Stardate -317427.91622272966

MY LATEST ENTERPRISE

Okay, forgive me.

I just couldn't resist the impulse.

However, despite the dorky name, this blog is not some sort of weird blend of Armstrongism and Star Trek fandom, so relax.

I'm not even a Trekkie, so please don't ask me to write something in Klingon.

The dorky title came to me a while back. I was inspired to write an essay about the next generation of the Church of God movement and came up with the rather clever title, "The Next Generation." Which of course made me think of Star Trek: The Next Generation. So, in the spirit of ironic cheesiness and whimsy, I decided to make that the title of this blog. (Mad props, by the way, to whomever created the handy Stardate Calculator.)

But there is, come to think of it, a more serious meaning to the word trek: for to trek means to travel, and scripture repeatedly likens the life of faith to a journey, a pilgrimage, a road, a walk, a Way. It is not for the complacent who prefer sitting, nor for those who'd prefer to stop in a certain place to build great towering edifices to "make a name for themselves." The Way is for the restless, the never-satisfied, the pilgrims, the searchers, the nomads.

This weblog will probably end up serving several purposes. For now we can say its purpose is to provide the Church of God movement with a unique perspective from a younger (yeah, I'm over 30, but in COGdom anything under 60 is "younger") perspective. And, you might add, a nomadic perspective.

The content will vary: I'll vent, opine, speculate, share insights, and point your attention to the noteworthy work of others, all with the purpose of glorifying Yahweh Elohim and building up his people. In so doing I will be sure to examine new ideas and ways of understanding scripture. I will also criticize whatever deserves criticism. You are welcome to criticize me, too, if you like. (Unlike many of the teachers, prophets, apostles and "Witnesses" dotting the COG landscape, I have no problem acknowledging that every once in a blue moon I might be wrong about something.) In fact, I can guarantee you won't agree with everything written here. But by the same token, I can guarantee that you will learn, or at least will be stimulated to think.

If any of that -- criticism, thinking, learning -- scares you, it would be best for you to exit now and to never return. If not, then carry on.


SO WHO ARE YOU?

I hate writing introductions and profiles and such, but for once I'll try to be halfway thorough about it. To describe myself:

* David Harrell
* 31
* Chicago
* Single, nephews, niece, dog
* Journalist (currently paid more in satisfaction than in money)
* Songwriter and erstwhile artist
* Black sheep of the family and, so far, the only "cult member" (see story below)
* "Hunter/Explorer"
* INFP (at times a bit more T than F)
* second-decan Aries (right on the edge of the third)
* One-man think tank & wacky idea machine
* Or, maybe just a bad case of ADD

For what it's worth, I have subscribed to COG publications for more two-thirds of my life, which is 31 years long, which makes me a Gen-Xer. Appropriately, I possess the requisite penchant for irony and a default setting of cynicism, which if you dig deep enough, is really only the sour lemon coating on a soft, sweet idealistic center.

I am always reading and/or thinking about deep stuff, not to revel in the arcanity of it all, but in order to uncover the underlying principles of things. (I prefer to eschew obfuscation.) I try not to let my schooling get in the way of my education.

Despite being overly philosophical at times, I'm not averse to sports (playing, not watching other people play on TV), mechanical tinkering (like turning an AM radio into a shortwave radio by accident), or getting my hands dirty. In my youth I was consumed with drawing, but now I'm more into playing music, or better yet, letting the music play me.

I follow politics closely enough to know how rotten the whole game is. My world view is not one of the coincidence theorist (for examples of this view see The Coincidence Theorist's Guide to 9/11); it is a biblical world view, which some folks ridicule as "conspiracist," but which I call "realist," in the sense that Franklin Delano Roosevelt said: "In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happened, you can bet it was planned that way."


Q: ALL RIGHT, BUT HOW DID YOU COME INTO THE TRUTH?

A: Well, I'm still learning the truth.

But if you mean to ask how I came to associate with the Church of God movement, here's the story.

I grew up in an American Baptist church where I got dunked and "saved" at the age of 10.

Later that same year, a most fascinating magazine called The Plain Truth came into our home by way of an aunt who gave my older sister a gift subscription. (The aunt has regretted it ever since.) Being naturally curious and contrary, I instantly took to the magazine's broad-based and integrative approach to world events, science, politics, history, religion and practically every other field of knowledge. (My sister ignored it.)

I greedily devoured the Ambassador College Correspondence Course and other church literature — which so sparked my interest in the Bible that I read my little Today’s English Version from cover to cover (except for Psalms) over several months’ time. I was probably one of few 11-year-olds to reverently pore over that “most important book since the Bible,” Mystery of the Ages. With all this material it was easy to stump my Sunday School teachers. For example: "Jesus said 'no man has ascended to heaven' ... So why do you teach that we go to heaven after we die?" Then I'd watch them trip all over themselves trying to explain.

I would getup early on Saturday mornings, before the cartoons came on (remember, I was still ten) to watch the nonagenarian Herbert Armstrong’s telecast for a little more than a year until his death. It wasn't long before I also spotted a listing for an identically surnamed evangelist whose program aired Sunday mornings. Soon I was a regular viewer of Garner Ted Armstrong as well. So through my teenage years -- even as I continued in the Baptist church, the youth group, the church choir, etc. -- I was building a small library of literature from both the Worldwide Church of God and the Church of God, International. From these sources I learned much about the Bible and numerous other subjects as well. (Alas, a good percentage of what I learned I have had to unlearn, but that’s life.)

I tried to figure out the relationship between the two Armstrongs and their respective organizations. The WCG's communications on this matter tended to be glib and unsatisfying, but I gathered that there had been some sort of falling out.


THE PLAIN TRUTH INSPIRED ME in a number of ways, but especially in getting me interested in journalism: a great way, I reasoned, to be a vessel for spreading the truth. As a high school junior, I watched a classmate of mine make and distribute crudely photocopied "comix" zines featuring his and others' artwork. So I tried making my own pamphlets, usually two or four typewritten pages, with articles on subjects such as evolution vs. creation and the meaning of life. At the bottom I would recommend further reading from the WCG: "Just call 1-800-423-4444 and request the booklet 'A World Held Captive'!" I'd use storebought stencils to create big, bold titles. Then I would then copy the pamphlets and stick them into random lockers at school. Thankfully, I did not distribute many of those.

By the summer of 1991, I was out of high school at age 17 and finally made it to a WCG "evangelistic" meeting held just minutes away from my home. The preaching itself was unremarkable and covered familiar ground (which, alas, would become a recurring theme during my CoG sojourn). But there were some free booklets and articles available that I hadn't read.

I was struck by the fact that everyone carried a Bible -- usually a huge one, marked up in a rainbow of colors, margins filled with notes. A lot of the men seemed to carry their Bibles and other paraphernalia in briefcases, an accessory I had never associated with church at all. (At First Baptist of Park Forest, which I was still attending, there was no need to bring your Bible; you could go through an entire service and hear only a few scriptures cited. The most-used book, by far, was the hymnal.)

But I was noticing something strange going on with WCG literature. When I requested additional copies of older booklets to give away, I was told that many -- especially, it seems, those bearing Herbert Armstrong's name -- had either been extensively revised, "suspended pending further review," or discontinued altogether.

The Plain Truth, too, seemed to be strategically watering down its doctrine and presentation. This became especially obvious in the summer of 1992 with a John Halford article on evolution that took a very wishy-washy, muddled tone. It seemed to say: Well, maybe evolution really is true, and maybe it isn't; does it really matter? Since the scientific case for creation and against evolution was an issue of special interest to me, this raised my eyebrows and prompted me to cancel my subscription not long thereafter. The magazine just wasn't the same any more.

At the same time I was gleaning from Garner Ted Armstrong's sermon tapes that WCG remained a cultlike, authoritarian group. CGI seemed to be a kinder, gentler version of WCG but with essentially the same truths. So I began attending CGI in June, 1992 and was rebaptized August 30, at the age of 18.


DURING MY FOUR YEARS THERE I met some great, beautiful, generous people. But from the very first service on, I was a bit disappointed. I had imagined that I would discover a place of joyous worship and celebration -- after all, these people "knew the truth"; they were real Christians! However, I found CGI services to be no more alive than those at First Baptist. Which was to say: dead. There was more flipping through scriptures, to be sure. But what was missing was a spirit of joyous worship.

Also, some of Armstrong's messages and his tone began to rub me the wrong way. For example, in a 1993 sermon about angels, he went off into a long aside in which he indulged in some very racist speculation. Specifically, he claimed to know that Yahweh brought the Flood upon the earth because the non-white sons of Cain were lusting after and marrying the lily-white, blonde-haired daughters of Seth. As he put it, all men can't help lusting after a "six-foot Swedish blonde." (Knowing what I now know, I'm pretty sure this was a classic case of what Freud called "projection.") I dashed off an irate letter to Armstrong. However, I'm pretty sure that I never sent it.

That same summer some brethren introduced me to The World Ahead, from the newly formed Global Church of God, and Ambassador Report, which revealed some of the very serious -- and sometimes shocking -- stains upon the CoG organizations and their founders. But AR also informed me of the existence of a cornucopia of WCG splinter groups, and I began to think of it as my mission to help bridge the gaps between them. To some extent this was for "selfish" purposes: the other church groups contained other young adults, who were potential friends (or dates). But also, it was just the principle of the thing: Why should potential brothers and sisters who believe essentially the same things be separated by organizational walls?

When Rod Meredith put on a Chicago appearance (don't you love that term? It's the language used for entertainers: "Barry Manilow, appearing LIVE in Chicago -- one night only!") I met him, shook hands with him, and invited him to come visit our CGI service that afternoon. For a moment he and the men around him looked at me as if I had just invited him to Mars. Then he declined politely, saying he had other plans.

While pursuing my college education in Chicago, I faithfully continued with the CGI, albeit with a sense that I was settling for less than the best; that the church was lacking something.

I still find the events of 1995 amazing in their timing, as if some unseen hand had lit a fuse set to blow everything up within a few short months. That spring saw the large exodus from the WCG that formed the UCG-AIA; later summer and early autumn saw the breakup of the Chicago CGI congregation, the CGI’s largest (ostensibly over disagreements between the pastor and "Headquarters" over the need for a local church building, and other issues as well). The pastor took about half the congregation with him. I started attending with them in the mornings and with CGI in the afternoon.

Then came the Feast, and then we were hearing that #2 man Ron Dart was leaving the church for health reasons (but also, somewhat incongruously, to start a new ministry to independent believers). Then we were hearing something about Armstrong getting in trouble with a masseuse.

These revelations did not come as a surprise to me, as they evidently did to many CGI members, since I had been keeping tabs on the overall Church of God situation through Ambassador Report and other ministry publications. AR, the premiere outlet for actual investigative reporting on the CoG movement (truly a foreign concept in the cultlike WCG environment), was "salacious," "vicious," "scandalous," "slanderous" -- and unfortunately, in all too many instances, correct.

By spring 1996, it became clear that Armstrong and his Headquarters supporters were stonewalling the members' questions and concerns. A CGI official who is now a very prominent name with the CGI was sent to Chicago to blatantly lie to us about the severity of GTA's infraction. His supporters in the home office circled the wagons around him and refused to demand that he step down from his very public position as the leader and "face" of the church on television.

The result was that the best ministers left the CGI, and with them many members, forming a new wave of independent churches. These churches would later serve many refugees from the disintegrating WCG -- and later, some who left or were "shown the door" of UCG as well.

A local church elder, Mike Linacre, announced he would be holding independent Spring Holy Day services at the University of Chicago, where he was an adjunct professor. This group became the Active Bible Church of God, my home church for most of the last nine years.

IT WAS CURIOUS ENOUGH to attend an urban congregation composed mostly of black folks and led by an Englishman married to an Aussie. It was also nice that Mike (if we wanted to get formal, Pastor Mike) dropped all the pretension and elitism that had previously existed between ministers and "laity." Mike and his wife Maureen ("Mo") were not haughty holders of some office or title, nor did they wish to even appear as such; they were not out to use religion to profit or to control others. They were simply out to serve.

ABCOG was, and still is for the most part, small and family-like. At first it was run like a living-room fellowship. More recently, since Mike and Mo left for Australia, it has evolved a bit more toward a "churchy" format, which in my opinion, is regrettable.

Concurrently with the above events, I continued to learn via various sources: first of all the information-packed Ambassador Report, the primary source of information about the greater COG world. As new organizations were founded I quickly got on their mailing lists or ordered sample literature if it seemed interesting. I benefited early on from literature or personal correspondence with an array of independent ministries who were ahead of their time, such as Ken Westby & co. (ACD) and a maverick minister then operating out of Las Vegas, John Allen. Later, the ministries of Ron Dart, Jim Rector, Norman Edwards (of Servants' News and Port Austin Bible Campus), and the Likeminds internet forum would help clarify what I already instinctively felt: that the sectarianism, hierarchy, exclusivism, and the clergy/laity system of the WCG and its splinter groups were wrong and unbiblical.

In addition to learning all that, I was studying on my own and learning a lot of deeper things about faith, prayer, and so forth -- things that were largely neglected in CGI teaching. Some of those issues I'll be writing about in this very space. As I said above, I am still learning the truth, and I suppose I will be until my last day on this earth.

I will refer a lot to the CoG movement in this blog. However, these days I don't consider myself part of any movement other than the one founded by Messiah. "Movement," anyway, is not the term to use for a group of people who are all about coalescing and coagulating around a certain leader or set-in-stone set of dogmas. The word movement implies, well, movement. So I keep moving. As I have said before in Internet debates (often with second- or third-generation CoGers who were born "in the church"), I didn't get into this by being a conformist, so why start now?

Well that's more than enough to get the party started. If I think of anything else you need to know, I'll throw it in later. I can't guarantee this blog will be updated every day, or even every two or five. But it will be worth your while to check every now and then.