Though I purposefully went through cult deprogramming 18 years ago, the deleterious effects of my involvement in the church were long lasting and deep and there was not one area of my life that it left untouched. WalkerвЂ™s book (which I won in a Goodreads Giveaway) with some trepidation. Would reading this resurrect feelings from my own experience that would be better left alone, I wondere I had been a member of the Worldwide Church of God cult for almost 35 years, and so I approached reading Mr.

I had been a member of the Worldwide Church of God cult for almost 35 years, and so I approached reading Mr.

When the 1975 end-time prophecy also fails, he finally begins to question his faith and imagine the possibility of choosing a destiny of his own.more When the prophecy of the 1972 Great Tribulation does not materialize, Jerry is considerably less disappointed than relieved.

They took comfort in the belief that they had been chosen for a special afterlife, even if it meant following a religion with a white supremacist ideology and dutifully sending tithes to Armstrong, whose church boasted more than 100,000 members and more than $80 million in annual revenues at its height. When they joined the church, in 1960, they were living in a two-room apartment in a dangerous Chicago housing project with the first four of their seven children, and, most significantly, they both were blind, having lost their sight to childhood accidents. Jerry's parents were particularly vulnerable to the promise of relief from the world's hardships. The next life, according to Armstrong, would arrive in 1975, three years after the start of the Great Tribulation. Anyone who dared leave the church would endure hardship for the remainder of this life and eternal suffering in the next. The substantial membership was ruled by fear, intimidation, and threats. Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God was that its members were divinely chosen and all others would soon perish in rivers of flames. Composed of a hodgepodge of requirements and restrictions (including a prohibition against doctors and hospitals), the underpinning tenet of Herbert W. His consciousness revolves around being a member of a church whose beliefs he finds not only confusing but terrifying. When The World in Flames begins, in 1970, Jerry Walker is six years old. Composed of a hodgepodge of requirements and restrictions (incl A memoir of growing up with blind, African-American parents in a segregated cult preaching the imminent end of the world A memoir of growing up with blind, African-American parents in a segregated cult preaching the imminent end of the world When The World in Flames begins, in 1970, Jerry Walker is six years old.

In this moment world in flames