Living Church of God

Roderick Meredith's career spans the whole Armstrongist arc: among the first evangelists Armstrong ordained in the 1950s, a hardliner within Worldwide through its imperial decades, sidelined in the 1980s, and — when the post-Armstrong leadership dismantled the distinctive doctrines in the 1990s — twice a founder: of the Global Church of God in 1992, and, after a governance dispute with Global's board in 1998, of the Living Church of God, taking most ministers and members with him. The sequence matters for the entry's scoring: LCG's structure was built explicitly to restore governance 'from the top down' — the hierarchical model in which authority descends from Christ through the presiding evangelist, and boards cannot remove the leader.

Doctrinally and practically, LCG continues the template documented at the parent entry: seventh-day sabbath and annual holy days ordering the calendar; abstention from Christmas, Easter, and birthdays; the three-tithe system (with the third-tithe years and festival tithe of the Armstrongist pattern); British-Israelist readings of prophecy identifying the English-speaking nations in end-times scenarios preached through Tomorrow's World; and separation norms — disfellowshipment of members judged divisive, with ex-member accounts describing the standard splinter-family experience of social loss on exit. The ex-Armstrongist documentation ecosystem records the recurring pressure points: tithing burdens on modest incomes, historical teaching against medical intervention (softened across the splinters in recent decades), and the governance model's lack of appeal mechanisms.

The church's darkest day was not of its making. On March 12, 2005, at a rented Sabbath service in Brookfield, Wisconsin, long-time member Terry Ratzmann shot ten fellow congregants, killing seven, then himself. Investigations found no directive cause; discussion of motive — personal depression, reported distress at a recent sermon's prophetic content — remained inconclusive. The entry records the tragedy as congregational history and scores nothing against the organisation for it.

Meredith died in 2017, succeeded — by his designation, per the governance model — by Gerald Weston. LCG remains, with the United Church of God, one of the two poles of the splinter family: more hierarchical and prophetically urgent than United, notably less extreme than the Restored Church of God's trajectory documented at that entry. Confidence is set low: the record is consistent but rests principally on the church's own publications and long-running ex-member documentation.