Raising the Ruins (36 page)

When we asked him earlier about whether or not he thought the
PCG
was a cult, he responded, “Unquestionably.”
¹⁸
He went on to explain that there are two types of cults—theological and sociological. “Theological cults would be the ones that misrepresent history and Scripture but aren’t necessarily pathological in nature. And then you have sociological cults, groups that are dangerous, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Heaven’s Gate.”
¹⁹
At least we only made it onto his list of theological cults. But “we’re concerned,” he went on to say, “that [the
PCG
] may be crossing the line into the sociological realm.”
²⁰

For clarification, Mark asked, “So you have concerns that the Philadelphia Church of God may be a cult in the sense that it is dangerous, sociopathic?”

“Certainly,” Tkach answered.
²¹

Yet they wanted, all along, to license Mr. Armstrong’s literature to us as a “benefit” to our work.

Talk about speaking from both sides of your mouth.

We also made sure to compare Mr. Armstrong’s academic background with Tkach Sr.’s, which made the younger Tkach very uncomfortable.

Michael Feazell

Since he was primarily responsible for authoring the preface, we were quite anxious to depose Mike Feazell. At our Edmond offices, our employees combed through Feazell’s book and other writings of his, as well as documents that were written about him.

We assembled at the Los Angeles offices of Munger, Tolles and Olson for his deposition on Wednesday, July 24, 2002. Early on, Mark Helm quoted from Feazell’s book, where he spoke of the church’s transformation.

One by one these core values shriveled and fell from the
WCG
tree. As they did, leaders and members became increasingly unsettled, fearful, and frustrated. “How are we different anymore?” “Where is all this leading?” “What will be changed next?” they asked.

The church these people had come into had
slowly ceased to exist
.
²²

Any time we found statements by
WCG
officials describing the
WCG
today as being completely different from what it once was, we made note of them. If the
old
church no longer existed, why should the
new
church be allowed to keep others from continuing to distribute the traditional teachings?

When Mark asked him about his comparison of life in the Worldwide under Mr. Armstrong to a rape victim, which we discussed in chapter 1, Feazell tried to brush it aside as a “figurative expression.”
²³
Mark pressed further. “But by using the figurative term … ‘raped,’ that is a feeling of the highest order, correct? It’s not a casual feeling of unpleasantness, it’s—it’s a very serious feeling that you’re trying to describe here; isn’t that right?”

Feazell’s lawyer tried to intervene repeatedly for his client by interrupting Mark. But Mark ignored him and insisted that Feazell answer the question. “Is rape a terrible crime?” Mark asked. Feazell’s attorney asked Mark to calm down, but he refused. “No … he is trying to walk away from what’s clearly stated here, and acting as though … ‘spiritually and emotionally raped’ … [is like] a typo in a memo.”
²⁴

After Feazell wouldn’t answer, Mark came at the subject from another angle: “When you said you had been spiritually and emotionally raped, were the feelings that you experienced akin to having had a terrible crime committed against you?”
²⁵
Feazell said
no,
repeating that he only used the term in a figurative sense.

“So when you figuratively used the term
rape,
it’s not a terrible thing?” Mark followed.
²⁶
It was as heated as we had ever seen Mark during a deposition. It made Feazell noticeably uncomfortable.

Later, Feazell said he believed the
PCG
is a cult “at least in the sense of its submission to the authority of one individual and his personal interpretation of the religious views of the organization … .”
²⁷
In his book, he wrote about how Mr. Armstrong’s authority had brought the church to a virtual “standstill administratively.”
²⁸
He said “decisions of any significance could not be made without” Mr. Armstrong’s approval.
²⁹
So at the deposition, we pointed Feazell to other statements in his book that talk about the authority Tkach Sr. inherited from Mr. Armstrong: that Tkach would not have been able to transform the church “without the unfettered hierarchical authority delegated to him by Armstrong”
³⁰
; that the changes would have never happened unless Tkach had “total authority.” We then asked about Tkach Jr.’s supposed plans to dismantle the authoritarian approach to governance in the church—and how that was one of his first goals after becoming pastor general in 1995. But as of 2002, when we asked Feazell if the younger Tkach had the same powers that Mr. Armstrong did, he responded, “[T]hat may well be true.”
³¹

On page 107 of his book, Feazell wrote, “In the Worldwide Church of God, however, we found ourselves in the no-win situation of having to change the core values. The changes we were forced to make devastated the very sense of identity of our church and its members.”
³²
Since the Tkaches had “total authority” to change the church’s “core values,” we wanted to remind Feazell that they forced their transformation on the ministers and members of the Worldwide Church of God. In response to that charge, Feazell testified, “The Church no more forced … itself … on the ministers after the changes than it did before the changes.”
³³
To which Mark brilliantly responded,

But after the changes took place, these were ministers who had joined a church [that] had different doctrines and were now being told:
Either teach the new doctrines or hit the road
. That is different from the ministers under Mr. Armstrong, isn’t it, who joined the church knowing what the doctrines were and believing in them?
³⁴

Feazell couldn’t see how that was different at all.

Ron Kelly

Since Ron Kelly is mentioned in
Transformed by Truth
as having heard Mr. Armstrong supposedly say “I am Elijah,” we were anxious to hear what he had to say under oath. Not surprisingly, Mr. Kelly could not remember where or when he heard Mr. Armstrong say that. We then showed Mr. Kelly the letter Tkach Jr. wrote to Mr. Leap in April 1990, where Tkach insisted that the Elijah prophecies had been fulfilled
by the work of the church
and that Mr. Armstrong never claimed to be the exclusive fulfillment of them. We asked Mr. Kelly if he made his “I am Elijah” comment before or after Tkach wrote the letter to Mr. Leap. He said it “would have been made much later than this letter, which was April of 1990.”
³⁵
But Mr. Armstrong died in 1986. And in
Transformed by Truth
, Tkach Jr. indicates that Kelly came to him
after he heard
Mr. Armstrong say “I am Elijah.”
³⁶
It wouldn’t make sense for Kelly to go to Tkach Jr. “much later” than April 1990 about a comment he heard Mr. Armstrong make. But that’s the illogical chronology Kelly had to go with during his deposition, otherwise he would have been forced to admit that Tkach Jr. spoke from both sides of his mouth.

Ron Kelly went to Ambassador College in 1956 and went into the ministry after he graduated in 1960. He became the first dean of students at Ambassador College in Big Sandy in 1964. After Big Sandy closed in 1977, Mr. Kelly transferred to Pasadena and soon after settled into the field ministry as a pastor serving in Colorado. He returned to Big Sandy briefly after the campus opened in 1981. In 1982, he moved back to headquarters in Pasadena to fill a position in the editorial department. Two years after Mr. Armstrong died, Mr. Tkach appointed him to manage the editorial department. In 1991, Mr. Kelly transferred to Church Administration, where he directed pastoral development. In 1998, he became the church’s controller in the finance and planning department. That was the position he held when we deposed him August 1, 2002.

In our preparations for Mr. Kelly’s deposition, several articles and messages of his stood out because of his long history in the church. One document was particularly interesting. It was a sermon transcript the church produced in 1987—a year after Mr. Armstrong died. He built the sermon, titled “Principles of Living,” around lessons he learned from Mr. Armstrong. He said, “Twenty-nine years ago, I began to sit at the feet of Mr. Armstrong and listen to what he had to say.”
³⁷
Later, he said, “I would especially like to bring out those points and principles that I feel Mr. Armstrong was
uniquely
able to instruct us in.”
³⁸
In his deposition, Kelly acknowledged that he had learned from Mr. Armstrong, but that today he wouldn’t use the word
uniquely
. “I look at things from a more mature point of view,” Kelly said. “I realize Mr. Armstrong had wonderful things to teach. They weren’t always unique to him.”
³⁹

Mr. Kelly then highlighted several of Mr. Armstrong’s teachings that he now considers burdensome. Of course, he didn’t think that way before embracing Tkachism—and we reminded him of that. “Mr. Armstrong taught me how to love my wife,” he said in that 1987 sermon. “I told him so, and I hope it pleased him to realize that what he taught did work.”
⁴⁰

Here is how he once described life for his children in the
WCG
:

My children have been reared all their lives with a knowledge of God’s festivals. Now that some are grown, many of their fondest memories are of keeping the holy days. We have saved for trips to England and Australia. By observing the holy days with God’s people, we have traveled as a family throughout most of the United States and Canada. … We have grown each year in spiritual understanding and have profited from the education of travel.

No one can ever tell me keeping God’s feasts is a yoke of bondage and a burden.
⁴¹

Those memories have seemingly faded from view, along with the practical, biblically based way of living Mr. Armstrong taught and recorded in huge stacks of written works.

In March of 2005, someone contacted me anonymously about a bound collection of almost all the
WCG
’s periodical literature, including the
Plain Truth, Good News, Tomorrow’s World
and
Youth
magazines, between 1934 and 2004. The collection also included a complete set of the 58-lesson Bible correspondence course
,
produced during the 1960s. The individual wanted $10,000 for all the magazines and another $500 for leather-bound volumes of all Mr. Armstrong’s books, including
Mystery of the Ages
.

My father thought the collection would be a great addition to our college library. So we made a lower offer and ended up settling on $5,000 for everything. We didn’t know who to make the check payable to until about a week before we arranged to pick up the materials.

As it turns out, the anonymous seller was the same man who, because of Mr. Armstrong’s teachings, learned how to really love his wife.

Ralph Helge

Perhaps the most significant material we uncovered in preparing for Ralph Helge’s deposition was the role he played in defending the
WCG
against the state of California in 1979. As head of the church’s legal department, he fought right on the front lines against dissident ministers who wanted to wrest control of the church away from Mr. Armstrong. Speaking before church members inside Ambassador Auditorium on January 13, 1979, Helge asked, “Now what’s really behind the scenes of this lawsuit? … I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a few dissidents that want to take power and change the doctrines of the church of God. They don’t like the way it’s being run. And they don’t like the doctrines.”
⁴²
That comment could just as easily describe our lawsuit with the Worldwide Church of God 18 years later, except this time the ones who wanted to take over power and change the doctrines were on the
inside
. And the tragedy is, Ralph Helge had joined the dissidents who wanted to take over and change the doctrines Mr. Armstrong had established.

Helge continued in his 1979 message with another comment that probably tens of thousands today would make about Tkachism: “We’ve got certain rules and we’ve got doctrines. If you like them, tremendous. And if you don’t, or I don’t (I’ll point to myself), then I’ll go to the church that teaches doctrines I do like. But I don’t come in here and try to change the way Mr. Armstrong has set the doctrines”
⁴³
—which is exactly what the Tkaches did. They didn’t like the doctrines, changed them, and then
FORCED
everyone out who wouldn’t go along.

When we reminded Helge about these statements in his 2002 deposition, he said it was different in 1979 because the dissidents attacked “from the outside.”
⁴⁴
But even in that case, those dissidents were
originally
on the
INSIDE
before Mr. Armstrong disfellowshiped them for attempting to liberalize church doctrine. In any event, a takeover attempt from the outside is not in any way worse than an inside job, spearheaded by a Judas-like betrayal.

Later in 1979, again while speaking at church services in Pasadena, Helge said, “You talk about contempt. You talk about utter contempt. Here a man [Herbert Armstrong] works all his life in the might and power of God to raise up churches, and here some pip-squeak dissident is going to control Mr. Armstrong and the church.”
⁴⁵
Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nineteen years later, Helge testified under oath that Mr. Armstrong was employed
by
the church, that the board had
control
over Mr. Armstrong’s work, and the authority, if necessary, to
FIRE
him.