Talk:World Mission Society Church of God

Uninformative and uncotextual general tone, specially on introduction

I wish to leave a simple note concerning the general tone of this article. The first 3 paragraphs of the article completely ommit the essential fact of several characteristic teaching of this "church".

Describing this religious denomination as a simple "church" is blatantly ommissive to say the least. This is a new religious movement religion, filled with anachronistic and original teachings unlinked to any traditional religious denominations, christian or otherwise. All of this should be appropriately explained on the first section paragraphs. If no sources can be found, call on higher up editors to write the appropriate paraghaphs. Of course it should be from a neutral standpoint, but any editor complaining this is not a new religious movement is being disengenious. Every other of the major christian denominations would consider sabbatarian and claims of reincarnation of Christ of the religious leader teachings in this religion to be a new religion. Even the Adventists from which the founder splinter from.

I wont do this myself because this page feels like already have very partisan users editting it. And I suspect my attempts to do some editing including sociological or historical context would probably upset someone trying to promote this religion.

And after these scant 3 paragraphs, with simplistic and one-sided assertions of it being a vhurch and following the Bible, it starts with a schematic historical timeline and doctrinal points. All of which also lack context, even with other wikipedia articles.

This religious denomination's founder article is also ridden with these problems.177.133.165.194 (talk) 10:19, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

and I would like to know why it is called a cult. I notice that the Unification Church is not called a cult, but a new religious movement. Richardson mcphillips (talk) 19:49, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

Holy Passover

I conversation I had with a man who came to my door was trying to tell me that the Christian church is not following the teachings of Jesus. He said that the time of day in which we celebrated Passover (communion) was essential to Jesus' teachings. With him knowing that I was a Christian, he was rebuking me for this "fatal" error. If someone were interested in finding an official source verifying this information, it might prove beneficial to add it to the list of differences between traditional Christianity and WMSCoG. Thank you.2602:304:B304:EE20:BC79:776E:849F:7BCB (talk) 21:42, 22 August 2017 (UTC)

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Troubling Topic, few independent reputable sources

This is a troubling topic, given that it appears to be a widespread religious organization (claiming over a million and a half "registered" members, and with web pages claiming locations all over the world -- particularly in Southeast Asia -- and throughout the U.S.), yet there is hardly any information about it online, from independent sources of any substance or repute.

Sadly, the most substantial source seems to be People Magazine and a few small-town / small-city newspapers, along with the student newspapers from a few colleges and unviersities. I found only one single academic treatise (apparently from a conservative Protestant theologian) that mentioned it.

Attempts to find information about it from the normal non-profit evaluation resources, such as charity and institution reviewers Better Business Bureau/Give.org, Guidestar and Charity Navigator have nothing on it -- at least one of them suggesting their inquiries were not responded to by the church.

These information gaps clearly suggest a secretive cult, or one that is simply lying about how large its membership actually is. I urge fellow Wikipedia editors to make an effort to find information from reputable major media and academic sources on this topic, and include it here.

~ Penlite (talk) 10:36, 24 May 2018 (UTC)

@Penlite: Thanks for your work on this article. There is a substantial amount of sources about the church in Korean. Sam Sailor 10:25, 6 June 2018 (UTC)

Removal of controversial comment

An IP user appears currently to be edit warring and removing references to controversy, with sources, from this page. Tacyarg (talk) 23:25, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

@Tacyarg: Thanks for watchdogging this. Always irritating at how unethical people try to purge embarrassing facts from Wikipedia articles about their political or relgious faction, cult, organization or enterprise -- or favorite issues or persons. Makes it hard to keep things honest. Great that you're watching out for it.

~ Penlite (talk) 10:14, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Topic of Church in the first line.

In response to the first topic regarding it being referred to as a "Church." It absolutely fulfills the qualifications of being a church and is registered as such both in the U.S. and internationally. Just because it doesn't fit your idea of a church doesn't mean it's not. Realistically, a "Church" that keeps pagan teachings including Christmas, Easter, Sunday worship, and the image of the cross, is not a church but a temple of pagan gods, specifically the sun god. Yet they are still registered as "Churches." Please do research to confirm that all these teachings originated paganism and are still pagan, not Christian, because this is a well known fact acknowledge by both pagans and Christians - even the Christians that keep these teachings. Also note that in the time of Jesus, there was no such Church that kept these pagan teachings - they were adapted much later, and early Christians would've never acknowledge a group of people keeping pagan teachings as a Christian "Church." So for many other pages on "Churches," perhaps you should edit them as "religious movements" or as "pagan temples" because they definitely don't match the Bible's description of "Church" past that they acknowledge Jesus as Christ.

It is clearly explained from the beginning of the article that the Church believes in Second Coming Christ Ahnsahnghong and God the Mother in the flesh. It's not a secret. It's also explained that the same teachings the Early Church kept - Passover, Sabbath, the feasts of the new covenant, which are found in the Bible - are celebrated in this Church, because they believe in and follow the teachings of Jesus. These too are from the Bible, and not far fetched from a church at all. The Bible definitely testifies that Christ would have to come with a new name again, and there had to be a time of fulfillment. Of course it is your liberty to believe or not, but it doesn't mean it's not true or not a Church. The belief is based on the Bible. Christmas, Sunday, Easter, and the cross are practices that do not come from the Bible, yet people still call these organizations "Churches." Like everything, the majority usually prevails, even if it isn't factual. Please respect the fact that the organization is a Church, and a really spectacular one that is helping many people and making millions of people around the world very happy. All edits should be in good faith, not with malicious intent and negativity, deeming it a "cult" based on your own opinion. At the time when Jesus came in the flesh for the first time, they also called it a "cult" because it didn't fit the majority's standards and because they believed in a Jewish man who was a carpenter, taught people to eat his flesh and blood, and who hung around prostitutes and tax collectors, as God in the flesh (Acts 24:5). Now the "Jesus cult" has become the biggest religion in the world with over 2.2 billion followers.

There are many religions out there that I personally don't follow or agree with, or that I believe are dangerous or strange and I don't understand how people follow what they believe. But I keep that to myself, respect people who follow it, and don't spend time hunting up their wikipedia pages to see how I can try to turn people away from their religion or to make it look bad just because I don't agree with it. We live in a country where religious freedom is the first amendment in the constitution. People should be free to choose their religion based on the church, the Bible, and their beliefs, not based on wikipedia pages. To each his own. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.99.206.157 (talk) 21:48, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

I recently edited this back to saying New religious movement due to that being a much more descriptive label. I noticed that this person had edited it so that it would not say that term specifically, but this conflicts with the citation provided on that sentence, which regards the organization as a cult. Certainly many sources seem to regard this organization as a cult, but I do not find it appropriate to change the text of the article so that it does not match with the cited source. The organization is matter-of-factly a product of the 20th century, which qualifies it as a new religious movement. This label, while also used to describe cults, simply indicates that it is new and is peripheral to its society's dominant religious stances. Certainly, Joo-Cheol employs many views that are heterodoxical, such as nontrinitarianism, notions of humans existing as fallen angels that are reminiscent of Mormon cosmology, and verbatim mentions of a seventh-day sabbath and an already-transpired advent of Christ, clearly influenced by his time with the Seventh-day Adventist denomination in South Korea. These and more are examples or variants of well-known heresies and heterodoxies, which inherently makes the beliefs incompatible with the more dominant religious traditions in Christianity, such as most forms of Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy; thereby placing this religious movement necessarily on the periphery of the broader religious culture. I hope this helps to clarify why including more descriptive labels helps balance the point of view of the article by adding broader context and incorporating the information from the cited source. Penitence (talk) 04:43, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Sources and Good Intentions

@Penlite: With your statements, it is hard to believe that you are making edits in good faith and in efforts to help the project. Have you done any research through small-town and larger newspapers and news sources on all of the positive and good deeds done by the charge? Why are you persistent in finding only controversial evidence when there are hundreds and hundreds of articles about so many good deeds that members are doing while volunteering their time and helping other people on a grand scale, internationally? Why don't you look up those articles and list them on this page as much as you are spending time looking up controversial topics? The fact that you consider People magazine as a credible source already says a lot. The journalist's article in People magazine was based off of an ex-member's opinion yet was referenced as if it were credible and factual information. There was also a personal connection to encourage that article to be written by that former member and much ill-intent and drama behind it. Can you really conclude that is a reliable source and professional, fair journalism? Writing about one sour person's account?

Article as means of spreading propaganda, the need for Korean sources, and potentially requesting edit protection

I've noticed large swathes of this article cite the topic organization's main website, various media outlet sites that they own, newspapers that have published articles submitted to them directly from the church, or other means of directly or indirectly relying on the organization to accurately and neutrally portray itself. Obviously, much of this is the result of unregistered accounts and throwaways belonging to members of the cult, but there is so little scholarly or published works about the cult available in English that it is difficult to tell whether a newspaper has printed skewed (usually positively) representations of the cult in earnest or if they have gotten it from copying some source which traces back to the cult itself. The cult's website and any media it has directly influenced is not fit for this article for any purpose other than to outline how the cult views themselves. While this is of course necessary to include, I don't feel like there is enough reliable English material due to the cult's contamination of the pool of online articles through various means or lack of interest in the topic from reputable sources. What I mean is that there is a lot of sources that regard the cult excessively positively or excessively negatively, and the only large pool of resources that have extensive investigations and secondary and tertiary sources are almost entirely in Korean. I'm not personally familiar with the process for requesting an expert in a field to help with a topic, but I feel like this article treads into the territory of serving as a platform for the cult's propaganda in the first half of the article. As for evidence of the extent to which the cult has polluted the resource pool in English when trying to find relevant information about them, two of the newspaper sources on the first line that I could not outright prove were influenced are extremely similar to the cult's own news story about the Queen's Award for Voluntary Service, and seem to heavily copy a third party newspaper that seemingly unknowingly published the cult's article on their website. The initial claim in the article was that several churches won the award, which was mentioned in the article I removed, but this is impossible as most of them were in the United States and therefore not eligible for the award, as well as outright not being listed on the official government list of recipients publicly available online at the source I added. There is a tendency to weave in partial truths into many of the favorable/positive sources as is fairly common for cults, but almost all but the last two sections feature media that has in some way or another incorporated the cult's own publications about itself into them, which has influenced the POV of the article heavily. I will come back to the article later if I have the energy to sort through this junk and add things like common Christian orthodoxies and the ways the cults beliefs as listed on their site match up or differ from commonly held protestant beliefs because that's something I know a bit about, but in looking through all of their sites and affiliate/puppet organizations it feels like the article may scarcely be worth it. This is partially due to the heavy edit warring, vandalism, intentionally factually inaccurate sources and other shenanigans with the article. For example, at some point, I don't even know when, someone went and added this article to a list of vital articles. Obviously it will be dropped from that as the philosophy and religion subsection is filled out, but I feel like the extent to which this article is being messed with is perhaps not clear even from its borderline propaganda POV. I don't know how to do it, but I feel like the article should be at least semi-protected for 6 months due to the unregistered vandalism and misinformation. I would probably further subject edits to pending approval since the edits from cult members seem to come in waves and they've been very active since the start of this year. It's a bit draining for me to try to keep up with trying to set straight some of the damage done when checking that claims from an anti-cult researcher about the cult having large sums of dubiously sourced income has some verifiable basis. I watched through the whole 2017 UN CERF video to verify that Kim Joo-cheol was not a speaker at the high-pledge conference, despite actually being listed there on the UN CERF's list of donors with a large private donation. Maybe I'll come back and add stuff about that later, but it just feels so pointless while the article is constantly being vandalized and distorted by the cult members. Penitence (talk) 05:29, 2 March 2019 (UTC)