Perth, Australia - My experience with SCJ
Date Created: Mar, 2020
Region: Perth, Australia
Hello everybody. I recently escaped what I highly suspect to be Shincheonji, and I’d like to share my long, long story. I’ll first write what I know of SCJ’s operations in Perth (which will provide some background for my testimony), then I’ll share my testimony, and add a tl;dr at the end. Before I start, though, I would like to acknowledge the numerous Redditors who have spoken out against SCJ, both on this subreddit and elsewhere. Your testimonies played a monumental role in helping me leave the group, and they have inspired me to share my own story in turn.
Operation in Perth
In Perth, they use the name Living Bread Ministries. Do note that this could change in future, as SCJ operates under various different names in different areas.
I was recruited at uni. It seems they target universities in particular, since the vast majority of my classmates were also uni students.
Most of my one-on-one classes were held at the City of Perth Library (Hay St). There were also occasional classes at the State Library of Western Australia (Francis St) and Murdoch and Curtin Universities.
The bigger classes are held at 102 Beaufort St in the CBD, next to the Jacksons art supplies shop.
These classes run three times a week – Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. There are two sessions each day, 9am and 5pm. Each session runs for 2.5-3 hours.
I also heard they run more advanced classes every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
Many of the teachers, including the head, came to Perth from Melbourne. As far as I know, none of them are Korean, they’re mostly Southeast Asian.
And now, my super long story. I’ve included as many details as I can remember, in the hope that others will be able to find similarities between their experiences and my own, just as I did in other people’s testimonies.
Basic classes
One day in late October 2019, a nice girl (whom I’ll call R) stopped me at uni and asked if I was Christian. Upon saying yes, she invited me to attend Bible study, and I agreed. I asked her which group was organising it, and she just said it was run by “a group of students”, so I assumed it was something like Cru (Campus Crusade for Christ). But anyway, she seemed nice enough, and we were really hitting it off, so we exchanged numbers.
In about mid-November, I attended my first Bible class and was introduced to the first teacher (whom I’ll call L). These classes went on for around 2 months (mid-November to late January), and were mostly one-on-one, though R would sometimes attend together with me. I can’t remember too much about the content of those classes, but they mostly covered basic topics such as the purpose of the Bible, the nature of God, and the different types of books in the Bible and how to read them.
Only one bit of content really sticks out to me right now, and it was when we were talking about sin and L mentioned that God didn’t know Adam was going to sin. I thought, wait, that can’t be right since God is all-knowing, and brought that up to her, but she managed to explain that away (I have forgotten how exactly, but I think she said something about how God wouldn’t have gotten angry and cursed Adam and Eve if he’d known they would disobey him). After listening to her explanation, I thought maybe this was just a small thing that wasn’t too important, and so I decided to just leave it there.
During the time I was having these basic classes, I was due to go on holiday in December for around 2 weeks. I was also scheduled to have a 1-week work attachment in January from Monday to Saturday. Both of these had been arranged far ahead of me joining this Bible study, and I let L know about them. She didn’t seem overtly irritated or disappointed, however, she was quite insistent on me returning to class as soon as I could. I remember going to class only a couple of days after coming back from my holiday, and in the case of my attachment, I was in for class that Saturday afternoon right after work.
Intermediate classes
After the introductory classes were done, I moved on to attending more advanced classes in a bigger group (40+ other people including R). These ran three times a week, and I attended them for around a month until I escaped in late February. Here, I was introduced to several more teachers, including one whom I’ll call E. L didn’t do much teaching for these classes, even though I still saw her around.
These classes had numerous rules pertaining to attendance and conduct. We had to let the teachers know if we were going to be late to class by even a few minutes. The teachers encouraged us not to just be punctual, but to arrive 10 minutes early for each class, even though there was no real reason for that. We were explicitly discouraged from missing class, even if we were sick. In the words of the head teacher, if we had a stomachache, we “should take some medicine and come [to class]”. On multiple occasions, teachers referred to wilfully skipping class as being “snatched by Satan”, and even went as far as to say that things like job offers that would clash with Bible classes were tricks from the enemy. I study a very demanding university course that requires me to complete quite a lot of extramural work, so I was already quite busy outside of Bible class. Knowing that missing classes would be inevitable, I felt guilty, but never told anyone. I did inform the teachers of my situation, though, and they told me that they could run classes over Skype in that case.
We were to arrive peppy, energetic and “ready to receive God’s Word”, and we were also told to keep an eye on our desk mates – to nudge them awake if we noticed them falling asleep. Probably the most important rule in the area of conduct, however, was that we were not to tell friends or family about the content of the classes. The teachers explained that it was to prevent them from persecuting us or interfering with our understanding of the teachings. We students were also forbidden from exchanging contact details, though I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps it was for the same reason.
Topics covered in class included the four kinds of field (Mark 4, the parable of the sower), the spiritual realm and the physical realm, discerning false prophets from true prophets, and the nature and purpose of parables and prophecies, among other things. In particular, there was a heavy emphasis on interpreting figurative language and parables, and the teachers promised us we’d get to understand them one by one in future. They even promised that we’d get to understand Revelation, though I didn’t stick around long enough for any of those. I still have my notes from class, so if you’re interested to see them, just flick me a message and I’ll send them over.
For the month that I was attending, I didn’t really think to question the teachers’ doctrine, but now that I’ve left, I’m beginning to notice some aspects of their interpretation of scripture that are… let’s say, far-fetched at best, and downright misleading at worst. For example, they claim that Exodus 20:12, “honour your father and mother”, has a “spiritual meaning”, with “father” referring to God (reason being that He gives “seed”, which the teachers say refers to the Word of God), and “mother” referring to pastors and teachers of the Word (reason being that they receive the Word from God, just like how a woman receives seed from a man). Another example was their interpretation of the parable of the hidden treasure (Matthew 13:44) – they claim that the man selling everything he owned to buy the field refers to people needing to discard all thoughts they have about God that are not from the Bible in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Central to their teaching was the idea that believers had to “record God’s laws in their hearts and minds” in order to attain salvation i.e. reach the Kingdom of Heaven. This meant being able to understand the entire Bible, including being able to correctly interpret parables and prophecies. So, they were basically teaching a works-based salvation (though they didn’t use this wording, of course), thereby contradicting verses such as Ephesians 2:8-9 and Romans 1:17. The teachers insisted that everything they were teaching was from the Bible, and that if we had a question about something in the Bible, the answer needed to be from the Bible and nowhere else (they did, in fact, discourage the use of Bible commentaries, as well as Christian websites like GotQuestions). To back this up, they cited Isaiah 34:16 “none shall be without their mate”, but this was taken out of context. if you read even the few preceding verses, you’ll see that this verse is talking about wild animals, and not Bible verses.
There are other things about their teaching that don’t make sense even from a more logical standpoint – for instance, they taught us Isaiah 55:8-9 in class to illustrate how different God’s thoughts and ways could be from ours, as mere humans. But if God’s thoughts are vastly different to our own, and He knows everything (which He does, according to 1 John 3:20), how is it realistic to expect us to fully understand the whole Bible when we as humans don’t know everything? Another thing they emphasised was that we would only get to understand prophecies when they were being fulfilled. Going by that logic, how could they claim to be able to understand Revelation if Jesus’s second coming hadn’t yet occurred?
As you can imagine, I’d never heard these sorts of interpretations before. After class one day, I asked E which organisation the teachers were affiliated with, and the answer I got was “Living Bread Ministries”. When I got home, I looked up “Living Bread Ministries” on the internet, but found nothing in Perth. That was obviously suspicious, but I don’t know why I didn’t try to raise the alarm at that point. Anyway, this incident would later become one of the things that spurred me on to escape this group.
There were a couple of times where I met up one-on-one with E outside of class, and I really only remember this one thing that would later also push me to escape. She asked me if my parents knew I was going to Bible study, to which I said yes, I had told them. The reason I told them was because I normally video-called them on Wednesdays, but had to switch to Thursdays because of Bible class. E then replied that, if they seemed concerned, I could just tell them that I “spent some extra time in the library”. Her tone when she said that wasn’t one of humour or sarcasm. Immediately, I recognised that as a lie, but thinking it was only a small passing comment, I brushed it away.
Escape
One day in late February, E sent me a message saying that the building we normally used for class had to be vacated due to maintenance works, and so classes would be suspended until further notice. Upon hearing that, I felt a twinge of relief at finally having a little more time to dedicate to uni commitments. That Wednesday, I video-called my parents, and we talked about the coronavirus and how it could’ve spread so easily through SCJ in South Korea. My mother sent me a link to a YouTube video about SCJ, and this was the first thing I read in the description:
"The covenant of Jesus that states only those who record God’s law in their hearts and their minds will become people of heaven is being fulfilled today through Shincheonji."
Seeing this really rattled me, because this was (almost) exact wording that the teachers had used with us in class. I was concerned, but knew I couldn’t just jump to conclusions there, so I decided to do more research into SCJ and its teachings. One of the most outstanding things I found was that SCJ teaches it’s okay to lie, as long as it “serves God’s purposes”. As soon as I read that, I thought back to that time I was told about “Living Bread Ministries”, as well as that time where E practically told me I could lie to my parents about attending Bible study. I sent E a text asking about it, and mentioning that I couldn’t find anything about “Living Bread Ministries” in Perth (the closest thing was this one church in Sydney that seemed to be restricted just to Sydney). And so, this was the start of a lengthy exchange that culminated in me leaving the group. I still have all the messages, so if you’re interested, just DM me and I’ll gladly send you screenshots.
While awaiting E’s reply, I dug up a couple of news articles on SCJ, as well as a number of testimonies written by people who had left the group. And I was absolutely shocked by the number of similarities between their experiences and my own. What’s more, these similarities spanned multiple areas: class content, class structure, rules for students, and even certain things the teachers said (like “you’ll get to learn this later”, which I thought was okay at first, but gradually became annoying). I made a mental list of all these similarities and prepared to ask E about them.
The next morning, I received a reply from E about “Living Bread Ministries”. She told me it was a US-based organisation that was new to Perth, and she’d been introduced to them back home in Indonesia. I looked up the name again and found a number of American ministries named “living bread” or similar, but none of them had operations in Australia. Or even in Indonesia! I told E about this, and she just stopped talking about “Living Bread Ministries”. And so I became more suspicious. E did, however, go on to address the “library excuse” incident… well, sort of. She claimed I had misunderstood her, and asked if we could meet up in person to discuss it. I politely declined, partly because I was busy, and partly because I was afraid she might talk over me, and then coerce or guilt-trip me into going back to the Bible class.
Shortly after, I asked her if she had heard of SCJ. She said she had, but only because of the coronavirus outbreak. I then briefly questioned her about the Trinity (which SCJ denies), and she insisted that she believed in it. Of course, I was still suspicious of her being involved with SCJ, and so I sent her my big long list of all the parallels I’d found between SCJ and this Bible class. I told her in my message that, even though I didn’t have explicit confirmation that the class was indeed linked with SCJ, there were just so many similarities that they could not all have arisen just by coincidence.
A little later, I received E’s reply. She didn’t attempt to refute any of my points, instead she just shoved them aside by vehemently denying any affiliation with SCJ. I figured that was all the confirmation I needed, so I thought I would just leave the conversation there. But a couple days later, I received a message about SCJ’s activity in Singapore. It said that one of the names they were operating under was – wait for it – Living Bread Ministries!
I took a screenshot of the message and sent it to E, and she… appeared to just play dumb about it. Unimpressed, I let her know the reason I was texting her, and proceeded again to ask about “Living Bread Ministries”. She insisted again that she was affiliated with a “Living Bread Ministries” from the US, and so I asked her if she knew which city or which state it was based in. She didn’t answer, nor did she offer an explanation as to why she didn’t try to address any of the similarities between SCJ and Bible class that I had mentioned to her. She only said that she wanted to avoid any “misunderstanding”, which was apparently what was currently taking place, and again asked to meet me in person.
I offered her a chance to explain how exactly I was misunderstanding her, and asked her again if she knew where in the US her “Living Bread Ministries” was based. At this point, though, I recognised that this conversation was essentially going nowhere, so I also offered to break it off. She didn’t answer either of my first two questions, but agreed to end our conversation there. She also mentioned I was free to find someplace else to study if I wished, and so I formally bid her goodbye.
And that’s the end of my story! Three words, guys: documentation, documentation, documentation! Always ask which organisation the other party is affiliated with, and ask them if they can show you a website or social media page, or look it up yourself if they can’t. If you can’t find anything about the group, that’s probably a cause for alarm. Particularly if they keep evading your questions when you ask them about the group’s origins.
tl;dr Joined a Bible study group, found out it was likely SCJ after doing research and reading testimonies. Confronted a teacher about it in a lengthy text-message conversation, and she continually denied any involvement with SCJ, in a way that only made me suspect she was lying. DM me if you’d like to see my notes from the classes, or screenshots of my exchange with the teacher.
(ETA: if anyone is wondering what happened to R, I managed to convince her to escape by presenting to her the same evidence as I did the teacher. I only wish I could get in touch with more people from the class, so I could share it with them too. I guess I now see why the teacher forbade us students from exchanging contact details.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Shincheonji/comments/feg5se/my_experience_with_scj_perth_australia/
