spankings were, in fact, more like beatings. “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” was my father’s definition of parenting, at least of the older ones. Corporal punishment was encouraged, and when you went into the bathroom during church services, you would often hear the sharp slapslapslapslapslap of a mother’s hand against a child’s bare bottom. Not until the child stopped crying would she exit the stall, toddler in hand, the three-year-old’s face blotchy with crying. The mother felt no shame. In fact, she had done her parental duty.
I was completely unaware of the personal lives of any of the members. I found out that a man we all thought was upstanding actually liked young girls. One of the regular door greeters drank three martinis during Spokesman Club and got looped at restaurants. Several of the men spanked their wives to discipline them. And children were beaten regularly for any infraction.
When everyone was seated, the music director went to the front and said, “Please rise for the opening hymn.” Old and young voices joined together to sing songs from The Bible Hymnal, most written by Herbert Armstrong’s brother Dwight. The first song, “Blest and Happy Is the Man,” taken from Psalms 1, was a crowd favorite:
Blest and happy is the man Who doth never walk astray,
Nor with the ungodly men Stands in sinner’s way.
All he does prospers well,
But the wicked are not so;
They are chaff before the wind,
Driven to and fro.
I imagined myself, a fluff of chaff, being tossed about in the wind, never coming to a rest. I feared being wicked.
Next, another deacon offered the opening prayer. Heads bowed, eyes closed, hands clasped either in front or behind us, we listened. “Our merciful Father in Heaven, we thank you great God for bringing us here together on your Sabbath Day, and Lord, we pray that we will take the spiritual nourishment we need today. We pray that your work be done here on earth, and that you just strengthen and lift up your apostle, Herbert Armstrong, to witness to the nations and spread the gospel. In Jesus’s most holy name we pray, Amen.” The deacon’s prayer filled the creaky old room, and it was as if the entire congregation was one soul, praying to God, who bent His ear toward us, taking note of what was being asked.
Depending on the deacon, the prayer could go on for quite some time and incorporate asking God to help us remain strong in the face of persecution (“persecution” was code for one’s extended family or community opposing the church) and thanking God that we knew the Truth, and praying for those in our families who had not yet come to the Truth. Then we sat, placed our Bibles and notebooks in our laps, and listened to the sermonette, followed by the sermon.
Whether the topic of the sermon on any particular Saturday was “What Is Spiritual Sin?” or “Why Were You Born?,” it invariably became a shouting exhortation to remain steadfast in the church because these were the End Times. “You can be alive in Christ or dead in Adam!” the minister would scream. “You must love correction, and diligently seek the sin in yourself. Satan roams society like a lion seeking to devour you! God has raised up this church to witness for the End Times!
“God’s Holy Work must be done so Jesus can return,” the minister would remind us. “God needs YOU! God has called us—the weak and the poor—to confound the wise. Many are called, but few are chosen. This church and God’s chosen prophet, Herbert Armstrong, need your prayers, your loyalty, and your money to do the End Times work.”
My parents tithed ten percent of their income and gave it to the church; another ten percent they set aside to spend at the Feast of Tabernacles, plus there was a third tithe in the third and sixth years of a seven-year cycle that went to the poor, as well as the various “free will” offerings and pleas for money from Mr. Armstrong. My parents believed that our relatives, who disapproved of the money we gave the church, failed to understand that we’d been chosen for an important purpose: so Jesus could return. I was proud to be a part of God’s work on earth, even in a small way. As God’s soldier, I was heralding Jesus’s return to the earth. Nothing could be more important than that. I was proud that my family was chosen but also worried that too much pride was a sin. It was hard to calibrate how much pride was acceptable and how much would get me in trouble.
If Jesus didn’t return, it was the church’s fault. It meant that we were sinning, or not giving enough money to the church’s coffers so that Mr. Armstrong and the evangelists could spread the gospel worldwide. You could never pray enough, never give enough. God, who we were taught was good and merciful, was also insatiable in His demands. God was as inconsistent as the church, as my parents.
The screaming, dire certainty with which the minister announced that we were in danger of losing our eternal life—“If you are lukewarm in your love for God, if you are a spiritual DRONE, then your ETERNAL LIFE is at stake! You will NOT make it into the Kingdom!”—the fear of the End Times, the threats of the looming Lake of Fire where sinners would be tossed, and the incessant accusations that, as sinners, we needed to do more, be more, and give more, terrified me as a child. With their every exhortation, a sense of panic and doom squelched my childish optimism, my faith that tomorrow would come. We had to obey every command. Do it God’s way. Our lives, our salvation, were in jeopardy. The stakes were very high.
CHAPTER 4
For years, the question nagged at me: If my parents had to choose one of us ten kids to eat, who would it be?
It was a Saturday in 1968, and I was seven, sitting in church in a long row with my family listening to another sermon. “In the End Times, the time of the Great Tribulation,” the minister shouted from the pulpit, “there will be mass murder, corpses will litter the streets, and the world will reek of the stench of dead bodies!”
This was the fate of those who, in the End Times, had been left behind at Jesus’s Second Coming, and hadn’t made it to the Place of Safety.
“Jesus will return, like a thief in the night. Do not slumber, do not sleep, do not let your love wax cold! The great God is going to spank this world, and he is going to spank hard! Worldwide droughts. Starvation. Parents will eat their children!”
Alarmed, and with a terrible sense of foreboding, I wondered which of us our parents would devour first. A girl and skinny, I was hardly worth killing. Mary, four years older than me, was the nicest, always helping others finish their chores. They wouldn’t eat her. Wanda was the oldest and bossy. My parents wouldn’t dare eat her. Probably one of my older brothers. They were always in trouble. Jim did not close his eyes during opening and closing prayers, and Ed made blasphemous jokes about prayer cloths.
These small, white flannel cloths came from church headquarters in California. Someone there—an evangelist, or perhaps Mr. Armstrong himself—prayed on the cloth, thus making it a “prayer cloth,” then sent it to ailing members, including me when I had pneumonia. One woman believed that it could also repair her car and asked the minister for a prayer cloth so it would stop stalling. After hearing about this, whenever our car rattled or steam rose from the radiator, Ed would mutter an irreverent “prayer cloth.”
I worried that if I were slumbering when Jesus returned, the rest of the brethren would be lifted into the sky and transported on “wings of eagles” to a Place of Safety, according to the book of Revelation. Herbert Armstrong had identified that place as Petra in Jordan. According to the church’s booklet This is PETRA!, the ancient Jordanian city locked in by mountains and carved almost entirely of stone was the Place
