the "Alpha Gospel", resentment arose on the part of overseers who saw him as a threat to their positions. Australian overseer John Hardie was the first to break with Irvine and excluded him from speaking at the South Australia convention in late 1913. As 1914 progressed, he was excluded from speaking in a growing number of regions, as more overseers broke away from him. Rumors circulated about Irvine's comfortable lifestyle and supposed weakness for women, though nothing concrete was ever exposed. It was put about that Irvine "had lost the Lord's anointing" in an effort to explain his ouster. He was shunned and his name was no longer mentioned, making him a nonperson in the church he founded. There were many excommunications of Irvine loyalists in various fields during the following years, and by 1919, the split was final, with Irvine moving to Jerusalem and transmitting his "Omega Message" to his core followers from there. Lacking any organizational means of making his case before the membership, Irvine's ouster occurred quietly. Most members continued following the overseers, and few outside the leadership knew the details behind Irvine's disappearance from the scene, as no public mention of the split seems to have been made. Mention of Irvine's name was forbidden, and a new explanation of the group's history was introduced from which Irvine's role was erased. Although the threat posed by Irvine to the church's organization had been dealt with, the prominent worker Edward Cooney refused to place his evangelistic efforts under the control of the overseers. Cooney himself adhered to the earlier, unfettered style of itinerant ministry, moving about wherever he felt he was needed. He rejected the appointment of head workers to geographic regions and criticized their lifestyles. He also preached against the "Living Witness" doctrine (i.e., that salvation entails hearing the gospel preached directly by a worker and seeing the gospel made alive in the sacrificial lives of the ministry), the bank accounts controlled by the overseers, use of halls for meetings, conventions, the hierarchy that had developed and the ministry and the registrations under official names. For a time, his message urging a return to the original principles of Matthew 10 gained a following, even among some Australian overseers. A second division occurred in 1928 when Edward Cooney was expelled for criticizing the hierarchy and other elements that had arisen within the church, which he saw as serious