The Death of Roderick C. Meredith

LCG has announced that Roderick C. Meredith has passed away aged 86 on Thursday, May 18, 2017. It had been announced earlier that he had terminal cancer. His funeral is to be held Sunday, May 21.

I wished he had lived longer. My thoughts and condolences go to his family members.

We human beings are complicated. We can treat those close to us well while neglecting those not so favored. I will not speculate about those who were close to him. But for those of us who participated in and saw the fallacies of what Roderick C. Meredith taught it is sad to see that he used up his working life promoting and sustaining a religion that is severely flawed and has caused much pain to the many people who have grown disillusioned with it.

As HWA's organization grew HWA and those immediately below him including Meredith had few restraints upon their authority. In a situation like that abuse of that power were practically certain to occur.

Infamously, as may be seen in his July 18, 1969 letter, he helped enforce HWA's astoundingly brutal divorce and remarriage policy which gave ministers of HWA's organization the power to order couples to end their marriages for arbitrary reasons. This frightening policy was in force until 1974.

In 1992 HWA's organization had to pay $750,000 to Leona McNair to settle a libel case that started after Meredith made public statements about her in 1979 that she denounced as libelous. At one point of the long running case a jury awarded her $1,260,000 in damages for Meredith's libel on August 23, 1984.

Last year Meredith was sued again by the Scarboroughs for alleged bad behavior against them when they were disfellowshipped out of LCG. However that particular lawsuit failed.

Although Meredith often played up his associations with HWA he actually fell out of his favor long before HWA's death. David Robinson stated in his book, Herbert Armstrong's Tangled Web, that HWA no longer favored Meredith as early as 1972. He insisted that Meredith was only placed over the ministry in 1979 in order to bolster HWA and Stanley Rader's power over HWA's organization during the receivership crisis. Once he had served his purpose in reasserting HWA's authority over the ministry he was immediately replaced by Joseph Tkach in July 1979. Even after Rader lost HWA's favor in 1981 Meredith was not returned to that position which he previously held. HWA's actions indicate that he did not view Meredith as a possible successor.

While Meredith was over the ministry in January-July 1979 he disfellowshipped numerous ministers. The authoritarian nature of HWA's organization allowed Meredith to wield such frightening power even over other ministers.

In 1992 as the Tkach changes got closer to transforming the organization founded by HWA into essentially another Protestant church Meredith left it and formed a splinter group. In 1998 a schism erupted and he left to form yet another splinter group. While leading these organizations of his he hosted a telecast. And even though there had emerged hundreds of splinter groups which taught many doctrines very similar to what he himself preached he would still say things like, "You will gain precious insights and information available nowhere else," letting his audience falsely think that no one else taught what he did. How is saying a statement like that not a con?

Meredith also had a long history of demonizing and vilifying the LGBT community. While such hostility is common among the splinter groups originating from HWA's organization Meredith seemed especially obsessed with vilifying them. One shudders to imagine the effects of his vindictiveness upon those who paid attention to his words. One wonders why he was so bitter and nasty towards them,

It is clear that Meredith was badly served by his uncle C. Paul Meredith who seems to have helped lead Meredith into joining HWA's organization in Meredith's teenage years. Serving HWA's organization led to Meredith promoting all kinds of misinformation that were simply untrue such as British Israelism. It would have been better for himself and those around him if Meredith had pursued another avenue of employment that would have prevented him having such a negative influence over other people. But he made his choices and the consequences of his choices have to be addressed.

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Roderick C. Meredith's death has been mentioned elsewhere.

Banned by HWA. (Here and here.)

As Bereans Did.

Painful Truth.