Literature

In the 1970s and 1980s, one private citizen was jetting around the world and meeting with hundreds of world leaders. He met presidents, prime ministers, kings, emperors, princes, legislators, ambassadors, generals, officers, mayors, judges, scientists, educators, magnates and executives. He talked with heads of state and heads of government in their offices at their invitations. Who was this man?

He wasn’t a head of government; he wasn’t even a government official. He wasn’t a captain of industry; he wasn’t even a businessman. He wasn’t a billionaire or millionaire. He was a man named Herbert W. Armstrong.

Mr. Armstrong was a man who actually gave up his business to follow what he read in the Bible. He followed God and lived for decades in poverty. He eventually led a church and a college. He did not seek to become a world traveler, a friend of prime ministers, an unofficial ambassador for world peace. Even if he had tried, he never could have achieved a fraction of what he ended up doing.

What Mr. Armstrong did in the 1970s and ’80s was nothing short of miraculous.

“I have exciting news!” he wrote from Hong Kong in a November 26, 1973, letter to supporters of the Church. “As this new dimension of the great Work of the living God gets under way there is already tremendous accomplishment! Never in the history of humanity has anything like it happened before! Never has the living God carried His message through His human servants in this manner before.” The “tremendous accomplishment” Mr. Armstrong was referring to was his taking the message of God to prominent world leaders.