Offensive Warfare

“The way we look at it, this preface gives us much greater opportunities in the upcoming depositions and trial. I believe this is the only way we can win.”

— Gerald Flurry

Letter to legal team, June 11, 2002

Like Tkach Jr.’s “Christian duty” footnote in Transformed by Truth, Feazell’s preface backfired. For one, it showed how phony the e-publishing scheme really was. They weren’t about to produce Mr. Armstrong’s literature unless it was introduced by Feazell’s remarks. And there is no way we would have ever directed prospective members to download that filth. Though we knew it all along, the preface fully revealed just how interested they were in “helping” fulfill our spiritual needs. The whole e-publishing sham, as it turns out, was just another way for them to trash Mr. Armstrong’s legacy.

But the preface’s impact on our legal arguments was minor compared to the way it impacted us. I won’t say it surprised us—not after witnessing Tkachism’s destructive assault on the church the previous 16 years. But it did serve as a jolting reminder of what we were fighting against: people who hate everything Herbert W. Armstrong stood for. We couldn’t reason with them. We couldn’t deal with them—all we could do was fight.

So from that point forward, everything in the lawsuit would turn on Feazell’s preface—at least, as far as we were concerned. My father wrote to our legal team on June 11, 2002,

The preface to the wcg e-publishing sham is the opportunity we have been waiting for. Ever since Judge Letts was involved, I feel like we haven’t been able to thoroughly get across what really happened in our church.

This preface has opened up a tremendous opportunity to do that again. I feel like we can now go on the offensive as never before with an even bigger goal in mind (rfra, writing a book, etc). I strongly believe that our answer to the preface is going to make them feel the heat. …

Perhaps we lost the appellate court decision because the wcg made a few comments labeling us a cult. … The preface allows us to answer the cult attack. But it gives us a greater opportunity. We can now expose them for what they really are—a cult and much worse. At the same time, I believe we can help the judge and jury to understand the pcg’s true motives.

They say a battle is 50 percent won when you go on the offensive. The way we look at it, this preface gives us much greater opportunities in the upcoming depositions and trial. I believe this is the only way we can win.¹

Over the next two months, our attorneys probably heard the word “preface” so often, they might have thought we were a broken record. Of course, they still had to accumulate evidence to support all of our legal arguments, insofar as copyright law is concerned. But since the wcg now wanted to insert Armstrong-bashing into the case, we insisted on telling the behind-the-scenes story, whether during a deposition, before a judge or jury, or within court documents. In fact, as you can see from the letter above, the preface is what prompted the whole idea for this book. The case had now gotten much bigger than just fighting for the right to distribute Mr. Armstrong’s literature. Now we had to obtain the literature—and expose them in the process.

Turning Point

Even though we were technically going into the damages trial as the “loser” (with respect to Mystery of the Ages), my father believed something dramatic would happen, whether in court or out, that would eventually turn the tide in our favor. “If God is with us,” he said, “we will win this. If He’s been with us, He still is with us—that is, if we keep the faith.”

Judge Snyder was hoping for a mid-October 2002 trial, which meant discovery and depositions needed to be completed by the end of the summer. As we geared up for a busy summer, my dad instructed his entire staff at Edmond to make the court case their top priority. More than a dozen people involved themselves in gathering information and helping to prepare for the depositions of the wcg’s key witnesses—Joseph Tkach, Michael Feazell, Ron Kelly, Ralph s and Bernard Schnippert, as well as a few others. My father relieved Dennis Leap and me from some of our youth camp obligations that summer so we could devote more time to researching for depositions. pcg ministers Gary Rethford and Tim Thompson were also instrumental in digging up information for our lawyers.

This was a real turning point. In 1998, the bulk of deposition preparation was left to our attorneys, although Dennis and his wife made sure they were supplied with church documents and literature. We also offered a lot of feedback during conferences we had before depositions. But for the most part, the lawyers were responsible for doing most of the research and drawing up the questions.

In 2002, the lawyers still did all that, it’s just that we did too—only coming at it from the preface angle. If Tkach’s fellows wanted to talk about Mr. Armstrong’s heavy-handed approach to governance, then Tkach Jr. and Feazell were going to be asked about the legacy of Tkachism—how it forced people to go along or else forced them out of the church. If they wanted to bring up how Mr. Armstrong supposedly “hooked” people into his system of beliefs, then they would have to testify about all the lies Tkachism told in order to lull unsuspecting members to sleep so they wouldn’t lose their tithes. If they wanted to bring up Mr. Armstrong’s lack of “study” and “seminary training,” then we were going to ask them about Tkach Sr.’s academic and theological credentials. It they wanted to talk about how burdensome it was in the church under Mr. Armstrong, then they were sure to hear about Tkachism’s heavy legacy. And if they wanted to bring up Mr. Armstrong’s “extravagant” lifestyle, then we would ask, Well what did Tkachism do with its billions?

So as we got ready for the 2002 depositions, our attorneys prepared their questions and documents and we prepared ours. Then, in a status conference before the depositions, we worked to blend the two together.

Joseph Tkach Jr.

In the Tkach Jr. deposition on Friday, August 23, 2002, Mark Helm wasted little time in setting off explosives. Fifteen minutes into the deposition, Allan Browne instructed Tkach not to answer on account of Mark’s “harassing and oppressive” questioning. Thirty minutes after that, he threatened to leave unless Mark lowered his voice!

Mark began by reviewing the December 4, 1998, Advisory Council of Elders minutes—where the wcg officially explained its position on discontinued literature and how it had plans to use the material again. In the case of Mystery being discarded, the wcg minutes explain, “As a consequence, an ecclesiastical determination was made that moa and other such works be retired from circulation and not be distributed until appropriate revisions could be effectuated, compatible with the Bible.”²

Now that the wcg intended to e-publish these works, Mark wondered if the preface counted as an “appropriate revision.” After Tkach said “No,” Mark then asked if the ecclesiastical determination had changed. Tkach indicated that they hadn’t changed their decision, but that they felt comfortable enough e-publishing the literature as long as it had a preface to provide background. Since the wcg had made statements throughout the lawsuit that they would have considered licensing the works, Mark was trying to pin Tkach down to see if the terms for the hypothetical licensing meant the literature had to be prefaced by derogatory remarks about Mr. Armstrong. He also exposed the degree to which the wcg wanted to control the literature if a licensing agreement ever happened.

Later, he got Mr. Tkach to talk about Gerald Flurry. Tkach said he thought my father was mentally unbalanced, that he taught heresy, approved of lying, and was engaged in unethical conduct. Mark then asked if Tkach’s personal views toward Mr. Flurry might factor into any decision considering the pcg as a possible licensee. It was brilliant. Tkach answered, “I think the key here is that in developing a license agreement, we would be in a position to police or control that by the terms we dictated in the license agreement.”³ That’s exactly the point. Assuming Tkach ever licensed the literature to a mentally deranged, heretical liar, he would only do so if the wcg maintained “control” and was able to “police” our actions. In that scenario, what would prevent him from then pulling the plug on the license agreement after litigation ended?

Later in his deposition, Tkach Jr. complained that we had misrepresented his “authorial intent” in saying he had a “Christian duty” to keep Mystery of the Ages out of print.⁴ When asked what he meant by “out of print,” Tkach said he was “expressing a feeling, but not a course of action.”⁵ Of course, with that kind of reasoning, you can back away from practically any hard-and-fast position. But the facts prove that their whole reason for filing suit in the first place was to prevent us from distributing Mystery of the Ages—to act on their Christian duty. In his book, Tkach Jr. also made this statement about another one of Mr. Armstrong’s works: “… don’t bother writing for a copy of The United States and Britain in Prophecy. You won’t get it from us.”⁶ Was that just a feeling or do the fruits prove that they acted on that conviction? Tkach wrote, “Today we reject what is well known as ‘Armstrongism,’ that is, adherence to the teachings of Herbert W. Armstrong ….”⁷ Feeling or action?

Both Sides of His Mouth

Four times during his deposition, Tkach Jr. accused Mr. Armstrong of speaking out of “both sides of his mouth”—particularly with respect to his role as an apostle. At times, Tkach explained, Mr. Armstrong seemed to think he was right up there, on par with the apostles of the first century. Yet on other occasions, he apparently made statements relegating his apostleship to something less than first-century-like. But as we have already seen in this volume, it is Joseph Tkach Jr.—not Mr. Armstrong—who spoke from both sides of his mouth.

In his 1997 book, Tkach Jr. wrote, “Over two or three decades he claimed rank on a par with the first-century apostles”⁸—a very definitive commentary on Mr. Armstrong’s views. Two or three decades! But on March 16, 1992, in a letter the wcg turned over in discovery, Tkach Jr. wrote, “It is good to remember, however, that Mr. Armstrong’s role was not synonymous with the original 12 apostles.” Later, he wrote, “Mr. Armstrong never claimed his writings were equivalent to Scripture.”⁹

We reminded Tkach Jr. about what his father said two days after Mr. Armstrong died—that he was “confident that the same policies, doctrines and everything else which [Mr. Armstrong] taught would be preserved and carried out.”¹⁰ We asked if this comment contradicted what his father said about the “deathbed repentance”—that Mr. Armstrong commissioned Tkach Sr. to make the very changes in doctrine that had been made between 1986 and 1991 (a list of changes so extensive, you will recall, that he wanted a tape recorder so he could remember all of them). Tkach Jr. responded, under oath, by saying “No”—there is no contradiction.¹¹

We asked him about this statement from his book: “It is said that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Mr. Armstrong may have never wielded absolute power in our church, but by that same token, there weren’t many who would challenge him on an issue.”¹² Tkach defended the statement this way: “The audience for this book was not only church members …. They were counter-cult ministries who viewed Mr. Armstrong in this way. And I’m explaining for the historical record that that was inaccurate for them to view him that way.”¹³ So the comment was actually intended to defend the manner in which Mr. Armstrong led the church!

Earlier in the deposition, Tkach described the manner in which Mr. Armstrong would sometimes deal with subordinates. “When he would correct people at times, he would ask, Do you believe I’m an apostle? Do you believe I’m an apostle just like Peter and Paul are apostles? And the person would be generally trembling and responding in the affirmative.”¹⁴ He then described an incident where Mr. Armstrong called Tkach Sr. about a Bible study given in Pasadena. According to Tkach Jr., Mr. Armstrong “was very angry and yelled at my dad for about 40 minutes.”¹⁵ Yet at the same time, what he wrote in Transformed by Truth about Mr. Armstrong’s governing style was supposedly a defense of the church’s founder.

We reminded Tkach about the changes in government he promised in his 1997 book and got him to admit that nothing had changed in the five years since the book was released. He still retained all the absolute powers he is quick to condemn Mr. Armstrong for.

When asked about his description of the pcg in his book—that we are a “militant church of God”—he explained that we would “confront” their members and tell them if they didn’t accept Malachi’s Message, “they were going to burn in hell ….”¹⁶ He said that “numerous people were confronted that way in restaurants and grocery stores.”¹⁷

When we asked him earlier about whether or not he thought the pcg was a cult, he responded, “Unquestionably.”¹⁸ He went on to explain that there are two types of cults—theological and sociological. “Theological cults would be the ones that misrepresent history and Scripture but aren’t necessarily pathological in nature. And then you have sociological cults, groups that are dangerous, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Heaven’s Gate.”¹⁹ At least we only made it onto his list of theological cults. But “we’re concerned,” he went on to say, “that [the pcg] may be crossing the line into the sociological realm.”²⁰

For clarification, Mark asked, “So you have concerns that the Philadelphia Church of God may be a cult in the sense that it is dangerous, sociopathic?”

“Certainly,” Tkach answered.²¹

Yet they wanted, all along, to license Mr. Armstrong’s literature to us as a “benefit” to our work.

Talk about speaking from both sides of your mouth.

We also made sure to compare Mr. Armstrong’s academic background with Tkach Sr.’s, which made the younger Tkach very uncomfortable.

Michael Feazell

Since he was primarily responsible for authoring the preface, we were quite anxious to depose Mike Feazell. At our Edmond offices, our employees combed through Feazell’s book and other writings of his, as well as documents that were written about him.

We assembled at the Los Angeles offices of Munger, Tolles and Olson for his deposition on Wednesday, July 24, 2002. Early on, Mark Helm quoted from Feazell’s book, where he spoke of the church’s transformation.

One by one these core values shriveled and fell from the wcg tree. As they did, leaders and members became increasingly unsettled, fearful, and frustrated. “How are we different anymore?” “Where is all this leading?” “What will be changed next?” they asked.

The church these people had come into had slowly ceased to exist.²²

Any time we found statements by wcg officials describing the wcg today as being completely different from what it once was, we made note of them. If the old church no longer existed, why should the new church be allowed to keep others from continuing to distribute the traditional teachings?

When Mark asked him about his comparison of life in the Worldwide under Mr. Armstrong to a rape victim, which we discussed in Chapter 1, Feazell tried to brush it aside as a “figurative expression.”²³ Mark pressed further. “But by using the figurative term … ‘raped,’ that is a feeling of the highest order, correct? It’s not a casual feeling of unpleasantness, it’s—it’s a very serious feeling that you’re trying to describe here; isn’t that right?”

Feazell’s lawyer tried to intervene repeatedly for his client by interrupting Mark. But Mark ignored him and insisted that Feazell answer the question. “Is rape a terrible crime?” Mark asked. Feazell’s attorney asked Mark to calm down, but he refused. “No … he is trying to walk away from what’s clearly stated here, and acting as though … ‘spiritually and emotionally raped’ … [is like] a typo in a memo.”²⁴

After Feazell wouldn’t answer, Mark came at the subject from another angle: “When you said you had been spiritually and emotionally raped, were the feelings that you experienced akin to having had a terrible crime committed against you?”²⁵ Feazell said no, repeating that he only used the term in a figurative sense.

“So when you figuratively used the term rape, it’s not a terrible thing?” Mark followed.²⁶ It was as heated as we had ever seen Mark during a deposition. It made Feazell noticeably uncomfortable.

Later, Feazell said he believed the pcg is a cult “at least in the sense of its submission to the authority of one individual and his personal interpretation of the religious views of the organization ….”²⁷ In his book, he wrote about how Mr. Armstrong’s authority had brought the church to a virtual “standstill administratively.”²⁸ He said “decisions of any significance could not be made without” Mr. Armstrong’s approval.²⁹ So at the deposition, we pointed Feazell to other statements in his book that talk about the authority Tkach Sr. inherited from Mr. Armstrong: that Tkach would not have been able to transform the church “without the unfettered hierarchical authority delegated to him by Armstrong”³⁰; that the changes would have never happened unless Tkach had “total authority.” We then asked about Tkach Jr.’s supposed plans to dismantle the authoritarian approach to governance in the church—and how that was one of his first goals after becoming pastor general in 1995. But as of 2002, when we asked Feazell if the younger Tkach had the same powers that Mr. Armstrong did, he responded, “[T]hat may well be true.”³¹

On page 107 of his book, Feazell wrote, “In the Worldwide Church of God, however, we found ourselves in the no-win situation of having to change the core values. The changes we were forced to make devastated the very sense of identity of our church and its members.”³² Since the Tkaches had “total authority” to change the church’s “core values,” we wanted to remind Feazell that they forced their transformation on the ministers and members of the Worldwide Church of God. In response to that charge, Feazell testified, “The church no more forced … itself … on the ministers after the changes than it did before the changes.”³³ To which Mark brilliantly responded,

But after the changes took place, these were ministers who had joined a church [that] had different doctrines and were now being told: Either teach the new doctrines or hit the road. That is different from the ministers under Mr. Armstrong, isn’t it, who joined the church knowing what the doctrines were and believing in them?³⁴

Feazell couldn’t see how that was different at all.

Ron Kelly

Since Ron Kelly is mentioned in Transformed by Truth as having heard Mr. Armstrong supposedly say “I am Elijah,” we were anxious to hear what he had to say under oath. Not surprisingly, Mr. Kelly could not remember where or when he heard Mr. Armstrong say that. We then showed Mr. Kelly the letter Tkach Jr. wrote to Mr. Leap in April 1990, where Tkach insisted that the Elijah prophecies had been fulfilled by the work of the church and that Mr. Armstrong never claimed to be the exclusive fulfillment of them. We asked Mr. Kelly if he made his “I am Elijah” comment before or after Tkach wrote the letter to Mr. Leap. He said it “would have been made much later than this letter, which was April of 1990.”³⁵ But Mr. Armstrong died in 1986. And in Transformed by Truth, Tkach Jr. indicates that Kelly came to him after he heard Mr. Armstrong say “I am Elijah.”³⁶ It wouldn’t make sense for Kelly to go to Tkach Jr. “much later” than April 1990 about a comment he heard Mr. Armstrong make. But that’s the illogical chronology Kelly had to go with during his deposition, otherwise he would have been forced to admit that Tkach Jr. spoke from both sides of his mouth.

Ron Kelly enrolled in Ambassador College in 1956 and went into the ministry after he graduated in 1960. He became the first dean of students at Ambassador College in Big Sandy in 1964. After Big Sandy closed in 1977, Mr. Kelly transferred to Pasadena and soon after settled into the field ministry as a pastor serving in Colorado. He returned to Big Sandy briefly after the campus opened in 1981. In 1982, he moved back to headquarters in Pasadena to fill a position in the editorial department. Two years after Mr. Armstrong died, Mr. Tkach appointed him to manage the editorial department. In 1991, Mr. Kelly transferred to Church Administration, where he directed pastoral development. In 1998, he became the church’s controller in the finance and planning department. That was the position he held when we deposed him August 1, 2002.

In our preparations for Mr. Kelly’s deposition, several articles and messages of his stood out because of his long history in the church. One document was particularly interesting. It was a sermon transcript the church produced in 1987—a year after Mr. Armstrong died. He built the sermon, titled “Principles of Living,” around lessons he learned from Mr. Armstrong. He said, “Twenty-nine years ago, I began to sit at the feet of Mr. Armstrong and listen to what he had to say.”³⁷ Later, he said, “I would especially like to bring out those points and principles that I feel Mr. Armstrong was uniquely able to instruct us in.”³⁸ In his deposition, Kelly acknowledged that he had learned from Mr. Armstrong, but that today he wouldn’t use the word uniquely. “I look at things from a more mature point of view,” Kelly said. “I realize Mr. Armstrong had wonderful things to teach. They weren’t always unique to him.”³⁹

Mr. Kelly then highlighted several of Mr. Armstrong’s teachings that he now considers burdensome. Of course, he didn’t think that way before embracing Tkachism—and we reminded him of that. “Mr. Armstrong taught me how to love my wife,” he said in that 1987 sermon. “I told him so, and I hope it pleased him to realize that what he taught did work.”⁴⁰

Here is how he once described life for his children in the wcg:

My children have been reared all their lives with a knowledge of God’s festivals. Now that some are grown, many of their fondest memories are of keeping the holy days. We have saved for trips to England and Australia. By observing the holy days with God’s people, we have traveled as a family throughout most of the United States and Canada. … We have grown each year in spiritual understanding and have profited from the education of travel.

No one can ever tell me keeping God’s feasts is a yoke of bondage and a burden. ⁴¹

Those memories have seemingly faded from view, along with the practical, biblically based way of life Mr. Armstrong taught and recorded in huge stacks of written works.

In March of 2005, someone contacted me anonymously about a bound collection of almost all the wcg’s periodical literature, including the Plain Truth, Good News, Tomorrow’s World and Youth magazines, between 1934 and 2004. The collection also included a complete set of the 58-lesson Bible correspondence course, produced during the 1960s. The individual wanted $10,000 for all the magazines and another $500 for leather-bound volumes of all Mr. Armstrong’s books, including Mystery of the Ages.

My father thought the collection would be a great addition to our college library. So we made a lower offer and ended up settling on $5,000 for everything. We didn’t know who to make the check payable to until about a week before we arranged to pick up the materials.

As it turns out, the anonymous seller was the same man who, because of Mr. Armstrong’s teachings, learned how to really love his wife.

Ralph Helge

Perhaps the most significant material we uncovered in preparing for Ralph Helge’s deposition was the role he played in defending the wcg against the state of California in 1979. As head of the church’s legal department, he fought right on the front lines against dissident ministers who wanted to wrest control of the church away from Mr. Armstrong. Speaking before church members inside Ambassador Auditorium on January 13, 1979, Helge asked, “Now what’s really behind the scenes of this lawsuit? … I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a few dissidents that want to take power and change the doctrines of the church of God. They don’t like the way it’s being run. And they don’t like the doctrines.”⁴² That comment could just as easily describe our lawsuit with the Worldwide Church of God 18 years later, except this time the ones who wanted to take over power and change the doctrines were on the inside. And the tragedy is, Ralph Helge had joined the dissidents who wanted to take over and change the doctrines Mr. Armstrong had established.

Helge continued in his 1979 message with another comment that probably tens of thousands today would make about Tkachism: “We’ve got certain rules and we’ve got doctrines. If you like them, tremendous. And if you don’t, or I don’t (I’ll point to myself), then I’ll go to the church that teaches doctrines I do like. But I don’t come in here and try to change the way Mr. Armstrong has set the doctrines”⁴³—which is exactly what the Tkaches did. They didn’t like the doctrines, changed them, and then forced everyone out who wouldn’t go along.

When we reminded Helge about these statements in his 2002 deposition, he said it was different in 1979 because the dissidents attacked “from the outside.”⁴⁴ But even in that case, those dissidents were originally on the inside before Mr. Armstrong disfellowshiped them for attempting to liberalize church doctrine. In any event, a takeover attempt from the outside is not in any way worse than an inside job, spearheaded by a Judas-like betrayal.

Later in 1979, again while speaking at church services in Pasadena, Helge said, “You talk about contempt. You talk about utter contempt. Here a man [Herbert Armstrong] works all his life in the might and power of God to raise up churches, and here some pip-squeak dissident is going to control Mr. Armstrong and the church.”⁴⁵ Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nineteen years later, Helge testified under oath that Mr. Armstrong was employed by the church, that the board had control over Mr. Armstrong’s work, and the authority, if necessary, to fire him.

Helge’s Late Career Move

During the deposition, Helge said he had been told by the wcg he would soon retire and be replaced by Bernie Schnippert. It sounded like his final job assignment would be this lawsuit. Mark Helm asked him about the e-publishing project and how that got started. Helge said he got the idea sometime in 2001 while reading a magazine over lunch. “I just started to read it and it just clicked, hey, this is something to investigate.”⁴⁶

In looking at the timeline, however, the decision to e-publish appears to have been much more calculated than Helge indicated. On February 13, 2001, Mark Helm informed wcg attorneys that we intended to amend our counterclaim to allege that it would be futile for us to seek the wcg’s permission to reprint Mr. Armstrong’s works. We wanted to add this to our brief because the Ninth Circuit, even in ruling against us, did leave the door open slightly for us to possibly rely on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. And for rfra to be added to our counterclaim, we had to show how futile it would have been to obtain a license for the works.

On February 16, 2001, Ralph Helge contacted Zondervan Publishing for its evaluation on “the licensing fee or sales price for copyrighted literature owned by the church.”⁴⁷ This means that just three days after we told them about the futility amendment, they started contacting publishers about the procedures and fees for licensing their literature. It was yet another made-for-litigation ploy.

It was later during the summer when they stated in court filings that they would have considered all along to license the works to us. Around this time is when the e-publishing idea “clicked” with Ralph Helge. At the deposition, Mark asked if there was anyone else at the wcg involved in the e-publishing project. “Not to my knowledge,” Helge responded.⁴⁸ Later, after we asked who was in charge of coordinating promotion for the sale of Mr. Armstrong’s books over the Internet, Helge answered, “I’m the man.”⁴⁹

So here was an elderly man on the verge of retirement, who had worked in the wcg’s legal department for most of his adult life, given charge of the church’s new e-publishing “department,” established solely in order to undermine our futility claim and to “prove” they had never intended to suppress Mr. Armstrong’s works at all.

It’s pathetic, I know. But at the same time, it’s fascinating history because it shows how much we had acquired in fighting for the truth—even after losing at the Ninth Circuit. As much as they hated the idea, they knew that to prevail on the merits in court, they had to convince a judge that they were still using Mr. Armstrong’s material. So they lied about an annotated project and won at the Ninth Circuit. And in order to defeat our counterclaim, their in-house attorney established a new branch in the church’s publishing department, even on the eve of his retirement.

These are supposedly religious men—and yet willing to do or say just about anything as long as it helped them win in court.

At the same time, look at what we forced them to do by simply confronting them. At the beginning of the case, remember, Tkach Jr. arrogantly asserted that the reason they filed this suit was to “block the republication of Mystery of the Ages.” Their duty as Christians was to keep this book out of print because they believed “Mr. Armstrong’s doctrinal errors are better left out of circulation.” Two years later, even though it was a lie, they talked about using Mr. Armstrong’s material again. Two years after that, they inquired about licensing and followed that up by making Mr. Armstrong’s literature available on demand through e-publishing. True, the literature had to be prefaced by Feazell’s attack, which we weren’t about to accept. But still, they were forced to do things they never would have dreamed of doing at the start, simply because we were willing to fight for Mr. Armstrong’s legacy.

My father’s faithful determination was beginning to wear them down.

Bernard Schnippert

As the wcg’s director of finance and planning, Bernie Schnippert made some interesting comments about the relationship between the church’s income and its distribution of literature. With Mr. Armstrong, Schnippert said, distributing free literature was designed to hook people into a well-orchestrated fundraising scheme. “If you’re going to move someone to your state of mind, you begin at a place you think will interest them and you take them where you want them to go. … The progression of topics is a type of psychology.”⁵⁰ Later, he said, “Mr. Armstrong’s books, when given, tend to create donations. … [W]e discontinued Mystery of the Ages in spite of the fact that we knew it was, to be crass, a moneymaker.”⁵¹

Quite a difference from the party line in 1989—that they discontinued the book because of its expense.

Schnippert also elaborated on the wcg’s new approach under Tkachism—charging subscription fees for church literature instead of distributing it freely. He said, “[W]hen you give free literature and the person is told they must tithe, in the end you’ve taken more money out of them in some ways less honestly than if you just charged them in the first place.”⁵² Of course, as Schnippert well knows, no one ever forced people to voluntarily give donations to the wcg. But that’s certainly the way they love to portray Mr. Armstrong’s followers—mindless dupes brainwashed into giving money to—of all things—a church!

Tkachism’s approach, of course—even though it triggered a precipitous decline in church membership and donations—is much more honest, in Schnippert’s view. They charged people up front for new literature and retired the flawed material so as to “not use it disingenuously” to make money when they “didn’t believe it.”⁵³ Yet now that they were in the midst of a legal struggle over the “flawed” stuff, they had no problem disingenuously making money off Mr. Armstrong’s literature, so long as the e-publishing scheme helped them win the case. Schnippert said they could now justify profiting from Mr. Armstrong’s works so long as the writings contained a “disclaimer that plainly tells everyone that we don’t agree with it.”⁵⁴ So he not only revealed the rank hypocrisy behind their supposedly courageous move to retire moneymakers in 1989, he admitted that they would not make Mr. Armstrong’s writings available without a derogatory preface attached. This was another huge admission for us.

Later, in discussing the preface, Schnippert said they worded it as carefully as possible in order “to be respectful of Mr. Armstrong and anyone who were to read it.”⁵⁵ So Mark went through several statements from the preface, giving Schnippert an opportunity to explain what he meant by “respectful.” We asked him if he thought using phrases like “personal bias” and “advertising hook” were complimentary toward Mr. Armstrong. “Do you believe that Mr. Armstrong’s views were the result of a personal bias?” Mark asked.⁵⁶

wcg attorney Miles Feldman objected to the question and asked how Schnippert’s personal views were relevant to the case. But they were the ones trying to inject this preface into the litigation, we maintained.

A lengthy exchange then followed with Miles threatening to call the court magistrate to settle the dispute and Mark complaining that Miles was wasting time. “This is a serious matter,” Miles said, raising his voice. “And if you’re going to accuse me of bad faith, I’m suggesting right now let’s get the magistrate on the phone and we’ll get to the bottom of this.”⁵⁷

After Miles cooled off, Mark turned to Schnippert:

Suppose that the wcg literature had a preface which said that the doctrines of that church under Joseph Tkach Jr. were biblically unsound, he was an uneducated dictator with crackpot ideas, that his views were of interest only as a historical curiosity. … Do you think that would be an effective marketing tool for your literature?⁵⁸

Miles went ballistic.

But this was all their doing. They were the ones who introduced the preface and then insisted it be attached to every publication they supposedly offered as a “benefit” to us. They were the ones who made the preface central to the case. So we took them to task on the preface and exposed the fact that they were guilty of the very things they accused Mr. Armstrong of. And when called upon to answer for their self-righteous hypocrisy, they ran for cover like cowards, hiding behind their lawyer’s objections: Inappropriate! Argumentative! Irrelevant! Invasion of privacy!

But we weren’t about to let them off the hook.

One might think both sides in this battle were being driven further apart in the summer of 2002—hardened by the grueling deposition warfare that took place over the course of two months. And from what we saw on the surface, wcg officials were getting angrier and more defiant by the day.

But on the inside, they were deeply conflicted. They had the copyrights to Mr. Armstrong’s literature and they burned with anger at the thought of our little church—their nemesis—obtaining rights to distribute these works, especially after we tried to “steal” them.

On the other hand, they did not want to be exposed.

The wcg’s preface turned out to be a tremendous opportunity for us. Our forceful response to it, my father said at the beginning of the summer, was the only way we could win.

And he was right.

Continue Reading: Chapter 23: © Philadelphia Church of God