On a Friday in the summer of 2013, Marc Cebrian put on a nice white shirt and a clean pair of slacks for his shift working campus security at the Restored Church of God in Wadsworth.
This wasn’t any typical shift, however. David Pack, the church’s founder and pastor general, had told his flock that Jesus Christ himself would be returning that evening—not just to Earth and not just to Wadsworth, Ohio, but this church. Like thousands of members around the world that night, Cebrian was waiting, waiting for the “fiery chariot of angels” he was told would wrangle everyone together at one location. And that location was 1000 Ambassador Drive.
For Cebrian, a videographer in his forties who’d been hired by the Restored Church of God to help produce an ongoing series of videos to publicize church doctrine, the evening was one of elation and anxiety. Unmarried, Cebrian had sold his home in Oakland, California, and liquidated his retirement fund to help spread the “one and true gospel” on David Pack’s campus. He was thrilled.
“I finally had a purpose in my life,” Cebrian recalled. “To come and work and serve in headquarters and prepare the entire world for the arrival of Jesus Christ?” he said. Cebrian scoffed. “I mean, there was no bigger calling on the planet.”
The sun went down. An hour or so passed as Cebrian and fellow security guards studied the Wadsworth sky. It was quiet. No flaming chariots would show. “I remember feeling, ‘This is a test of faith and we’ll see what happens,’” Cebrian recalled. “But what it really was, was the first sign that I should’ve gotten out of Dodge.”
Cebrian didn’t. Like many others, he remained a member of the Restored Church of God for years before finally leaving the congregation for good in March of 2021. Since then, Cebrian has led a public campaign devoted to outing the Restored Church of God and its pastor general over what he claims is a worldwide scheme to financially enrich the church and its leaders while selling RCG as the oracle for when the Kingdom of God will return to earth.
Pack has failed to prophesize the date, Cebrian reminds followers of his blog and social media channels, “at least 140 times” over the past decade. (144 times as of late May, when another date Pack had prophesied came and went without note.)
But for that insider information, the flock prays and it pays: All baptized brethren sign up to give ten percent of their gross annual income—a tithe—to the church. Another ten percent is given for the Restored Church of God’s annual weeklong, luxury vacation at its Feast of Tabernacles. And, in certain years, yet another ten percent, ex-members told me, is handed over as a “poor tithe” given to church for “the widow, the orphan and Levite,” as Deuteronomy orders. Then, there’s the extra $50 or $100 on the seven Holy Days and maybe more after a particularly moving Saturday service.
But the most intense offering, ex-members explained, is referred to as Common. And it’s the most proving financial test of faith: an ongoing, supposed free-will offering resting in the belief that every single thing you own belongs to God. And if you don’t pay? “Oh, there’s a risk of eternal death,” one ex-member said.
The Common and the yearly tithes around it add up. And it gets spent.
Today, the Restored Church of God’s global headquarters in Wadsworth sits on a lush campus of 100 acres sandwiched between I-76 and a Giant Eagle. There’s the 40,000-square-foot Hall of Administration. The 12,000-square-foot Mail Processing Center. The 4,000-square-foot Media Center. The gardens. The lake. The nine homes for David Pack and his ministers down the road.
To an outsider, RCG’s grandeur might not compute. But for members, tithing means having access to the “one true” church of Christ and Pack’s prophecies—a church with a campus to back it up—as well as salvation once the Kingdom of God arrives. One the Restored Church of God foretells as a “future, world-ruling government that will bring peace, restoration and righteous leadership to the Earth, in which faithful Christians will ultimately rule and reign,” according to its website.
“It’s not the fact of men telling you what to do. You’re sending that money to God, not to men,” former member Peter Baerg, a 47-year-old farmer outside Saskatchewan, Canada, told me. “And if you don’t, you’re gonna burn.”
Plus, who needs money when Jesus Christ is coming back to deliver the Kingdom? That second home, retirement account, or high-yield savings nest will be worthless when it all ends.
“Ministers would call me saying, ‘Jesus Christ is going to return soon,’” Baerg recalled, “‘You don’t have to worry about tax breaks.’”
RCG’s pitch worked in spades. Baerg, who joined with his wife and two daughters, sold off farmland near Saskatchewan to help wire more than a half a million dollars to the Restored Church of God since 2011. Like many who have joined the church, Baerg grew up religious (a Mennonite) and felt compelled to join a group with like principles and religious fervor. RCG, he felt, was “the end all be all.”
But those who have left the church say they have finally seen reality as it is, including about a dozen who spoke to Scene, and they’re not shy about sharing.
“It took me years to do this, but I can clearly and easily say, and I do, that God and the Holy Spirit is not guiding David C. Pack or what happens at the Restored Church of God,” Cebrian said.
As for what he thinks is behind Pack’s mission: “Some say demons. Some say his own ego,” he said. “What I do know is that it’s carnal and it is wicked.”
Herbert Armstrong was a boy from Des Moines, Iowa, who wanted to sell. And he was good at it, selling and designing ad space for the Des Moines Daily Capital. Then, at the onset of World War I, Armstrong married. He moved his family to Eugene, Oregon, where he fell in with Seventh-Day Adventists. He left the ad business to become a minister. In 1934, after disputes over scripture, Armstrong founded his own church. Leveraging the media of the day, he called it the Radio Church of God.
What grew into the Worldwide Church of God in the late 1940s soon became America’s go-to church of prophecy. Christ was to return—to the United States—in 1975, Armstrong belted over the airwaves, and only WCG members, those subscribers to the “World Tomorrow,” would have a front-row seat to his homecoming. Armstrong was as strict in his convictions as his own theology: members must keep the Sabbath and Holy Days just as they must pay their tithes. And they must ignore false prophets (and doctors). “If a man tells you what’s going to happen, wait and see!” Armstrong voiced in one broadcast. “If it doesn’t happen, he’s not speaking the word of God—he’s speaking out of his own mind!”
By the 1970s, WCG had exploded. Thousands attended Armstrong’s Ambassador College in Pasadena, California, hoping to become ministers like him. Proceeds from tuition, along with donations and tithes from its 150,000 members around the world, brought Armstrong’s organization roughly $80 to $100 million a year. It was a religious refuge to many who survived the 1960s and the Vietnam War. They would become “immortal” one day, Armstrong promised, and “become God” themselves.
But 1975 came to America and Christ did not. Two years later, as Armstrong’s son Garner Ted battled sexual assault allegations, six ex-students of Ambassador College accused Armstrong of being a fraud in a 92-page magazine exposé. An ensuing lawsuit accused Armstrong and WCG of “pilfering” church funds, “mishandling $1 million in weekly tithes”—some $70 million a year—and spending church dollars on lavish expenditures for ministers, including homes, paintings, jewelry, gold bullion and private jets. Protests erupted in Pasadena. WCG’s bank accounts were frozen by the state of California. Armstrong fled to Tucson, though he “feared God more than the Attorney General of California.” Six years later, he was dead.
David Pack was in his twenties at the time. An All-American swimmer from Lima, Ohio, Pack passed on a scholarship to Dartmouth to study the Armstrong way in Pasadena. Pack was hooked. He had become a “school outcast,” and had been scrutinized by his family for forgoing an Ivy League education for what was essentially West Point for Bible thumpers. “I was going to continue recording the full biblical proof of absolutely everything,” he says in his biography. So, when California took control of WCG’s bank account, Pack was unflappable in his defense. He chuckled at a reporter trying to out Armstrong. Accusations of his mentor “pilfering” church funds, he said, “were utterly baseless.”
But Armstrong died, Christ didn’t return, and the church lost nearly 100,000 of its members. Pack was one of them. After helping minister at a few WCG offshoots around the Midwest, Pack relocated his wife and three kids to Northeast Ohio. By 1999, he started his own splinter group, calling it the Restored Church of God. Membership ballooned so fast that, by 2007, Pack sought to move from cramped office space on Park Center Drive in Wadsworth to a larger plot. He found 100 acres on the east end of town, rolling greenery covered in forest.
Around the same time, ex-members told me, Pack began peppering his sermons with “clarion” calls for more donations. By the time construction began in 2012, RCG had more than doubled tithe money year over year, Pack’s biography details. Money that would be used, ministers told reporters at the time, to gild David Pack’s Wadsworth palace. Plans included an auditorium with four crystal chandeliers and three miles of wood trim; Versailles-styled gardens; a lake and streams with waterfalls; lit-up walkways and a horse barn. And, by the end of the decade, a nearby cul-de-sac with nine homes to be occupied by RCG’s highest-ranking ministers.
RCG moved into its new headquarters on June 23, 2013. Pack christened the move, funded by bank loans backed by Common collateral, several ex-members said, as the church’s watershed moment. It was “perfect,” he told the Akron Beacon Journal, “for all of our rapidly expanding needs.”
“I envisioned a shimmering jewel befitting the Great God that would be visible—as a biblical ‘city set on a hill’—to literally hundreds of thousands,” he told a reporter at the time. The campus allowed RCG to “explode in size,” he said, “in taking the gospel of the soon coming Kingdom of God.”
That Kingdom, ex-members told me, begins and ends with Pack.
Now in his late seventies, Pack is six-foot-seven with an image that brings to mind the pitchfork-wielding farmer in American Gothic. Like Armstrong before him, he preaches at a desk, in a form-fitting suit, wire-rim glasses and striped tie. He emphasizes Bible verses or sets Christ’s return dates with furrowed brows and wild gesticulations of his hands. As he preaches, which he does for at least two hours in his main hall every Saturday, his voice booms and wails with the timbre of a rollercoaster.
And he commands absolute devotion, namely to himself. To be admitted and baptized into the church, ex-members told me, one must read and study thousands of pages of church literature and Pack’s own 1,200-page biography. You vow to hold the Restored Church of God as the “one true church” and trust that only its pastor can decipher “the world to come.”
“You have to know everything about him,” Elizabeth O’Leary, who left in 2022, told me. “You have to actually admit that David C. Pack is an apostle before you can join the church. You have to verbally admit that” to a minister.
Cebrian recalled his own recitation from 2012. “‘He’s the voice of God and God is using him alone to teach end-time knowledge, to prepare the flock for the arrival of the Kingdom,’” he said. “And you believe it.”
The rules and regulations for members are many, I was told. Some strictures are common to Christianity in general or other religions. Pork and shellfish are “unclean.” Easter and Christmas are “pagan” holidays; RCG members celebrate Hebrew ones instead. (Until last January, members weren’t allowed to observe their birthdays.) Men’s hair can’t be too long or too buzzed. Women can’t wear makeup or nail polish, can’t show too much skin, or don heels higher than two inches. A minister must approve of all marriages.
Others are more unique and restrictive. No one can date or seriously befriend anyone outside of church limits (“the world,” as RCG calls it). Want to marry outside of your race? Forget it, several ex-members told me, as it’s against church doctrine.
Breaking rules has consequences, as one might find in the Amish community. Anyone caught celebrating Christmas or engaging in premarital sex could risk losing their membership and be shunned. Which means no seat at Christ’s government when it’s finally formed.
“It’s almost like information control,” Tabitha, a member who left last summer who didn’t want her real name used because she’s still married to a member, told me. “I feel like Dave Pack uses fear to make people stay where they are because they’re told not to question things. It’s very isolating.”
Another woman, a former RCG employee who gave tens of thousands over the years, said her life was turned upside down after she departed in 2018.
“In one day, I lost my job, my friends, my family, my connections, my church,” she wrote in an email. “No amount of money can fix the broken relationships, the missed opportunities or the fear I had as I walked away.”
Alexandre Desmarais, an ex-member who lives in Montreal who gave more than $100,000 to the Restored Church of God, said he’s had trouble even considering another congregation.
“My faith in God is unshaken,” he said. “But in human institutions? Not so much.”
Others described similar feelings. Shame. Confusion. Anger. And that includes Pack’s own daughter and son-in-law. Kevin and Jennifer Denee played a long version of tug-of-war before finalizing their decision to leave the Restored Church of God in June of 2016. Both grew up surrounded by Armstrongism. Both tithed tens of thousands since the church’s inception. And besides being family members of the pastor, both were once employees or high-ranking ministers.
On a recent visit to their home in Wadsworth, on yet another day Pack predicted Christ would be returning, Kevin characterized his father-in-law as a man consumed by his own prophecies. One who danced around dates just as he continued to prod those around him for more money. For the Denees, that meant selling Dutch paintings or gold heirlooms because, Kevin told me, “we didn’t have a house to sell at that time.”
Eventually, as Jennifer’s two siblings before her did, they turned on the church.
“That combination of a focus on end-time prophecy and the finances meant coming up with more teachings to get more people to give more money,” Kevin said. “I tried to bury it. But it just felt too extreme. Like, I think deep in my soul or my subconscious, this man is asking for too much.”
When I described all of this to Ashlen Hilliard, a cult recovery specialist who left a religious group in her twenties, she explained how people like David Pack can gain the trust of thousands.
“What makes these characters really interesting is not only do they have some sense of charisma, but a spiritual grandeur only they possess,” Hilliard said.
But “it’s hard to know if these characters actually believe what they’re saying, or if they’re just saying it as a greater path to manipulating people to achieve their goals.”
Ex-members aren’t hesitant to say what they think it is.
“I see it as completely illegal behavior,” Baerg, the farmer, told me. “That’s a fuckin’ cult, that’s what that is.”
Neither Pack nor anyone at the Restored Church of God agreed to speak with me or let me attend a sermon in person. The church’s communications department, in response to a detailed list of questions regarding mandatory giving and end-times prophecies, responded generally on RCG’s philosophy.
“We teach biblical tithing and voluntary giving principles based on scripture, consistent with longstanding Christian teachings,” they wrote. They teach of the “soon-coming Kingdom of God, a future, world-ruling government that will bring peace, restoration and righteous leadership to the Earth, in which faithful Christians will ultimately rule and reign with God.” These teachings help members “live more stable and successful lives.”
I shared the response with Cebrian. He reminded me membership is roughly half of what it was circa 2013, in the ballpark of 1,300 members. “It’s a facade,” Cebrian said. “RCG is a bait-and-switch.”
That weekend, Cebrian returned, like he does most weekends, to his computer at his kitchen table, to parse the David Pack sermons that week and analyze them for inconsistencies that he posts meticulously on his website. He cuts videos and writes lengthy summaries using Pack’s words “against him.” When asked when he might stop, Cebrian ironically doesn’t have his own end date in mind.
“I don’t want vengeance against him. And I’m certainly not asking for justice to be put upon him,” he said.
He paused then added, “I mean, I just want mercy for all of us. It’s not up to me. God can handle that.”
Subscribe to Cleveland Scene newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
