On May 12, 2019, Xiao Qing, a Christian woman, encountered five or six people who claimed to be Christians after attending the Sunday service. Distributing gospel tracts to passers-by while holding reusable bags, these men fervidly asked for her contact and invited her to visit their church.
After some talk, Xiao Qing felt something not correct in that they only shared from the Book of Revelation without mentioning Jesus and made an ambiguous statement about their church.
Afterward, she searched the Internet and found that their tracts were as the same as those of the Korean Shincheonji "New Heaven and New Earth" cult. She determined that they were members of the Korean cult.
Four days later, two churches in Pudong New Area, Shanghai, released a notice saying that the Shincheonji cult was active near local churches in the district and the cult followers were found passing out leaflets in front of churches. It added that well-informed sources had said that the cult members had infiltrated a few churches. The announcement also said that some believers who didn't know the truth "helped" the cult hand out the leaftlets.
Apart from being in Shanghai, the cult was also active in Quanzhou, Fujian province. Since April 29, Fujian Quannan Church has daily warned its congregation against the cult through its official WeChat account. It has claimed that some believers have been seduced to become the cult's "backbone". What is worse, "perplexed" believers have poached other people into participating in "training programs" that have been held in different places from time to time.
The cult has intruded into Hangzhou's megachurch Chongyi Church, Tianjin Shanxi Lu Church, and other churches in Fujian's cities of Xiamen and Quan'gang.
In addition, the cult has also used the Internet to spread its doctrine and recruit new members.
Around Mother's Day of this year that fell on May 12, some members of a cult joined a one of the church's QQ groups and sent messages equating their founder Man Hee Lee with the second coming of Jesus. Other Christian groups on China's social media platforms QQ and WeChat have also been its targets.
Meanwhile, it has sent an online systematic theological course invitation to Christians in order to collect their personal information, then preyed on them offline in order to brainwash them and then absorb them into their cult.
Rumors say that the reason that the recruitment has been so rampant these days is that the cult requires 100,000 new members to attend the commencement to be held in their Korean headquarters by the end of 2019. The objective for China is that the cult's new members in each parish must be above 5,000.
- Translated by Karen Luo
