The British Churches – A Lively Inheritance

By Neil Earle

Raymond McNair (right) presents Herbert Armstrong with a token of ten years of Ambassador U.K (June 1970). Click photo to enlarge.

To a select group of people around this world from Israel to Tasmania to Wyoming and Watford a small piece of British earth named Bricket Wood will most certainly ring a bell. There between the cities of St. Albans and Watford just north of London sat an establishment called Ambassador College (U.K.). Some 800 people on this planet will remember studying there in the service of a group named Radio Church of God or later Worldwide Church of God – WCG (now Grace Communion International).

From 1960 to 1974 students from America, Australia and the United Kingdom mostly interacted and studied and grappled with speech classes and the unorthodox theology of the church, a maverick sect that had been planted by an American radio preacher named Herbert Armstrong in the 1930s. This September the British churches celebrated their 60th anniversary of the London church founding in June 1956. I wish I could have been there. My own stint at the College for ministerial training lasted from 1968 to 1972. I did my first preaching in Warrington in the north. Indeed, from Ambassador in England would come a talented collection of administrators and ministers to staff the expanding work of the church.

The head man at Ambassador (UK) in my day reflected the unique cosmopolitanism of the church and college. In Raymond McNair students found, in the main, a largely sympathetic and utterly sincere campus leader. He had been born and raised in Camp, Arkansas and mused often on the strange workings of Providence that led him from rural America to live within twenty miles of Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square. It was a feeling many of us could share.

Though no longer church-owned the UKPT still spreads a Gospel message.

A Lively Cosmopolitanism

How did we end up there? As a WCG member and reader in Goose Bay, Labrador I remember reading and hearing about the church’s work in England never dreaming I would end up on the British campus when Pasadena, California loomed so large in our hopes and dreams. But I’ve no regrets. This is a personal reminiscence so I can say that from the first day on campus the lively diversity of the Bricket Wood campus came into play. The first night in the dorm a jovial Scottish doctor unveiled a bottle of Glen Livet to those old enough to appreciate it. I was soon singing Irish folk ballads with an authentic Ulster banjo player and enjoying the unfailing politeness and good manners of a former salesman I would eventually serve with on the Student Council.

Life-long friends one and all, some sadly deceased. You can’t trade those experiences for anything. Deputy Chancellor McNair would charge on every week with sermons on “Are You a Spiritual Drone” – more hard-hitting than Christian journalism would dare be today, but always lively and helpful, yes, helpful to the max. I remember Raymond McNair’s series of sermons in 1969 that turned into articles titled “Lessons From The Master Potter” wherein he showed how the experience of conversion went through a seven-step process that Mr. McNair demonstrated with the help of props given him by one of England’s talented potters at the time. The series should be reprinted somewhere as an example of the McNair perseverance.

Early church growth had been predicated on the Armstrong radio broadcasts coming in from Radio Luxembourg in the 1950s and Reader’s Digest ads. The radio signals were clear enough to collect hearers in Britain who would subscribe to the church’s flagship magazine, The Plain Truth. This mailing list anchored several Bible lectures across the region in the early and mid-fifties by Herbert Armstrong himself. His son Richard David was sent to staff a small office in London. During those years the British churches grew slowly and the grand campus of Ambassador took shape as a unifying symbol. We are not angels but men as John Calvin would say and we need something a little bit tangible to hold onto. The college in the lovely Green Belt outside London centered the church’s work and by 1971 there were 1700 members.

A solid start had been made.

Radio Ship Caroline, 5 miles off the Isle of Man, about 1965.

Pirate Ships and Perseverance

One of the most colorful episodes in the tenacious story of the British churches was the Pirate Ship saga of 1964-1967 where the church became the biggest buyer of radio time on ships anchored off the British coast beaming in pop music and the Armstrong brand of the Gospel.

That brand caught on. Church attendance picked up while the pirates were broadcasting and aggravating the BBC and the official British media. The scrapes with the BBC and the British government strangely prefigured the battles with big government and private entities that would characterize the Reagan-Thatcher conservative era in Trans-atlantic politics. The pirate ship closures threw the British back on high profile magazine advertising. Not surprisingly in the early 1970s the British office conceived of a newsstand program for the Plain Truth that would take off across the British Isles and around the world. This was mass impact of the kind the church was known for.

Altogether though, the 1970s were a difficult time for the Worldwide Church of God worldwide – overexpansion, high-level scandals and a measure of weariness scrapped the forward momentum of the 1950s and 1960s. The closure of Ambassador (UK) in 1974 epitomized the tough times of the decade. But overall the British church members stayed loyal and supportive and in time their patience was rewarded. Slow and steady was the watchword looking back, and the high-level trips of the church’s leader, Herbert Armstrong, often featured London as a strategic crossroads.

Even in-house, the British churches still display a talent for relevant journalism.

The 1980s were again times of testing – dwindling subsidies from America and the death of the church founder in 1986 which many critics thought would spell the end of the church. Especially the overseas outposts. No, it didn’t. These crises showed how welded together by trial and test and camaraderie the WCG really was – and the U.K. was no exception. There were years of struggle, years of endurance with worse to come.

Shining Through

Not all is smooth sailing in the Christian life and the British were writing their own peculiar chapter in perseverance during those years. Nevertheless Britain hosted lively festival sites for members from around the world and there was always a dedication to the printed word. The British printing office had been publishing 750,000 copies of four European editions of the Plain Truth as far back as 1972. Then came the American headquarters launch of a massive and much-needed doctrinal renewal in the 1990s. This again spelled crisis all across the WCG. Again there were voices saying all was done. But not so. There were even compensations. The British churches were encouraged to become more independent. As International Editor from 1993 to 1996 I witnessed the cutting free of our international media efforts in hopes it would rebound again. It did.

England came through. Most churches stayed supportive. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the editorial team under talented journalist John Halford relaunched The Plain Truth. Then it eventually ended up as a charitable trust disconnected from WCG but still spared to fight another day – much needed in a Christian Britain that still languished in decline. Along the way the British office fostered publishing efforts in Malaysia and Bulgaria raised up on a shoestring and speaking much more to the local situation, something the British editorial team had achieved after many years. Today there is a lively in-house publication titled “Because” and a growing effort in television titled Gracecom TV. (Check gci.org web site under UK for more.)

UK festival-goers leave venue in West Country (1968).

Meanwhile the individual churches picked themselves up in that stalwart British way (“Stay calm and carry on”) and saw the need to more than ever set personal examples of Christian living in a country where church attendance figures were not inspiring. Relations were established with the Evangelical Alliance and other progressive entities. Things were moving at the grass roots. Summer camps for young people had been uproariously successful in Britain since the early 1970s. Now a set of personal improvement speech groups patterned after Toastmasters International called “Life Clubs” spread from the U.K. to many of their fellow churches around the world. Tenacity, resilience and a touch of creativity were once again working wonders.

The roughly 45 tUnited Kingdom churches have weathered many storms and are well entitled to look back at 60 years of tenacity and struggle with some measure of confidence for the future. It seems like what was written in one context still applies to our brethren in the UK today, “There’ll always be an England.”

With God’s help this will stay true.