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Now Garner Ted seems to be invoking a kind of divine executive privilege about it all. "It is not love to expose someone," he writes in the February issue of the members' magazine Good News. "Causing people to lose confidence in their leaders is one of the most terrible things anyone could do —especially if those leaders happen to be God's very ordained servants ... You don't need to know about anyone's sins."
Armstrong's plea may have sounded somewhat hollow to one former member, Buck Taylor, who recently slapped Herbert with an $11 million damage suit charging that Herbert had accused him of sexual sins ("bestiality ... perversion and homosexuality") at a gathering of some 1,500 members.
The suit, the indignant ex-ministers, and the congregants who have accompanied them out of the Worldwide Church will hardly dislodge Founder Herbert from his posh throne, but they could conceivably induce Garner Ted to step down or initiate his own aggressive program of reform.
*The sect has only 85.000 churchgoers in the U.S. and abroad. But its Plain Truth magazine is mailed free to 3.1 million subscribers each month, and the church probably took in more than $50 million last year from members and sympathizers.