José Rocha went to the church because he had questions that needed answering. It was February 2000 in Bogotá, Colombia, and was, Rocha said, “one of those moments in life when you have to make decisions.”
When he walked through the door of the Iglesia de Dios Ministerial de Jesucristo — “La Ministerial” — there was someone tasked with spotting newcomers, greeting them enthusiastically, and seating them near the front. Toward the end of the service, the pastor turned to the novices and invited them to stay and receive la profecía. They would each hear a message from a member of the church who had the gift of prophecy, the pastor explained. Although it would be a human being uttering the words, God would be the one speaking, and his words would reveal to them things they needed to know — things about the future.
Rocha, despite already being an emergency room doctor at a prestigious hospital at the age of 29, felt lost.
His son was born the year before, thousands of miles away in New York City, where he lived with his mother, Rocha’s ex-girlfriend. “We separated when she was pregnant,” Rocha said. “And that was always my doubt. Did I do the right thing? What will the boy’s life be like growing up so far from his father? Am I selfish? Am I crazy?” The mother of Rocha’s child was also a member of the Ministerial, one of the reasons he went there seeking clarity.
When his turn came to receive prophecy, Rocha was approached by a man not much older than he. The man put both hands firmly on top of Rocha's head, then leaned forward and began murmuring into his ear. I have brought you here so that I can bless you, he started — general statements, intoned dramatically, in vaguely biblical rhetoric. I know you have been seeking me.
Then came the words that determined the next dozen years of José Rocha’s life. I will lead you to that foreign land, that place where your beloved lives, the one you love and value most. It was as if he knew exactly what to say.
The Ministerial temple in Bogotá where José Rocha converted.
Iglesia de Dios Ministerial de Jesucristo Internacional / Via commons.wikimedia.org
Rocha packed up his life and moved to New York City. He and his family, like many believers, built their lives entirely around the Ministerial, receiving prophecy on a regular basis and volunteering large amounts of time, money, and labor to the church and its political wing.
Twelve years later, Rocha wrenched himself away from what he had come to see as a damaging cult, one that exists to funnel wealth and political power into the hands of its leader.
That leader, a Colombian woman named María Luisa Piraquive, is revered by her followers as a prophet, the semidivine messenger of God on earth. Over the last two decades, she has used that influence to turn the Ministerial into a global empire with 868 locations in 48 countries. The church says it has more than 2.5 million followers worldwide, and while outside observers consider this figure exaggerated, defectors and experts still estimate its size to be somewhere in the mid to high hundred thousands. The bulk of its operations are in Colombia, where it also wields political power through an influential party with officials in every level of government.
Much of that political capital is accumulated abroad, where the Ministerial, according to its defectors, exploits the captive devotion of its immigrant members to advance its political project. In the United States, the Ministerial claims 89 locations from coast to coast, ranging from tiny storefronts to large temples in major cities. This is second only to the number of Ministerial churches in Colombia itself.
The rise of the Ministerial forms part of the relentless growth of Evangelical Christianity in Latin America and among its emigrants, a huge demographic shift that has shaken Catholicism’s once uncontested reign. But the church of María Luisa Piraquive stands apart for its zealous reverence for its leader, and for the strange rite at the heart of its doctrine — the practice of prophecy, a literal foretelling of the future that strays from Protestant orthodoxy. This ritual, according to the church’s defectors, is also the principal mechanism by which the Ministerial lures believers, isolates them, and manipulates them into submission to the church and its motives.
In a letter to BuzzFeed News, the Ministerial objected to defectors’ claims that it is a cult and said that many of the scandals that have afflicted the church over the years have been the result of defamatory fabrications motivated by religious persecution. “Out of 89 churches in the US alone, with thousands of congregants, it is telling that there are only a few vengeful detractors willing to make these false allegations against the church.” In other contexts, church leaders have pointed to the charitable work performed by the Ministerial’s affiliated nonprofits around the world.
To Rocha and a larger community of apostates, even the most seemingly well-meaning of the church’s endeavors are a ruse. “It’s not a church,” Rocha said. “It’s a business built on manipulation and fear.”
María Luisa Piraquive's supporters march in Bogotá.
Juan Diego Buitrago / EL TIEMPO
The Ministerial was small when Priscila Angulo found it in the early 1990s. Like many believers, she turned to the church in a moment of crisis. Her mother had suffered a brain aneurysm that left her in a vegetative state. Angulo felt trapped in a loveless and abusive marriage, having wed at 17 and quickly realized her husband was not the man she thought him to be. She needed a miracle.
At first, Angulo received vague prophecies about a person she loved who was ill. Later, the prophecies became more specific — one church member, who had accompanied Angulo to visit her mother in the hospital and had seen her improve, prophesied that she would be healed. Three months later, her mother recovered, and Angulo’s conversion was completed. At the time, the Ministerial was led by its founder, Luis Eduardo Moreno, María Luisa Piraquive’s husband. Moreno, a paternal figure beloved by his flock, saw a young devotee in the 21-year-old Angulo. Before she and her mother returned to their home in the state of Santander, half a day's drive from Bogotá, Moreno entrusted Angulo with a task: Find 10 people who are interested in starting a congregation, then call me.
Luis Eduardo Moreno
Iglesia de Dios Ministerial de Jesucristo Internacional / Via commons.wikimedia.org
She did as she was told. On February 29, 1992 — it was a leap year — 10 people gathered in Angulo’s living room. Moreno showed up with María Luisa in tow and gave a brief sermon on the subject of 1 Corinthians 12, the Bible chapter that introduces the gifts of the Holy Spirit. When he finished, María Luisa, who hadn’t otherwise spoken much, circled the room and gave everyone prophecy.
“All of my friends were excited, because they thought they had just been told their futures,” Angulo said. After it was all over, Moreno told them they would meet again the next month and asked them to bring one person with them — not two, not none, but one.
At the next meeting there were exactly 20 people in Angulo’s house. “Then there were 40, then 80, then 160,” Angulo said. They started meeting in schools and restaurants, and when they passed 500 Angulo rented a permanent space in a disused factory.
“It was the perfect way to start a business,” Angulo said. “It was a pyramid. That’s how I look at it now.”
The Ministerial, in its letter to BuzzFeed News, called Angulo’s statement “false” and said that “the Holy Spirit revealed from the very beginning that He would bring the people to the church, and that the founders of the church did not have to do anything to bring people because all the work would be done by Him.”
As the church itself has grown dramatically over the years, the Piraquive family has accrued significant wealth, including several million-dollar homes in South Florida. The Ministerial’s members are expected to donate a tithe (10% of all their income) to the church, and are encouraged to make extra “offerings” — gifts of cash or clothes or anything else of value. The church has its own publishing house, part of a larger network of corporate holdings affiliated with the Piraquives and the Ministerial, and some larger temples sell magazines, CDs, Bibles, and other goods to worshippers. Defectors say members also routinely devote large amounts of uncompensated labor to the church — people from doctors to real estate brokers to chefs say they have done free work for the Ministerial and its leading family.
Still, according to defectors, many church members are poor, and others are not always obedient about paying their tithes, raising questions about whether the Ministerial's aboveboard fundraising is enough to explain the Piraquive family’s wealth. Last year news broke that a Ministerial pastor in Argentina was arrested in a drug ring and that Colombian prosecutors were investigating María Luisa Piraquive for drug trafficking and money laundering.
Priscila Angulo
Courtesy Priscila Angulo
Over the course of their visits to Santander in the '90s, Angulo noticed that the union between Moreno and Piraquive was strained. He would silence her whenever she tried to speak, and she would glare at him with a “.38-caliber face.” No one spoke to Piraquive much, but Angulo forged a close relationship with Brother Luis, as he was known. She would call him regularly on the phone, asking for advice on all manner of things. “He became like a father to me,” Angulo said.
In May 1996, Moreno died suddenly. The publicly given cause was heart disease, although Angulo said she had always known Moreno to be a healthy and active man.
Moreno’s funeral in Bogotá was packed with his followers, including most every high-ranking member of the Ministerial. Piraquive called for a three-day vigil for her husband and predicted that it would culminate in his resurrection. On the third day, he was still dead. Piraquive told the church’s inner circle that the Lord had informed her that he would be keeping Brother Luis after all. (The Ministerial denies that Piraquive predicted Moreno’s resurrection.)
It came time, then, to choose the minister’s successors — the church was growing fast, and the flock was eager to know who would guide it into the future. Piraquive stood before the congregation and told them of her revelations, which dictated that leadership would be split between two of Moreno’s top lieutenants.
Piraquive cut a humble figure in those days. Video footage of the funeral shows a middle-aged woman with her jet-black hair in a shapeless cut, a far cry from the glamorous woman she would become. (Many years later, the church sued an anonymous person in the United States under copyright claims for posting the funeral video to YouTube.)
Brother Luis believed strictly that women were not to rise to the pulpit and preach, and that, Piraquive assured the flock, would not change. (The Ministerial has since changed this policy.) However, she informed the believers that she had always been the source of her husband’s divine inspiration. “The Lord used me to deliver the doctrine to Brother Luis,” she said. Earlier in her speech, Piraquive had reminded the believers that in the Old Testament one finds kings and priests, and then one finds prophets — male prophets and female prophets. “And God gave the same gifts and the same principles, the same power, to the female prophet as to the male prophet.”
Now Piraquive explained the meaning of that lesson. “The gift the Lord gave to me,” she said, “is the gift of the prophet.”
Mauro Fernando Diaz / Via commons.wikimedia.org
I will lead you to that foreign land…
The words had drilled directly into José Rocha’s core. “Caramba,” he thought. “How could it be that this person knows that this is what I’m going through?” On that first day in the Ministerial in Bogotá, Rocha was vulnerable. “There are moments in life when you don’t feel emotionally strong,” he said. “And the tendency is to look elsewhere for something that will solve the problem. You’re sensitive, and you get caught off guard. And you wind up believing that maybe it was God who spoke to you.”
“Now I understand that it’s simply a question of probability,” Rocha said. “Out of 100 people who sit down for prophecy, you might get it right with 30, and out of those, 10 will stay in the church. But those are people they’ll have tied down for a long time.”
That was February. By May, Rocha had quit his job, sold his car, packed his things, and boarded a plane to New York. His friends thought he was insane to abandon a stable career at the urging of a fortune-teller in an Evangelical sect. But to Rocha the move felt inexorable. The mother of his child was pregnant and alone the first time she went to the Ministerial, and was told in prophecy that the man she loved would return to her. This was fate — they were two sides of the same prophecy fulfilling itself.
Once in New York, Rocha and his girlfriend married and had a second child. The Ministerial’s presence in New York was small at the time, with some 40 believers gathering in a rented second-floor room in Jackson Heights, a heavily Colombian neighborhood in Queens. Rocha and his family went multiple times a week, spending the entire day on Sundays, riding the train an hour and a half each way from the Bronx. On weeknights they wouldn’t get home until after 10.
Their fellow parishioners lived similarly devoted lives, a level of commitment arising in part, Rocha said, from the immigrant’s sense of having been uprooted. “You feel a disconnection from your native land,” Rocha said. “So you arrive in this country, and you find in this group a way of feeling part of something related to what makes you who you are.”
They were hardly alone in their devotion. The Ministerial identifies itself as a neo-Pentecostal denomination, an outgrowth of Pentecostalism. Over the last few decades, Pentecostalism and other charismatic faiths have exploded in size across Latin America, Africa, and their respective diasporas. Pentecostalism, a Protestant denomination that emphasizes the personal, spontaneous, mystical elements of worship, is said to have originated in 1906 when a black preacher, William J. Seymour, the son of slaves and blind in one eye, held a series of sweat-drenched revival meetings on Azusa Street in downtown Los Angeles. Quickly expanding crowds of converts — black, white, and Mexican alike — got together to cast out spirits, yell and shout in tongues, and otherwise feel the presence of the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit-filled denominations draw their theological authority from passages in Corinthians that explain the various gifts the Holy Spirit is liable to give the true believer, among them divine healing and speaking in tongues. Prophecy is in there too, but in the conventional reading, the word means simply a revelation from God, more often intended to strengthen the faith and uplift the spirit in the present moment. The future has little to do with it.
Not so in the Ministerial, where the fortune-telling version of prophecy overshadows every other doctrine. Defectors say the church’s predictions are almost exclusively positive. “Generally they don’t tell you that your mother’s going to die,” Rocha said. “They say: ‘You will get a car, you will travel, you will fall in love, you will get a job offer’ … Health, wealth, and love, basically.”
A gathering of worshippers in Colombia.
Pownerus / Via commons.wikimedia.org
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