Like
any cat owner, I'm pretty abuse tolerant and would consider myself liberal to
other people's faults: I have my own and I just don't want to waste my time
looking at what other people are doing. People should be free--within certain
limits--to do and say what they will, as long as they can learn from their
mistakes and don't do too much damage to themselves and others.
There are certain assumptions I make about others,
particularly those in the Churches of God, and particularly the ministry of the
Churches of God.
I grew up a baptized Lutheran and attended a Catholic
Parochial School, Saint Joseph's Academy--to be specific--under the tutelage of
the Sisters of Charity of Providence. I attended Sunday Services at both the
Lutheran Church and the Sprague Community Church, although most Sundays it was
in the Community Church, which was nicer and a bit less 'stuffy'. I was highly
religious and believed firmly in the Ten Commandments as well as being ethical
and moral. The environment in which I grew supported such a moral and ethical
center. In my teenage years, I would spend weekends with my brother in 'the big
city' and attend the Lutheran Church there, and later, a church with a pastor
named Alexander Schiffner. At the Catholic School, I was voted to be Junior
Class President by my classmates, even though I was not a Catholic because they
all said that I was such a 'good' person that they couldn't think of picking
someone else. If anyone had attempted to corrupt me, I simply would not have
understood. I was willing to change and do anything I believed was right to
honor God.
The World Tomorrow Program with Herbert Armstrong came
into our lives in 1962 or so. At that time, my teenage view was that Herbert
Armstrong fit within my paradigm of a righteous, God fearing, godly preacher of
righteousness. I was hungry for morals and ethics.
For many years after that, I viewed ministers in the Radio
Church of God, and, later, the Worldwide Church of God, as being special. When
they said they sinned and had faults--on those rare occasions that they might
admit it, usually in rather nonspecific ways--my expectation was that they may
have had a momentary thought of lust for a woman not their wife, or that they
inadvertently lied, or perhaps had wrongly pocketed change at the grocery store
given to them by the clerk by mistake. There were other possibilities in my
mind: Maybe they broke the Sabbath by following their pleasure in some way which
would be deemed inappropriate. In other words, I mapped my worldview to their
assumed behavior. It never occurred to me that perhaps those problems were far
worse than I could have imagined, or even been able to accept in my immature
state.
Enlightenment has dawned on the fruit of the tree of the
knowledge and good and evil. It is difficult to determine at this point, but
with all that has transpired, I suspect that I was a better and more moral
person as a teenager than I am today, because of Herbert Armstrong and the
Worldwide Church of God. I learned to compromise because of what the Church was
and who Herbert Armstrong was and what the ministry in the various Churches of
God are today.
Society has changed in 40 years significantly. People in the
United States have much more freedom and opportunities today than ever before.
We have new technologies. We have the Internet. And with the Internet came an
explosion of availability of knowledge--knowledge of who people are and what
they are doing [and have done]. The Truth has come out.
At the same time, there has been a real decline in being able
to rely on what people say they will do. To be fair, part of the problem is that
the environment is changing at a dizzying speed and it is difficult to cope with
the changes and make any sense of what is happening around us. The world changed
significantly on September 11, 2001 and there is no going back.
Unfortunately, my expectations concerning people being moral,
ethical and legal have not changed. My expectation is that the ministry of the
Churches of God will abandon programs, policies and preachments which
simply--quite obviously--don't work and never have. Rather, my expectation is
that the ministry of the Churches of God will preach, teach and set an example
at least as good as those of the Catholic Church, the Lutherans and the
Community Church of my youth. Prophecy, the Second Coming, the Millennium and
the Place of Safety need to take second place to telling the truth, keeping
one's promises, being completely honest, ethical, moral and legal.
When was the last time you heard a sermon in your Church of
God about not lying? How about a sermon about "Thou Shalt Not Steal"? We may
have heard a few about adultery, but what about the ramifications of "Thou Shalt
Not Kill"?
I suspect that the youth in many of the Churches of God are confused
because there has not been a concerted effort to teach them morals, ethics,
honesty and what is right and legal. We may pander to them to appeal to them,
but from my perspective, they need to be told right from wrong. Music Piracy is
wrong. Breaking your promises is wrong. Premarital sex [although the Churches of
God seem to have this one down] is wrong. Shoplifting is wrong. Assault is
wrong. Situational ethics is wrong: You don't give in to your boss or peers at
work. Perception is not reality: It is fantasy; and sooner or later, you will
pay the full price, though it might not seem like it now. The ability to have
self-control and self-determination in the face of your peers and superiors even
under duress brings great freedom.
My daughter did not like what I told her as a teenager and
she vehemently disagreed with my 'old fashioned' ideas of morality. More than a
decade has passed, and she now understands through experience that what I said
really was true and appreciates it.
The ministry should back up the parents in their
responsibility to teach their children, both by setting a right and good example
and by preaching what they practice. It is time to get back to basics, lest we
produce spawn twofold the child of hell than ourselves.
