Philippines—Quarter-page advertisements were run in the Philippine Star and Inquirer newspapers in a four week campaign during March. Many respondents commented that they were former PLAIN TRUTH subscribers and some had even seen Herbert W. Armstrong live at his “A Voice Cries Out” campaigns in Manila.

ABC Radio Networks has approved a 30-second spot for the Sean Hannity “Tuned Into America” radio program. The ads will run August 13 to 31 on the nationally syndicated program. During the same period, rich-media Internet ads will run on talk show host’s website, Hannity.com.

In an article titled “Raising the Ruins acts as counterweight,” former Worldwide Church of God member and Christianity Today contributor Mark A. Kellner reviewed Raising the Ruins in issue 119 of the Big Sandy-based Journal newspaper.

Kellner wrote, “A trip through the 435 pages … is at once fascinating and frustrating to those of us who lived through the days of the decline and fall of what was the Armstrong Empire, as religious scholar Joseph Martin Hopkins termed it.”

“Stephen Flurry writes at his best when detailing the chaos that followed Mr. Armstrong’s passing,” he noted.

Kellner concluded his full-page article with, “The book is interesting and a counterweight to the anti-Armstrong books of current WCG leaders including Joseph Tkach, Jr.”

An Internet advertisement appeared on the news portal Drudgereport.com May 10 to 11, and again on May 19 to 20. The advertisement featured a rotating series of pictures: one each of Herbert W. Armstrong, Mystery of the Ages, and Raising the Ruins.

The ad was run as a test to determine the effectiveness of Internet advertising for the book. Results were extremely positive, yielding almost 20,000 hits in the first 24 hours.

Edmond—Writing for the Decatur Herald & Review in Illinois this past weekend, Sheila Smith reviewed Raising the Ruins and included a local story on how the Tkach transformation traumatized the Worldwide Church of God membership in Decatur. In her review, Smith quotes from and paraphrases Stephen Flurry’s book, commenting on how Tkachism “trashed” Mystery of the Ages and “amassed a fortune” selling off all the church’s assets. For the related story, Smith interviewed a former member of the Worldwide Church of God who lives in Decatur. She concluded her article by saying “the Philadelphia Church of God is making progress in continuing Armstrong’s legacy.”

Two quarter page advertisements are scheduled for May 5th and May 12th in the daily Australian newspaper, marking the first time the book has been advertised in Australia.

Edmond—National advertising for Raising the Ruins continued this week in the U.S. with two more spots on Fox’s O’Reilly Factor. The ads ran on Wednesday and Thursday evenings, April 25-26, during the 11pmET broadcast.

Edmond—On Wednesday, February 14, Fox News approved a 30-second advertisement to be broadcast on its most popular program—the O’Reilly Factor. The commercial played last night, February 22—about halfway through O’Reilly’s show (8:28 est). This represented our first national spot on television and it prompted a record amount of traffic on our Raising the Ruins website.

To this point, our highest-traffic day on the website was 984 visitors on December 10, which was the first time the Key of David featured the book for the entire half-hour. A week after that, when we advertised the book in the U.S. News & World Report, 683 people visited the site on December 20. We registered our third highest day on December 29, with 582 visitors, the same day we repeated the Key of David special on our Friday morning television stations.

After the O’Reilly spot ran last night, more than 500 people visited the website within the first hour. All totaled, we had 833 visitors yesterday—725 of which viewed the site after the commercial aired. It was our second highest-traffic day ever.

The ad will run again tonight, this time during the late-night replay of O’Reilly’s program (11:00 p.m. et / 8:00 pt). The commercial is scheduled to appear a little after the half-way point of the program.

Last week, producers of the Key of David television program wrapped up production on another special episode which publicizes Raising the Ruins. The previous promotional program, which aired in December, relied on interviews and focused on Herbert W. Armstrong’s 1985 “sophomore address” as well as the appalling post-Armstrong legacy of Tkachism. The follow-up program summarizes Mr. Armstrong’s lifelong work and concludes with about eight minutes of material highlighting today’s work of raising the ruins. Chapters 2 and 25 of Raising the Ruins provided most of the script for the new program. The Key of David special is scheduled to air this Friday, February 23, and Sunday, February 25. Check local listings for a Key of David television station in your area—or go here.

EDMOND—Raising the Ruins author Stephen Flurry spoke to over 120 Key of David viewers and Trumpet subscribers on a recent four-city tour through the Midwest Jan. 8-11. The author delivered three different lectures titled: “My life growing up in the Worldwide Church of God”; “The Book of Remembrance”; and “The Elijah has Come Already.”

The lectures, delivered in Kansas City, St. Louis, Memphis and Dallas, were videotaped for use in future television promotions for the book.

EDMOND—Author Stephen Flurry will undertake a short tour over four days in January 2007 to promote his new book, Raising the Ruins.

The cities on the tour are Kansas City, Mo., on January 8; St. Louis, Mo., on January 9; Memphis, Tenn., on January 10; and Dallas, Tex., on January 11. The meetings all begin at 7 p.m. and will last approximately one hour.

At each location, Flurry plans to give a 40-minute lecture about the book, and then field questions from attendees.

EDMOND—A full-page, full-color advertisement for Raising the Ruins will appear in one of the world’s highest-profile newsmagazines, U.S.News & World Report.

U.S.News has a circulation of over 2 million. The ad is slated to run in its December 25, 2006, issue, which hits newstands on December 18. Because the issue appears during a holiday week, it will have a two-week shelf-life instead of the usual one week.


You can view a PDF of the ad here.

EDMOND—In author Stephen Flurry’s home town, Raising the Ruins was featured as the “Book of the Week” in the weekly Edmond Life and Leisure.

Reviewer Clif’ Warren wrote, “Once anyone who is interested in modern evangelism and Christian education becomes engaged with Flurry's RAISING THE RUINS, his or her fascination with the author’s passionate, fact based, seemingly fair-minded account of the legacy of Herbert W. Armstrong will surely carry that absorbed reader from the first page to the last.”

EDMOND—Midpoint Trade Books has received orders for 13,521 copies of Raising the Ruins, leaving just 1,129 units from the first printing. More than 50 percent of those orders have been placed by online retailer Amazon.com. The others have been distributed to Borders, Barnes & Noble, and book wholesalers Baker and Taylor and Ingram Book Company, the world‘s largest book wholesaler.

The book started to appear on shelves at some bookstores by the end of November, just one month after its release. Midpoint had originally estimated that it would take about six months for the book to appear on shelves.

EDMOND—Gerald Flurry used his weekly television program, the Key of David, to promote Raising the Ruins and the book at the center of controversy between the Philadelphia Church of God and the Worldwide Church of God, Mystery of the Ages.

The 30-minute special was broadcast on 175 television stations covering the United States and Canada beginning the weekend of December 8 and generated record responses on the i-Network (formerly Paxson), the CW-Plus network, as well as several over-the-air stations in large markets. On WGN, the program brought in the fourth-highest response ever. All totaled, more than 3,000 people called to request a complimentary copy of Mystery of the Ages.

The program is scheduled to run again at the end of December. Viewers may check local listings for the Key of David in order to see the Raising the Ruins special on Friday, December 29, and Sunday, December 31.

GREENVILLE, S.C.—Raising the Ruins author Stephen Flurry spoke to interested readers at the Palmetto Center in Greenville, South Carolina, on December 3. Over 200 people attended the hour-long presentation.

Flurry developed his lecture around a statement Jesus Christ made in Matthew 7:20: “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” He said Raising the Ruins was a book about the fruits of Herbert W. Armstrong’s work, as well as the “evil fruit” of his successors. He encouraged attendees to judge Mr. Armstrong by the work that he did, not by critical comments his successors have made. Tkachism has misrepresented Mr. Armstrong’s legacy and work by simply “revising the true record of history,” he said. “Raising the Ruins, based upon thousands of pages of official documents we obtained from the Worldwide Church of God in court, sets the record straight.”

After his 30-minute lecture about the book, the author fielded questions and then stayed afterward to sign copies of the book. Attendees purchased 70 copies of the book after the lecture.

EDMOND—Supplies of Stephen Flurry’s Raising the Ruins have been significantly exhausted, necessitating a second print run.

After only two weeks in print, the distributor, Midpoint Trade Books, has received orders for half of its initial supply of 14,650 books. On November 10, the Philadelphia Church of God ordered an additional 50,000 books to be printed at R.R. Donnelly. The second print run is scheduled to arrive at Midpoint‘s distribution facility on December 22.