[jellybean]

Hello everyone! I hope every one of you are having awesome holidays. While surfing on the internet I found the recording of a radio show in Spanish which contains a testimony of a very concerned mother from Puerto Rico. I decided to translate this testimony for everyone to see the impact in our parents when we at one point decided to be part of this group. In my time at the church I believed that my parents were not concerned about me because they never questioned me about anything and they always have supported me in the positive actions that I have taken in life. As you can see my relationship with my parents is very close and for many hispanics families that live in the States this is not different. Conservative Hispanic families have a very different way of dealing with their children even if they are 18 years old. Here I leave the testimony to the world in English: 

Video Title: Entrevista a personas afectadas por la Iglesia de Dios Sociedad Misionera Mundial (Interview to people affected by the World Mission Society Church of God). Can be found in Spanish on Youtube with the Spanish title.

 

Ana:  I met this destructive sect by the end of 2011. My daughter was stopped at college by a girl that had a bible under her arm and she asked her if she knew about Mother God. They are a group that use verses on the bible to emphasize their belief. They use the Genesis to say that there is a Mother God and a Father God. Then, they are taken to take some bible studies, they say that they don't have any denomination and that the only thing they do is to study the bible. At the beginning it was all good because who wouldn't want to study the bible and understand many things? As I said my daughter was stopped at College and with the pass of the days she started changing and changing. I noted on her like an exaggerated need to go to these studies which started to happen every day. I had the opportunity to visit them because my daughter disappeared on a Saturday. We didnt know with who she was, where she was, and she appeared at 11:00pm when we realized she was with one of the leaders of this organization in Puerto Rico. I had a serious conversation with her and I told her  that that was very irresponsible that she had taken my daughter and that nobody knew where she was. She answered my that because my daughter was 18 years old that she did not felt any responsability. [In other words] what she was trying to tell me was that my daughter was older enough but in Puerto Rico older enough is 21 years old because parents are responsible of what they do and what happens to them until they are 21 years old. Of course if after they are 21 years old the son or daughter is still living with the parents they have to adapt and accept the rules that they parents have at home. I was invited after this, and after my daughter told me her feelings about mother god. My daughter and I made a stop on that because that was outside of what Christianity is. The study I went they started to talk to me about mother god and father and never told me she was a Korean women and never mention Ahn Sang Hong as Second Coming Christ. I had many questions and they never answered me. They told me to write down my questions and to ask them in the studies if they were related to them and according with that my questions were going to be answered. Of course this was very estrange to me because when you have a question you are expecting your questions to be answered. There was when I noted how people starts to accept all this fallacy little by little because they give studies by studies so people assimilate a truth that does not exist. The changes on my daughter started to be noticeable, she started to loose her hair, her weight was not normal, she lost too much weight because they demand fasting even for 24 hours where they do not eat, don't drink water. My daughter is hyperglycemic so she started to loose weight and as a consequence she lost her hair and I had to take her a couple of times to the hospital. On top of that she got far from her teen friends, her family and I started to study where this cult was from and what they really believe because what they really want to let the world see is that they are a Christian church and that they teach love, comprehension and that they do social work and they love to show their faces in the newspaper, television and propaganda; lots of majors and political figures on activities of their cities or states. Obviously they do social work and they emphasize this. In my case I started to research this because if this is so good they shouldn't be all these negative symptoms. My daughter physically attacked my mother, her grandmother. She physically attacked me. When the time of the subliminal feast came, because they celebrate like the Jews my daughter was deprived of sleep. They will pick her up at midnight and they will drop her off by 2:00am then they will pick her up again later. She was all day out and she will arrive evenings, she was not resting. My only intuition is to say my truth and to prevent families, to be very careful with this destructive cult whom first will say that they believe in the existence of mother god, who believe that Ahn Sang hong the founder is Second Coming Christ, the Holy Spririt, The prophet Eliah, and the Root of David. They say that for you to be spiritually saved you must get baptized in the name of Ahn Sang Hong who is supposed to be the name of the Holy Spirit and have to Celebrate the Passover, which is The Passover of the new covenant how they call it. Meanwhile you are assisting to the studies they will take more and more of your time. Many people stop studying [she means College]. For the time that they were teaching my daughter she thought that the world was going to end in 2012 so she wanted to bring more people and recruit them so they can be saved. My daughter lost her interest in studying [going to College] and eventually she lost her interest in everything I saw her depressed always locked in her room. Obviously, they are taught that the real family are the brothers and sisters of the church. They have mother god, father god and the brothers and sisters are the ones at the church. Because of this they deduce that because they have their spiritual family, the earthly family does not have any value, neither their parents or people around them. They judge the people from other denominations, they say that the Catholic Church is satan, and all the churches that come from the Catholic Church are satanic. When you see these people that come to you all smiling and tell you all of this new things from their translation of the Bible, you will not imagine that you will end up being a very lonely person and obviously you will see that things are not as easy as they said at the beginning. As you more attend as more they will demand from you. They will demand time. They have a table where they measure the members by points and this is about the studies, you have to go out and preach, you have to be baptized, participate in the Passover, give your Tithe.  There is people that give the tenth for themselves and for their children, offering, tithe, if they eat at the church, the food is purchased by the members. If they do flower arrangements they are paid by the members. There is the situation where many members cannot make a living, cannot pay for themselves so they bring to the church what they have for living to support the church. Here in Puerto Rico they try to hide and to pass as unseen as possible. They have been in Puerto Rico around 5 or 6 years. We, the affected families got together and handed out flyers and when they realized, this was at the beginning of 2012, they registered in the department of State of Puerto Rico and are Registered as a non profit organization. Before that they were here(communication was interrupted) [without being registered]. If you want to go to any of the meetings are only through an invitation, you cannot just show up how you will do in a Catholic Church, Pentecostal Church, That over there is not allowed. Now I think that as a requisite they are demanding the baptism to be able to join. Obviously, here they are trying to eliminate the information that comes out and what we know. They say that [what they do at the church] cannot be recorded, cannot be pictured; the sermons or anything like that because their work is so secret that what they teach and their procedures can be seen. (Ended around minute 21:00)

 

There are other testimonies on this recording and the testimony of Ana continues a little bit more about what they are told that will happen to them if they leave and about the internet. The point of view of this mother was very interesting to me because these are people that live somewhere else from where I did when I was at the church and I got to meet some of the young ladies of the Puerto Rico Zion. I am not the best translator but I did my best. Therefore, I might have some grammar mistakes.

 

*See every part where the word "cult" is found she actually said sect. For us in the Caribbean a sect is a cult but its meaning might defer depending from which Hispanic country you are from. 

 

This post is not made to persecute anyone but to share the experience of this Mother and the people related to this case. I hope that the families of the members that still part of this organization get to reunite with their love ones and this war of "you against me" ends soon. I hope that the bond of this girl with her family never breaks as mine never broke even thought my family lived very far away from me when I joined this group I still missed them and loved them very much to the point of going back home.