Less Than 7000 PCG Members in 1997

This is the 1300th post for the Living Armstrongism blog. Thank you to all you readers for inspiring me to carry on.

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PCG is notoriously secretive about themselves. But every now and then they let out a glimpse of their internal affairs. One such glimpse may be seen in Stephen Flurry's August 1997 article, "Don't Waste Your Time!"

Here Stephen Flurry boasts that PCG is doing things in an efficient and effective manner. While doing so he mentions that PCG has less than 7000 members.

Just look at what the right priorities have done for the Philadelphia Church of God. Each month, you can receive the Trumpet magazine at no cost to you. Furthermore, our television program, The Key of David, seen around the world, never solicits contributions. And television and publishing are only two departments of this worldwide work. Yet the Philadelphia Church of God has less than 7,000 members! Many people are astonished at that figure. (p. 2.)

So it is evident from PCG's leaders themselves that by the middle of 1997 PCG had less than 7,000 members. All their work trying to convert as many WCG members as possible during the course of the Tkach changes and the consequent disintegration of WCG gained 7000 members.

The vast majority of WCG members were not interested in PCG and stayed away from this particular group which has since gained infamy as one of the more severe and authoritarian forms of Armstrongism.

According to a recent post on Banned by HWA it appears that PCG's membership is in decline.

I remember attending the Feast back in the early 2000s when we had over 1300 people attending at Greenville SC and Sandusky OH. Flurry would proudly shout and boast at the Feast that the PCG would eventually have 10,000 members. Now the members attending at the Feast are around 700-800 people.

Clearly buying the copyrights to some of HWA's writings clearly failed to persuade many within the other COGs to convert to PCG.

This claim by Gerald Flurry that PCG would have 10,000 members may be seen in his 2001 booklet, No Freedom Without Law, as mentioned in a previous post.

Being part of the former prophets, I Kings includes prophecy for us today. It doesn’t say men. This is 7,000 people who are converted and have the Holy Spirit of God, people who know God and haven’t caved in to Baal. These are the people who will join God’s work before this is all over. But [PCG's version of] God clearly says there will be 10,000 in the place of safety. He is going to come back with those 10,000. So maybe we will convert about 500 of our teenagers before and in the place of safety. And we’ll pick up between 2,000 and 2,500 from the world before the Great Tribulation. (Gerald Flurry, No Freedom Without Law, Chapter 5, p. 59.)

In 2014 Gerald Flurry repeated this claim in his book, The Former Prophets.

So it would seem that all is not well with PCG these days.