Will You Fight to Preserve Herbert W. Armstrong’s Legacy?

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Will You Fight to Preserve Herbert W. Armstrong’s Legacy?

As the grounds of the former Ambassador College are commercialized and demolished, Herbert W. Armstrong College perpetuates the recapturing of true values.

Currently 3.5 million high school students across America, including my oldest son here in California, are undertaking the Preliminary Standardized Assessment Test (psat).

This test is to prepare U.S. students for the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, which is directed by the College Board and National Merit Scholarship Corporation. Test scores help in identifying student accessibility for the National Merit Scholarship Program.

Toward the end of the test, my son noticed a section asking for identification of religious affiliation. He scanned the list of about 80 churches for Philadelphia Church of God (pcg). To his disappointment, he found Worldwide Church of God (wcg) listed as an option.

“Dad, that test must not have been updated in some years,” he told me. He knew well that the wcg doesn’t exist any longer, and that it was renamed Grace Communion International with its headquarters in Glendora, California.

He also knew that wcg founder Herbert W. Armstrong died in 1986, and thereafter—in direct opposition to the clarion call of world leaders to continue his legacy—the cadre of church leaders assigned with the responsibility to continue his work without mandate drove the wcg from its founding doctrines into the welcoming arms of mainstream Christianity and Protestantism.

Furthermore, my son knew of a six-year court battle between the wcg and pcg over the preservation of the written works of Mr. Armstrong in which the wcg controlling cadre had openly declared it was their “Christian duty” to keep the works of this unofficial ambassador, friend of world leaders and humanitarian, out of print.

My son also knew of the writing of Malachi’s Message and the defense of Mystery of the Ages as it was pulled from circulation, both resulting in the firing of pcg Pastor General Gerald Flurry and his assistant, John Amos, my son’s grandfather, on Dec. 7, 1989, on the campus of Ambassador College. These events initiated the establishment of the pcg. Request your free copy of Raising the Ruins for the truth behind this mammoth betrayal and battle for religious freedom.

In the same week my son took the psat,a commercial was released promoting a new tablet computer. The commercial was produced on the grounds of what once was Ambassador College, featuring its administration building and the spiraling egret sculpture by Sir David Wynn fronting the famed Carnegie Hall of the West, Ambassador Auditorium.

The grounds’ commercialization strikes pain into the heart of anyone who supported the work of Mr. Armstrong. Add to this the recent reporting of the destruction of the former library of Ambassador College, one of the first buildings Mr. Armstrong acquired in the early days of the college back in 1947. This building was where the World Tomorrow program was once recorded and sent worldwide to its millions of viewers on hundreds of stations worldwide.

In addition, Ambassador Auditorium’s owners are currently pleading to supporters for help on their website, fearful of the facility’s future as its acoustical quality comes into question amid other slated demolitions on the former campus to make way for a senior citizen housing development complex.

During the psat, my son selected the box marked “other” in designation of his religious affiliation as these thoughts streamed through his mind. The following day, he and I sat down with his guidance counselor for our regular monthly student progress meeting.

We discussed the psat, and he was asked if he was considering a college for the future. He answered yes. She asked where. Edmond, Oklahoma, came the answer. “What is its name?”, she countered. “Herbert W. Armstrong College,” he replied as she typed the information into his student profile.

The test came two days after we returned from a wonderful trip to visit Edmond and the beautiful grounds of Herbert W. Armstrong College. The night before the test we had reviewed the 2012 Envoy, a pictorial review of the college and its activities.

“This college is patterned after a college that Herbert W. Armstrong founded,” wrote Mr. Flurry as its founder and chancellor. “As Mr. Armstrong worked to establish Ambassador College as a revolutionary, character-building institution, he said he had to fight and bleed to keep it from failing. Even many people in the college itself thought it would fold. It’s not easy in this world to establish a college that believes that the Word of God is the foundation of all knowledge. Such an epic undertaking is certain to encounter a lot of resistance.”

Our readers of the Trumpet, viewers of the Key of David program, members of the Church, Herbert W. Armstrong college students, co-workers, donors, patrons of Armstrong Auditorium performing arts events, and recipients of the benefits of and partners of Armstrong International Cultural Foundation are assured that Mr. Flurry, as founder of these institutions practicing God’s way of give, will never betray, commercialize or bulldoze God’s spiritual nor physical assets in the pursuit of profits.

As Gerald Flurry wrote in the final paragraph of the afterword of his book Malachi’s Message, “The Worldwide Church may have disfellowshiped Herbert Armstrong from their own church, postmortem, but they will never do away with his teachings. As this ongoing story unfolds and the Worldwide Church continues to self-destruct, be assured the work of Mr. Armstrong will never die. God’s end-time message from Malachi will go out. The work will continue.”