Sabbath 28/8/32/120

Dear Friends    

This week we will update you on the growth of the work around the world. Our activities are increasing everywhere. In some nations we approximate between 0.1 and 0.2 percent of the population of those countries, which is a pretty amazing development for such a short time.

For background to those visiting for the first time, the CCG site is at www.ccg.org. The multi-language site is at www.logon.org. There are other sites that can be linked from the CCG site.

The world trade languages are accessed from either site but the site set up for it is www.logon.org. Logon is the major site but it is ranked, by US engines, lower than CCG because its US audience is less than CCG but its global audience is much larger. We are in over 60 languages now. We have massive access on the web at between 150,000 to 200,000 papers per week downloaded from 160-170 countries. There are up to 400,000 hits a week and the rate is increasing. Many tens of thousands of papers are given out in our local churches all over the world. Many of the papers are used in sermons by ministers of other churches; some are simply plagiarised.

We hope to have a distance education facility set up with accredited universities by next year and a 24/7 radio station on short wave and local. At present the web sites act as our education facility and study is supervised locally where possible or by email.

Our web access is in two forms: html and ftp. The ftp is for word docs downloaded for sermons in churches and group study. The html is the smaller access but we have quantified it and it is accessible on Quantcast.com. The html ranks at about 50,000+ for the network but that does not include the ftp which is much larger. The reason we quantify our access is to compare the html and the ftp access for administration purposes.

Middle East
Our senior coordinator for Arabic is back from the Yemen organising the work there with the coordinator for the Arabian Peninsula and Middle East Region. We have had another church group from Algeria join us this week as well as another church from Tunisia and so the coordinator has to leave again for those countries to induct the churches there and baptise and ordain the officers there. Our coordinator in the Yemen has to go to Saudi Arabia to baptise and organise the people there. We now have multiple churches in many Muslim countries, virtually wall to wall, from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. We are now updating the web site for the Middle East and incorporating the area on the CCG Africa site. God has commenced to incorporate the churches of North Africa and the Middle East into CCG and is calling Islam back into the Church of God, as it was originally. Please pray to end the war in Northern Yemen and also in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our brethren in the war zone in North Yemen need your prayers.

Africa
We have also had another organisation of 21 churches from the Congo making it over 30 churches situated in the Congo DR waiting to be inducted this week at Goma and another large group in Rwanda. We have to print the Statement of Beliefs (A1) and Calendar papers out in the untold thousands of copies. It took 46 reams of paper to do one Rwandan group of churches alone.   At the current rate of growth we could well have more people in the Congo and Uganda alone by Passover than the WCG had in the entire world at the peak of its operations under Herbert Armstrong. We should be larger, by Passover, than the entire Sardis era from the Seventh Day Baptists in the Reformation, through all the Churches of God (SD), and the WCG/Armstrong offshoots to the formation of the last Sardis Era Church, namely the Living Church of God in the USA (cf. Christ’s words in Rev. 3:1). This year we have been growing at the rate of 100% a month.

It is doubtful we can sustain that growth rate, but only God knows. That rate is as great as the Churches of God have experienced over their 2000-year existence. It was done on sound doctrine and by word of mouth and no advertising at all by CCG. That is in contrast to the Sardis system in the US which has expended tens of millions of dollars annually for decades and is still shrinking.

Success
The secret of our success is the first century doctrines and they are recognised as that by most of the denominations outside of the US. The understanding of the Nature of God is fundamental to the keeping of the proper Temple Calendar. Once you get that right you are allowed to keep the Temple Calendar. One is consequent to the other. Once you start keeping the New Moons you are given more understanding and that seems to be what is happening now everywhere. This is the largest growth phase the Churches of God have seen since the first century. The US Churches of God, outside of CCG, have not been allowed to keep the Temple Calendar since the Caldwell Conference of the COG (SD) because their doctrines on the Nature of God are wrong (see the papers Ditheism (No. 76b) and Binitarian and Trinitarian Misrepresentation of the Early Theology of the Godhead (No. 127b).

David Pack says in his authorised biography that Rod Meredith wanted to introduce the New Moons in LCG. However, LCG now denies that was so. I have been personally informed, as early as 1994, by ministers in what is now the LCG that they considered that the New Moons must be kept, but they never did keep them. Once you keep the New Moons you realise that the Hillel Calendar is a fabrication and you have to get rid of the postponements. We will deal with these aspects in the following Sabbath Messages as well as the shallow and less than honest theology of the ex-WCG writers posing as theologians.

Currently there are over 207,000 hits a week from the US (see section below).  Russia has about 40,000 hits a week on the Russian site, although that figure halved this week to just under 20,000. China has 10,000 to 12,000 and more a week on the Mandarin site. Most are ftp downloads. France is ahead of that figure. The UK, Canada and Australia are not far behind. The Indo/Malay site is virtually up to date with the English and has good access. The Indians are now starting on their languages. Arabic is well underway now with churches in most countries from Morocco to the Yemen and South into Muslim West Africa and on into the Sudan. We have churches in France and South Africa and the European countries to the Baltic. Our biggest physical distribution of papers is in Africa with over 80,000 baptised adults at the weekly sermons and about 250,000 adolescents and kids over 23 countries. That figure is expanding each week. They have various languages but the two European languages are English and French with Kiswahili, Arabic, Dholuo, Rutooro and Rukindi, Lugandan, Kinyarwandan, Kirundi and a host of other local languages.

Statistics
The Statistics this week are much the same as last week although the hits were only at 340,248. We reach about 178,000 page views now each week with some 42,800 visitors per week. Approx 50% of these visitors are from the USA. They are mostly regulars on ftp through no referrers. In other words they are people who are used to accessing the site and who know what they want and where to get it.

Summary

A number of the CCG ministers in the unification taking place were from the old WCG/UCG etc. system. Some were RC seminary trained people who rejected the RC faith because of the doctrinal errors and corruption. Others were from Protestant etc. systems; others were from the old Sabbatarians of the Nile Valley. Our ministry comes from all faiths and all walks of life. God is calling pagans/Animists and Trinitarians and Pentecostalists and Unitarians and Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus with Atheists and who knows who else.

We have grown by up to 12,000 plus each month. We have more than one ex-SDA church join us each week. The most was nine SDA churches for the week. That was in Kenya. In each case the ministers and all people requested re-baptism and re-ordination for the ministry. The local churches already with us baptise who knows how many each week. The documentation can’t be processed fast enough.

So far we have put together all the Churches of God in Africa with the exception of a couple of United COG churches in Kenya. There is one in Nairobi and a small one in Migori and another small group in Rwanda. All RCG (Pack) in East Africa have joined us and also what we consider to be the genuine Sabbath-keepers of LCG and COG (SD). All COG (SD), except for one small group in Musoma, have joined us over Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Zanzibar and also the Seventh Day Baptist Unions from the Sudan and the CAR into the Congo DR, Uganda and starting in Rwanda.   

What appears to be uniting people is the clear doctrine and sound administration under a written constitution. They simply reject the Armstrong idolatry and errors of the offshoots and their known corruption. We don’t appoint polygamist ministers or retain corrupt officers.

There were two groups that tried to establish the First Century doctrines in the Congo DR and they number two million and one million each. Our coordinators in East and Central Africa tell us they think a lot of them will join us when they are exposed to our doctrines. We have inducted over 20,000 there over the last few months. Uganda has been even bigger in growth. Our coordinator and project officer there inducted 9000 people and 167 officers in one district in one week. There were five churches unified under our doctrines. His national assistant coordinator was working very hard with groups elsewhere. They inducted over 12,000 in one week in one country. We literally don’t know how many ministers we actually have let alone people. We think there are over 1300 officers in Africa alone. We can’t document them fast enough.

The Europeans are much slower but it seems to be growing from South to North and that is in accordance with Scripture (see the paper Fire From Heaven (No. 28)).

By Passover we will be the biggest Church of God in history and by the following Passover, if not sooner, we will be bigger than all of them combined. We are already bigger than all the current Churches of God combined. It was slow work at first and we were attacked incessantly, often from the offshoots and the secret societies, and the unstable, planted within the WCG system. However, it was like Christ said in Mark 4, we worked and carried on documenting the faith and put it there for all to see and God did the rest. One day He simply sent us to work on the harvest.

The growth is now massive. Please pray that God continues to increase us and provide us with the funds we need to do the work.

Pray for us all and for the proper unification of the Churches of God in accordance with Ezekiel chapter 34.

Wade Cox