False Prophet Ronald Weinland

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 administrative summonses were issued.  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.

Yesterday False Prophet Ronald Weinland was in Orlando delivering another sermon mostly devoid of his false prophecy.  The venue was saving money on air conditioning making Ronnie jacketless after awhile.

Ron read from the recent post on his blog about Quarantines.  He starts with the somewhat reasonable, and soon segues to:

The second and more serious concern is that this strain could mutate into an extremely deadly strain and do so very quickly. The potential for this is great, and with the time we live in it is likely. Even if this does not occur, a completely new strain will emerge that will prove to be much more fatal.

And continues to

Compulsory vaccinations: Along with pandemics there is the likelihood of some governments enforcing compulsory vaccinations.

I doubt that compulsory vaccination will occur should the H1N1 virus mutate to a more deadly form.  It takes time for vaccines to be developed.  I rather think that there would be a shortage of vaccines for those who would want them — in which case the military will not be rounding up people at bayonet-point for forced immunizations.

During the sermon, Weinland accused his critics of looking for things to take out of context.  The fact is, I don’t have to take his statements out of context to find contradictions.  Unless the context he’s talking about is hie preference is that only his latest statements should be considered and any prior statement on the topic is “out of context”.

For example, his defenders will point out the weasel words such as “may” in Weinland’s quarantine post in the paragraphs just prior to the part I quoted.  However, I’ve noted that people prone to following false prophecies ignore the weasel words and are only made aware of them after the prophecy fails.  And if the prophecy comes true, then the weasel words are not needed. Herbert Armstrong was adroit at the use of weasel words.  In any case, it would be a stretch to pull the weasel words into the paragraph I quoted.

The fact is that Weinland is not a virologist, and has no idea whether or not a “completely new strain will emerge.”  And neither do I.  For either of us to make a firm prediction on the matter is … well, presumptuous.

In the comments section of my previous post, the topic of whether or not Weinland controls his members’ communication. I can point out a definite example.  At the Feast of Tabernacles in October 2005 held in Nashville, Weinland imposed his new doctrine on the origin of Christ upon a following which at that time largely comprised of people from a WCG background who believed that Christ existed before being born to Mary.  In his October 19, 2005 sermon (at 21 minutes in the version downloaded from the PKG website) Weinland stated:

Because what will not be allowed in this body, in this church, by God — and he works through his ministry — will be any division.  Will be anything that speaks against these truths.  NOT ONE WORD!  For if that one word comes out it is against God Almighty, and he will not take it lightly.  And I would not want to be in your shoes.  For you will have things of the wrath of God upon you and your life.  Not a small thing, is it? You will most definitely be encouraged to make a rapid exit from this fellowship.  NOT ONE WORD!  So any of you who hear one word against God, stand your ground and be firm and tell them “You should leave.  Get behind me.”  …. You’ve never heard anything in this period of time, in the last ten years stated quite as strong brethren.  That’s how important this is before God.  And where we’re headed next, and where we’re going, and what God is doing.  For you’re going to hear far greater things as time goes on.  [And it was exactly one month later that Weinland kinda-sorta announced that he was one of the Two Witnesses. And less than two months later that he made it totally clear.]

It is quite clear that Weinland controls the communications of his members.  One of the aspects of COG-PKG defining it as a cult.