Retiring Pastor Reflects on Early Years of the Work

What was it like working with Herbert Armstrong, starting an office in Europe and helping do God's work for more than 50 years?

George Meeker
interviewed by Joel Meeker

Q. How and when did you come in contact with the Church of God?

A. My father began listening to Mr. Herbert Armstrong's radio broadcast in the mid-1940s. My dad and I were close, so he would talk to me about it and we would discuss the various topics. I began listening too. I remember being very impressed by Mr. Armstrong's powerful voice; I imagined that he must have been well over 6 feet tall.

In 1950, as I was finishing high school in the Kansas City area, I wrote for an application to Ambassador College. I didn't get a response right away, so I spent the money I'd saved for college on a car. Then I received a call from Mr. Armstrong asking if I could still come to Ambassador. I drove my car out to California, had a tour of the campus given by Mr. Armstrong and, with his encouragement, decided to enroll.

Q. What was Ambassador College like in those early years?

A. It was very small compared to what it became. All of the classes were taught in the building that later became the library. All the students lived in one building, the Mayfair mansion, while I was a student. The men stayed on the third floor, the women on the second floor, and the ground floor was the "student center"—dining and common room. We could all eat our meals sitting around one table. Mr. Armstrong taught all the Bible classes; there were three or four other teachers for the other subjects. In the early years there was a rather informal atmosphere. Almost everyone was on a first-name basis.

We all had jobs on the campus. I worked on the grounds and in the mailroom. There wasn't much money in those days, so we never really were "paid." What we earned was simply deducted from what we owed the college.

Q. What was Herbert Armstrong like?

A. He was very involved in the lives of the students at the college, very interested in the students themselves. He spent a lot of time talking with us. I remember him as always being very friendly. In a way, he was a gentle father figure to everyone, not at all overbearing. He was nearly 60 when I first met him, but I remember him as being very energetic, as much as any of the students. Loma Armstrong was also very involved; usually when you saw him, you saw her. They were very frequently in Mayfair. She was a very important part of everything that was going on at that time, and took a special interest in the women students.

Q. How large was the Radio Church of God then?

A. As I recall, there were only three congregations and two ministers when I arrived in Pasadena. Basil Wolverton was an elder in the Portland, Oregon, area, and Herbert Armstrong was the minister in Pasadena. During my years at Ambassador seven or eight men were ordained, but things were still very small.

Q. What were church services like at the time?

A. At first services were held in the main library room. Then we had to use two rooms, and the speaker would stand in the doorway between them so everyone could see him. Mr. Armstrong did all the speaking at first. He could speak very intensely for three hours, and we felt like we needed those long services. When we outgrew the library, we moved to the Shakespeare Club in Pasadena, and things kept growing from there.

Q. What happened after graduation?

A. I continued working in the mailroom. I remember we used to get many bags of mail. One time I remember being at the post office to pick up our mail at the same time as another radio speaker was there to get his. He got just a handful and we had bags and bags full. The fellow was very impressed by the quantity of mail we received.

Burk McNair and I were ordained the same day in January 1955. In June of that year, I was sent to England with Mr. Armstrong's eldest son, Richard. I was to assist him in setting up and running the first church office outside the United States. Air travel still wasn't very developed, so we crossed the Atlantic by ship, the French liner Liberté.

Q. What was it like getting started in Europe?

A. Dick and I first made a tour through the continent. We disembarked in France, and took some time to see a bit of Europe by car, and also to visit prospective members. Mr. Armstrong's radio broadcast had started airing on Radio Luxembourg in 1953, so we had some visit requests. In Holland, I remember, we visited a man who had named his son Herbert, after Herbert Armstrong. In all, we traveled through France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

While I was making a further side trip to Germany, Dick leased two rooms for an office in a building on Cranbourn Street, just off Leicester Square in London. Before very long we had rented all four rooms on that floor. Dick also purchased the office furniture we needed to start the office. Our first project was to answer a shoebox-full of mail we had brought with us from Pasadena. That's really all there was to the office at first. It was a very simple beginning for the "international work."

Q. How did the London office operate?

A. My daily routine was to pick up the mail at our BCM (British Crown Monomarks) address, which was within walking distance of the office. I sorted and processed the mail, banking whatever money came in. If there were letters to answer, I did that as well. We were responsible for all addresses outside the U.S. at that time, so I remember getting mail from places as far away as the Philippines and South Africa.

Church literature, including the Plain Truth magazine, was printed in the U.S. and bulk shipped to us. We would then mail the literature from England. We addressed the mail using a type of addressograph machine. Names and addresses were stamped onto small metal plates. Then the individual plates were inserted into the stamping machine, and we pulled a lever, which then placed the mailing information on the envelopes. Each piece was hand-stamped, and usually there were between 2,000 and 3,000 Plain Truths to be mailed. It was a pretty time-consuming activity. Then we put it all in big red mailbags, called the post office, and the postmen would come to pick them up.

Q. How did things develop in Europe?

A. Mr. Armstrong held his first European evangelistic campaign in several cities around England, Scotland and Northern Ireland in September 1954. Volume 2 of his autobiography gives some of the details. He held a longer series in London in June of 1956. The Armstrongs arrived in London in April of 1956 and left almost immediately with Dick Armstrong for a five-week tour of the Middle East. I recall that I didn't have a regular salary during that time. Mr. Armstrong had told us we could use whatever money came in the mail for our living expenses. We all had faith that there would be enough income for me to live, and there always was.

He held nine meetings in all, one of which was conducted by Dick Armstrong and one by Garner Ted. That campaign marked the moment when the church really began to form in England. Following those meetings we had Sabbath services every week, with an attendance starting at about a dozen people. By that time Frank Longuskie had come from Pasadena to join me in the office. Dick Armstrong had gone back to the U.S. by that time. At first we were the only two baptized members in the little congregation. He and I did the speaking, and little by little the church grew. Our responsibilities changed several times in the following years. I was sent back and forth across the Atlantic several times.

Q. What do you remember about the founding of Ambassador College, Bricket Wood?

A. In June 1959, Mr. Armstrong purchased Hanstead House, a somewhat neglected but beautiful estate north of London, to be the site of a new Ambassador campus as well as the British office of the church. Raymond McNair did most of the legwork in locating this property. Ernest Martin was to begin teaching at this campus, so I was asked once again to act as office manager. I moved back to England in early 1960, just as the office equipment and supplies had been moved to the Bricket Wood campus. The new office was located in some refurbished stables on the campus grounds. I took up my new responsibilities right away.

Lots of work had to be done to get the buildings ready to open the college for classes in 1960. In our spare time all of us pitched in, doing things like helping the paint crew to make sure we'd have everything ready on time.

The college opened in the summer of 1960. Most of the students the first year were Americans or Britons who had transferred over from the Pasadena campus. But, as I recall, we also had students coming in from Australia, Canada, South Africa and Germany.

Memorial Hall, as Hanstead House was rechristened, served the same functions that Mayfair had when I was at college in Pasadena. The women students stayed on the top floor, the men were on a different floor, I believe. Initially, the Armstrongs also had an apartment in the building. Classes, meals, college activities—everything was in that building.

Q. Was there any reaction in the neighborhood when the campus opened?

A. There was some curiosity in the local community. Our doctrines were so different from those of the Church of England that Ambassador College was bound to raise some questions. I don't recall there being any opposition, though some unfavorable things appeared in the press. Much of the British press was not too trustworthy at that time as they were more interested in a sensation to sell papers than in the facts.

Q. How did you end up coming back to the United States?

A. One of the students who came from Pasadena for the start of Bricket Wood was a charming young lady named Karen Kunkel. I had met her earlier in Pasadena, but it was in England that we became interested in each other. Mrs. Armstrong was a bit of a matchmaker, and she gently encouraged the two of us to get to know one another better. We began courting, and were finally married in November 1960. There was an urgent need for pastors in the field by that time, so we traveled back to the U.S. in July of 1961, on the Queen Mary, to take up a pastorate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We've continued to serve God's people in various pastorates in the United States since that time.

Q. How would you compare the church in the early days with our situation today?

A. I would say I see positive and negative changes. It is sad that we are now fragmented into different groups. A unity of purpose was one of the hallmarks of our early years. People had a willingness to submit their personal desires to the good of the work. It seems not everyone has that same willingness today, although there are those who are still steadfast and faithful after many years—years often fraught with challenges and disappointments. It gives me great joy to see people that I had first met on a baptizing tour perhaps in the 1950s or early '60s, and to know that they are still enduring to the end.

On the positive side, I think now we as a church are even more careful about substantiating what we believe. In United I find an unwillingness to change any doctrine or practice unless the need for change can be clearly proven. There is a more deliberate process for approving (or reconfirming) our positions. When some few changes have been made, in my view they've been well documented. The church's explanations are very deliberately considered by many people. This prevents any one person from being appointed or appointing himself "protector of church doctrine." My observation is that sometimes in the past the church's positions, though they may have been correct, were not sufficiently documented. I believe the system in place is better at protecting against error today.

Q. Based on your life's experience, do you have any advice to give to young Christians?

A. If I had any advice to give young people starting out in the faith today, I would encourage them to really get to know the Bible—to spend lots of time with it. We all need to be very familiar with, and well grounded in the unchanging instructions and principles of God's Word. I think perhaps we did that a bit more in the early years. Church members really studied the Bible, they knew what it taught, and they patterned their lives and their decisions after it. They might have needed some help from time to time, to discuss applications of biblical principles with others, but the foundation was always the Bible. Fundamental principles like the Ten Commandments will never change, and they should guide all our actions.

Q. Looking back on your years in the Church of God, some of which included some pretty difficult moments, how would you sum things up?

A. Looking back on my life and career, I can say I have no regrets. There have been situations I wish would have been handled differently through the years, but nothing sufficient to cause me any second thoughts. Karen and I feel we've had a very good life. It's been a pleasure to work in the congregations where we've served. We have developed some wonderful friendships that have lasted 30 or 40 years, friendships I simply can't qualify. Some of those good friends are no longer alive, but the memories of such strong friendships can't be replaced. And we have the opportunity to be developing new friendships as time goes on. We've had a very good life; God has been very gracious to us. UN