Articles for the Benefit of Members and Ex-Members of the WCG

* * *

41
WCG: Don't Trust Your Leaders
Part 4

Members of the Worldwide Church of God and its splits should not trust their leaders. You are called to use your mind and let the Holy Spirit guide you. To fully do so, you need to accept and utilise the supernatural gifts of the Spirit which your church leaders don't.

You may recall in Part 3 of this series that I referred in passing to the authority of the individual believer. You believe in Jesus as your Saviour? Good! Do you know what authority He has given to you as part of your inheritance NOW as one of His followers?

Take a look at this:

Believe Me.... I tell you the truth [which is more than Worldwide ministers do!], anyone who has faith in Me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father (Jn 14:11-14, NIV).

WOW!! Did you grasp that? What was Jesus doing? Hundreds, maybe even thousands of miracles! Healing the sick, restoring crippled limbs, opening blind eyes, feeding thousands miraculously, expounding the Word of God, prophesying and receiving revelation, raising the dead, and turning water into wine. Those are only some of the wonderful things He did.

He says you can do such things too!

But there's a "catch". You've got to believe...

Whoever believes and is baptised will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: In My name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues... they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well (Mark 16:16-18, NIV).

That sort of belief is rare in the Worldwide Church of God and its closest splits. It is virtually extinct!

When have you, as a Worldwide member, ever been educated in how to perform the miracles Jesus did? When have you been trained to go out into the world, take Jesus to others and demonstrate His supernatural power?

You haven't! You haven't been told about the authority of the believer. Instead, you have been inculcated with an acute awareness of the "authority" of the church ministry! But that is a bogus authority. It is human, not divine. It is contrived from below, not derived from above.

The WCG leadership is very clever. They have learned to spout the "in" jargon to cover up for their inadequacies. Paul described preparing the saints for service (Eph 4:12). Most evangelicals and Charismatics have given this the tag "equipping" the saints. So, to make it look like Joseph Tkach and his side-kicks are doing that, they use the term "equipping" and other similar jargon in their articles. It gives the impression that they not only know what they are talking about, but are also doing it.

The trouble is, they are not! They are deceiving. They themselves are deceived. They most probably think they ARE equipping you for works of service, but the main hindrance to this has not yet been removed from the minds the majority of the membership. That hindrance is a reliance upon church leadership.

Listen to Jesus, Not Leaders

In part 3 I broached this matter. I mentioned that church leaders expect loyalty and submission to them. This is in fact a breach of the duty you have to Christ.

There doesn't seem to be any problem in this regard so long as church leaders are following the lead of the Spirit themselves, but when they veer away from that or block it, that's when great difficulties arise. That is the point at which it should become obvious that a blasphemous transference of loyalties has occurred.

You are called to follow Christ, not men who usurp His prerogatives as Leader, Teacher, Guide, Revelator, Deliverer, Master or Lord. You are called to have faith in Him, not faith in men who claim to represent Him. (Some do; many don't!)

As long as you have this faith in men, replacing faith in Christ, you will not have the close personal relationship you need with Jesus. And without that relationship, you won't have the connection by sharing HIS faith so that miracles can occur at your hands.

You need to hear from Him. Do you know how to hear from Him? Leaders of the WCG, CGI, PCG, UCG, GCG and other similar splits do not teach their members how to rely upon God in faith and how to receive direct divine revelation and guidance. They prefer to dole out instruction to their members and control all such spiritual matters. They don't expect divine revelation themselves, and they certainly wouldn't want their members having that if they don't! That would undermine their position at the top of the pyramid.

You probably are unclear about what I mean by hearing from God. So, let me give you an example.

I was invited to a small independent Feast site of ex-WCG brethren in 1995. The organisers asked me to give a message. (It's not my fort้, but I did so.) God showed me that I should speak on the subject of hearing from Him. This was not a matter they were very familiar with. They were aware of some aspects, but much of this was new to them – as it was new to us in 1991 when God first broadened our experience of it.

I explained with some video footage of the various ways God speaks today through believers. (Remember, faith is the operative factor. Those who believe receive. Doubters don't receive. This sort of faith comes through dwelling in relationship with Jesus.)

After the message, we prayed for revelation from God and waited for His reply. Various messages in tongues were received with their interpretation. Then I felt in my spirit that God wanted me to ask if anyone was seeking Him for healing. A number of hands went up. At the same time, God spoke to me with a word of knowledge (1 Cor 12:8). It was very brief: merely two words – "bad leg". I asked if there was anyone present who had a bad leg. A lady put her hand up. She did. Since this was the first time I had ministered like this, and God said nothing more, I concluded that I expected God meant that He would heal her of this condition. She came forward. I said a brief prayer of thanks, and she was healed.

This personal "touch" from God in meetings is nothing new. By exercising active faith, "Charismatics" have practised this sort of thing for decades – and Pentecostals too, a hundred and more years before. It is what happened in the early Church, and is what Paul was referring to in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14, although those chapters make little sense to Worldwide folks because miraculous experience of the personal presence of Jesus in meetings is outside their experience. So they can't relate to it.

WCG Rejects Spiritual Gifts!

In the 20+ years we attended the WCG, we heard virtually nothing preached about gifts of the Spirit. No one in the church understood them, and none had these spiritual gifts. If they were ever experienced in a small way, it was so rare that they went unrecognised.

Certainly, the spontaneous gift of tongues was not accepted, nor interpretation of tongues or prophesying. The latter was explained away as being inspired preaching. Words of wisdom and words of knowledge were likewise dispelled as merely generated from the human psyche. And discerning of spirits and casting out demons was not practised nor taught.

The only time I heard a WCG minister relate an experience when he received a word of knowledge was Carn Catherwood telling a story of how he comforted a distraught woman at the funeral of her husband. She was so forlorn about her personal circumstances that she wondered whether God had forsaken her. All she wanted to hear was something to reassure her and give her faith to carry on. If she could only hear the words from God that "everything is OK" she would be consoled. But, of course, the WCG didn't know how to receive from God themselves, let alone be able to teach others how to hear from God.

At the funeral, Carn Catherwood said that, as he passed by this woman, "foolishly" he blurted out to her "everything is OK". He felt such a fool for doing so. He couldn't understand what had made him do it. Only later did he realise why. That was a word of knowledge with a strong prompt from God in the spirit. It is the essence of prophecy which Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 14. Tragically, it was alien to the WCG, and is still foreign to them today, because they trust in their leaders not in the leadership of the Holy Spirit.

Learning how to hear God's voice, how to be sensitive to the Spirit, how to receive and operate in the Spirit with supernatural spiritual gifts was what God gave us a crash course in after we were thrust out of the WCG in 1990.

About five years ago, after we had learned about spiritual gifts and had received these blessings ourselves, I wrote to David Silcox and asked him if he would like us to introduce them to WCG members.

Not surprisingly, I received no reply. WCG leaders don't want anyone else teaching their members truth. They want to be the ones to do so. It gives them prestige and causes the members to follow them. They don't want anyone else coming in from outside and "stealing" away their limelight.

However, WCG mentors are not familiar with spiritual gifts. They have not received such a baptism in the Spirit, nor do they know how to operate in and utilise the gifts of the Spirit in meetings. So they cannot teach members about this important subject.

Their ignorance would be excusable if they were open-minded and permitted others to teach them who have accepted and learned to demonstrate these gifts. But they don't. They won't.

Instead, they preach to their members as if they already have such spiritual gifts, further deluding the minds of the undiscerning. By referring in passing to such things, mentioning them in articles from time to time as if they are an established fact in the church, members become conditioned to thinking these gifts are present in the WCG already. But they are not! Thinking they are, members would tend to assume that such gifts are merely natural proclivities of each individual that the Holy Spirit somehow enhances, or something similar. They never come to grips with the stark reality that THE WCG DOES NOT POSSESS SUPERNATURAL SPIRITUAL GIFTS in the way Paul describes them in 1 Corinthians 12.

Most members are still suspicious of such things because of the legacy of Herbert Armstrong's prejudice against the Pentecostal churches and the gifts of the Spirit seen there. He made out that they were all bogus manifestations – either contrivances of the human psyche or demonic activity. Those lies did incalculable harm to the introduction of the power of God into the Churches of God.

The WCG and its sister churches ostensibly accepted divine healing, but God wanted to confer further spiritual benefit through other gifts. In their ignorance, WCG leaders perpetuated the misunderstandings of HWA and prevented a deeper spiritual renewal taking place in the lives of their members.

We still await such a wonderful renewal!

Do you want to do the things Jesus did? Do you want Him to work wonders on your behalf? Then get into the right place to receive. Quit following men and start following the One who is Lord of all.

To be continued...

Malcolm B Heap, 15 March 1998

For further understanding, request:
The Video, Hearing From God, Listening To God, Holy Fire, Faith – Raising Your Level of Expectation, all available from Midnight Ministries.