Copyright Philadelphia Church of God

Copyright Philadelphia Church of God
Following the death of Herbert W. Armstrong, a new host of leaders took over the worldwide church, media and humanitarian religious empire God had used him to build from scratch.

Mr. Armstrong’s successors indicated they would follow his teachings and traditions. However, almost immediately after Mr. Armstrong died, the church’s new leaders began subtly altering Mr. Armstrong’s writings.

Changes to Mystery of the Ages, Mr. Armstrong’s crowning work, began to surface quickly after the book was released in September 1985, when Mr. Armstrong emotionally presented first copies of the book to students at Ambassador College, urging them to study it alongside their Bibles in order to help make the meaning of the Bible clear.

Church leaders put the book “on hold” in the spring of 1988, supposedly for minor reasons and for a short period. The Worldwide Church of God would never publish it again.

In 1989, church member and pastor Gerald Flurry was summoned to Worldwide Church of God headquarters in Pasadena, California, along with his assistant, John Amos. There he was fired for continuing to adhere to the teachings of Herbert Armstrong and for contesting the repudiation of Mystery of the Ages, which the administration told him was “riddled with error,” even while the membership at large was led to believe otherwise.

Immediately afterward, the Philadelphia Church of God was founded, and those who continued to believe in God’s teachings through Mr. Armstrong began to join.

In 1997, the PCG printed Mystery of the Ages under the copyright of Herbert Armstrong, advertising the book through its media and distributing it for free to anyone who requested it: the “largest audience possible.” The Worldwide Church of God countered by suing.

A six-year legal battle ensued. The Worldwide Church demanded the PCG cease from disseminating Mystery of the Ages or any other books by Mr. Armstrong, while the PCG contended that the WCG’s new administration had abandoned the copyrights in every sense of the word.

The PCG won on the district court level in 1999, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals eventually overturned the lower court opinion in a split decision the following year. The PCG subsequently stopped printing distributing the book.

When the Supreme Court declined an appeal by the PCG, both churches turned their focus to the damages trial and the PCG’s counterclaim for the rights to produce 18 additional works by Mr. Armstrong.

An article covering the litigation appeared on the front page of the February 21, 2001, Wall Street Journal, and a criticism of the Ninth Circuit’s opinion was published in the April issue of the Harvard Law Review the same year.

As high hopes for the damages trial dropped lower and the thorny counterclaim issue complicated the WCG’s legal position, the Worldwide Church of God approached the PCG offering to sell Mystery of the Ages. After a series of counteroffers and finally insisting that any arrangement include all 19 works as well as the court documents obtained during the lawsuit, the PCG purchased full copyrights to Mystery and Mr. Armstrong’s other works and retained the discovery documents uncovered during the lawsuit. The PCG now prints and distributes all of these materials for free.

A book written on the basis of those documents, Raising the Ruins, chronicles the history of the WCG leading up to the copyright battle, as well as court case itself and its outcome. Raising the Ruins is also available in serialized form in the Philadelphia Trumpet magazine.