Celebrate the Feast without the Armstrongism!
September 20, 2007 by ftloveblog70
To certain ex-Worldwiders and other ex-XCGers they believe that this is impossible! Not only they would believe that this is sinful Judaizing but “so-called” Christians celebrating the Levitical festivals is Armstrongism hand in hand. Well, thanks to none other than Doug Ward, editor of the magazine Grace and Knowledge which invests it’s time discussing the Hebraic roots of Christianity mailed me his latest copy of the magazine with an invitation to go the Feast of Tabernacles. What was the XCG??? Believe it or not, none! Yes Messianic Jews do celebrate festivals but not all of them have a convention like this. This event is sponsored by the Church of the Messiah which is a group that specializes in the Hebraic roots of Christianity. They are based in Dayton, Ohio and in turn, they are also associated with Dr. Dwight Pryor’s Center for Judaic Christian Studies, website at http://www.jcstudies.com/index.php . These groups have no connection with the WCG, it’s splinters or the religious ideology of Armstrongism. Dwight Pryor firmly believes in the essentials of Christian faith (God exists as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the humanity and deity of Jesus Christ, salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ). I firmly agree with Doug Ward, that the WCG now orthodox (thank God!) could have took this more non-polarizing route for change. In other words, it was bitter and fruitless for Joe Jr. and Mike Feazell (and friends) to millitantly carry out “anti-Holy Day” campaigns. To the traditional feast-keeper, this maybe of a disappointment because you would celebrate your feast from September 27th to October 4th, this convention is during the weekend of October 12th and 13th. For all interested in attending (count me out this year but I hope 2008 will do it for me), I have scanned copies for general information, the schedule and registration. Give me a shout on the comments section! To all those who can make it, I hope you will have a truly God-centered good time and Chag Sameach!
I might be missing something, but going to the site is an exercise in frustrating futility: Limited links, some mysterious membership logon and not much in the way of information. The schedule says nothing of the Feast.
It would be great if there were an alternative to Armstrongist Feasts. Even the Festival with the Church of God Seventh Day is preferable.
All the xCGs have something really wrong with them. Every last one of them. The biggest of them is so liberal they permit all sorts of unacceptable activities within, while claiming to keep the Commandments. It is a show of terrible hypocrisy and sets a terrible example. If people are going to keep the Sabbath, then the young adults should not be parasailing in Mexico on that day. It’s one thing to delight in the Sabbath and quite another to do your own pleasure while the minister cowers in his cabin on board the cruise ship. This is not to mention the nasty turn of the Council of Elders at the mention of the stalking incident: They don’t even uphold the civil laws of the land — it took a court order. They are all dark souls steeped in evil.
The PCG, RCG and LCG are nasty cults of personality following a man. Various people have described them as “a black hole”.
The smaller xCGs get weirder and weirder in ways that many people cannot even imagine.
In all of this, the joy of being the Bride of Christ and loving Jesus as a coming husband is all lost. There is no real honor and respect. It is all about keeping the laws and ordinances of the Old Covenant without much embracing the love and fellowship of the New Testament. It’s an armed camp at war with itself.
At the heart of this is British Israelism and the fruit of it in the self-righteousness of the irrelevant failed prophecies attendant to it. Many of us have been stuck in these smaller groups listening to ministers grousing about how all the other Churches of God have “rejected the truth” and will be those in Revelation 3 to worship at the feet of the 70 or so people have not committed synchretism.
It is difficult to impart the dreary drudgery of the tedium of such joyless groups, culminating in vacation planning and little else where people are subjected to the horrors of death, devastation, destruction as less a background to the good news of the World Tomorrow as the front piece to all the messages of depression. Give us Whaid Rose instead, at minimum.
No, what we would really like is to have a group that really and truly honors and worships God the Father without guile, embraces Jesus Christ as their brother, friend and “husband” in honor and reverence, meets with joy and peace and perhaps looks to Festivals as the pattern of hope for mankind as opposed to using it paint pictures of gore from bloody and shocking news reports. It would be nice to have a New Christian perspective which is free of the man made religion of Judaism, created from the whole cloth of Babylon of the captivity, replete with pagan names of the months of their calendar and sliding calculations replete with postponements which will one day put the Feast of Tabernacles to map to Christmas through New Year’s.
It would be nice to have love and warmth without the Church Corporate. The WCG is no better, steeped as it is in the lies, deceptions and the crime of taking blood money on false pretenses.
You know, it would be wonderful to put all that behind us to find a venue rich with the fruit of the Holy Spirit, devoid of the works of Satan the Devil. It would be nice to have support from other believers, instead of having a Third Reich system of slavery where we give everything to a Gestapo group for their retirement plan. It would be nice to get some sort of meaningful return on our investment.
Yes, it would be nice.
But we’ve come to give everything and get nothing: We’ve been conditioned to be prey to the predators without recourse.
Thanks for posting this, Felix. We’ve attended this event every year beginning in 1998, and it’s always very meaningful and wonderful.
I sent you the flier because I knew you’d be interested, and you’ve mentioned a few times that you’d like to come down sometime.
Dwight Pryor is still in Israel right now and won’t be back in time to speak at this year’s celebration. But he’s usually the keynote speaker. I’m guessing he probably will be again next year.
((Limited links, some mysterious membership logon and not much in the way of information. The schedule says nothing of the Feast))
I don’t think of the situation above as sinister but rather more sloppy and incompetent. Trust me Douglas there are many sites like this. I just hope CJCS will make dramatic changes to their format soon.
To Doug Ward, I say in turn, you are entirely welcome! I am going to create a post where people CAN have the general information, registration and schedule. I hope you will have another good time.
And Mr. Ward, that was a great message about the Jubilee Year and freedom from slavery you gave this morning. Thank you, and all blessings at such a time.
Douglas,
Thank you for this note, and blessings to you too.
I enjoy getting together with Ken during the festival seasons. But one disadvantage of the phone-in church is that there’s not so much opportunity for interaction among the people who are getting together. So I’m glad to hear from someone else who was “there.”