1st time Mr. Armstrong was called and Apostle

**The first time Herbert Armstrong was called an apostle in public was in a sermon in 1951 during the Feast of Tabernacles.

"The first proclamation before the church that God had filled the office of apostle was made by Herman Hoeh in his sermon at the Feast of Tabernacles at Belknap Springs, Oregon, in 1951," Mr. Armstrong wrote of the incident a few years later in the February-March 1955 issue of The Good News.

Mr. Armstrong revealed that Mr. Hoeh had not consulted him about what he was going to announce in his sermon. "I had no inkling of what he was to say," Mr. Armstrong wrote.

"At that time his words hit my startled ears like an atomic bomb and my first impulse was to deny and correct his statement immediately. Only propriety restrained this impulse. I felt Mr. Hoeh was just a little young and carried away with himself. Never in my life had I thought of occupying such an office."

But, in the 1955 Good News article, he acknowledged his apostleship.

"But in the light of events the fact of how God has set up His church today has become self-evident to all. It is God's doing. If one does find, unexpectedly, that God has set him such an office, there is only one choice--he must accept it with full humility realizing personal lack, and surrendering the self totally to God as an instrument in His hands, relying wholly on God for guidance and every power and need."

To Mr. Armstrong's credit, he did not dwell on his apostleship for the next 20 years. For most of the next two decades, he would rarely call himself an apostle. He did, however, with increasing frequency over those years call himself "the one you [the ministers and other brethren] call an apostle."

By the 1970s he was calling himself an apostle with growing frequency. In his final decade of life, he often billed himself as the "sole apostle of the 20th century......(slightly edited)....tony