Thanks to my Mother, I’ve always believed in God’s existence. When I was quite young my mom began listening to Herbert W. Armstrong on the radio, and then began receiving literature from his organization, the Worldwide Church of God. Mr. Armstrong was quite a persuasive speaker and writer, and he claimed that they were the one and only “true” Church of God, and that old covenant laws such as strict (7th day) Sabbath and annual Holy Day keeping, double-tithing, clean and unclean meats, no Christmas or Easter (that was pagan), no aknowledging birthdays or anniversaries, and other works were the proof of this. These were the “signs”… (along with doctrines like British Israelism, and the heresy that the Holy Spirit was not God, only God’s “force”, etc)
I grew up believing all this, totally convinced that I could never have a right relationship with God until I “joined” this “Church”, and then performed these works adequately enough to please God. H.W. Armstrong had also prophesied that the world would end and Christ would return by 1975, and as a result of believing that I began thinking, “well I’ll only be 20…I’ll just experience as much of life as I can before then, and then get on the Salvation bandwagon at the end….”. Why bother planning for a future, college, marriage, etc…much damage done. So during my young life I lived quite a debauched life. “The night life ain’t no good life, but it’s my life” became my theme song.
Strangely enough, even when 1975 came and went and nothing happened, I still continued to believe what I had grown up with, that this cult was the only true Church, and that to ever finally get right with God I had to officially become part of it…which I finally did in 1990. Now H.W.Armstrong had passed away a few years before this, and the Church was then under the new leadership of a man named Joseph Tkach. And for about the next five years, nothing changed as we labored under these burdens of legalism…I and my family, which I dragged into it with me.
I can tell you we found out the hard way that Salvation by works is frustration…you can never do enough! And those of us who thought we could? Well, we just ended up measuring one another and everyone else in self-righteous judgementalism. Actually I do remember thinking at times that I actually had satisfied or pleased God by doing everything good enough, but then that feeling would soon wear off…and to get that “I’ve pleased God feeling” back again, I had to keep doing more….like a junkie, like an addict that had to do more, more to get the same feeling. No wonder the rabbis and Pharisees kept adding hundreds of additional rules and interpretations of how you should keep the law! Like a hamster wheel of futility that never ends.
And the motives of my heart most of the time swung from guilt to fear to pride and self-righteousness…around and around… because I didn’t realize that to add anything to Christ and His sufficiency and His centrality and His finished work for our salvation is to actually subtract from Him, is to diminish Him at the centre….and dishonors His sacrifice. And like all cultic groups, we were not Christ centred because we were never taught or even had a clue about what the amazing grace of God really means as the total basis of our personal salvation and ongoing relationship with Him.
As time passed some of us began to sense more and more, that something was wrong…missing inside. Just a dead ritualism…duty. But one thing we did believe, thank God, was that the Bible…is the only source of God’s Truth. At least Armstrong didn’t issue his own perverted interpretation or version of the Scriptures themselves, or put any other “book” ahead of the Bible as a couple other well known cults have done. And so more of us at the grassroots level at least began to pray fervently for growth in the Truth!
And then, beginning in 1995, amazing miracles began to happen. God responded to our prayers, the prayers of course of Joe Tkach and our leaders, and the prayers of Christians everywhere for us in this cult, in a mighty way, perhaps actually unprecedented in speed and in scope… in the history of Christianity. The Lord caused Joseph Tkach along with his appointed team in the W.C.G. to honestly re-examine every doctrine and teaching of Armstrongism as objectively and prayerfully as possible. In less than 2 yrs. God showed them, and consequently the rest of us, and with the help of good mainstream evangelical scholarship, that our beliefs and practices were riddled with unbiblical heresies and falsehoods.
They then publically proclaimed these things, aknowledged the arrogant elitism and apologised for the years of constant “persecutions” through the many false accusations toward real Christians And for many years now this group ( called Grace Communion International in the U.S.) has been a doctrinally sound member of the Churches of the mainstream evangelical Body of Christ.
Major divisions resulted from the huge changes, splinter groups that still continue in the old heresies, with probably only about a third of the membership receiving the correction and Truth that was so patiently and thoroughly delivered. I still thank God for the courage and honesty and faith of Joe Tkach, who must have known what kind of traumatic upheavel would occur, and that a price would be paid for the Truth! (even death threats toward him from some of the more extreme “Pharisees”).
So it was a traumatic and disorientating time to go through, but what a blessing! What Grace! What a deliverence! And for me personally, an intensive study of the Word of God and love of it ever since…and to be like the Bereans, who “searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so”…(Acts 17:11). Prayerfully seeking to grow in all the wisdom, Truth and especially Love of Christ.
So all of this really glorifies Jesus Christ, and shows us there’s hope for the cults, or at least for any individual trapped in one.
Since all that, the Lord has shown me the freedom in Christ of simply seeking and allowing Him to do His will in us, and for us, and through us for others, wherever He has planted us. For me the result has been the gift of ministry in the capacity of an ordained Lay Missionary/Pastor with the house church ministry of the Cariboo Presbyterian Church, begun by Dave and Linda Webber over 25 years ago, and which is a missionary work taking the Gospel and Church to people where they are and as they are….and is scattered all around the Cariboo area.
So I now know the Lord has graciously worked my past experiences for good, and as a powerful witness to the dangers of legalism, elitism, and of any kind of worship that denies or restricts the absolute centrality and deity of Christ, and the total sufficiency of His sacrifice and His Grace for us. And the need for our absolute and radical dependence on Him and His grace every day, and to “cast out the bondwoman and her son”…(see for example Paul’s parable of bondage (old covenant) vs freedom (new Covenant) in Gal: 4 verses 21-31).
