While surfing the World Wide Web, I came across a blog entitled: “My first visit to the World Mission Society Church of God.” The link to the blog is http://narrowgate-ahnsahnghong.blogspot.com. This blog is from the parent of a Church of God member who visited the Church of God after reading the Cult Watch site. Please read the whole article, it is worthy of recognition.
My first visit to the World Mission Society Church of God
Hey it’s me again, so I paid my first visit to the World Mission Society Church of God in New Jersey. My son who attends asked me to pick him up after service. So before I went there I decided to take some of the pointers from the cult check list that I found. Upon my arrival my son greeted me, and asked me to come in while he took care of some things, I was really glad he did that, because I really wanted to check it out. So here is what I found:
When I first came in everybody greeted me very nicely and politely, this is very nice. Everybody smiled, and they were very courteous. One thing that was on the checklist of cults is that everybody is nice and they welcome you with love (now I don’t agree with this, because then in order for it not to be a cult everybody has to be mean. I guess we have to keep our kids away from watching nickelodeon, because all the people on T.V. are too happy and loving, these are cult rituals; Barney and Dora the explorer are cult leaders. Nonsense!) I was very pleased by the way the people treated me, because I feel comfortable knowing that my son is in this kind of environment.
Another cult point is that the congregation has to be mostly young people 20-30 years old, but in the Church of God I saw many grandparents and also people in their 40’s and 50’s. I also saw kids and teenagers, so if cults recruit only people between the ages of 20-30, the recruiters of the Church of God should get fired, because they are not doing a very good job in their filtering process. So I was glad to see people of my age too.
Point #3. Cults usually have small congregations.
Well I guess this one Church of God failed also, because I saw about 200 to 300 people coming out of this Church(I am guessing these cult leaders are not very good at math). When I asked how many members attended the Church of God they told me that about 350, this is very amazing, most congregations are not this big.
Another thing I was trying to pay attention to was how many people I sat down with, I mean according to the Cult guidelines; they usually sit you with a group of 2 or 3 people. Well to my surprise, there were about 10 to 15 people who joined the conversation we were having. Ok they failed this one too; they are not meeting cult guidelines. Most of the people that were there at the time participated in the conversation, the age group didn’t matter, and everybody joined the conversation. They were mentioning how some of the members sometime did good performances, they gave me examples, like break dancing, singing, dancing, playing instruments…etc, I don’t remember them all; but through this I saw another cult guideline not met. According to the cult guideline, no member could claim that they have special talents, or abilities, everybody is the same.
Another thing that I was glad about was that I came during the time to eat dinner. In this situation I paid really close attention to see if what they served was really low on protein, and was going to make my mind weak. That night dinner was chicken stew with rice and beans. Ok hold on! I did my research, on a protein scale chicken is the second highest source of protein, and also beans are very good source for proteins. Now whoever is the nutritionist for this “cult”, I think he should find another profession, because he is messing it all up, it is low on protein, not the most high on protein.
After my first visit to the World Mission Society Church of God, many of the cult guidelines I was looking for were not met, this leaves the cult like behavior behind, and now the only thing left for me to see is if their teachings really come from the Bible, or they are just made up. I scheduled another visit, next time I would like to attend one of their Bible studies, to see how they backup all the claims that they make through the Bible. That night I was not able to study, because there was not much time, but my first impression of the Church of God, was a good one, we’ll see as time goes on what happens. I will keep you posted and let you know after my first study. Till next time.
