Escaping Deception: Jim Valekis on Faith & False Beliefs
About this episode
Jim Valekis joins Philip Cameron to share a remarkable personal journey through three — and arguably four — cultic religious movements, beginning with the Greek Orthodox Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and leading into the Worldwide Church of God founded by Herbert W. Armstrong. Jim explains how a 1960s Life magazine article asking "Is God Dead?" sent a teenage boy into a spiritual crisis that made him vulnerable to Armstrong's radio broadcasts, which offered booklets on biblical proof of God's existence. "It takes a lot of truth to sell a little lie," Jim observes, capturing the seductive logic of cultic doctrine. The conversation moves into the Worldwide Church of God's strict Sabbatarian and Old Testament practices — including a three-tiered biblical tithing system — before tracing Jim's transition into evangelical ministry. There he encountered what he calls the "cult of the American personality," a Declaration of Independence Christianity where personal freedom overrides scriptural authority. He warns that modern churches risk producing spectators rather than disciples, and calls believers back to a marketplace ministry rooted in Christ alone. Jim's book, The Christian in the Cult, is available on Amazon and at smilingicon.com. If you want to understand how deception enters the church, this episode is essential viewing.
Part of our Faith collection of conversations.
Quotes worth sharing
“The devil does not come in with a forked tail and a spear, or whatever you call it, a trident thing. He comes in dressed in the most beautiful clothes, with the best sounding and the best looking and the best everything, because he's a deceiver of the brethren.”
“It takes a lot of truth to sell a lie. That's the problem. You have a tremendous amount of truth. And I would listen and think, wow, that makes so much sense. But all the time in the back of my mind, there was this nagging thing — something, something's not right.”
“I realized I'm not a pastor, I'm a performer, and I've got to continue performing in order to have this opportunity to maybe bring some people as deeply to Christ as I think the scripture wants us to bring them to him.”
What's Discussed
Jim Valekis recounts growing up in the Greek Orthodox Church in Birmingham, Alabama, before a Life magazine cover story on whether God exists drove him to Herbert W. Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God. He details the organization's Sabbatarian theology, Old Testament food laws, and a three-tiered biblical tithing system that sometimes consumed 30% of members' gross income. After the organization reformed doctrinally, Jim transitioned into evangelical ministry, where he encountered a different kind of cult — what he terms the 'cult of the American personality' — and the pressure to be a performer rather than a pastor. His book, The Christian in the Cult, available on Amazon and at smilingicon.com, calls believers to root identity in Christ rather than culture or personality.
- Jim's Greek Orthodox Upbringing
- Life Magazine and the Crisis of Faith
- Herbert Armstrong and the Worldwide Church of God
- Old Testament Laws and Triple Tithing
- Truth Used as a Vehicle for Deception
- Transition to Evangelical Ministry
- Cult of the American Personality
- Marketplace Ministry and Smilingicon.com
Episode Transcript
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Intro
Philip:Hey, welcome to Daily Faith today. My name is Philip Cameron, and I am delighted to have you with me today. We've got a great guest, a great show. This country is in a cult mentality in a lot of Christianity. We follow people. And now let me tell you something.
Philip:I can hear my dad, departed now for 25 years, on Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand. I dare not trust the sweetest frame of mind, but wholly lean on Jesus' name.
Philip:And as we are getting closer to Jesus, whenever they ask Jesus about the end times, this is what he said: be not deceived. And deception is one of the great tools of the enemy to render the church ineffective.
Philip:And we have got a guest today that was in one of these cults. I know the cult because I used to watch Garner Ted Armstrong every Sunday morning, for years, and loved his delivery and how he spoke. And it was so reasoned.
Philip:But I always knew there was something wrong in that. And if you are interested in knowing the truth, you're gonna learn something today. If you love your pastor, listen to me. I'm gonna be talking about a book during this program. If you love your pastor, you will buy him this book,
Philip:because the devil does not come in with a forked tail and a spear, or whatever you call it, a trident thing. He comes in dressed in the most beautiful clothes, with the best sounding and the best looking and the best everything, because he's a deceiver of the brethren.
Philip:That's what he is. And you need to get this book for your pastor, because I believe it's gonna be important. I thought it was gonna be snowing this morning. I was warned and threatened by the weather servers that tomorrow morning the skies are gonna open and Tennessee is going to be swamped with snow.
Philip:Got up this morning, I've got an 8-year-old kid, all my grandkids are off school. I opened the door and there's not a flake of snow anywhere. I'm disappointed, but nevermind. We'll just keep hoping all day that we have snow so that we can go out and play in the snow with my grandkids.
Philip:But I'm delighted to have you with us. We're gonna have a great show. I've just been told on my monitor it is snowing now. So I've got 30 minutes with you today, and by the time we finish it'll be up to my neck, I hope. Not really, I've gotta leave tomorrow.
Philip:I'm preaching down in Mobile this weekend. So we've got to be reasonable in our expectations. Turn on your notifications if you would — that would be a great help for us — and share this with a friend if you are watching this on any social media platform, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube.
Philip:We've got a YouTube address, YouTube forward slash Daily Faith, and you can get watches there. Our Daily Faith TV is our home base. All of the programs we've made are stored, there is an index there.
Philip:And you can go back and pretty much any subject in your life that you're facing, we've got someone talking about it on Daily Faith. We started this program during COVID because a lot of pastors were calling me and asking me what was going on in the other churches that I traveled in. And I would speak with a pastor
Philip:and get him to share his situation. And my son says, why don't we do this on a podcast, on a TV program? And that's what we've been doing, and we are amazed at people enjoying my funny accent. I'm Scottish, in case you wonder where I'm from,
Philip:in case you thought I was an Irishman. And we are having a tremendous time meeting new people. And today Jim is with us and he is going to share hope and truth for you in your circumstance. I am absolutely delighted to have you with us. Welcome to Daily Faith.
Philip:Hello, my friend. It's good to have you with us on Daily Faith. We are just so excited to have you with us. And as we start this new year, I am praying and believing God that this year is a year of abundance in your life.
Philip:Abundance of peace. You see, we always think of abundance as in money. Let me tell you something. Money can't buy love. Money can't buy peace. The Beatles sang about it a long time ago. The only thing that really makes you happy is having peace in your heart, love in your life,
Philip:and Jesus Christ as your Lord, and everything else is up for auction. Everything else in your life is up for auction. Only Jesus matters. Only Jesus matters. And we here at Daily Faith and the Orphan's Hands are just absolutely delighted to have you with us.
Philip:I want you to stay with us this year. We are on here most times this day, at this time, and on Facebook and YouTube and all these other things. Share it, hit that notification bell so that we can get in contact with you when we're on the air live.
Philip:But also share it with your friends, because the reason why we are here is because we wanna be a part of your daily walk with the Lord Jesus. That's why it's called Daily Faith. We want to affirm you. There's nothing more powerful — listen to me — there's nothing more powerful than a word, a real word
Philip:of affirmation in your heart. I'll never forget the day — this is in the natural realm — I was driving my car in Montgomery, Alabama. 1170 was the local news station. And I switched on the radio going to do something, and I heard this voice on the radio
Philip:with talent on loan from God. And I said, who the heck's that? My wife said, that's Rush Limbaugh on the radio. And this conservative thinking man began to speak things that I'd thought for many, many years in my life.
Philip:And he articulated what my belief system was. I pulled over on the side of the road and listened to him. And I thought, wow, that's the power of affirmation. And what we try and do here at Daily Faith is to have people come in and speak into your life.
Philip:An affirmative word. You're believing right, you're walking right, you're seeking right. And by doing so, it gives you an anchor for the rest of your day. And we are absolutely delighted to have you with us. We've got a great friend, a great guest today — he is a new friend.
Philip:He's written a book about the Christian in the cult. You need to get this book. Get a piece of paper and a pen and we'll be telling you how to get it afterwards. We are suffering today in the church from a cult personality problem.
Philip:And we put our hope on men and not on Jesus. And I'll promise you, you can write this down on whatever date this is in January. Write this thing down and say, if I trust in man, I'm gonna get disappointed. Because all men are failures. All men outside of Jesus, all women — we all have sinned
Philip:and come short of the glory of God. The only hope we have is being founded and grounded and grafted into the Lord Jesus Christ. So Jim's gonna be talking to us today about what his experience was. I think it was called the Church of Tomorrow. Is that right, Jim?
Philip:The Worldwide Church of God. Now I remember. And I used to watch this guy called Garner Ted Armstrong, who was a son of Herbert Armstrong. And I used to enjoy watching him, but boy, they were a cult. And you're gonna be hearing that today.
Philip:It is exciting. We have a ministry work in Moldova. We started, oh dear Lord, 35 years ago. I adopted a wee boy from Romania in an orphanage. And I had no idea that by adopting him, I'd end up in a whole lifetime of this.
Philip:In fact, my wife was leaving with my daughter in a few days to fly to Moldova. We've sent a container with all kinds of supplies and clothes and stuff, and Christmas presents for orphans and orphanages and our own kids in our homes. And so we are involved in rescuing
Philip:and saving kids, especially young girls, from going into trafficking. A girl with no hope and no future is easy prey for these guys. In fact, January is anti-human trafficking month. And these guys offer them bogus jobs.
Philip:And these kids get in the back of the car. A woman comes up and says, I'm looking for a nanny for my grandkids. And they get in the car and they're gone. They use them 30 to 50 times a day until they kill them. And we have homes at a great place called
Philip:Vara Village in Moldova. We also have a home in Ukraine. That video you looked at just now is Vara Village. All those red roofs are our homes right there, right on the largest lake in Moldova. That village was built for rich people and they poisoned the lake
Philip:to kill the algae in the lake. And we bought it unfinished. And every girl you see caught by a trafficker that's now in our place and safe is worth $300,000 a year to the trafficker if they can get one of those girls.
Philip:So every three girls you see is almost a million dollars the trafficker can make. And we take them to our houses. All of the house parents were once orphans themselves, and they have prayer times and they go to church and they're involved in church, they go to university. We've got doctors and lawyers
Philip:and police officers coming out of our place with no hope. And Jesus and the gospel transforms lives and we are loving it. We just got a video for the end of the year from last year. All the videos you see, including that one you saw right now, are made by our kids.
Philip:We don't have a big production TV crew over there that we spend thousands of dollars on. Our kids make these videos and send them to us. It's incredible. And we just got this the other day, and it'll give you an idea of some of the stuff that we're doing. Watch this.
Philip:Isn't that miraculous? What we've learned is by taking our kids — when they come to us first, they're broken. They're being abused in the orphanage system, abused by poverty. And the quickest way we've learned how to change their mindset is to let them give out stuff
Philip:and in serving others. And it's a good lesson for all of us, I think. And what they do is they are nonstop out there. They adopt a village and they'll find every widow and every broken family in the village, and they bring them food. And in fact, right now as we speak,
Philip:we're in the middle of a challenge. Winter in Romania and Moldova and Ukraine is just desperately cold. And we found a company that we can buy a great big bag of wood. It's an industrial-sized bag. I don't know if we've got a photograph
Philip:to show you. And these bags each cost us $65 per bag. And what we can do is we deliver this to a family,
Philip:a poor family, and it keeps them alive for one month of wood. And so for $65, you can bring hope to a widow. And the fact that the wood is already chopped saves them just misery beyond belief.
Philip:And so we are asking folk right now, for the next couple of months, if you could give a gift of $65. For every $65 you give — our businessmen watching right now, you could help 10 families. And our folk here that are watching could help a hundred families. And by helping these kids, it's a twofold blessing.
Philip:You help the family, of course, but what you're doing is you're loving an orphan to give something away. And an orphan has never given anything away in their life. They've always been receiving, always been the recipient of second-rate, poor stuff. And when we can let our kids go out there
Philip:and bring food, and have these camps all through the summertime and Christmas programs all through the autumn and into Christmastime, what it's doing is it's rewiring their spirits to let them know that they are the head and not the tail.
Philip:That they are something special. And our motto of our homes amongst our kids is, if you are born, God has a plan. You are not a mistake. And we are watching these kids overcome incredible stuff. We're taking more kids in this year.
Philip:In fact, we're believing God to buy two houses with an orchard and a barn. We're gonna make the barn a youth camp. And the two houses are gonna be used for small kids, four to 16, so we can help them from being abused in their young years
Philip:so they can come to Vara Village and go to school without the scarring that they've had to live with the rest of their lives. All of that part of a ministry is done by someone giving a dollar a day. You can be a hero for a dollar a day. You can change someone's life — who they marry, their kids.
Philip:I mean, we are watching it all the time. All the parents in our village that are caring for these kids were once orphans that we rescued, and now they're married with their own families. And they have found hope and peace in Jesus. So if you could, you can write this right now. It's really simple.
Philip:The Orphan's Hands, PO Box 25, Clinton, Tennessee 37716. We'll leave it up on the show so you can take the note down. The quickest way is to go online, DailyFaith.tv. There's a giving page there and you just say this is to help us with the kids.
Philip:You can help. This is for wood. You tell us what you want to do and we will do it, I promise. And also you can go on TheOrphansHands.org, that is our webpage. And there's also an 800 number you can call right now. Someone real and live is there waiting for your call.
Philip:It's 833, and just dial Daily Faith on your phone pad. Daily Faith, that's all. And someone will pick up the phone and receive your gift. Please do something to help us. We are a little ministry doing big ministry stuff.
Philip:And every time someone comes to Moldova and visits — if you're a pastor, we'd love to have you come and see what we're doing — what happens is they always say, every time they tell us, they'll say, this is nothing like we thought it was. You are doing way more than you say you're doing.
Philip:And that's the way I like to do it. These houses that these kids live in are nicer than my house. I decided to treat an orphan like Jesus would treat an orphan, not giving them the junk, but giving them the best. And it is working in their lives. So please help us today.
Philip:Jim is a man of a lot of experience. He's gone through some mills, I'll promise you. And he's written this book entitled The Christian in the Cult. And he's gonna talk to you today about how Christians still today are in the maze
Philip:of cultism in America. And I'm just delighted to have Jim with us. Welcome, Jim. Thank you so, so much for coming to be with us on Daily Faith.
Jim:Well, thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to it and I've enjoyed hearing about your ministry. It's amazing. I'm gonna — I'll be giving myself, you've talked me into it.
Philip:That's not why we asked you on the program, I promise you.
Jim:No, but I'm sorry.
Jim's Greek Orthodox Upbringing
Philip:You have joined — you have lived an incredible life. And I used to watch the Armstrongs
Philip:and the program on Sunday mornings in hotel rooms as I traveled all across America. And the son, Garner Ted, was a tremendous communicator. I mean, one of the best I've ever seen. And so you were in the
Philip:Worldwide Church of God during this time and not even knowing that you were in a cult. Let me tell you how the story began, because I think in hindsight, as I look at my life, I've been in three cults, actually four.
Jim:Let me explain what I mean by that. Like you, you're Scottish, I'm Greek. I could do the accent if you wanted me to, but I was born in Alabama with a bouzouki on my knee. So I've got a lot of southern in there.
Philip:I was born in Scotland. I've got an excuse.
Jim:Well, I had a lot of Greek relatives and I could tell you lots of stories, but right now I wanna tell you this story. I grew up in the Greek Orthodox Church and it was an amazing, technicolor experience of faith
Jim:and of sounds and of colors and of liturgy. But at the age of about 13 or 14, I saw this Life magazine article entitled, Is God Dead? And that stopped me in my tracks, because through my years of being kind of like the
Jim:funny kid of immigrant children, bonding in a little blue-collar neighborhood in Birmingham, Alabama, God found me, or I found God, or both. And God had become very important to me. And the thought that God might be dead
Jim:was terrifying to me. So I went into kind of like a period of searching, almost a depression. I'm not sure it really was a depression, but did God exist? I studied, I went to the Greek priest. My father got me to talk to him.
Jim:And the church is an amazing church. Their doctrine is by and large some of the best in the faith, but they were so focused on their culture and on culturally succeeding in the culture of the Birmingham of the day.
Life Magazine and the Crisis of Faith
Jim:There was a lot of things going on — Martin Luther King, the riots and that sort of thing — that he talked to me for five minutes, gave me a few platitudes, and did nothing to help me with my questions. We had a beautiful liturgy in the Greek Orthodox Church.
Jim:We didn't have a whole lot of the Bible. So as I was searching, as I was waiting to find out what was my answer, I remember driving home somewhere and it was in the dark, it was in the dusk. I heard this voice on the radio offering two booklets:
Jim:Does God Exist? and The Proof of the Bible. That was the voice of Herbert W. Armstrong, who founded what became the Worldwide Church of God, and later a magazine called The Wonderful World Tomorrow. So that's where you got that name. And his son actually was the key speaker.
Jim:But I wrote for those booklets, and those booklets, even though the doctrine of the church was wrong, put my nose in the Bible. And even when you're reading the Bible wrongly, you still feel the presence of the Lord.
Jim:And there was a way they had of luring you through the scriptures and helping you to understand this and that, line upon line and precept upon precept. And lo and behold, I found myself empowered and very convinced that there indeed was a God.
Jim:So this group gave me God back. In a way, in a way that my previous culture — I won't call it like a crazy Jim Jones kind of cult, but my cultic church, my Greek Orthodox church, which was at that time, for my experience, more focused on being Greek
Jim:than it was on being Orthodox. Romania and Moldova has the Russian Orthodox Church, which is exactly the same. Anyway, I got my nose in the Bible. And so being 13, 14 years old — and they say that a lot of Christians today have kind of like a Reader's Digest knowledge of the Bible, just enough
Herbert Armstrong and the Worldwide Church of God
Jim:to be dangerous and just enough to be easily misled. And so they hit me with the questions: what day is God's true Sabbath? What worship days did God command? And if you wanna look at what days God commanded, put your nose in the Bible.
Jim:Look at the Ten Commandments, the Sabbath day. And I know the right approach to the Sabbath right now, but back then the whole premise of that organization was that the way that Christians in the world were doing it, by worshiping on Sunday
Old Testament Laws and Triple Tithing
Jim:and keeping what they called pagan holy days like Christmas and Easter, was wrong, and that to please God you had to keep the Sabbath and that you had to keep the biblical holy days as well. So bless their hearts, they put my nose in the Bible.
Jim:And I even lived in a world where, believe it or not, some of the most responsive Christians I'd ever met were in that organization. They were willing to lose jobs because they wanted to obey God and not break the Sabbath. They followed all of the Old Testament laws, or many of them, the food laws.
Jim:They even followed — and this will surprise a lot of people — the three biblical tithing laws in the Bible. There's the first tithe that you give to the temple or to the church. There's a second tithe that you keep for keeping
Jim:religious festivals, the holy days. And then there's a third tithe every three years that you keep to take care of the widow and the fatherless and the Levite. So there would be some years that these people would not only pay 15 to 20% in social security and taxes,
Jim:but 30% on the gross in tithes. And they were living off of 50% of their income. But I've got to tell you, because they were doing it for God and because their faith was in him,
Jim:God blessed them. There will be people — I could line up people that could tell you that out of those experiences, their years when they were paying their third tithes were better financially than years when they weren't paying it. The thing is, and this is where — our doctrine was cultic
Truth Used as a Vehicle for Deception
Jim:and our religious hierarchical government was without a doubt cultic and open to abuses. But it takes a lot of truth to sell a lie. That's the problem. You have a tremendous amount of truth. And I would listen and think, wow, that makes so much sense. But all the time in the back of my mind, there was this nagging thing — something, something's not right.
Philip:And when did you come to — we've got six minutes left — when did the realization come, and you moved out of that, and what did you move into from that experience?
Jim:I'll go and fast forward because my history has been jumping from one cult to another cult to another cult. The organization, because it believed in the Bible and letting the Bible correct it, did reform doctrinally.
Transition to Evangelical Ministry
Jim:When they reformed, we were plunged back into the world of mainstream American Christianity. And I became, I guess you would say, an evangelical Christian pastor, first
Jim:reorganizing a church around the truth of the doctrines, but then attempting to reach the community in the same way that many evangelical churches have to do it to be successful. And all of a sudden, after several years of doing it, I was successful.
Jim:I baptized a lot of people. I brought a lot of people to Christ and to church. But I found that when I tried to bring them to that passion for the scriptures and living like those people in the organization used to live, I couldn't do it.
Jim:And that was because American Christianity has been lensed through the cult of the American personality, which is based on your personal freedom to believe whatever you wanna believe, and nobody can tell you what to believe.
Cult of the American Personality
Jim:And that's not exactly — that's a little bit of a hyperbole, but you get my drift. I call it Declaration of Independence Christianity. Nobody, sometimes even God, can tell you what to do unless you want to do it.
Jim:And I found out what it was like to grow a successful church in this society. You had to have the four Bs. You had to have Bibles, you had to have buildings, you had to have bucks, but you also had to have box-office-draw pastors
Jim:that could keep the attention of the people in a world where there were so many things competing for their attention. And all of a sudden I ran into some hardship with that. I could not stop trying to help people be
Jim:as passionate about the scripture as we had been. And then I ran into some run-ins too with my former denomination and some different issues. But all of a sudden I realized I'm not a pastor, I'm a performer, and I've got to continue performing
Jim:in order to have this opportunity to maybe bring some people as deeply to Christ as I think the scripture wants us to bring them to him. And then as my doctrine grew and changed, I went back to actually some of the pure Trinitarian doctrine of the early Orthodox Church.
Jim:There's a scripture that says, in him we live and move and have our being. So who's not in that sense in Christ? It's just like you've said, if somebody's been born, they've got a part to play. They are important.
Jim:They are a miraculous creation of God, whom God loves. And I think the problem in the church is that we've been turned into spectators. When I was growing up in church, my dad was a pastor, and you better have somebody to talk about. You better have a testimony
Jim:or a thought every time you come to church, because he believed in church participation. And we've come to the point now that we just sit down and get spoon-fed for an hour on a Sunday morning — not an hour and ten minutes, it better be just an hour. And we're not having a commitment
Philip:to this thing. In your book, The Christian in the Cult, I really think that there's information in here that pastors would be benefited by reading. And so I really want you to talk — we've only got two minutes left.
Philip:Tell us about this book and how folk can get in contact with you to get this book.
Marketplace Ministry and Smilingicon.com
Jim:Okay. You can find the book on Amazon. You can find it on my website, SmilingIcon.com. And even if you read the book and don't wanna read my story,
Jim:although I think it's got something to tell people, read the past few chapters and discover what it means to be a Christian in Christ. Not a Christian in your culture, not a Christian in some type of cultic expression, not a Christian in the way you've always done things,
Jim:but a Christian because you live and move and have your being in Christ. And you are working among people who live and move and have their being in Christ, even if they don't know it. We don't have to bring Christ to anybody. He's already there. We just have to help them to see where he is,
Jim:recognize him, and build on what he's doing.
Philip:Absolutely. And when you take that approach, like I'm doing right now in a marketplace ministry — part of the Smiling Icon, a thing that you can read about on my website — you have opportunities every day
Philip:to advance the Kingdom of God, shoulder to shoulder. I call it marketplace ministry. And that's what we're gonna do. SmilingIcon.com. Right now the site is new, is getting refreshed as we speak, but get in contact with him and this book is available on Amazon as well. The Christian in the Cult.
Philip:And I think there is information in there that your pastor may find valuable to help him through the maze of all these distractions pulling the church one way and the other. It all boils down to this: on Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand. The older I get, the more conservative I get in my belief, in my faith.
Philip:And so thank you, Jim, for being with us. We'll have you back on again. Thank you for watching Daily Faith. Pray about helping us in our mission work. So many lives depend on what you do and we can change the world together. We love you. Thanks for watching us today. Bye-bye.
For over 25 years, the Cameron family has been changing the lives of orphans in Romania and Moldova, from providing running water, flushing toilets, and clean wells to coal for heat, new windows, as well as food and clothing. They champion the physical needs of the orphans in these broken and desolate countries. Many of Moldova's orphans are saved from the horrors
of trafficking through homes founded by the Camerons. And in the process, orphans become daughters and sons. They come to know their heavenly Father and are forever changed by the love of Jesus. God help the Camerons lift these amazing young men
and women out of darkness. Now no longer orphans, they want to return and invade that very same darkness with the light of Jesus Christ. The Orphan's Hands equips these daughters and sons to become missionaries.
Your monthly gift of $31 will allow us to rescue and take in more girls and boys, saving them from the hell of human trafficking. Your monthly partnership will allow us to care for those in the Orphan's Hands homes in Moldova and Ukraine.
If you want to join Philip and Chrissy in taking care of these precious young people, please contact us today by calling 833-Daily-Faith. You can also give by going online to www.DailyFaith.tv,
or by writing to PO Box 25, Clinton, Tennessee 37716. So many lives depend on what we do. Thank you for loving the lost.
Common questions
How did Jim first get drawn into the Worldwide Church of God?
As a teenager, Jim was shaken by a Life magazine article asking 'Is God Dead?' and began desperately searching for answers. He heard Herbert W. Armstrong on the radio offering free booklets called 'Does God Exist?' and 'The Proof of the Bible,' wrote for them, and found that — even though the church's doctrine was wrong — those booklets put his nose in the Bible and ultimately restored his faith in God.
What made the Worldwide Church of God feel so convincing even though it was a cult?
Jim says 'it takes a lot of truth to sell a lie.' The group had members who were genuinely passionate about Scripture, willing to lose jobs to keep the Sabbath, and followed Old Testament tithing laws so strictly that some were living on 50% of their income — yet Jim says God still blessed them for their sincerity. That real spiritual fruit made the underlying doctrinal errors much harder to spot.
What does Jim mean by 'Declaration of Independence Christianity'?
Jim uses the term to describe a mindset he encountered in mainstream American evangelical churches where personal freedom overrides spiritual accountability — the idea that nobody, sometimes not even God, can tell you what to believe or how to live. He found this attitude made it nearly impossible to cultivate the deep, scripture-driven commitment he had seen in his former organization.
What are the 'four Bs' Jim says you need to grow a successful church in America?
Jim says a successful American church needs Bibles, buildings, bucks, and box-office-draw pastors — preachers who can hold people's attention in a world full of competing distractions. He admits he eventually felt more like a performer than a pastor, which troubled him deeply.
What is the core message of Jim's book 'The Christian in the Cult,' and where can you get it?
Jim says the book's heart is about being a Christian rooted in Christ himself — not in your culture, your denomination, or any cultic expression of faith. His key point is that we don't need to bring Christ to people because he is already present in their lives; our job is simply to help them recognize him. The book is available on Amazon and at SmilingIcon.com.
Topics
jim valekisworldwide church of godcult deceptionherbert armstrongmarketplace ministrysabbatarianismamerican christianity