The United Church of God and the Evils of 300-Man Rule

Over the past year, the largest offshoot of Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God, ironically named the United Church of God, has been rocked by internal division and contentious strife—much of it brought on by disgruntled ministers who are unhappy with the way the church is governed. It is also ironic that the church appears to be falling apart after the same manner it first broke away from the wcg in 1995—following a series of secret meetings and mass resignations.

The ucg’s first ministerial conference in May 1995 attracted 150 former elders of the Worldwide Church of God—a veritable who’s who of the wcg hierarchy. Former members of the wcg, fed up with Tkachism, fled for United in droves. Within weeks of its coordinated kickoff, the United Church of God became the largest splinter group to ever break away from the wcg. Approximately 6,000 members attended its first Sabbath service in 1995. By the end of 1996, its worldwide membership had swelled to about 20,000 people. Within seven years of its inception, the church had more than 200 congregations worldwide and well over 300 elders.

From the outset, ucg ministers made no secret of their intent to try out a new approach to government—a bottom-up format where the general assembly of ministers would regularly vote for a council of elders. They even went so far as to use the term home office when referring to the church’s office complex in Arcadia, California, rather than headquarters, which sounds too hierarchical.

The interim council set up in 1995 chose David Hulme, a well-known wcg evangelist and presenter on the World Tomorrow television program, to serve as the church’s first president. After his appointment, Hulme made these candid remarks about the ucg’s “new” government format: “It’s not a hierarchical structure anymore. It’s a collaborative process, and it should be seen as that” (In Transition, May 5, 1995; emphasis mine throughout). He admitted this was a radically different approach to what Mr. Armstrong used, but was convinced that “God’s hand” was behind the establishment of the ucg. The brethren, he said, just needed to give the new government a chance—“give it time,” he said.

As it turns out, Hulme gave it less than three years. After a contentious and protracted struggle with the council of elders, he was removed from office in early 1998 and left the church soon after. “I could no longer support a governance structure that I believe has failed,” Hulme wrote to those who followed him out of the ucg. “I have had to admit that Herbert W. Armstrong was right in Mystery of the Ages, especially Chapter Six, where he describes a proven form of government for the Church.”

It took 20 years of service as a minister in the Worldwide Church of God and three years as president of the United Church of God for Hulme to finally conclude that Mr. Armstrong was right. But instead of searching for a worldwide work that was backed by God’s family government, Hulme opted to start another church—an offshoot of the offshoot.

Rod Meredith is another prominent wcg evangelist who got burned by the “collaborative” scheme. When he broke free from the wcg in 1993 to form the Global Church of God, he claimed to be following in the footsteps of Mr. Armstrong. Yet the very first doctrine he changed was the principle of God’s government that Mr. Armstrong used throughout his ministry.

“If we look into the New Testament with an open mind, we find a totally different approach to government than what has developed in the Church,” Meredith wrote in Church Government and Church Unity. On the most important matter of all, in other words, Mr. Armstrong had it all wrong. The right kind of government, Meredith later wrote in his 1993 booklet, should be “collegial” in form. It should include “a broad representation of all the elders” in the church, he believed.

Five years later, after the church’s board of directors terminated Meredith’s employment at the Global Church of God, he quickly changed his tune on the subject of church governance. After starting another offshoot of the offshoot, Meredith handpicked his board of directors and charged them with the responsibility of advising the president, rather than ruling the church.

It took Mr. Meredith 40 years of service as an evangelist in the Worldwide Church of God and five years as president of Global to figure out that Mr. Armstrong got it right on the principle formation of God’s government in the Church.

Given these much-publicized, embarrassing failures, you would think these men would wonder, Where was God during the three years I served as president of United? Or, Where was God when I founded Global?

Prior to the first ucg conference in 1995, David Hulme said he was “skeptical” that a large group of ministers could ever reach a consensus on church governance. After he came out on top, however, he was convinced that “God’s hand” was behind it.

Rod Meredith was equally sure that God was behind his “collegial” experiment back in 1993. He claimed to be “faithfully preaching” everything Mr. Armstrong taught—assuming, of course, that everything does not include his radically different approach to church government and his rejection of Mr. Armstrong as the end-time type of Elijah (Matthew 17:11).

Today, both Meredith and Hulme head up two spin-offs of wcg offshoots. All totaled, there must be at least 100 offshoots of what once was the Worldwide Church of God.

It makes you wonder: How many failed experiments with collaborative government will it take for former members of the Worldwide Church of God to wake up and figure out where God is working today?

Since firing David Hulme in 1998, the United Church of God has tried out four other presidents. Les McCullough agreed to fill the post for three years after Hulme was ousted. After McCullough’s three-year term expired in 2002, he asked the board for another three years. Instead, it gave him one additional year and then voted to replace him with Roy Holladay in 2002. Three years after that, in 2005, council members gave Holladay the boot and selected Clyde Kilough as his replacement.

Last year, amid swirling controversies about a proposal to move the “home office,” complaints of politicized bloc voting within the general conference of elders and charges of unethical behavior and financial mismanagement aimed at board members, Kilough decided to give up his chair on the council, but continue on serving as president.

Against this backdrop, the council distributed an eight-page heart-to-heart letter to all the elders in the church. In it, board members maintained that God was still leading United, but that the ucg ministry had become deeply divided and the atmosphere in the church had become toxic.

The council wrote, “Due to this negative spiritual incursion into our fellowship, for more than two years we have been forced to focus our church’s time, energy and resources inwardly ….” Later, board members expressed grave concern about the “preservation” of the United Church of God.

The church, we now know, was teetering on the brink of total collapse.

We predicted this would happen way back at the start, when the former wcg ministers gathered themselves together to experiment with a new government format. On May 6, 1995, for example, my father said this about the newly-established United Church: “It absolutely will fail because it’s a new form of government, and not the one that Herbert Armstrong taught us, inspired by God.”

He issued the very same warning in response to Meredith’s collegial experiment in 1993: “You can’t do God’s work without God’s government. Mr. Meredith will have that proved to him by God—since he has shamefully failed to learn that most important lesson of all while he ‘sat at the feet’ of Mr. Armstrong!” (Trumpet, April 1993).

It’s so simple—if you’re submitted to God’s family government. If not, then—as we have seen—history simply repeats itself.

Earlier this year, on April 9, the ucg council of elders terminated Clyde Kilough’s presidency and outlined a new process for selecting a president whereby the general conference of elders would submit nominations to the council. The council would then determine which nominee should be president.

Toward the end of June, the ucg council settled on Dennis Luker as the church’s fifth different president in just 15 years.

Over the past six months, Luker has been desperately working to keep the sinking ucg ship afloat. The worst of it started about the same time Luker was voted in as president. That same week, the council terminated the employment of Leon Walker, who had served as regional coordinator for Latin America. Firing Walker triggered a mass exodus of Spanish-speaking brethren and ministers from the ucg and resulted in the establishment of another offshoot—the Church of God, Latin America.

Incredibly, when responding to the crisis, President Luker pinned the blame for the split on hierarchical government, rather than the collaborative form that has repeatedly failed inside his own church! Walker’s rebellion, Luker wrote in a letter to ucg members,

represents the very reason that hundreds of ministers collectively chose some 15 years ago to embrace and refine the administrative structure that we now have. We have seen the destructive outcomes that “one man rule” in a Church of God organization can wreak, and this current experience in Latin America underscores the reason we changed our model of governance 15 years ago to include safeguards from this happening again.

In looking at the fruits, one would think he would at least acknowledge how destructive 300-man rule has been over the past 15 years. In the six months since the ucg council relieved Mr. Walker of his ministerial duties, at least 100 moreucg elders have either resigned or been removed from the ministry.

That can only mean that many more offshoots are on the way.

Meanwhile, the one organization that actually started the right way—as a tiny mustard seed planted in 1989, without any of the best-known former ministers of the wcg or their many thousands of supporters, but with God’s government—continues to grow and prosper as it fulfills its God-given commission to prophesy again before all the world and to raise up the ruins of a work God established and built through His servant Herbert W. Armstrong.

Next week, we will examine the fruit borne of God’s work on Earth and compare it to the works of the many offshoots. This is the surest way to find the correct answer to the one question every former member of the Worldwide Church of God ought to be asking right now: Where is God?

For as Jesus said, “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:20).