Gone With The Wind: It's Springtime!

Springtime at Tara

It's Springtime! Vagaries of the winds of war in the Churches of God are beginning to subside. Member allegiances, ministerial alliances, ownership of church real estate, territory and property continue to coalesce. Division of the spoils of the UCG-COGaWA war and reconstruction of what is left is on the horizon, if not already here. 

After the war - with money at such a premium, what better time is there to restart UCG's website. United's tattered, old website is getting laid to rest, while a new and improved UCG website gets debugged, ready for action.  

Here's the new UCG website marketing strategy, guaranteed to start high school dropout, adman and WCG founder Herbert W. Armstrong spinning in his grave, at warp speed:

UCG requires a validated email to register for their new website features, such as personal profile creation, connecting with website chat features, or messaging. It says that they "will NEVER give away your information to anybody else - we promise!". (Ed: Does "NEVER"  include not giving it away to that soon coming Assyrian-German army, invading to spank the United? Ouch!) 


Some new UCG website features:

• · Website user accounts.
• · Author pages with bio information, photo and content produced by that author.
• · Online chat with other website user account friends.
• · Better search engine.
• · Mobile version.
• · MP3 recordings of various booklets and publications.
• · Recipe section (biblically clean).
• · Commenting on posted content. (They can't really mean this, can they?)
• · UCG congregation finder (by zip code). 
• · Highest UCG contributors by zip code, congregation or pastor. (No, not really.) 
•  · Ministerial salaries, bonuses and benefit payouts by rank or longevity. (Is that asking too much?) 

In this new website religious marketing scheme, UCG membership are expected to "encourage" one another, or anyone else that shows up at the website, forming a sticky glue of online connections.  Every relationship click to click to click of all 5,000 members of the UCG can be tracked, documents downloaded, database inquires analyzed, tithe records checked, online chat buzz monitored for dissident views. What's next, UCG online disfellowship? 

What UCG really wants to know is what happens when someone completely new shows up at the website; how much it costs and how long it takes to get them seated in a folding chair, loyally tithing every Saturday. One problem with that UCG church growth scenario is that Herbert W. Armstrong, Garner Ted Armstrong and the UCG's predecessor church, the Worldwide Church of God is now a failed and tarnished brand in the religious landscape. The Internet has a long and detailed memory of the fraudulent disaster that was Pasadena, back in the WCG's "good old days".