Non-Believer Former Members of the Worldwide Church of God

I was 4 when my father came in from working on the car on a cold November night and announced, “We aren’t keeping Christmas any more.” He’d just heard Herbert W. Armstrong on the radio. This was 1962. For the next 5 years, my family ordered literature, including the Plain Truth and dozens of booklets, from what was then called the Radio Church of God. I remember the Christmas when I was four, my father refused to put up a tree, though he allowed my mother to have a small one in a windowsill because she was so upset that he’d forbidden that holiday. We also went to my grandmother’s house on my mother’s side. There were one or two pictures of that–I remember my siblings and I were allowed to keep the presents we were given but my mother acted as if by entering the realm of the Worldwide Church of God, we were leaving the realm of gifts. In many ways, she was right.

I still had a birthday party when I was five, but it was the last one my family kept for the duration of my childhood. My father stopped working on Saturday, and we kept the “Sabbath” by going to a local park where my father would spend at least an hour reading from the Plain Truth or one of the booklets before we were allowed to walk a “Sabbath Day’s Journey” (my father had it marked out to about a quarter mile but I don’t know if that was correct).

In late 1966, two WCG ministers came to our house. I remember that my siblings and I had to be very polite and very quiet, and that my parents had a lot of WCG literature spread out on the coffee table. Each year of the Plain Truth was placed in its own 3-ring binder. I remember later, showing them to WCG friends who would visit as proof that we were involved with WCG since 1962. The ministers invited my parents to attend a local congregation that met over a bowling alley in Paterson, NJ. That began our attendance with WCG that for me ended in 1999.

My father had always been controlling. WCG gave him more incentive to control by its teaching that men were the rulers of their house. In one of his many longwinded lectures, my father told me that I belonged to him as property and that the Church would back him up no matter what he did to me. It was a scary time. During the first year we were in WCG, my father almost lost his job because the Days of Unleavened Bread (which my parents were excited to attend after being baptized so they could take part in the Passover service) were held every day, two services a day, in New York City. I missed school, too.

My mother had used her Catholic figurines when I was very young to control me when she’d go shopping and leave me alone at age 2, so the sense of control that my father conveyed when he and my mother became members of WCG seemed very real. My mother had said that her statues of Mary and St. Francis were watching me and that they would tell her if I did anything wrong. Since that idea had been drilled into my head as a young child, it was easy for my father to transfer the idea that his beatings and harsh punishments were “just” in the eyes of the church. I spent a lot of time as a child in confusion because I didn’t know what would make my parents mad. Even blind obedience sometimes wasn’t enough.

My father had the pattern before joining WCG of taking out his anger on his children. So once he had the backing that spanking was sanctioned by WCG, he found many reasons to beat me. One of his favorite WCG publications to read to us kids as a bedtime story (and the only “appropriate” bedtime stories for us were WCG stuff) was the Childrearing Booklet. He especially loved to read the parts where spanking was discussed, so he could not only rub it in that the punishment was “good” for us, but he could warn us that if we did anything he considered to be “disrespectful” that he was totally justified in using that tool.

That just about sums up the rest of my childhood. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I put together the ideas that since my father had begun beating me before WCG, that he was just using their patriarchal mindset in his favor. My mother beat me, too, pre-WCG, but though she resented my father’s taking the holidays she loved away, she quickly bought into the idea that she didn’t have to exert herself physically on her kids, since my father was “in charge.” She switched to doling out extra chores and to emotionally berating my siblings and I.

I spent the rest of my childhood trying to be good, trying to gain all the knowledge I could, sadly most of it WCG knowledge, and trying to survive. The restrictions were horrific–I couldn’t eat like my friends at school, couldn’t take part in sports in school, couldn’t sing in concerts that had any holiday music in them, couldn’t participate in plays or anything on Friday nights. I couldn’t even choose what to wear based on practicality. I was forced to wear nothing but dresses to church and school. The beatings that had begun before my parents joined WCG didn’t end until I left home at age 18 in 1976 to attend Ambassador College in Big Sandy, Texas.

I thought I’d be free there. In some ways, I was. I could wear pants, since the various buildings were far apart and the weather was often terrible–flooding rains, snow or ice storms. But I soon found out that I hadn’t escaped the intense scrutiny that I’d experienced in my childhood home. When I rested my feet on a chair in the student center, an upperclassman not only very rudely told me to remove them, but read me the riot act about how I was an underclassman so anything any upperclassman told me had to be obeyed instantly and without question. I countered this by becoming engaged to an upperclassman as quickly as I could, mostly as a way to bypass some of the scrutiny.

That summer, Big Sandy closed. We were bussed to Pasadena, CA. There, I soon found out that the overcrowded dorms were full of people who would break into my desk and steal my food (at that time, I was on a lunch and dinner only meal plan to save money. Also, meals were not served during school breaks, so many students were hungry). I moved off campus, which saved me money on food and on housing. Still, my custodian job left me only $15 every 2 weeks for food. I learned to cook with beans and ate a lot of Ramen noodles.

In the middle of that year, I realized I’d made a mistake in getting engaged. I broke it off. At the end of the second semester, I got a letter from my grandmother that contained a letter that the next door neighbor in NJ had sent to her. The neighbor’s letter described my mother, who had cancer, and wouldn’t get medical help because of a belief that only faith would heal her. My grandmother insisted that I go home and take care of my mother. I was terrified but I’d been taught for so long to obey without question, that the next thing I knew I was on a plane heading for NJ.

Trying to care for my mother when I had no medical experience was one of the most horrible experiences of my life. Partly due to having to watch her suffer and knowing I couldn’t do anything more than clean up the messes. Partly due to the messes themselves, which, to put it mildly, were horrific. When I first got home, there wasn’t even a washer or dryer to clean her soiled clothes in. My father did apologize for that, which surprised me. He got a washer and dryer within the first 2 weeks. In the interim I was forced to wash out my mother’s soiled clothing in the kitchen sink.

My mother died the day after the Last Great Day in 1978. I recuperated for a couple months, then went back to Pasadena. In hindsight that seems stupid to me, because by that time even though I was still pretty young (I was 20) maybe I could’ve escaped. But I was still walking lockstep and still stuck in the mindset that I “had to do everything right.”

So I graduated from Pasadena in 1981 and worked on-call at the WATS line for a little over a year. I liked a lot of the things I did there, since that is where I learned to use a computer. I also did a lot of policy writing, which was as close as I could get at the time to one of my core talents, which was writing. The downside was that every time I got a paycheck I was told it might be my last one. It was extremely stressful not knowing from week to week how many hours I would have or whether I’d even be paid at all. I ended up getting a job in International Mail where I stayed until 1985, when I moved to Washington state.

In Washington state, I was immediately viewed by the church people with suspicion, since I’d come from “HQ” but was very burnt-out so not flashy or pushy. I had almost nothing, and remember one of the church ladies actually looking at the clothes in my closet and criticizing them. I’d also moved to Washington as a result of my lungs reacting badly to the LA smog, and after writing many, many long letters to the man I eventually married a WCG member who lived in Washington. So the local members also resented me for “taking” one of their men without their consent. We had nothing but hassles from the time we announced our engagement until the time we got married.

First, people would start rumors each week that we weren’t really engaged, or that we’d “had” to get married, or whatever. Then the minister insisted we have $5,000. in the bank before he would allow us to get married. We should have just eloped–others had done that. But both my fiancee and I had been taught from a very young age that if we disobeyed any directive issued to us that dire consequences would ensue. So we used huge amounts of energy to comply to the requirements. We didn’t get it when the requirements kept changing that the local people didn’t want us to get married. We didn’t get it that we would’ve been better off if we’d just jumped in our car and started driving until we found someplace to stop that was far beyond WCG control.

The time in LA and the smog had affected my lungs and energy resources so that I was unable to work at that time. My fiancee was trying to run his own business so he didn’t make much money. We struggled along, getting our fathers to chip in enough of the mandated sum that we were able to convince the minister to let us get married. After that, it was just more of the same–trying to be “good” WCG members, constantly battling rumors and rudeness. At one point the minister actually brought in job listings and insisted the members look through them. He’d even gone through the listings and chose certain jobs for certain members who weren’t working. He’d chosen a zoo job for me that would’ve entailed lifting 50 and 100 pound sacks of food. I refused to apply, which labeled me as “rebellious.”

I wish I’d seen then how ridiculous it was for a nearly 30-year old adult to be treated the way I was treated. But that’s all I’d ever known. It was literally scary for me when I saw people just doing what they wanted. I was convinced something terrible would happen to them. As time passed, I did many jobs in WCG–I did the weekly bulletin, helped organize special events, led worship, wrote and taught worship songs, was part of the choir, was a soloist and a member and a soloist for a gospel choir that was really fun. It took the “changes” in the early 1990s and the targeting treatment some took upon themselves to inflict on our then 3 year-old son to get us to leave WCG. Still, I was 40 when we left. And yes, I was blackballed and shunned after I left. I’m glad I didn’t know that I’d lose literally everyone I’d known all my life when I left–that might have made it harder to leave. I feel in many ways that the time spent in WCG was a waste. I am remaking my life but I have less energy than I did when I was younger, despite the lung problems and energy problems I had then. I don’t attend any church, though right after we left WCG I did attend an EV Free church and lead worship there for about a year.

I’m trying to make the most out of life now. Thanks for this arena to think through all of those years and their effect on my life.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 16th, 2006 at 1:50 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.