents are taken out of context, their real connection with the very purpose of life ignored.” Furthermore, he wrote, “In my research into the history of education, the truth emerged of the diabolical master conspiracy for deceiving the whole world.”
⁵
Thus, Mr. Wolverton set out to tell the story of the Bible factually and chronologically, and in a way that would be interesting and understandable for children. Yet the series was not intended for children alone: It provided a basic understanding of the thread of the Bible for all interested readers, including many thousands of adults.

Chapter 5 of the 1960s version contains quite a lot of history regarding the establishment of civilization after the Noachian Flood. It discusses how Noah preached God’s truth and prophesied about a coming Messiah. “But something happened back then to cause men to believe that the son of a god had come to Earth shortly after the flood,” Wolverton wrote.
⁶
It went on to explain how Nimrod and his wife, Semiramis, established a Babylonian religious system as a great counterfeit to God’s true religion. “There, in ancient Babylon,” wrote Wolverton,

were born the false beliefs that have wormed their way into almost every religion. Even today millions and millions of people who may want to live according to the right ways are not aware that their manner of worship follows very closely that of ancient idol worship and pagan rites begun at Babel.
⁷

Virtually all of this critical history—Nimrod’s plans to rule the Earth; his wife’s successful attempt to make a false god out of her slain husband—was removed from the 1982 version of
The Bible Story
. It was edited out four years after Mr. Wolverton died—and a full four years
before
Mr. Armstrong died. There, in a 1982 publication, is evidence of Tkachism—conveniently enough, at about the time Mr. Armstrong’s eyesight went bad.

After Mr. Armstrong died, the editorial staff saw fit to remove any reference identifying modern Babylon as a truth restored to the church. They did this despite Mr. Armstrong’s repeated references to this point the last two years of his life.

The
WCG
’s new explanation about the history of Babylon and its prophetic significance immediately surfaced in other church literature once Mr. Armstrong died. In
The Plain Truth About Christmas,
for example, Mr. Armstrong had written,

Nimrod, grandson of Ham, son of Noah, was the real founder of the Babylonish system that has gripped the world ever since—the system of organized competition—of man-ruled governments and empires, based upon the competitive and profit-making economic system. Nimrod built the tower of Babel, the original Babylon, ancient Nineveh, and many other cities. He organized this world’s first kingdom.
⁸

That entire paragraph got chopped out of the “updated” 1987 version, which is a major change when you consider what the church had long taught about the system Nimrod established.
⁹

All well
BEFORE
, if Tkach Jr. is to be believed, “we were even
thinking
about such changes.”

Revisionist History

In 1984, the
WCG
produced a booklet titled
The History of Europe and the Church,
written by Keith Stump. The booklet, written when Mr. Armstrong was nearly blind, is full of politically correct language that Mr. Armstrong never would have approved. For example, it attributed the cause of World War i to a “bloody event” in Sarajevo and the fact that great powers were “caught in the webs of their alliances. “
¹⁰
Mr. Armstrong—and every other honest historian—would have blamed Germany for starting that war. But shortly before and after Mr. Armstrong died,
WCG
scholars attempted to revise that history.

Worse than that, they also revised the church’s prophetic teachings about Germany. Less than four months after Mr. Armstrong died, Church Administration informed its ministers that several books would need to be “updated.” Page 93 of Mr. Armstrong’s
United States and Britain in Prophecy
said, “Israel had been removed from Palestine more than 130 years and had long since migrated, with the Assyrians, north (and west) of Assyria’s original location.”
¹¹
In the 1986 version, editors rewrote it to say that Israel migrated north
OF
Assyria, as opposed to
WITH
. The significance of this change is made obvious by the other edits in Mr. Armstrong’s work. On page 147, Mr. Armstrong wrote,

Ezekiel was among the Jewish captives after their captivity, which occurred more than a hundred years after Israel’s captivity. By that time the
Assyrians
had long since left their land on the southern shores of the Caspian Sea and migrated northwest, finally settling in the land today called
Germany
.
¹²

In the 1986 version, all references to “Assyria” and “Germany” were removed from this passage. There is no mention of the Assyrians migrating to a land called
Germany
today. Then they completely removed this paragraph in the 1986 version:

The Assyrians—before 604 b.c.—left their land north of Babylon and migrated northwest—through the lands that are now Georgia, the Ukraine, Poland, and into the land that is called Germany today. Today the descendants of those Assyrians are known to us as the German people.
¹³

Again, these edits were made
within months
of Mr. Armstrong’s death—perhaps set in motion even
before
he died. Reading the 1986 version of
The United States and Britain in Prophecy
for the first time, a new reader would have had
NO IDEA
that Germany today ascended from Assyria anciently—a teaching that essentially identifies Germany in Bible prophecy. For those even vaguely familiar with Mr. Armstrong’s prophetic teachings, this represented a monumental change in the church’s teachings.

Of course, Tkach Jr. had
no idea
that a change this significant would have a profound impact on the church’s prophetic teaching—or so he would have us believe.

Mystery of the Ages
, Softbound

On September 9, 1985, Mr. Armstrong handed out the first hardcover copies of
Mystery of the Ages
to the sophomore class at Ambassador College. Two months later, in November, the softbound version of the work arrived from the printer.
¹⁴

At first glance, there appears to be no difference between the two versions. Though the softbound is 66 pages shorter than the hardcover, its smaller font size and line spacing accommodates more text on each page. Nevertheless, someone in the
WCG
—certainly not Mr. Armstrong—saw fit to alter certain statements having to do with race.

On pages 122 and 123 of the softbound version, they left out statements saying that Adam, Noah and Jesus were white. They even omitted a reference to ancient Israel being Caucasian. On page 143, they also removed a reference to ancient Israel being “racially” separate from other peoples.

On page 124, they omit a reference to Nimrod being “black,” even though the Bible identifies his father Cush as a black man.
¹⁵