False Prophet Ronald Weinland

A sermon file of interest came to my attention recently. In particular, an excerpt of it which I’ve transcribed below. You can also click on the player to listen while you read and double check the accuracy of my transcription.(Hyperlink for iPod and iPad users who can’t access Flash).

False Prophet Ronald Weinland speaking in his sermon titled “Planning Ahead” on Dec 28, 2002:

Also as a matter of keeping the church informed, I wanted to share something else with you.  Some of you I just mentioned beforehand here about Jeremy having an opportunity of going over to Austria this year. He’s going to meet up with some who came over from the feast from Holland and Belgium. And they had invited him to come over. Well, we just happened to take a look at some of the flights over and got a real good deal for him to fly over there. And so he’s going to go skiing.

The reason I’m mentioning that is because — backing up here, about a year ago when Laura and I went over to Belgium and to England, we also took a side trip which I haven’t mentioned to the church, I don’t believe I’ve mentioned to the church anyway, but we took a side trip to Switzerland. And one of the things, primary things motivating some of that was the opportunity to go to a bank there and talk to a banker for some time. We picked out a particular bank. Talked to them about the possibility of transferring funds over to Switzerland.

Because of considering some of the things that are going to come to pass and knowing what’s going to happen to the United States, and being convicted of those things, I started looking at some of that. It’s not just as simple as opening up a bank account like you live here in the United States. It’s much more complicated.  They gave me a book to read, basically. And I’ve gone through a few things there, discussed it with the elders. And they gave some different suggestions which I was very thankful for.  And that’s why we come together like that because as a council of elders for the purpose of counseling and listening to what they have to say and considering those different things, and looking to God’s spirit to lead, guide and direct us.

But anyway, Laura and I were going back again this year.  We’ve already scheduled to go back for Pentecost again this year to the same places. And we were going to go on down there to probably open up an account. But since Jeremy was going over in January, it became a little more urgent in my mind that we need to get this done quickly.  So we’re going to go on over there — I’m going to go over there. Laura’s not coming, but I’m going to fly over there to Zurich, straight to Zurich, and talk with a bank there. Possibly the same one that was in Geneva that I talked to, but it will be different people obviously but may be the same banking system. But talked with some in Geneva about opening up an account there in Zurich, and then flying back over and meeting up with Jeremy and flying back with him.

But I wanted to share that with the church, asking you to be praying about it.  Because we’re talking about maybe putting quite a bit of funds over there. We have quite a bit to work with, and haven’t known what to do with it. But it may be for a purpose of what’s coming.  We don’t know what’s coming, and in may be for a purpose of helping to sustain some things in the church. And it may be for a purpose of continuing doing some of the things we’re doing, being able to travel. An so we’re even going to try to get a credit card out of that, that allows us to go anywhere in the world and use those funds. Terry Wrozek had mentioned the possibility of something like that. So we’re going to check into that to be able to use those funds.

I wanted to share with you something else, because I don’t want to hold anything back. It’s going to be in my name, as well. It’s not going to be in the church’s name. So if someone hears about something like that, I didn’t want someone think “What are you going to do, take off to Europe? Whatever, these 200,000 or whatever over there?” No. We don’t want the church’s name involved. It’s going to be a personal account because Europe when it comes to religious groups and so forth, they’re not real keen on some of those things. So when we do transfer the monies we’re trying to think of different ways to put it in there.

We’ll probably put a lot of it into euros, some in Swiss francs. Nothing in US dollars. And that’s not to scare the church that people ought to be doing the same thing. Because it’s going to come down to this is just strictly, I believe deeply whether it would be for us or someone else that’s going to be able to use that money later on. And we have to plan ahead and think accordingly and I believe that’s what God is leading us and guiding us and helping us to think about and consider.

But this doesn’t mean it’s panic time for people in the church to wonder what to do with funds and so forth. The reality is that when things happen you’re going to have to rely on God, period, first and foremost in your lives, in your families, in your homes, and where ever you are. Because it’s not going to be a pretty picture on this earth. And it will be a total reliance , as we heard last sabbath, on God to bring us through these things. And that is a reality, it’s just a reality of life.

Of particular interest is that cassette tapes of this sermon were not sent out, as was Ron’s practice back in that time frame. The sermon tape of the prior week delivered by Paul Worth was sent out, and so was the tape of the following week’s sermon. The audio quality of this recording is consistent with one made at the other end of the teleconferencing hookup that Ron used.

As a reminder, it’s not illegal to have a Swiss bank account.  It is legal to have foreign bank accounts, but if the sum of your balance exceeds $10,000 (as did Ron’s accounts), you are required to file an annual FBAR report.  What are the odds that Ron did that?  The penalties for failing to file the FBAR can be quite severe. The penalties possible include:

• a civil penalty of 50% of the account balance, or $100,000 (whichever is greater)
• a fine of $250,000 and a 5-year prison sentence

Did I get this recording from a disgruntled ex-PKG member? No, not at all. Actually, I downloaded it myself directly from the PKG website. This recording was put up on the website in the last few months.

I’m wondering why Ron had Jeremy put this recording up. My speculation is that IRS Criminal Investigation is getting closer to a prosecution recommendation (or maybe it’s already happened), and that Ron is throwing himself under the bus to protect Laura. The important part is his statement that Laura did not go with him to open his Swiss bank accounts. I’m skeptical that such a legal strategy would work. Obviously Laura knew that Ron was doing this from this statement that was public within the environs of PKG back then. And I expect that Laura signed the annual 1040 tax returns since then, Schedule B of which requires one to list foreign interest sources.  We also have Ron’s statement that Team Member Laura handled their finances.  So much for the “innocent spouse”, so I doubt that releasing this recording would protect Laura legally.

I’m interested in your reactions, and your ideas as why Ron had this previously undistributed sermon posted now for the entire world and IRS Criminal Investigation to download.

False Prophet Ronald Weinland was a few minutes late getting started since the hall in Orlando needed to be rearranged.  During the announcements, he mentioned Tyler, a child in New Mexico who is undergoing treatment for leukemia.  I view it as a positive sign that he is being given qualified medical care and hope it works for him.

Ron made a point of not giving Tyler’s address as there supposedly are crackpots and weirdos out there who like to stir things up.  That sort of thing does not happen on my blog.   I have not published any of the addresses that have come my way, including that of the false apostle and has-been Elijah.  In fact, I’m not aware that it has happened anywhere except for a couple of incidents in comments which were quickly deleted by the website management. So Ron, whom are you talking about?

During the sermon, he railed against mockers and critics, who seek to destroy Ron and his church with lies and deceit.  Ron, I would like to see your false ministry end, but my means are to show the truth.  As I’ve said before in an email to you which you probably deleted, if I’ve said something on my site that’s not truthful then tell me what it is so I can correct it.  Rather, you impugn what I’m doing because you’re afraid that if more of your members read my site then even more will leave.

At the beginning of the sermon, Ron said it would be on the par of his sermons at the 2005 Feast of Tabernacles at which he presented his unique (at least among Armstrongites) doctrine on the origin of Christ.  First he read part way through his blog posting, and then diverted to the new topic.  After reading verses from Acts 8 and Acts 19 about the laying on of hands after baptism possible only by ordained ministers, he announced that there would be additional waves of elders.  These would be termed as associate elders, whose job it will be to baptize the hordes of people wanting to join PKG due to the fulfillment of Ron’s prophecies, which although they didn’t happen when he said they would, they will eventually.

I speculated in my last post that the status of Laura would change.  Its turns out that it has in an indirect fashion.  Laura no longer is the only ordained female in PKG.  It turns out that sleeping with an evangelist gives one spiritual qualities, as Angela (Ann) Wrozek and Myrtle Harrell were ordained by Ron as senior elders last week in Georgia.  Then Ron called Wayne Matthews in Melbourne who then ordained his wife Christine (Chris) as the third senior elder.  More men and women will be ordained as associate elders.

And Laura does have a new title.  She no longer is a prophetess.  She now is a prophet.  Ron objects to the second-class status of women, although they still will not be able to speak during services.

Some of the sealed who are older and physically not capable of performing the baptism are ineligble to be ordained.  Now this doesn’t quite make sense.  If lay members can help in the dunking part, then all they have to really do is the laying-on-of-hands part.  But why am I expecting anything Ron does to make sense.

But adding more elders including does make sense to me.  It binds the ordained ones closer to Ron so they’ll continue to ignore the failure of Ron’s prophecies. Ron plans an elders conference in Cincinnati on February 27 for training.  Ron promises more waves of ordination.  And who knows?  Maybe 20-something Tony Wilson who runs the HWA Compendium website will get to be an elder too.

Ron took time to rail against mockers and critics, who are trying to weaken the church with lies and deceit and who are being eaten up with cancer from the inside.  Now that was his curse in his first timeline — Ron, you said 53 weeks ago that I was to die quickly from the inside.

False Prophet Ronald Weinland spoke from the London UK area today.  Ron went into full-sheriffing mode this week on a visit to the home of his UK elder Benjamin Ikwueme.  The outcome  of this meeting was that Ron de-ordained Benjamin as one of his elders.   After the two witnesses left Ikwueme’s home and returned to their hotel, Mrs. Ikwueme called to say that they were quitting COG-PKG.  Perhaps the issue for Ron was that Benjamin kept his Facebook page despite Ron’s fatwa and edict that elders were not to be on it.  In his sermon on August 29 in which he strongly suggested that his members should not be on Facebook, Ron said:

That’s why I told the elders a long time ago to not be on those sites. Do you understand why I would have said something like that to elders a long time ago? Not to be on some of these open forums and so forth? If you don’t understand, think about it, pray about it and you’ll come to understand what’s healthier for the Church and why. And if it is good for elders to not do, I  wonder… hmmm, it might be good for us.

Or perhaps Benjamin did not come through with the 419 millionaires Weinland expected since ordaining Benjamin in September of 2008. Joking aside, I hope that Benjamin and Grace will soon be able to put PKG behind them and that they and their sons will recover from the cult.  And that they will reflect on their experience in PKG and avoid making the same mistake with another false prophet of which there are too many.

This trip has been an anniversary of a sort.  It was 10 years ago, in late November of 1999, that Ron and Laura started their false prophecy globetrotting with a trip to the Belgium and Netherlands using air miles donated to them by Steve Dalrymple.  While on that trip, Ron and Laura went to Paris and then London on or about November 25, 1999 and met the Ikwuemes.  So Benjamin and Grace have had a long association with PKG.

Ron promises some timeshifting sermons to be delivered leading up to the fast on February 6.  He’ll need to explain why the Great Tribulation has still not arrived well after the first trumpet blew for the second time.

Ron recycled one of his “News Watch” articles from the May 1998 issue. Looks like Ron’s not going to write another book, since he stated that everything in “2008 – God’s Final Witness” would happen exactly as written. And the timing would be right on target.  Except for the 8 month delay between timelines which was qualified in the book as “a marginal 6-month window of time”. So does that mean:

• The US will no longer be an independent nation by June 21, 2009?
• The five specific ministers named as the first phase of the fifth thunder of the 6th seal who are still alive will indeed die during the 6th seal which ended on Feb 2, 2008 Nov 14, 2008?
• The economy is the 4th thunder and not the 1st trumpet?
• where “2008 – GFW” describes the 1st trumpet as “When we are told that a third of all plant life will be destroyed, that is exactly what it means.” that that’s exactly what it means, and that it’s not talking about the economy?
• That somewhere is an archive of interviews not arranged by Ron’s publicist?  Since “2008 GFW” states “Radio and television interviews will become more the norm as curiosity, news, controversy, and fear increase in proportion to the growing intensity of these thunders.”  This statement was in the chapter entitled “The Seven Thunders of the 6th Seal” which ended on Feb 2, 2008 Nov 14, 2008.

And where “2008 GFW” says:

The fire proceeding out of their mouth is symbolic of the power to pronounce exacting judgments upon anyone who would do them harm. Whatever the two witnesses pronounce will come to pass.

does it mean that I died a speedy death shortly after the Spokesman Witness pronounced his curse on me 49 weeks ago? That makes me so special. Not only am I a vulture picking on Ron’s putrid corpse, I’m a zombie vulture picking on Ron’s putrid corpse. How unusual. Somehow I manage to avoid picking on my own corpse and continue picking on Ron’s.

Awhile back, False Prophet Ronald Weinland promoted senior elder Terry Wrozek to evangelist, and at the same time promoted Johnny Harrell to senior evangelist over the other evangelists Terry and Wayne and all the elders.  At the time, the promotion of Harrell seemed to me to be counter-productive — should Ronnie end up taking an extended vacation as a guest of Club Fed, Laura could maintain control by dividing up the equally ranked evangelists and playing them off against one another, having them take turns delivering the sermons.

Since then, I’ve heard a sermon that gave me a new perspective on the issue.  In the sermon, Ronnie is discussing how some husbands are overly controlling and their wives don’t even know what’s in their bank account, because they’re not a team.  Then as an aside, Ron states: “she does my finances, thank God.  I learned very early on, I don’t want that job.  I’m very glad she has it.  She has talent in that area, I don’t.  I mess things up — I just want an overview.  That’s all I want to know — I’m happy”. Audio Clip

The following is somewhat speculative and we may never know, since the IRS does not release the results of their investigations except as disclosed during a court trial or in court filings.  The IRS began its criminal investigation of Ronald Weinland last year, issuing administrative summonses during July of 2008 for financial records for Ron, Laura, and the Church of God.  According to court filings, at that time only Ron was a target of the investigation, so Laura would have been considered an “innocent spouse” who didn’t really know what was going on.  But who knows what the investigation has turned up?  Given that Laura handles Ron’s finances and is fully on his team, it may be that the target list of the investigation has expanded.

Maybe Laura wasn’t an investigation target then, or not understood by Weinland to be a target back in December when he ordained her as prophetess and placed just below him in authority over the rest of the Church of God – PKG.  And perhaps since then it has been recognized that she is a target, leading them to cook up Plan C which leaves Johnny in charge to keep things going and manage the millions of people who join PKG as the Great Tribulation develops while the Two Witnesses turn water into blood and call down plagues from their cells.   According to Ron, the decision to promote Johnny was agreed to by his other team member, prophetess and silent end-time witness Laura.

It’s now 16 months since the IRS issued administrative summonses for Weinland’s financial records.  With an average length for an IRS criminal investigation of 14 months, an end either way is likely in sight.  The Two Witnesses are planning to travel to Europe next week.  Likely they’ll be coming back to the US this time, but I’m beginning to wonder.  Lately, Ron has again mentioned plans to live in Germany.  Jeremy, how comfortable is your couch to sleep on?  You may be finding out soon.

A few weeks ago, False Prophet Ronald Weinland gave part 2 of a sermon series called “Judgment”.  I don’t know how he’s edited the sermon since I downloaded it from the PKG website during the following week,  so I’m providing the version I downloaded.  The following quotes are from a segment beginning at about 1 hour and 39 minutes in this MP3 file (Right-Click the link, then Save-As to download to your hard drive).

“When you get into conversations, we’re not all going to be on the same page.  And we don’t have to correct each other in everything that’s said……  So we give people time and just let some things go by the wayside unless it’s going to cause real harm or great damage.”

A bit later, at 1 hour and 43 minutes in the sermon MP3:

“Another one is: maybe it’s because of something physical that they’re weak.  As an example I’ve know of people because of their bodies, because people who know their bodies, see.  Don’t you love it when people come along and they have to tell you they tell you what to do to have better health yourself  that they see you doing wrong.  ….. Sometimes people get all worked up about those things, ….   You don’t want to give a doubtful disputation and start butting heads.“

Let’s compare Weinland’s teachings to the experiences of a couple I’ll call “John and Jane Doe”.  The first part of their story was related on the Weinland Watch blog, as the “Does” started attending CoG-PKG early in 2005  and later attended the Feast of Tabernacles where Weinland rolled out his Origin-of-Christ doctrine.  Here is some more of their story, as related by “Jane”:

Between DUB and Pentecost, we had the opportunity to see Weinland in person for a church service. The service itself was uneventful, but after the service the brethren were gathering for a meal at a member’s nearby home and we inadvertently offended Weinland for the first of two times.

Our family has dietary sensitivities making it difficult to eat at restaurants and even most food that most folks eat and would serve in their homes. For this reason, we always travel prepared to feed ourselves when we are out and about. This day being no different, we came prepared with the food we needed. We also were not anticipating this invitation. Anyway, we were happy to be included with the brethren, but when we politely declined most of the food served,

Weinland was not happy. We later learned that he felt we should have abandoned our special dietary restrictions and should have just eaten what was offered us so as not to offend our hostess. Be assured, we are very accustomed to dealing with situations like this and we have learned how to tactfully decline food we can’t eat.

The story continues with the “Does” attending the 2005 Feast of Tabernacles.

As I mentioned earlier, our family follows a special diet due to numerous sensitivities. Eating out is very difficult for us. CoG-PKG has a standing tradition of a buffet dinner on the first and last holy days. Again we inadvertently offended Weinland when we did not attend the buffet on the first holy day. We had no idea that attendance at these buffets was expected and almost seemed mandatory.

In the middle of the Feast after services one day, our family was leaving the hotel for the afternoon. I took our children out to the parking lot to our vehicle.  When quite some time passed and my husband did not join us, I went back in to the hotel to find him. I found him in the hallway just outside the conference room talking to Weinland. I can’t tell you what transpired before I happened upon them.  But as I stood there a few feet away from them listening to the conversation in progress, I was absolutely stunned.

Weinland was in the process of threatening my husband with disfellowshipment if he did not bring his family to the buffet dinner scheduled for the Last Great Day. Not only was my husband being ordered to bring his family, but he was also being told that he must allow our children to eat anything and everything they desired regardless of the impact or affect on their fragile health. My husband was told to decide quickly whether or not he would comply because if he decided not to comply he would not be welcome back at services.

My husband reacted to Weinland’s tactics by saying something about NEVER having been treated this way by a minister before. To this Weinland coldly retorted: “You have never dealt with a TRUE minister of God before.”

While witnessing this exchange between Weinland and my husband, it was very obvious that Weinland began to attempt to use my presence to unnerve my husband. Many things he said were said to try to influence me against my husband.

We left the hotel that day shaken and not sure what we should do. In the end, my husband acquiesced and we continued to attend the rest of the Feast. On the Last Great Day we went to the buffet. Our children made us proud that day by making decisions about what they ate that did not have any harmful affects on their health. Under Weinland’s watchful eye our family ate our mid-day meal without incident.

The Feast concluded and we returned home feeling like we had made a huge error in judgment to think that PKG was where we belonged.

For whatever reason, we did continue to listen to Weinland for a few more weeks. Until his WITNESS announcement, that is. That, I’m happy to say, was the last straw and we haven’t listened since.

“John” and “Jane”, I’m glad that you made your escape from this false prophet.  Weinland is no longer attempting to force you to eat the physical food to which you’re allergic, nor eat at his table of spiritual garbage.   I expect the experience has given you the defenses to stay out of the snare of another such false prophet.  Thank you for sharing your story.

I’m going to let Ronnie have the last word on the topic (brief audio clip).  That is before you comment.