The year was 1958. Allie and I had just moved to Pasadena California to attend Ambassador College. We were very young, and excited. I was 24 years old and embarking on what would ultimately change the entire direction of my life and bring me to where I am today. I got a job on campus, earning 1 dollar and 25 cents an hour. Allie went to work at the Bank of America earning rather more than that.

We were still as poor as church mice in those days. There were times when the college couldn't meet payroll and unless you came in with an emergency, they would hold your check and promised to give it to you sometime later on. Thanks to Allie's job we made it through, even though there were times when we had nothing to eat, but beans and cornbread. But having been brought up on beans and cornbread, both of us were able to make it through. When I graduated from Ambassador College, I was able to pay off my entire debt to the college with salary checks I never got. So I was out of debt when I graduated from college, that is something not many students these days can be able to say.

But in 1958 after dragging our entire earthly belongings from Abilene, Texas to Pasadena in a 5' x 12' U-Haul trailer, you all know what those things look like, you see them interminably along the road. In those days it didn't say 'Adventure in Moving,' it was just implied.

When we got to Pasadena, after going from Abilene, Texas to Pasadena, we found that the Feast of Tabernacles was coming and it was in Glade Water, Texas which called upon us to go all the way back across the country to Glade Water again. The problem was we didn't have enough money. We just flat didn't have enough money.

We had not known about the doctrine of the Festival Tithe long enough to have saved any, or at least not very much. Leroy Neff, of which some of you would know, offered to have the church give us the money so we could go to the Feast of Tabernacles along with everybody else, but we had just read an old article by Dick Armstrong, another name that some will know, most will not. It said that you really couldn't keep the Feast properly unless you had saved Festival Tithe, and he made his case going through the Bible. I think the motivation behind the article was that people were charging off to keep the Feast with insufficient funds and were getting in trouble, being hung out to dry almost, as a result of doing that, and his point was, if you hadn't saved enough money to go to the Feast, then stay at home. You can't really do it like God wants you to do it anyway.

So it would have put us in a bind, because Allie had just got her job at the bank and she couldn't afford to be taking off after two or three weeks on the job, to be gone for a week and a half, so we declined the offer and decided we'd stay put.

The scripture that Dick Armstrong used was Deuteronomy 14 verse 22, "You shall truly tithe all the increase of your grain that the field brings forth year-by-year. {23} And you shall eat before the LORD your God, in the place which He chooses to make His name abide, the tithe of your grain and your new wine and your oil, the firstborn of your herds and flocks, so you can learn to serve the LORD your God always."

The whole idea was, you take about one tenth of your production as a farmer. You save it up and use it to go to the Feast of Tabernacles and you eat all that stuff there. You really would have plenty to eat, plenty to share and you could really have a good old time.

If it was too far for you, which for some people it would've been, then turn it into money and take it with you and buy what you need there and really have a rip-roaring good time at the Feast of Tabernacles.

The idea seems to be that if you saved the equivalent of a tenth in order to be able to go to the place which God chose, have a really good time and actually live at a higher level than you might live for the rest of the year.

Now I've addressed the question of the Festival Tithe in an article available on our website or we will also print you out a hard copy, if you don't have access to the web, so feel free to ask for it and I won't bother going into it here.

The buckshot of it was, we stayed home for our first Feast of Tabernacles and saved for the next Feast. I'm really glad we did because it was a part of the lesson that I think we needed to learn about how we're going to serve God.

We went to the next Feast with enough money to really enjoy the trip and the Feast and we were young in those days, and even the trip was an adventure and it was a lot of fun and we got to stay in motels that were better than we would normally have stayed in and we got to eat in restaurants that were better than we normally would have eaten in and we just thoroughly enjoying it.

The Feast of Tabernacles was a pilgrimage festival and it was a time of year when you hit the road and became a pilgrim again. At that time there was one, and as far as I know, only one Feast of Tabernacles held anywhere in the United States and there was only one location. We called it Glade Water. It only became Big Sandy, Texas sometime later, perhaps because it was closer to Big Sandy than it was to Glade Water but that's what we always heard people saying, "We are going to Glade Water for the Feast of Tabernacles."

The Feast had been held there for many years, in a small redwood building, but in 1958 they had put up, because of growth, a new metal building and by the time I got there in 1959 they had expanded that because it was not really big enough. I don't remember, maybe Larry may know, did that building seat 7,000 or 5,000. Five, okay close to 5,000. I really couldn't put that together so it would seat about 5,000 people and the first year I went, it was pretty full. I mean it was wall-to-wall and I don't know what the attendance was that year, but it was substantial. I don't think, except for maybe a Billy Graham rally, that we had ever been in that large of a congregation to worship, to experience the singing and all the things that we did.

Now, if you know anything about Glade Water and Big Sandy, you will know what a housing problem that created with 5,000 people coming down on that place. I don't recall a single condominium for rent in those years. The nearest motel was in Glade Water. I don't think there was any lodging in Big Sandy. The Glade Motel was the only motel in Glade Water, and the next one was another 30 miles away in Longview. And so it went, you know people were scattered all over East Texas as best they could, but guess where most of them were, they were camped out, up in the piney woods, where campgrounds had been prepared and where there were showers and restrooms built every so often and they camped out at the Feast.

I was kind of sorry that I never got to do that. We stayed in motels in Longview and drove back and forth every time. But the idea of being camped out in a big campground with a lot of people you know and like and where you can wander up and down the rows of tents running into somebody at every step and where somebody is having a big cookout and calls you to come over and sit down and say, "Here, have a hamburger," and it is really wonderful fellowship, I think that existed in the feasts in those early years.

Now those early feasts were far from comfortable or convenient, but I came to love the Feast of Tabernacles. It was then and now the high point of my year, and I expect it always will be.

Having just returned from the Feast, experiencing it once again, I've been reflecting this week on "Why that is so, and why it is that I love the Feast of Tabernacles." One of the primary reasons was, when we came to the Feast, we did not feel so alone.

When I was ordained in 1961 on the Last Great Day of the Feast, I was minister number 42 in the Radio Church of God, as it was known then. There were only 41 ministers prior to that time. Several of them were at headquarters and the rest of them were scattered far and wide across the country and there were really relatively few churches.

In fact, at the time I first went into the field to two brand-new churches in Little Rock and Memphis, there was no church going east from Little Rock and Memphis, except for the one in New York City. That was it.

But that's all there was to the ministry, and because the Church had grown out of the World Tomorrow radio program, the people were scattered far and wide, and the metaphor of salt being shaken out across the landscape is very useful because that's precisely the way everybody was. They lived in a world where their beliefs and practices seem strange. There was no one that they could routinely sit down and talk to about their beliefs. They just felt alone. They could write letters to one another. They could write letters to headquarters and wait for however long it was from the U.S. Postal Service to get a reply back to them.

You have to remember, there were no cell phones in those days. Long-distance calls were expensive. There were no tape recorders. There was no means of that kind of communication and so those scattered people hung on the words of the radio program. I can remember us going down to our cars, and sit in the car listening to the World Tomorrow program out of XCG in Monterey Mexico, because we couldn't get it on the radio in the house and could just barely get it in the car.

When you tell that story to the old-timers in the church, they will sit there and nod their head. It probably wasn't XCG, but maybe WOAI, or one of those 50,000 Watt Clear Channel stations that they could get, if they had a very good radio, or if they put their hand on the antenna and stood in the right position, they could actually listen to the program. That's the way it was.

So when those people came to the Feast, the Feast was precious. In a way I don't think many of the people who are relatively new to the Church have any idea, what it was like in those days. A lot of those people, if they ever went to church, had to drive two hours one way to get there, sometimes more, depending on how intrepid they were, very commonly their drive was 45 minutes, an hour, or an hour and half.

When we established the Memphis Church in 1961, we had I think 25 or 26 visits in West Memphis and after that it was nearly an hour drive to the next visit we had, of the 150 people who attended that church on occasion.

So it was, they were just all over the place. They were down in Tupelo Mississippi. They were off somewhere in northeast Arkansas. They were down in Louisiana, wherever it was, where ever we could drag them out from to get them to come to Church in Memphis, so everybody was very badly scattered and as they came to the Feast, the fellowship with one another was absolutely precious.

We had two services a day, every day, and no one thought of thing about it. Nobody was moaning about, "I want to go play golf today." That seems unthinkable today, but you have to realize how different it was back in those times.

As I said the cassette tape had not been invented. That means of spreading information was not there. Nobody had a personal computer or the Internet. In fact back in those days, the personal computer, that will do what you have one in your house today, would almost fill this room in terms of the wiring, the vacuum tubes, and so on and would generate enough heat to heat up an apartment building if you didn't take to keep it cool.

People came to the Feast of Tabernacles like a starving man comes to a banquet. They really did, because all they had was printed literature, and a radio program throughout the year and at the Feast they could hear sermon after sermon after sermon and they wanted to! They were there. They didn't mind. Nobody complained about the length of the sermon, but they complained that they didn't get enough. That was the way it was.

I will not call those the good old days, I think I like it better now, but I am telling you these stories to help you understand, why it was, that the Feast was so precious to all of us.

Song services were big, so were the sermons. We heard sermons from some really great speakers, some of whom you have never heard of. You have never heard them. You never will. They are dead and they were not recorded.

Garner Ted Armstrong could leave us hanging from our seatbelts at the end of the sermon and often did. Everybody was very anxious to hear him because he was so dynamic. I can remember a sermonette by David Antion, I can remember to this day, of him standing up holding up the lightbulb and using the light bulb as a metaphor for his sermonette. I will never forget a sermon by David Jon Hill in which he described David killing Goliath, and the descriptive power of that man was awesome. He was probably the best speaker that existed in the Radio Church of God. We heard from Herbert Armstrong before he began to decline later in life, and he was pretty good in those days.

Now that may seem strange to some today, when it is fashionable to kind of dis (showing disrespect to) the old church, but most of the people really relished the Feast in those days. It was the high point of their year. They loved it. They loved to come. They would plan for it all year long. They went to great pains to get their car ready for the Feast, with oil changes and a new set of tires if they could manage it and all the stuff that they did, and of course, once the smell of autumn was in the air and once the trees started to turn, the desire for it is so strong.

In 1962, Allie and I were transferred to the college in Bricket Wood in England. My job was going to be to teach Bible and speech over there. Our first Feast of Tabernacles there was, awesome is not really the word for that first Feast of Tabernacles. Uh, it was quite an experience. The Feast was held in what the English call a Holiday Camp. Now you should know that in England the word 'holiday' means vacation. They say, "How did you enjoy your holidays this year?" When we would say, "How did you enjoy your vacation?"

A Holiday Camp was a low-rent place, for British working class people, to go and have a vacation, to have a holiday, with entertainment and food and a place to stay. They were in a word 'Spartan' in their facilities. It was low-rent and I do mean low-rent. The camp was customary only open in the summer so there was no heat in the individual chalets and it is common in Europe, the individual units had no bath and no toilet. It had a washbasin and that's all.

Now all of this is fine, but this was in October in England and the camp would have normally been closed except for getting us in there and it was cold, especially for someone having come back from Texas. It was downright cold over there. The only place I was ever warn during the entire feast was in the bathtub. The bathtub was in another building, actually it was a part of it. The chalets were laid out in a long row and there was a bath area in the middle with toilets and all, and then there was another row of chalets beyond that.

We would kind of plan for it, we would go down and run a tub full of hot water, get down in the hot water and get warm for a few minutes and incidentally get clean at the same time, but there were no showers. Everything was tubs, and I recall one day putting my hands in hot water in the basin, just standing there with my hands in hot water to just kind of feel a little bit of warmth that might make its way through the rest of my body.

To prepare a sermon, and the only place I had to work was in my chalet. We would fill two hot water bottles with hot water. I would put on my overcoat and I knelt on the floor by the bed with one of the hot water bottles on my chest as I leaned over the bed and the other one behind my knees and underneath the overcoat and I had my pen, my notes and my Bible. That's how I prepared my sermon so that I would not be shaking all time and I would be able to read my notes when I got up to preach.

Food was mass prepared by the camp and it was, I don't know if I would say filling, but it sort of got you through the day. It was not what I would call inspiring. But I still loved the Feast.

When I wonder again why, given all that, I would have to conclude, it's because we were all together and we were worshiping the God that we had all come to know and we had something in common with everyone around us, except the camp staff, that we just never had at home, and it was much more of an occasion for the people who were not involved with us at the college. Those of us at the college were around fellow Christians all the time. But I'm talking right now about the people who were scattered all over the place, some in Scotland, some in Wales and Northern Ireland and people who had at oftentimes come long distances. You know 150 mile drive in England takes three hours, before the motorway system and that is what we are talking about. It is not like driving in this country. Nothing was like driving in this country. It is just a totally different world environment. But I still loved it.

It was a shared experience and there was only one site, by the way, in Britain, not multiple sites, so the whole church was there and it produced a kind of spiritual bonding. I don't how to describe it, in any other way. It was so special and we were so special to one another, that to this day, some of them, I'm still bound in my heart to them.

Was there complaining? Well that raises an interesting story. Now you know, you couldn't get through the week without somebody complaining, right? Well Raymond McNair, bless his heart, was a fellow who wanted us to not be like the ancient Israelites. We were not supposed to complain and I don't know if it was the announcements or sermons or both, or what have you, but he was constantly on us about not complaining. One day in the ministers' dining room, we were sitting there, and served the soup, we always had soup to start with. That is one thing the British did very well, but on this occasion, somebody had dumped too much salt in the soup and David Wainwright who was sitting across the table, said "AH, this soup is to salty!" And Raymond McNair turned and looked at him, and David' said, "Just the way I like it!"

You know you build these memories and memories are oftentimes built out of hardship, out of inconvenience, out of frustration. You know I can't help but recall that that's part of what the Feast of Tabernacles is about, the temporary nature of life, camping out in the wilderness for 40 years on your way to the promised land. Of all the things that people can learn and to enjoy together and how they can bond together in suffering different things. That was a really wonderful experience.

After two or three years of British feasts, someone got the inspiration and it was an inspiration to send both of us to South Africa for the Feast. This was a different world. Another set of experiences and it was a wonderful experience. My first time ever to give eight sermons in eight days, which was a tiring experience, but I was a young man, full of vinegar and whatever else, and I could handle that kind of a load. In speaking to the same audience every day, that was a challenge. The blessing was that this was before the cassette tape, that wonderful invention we all enjoy. Which meant no one in South Africa had heard any of the sermons I had given in the last 12 months, so I had dusted off all kinds of notes, class notes, sermon notes, whatever and so I didn't have to work quite so hard.

Another year I shared the Feast of Tabernacles down there with a gentleman named Dennis Luker. His wife Lee Ann, went down with Allie and I, and we were able to split up some of the duties of the Feast. The people in South Africa are really just wonderful and I learned to love those people very much. South Africa in those days had a singular blessing, there was no television. There was another blessing? There were no clothes dryers, I don't think. We would send my shirts off to the hotel laundry, they would come back still damp, very damp. We would hang them up in the room overnight and in the morning they would still be damp. We were on the coast of the Indian Ocean, right down there on it and the humidity was like 103%. It was really, really damp. One of those places where your shoes don't dry out overnight either.

We had another blessing. I have an old railroad lineage in my family and there was a railroad track that went by us pretty close and they were running an old-fashioned steam engine on that track and the sound of it was kind of nice for me.

In 1969 we were yanked back to Pasadena to work in the international division and soon thereafter, I was made a key traveling speakers preaching at the Feast of Tabernacles in the United States. It was flattering, but these were not my best feasts. Once again, eight sermons in eight days but this time, eight different locations from one side of the country to the other in eight days.

Now the only way that was possible was the fact that the church had aircraft in those days and I was either on a King Air 100 or on a Cessna Citation on most of those legs.

I would start off the first feast site, give my sermon and there would be a car waiting, and they would drive us to the airport and then throw our stuff on the airplane and they would fly us to another feast site. We would get in there in late afternoon, we would be met by a car and taken to a hotel. Our bags were taken to the room and there might or might not be a basket of fruit in the room and the next morning, I got up and gave another sermon at that Feast site and immediately after services we were picked up by a car, taken to an airplane and taken somewhere else. And so it was hop-scotching across the country.

It was wonderful in its way. And it did nothing to diminish my love for the Feast of Tabernacles because I got to see so many people over that period of time. It had the additional blessing of course that nobody at the Feast site had heard my sermon from the other Feast site and so I didn't have to come up with a new sermon every day.

It really was a good time for us to learn a lot of things, to meet a lot of people, and see people that we had come to know and love. Eight sermons in eight days. Now I do not recall how long we did that.

But in 1978, as probably many of you know. political considerations led to my resignation from the Worldwide Church of God and that was the end of that era of what I did.

That year I attended with some 500 bruised people in Jekyll Island, of which at least half of them were excommunicated from the Worldwide Church of God for really serious things like going to hear Garner Ted Armstrong speak somewhere at a campaign and boy you talk about a people who are hurting, that was a hard feast. I am glad I was there. I'm glad I was able to participate, but it was a long way from being my best feast ever personally. It was painful for so many people, but it was a pain, I guess that we all had to endure together and make our way through.

I was 17 years with the Worldwide Church of God and for the next 17 years I served with the Church of God International and again I traveled to as many of these sites as we had. Just pick them up and go on down the road.

Finally, in November 1995, I resigned from the Church of God International and created what you all know as CEM (Christian Educational Ministries) which is a non-church service ministry, but I still loved the Feast and I had to do something about the Feast. So we went to work. Larry Watson and my wife Allie were calling around trying to find locations, convention centers, centers in the places where we could actually fit in at the Feast. We thought we had found a really nice place, The Civic Center in Destin, not the big one, it wasn't built then, but the one that we did meet in some later years.

A gentleman who lived there at the time had been asked to help us find a Feast site, so he went out and he knew a lot of people in town and he found this Feast site, so we went down there, particularly to meet him, talk with him, see the Feast site and to make plans for having a CEM Feast there. When we got there, we found that the gentleman had reserved it for himself and all they wanted us to do was to come along to their Feast site that they were going to plan. I declined because I had a vision for the Feast, which really differed so markedly from anything that had been done before, that I didn't want to have to struggle with some committee about what we're going to do and when we’re going to do it and how we were going to get things done.

You can see that vision at work in the CEM Festival as it is now conducted today. We didn't get it all together on the first year. We were down there, but every single year we have managed to grow that program into what those of you came to Chattanooga saw this year. It was Allie who found the convention center for us in Kissimmee, Florida, and we kicked off a new version of the Feast and the second year saw a gentleman, and some of you may know named, Brent Kern, who would serve as our music and worship leader. A job he's held with us ever since, and has become just about as much of an institution at CEM Festival as I am.

I've been reminded all over again as to why I love the Feast. It isn't the place, It isn't the environment. It isn't any of that. It’s the people. That's why I love the Feast. Now I can hear someone say, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, it should be God who is the reason." Now that's true, but I want to explain why I say what I say.

I'm going to read to you four scriptures at this point and I want you think about what I'm reading:

Colossians 1 verse 26, "The mystery which has been hidden from the ages and from generations, but now has been revealed to his saints, {27} To them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory."

Now that is not just so many words. That Scripture has meaning and very explicit meaning at that.

Romans 8 verse 9, "You are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if any man has not the spirit of Christ, he is not his. {10} And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness."

Galatians 2 verse 20, "I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me."

Galatians 4 verse 19, "My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you."

Why do I love the Feast?. It isn't the place, It isn't the environment. It isn't any of that. It’s the people.

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This article was transcribed with minor editing from a Sermon given by

Ronald L. Dart titled: Why I Love The Feast

#10/21/2006 #0642D

Transcribed by: bb 9/27/20