When Rod Meredith left the Worldwide Church of God to start a new church in 1993, he clearly called into question the way Herbert W. Armstrong had governed the Worldwide Church of God. He wrote in Church Government and Church Unity that the subject of church government had been seriously misunderstood during the days of Mr. Armstrong’s leadership.

Furthermore, Meredith said, God’s Church had rarely ever been governed by one administration, with one man in charge—and Mr. Armstrong knew it.

In actual fact, Mr. Armstrong’s writings flatly reject this revisionist reading of Church history. He wrote in April 1981 that God always works through one man at a time. “He worked through Abraham. He worked through Moses, through Joshua, through one ‘judge’ at a time, through Samuel, through David, through Solomon. He worked through Peter and when Peter had left the Middle East, through Paul. These men had, in greater or lesser number, staff assistants under them, but God’s work was through the one man at a time!” Mr. Armstrong wrote (emphasis mine throughout).

Without a doubt, it was a deceitful and confusing web Mr. Meredith tried to spin after Mr. Armstrong’s death. On the one hand, Mr. Armstrong supposedly knew God didn’t work through one man. And yet, Mr. Armstrong’s own administration was obviously hierarchical, with one man at the top.

In his booklet, Mr. Meredith said he and fellow minister Herman Hoeh were largely responsible for the top-down government Mr. Armstrong adopted. “Even after several years of guiding the college [which began in 1947], Mr. Armstrong still did not understand much about Church government,” Meredith wrote. “Consequently, in the early to mid-1950s, Herman Hoeh and I each were inspired to write articles along this line.”

So he and Mr. Hoeh were the ones responsible for helping Mr. Armstrong set up the government structure. In fact, “all of us leading ministers,” Meredith noted, understood that for the wcg to do God’s work, it needed to be unified. And as long as there was a dedicated man like Mr. Armstrong at the top, a hierarchical form of government would best preserve the unity, he said. So the leading ministers devised this pyramid structure and wrote about it in articles; then, as Mr. Meredith remembers, “Mr. Armstrong accepted these articles and immediately published them in the Good News.”

Over time, however, Meredith said this form of government led to all sorts of hardships and abuses. According to his booklet, everything started going haywire when wcg ministers began to compare Mr. Armstrong to Moses.

“Frankly there was never—in the New Testament Church—any example of a Moses figure,” Meredith wrote. “God guided many apostles and elders to work in a brotherly, non-threatening, collegial atmosphere, and no single one of the apostles towered over the others.”

According to Meredith, this collegial “New Testament” approach is what they failed to grasp during the days of Mr. Armstrong. This is why, Meredith said at a ministerial conference in July 1993, he didn’t understand the right approach to government during the 1960s and ’70s.

Today, however, he does understand. “I’ve learned the right approach in servant leadership,” Meredith told his ministers in 1993. Later, he added, “Let’s try to do it right this time, as shepherds with a loving approach.”

It is well worth noting that this is the same deplorable tactic the Tkaches used to destroy Mr. Armstrong’s legacy. We’ve made so many mistakes in our past, they often said. And unfortunately, Mr. Armstrong didn’t live long enough to correct these many errors. But now, God has led us to make the necessary changes!

How convenient that argument was for them. And how pitiful and ignorant it made Mr. Armstrong look.

In Mr. Meredith’s case, he implies, If only Mr. Armstrong would have lived long enough to learn the right approach to servant leadership. If only he would have been able to administer government the right way, with a loving approach.

That was the message that came through loud and clear in Mr. Meredith’s Church Government and Church Unity booklet. It was not a booklet that just needed a few minor corrections or that inadvertently used a couple misleading terms, as some have suggested.

From beginning to end, that booklet was a blatantly vicious attack against God’s government! It revealed so much about the problem Mr. Meredith had with the government Mr. Armstrong administered.

How could these men who came along decades after the fact—who were taught, trained, baptized and ordained by Herbert W. Armstrong—think they know more than Mr. Armstrong did? And on the subject of Church government, of all things!

There never was a Moses-like figure in the New Testament Church? Mr. Meredith certainly didn’t get that from Mr. Armstrong. “Peter was the first and chief apostle,” Mr. Armstrong wrote in Mystery of the Ages. His God-given surname was a title designating a religious leader or head!

Mr. Meredith rejected this truth right out of the starting gate and then added that it would be incorrect to even think Jesus Christ directly guides His Church! Instead, Meredith told his followers, Jesus Christ uses many “different branches”—all co-existing at the same time—to do His work.

Sounds good. But is it biblical? Is it what Mr. Armstrong taught? In his classic Worldwide News piece from June 24, 1985, “Recent History of the Philadelphia Era of the Worldwide Church of God,” Mr. Armstrong actually said the “different branches” idea was one of the “fruits” of the ’70s-era rebellion in the Church. “Little groups, splintering off,” he wrote,

centered in Washington, d.c.; Eugene, Ore.; Tyler, Tex.; Monterey, Calif.; and other places with groups too small to mention. They are not bearing fruit for the Kingdom. They are not pleasing God or being blessed by Him. Jesus said, “By their fruits you shall know them.” They usually claim to be “branches” of the Church of God. But Jesus said, “I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18). He did not say denominations, sects, cults, branches or a church divided against itself. Rather He said a house divided against itself cannot stand. There is one true Church and one only. The Apostle Paul pictured humanly self-appointed “branches” when he said to the elders of the local church at Ephesus that some of their own selves would depart to draw a following after themselves.

Mr. Armstrong then referred to 1 Corinthians 12:25, saying there should be no divisions in the body—“no branches or branch organizations.” Paraphrasing Ephesians 4, he added, “The Church is organized and fitly framed together,not organized with competing and differing branches.”

Now please—consider this carefully. The reason this history is so critically important is because there are many thousands of brethren—people who once devoted their lives to upholding the teachings of Herbert Armstrong—who now are laboring under the delusion that there are many different branches of God’s Church doing God’s work today. This is why, even if ministers in United and Living choose to ignore us, many of their members do not.

They may not believe the Philadelphia Church of God is the one true Church. But they do believe the pcg is one of many different branches God is using to do His work. In their minds, we may be the branch God uses to preserve Mr. Armstrong’s literature or to proclaim a prophetic warning to this world.

That kind of thinking is a deadly delusion. And as Mr. Armstrong wrote in the article quoted above, it started during the liberal rebellion against God’s government in the 1970s. And six months before he died, he felt compelled to remind the brethren about this history.

“I want you, brethren, to think about and understand what happened to God’s Church in the 1970s lest history repeat itself! I want you to see the ‘fruits’ of rebelling against God’s way and God’s government,” Mr. Armstrong wrote.

Seven years after he delivered that sobering warning, Rod Meredith left the Worldwide Church of God to, as he claimed, faithfully preach “the truths proclaimed by Herbert W. Armstrong.” And yet, in his very first booklet—the battle cry for his church and the framework for his new government—Mr. Meredith said Jesus Christ almost always uses many different co-existing branches to do His work. And Mr. Armstrong, he added, believed this too!

None of it was true. But many people believed it.

And today, many still do, even if Mr. Meredith is no longer one of them. But leaving aside what he might teach today, it is nevertheless true that the minister most responsible for popularizing the many different branches lie after Mr. Armstrong’s death is Roderick C. Meredith.