Almost all the members who separated did so at least fourteen years ago; thousands of them left before that.  Yet to this day God's people are still chaotically divided contrary to the clear biblical command, “[Let] there be no divisions among you”:  they do not “speak the same thing”; they are neither of “one doctrine” nor “perfectly joined together”; one is “of Apollos, another of Cephas”; they are not “one body” but many, divided into several completely independent corporations, organizations and governments (I Cor. 1:10-12; 3:4; 12:13, 25; Eph. 4:3-5, 13-16).  Christ is not divided (I Cor. 1:13; John 17:20-21).  Citing these same Scriptures, all the splinter churches of the original Worldwide Church of God still use the argument, in their sadly weak efforts to proclaim the Gospel, that by Biblical definition only one body of Christian doctrine and government can be right (authorized by God)—all the others have to be in spiritual error and rebellion to one degree or another.

 

Thus, there are only two possibilities:  either all but one of the splinter churches are in rebellion and error, or all of them are.

 

Obviously the Tkaches and their ministers are not the primary reason why the disintegration of the Church persists to this day.  Those false ministers, long abandoned, do not prevent God's people from uniting as He commands under His one government and doctrine, nor do they prevent God from restoring to the faithful the great blessing He gave the Work in Mr. Armstrong's time.  Not one of the splinter groups has grown substantially in numbers, resources or work since its relatively early years; all the sizable groups {c. 2016} have greatly contracted from their peak. None has been blessed to do a work even remotely approaching what God did through the Church in Mr. Armstrong's time.  Despite present denials, every one of the groups' leaders believed God would distinguish them from the others with special blessing, to do a powerful work of some type or otherwise demonstrate very impressive “fruit.” Yet to this day the original WCG, despite the terrible corruption and ruin publicly inflicted upon it, is still much better known in the U.S. and around the world than all these groups combined: what remains of the once great recognition and influence of the Church still eclipses all the groups.

 

If God's people pleased Him in their handling of the stumbling block and test posed by the Tkaches, today they would be united under His government in one spiritual body and doctrine, and their work would be blessed as it was in Mr. Armstrong's day:  there is still an important Work to do because this country and the other nations have not heard the true Gospel proclaimed with anything approaching power for over twenty years.  Mr. Armstrong solemnly commissioned the Church's leadership to carry on after his death proclaiming the Gospel with all priority until the end. 

 

The only conclusion is that God's ministers and people are compromising with sin in a serious way (Isaiah 59:1-2), despite their faithfulness in ultimately rejecting Joe Tkach for his rejection of Commandment keeping.  This compromise with sin must have existed when God decided His people, rather than the apostate ones, would be shamefully driven out of the inheritance God gave them. The truth is that the Tkaches and their ministers encouraged, “stirred up” and preyed upon a pre-existing sinful inclination in all of us, to one degree or another, minister/official or member; they did not originate that inclination (II Tim. 4:3, prophesying of the Church in the “last days” (3:1)).