The Cult View of Church

Church.

For most people, the imagery is fantastic and fascinating. Stately stone buildings with beautiful shades of colored glass. A tapering steeple extends to the heavens – containing the bell that called believers from around the city to come and worship. A cross – the symbol of the Ressurrection – topped the steeple, indicating this church believed in Jesus Christ – that he died on the cross for our sins – the only one worthy to do so because He was God – and lived a sinless life for us. 

We didn't look at the cross in that manner. We, in our church, a church steeped in Armstrongism, looked at the cross with disdain, and with disgust. We believed that the cross was not what Jesus died on. We interpreted it as a stake – a tree – anything but a cross – because a cross, in our belief, was pagan and was rooted in pagan origins. We believed that church bells were not devices that called people to worship – no, we believed that it stemmed from antiquity and actually represented, of all things, testicles. The steeple, we did not see as a tower that displayed the Cross as a symbol of recognition of the Christian faith. No, we interpreted that as phallic. And the hymns that blared in beautiful harmonies from the tower of the bells, declaring hymns of ages past declaring the wonders of the Christ? We interpreted them as nothing but lies – untruths steeped in the rituals of Babylon, the coldness of the great false church that had a stranglehold over Christianity – who taught and preached a great false gospel to the whole world for just about 1900 years. 

People in our programmed way of thinking saw this image as pagan.

We saw the normal church – whether Baptist, Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, Mormon, Pentecostal, you name the denomination – as a church caught in the midst of mass chaos and utter confusion – and we saw them as ruled in deception and cloaked in a shroud of evil. We viewed those that went to these churches as workers of evil, deceived and not knowing what they do. We looked at them as rebellious sinners, unknowingly worshipping the god of this world – people who did not understand nor could accept what we called and believed was “the Truth”. We would not enter them, nor would we pray over them. For we believed that if God wanted them to come to what we believed was “his true church” - that is, the “One True Church” that my family was called by God, so we believed, to attend, God would draw them to himself. Until then, we saw them as a bad influence, distant, cold, and inferior to us – the ones, we believed, were the few called and chosen to be set apart from the world in God's one and only true church.

As we passed each business, car, person, and home on our way to the facility we would meet in privately, you couldn't help but think about how special you were. God had, after all, given you the greatest blessing you could ever conceive or think of. You were special. You were somebody. You had knowledge of a Gospel that everyone else in the world seemed to be blind to. You understood the purpose of life. You understood the plan of God. You knew your destiny – that someday, you would be God as God is God. You were, after all, in just a few years – maybe three, maybe four, maybe even ten – going to be changed, in a twinkling of an eye, to spirit – and were going to be one of the few of this world with the other church members to usher in the Wonderful World Tomorrow. This was your destiny, this was your calling – and if you did well, and if you did right – you might just be able to attain it and you might just make it and be worthy of your calling – maybe. 

Our version of "Church" in a building like this.