Chinese Church Voices

Cult Activity in China Impacts Churches

Chinese Church Voices is an occasional column of the ChinaSource Blog providing translations of original writing by Christians in China. The views represented are entirely those of the original author; inclusion in Chinese Church Voices does not imply or equal an endorsement by ChinaSource.


While the number of Christians continues to grow in China, so too does the number of cults active in China. As this article from China Christian Daily describes, there is a real threat of cults against Christian churches in China.

Korean Cult Actively Recruits in China, Even Christians Are Seduced to Become Essential Members

On May 12, 2019, Xiao Qing, a Christian woman, encountered five or six people who claimed to be Christians after attending a Sunday worship service. Distributing gospel tracts to passers-by, these men fervidly asked for her contact information and invited her to visit their “church.”

After some discussion, Xiao Qing felt something was off. These men only shared from the book of Revelation, said nothing about Jesus, and made vague statements about their church. 

Afterward, she searched online and found that their tracts were the same as those of the Korean Shincheonji "New Heaven and New Earth" cult. She realized 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 further stated that some believers who didn't know the truth "helped" the cult hand out leaflets. 

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 about the cult through its official WeChat account. It has claimed that some believers have been seduced into becoming 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, some members of a cult joined 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, and 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. 

Original Article: Korean Cult Actively Recruits in China, Even Christians Are Seduced to Become Essential Members by China Christian Daily

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