Non-Believer Former Members of the Worldwide Church of God

Montpelier, VT, USA

I was 5 years old when my mother heard HWA’s Radio Church of God broadcast in 1963. She was scared by his predictions of the Tribulation soon to come, left the “no piano” Church of Christ (you have to love Protestant proclivities to split over trivial details), and soon was baptised into the WCG.

My mother took the church seriously, and thus so did I. One good thing I learned in the early years was that you couldn’t trust religious pronouncements: From the Catholics, the Anglicans; the Baptists; the Methodists; the Presbyterians; etc. etc. "They are sincere, but sincerely mistaken." was HWA’s pronouncement. "Prove the scriptures for yourself!" he admonished. I took that seriously, too.

The first big problem I saw was HWA’s order that a person could not be baptised into the WCG if they were married to an “unbelieving” spouse. Many people divorced in order to be “saved”. Apparently HWA didn’t understand first Corinthians 7:1-16, which went through a litany of marital states:

To the believers he said: unmarried and widows: Stay unmarried unless you’re horny. Married: stay married. A woman is allowed to separate, but if she does she must stay single, or reconcile with her original husband. A husband is not allowed to separate from his wife.

"To the rest I say…" (verse 12): Who are these folks Paul is addressing? He was addressing believers with unbelieving spouses. "If any who has a wife who is not a believer and she is willing to live with him, he must not divorce her."

Whoa. And yet that was what HWA was requiring in order to be baptised.

HWA "received new truth" around 1969(?) or so, and though I don’t have the letter he sent out at that time, I do recall that it seemed he was blaming God for his own inability to understand clear text. I could go through a litany of HWA "policies" that were essentially his opinions that he wanted to be "law" for the WCG; (my breaking point was when I got the third-degree for dancing with a girl from the Phillipines). But what did I really learn from the WCG? I learned to take religion (too) seriously. I learned to be very skeptical. And now I take almost nothing "spiritual" seriously.

I find myself in the position that there is little more that I can teach my daughters than "Klingon Honor" — i.e., to teach them the non-worship rules and try to convince them to obey those rules without fear of some everlasting punishment or permanent death. The benefits of cooperation and trustworthiness; the pitfalls of lying and stealing, etc. I’m certainly not in the mood to "put the fear of God" (or other deities) into them.

— Mike

This entry was posted on Friday, May 13th, 2005 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Personal Story. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments must be approved by the moderator before they will appear.