Rebecca

Growing up in the Church of God Cult

My name is Rebecca, and I’m an ex-member of the Worldwide and United Church of God. I’ll just give you a quick run down of the history of the church.

The faith was founded by Herbert W. Armstrong in 1933 as the Radio Church of God. At first there were no church buildings, so members would listen to Armstrong’s evangelism over the radio during his ½ hour show every week. Eventually, enough people got together and paid their first tithes (which is 10% of your income), so the Worldwide Church of God was founded in 1968. It got pretty big in the 1970s, and even had its own college, Ambassador college; over a hundred thousand people followed Herbert W. Armstrong, even all over the world, and eventually his son, Garner Ted Armstrong. After Armstrong’s death in 1986, Joseph W. Tkach, and eventually his son Joseph Tkach, Jr., began to teach celebrating Christmas was okay, and that we didn’t need to keep the Sabbath on Saturday, which for us was radical. My parents were one of many families who left. We joined the biggest of the splinter groups, United Church of God, in 1995. That’s basically the church history in a nutshell.

I left United Church of God when I was 18. It was the best decision of my life, by far.

Church of God members seem nice from an outside perspective, but they are a lost, arrogant group of people. I grew up with the brainwashed idea that I was a part of a chosen people who were “called” to be given “the truth” about God. I had special insight into the Bible, and it followed me to school everyday with a special kind of arrogance. Basically, you believe that after you die you’ll get to say “I told you so” to everyone you’d ever met. And that’s really just the beginning.

When I felt that I was being “called,” around age 14 and 15, I started reading the Bible and praying a lot more. But what I found was scripture after scripture of women being put down, and things that simply weren’t true, like trying to justify being a fundamentalist Christian and believing in Genesis against information about science and history; things like believing in creationism and not evolution became a problem for me in school.

It was difficult, but my belief in the infallible word of God, and in United Church of God, slowly faded, and I was left to deal with losing my faith in what was God’s special plan for us. It’s been hard, even now as an atheist, to get over some of the church’s teachings. What I just described is the basic cult setting and mindset that all the members have in the Churches of God, and from that comes a variety of issues about God’s laws and everyday living, and it pretty much takes over your entire life, and controls who you get close to. It’s a divisive church, that’s often racist, anti-gay, and denigrating to women.

As someone who was born into it, trust me when I say that the United Church of God and other splinter groups of Worldwide have caused a lot of pain and destruction. Families are broken apart because of losing Christmas and other holidays, Sabbath obligations that take precedence over family, and missing crucial school events because of the Holy Days. It costs your integrity if you’re gay, or a woman who’s getting married and will be “under” her husband. Some people have lost their jobs over the Sabbath and Holy Days, and for others the Church of God has even cost them their lives.

When I was in high school, I remember hearing about a murder-suicide in a Wisconsin congregation. I remember hearing around the congregation that a mother who murdered her children in Rhode Island used to attend Worldwide. There was a Church of God pastor in California who jumped off the Golden Gate bridge. I’ve read about people in their 20s committing suicide as recent as the 2000s.

Even though the Worldwide Church of God cult is gone, don’t be fooled. Its splinter groups are out there, especially United Church of God, teaching its members the same beliefs. Its cult mentality lives on; most of the kids I grew up with in the church are still there. I’m so proud of those I do know who have left, but that’s only been a handful. I feel bad for the children who are being born in “the church” today and will have no choice but to conform or be judged.

As far as recovering, I’ve found that using artistic outlets like writing, poetry, music, art, and other forms of communication, can be therapeutic. Not being ashamed of where you come from is good, too. But in the end I became an atheist, and not every COG ex-member does that, so it’s hard to give advice except from my own perspective. I wonder if most former COG members do become nonreligious altogether, because it’s hard to accept another church over “the truth.”

Anti-gay and anti-women rhetoric, the strict laws that have cost people jobs and family, the cult mentality, the racism, the alcoholism, the classism, the rejection of important facts about science and history. It’s all there. You’re not taught to value your own family above the church. It’s a really destructive organization at its heart. I’m so glad that I got out.

I’ve found numerous websites and videos to be helpful and encouraging, including exitsupportnetwork.com, hwarmstrong.com, and a radio story done by Glynn Washington, the host of NPR’s Snap Judgment, on his time in Worldwide Church of God, called “Son of Ham”: http://soundcloud.com/iron5wolf/wfmu-tmi-son-of-ham.