People of my parents’ generation ask each other, “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?”

People of my generation ask “What were you doing when Challenger exploded?”

Kids of the Internet generation will ask each other, twenty years from now, “What were you doing when the towers went down?”

Second- and third-generation survivors of the Worldwide Church of God ask each other, “Where were you when the changes hit?”

The first three examples are of events that shaped the history of the world as those generations knew it. To us, they weren’t even blips on the radar. Or, if they registered at all, it was merely proof that we were “in the end-times”.

Trust me, between Herbie’s death, the Challenger explosion, Halley’s Comet, and the evangelicals really starting to put pressure on the church to “conform” to the rest of the dogmatic Xtian world (those bible-thumping bastards actually picketed my home Feast site one year—scared the shit out of us kids—real fucking “christian” behaviour that was), we really did believe that it was “the end of days”. This was in the 1980s.

Oh, there were politics and rumours of politics, but I was the unfortunate member of an extremely rural congregation. None of us could probably even find Atlanta on a map, never mind knew who Earl Williams was, nor why he was viewed as the Beast himself by Headquarters. There were “rumblings” of course, but those were designed to keep the sheeple as off-balance and confused as possible, so we would just go along to get along, once everything hit.

I remember the Pastor General’s letter where Senior waxed ineloquently about the trinity, about ‘92 or so. The converted parent couldn’t make heads nor tails of it, and asked me what I thought. My response? “That doesn’t sound right. Does he know what he’s talking about?” Turns out he didn’t. I found out last year, that Senior ended up being criticized by the trinitarian bible-thumpers because apparently he’d gotten some nitpicky little detail about their pet doctrine wrong.

Which doesn’t even get into the whole can of worms about how the fucking evangelicals were running the show behind the scenes; Weazell and Senior and Junior and Kelly were mouthing all the right words to keep the CRI and Hank Hanegraaf (who is pretty much a criminal in his own right; just google “Christian Research Institute” and “postal” if you don’t believe me) happy. All the while keeping the tithes-paying members of the church completely in the dark.

Then about ‘93 or so our pastor recommended from the pulpit that members read the newly-reissued “What is the Nature of God?” booklet that had suddenly appeared in the port-o-library. So I read it. Couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. My reaction was typical. Why? Let me tell you.

I had been born and raised under a legalistic semi-Arian binitarian regime. But those sick fucks figured if they published one tiny little booklet telling me how great and wonderful and “one true god” trinitarianism was, after drilling into my head for as far back as I could remember that the trinitarian RCC was the Great Whore of Babylon, that I would just go along with such an abrupt about-face without even stopping to think, never mind question it?

What the fuck were they smoking?

This was also around the same timeframe that we were receiving explicit warnings from the pulpit not to read Prophecy Flash! (Bill Dankenbring’s answer to the Worldwide News), and we were instructed in no uncertain terms that we were to have agape only for other members of WCG……We were not to have agape (in other words, no contact whatsoever) with members of the Philadelphia Church of God.

My congregation was so rural and so isolated, we didn’t even know what PCG was, never mind who started it, until they started warning us about it. During this same timeframe, the then-pastor (who was a tin-plated dictatorial little despot if ever there was one) gave the fateful sermon that proved to be his undoing. The “don’t hide your light under a bushel” sermon.

I haven’t read too much on the ex-member blogs about it, but the ministry seemed to be divided on it. In some areas the ministers just threw the material away, in other areas the ministers preached it with qualifications, or in such a manner that it became painfully obvious they didn’t have a clue what they were talking about, and they were just going along to get along. 

It was the extremely small minority, like Earl Williams, who saw what was coming down the pike, and jumped onboard so they wouldn’t be gypped out of a pension once the evangelicals started cleaning house. The then-pastor of my congregation at the time fell into this latter category (and yes he is still with Junior’s shiny-happy hand-wavey Jebus-saved-the-church-all-praise-Jebus church).

So Mr. X gave the “don’t hide your light under a bushel” sermon. About mid-way through, when he was telling us how it was all right for us to talk about being members of the church, to neighbours, friends and family members (this was absolutely verboten, prior to the changes; we were never supposed to proselytize our religion), I remember thinking, “Is he saying what I think he’s saying?” Then I dismissed it, thinking no, I must be misunderstanding the message.

He took a breath then, and looked out at the sea of three hundred faces before him. The people he had ruled with an iron fist. The people who lived in fear of him, that he might disapprove of their actions, if they didn’t consult with him first, in everything. I would like to think there was a touch of fear in his expression, but he was way too arrogant for even that small an amount of humanity. Then he said the fateful words that sealed his future (and neatly sewed up his pension at the same time).

“We must evangelize for Christ.”

Every last one of us held our breath. I half-expected him to be struck down from on high by the Lord of Hosts personally, for such blatant and clearly unrepentant blasphemy. You could have heard a pin drop. One look at the lay-ministry’s faces (our congregation always got the “liberal” ministers because the lay-ministry was Gestapo enough already; I think it was Headquarters’ way of trying to keep the ship on an even keel, in what was traditionally a “problem area” to begin with), and you could see the gears turning in their heads. They were practically rubbing their hands together in mercenary glee.

Mr. X and family were gone six weeks later. Transferred. The Gestapo definitely won that skirmish. But oh no, there were no changes happening in the church. None at all. Waterhouse visited our congregation personally (because we were “a problem area”), and told us how Senior was a weaver of men, and how we should follow him into Hell and back (Little Freudian slip there Gerry?) if the Eternal called upon us to do so. We got another “liberal” minister who the Gestapo lay-ministry hated and schemed against, with the members getting caught in the middle, and things were status quo once again.

Until December 24, 1994. When we walked into the room the congregation rented from the city’s union hall, the chairs were facing in the opposite direction. The off-kilter, slightly-out-of-balance feeling that I had had ever since heretical thoughts about Senior had begun plaguing me, suddenly blossomed into full-bore dread. I didn’t say anything to anyone about it at the time, but I remember the tension in the air was thick.

The unspoken question was: What is going on? Between the flip-flopping the church had been doing on makeup and birthdays and (I shit you not there was a sermon on this) wishing people Merry Christmas instead of saying nothing, none of us had a clue what we were facing, that day. Not one fucking clue. Then the sermon started.

I can’t stomach “Culled to be Free”, but I did manage to get some screenshots of the audience at Big Sandy when Senior gave the sermon. Just looking at the faces brings it all back for me. Just like it was yesterday.
 

Do these look like the faces of people who have been adequately prepared to receive the news that everything they have ever been taught or believed to be true is incontrovertibly false? Even worse, we were expected to just simply accept a new set of teachings that went absolutely against the grain of everything we had ever been indoctrinated with.

And yet Junior and Weazell still wonder why forty thousand of us “no longer walk with them”.

These things that Senior was telling us were false, these things we had held fast to for all of our lives, these were the things that couldn’t be changed. To call even one of the nineteen truths a false doctrine, was to topple all of them like a house of cards. Carried through to its logical conclusion, the unspoken thought foremost in my mind was, If the Sabbath and tithing and the nature of god are false, then all of it must be false. None of it is true!

It was a binary equation. Worldwiders saw “the world” in black and white. There was absolutely no room, within our dogmatic idiom, for any shades of grey. Either we are god’s one true church—or we are not. And if we are not, then what is the point? What is the point of sacrificing in third tithe years and giving to God every time a special offering is called no matter what? What is the point of living a half-life as we strive to “be not conformed to this world” because of our promised kingdom-to-come?

There was no kingdom coming. There would be no Wonderful World Tomorrow. There was no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, no drink of water at the end of the finish line, no golden carrot at the end of the stick. There was only the stick, and they would continue to keep beating us with it for as long as we were willing to stay submissive to the church.

The emotional, financial, and physical sacrifices, they had all been for nothing. We had backed the losing horse, and in my case, it was through absolutely no fault of my own because I had never been taught anything else. But everything I had ever been taught was now in question. I was a child of the church, and the church was leaving me behind.

I will never forget the sick dread that filled me that day. The day everything changed. That feeling of falling off the edge of the world, and there was no god or gods to catch you. There were only petty, lying, scheming, disastrous little men.

Where were you when the changes hit?