Nevertheless, as you point out, it is a fairly rich resource to understand such organizations as the WCG rife with it.

I’d heard of Narcisists before but hadn’t placed my own thoughts to that title itself until you pointed it out. Honestly.

So much that is written in that article link shared is just how it was under church authority. He must have been hell to live with now I think some more on it here!!

I chose to gain and grow with Gods help and for that I am encouraged however it is so sad to know there were some who didn’t or couldn’t endure. For those people it hurts me deeply.

Whether it is in a one on one situation, or one man ruling over the many, a controlling abusive person has little care or consideration to how those around their lives think, feel or are hurting because the make up to that kind of personality trait is fully about themselves. Egos and pride and a high need of self fulfilling that is never quenched from examples seen along time unfortunately.

Its about using people for selfish gains and a study/check on what personality traits come with an abusive person who needs keep control over others helps explain why things remain as they do within some splinter groups today that were happening when HWA was alive.

Because of how such people think and operate, I would imagine that they would have a poor concept to know how to “allow” others to show the fruits of love that God desires a christian to live by.

We need God working within out lives individually and those ‘out’ are the blessed ones who are now free to go according to Gods working and lead and sadly those who remain under such controlling authority will find it hard to freely express and live in line with Gods Will in their todays. Some may do so but the majority surely are being crippled by being held down so tightly as they are.

Rebellion seems to have its cycles down through history and God allows some things unfold to cause people to cry out to Him so that we do turn fully to Him again.

(In all fairness it could be Weinland’s followers weighing on my mind as well.)

The way I see it, whether you take a preterist view of the book of Rev. or a premillenialist view, or the view that John or whomever actually wrote it was toking up on kaneh bosm, it isn’t the text itself but what has been done with the text that speaks volumes.

Don’t believe me? I have two words for you: Left Behind. Now we collectively as WCG survivors, could write a Left Behind series that would make the evangelicals’ ears curl.

What WCG, and Armstrong, and all his follower-leaders since, have done with the text is hold it out like a carrot at the end of a big stick. It’s crowd-control, pure and simple.

Don’t worry about today, don’t worry about being mired in poverty because you’re tithing thirty percent of your income to some guy in an ivory tower, don’t worry about your poor health, because you’re not allowed to go to a doctor (or subtly discouraged from doing so, by the promotion of “alternative health” remedies), don’t focus on the miserable present!

Live instead, for “the wonderful world tomorrow”, and “the glorious future to come”!

It was misdirection, pure and simple ministerial sleight of hand, while the apostle was fleecing the sheep. His imitators are doing the same.

A real revolution would be all of the XCoG members abandoning their “faith” completely, for once and for all.

That’s definitely too much to ask isn’t it?

James: There is quite another school of thought, and that would be the one involving God creating a divine conspiracy, using Christians to revolutionize the world. In effect, this makes the individual Christian an undercover agent for God, promoting good, and being part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

By practicing what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount, a Christian has the opportunity to break many a bad chain that gets started by normal human reaction. It becomes fun to sabotage Satan’s activities!

One of the reasons I hated the original Plain “Truth” Magazine was that every article which supposedly exposed a societal ill, in the closing paragraph, would state that there is no solution until the return of Jesus Christ. That killed any reasonable and legitimate Christian effort within the current world! It reduced a Christian’s effort to 1) funding an endtime message, and 2) going isolationist and only watching out for self and self’s immediate group. These guys, while waiting for the Ark, were entirely missing the boat!

BB

You’re right on that! You don’t want to be a wicked person when Christ comes back.

FT,

Yeah, I know that the WCG put a lot of emphasis on dates, but that was before my time. I grew up in the Church of God, International, and I don’t remember it date-setting. But it was always saying that the end was near and was pointing to current events as “evidence.”

But I still struggle with the Second Coming of Christ issue in general. Even without dates, why make the world a better place if Christ will come back and fix everything? I mean, what I often hear is “Don’t vote or do social activism. Humans are corrupt and so they can’t fix anything. God has given us these 6,000 years to show us that we can’t govern ourselves (Okay, I’m cheating here, since that’s somewhat of a date). Plus, the Bible says that evildoers will wax worse and worse.” It’s kind of a fatalistic outlook on things. “The world is sinking, so get on the ark and be saved.”