Sabbath Message 9/8/33/120 B

Dear Friends,

We have more reports in and there is a great development in the Horn of Africa. We reported that Moses Hadi had gone from Ethiopia to Djibouti to induct the Sabbatarian Churches in Djibouti and he has returned after inducting 23 churches in Djibouti and leaving seven further churches to Ibrahim Kitwe to complete.

These churches are now to be inducted and a series of churches in Eritrea have requested to join us. Djibouti has thus become the centre of the work on the Horn of Africa with churches in Eritrea and in Somalia administered from Djibouti and the locations in the other countries kept confidential for security reasons.

We now have a significant number of Muslims over recent times return to the original Sabbatarian Faith. We have thirty National Conferences in Africa now with another 36 churches join us this week from the Horn of Africa and a number still to be inducted. There are many to be done in the Congo DR and we are awaiting reports from Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan and CAR, Ghana, Kenya and elsewhere.                                                                                                   
We have had requests for other additions to the Canadian Churches come in from other offshoots of the Armstrong system also from Toronto. We will process them this coming week.

Justôme at Tulear, Madagascar, has reported to Jean-Alphonse and he told me that all the elders of the Trinitatrian church who persecuted our people came to his home on the last Sunday and gave their apologies to CCG. They also tried to persuade the leader of their church, M. Ramaro Raphaël (son's name Klark Herway), to stop the stoning and persecution.

This is a powerful response from the Father Eloah to the prayers of the entire Brethren of the World Conference in the Church for the people there at Tulear. Thank you Father.

Please continue to pray for God's Work there. Justôme said that some of those elders of this church are interested now in joining CCG and some also from Tratsoa's church (called Apokalipsy). Our persecutors are becoming our brothers. Shades of Paul on the road to Damascus.

We noticed that the clowns in the anti-Armstrong sites have made the mistake of both assuming we are part of the Offshoots systems and also underestimating us.

It has not occurred to them that it is quite impossible for CCG to be an offshoot of the WCG system as our doctrines are totally opposed to the Armstrong system and we are far larger than the WCG at its peak and thus the vast majority of CCG have never been in the WCG system nor indeed would they condone the doctrinal errors. They have not read the large body of CCG work that critically examines Armstrongism and demonstrates that not only are we not part of it but that we hold it in disdain as well as the accusers of the brethren that they are. 

It has at last dawned on them that we have simply bypassed the US COG groups and ignored them and got on with God’s work.

It is quite amusing to watch them assume that they have some role in what God does in North America and their influence on the rest of the world. It is in fact next to zero. They are also creating false profiles on Facebook of CCG people with false information.

These are the papers that we have written about Armstrong concerning his actions and doctrines.

False Prophecy (No. 269) at http://www.ccg.org/english/s/p269.html   
Elijah? (No. 233) at http://www.ccg.org/english/s/p233.html
The 18 Restored Truths of Herbert W Armstrong (No. 233b) at http://www.ccg.org/english/s/p233b.html
Origins of Radical Unitarianism and Binitarianism (No. 76) at http://www.ccg.org/english/s/p076.html
Ditheism (No. 76B) at http://www.ccg.org/english/s/p076b.html
Fallacy of the Third Resurrection (No. 166) at http://www.ccg.org/english/s/p166.html ; and
The Place of Safety (No. 194) at http://www.ccg.org/english/s/p194.html
 
The following papers are about the History of the Churches of God which shows where his place really is among our brethren.

History of the church
Role of the Fourth Commandment in the Historical Sabbath-keeping churches of God (No. 170) at http://www.ccg.org/english/s/p170.html
General Distribution of the Sabbath-keeping Churches (No. 122) at http://www.ccg.org/english/s/p122.html
Origins of the Christian Church in Britain (No. 266) at http://www.ccg.org/english/s/p266.html

CCG is over three times the size of WCG at its peak under Armstrong and perhaps much more. Armstrong lost over 200,000 people and retained only 100,000 until he died and then they lost over 75,000 of those and split the rest into fragments assisted by hate sites like the anti-Armstrong group of people which are really quite small.  True a number of our people have come from WCG and their offshoots but so also have a great many come from COG (SD) and the SDAs and the SDBs. Virtually all of the LCG outside of South Africa in the continent have come to CCG as have almost all of the UCG people and the RCG and every offshoot of the WCG. They want nothing to do with them but so too have the Churches of God (Seventh Day) and the Seventh Day Baptists and the Seventh Day Adventists in the untold thousands and the Nilotic Sabbatarian Baptists and the Abyssinians and no end of other churches from Sunday Baptists to Anglicanism/Episcopalians and Roman Catholicism.

It is utterly impossible for us to be a formal offshoot of the WCG given our numbers and our doctrines. Last month or so we have inducted more people than the entire offshoots of the WCG system combined have in total. This last week aside from thousands of Christians we also baptised 20 Muslims in one country alone. The immense majority of our people are offended by WCG doctrines both originally and since its transition and in the offshoots.

The sad fact is that I was once a member of the WCG in Australia and I castigated them for their doctrinal errors. A number of people with WCG background helped form the CCG but these people form a minute number of current CCG people.  We detest Armstrongism and everything his ministry stood for. (See the paper Formation of the Christian Churches of God (No. 068) at http://www.ccg.org/english/s/p068.html.)

Those in the hate site blogs etc. also trying to claim we are racist and linking us to others are committing criminal defamation and hate crimes and simply don’t understand our structure. We are a massive multi-racial structure in over 42 countries and a massive African structure both Black and Arab.

Look also at the site www.abrahams-legacy.org.

Never be discouraged as to what we face and what these people in the WCG offshoots and the home churches say about us as they know nothing. We have not planned this massive work. God has simply directed it. Many nations have not been with the Churches of God since the Seventh Century.

Wade Cox
Coordinator General