My story started on an evening in April of 2021 when I was walking along the block outside my dorm to the dining hall for what seemed like the hundredth time. We were already a year into the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, but I was still required to take all my college classes online and physically distance myself from everyone every time I went outside. I was only a shy freshman who had an extremely difficult time socializing with people through Zoom meetings, and could not bring myself to talk to anyone in my dorm, so, needless to say, I did not have any friends. I was in a couple of extracurricular activities, like being on the parliamentary debate team, and writing for a school newspaper, but those activities were stressing me out and I would skip club meetings a lot. I had no place where I felt that I belonged on that campus, but I also knew that I probably wasn’t the only one who felt that badly.
I had walked only a minute away from my dorm when I saw a small, diverse group of about 7 young people crossing the street towards me. The girl in front, a short and fair girl with heavy makeup and a high ponytail, noticed me and said “Hey, I really like your outfit!”
I looked down at the oversized green sweatshirt and jeans that I was wearing. “Thanks,” I said.
The girl stopped me and continued to talk. “Hey, do you have any plans for this evening? And do you go to church and study the Bible? Because we’re about to go to our Bible night and it would be really cool if you could come with us.”
Being a schedule freak, I did not want to say yes to such a spontaneous plan. I had already made a reservation to show up at the dining hall in 5 minutes and I also needed to eat at some point that night. But I was actually a God-believing Protestant Christian who had not gone to church in a while since I left home, and had not yet bothered to join any religious groups on campus.
“Yeah, I actually do go to a Protestant church. I don’t think I can come to the meeting right now,” I told her, “but I can maybe come to the next one.”
“Oh, that’s fine,” she said. “Maybe you can give me your number and I can text you about having a Bible study with you.”
“Okay, sure,” I said, and she handed me her phone.
“I’m Hannah, and this is Patricia,” she said, gesturing to her short, smiling Asian friend, as I typed my name and number into Hannah’s contacts.
“I’m Lyla,” I told her.
“That’s a pretty name.” I tried my best to give a nice look towards her through my opaque face mask. She laughed and asked, “Do you play guitar?”
“Yeah! I actually do,” I said.
“I can tell because of your nails.” I looked at Hannah’s hands and she had similarly cut nails to mine. Long on the right hand for fingerpicking and short on the left for fretting.
I gave her back her phone. “Okay, I have to go, but, um, I guess I’ll talk to you later,” I said, continuing my walk. I ruminated over the interaction as I made my way to the dining hall. I later texted my group chat about the funny occurrence of someone noticing that I play guitar through the length of my nails. No one else had noticed that before.
Later that night, I got a text from Hannah where she said hi and introduced herself. She asked if I wanted to meet the following night, and if I wanted to do it online or in person. I wasn’t used to meeting people in person like that and there was always the risk of COVID, so I said I would be there online. Before the meeting started, she sent the Zoom link, and I opened it on my computer in anticipation. I seriously thought it was going to be a group meeting with several people and it wouldn’t be so bad to just sit and participate maybe once in a while. But then I saw the Zoom meeting title was “Lyla Bible study” (except Bible was misspelled as something like, “Bibel”). I was really surprised and nervous that the meeting was especially made for me, but I thought I could probably make it through.
I was greeted by a video chat of Hannah and Patricia sitting together at the student center. After some small talk and a prayer, their first activity was for us to share our life stories of being Christian and our relationships with God. Both Hannah and Patricia gave extremely detailed stories about their religious journeys and struggles throughout life and college. I learned that both of them were Filipina women, just like me, and Patricia had immigrated from the Philippines at a young age. I was distracted away from their stories because I was trying to formulate in my mind what I was going to say about myself after them. It was my turn to speak, and I really didn’t have much to say. They had talked for about 5 minutes each, and I probably talked for maybe one minute at most. “Uh, I was a Christian since I was a kid, mostly because my mom is such a strong believer. I used to go to church back home but I kinda strayed away from it over time because of the pandemic.”
I was embarrassed by how short and insignificant my story was, but they seemed pleased with it. Our next task was to start reading short passages of verses from the Bible. They picked out some rather random sections of verses from around the middle section of the Bible and asked me to read them. They then gave some points about the verses and asked questions about them. It wasn’t terribly difficult to be put on the spot, since I did know some info from going to church before.
Their main lesson for me that night was teaching me about their Bible study method called “Quiet time”, which they suggested I should do every morning and I should start with the book of John. I knew I wouldn’t be able to actually do it in the morning, though, since I’m not a morning person and I always wake up just before it’s time to go to class. Nor could I realistically find time to do that every day. I silently thought I would just binge read the book of John in one night before our next meeting, which they subsequently scheduled with me.
The next day, Hannah texted me a link to their Sunday morning service, but I felt like since I had just gone to something yesterday, I probably didn’t also have to go to this. Patricia, who had gotten my number from Hannah, also texted me a document with my “notes” from the lesson, which was an outline of the verses we read and the points they taught me.
A few days later, in the middle of the week, Hannah texted me asking how I was doing. I just said I was good, and then she asked me how my “quiet times” were going and what I was learning. I panicked because I hadn’t had motivation to actually do any of the daily quiet times so far. I literally just lied on the spot and said the book was too much to talk about, and I would just say my thoughts during our meeting. And then once I actually started reading later that night, I came up with something about Jesus that I learned to tell her. Right after that, she sent me the details for two more events that their group was having later that night. I just said “Sure, I might go to one of those,” but by the time they actually came around, I was feeling too swamped to show up at the Zoom.
Later, I apologized for not coming to the last events, but we scheduled our next meeting at 10 in the morning and did my quiet time with Hannah. She had asked to meet in the morning because it was the only time that worked for her. She looked quite tired, but maybe it was because she hadn’t put on any makeup yet. She was making her coffee on the call. I could tell that it was going to be the start of another very long day of church events for her. We sat on the Zoom call and read a Bible passage from John together, taking notes on it. Then we discussed what we learned from it, and also talked a little bit about ourselves.
After that, it was mostly a pattern of Hannah texting me about an exorbitant amount of events from their group that I was always too tired to go to. Some of her texts included graphic fliers with some info. I felt increasingly guilty about not having enough energy to go to their women’s midweek, or their Sunday service, or their Friday hangout. They had at least 3 group meetings a week as well as individual one-on-one meetings with the members? It started to look like a lot to me. But I was at least committing myself to showing up to the individual Bible studies. Sometimes it would be just Hannah or just Patricia on the Zoom, but it was usually both of them.
At some point, I sped-read the entire book of John in one night, and they were surprised that I finished it that fast, and then I didn’t know what else to do. I just said I would “reread John” and then didn’t do any more Bible reading on my own after that.
I also remember finally going to one of their Friday night group events on Zoom at some point since it sounded fun. It was a group of about 25 very diverse people. A lot of them were older adults who surely weren’t in college anymore, though, so I was confused just what exactly this group was. They sang gospel songs, read a few Bible verses, and prayed for each other. But it was mostly a social game night where we played some silly stuff. Including a game that was literally the same as a game I’d played with my friends many times over the years, usually called Mafia, where two people pretend to be murderers and we have to guess who they are. I wondered how this was acceptable to play at a church. But I was really too nervous to say much throughout the whole event.
A few minutes before my third or fourth Bible study, I suddenly got a very long text from a friend who I had not heard from in a while. He had been going through a lot of struggles at home, and he just told me about how he ran away from home for a week and ended up getting into violent and dangerous situations. I was speechless as I skimmed over the text and didn’t know what to respond because the Bible study was going to start in a few minutes.
As the meeting started, Hannah asked me how I was doing. “Okay, I guess…” I said.
Hannah looked concerned. “What does that mean?”
I decided to confide in her. “Well… I just got a concerning text from my friend saying that he ran away from home without telling me.”
“Oh, that’s rough. We’ll make sure to pray for him.”
When we started studying the Bible that night, that was when it got more intense for me. They were telling me about the meaning of being a disciple, and how important it was to be “fishers of men”. They used their same strategy of picking out seemingly random Bible verses and used each of them as an example of the criteria of what it means to be a Christian. One of the verses mentioned the importance of baptism. They had me repeat the criteria back to them, and I just said what they wanted me to say, even though it seemed like peculiar teachings that I had never learned from any church before. “To be a Christian, you have to be baptized, and you have to be a disciple, which basically means you help bring other people to God.” And some other specific stuff that I forgot. They made it clear to me that being a Christian was the same thing as being a disciple.
I wasn’t sure if I actually believed that being baptized was a requirement to be a Christian. I always learned from my mom and church back home that baptism was simply a symbolic declaration of one’s Christianity, and there was not some physical baptized-or-not requirement for salvation. I had never personally been baptized because I never felt like I was ready enough to give a whole speech to my church where I basically have to tell a story about how I’m going to be godly for the rest of my life. Again, I just told Hannah and Patricia what they wanted to hear, and I didn’t want to make them angry by having an ideological disagreement.
After that, they said we would do an activity called a Christian timeline. I would tell my life story of being a Christian by outlining the most important events in my life through answering their questions. Hannah phrased her questions in a very sneaky way. “When did you become a Christian?” was asked way before the question, “When did you become a disciple?”, even though they had just taught me those were the same thing. I just said “Hmm, I guess when I was in 3rd grade when I became a Christian” and “I probably became a disciple when I was in high school.” They smiled and nodded for a few seconds as they wrote down my timeline as I finished answering the questions, and then they read my story back to me.
It turned into frowns. “You see, there’s a problem here,” Hannah said. “You have ‘becoming a Christian’ and ‘becoming a disciple’ in different places in the timeline, even though those are the same thing. You need to understand that they are equal.”
I felt my stomach sink. The way they had sequenced the questions kind of led me to fall into that trap of making that mistake. I tried to explain myself. “I mean, I was calling myself a Christian since I was a kid, but I have always been trying harder to be a real disciple. I haven’t ever really full-on converted a friend to becoming a Christian. I don’t even have that many friends to begin with, so… it’s hard.”
“It’s not about how many friends you have,” Patricia tried to reassure me.
Then Hannah continued with the jabbing words. “I can try to give you an example of this problem. Say there’s a woman, and she’s trying really really hard to get pregnant, but her pregnancy tests always come back negative. So, is she pregnant?”
I was confused. “Um… I mean, figuratively, I guess she could be pregnant with something, like hope?”
“No, but is she actually pregnant?”
“...No.”
“So, you see, if you’re trying to be something, that doesn’t mean that you are the thing you’re trying to become. You understand?”
“Y-yeah. I get it.”
She had just told me I wasn’t a real Christian.
I looked at my upset face in the Zoom webcam. I couldn’t let them know I was on the verge of tears. I tried to hide it and I swallowed hard.
“It’s okay,” Patricia said. “We can try to help you.”
The meeting ended soon, and I felt really upset and drained from the whole stressful interaction. I ranted in my friends’ group chat about how bad that assertion made me feel. I wasn’t a real Christian because I hadn’t yet converted any friends to believers? That didn’t feel right. I had called myself a Christian my whole life.
The meeting ended. I still had to respond to my friend’s text about his dangerous experience and try to console him.
But I just ended up sounding mad and going on a tangent about how stressed the Bible study was making me and how they made my own identity as a Christian feel attacked.
Later that night, we continued the text conversation and I tried to clear things up. I complained about the Bible study to him again and how I felt attacked because I hadn’t converted any of my friends to Christianity yet. He knew I was a Christian and I would sometimes tell him about the Bible, but he usually refused to follow those beliefs. I wasn’t expecting it, but he responded with something that made me feel infinitely better.
“You showed me Jandek. The gesture is from your heart and your heart is in God,” he responded.
Jandek was a favorite musical artist for both of us; the first thing I showed him when I met him was Jandek, because I knew he would like that kind of lo-fi folk music. And I was right, as he became immediately interested, and being able to talk about Jandek’s music was an important foundation for our close friendship. Jandek has so many themes about trusting the way of God in his songs, like his song “Show Me the Way, O Lord”. I had never thought about that before. I thought he had just rejected my attempts, but maybe I actually had led someone to God.
“Follow your heart, ‘cause you know God is inside you,” he told me. “You showed me something that has to do with God.”
For one of the next meetings, Hannah asked if I wanted to meet up with her and Patricia in person and go buy tea downtown or something. I agreed since I had never gone downtown with friends before. I brought my Bible and all, but we didn’t actually end up doing a Bible study that day. I just walked downtown with Hannah to the tea shop and met up with Patricia there. We had a lively conversation and learned a lot about each others’ lives while we sat there drinking boba tea. I asked them what their Christian group was called, since I had already forgotten. Patricia reminded me of the name, META, and laughed as she said how great they were.
I was expecting us to bring out our Bibles, but Patricia already had to go. Then Hannah and I briefly went to the library. We explored the different floors and talked about things like movies. Then I said goodbye and walked back to my dorm. I thought it was a nice, non-stressful time.
Afterwards, I googled the name “META” in relation to anything at my college. Absolutely nothing came up except an Instagram page, with some pictures of happy people, that I wasn’t even sure was them. It was pretty hard to find info on them, which was weird, but I didn’t think much of it.
I think the next event I went to was their Sunday service. I usually watched the stream from my church back home on Sundays, but I switched it up for that day. It was… interesting. There was a very long “news” video segment that was done rather professionally, and reported on various events around the world that were somehow relevant to their church. There was also a woman who sang her own song that she composed. I barely got to the sermon part, but I left after an hour because it was starting to get tiring.
This part is dumb, but the next week, I got an email from the mailing list for a singer named Jeff Taylor. It said that the vinyl for his new album had shipped out. I had supported his Kickstarter campaign several months prior, so I would finally get my hands on his album that I had waited years for. And I would get it literally half a year before everyone else! But the vinyl had shipped to my parents’ house, and my only vinyl player was also at their house. I texted my mom asking if the package had come in yet, and she said yes. So I literally came home for the entire next week just so I could listen to my vinyl.
My brother picked me up from school and drove me home. I told him that I had joined a Bible study at campus so I’d have some friends and more stuff to do. “Ew!” he said. He had distanced himself from the religion of our childhood for a long while now. “You know, a lot of those groups on campus are like cults. You better be careful.”
My house was only 45 minutes away from my campus. I didn’t mind coming home at all. In fact, I was much more comfortable over there. There was much more space to breathe and more privacy than my weird dorm. At home, I took some time to vent to my mom about how the new Bible study was stressing me out.
I hadn’t mentioned this yet, but a big part of why I was participating in this in the first place was to make her happy. I knew that she wanted me to keep being a good Christian and study the Bible, and also try to join more activities and make more friends. So this all seemed like a good opportunity. But I felt like she could tell I was doing it to make her happy and wasn’t that genuinely interested in it as I could be.
But I also couldn’t help but tell her how bad it made me feel. They had three group events a week, and they also wanted to have individual Bible studies with me at least once or twice per week. “We have one study, and then they ask, okay, want to meet tomorrow? And the day after that? It’s exhausting!” My mom encouraged me that it was okay to tell them I didn’t have the energy to meet all the time. So, after that, I started giving them excuses about my schoolwork so I would get longer breaks in between meetings.
Plus, they confused me with some of their teachings, like the baptism thing. “It’s not what our church back at home believes, right?” I asked mom.
“It’s not about what our church believes,” she answered. “It’s about what the Bible says.”
I went to one more Bible study while I was at home. Hannah did notice that I was at home because of the different background on my webcam. The only thing that stood out to me about this meeting was that they included a third girl, a large half-black woman whose name I can’t recall. She was Hannah’s roommate who had just gotten married. To be honest, I don’t even know how I processed the fact that a member of this group, Hannah’s roommate, had just gotten married, yet I also believed that they were part of some kind of student Christian group. No, these are full-grown adults trying to teach college age students who will later take their place.
The new girl was nice, and she complimented me a lot. Near the end of the meeting, she said she looked forward to seeing me again, because she “liked the way I think”. It just made me feel embarrassed to hear that. I wasn’t sure what that meant.
They dragged on the meeting for so long that I was late to my class. I told them beforehand that I wanted to log off at 5:15, which was fifteen minutes before my class so I would at least have enough time to go to the damn bathroom and take a breath. But I ended up admitting that my class actually started at 5:30, so they kept me until literally 5:31. I scrambled to get myself ready for class.
The last META meeting I went to was another Friday night hangout. We did similar activities to last time. And then we played a game where we had to grab and show objects that fit the category that the announcer guy was talking about. One of them was “something that calms you”, and I grabbed my CD of Nick Drake’s Pink Moon off my shelf and showed it, saying “It’s a folk album”. I was lowkey worried that they’d say something about me listening to secular music. The game took a long time, since they had to go to everybody and they all had to explain what they were showing. So I easily got bored and opened another tab on my computer while the game was going on.
I still didn’t know much about what META was. Nothing had come up the last time I looked them up. I looked up the same term I searched before, seeing if anything came up connecting the name META to my college. I found a new Reddit post from that week asking about their group; finally, some kind of proof on the Internet that this group existed.
Got cornered by two of these guys today [on campus, on the bridge heading to the Lakefill]. Didn’t say who they were with but my friend had the same experience and said they were with META. Appears to be an iteration of the International Christian Church, which is a proselytizing machine and pseudo-cult. Anyone else had this experience? Are they actually students or just predatory ministers?
Well, that was unexpected. Pseudo-cult? What? And I thought I had finally found a group I could study the Bible with and make some friends like Hannah and Patricia. But that was pretty much what I experienced. I got “cornered” by some Bible-believing strangers as I was just doing my regular walk around campus.
The same Reddit user linked another post with some more information on what exactly the International Christian Church, or ICC was. In retrospect, I should have noticed that those fliers from Hannah’s texts also had “International Christian Church'' written on them in a tiny logo, and I should have looked that up earlier as well. That could have cleared this up for me much earlier. https://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/comments/lk5wuh/a_warning_about_the_international_christian/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
I encourage you to look at the post yourself to see just how much of a nightmare was unveiled to me that night, as I was still literally at one of their evening meetings in another tab. I immediately noticed so many details that perfectly matched the suspicious aspects of my experience so far: a group that targets vulnerable college students, especially ethnic minorities; they cherrypick excerpts from the Bible to prove their point; they recruit students through personalized Bible studies on Zoom; they make you get baptized by their group; they go by several different names at schools, including META; my college was listed as one of their known “sites”; and they use a “script” to recruit their members during the Bible study groups.
http://cityofangelsicc.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/FirstPrinciples_Eng.pdf
The script was, word-for-word, the exact same verses and lessons they were telling me, and the exact words from Patricia’s “notes” she was sending me after every study. I looked towards the end and saw that it just got more intense and cultlike.
The International Christian Churches are a controversial Christian movement. Some call us a cult and accuse us of both brain-washing and mind-control. Many false rumors and half-truths have been spread. News paper articles, television shows and especially the internet have slandered the ICC, and yet, the facts are that lives have been radically changed, marriages have been healed, drug addicts have been freed, the poor have been fed and cared for, and this rapidly growing movement – The SoldOut Movement – is spreading around the world in this generation! Just like the first century!
I found another popular Reddit post that took me even deeper into this rabbit hole. It just showed me more and more that I was already familiar with and made me feel scared for what was to come next if I were to stay any longer.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/comments/4yf18v/psa_to_college_students_others_watch_out_for/
You must baptize someone. Just like a MLM scam, you're told to convert people to their exact doctrine and if you can't, you'll be named & shamed for not being 'sold-out' enough.
They will come in pairs or alone, usually prowling the campus or nearby looking for lone youngsters to convert.
They'll ask for your phone number to set up a time & place. Then they'll get another church member to participate to get a numerical advantage over you.
First Phase - It's literally the purity test; it tests your biblical knowledge and starts out slow.
Second Phase - Where they convince you that you're not a Christian.
I didn’t even want to get that deep into what was coming next. Mandatory tithing? Only allowing relationships within their church? I had no idea it was going to get that bad. But what I read and had already experienced in that exact fashion described in the posts was haunting me. These people were fake college students. They were trained like robots to put vulnerable students through this exact process and exploit them. I was a lonely minority college freshman who had no friends and not much else to do, wandering on the sidewalk at night. Of course they targeted me for this. And I had never bothered to do my actual research on them. And I should’ve listened to my brother! I felt so unbelievably dumb.
I snapped out of my trance looking at these detailed Internet sources as the game ended in the Zoom meeting. The ICC members started asking each other if they had anything to pray about. Hannah chimed in and said she was so grateful to have brought in me, Lyla, as a new member and being able to study the Bible with me. I tried to smile. The meeting dragged on for a while, and after I had been there for maybe 90 minutes, I decided to dip. I went downstairs to my mom to tell her what happened.
I took a deep breath and ate some food while I explained to my mom that I googled their group during the meeting and finally found some info about them, except it actually wasn’t good at all. I was sad to tell her that I wanted to quit the group as soon as I possibly could, since it was the only Christian group I was part of. But when I told her about the ridiculous cultish behavior I read about, she agreed that it wasn’t a good idea for me to stay in the group. I even told her about the parts when they tried to convince me that I wasn’t a real Christian because I wasn’t converting people, and she definitely disagreed that that wasn’t right. That’s not what it means to be a Christian.
I vented to several of my friends online to tell them my frustration about how I thought I had found a group and made some friends, but I had actually just been manipulated. At least I was only part of it for one month until I finally found out about this info. It could have been much worse, but it was strange to think that weird people like these could show up in your life at any moment and take advantage of your vulnerability. I even looked up Hannah on Instagram and saw she didn’t even have anything related to my college on her profile and wasn’t followed by any of my classmates. It was so strange how she faked it by walking around that campus.
The next day, I finally sent a text to Hannah saying that I decided to discontinue going to any more Bible studies. My mom convinced me not to cut her off completely, and I said maybe I would meet with her again in the fall. She said she understood, but asked me how I came to that decision.
I didn’t want to say “I looked up your group and saw that you were actually a cult”. No, I said that I was still in the “exploring phase” of my college life and wanted to see if any other groups were better for me. But now I’m honestly scared to join another Christian group on campus in fear that they’re going to hold the same hoard of dark secrets.
The last time I saw Hannah was a very awkward interaction behind my dorm as we were both walking to the same place. I took out my earbuds that had been playing a post-punk album. I just said hey, and we both said we were doing fine. I was walking to the student center to get my next dose of the vaccine. We walked in mostly silence and then went our separate ways. I am so glad she never talked to me again. I was scared that she would try to hold me in the cult, especially since she seemed so happy about my entry in that last Zoom meeting we had.
So I didn’t end up making any legitimate friends in the end. Now I just have a traumatizing memory of a time some weird people tried to twist my beliefs about the Bible. But what about my friend who had texted me about running away? At least that came to a good resolution. After another few weeks of not reaching out to me, he told me that someone else came into his life who told him more about God and the Bible, and now he was a full-on believer. He thanked me for the bits of faith I had put into him that led him to this belief. I had truly done something to bring someone closer to God.
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