Eastern Lightning: Step by Step Instructions

In my last two articles about Eastern Lightning, I've documented both the central tenets of the religion that they have been trying to teach New Zealanders over the last few months in their Level 1 and 2 fellowship groups, and some of the tactics, such as love bombing, that they've been using outside of the fellowship time to keep members invested in attending the group. Immediately after finishing in the Level 2 group, I was moved to a new Facebook chat group called “NZ gathering in Almighty God-(10pm Mon/ Wed/ Fri)”. As you can see from the title there was some blessed relief here, with a reduction from nightly meetings to just three a week. Thank God!

Level 3

When I entered this Level 3 group, the first thing I did was to scroll back to see what had been discussed in the group before I was added to it. There was a really interesting conversation about how the group has been treated in the media, and how unfair it was that they were portrayed as a cult for their beliefs and their aggressive recruitment tactics. One person said that this was a New Zealand thing, and that other similarly benevolent churches like Destiny also receive unfair treatment from the media. Another person said that it was not okay to call Eastern Lightning a cult, as they don't even accept monetary donations from new members for the first year.

This was interesting to me - the idea of a church refusing offers of money from new members sounds great, and I wish more churches did that rather than trying to get their 10% out of new adherents as quickly as possible. But, of course, with this group it's likely to be a tactic they've found that works well to keep people in the religion long enough that when they are asked for money, they're more likely to say yes and offer something substantial.

One particularly awful comment was in response to this question:

_Suppose there is a thief🙈 and Jesus is a merciful judge...

🤔So, if the thief was caught and was brought before the merciful judge, and the judge wanted to give the thief another chance, he forgave the thief's crime. BUT!! That doesn't mean that the thief wouldn't steal again after he was let go, right? And that doesn't mean the thief's nature has changed, right? Of course not! If his thieving nature doesn't change, he'll go stealing all over again.😰😰😰Right?_

The response, along with a heart emoji given to it by the group leader, was simply:

“Cut his hands off”

You've got to love Christian love!

When it comes to leadership, the Level 3 group leader, “Bella”, has been a disappointment. She is really bad at love bombing - she kind of tries, but it's half-hearted and it feels like she really doesn't care too much. I can imagine that, like most people in this church, she's probably overworked and unpaid. Well, I guess if she's doing a bad job I could think of it as a positive thing. The worse she does at ingratiating herself with her new group members coming from the Level 2 groups, the less likely she is to hold onto these members in the long run, and the less quickly the church grows.

The Voice of God?

After two gruelling weeks, we came to our first Friday night sermon where we were told we would finally hear the “voice” of the leader of our new religion. And no, these were not the words of the woman who is God incarnate (Yang), they were the words of her husband, Zhao - a man 20 years her senior, who appears to be controlling her and using her as a pawn in his game of playing God. Before the sermon we were prepared with the by now familiar tactic of readying us for being told something that, by all rights, should set off our alarm bells. Here's the message I received before the Friday night sermon:

_As we know, it's very important to attend the sermon of the man used by the Holy Spirit.

Just as God says: 📕📕 “Because people are incapable of directly understanding God's words or God's will, God has raised someone up who is used to carry out such work. This person who is used by God can also be described as a medium through which God guides people, as the “translator” who communicates between God and man.”

God knows our deficiencies that we can't understand God's word directly, so He raises up this man to lead us in understanding His will and requirement so that we can gain the truth and be perfected by God as soon as possible. Thank Almighty God for His love for us🥰🥰_

I'm pretty sure Zhao would have written this himself, in the third person, to explain to people why they will hear from him and not Almighty God - this poor woman who is probably just as trapped in this whole thing as the millions of adherents are.

When we joined the sermon, we were greeted with a slightly robotic, monotone male voice that immediately felt like it was computer generated - this became more obvious when the reading switched to a female voice, one which sounded very familiar and wooden, and I'm pretty sure is one of Microsoft's speech synthesis voices.

When this woman's voice read the text “Psm 91:7” as “P.S.M. ninety one to seven” rather than “Psalm ninety one, verse seven” it was kind of funny. It feels cheap that a cult which is pulling in millions of dollars can't afford to pay a voice actor to read the Brother's words, or even just get someone to proofread the text and edit it to make sure it's read out properly by the software they're using.

A local sermon, for local people

One slightly worrying aspect of these Level 3 meetings is that once a week or so they have been run by local New Zealanders. The idea that our Chinese and Taiwanese supervisors might be able to sufficiently train up a group of local people to run this entire process independently sends a shiver down my spine. However, so far, the people that have been chosen to run these meetings have seemed incapable of following the simple formula set out for them in a spreadsheet. They forget to paste text for readings into our chat, talk for minutes while they're muted, repeatedly ask for advice from their supervisors, re-read the same text multiple times, and more. It's all a bit of a farce, which in a way has been really good to see.

Preacher in training

Why did I say spreadsheet? Well, at the end of the last article, I mentioned a conversation I'd had with my Level 1 leader, Mercy. She'd said:

remember before i ask u if u want to preach together with me? in level 3, 3 times fellowship a week, when we have tralining about preaching, are u willing to join?

I gave an enthusiastic answer to this question, and before long we had arranged for me to have a meeting with Sister Ellen from Guam. So, on a Sunday afternoon, I joined a Facebook chat with Sister Mercy and Sister Ellen. Sister Ellen started the meeting by telling me that preaching to others is like building the Ark, and that like Noah my preaching could save me and my family. She then had me read out a couple of passages of God's words, to test my ability to read. I've never had much of an issue being confident in my public speaking since my days at officer college in England, where we were taught how to project confidence so that our soldiers would respect and follow us. So I read loudly, with emotion, and convinced Sister Ellen that I could do a good job of running a sermon.

It was then explained to me that, as someone who lives in New Zealand, I would be well placed to connect with locals both because of my knowledge of local events, and because my accent and voice would be more likely to make people feel comfortable and trusting. So it appears the church is at least somewhat aware that Chinese leaders who have sometimes hard to understand accents are not ideal for converting kiwis.

I was told that “Colin” and “Graham” had also joined the church in New Zealand recently, and that like me they would similarly be used to pass on the church's message more effectively. I've not seen either of these people's names in our fellowship meetings, but this could be because one of the tactics the group uses is to merge two or more Facebook groups together for our fellowship meetings. The upshot of this is that the Facebook chat notification just tells us that the audio from some speakers is coming from the leader's account - but it's obvious they're feeding audio from another chat group, through the leader's account, and into our chat session.

Preaching by Numbers

Just before we finished the introductory call for my “preaching career”, I was given access to an online Google spreadsheet called “🥝NZ Tesitfying Documents Version 1”, that laid out exactly how to run a Level 1 group. They shared this document with me both in preparation for my potential running of a Level 1 group, and because they were hoping that, as a native English speaker with good grammar, I could rewrite it for them and make it more easily digestible. (Needless to say I have done neither of these, and my general rule is that I will not take part in any activity that is likely to cause more people to end up stuck in this cult)

I'd had my suspicions, as I've mentioned in previous articles, that these group leaders have been copying and pasting text from a master document, but I never realised just how tightly controlled these meetings were. Pretty much every single line of text that will be used in a sermon is delivered in this handy set of instructions, with emojis, images, and even the content of conversations that leaders are expected to have individually with members between the evening meetings - morning greetings, comprehension questions about how well people understood the previous night's message, and so on.

As an example, here's the beginning of the very first Level 1 meeting:

In case that's a little hard to read, the text starts with a greeting:

“Kia Ora, This is **. I am here to share with you the great and exciting news of how the kindom will come in the last days”

It then provides the first part of the lesson, which the leader is expected to read out. Then there are notes about how to ad lib by mentioning disasters around the world. The next section includes the instruction “copy and paste to the group”, meaning that the leader needs to copy the text into the chat session, and then finally there's a composite image to post showing the devastation from disasters around the world, along with pictures of a blood moon for some reason - maybe it's a portent?

After the end of the second day's lesson, there are follow-up instructions on how to engage one-on-one with each member of the group:

Here we can see the leader is expected to start conversations immediately after the meeting to test each member's understanding of the lesson (this happened for me after every lesson). Then, on the next day, there is a note to greet each member during the day “personally”, along with a group message to be pasted in the fellowship chat. And then some links to help the leaders share videos…

Illuminating Stories

Over time I've been asked to watch more and more of the group's videos, many of which are about an hour and a half long and billed as “movies”. Their production value is okay, but the acting isn't great, and their messages are overly simplistic to the point of making each movie feel unrealistic and like it's labouring the point. If you're a sucker for punishment (like me), you can watch the church's movies here:

https://en.easternlightning.org/video-category/gospel-movies-series.html

As well as these simplistic stories, in my chats with the various group leaders allegorical “stories” have often been used to illustrate theological points. I presume these are an effort to emulate the bible, and Jesus' use of parables to impart life lessons. But sadly the tales used by Eastern Lightning are a little childish. Tales of robbers with guns, walking through forests, swordsmen, ladies and maids…

_A boy made a lot of money outside and rode home happily. When he walked halfway, it rained. He wet his skin and complained that the weather was not good. Later, when he walked into the woods, a gangster block his way with a gun and planned to kidnap the boy. At this time, the horse ran away because it was afraid of thunder. The bandits wanted to shoot the boy, but because of the rain, the bullet was wet and did not hit. So the teenager escaped. After surviving, he thanked the rain relentlessly.

Most of the time, like young people, we talk about what happened to us according to personal preferences and imagination. However, we don't know that behind the "bad" things that we see, the beauty of God is hidden, and the beautiful will of God hidden behind it. This is what we can't imagine. Amen, thanks be to Almighty God!_

My response to this particular tale was “Thank you for that very relatable story”, although the leader obviously didn't spot the nuance of my sarcasm. Another tale, from a different leader, was about a swordsman who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, a maid and an evil government - sound familiar?

_There was a swordsman who specialized in robbing the rich and helping the poor, in suppressing the evil and supporting the good. But the evil doers, due to the loss of their personal interests, colluded with corrupt officials to frame him. They murdered, committed arson, and kidnapped women everywhere, leaving behind the swordsman's distinguishing mark.

So the government used this as an excuse to arrest him. Accordingly, he had to live in hiding in a forest, keeping his real name secret. One day, he came across a young lady and her maid who were being hunted by bad people. During the six months they spent together, both the lady and her maid thought well of him. Later, the lady declared her true feelings to the swordsman and expressed a willingness to marry him.

Rejoiced at her words, he blurted out his real name out while looking to the skies and sighing happily. On hearing it, she thought: Isn't he the man who is wanted by the authorities? After remembering the rumors, she immediately ran away in horror. As a result, she accidentally fell off a precipice, killing herself. The maid, however, realized that if the swordsman was really that wicked, would he not have killed them long ago? Then how could they still be alive today? So she returned to stay with him. Henceforth, she lived a happy life with the swordsman.

This story gives us the message that the maid focused on investigating the facts, and her reward was that she was able to live a happy life with the swordsman. From this, we can see that rumors will ultimately be proven to be false. Whereas the young lady believed the rumors without any discernment, and lost her life in the end. She was truly foolish, and that's so sad!_

Here's another, probably familiar, parable that I was sent:

More to Come

Sadly once again I find myself having run out of space to fit everything in. But unlike Fermat, I won't leave you hanging for a few hundred years - I promise to finish off my story in a couple of weeks, where you can finally hear about some of the sneaky ways in which this church tries to fake it until it makes it.