Herbert W Armstrong’s message contained several doctrinal ties to the Seventh Day Adventists and

The year 1972 had been prominent in Herbert W. Armstrong’s prophetic views, as elaborated in a booklet called 1975 in Prophecy!. January 1972 was supposed to be the conclusion of the second of two 19-year “time cycles” which, according to the elder Armstrong, had begun in 1953 when The World Tomorrow began to be heard over Radio Luxembourg in Europe. According to his theory, at the conclusion of that second 19-year time cycle the members of the church were expected to flee to a place of refuge, which leading ministers had speculated could be the ancient city of Petra, carved into rock in Jordan. Following this flight, World War III supposedly would begin, with an United States of Europe rising up to overthrow both the United States of America and the United Kingdom. This fitted with both of the Armstrongs’ teachings of a theory generally referred to as British Israelism, outlined in the elder Armstrong’s book The United States and Britain in Prophecy.^[6]

When the church’s speculative prophecies about 1972 and 1975 did not occur, Garner Ted Armstrong proposed dropping such an approach in favor of one centered on Christian living and an outline of church doctrines and practice. His establishment of a “Systematic Theology Project” was eventually jettisoned by his father, but a form of it was later adopted by a separate church that Garner Ted would establish.^[7]

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One plan was formulated by Garner Ted Armstrong, who wanted to take the church in a direction built around a larger publishing and broadcasting platform that would go out under his name. Garner Ted was wary of prophecies built around specific dates, and he was reported to be against the idea of continuing to deliver messages that associated the U.S. and Britain with the Lost Ten Tribes. He experimented with turning the church’s flagship magazine, The Plain Truth, into a tabloid-size newspaper in the style of the Christian Science Monitor. He envisioned a television broadcast along the lines of one that was later developed by the Christian Science Church, which created a short-lived nightly news program that was later seen on the Discovery Channel.