The following is a collection of crazy, ridiculous, and sometimes humorous statements made by Worldwide Church of God ministers (including comments from the former WCG member). Note: WCG is now known as Grace Communion International.
Also read: Crazy Statements Made by PCG Ministers
- I wrote to WCG headquarters, asking them about a book that was in our church library on husbands. My letter was mailed back to our minister who later pulled out the letter during his sermon and began to read it out loud to the congregation, making comical comments such as: “There are always going to be members who have to write headquarters to see if the ministers have their heads screwed on right.”
- We were having a lot of problems concerning jealousy and fighting between our two young children and were at the end of our rope. We made an appointment to discuss all of it with an elder and hopefully receive some solid help. Instead of getting the help we needed, he simple told us, “That’s as common as the rising and setting of the sun.”
- I counseled with my minister one time as I was having a very hard time financially. After I talked for awhile, he very patronizingly told me, “Your problem [so and so] is that you have a very low confidence in yourself.”
- I visited our local minister one day and since I had been afraid to talk to him before I finally admitted it to him. He answered, “You ought to see all the heads (of members) I have in my basement.”
- Our pastor paid us a visit and found out about the rented house we had to live in due to lack of money. The inside was fairly nice, but the outside porch was falling apart and made the place look like a haunted house. (We also kept our dog in the enclosed porch area at night to catch the rats that tried to come in.) My pastor took one look and said, “You shouldn’t have moved here, because God wants us to have quality.”
- We headed to church one Sabbath and when we arrived in the parking lot, our son (who must have been not more than 12 at the time) suddenly noticed that he still had his bedroom slippers on! Since he was way too embarrassed to go inside, we left him in the car. The minister later found out and said, “That was his excuse not to show up for services.”
- One night at a meal I accidentally dropped a glass that hit a dish and broke into pieces on the table. There were small pieces of glass all around the dish of spinach, so I assumed they must be in the spinach, as well. I began to remove the dish of spinach from the table saying that there was probably glass in it and that we couldn’t eat it. My husband said, “It’s probably all right. Just be careful when you eat it. We can’t throw it out.” He made a good salary and money was no problem, so it was not because of money! I went to our minister and told him about it. He leaned across the table and looked at me and said, “You’ve got to obey your husband! If he tells you to eat glass, you’ve got to do it and just pray that you’ll be all right. Maybe if he eats the glass, he’ll learn a lesson.”
- I stepped on a nail on the job and the boss sent me home, telling me to go to the doctor and get a shot before I came back to work. Wondering how to work my way around this, I phoned our local elder and he told me to “take a sip of whiskey or brandy, or whatever I had on hand, and then when the boss questioned me I could say, ‘Yes, I took a shot.'”
- The whole time I attended the WCG, my husband never stepped inside. In fact, he hated the “church.” Once when my minister came over to visit me, my husband jumped him and told him to get the hell out of our house! The next Bible study the minister told the members that he “was attacked by a man that had a demon.”
- The WCG minister that temporarily held the reins of power in the local church in Canada once “thundered” in a sermon the correct way for a Christian to dress. “A Christian (man) dresses in white underwear and white undershirt, never black underwear.” After hearing that message, I began to worry that he was going to become the “underwear policeman.”)
- I was sitting in a Bible study one night when the minister told us members that “we could become at least 98% perfect if we tried.”
- It was preached in one of the congregations I was in that if you couldn’t follow the sermon, that was proof that you were “becoming unconverted.”
- I told my minister once that I always felt so lousy on Sundays. He replied, “That’s because it’s Satan’s day.'”
- One day I was telling my minister how I was able to go through the Bible Correspondence Course quicker because I was typing the answers. He told me, “Start writing it out in longhand.” Believing that he was God’s spokesman, I had to obey. I think he thought I was getting a little too smart for my own britches. That was back in the days when the course was over 40 Lessons!
- An evangelist and tutor at Ambassador UK said in class one day that “a wife has to totally submerge her personality into that of her husband’s.” In other words, a woman has no identity of her own.
- Back in the early `70s at the Feast, one of the evangelists told us that we would all be “living in dome shaped bubbles” within ten years. He said that the pollution would finally be so bad that we would be forced to live like this because we wouldn’t be able to breathe outside of them.
- I was eating in a restaurant on a holy day and the member next to me was served something with pork in it. (I guess he didn’t know it when he ordered.) He already ate some without knowing it and wasn’t too alarmed because he said the minister told him that you could “just say a prayer for God to cleanse the meat and then it would be okay to have swallowed it.”
- I was trying to explain to the minister about the disease that our two year old had been diagnosed with, a lethal disorder. Once he understood our son was expected to die, he said, “Well, it sounds like you won’t have to deal with it much longer.” I was hoping for support, not a slap in the face. I never even tried to explain that an older child was thought to be coming down with it as well.
- We had lost almost all because of WCG’s demands on our money, but when we counseled with our pastor he told us that he knew where our problem was: “Your Holy Day offerings are too low.” All WCG was ever interested in was how much of our money they could get hold of.
- While a minister was visiting in our home, I related to him how we were thanking God for all our blessings lately. Instead of his saying it was good to give thanks, he told us, “Just don’t overdo it.”
- Here’s a funny thing our minister said after the changes and right before we left: “We are now mainstream. Everyone to the left of us, or to the right of us is wrong. We are the standard.” In other words, we are still “the church!”
- I never heard this mentioned anywhere else outside of our congregation and I don’t recall it ever being in any of WCG’s literature, but I’m sure my minister must have picked it up somewhere. He told us this in a sermon so as to explain why it says in Ecclesiastics 12 that “the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” He said that God had these “large computers up in the third heaven,” and “when we died, our spirit (which resided in our minds and didn’t have any personality of its own) would float up to heaven to these computers and then be filed away in a certain section. Then, when it was time for the resurrection, God would take the spirits out of these computers and use them to resurrect everybody.”
- When my (now ex) husband and I counseled our WCG pastor for marriage, I asked him how we would know that this marriage was “right.” He said, “When nothing is wrong!”
- I knew of a case in the WCG where one member was helping a more destitute family in a financial way. When the minister found out about this, he told the first member to “discontinue helping because you might be interfering with a punishment from God.”
- Evidentially our problems were never very important to the WCG ministry, who had practically everything they wanted anyway. One time ours told the congregation, “The next time you think you’re having a problem, ask yourself if it will still matter in a hundred years?” As if that was supposed to help us!
- Our son died at the age of eleven in a tragic accident. No one could hurt more than a grieving parent. About two weeks later, our assistant minister met with us in private. He had the nerve to tell us, “You can only grieve for forty days and then you must forget that you ever had a son.” We both felt like hitting him. We never had any more respect for that man.
- From 1978 to 1988, I heard the minister in England say many times in his sermons: “If it’s wrong, it’s right; if it’s right, it’s wrong.” In other words, if WCG headquarters made doctrinal or administrative decisions, even if they were wrong, they were right because God backed them to the hilt. I remember thinking as a young person, “So if Worldwide says murder somebody, it is okay?”
- Many of us in the WCG had gardens and since the horse was considered an “unclean” animal, I had asked my minister if it was okay to use horse manure on the garden instead of cow manure (the cow being a “clean” animal). He replied, “Well, when you ride a horse his sweat gets mixed with yours, so it doesn’t hurt to use his manure on the garden.” I didn’t even realize at the time how this didn’t make any sense whatsoever.
- At the Feast in 1989, the minister gave a sermonette called, “What Will Be Our First Job?” (in the Millennium) He said, “The people we deal with will be insane. Our first job will be healing the insanity in them so we can begin talking to them and teaching them.”
- I was with a small group of people in our congregation (I don’t remember exactly what the topic of conversation was, perhaps diet), and the elder made this statement, “It’s okay to drink Dr. Pepper because it has prune juice in it.”
- Our congregation had a standing job at the county fair to clean up the trash. I remember our minister making quite a point by saying, “If anybody finds any money, they are supposed to give it to the church.”
- When our minister gave a sermon about “rumors in the church,” he said, “I don’t care if the church is engaging in Devil worship, this is the true church and I am going to trust God to take care of it!” (He was later fired for not supporting the “changes,” but still attends today although he’s no longer a pastor.)
- One year I had come back on an emotional “high” after attending the Feast of Tabernacles and remarked to our local elder that I wondered why it couldn’t have gone on longer.” He replied, “God knew we couldn’t handle any more excitement.”
- One of the ministers once told us, “If you are turning to religion because you can’t make it in the world, then you’d better just go back to the world.”
- Our minister said, “I have spoken to others who think like you. Now, if you think you have the right to write a letter to Mr. Armstrong (about ministers we perceived to be off the track), then people like you are as far off the track as can possibly be, and couldn’t be any further off!”
- I heard one minister say, “We won’t need the Bible in the World Tomorrow because Mr. Armstrong has covered everything in his written materials.”
- Our minister used the “Announcement” portion of his sermon to excoriate his audience for everything we had done all week that irritated him, and, believe me, we always did something. One week we received this gem: “All I hear is, you want to get to know me, you want to get to know me. What are you trying to do, bring me down to your level?”
- The changes in the law in our state said that it was legal to carry a concealed weapon in a church unless the church complied with certain notification requirements, but they could only be applicable if they owned the building (which WCG didn’t). However, our minister told me I was not to carry a concealed handgun in services. When I reminded him I was not asking for permission, he said, “You’re just waiting for an opportunity to re-create the OK corral shooting.” I responded that I guess they preferred that should someone show up to shoot up the congregation, they would prefer there be no one there to stop them. He refused to discuss it rationally.
- When I was suspended and trying to get back in, I was cut off from all literature. So, I read through the old issues of The Good News. I especially focused on any articles about government. In one issue, Herbert Armstrong actually wrote that “prove all things” was for those proving that this was the “one true church.” Once you had “proven” that he was the end-time Elijah, you should never question him again. He claimed the proving was for those outside the church; not those within. Talk about blind obedience!
- I was talking to an ex-member who told me that there was a man in their congregation who wanted to attend Ambassador College to become a minister. The local congregation, located in the Appalachian region, loved this man and fully supported him. He was rejected by AC, so this member called HQ’s wanting to know why. “It’s his Southern accent,” the minister explained, “We don’t want people to hear him and to think we’re dumb!
- When I was counseling with my minister about my daughter and how she had been found with some makeup in her purse again, he told me, “If she doesn’t want to get with the Program, tell her to hit the road.”
- Our minister once told us, “We in the Church get so zealous for obeying, we strive so hard to obey and do the right thing, that sometimes we get carried away.” (This story is covered in more detail in the letter: “Minister Made Statement That Amazed Me.”)
- One time a minister told us when we were counseling for baptism, “If God pulled the shade up and showed you what you were really like, you wouldn’t even be able to stand yourself.”
- The argument from our WCG ministers was: “Both of us cannot be right, and I know without any doubt that I am right! Therefore, you must be wrong!”