Occluded Vision

Hulme

It seems to be official. The Hulmerous publication Vision - the pet project of David Hulme - is no more. At least in print form.

The latest issue, Winter 2016, is available, but only online as a collection of web articles.

Even then, with no further postage and printing costs, Dave pleads poverty: "Our quarterly online journal Vision is free of charge, but resources are limited."

Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

Money is tight brethren and costs need to be slashed. How many people do you think have been bumped off the payroll?

Weirdly, there isn't as much as a PDF magazine facsimile, or a flipping book version - the sort of thing COGWA do with their bimonthly Discern publication. Apparently it's all too hard.

Perhaps Dave, a onetime World Tomorrow presenter and founding president of the United Church of God (which he subsequently abandoned) has taken a drop in salary to go with the new austerity drive? That seems unlikely.

So is there a future for Hulme's secretive COGAIC? We know that a lot of its ministerial talent has, like rats, jumped ship. How its membership is holding up in the wake of all that trauma is hard to tell, COGAIC was never famous for its transparency. It is hard to imagine that the Hulmerous brethren will be elated by the media retrenchment, though.

Sixteen years after its launch Vision has been gutted and another ambitious COG splinter seems headed for the rocks.

Odds and Ends

LCG on trial. At the time this post went up, the GoFundMe page for the upcoming Scarborough suit had reached only $125 with just 4 donors over the last 8 days. The somewhat optimistic goal is 15k.

Magazine miscellany. Church of God periodicals, especially the minnows, seem to be in an increasingly parlous state; three examples.

CGI's Prevail has long enjoyed a beneath-the-carpets profile. While it has a very nice logo, it just seems to be a random collection of web articles, which means - in my book at least - that it's not actually a magazine. (Update: reading some of the comments it appears even people close to CGI are confused. Has it been discontinued? Was there a print edition late last year? Perhaps even the webmaster is confused...) You can, however, check it out for yourself here.

Meanwhile, David Hulme's quarterly journal Vision seems to be missing in action. It's now Spring up in the Northern Hemisphere and the last issue to see the light was Fall (Autumn) 2015. Vision was (is?) one of the least derivative periodicals in the COG stable, at least in terms of design and layout. Not so much a minnow as a beached whale, this is (was) a major periodical. Does this indicate troubles in paradise? Dave, tell us it ain't true.

Church of God Outreach Ministries (CGOM) is, according to a certain gentleman based in Arroyo Grande, ditching hard copies of its bi-monthly magazine (more a newsletter, really) New Horizons. It will now only be available online. Or maybe not. The latest issue still isn't - as this post goes up -  available on their website, nor anything for January/February. Perhaps energy levels are just running really low in Tulsa.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch. The sidebar here on AW has been reorganized, simplified and new links added over the last two weeks. The last several issues of The Journal can now be accessed directly, and just under that there's a new link to WCG stories that have appeared over the years in the LA Times.