GERALD FLURRY

Gerald Flurry was born in Oklahoma City in 1935. He grew up in Oklahoma with a less-than-ideal home life before his life turned around. He wrote that from his father he received “a lot of severe discipline. Some of it I certainly needed, but many of my needs went unfulfilled. So when the time came, I was happy to move out on my own. I wanted to live the ‘exciting life’ everyone in the world was living. Yet it wasn’t that way at all. Soon I felt life was hopeless and empty. I even started trying to prove whether or not there was a God. The more I tried to prove it, the more I thought God did not exist. This discouraged me even more.”

Mr. Flurry’s mother joined the Worldwide Church of God, led by Herbert Armstrong, in 1957. “[F]rom that time until 1961 she tried endlessly to convert me. I rebelled against that and persecuted her for what she was doing,” he wrote. “Whenever Herbert Armstrong came on the radio, she would turn up the volume so I could hear him, and that upset me. I was antagonistic against him and his message—that is, until my life had finally become so miserable and hopeless I would do anything to change it, even if it meant getting interested in ‘mom’s religion.’” Mr. Flurry eventually came to believe in what Mr. Armstrong taught from the Bible, joined the church in 1961 and was baptized. He wrote that since his father had not been taught how to teach him, he came to look to Mr. Armstrong as a father.

Barbara Jeanne Brewer joined the church in her late teens in St. Louis, Mo., and was baptized in the spring of 1964. On November 15, 1964, the two were married. They had a daughter, Laura, in 1967 and later a son, Stephen. Mr. Flurry attended Ambassador College in Pasadena, California, and graduated in 1970. He briefly worked as a writer for the Plain Truth magazine, and then was ordained a minister in 1973. He and his family moved to the Pasco, Wash., area in 1975 and then back to the Oklahoma City area in 1985 where he was a pastor of nearly 500 members. Mrs. Flurry was known to pop in on members with home-cooked meals, a helping hand in cleaning their homes, even tips on used furniture and houses. She was also known for her many phone calls and cards to brethren all over the world; one member in Washington State said, “It was like she lived down the street.” When Herbert Armstrong died in 1986, Mr. Flurry supported his successor, Joseph Tkach. However, when Mr. Tkach and his administration rejected Mr. Armstrong’s teachings and eventually fired Mr. Flurry for continuing to support them, Mr. Flurry founded the Philadelphia Church of God in 1989. He established the Trumpet magazine in February 1990, and a radio program that summer. He established The Key of David television program in January, 1993. He founded a cultural foundation in 1996, a college for church members in 2001 and a grade school in 2008.