I’m writing this to warn others.

At first, they treated me exceptionally well, which turned out to be a trap. I’ve learned, albeit late in life, to be cautious when someone is overly kind without a reason.

After attending for a short while, they started calling me aside after worship services, saying we should study tithes. They showed me passages from their guide about the curses of not giving tithes, clearly trying to scare me. Later, I looked it up online and found out those passages were from the Old Testament. It felt like they were living according to the Old Testament, much like the ancient Israelites.

They even taught that those who didn’t keep the Sabbath should be stoned to death. The scare tactics just kept increasing little by little.

Over time, I began feeling constant anxiety in my daily life. I used to be an easygoing person who rarely got stressed, but I couldn’t find peace anymore. I worried about being punished by Jang Gil-ja and felt uneasy for no reason.

In the beginning, they congratulated me, saying I would go to heaven even if I only attended occasionally. But later, they said I couldn’t go to heaven unless I evangelized.

Feeling pressured, I started contacting former coworkers, relatives, and even an aunt, trying to persuade them to attend the church. None of them listened. Instead, they scolded me, asking if I’d lost my mind and told me to snap out of it and stay away from such a church.

Looking back, I think I wasn’t in my right mind at the time.

I kept attending for another eight months until one day, I stumbled across a YouTube video about Jang Gil-ja’s divorce. I asked a deacon about it, saying, “Does it make sense for God to divorce? The Bible says divorce is wrong, so why did she divorce if the church claims to follow the Bible?”

The deacon lost their temper, yelling that I had “taken Satan’s bait.”

Even though I tried to stay calm and told them not to get angry, they continued shouting. I couldn’t help but tear up a little.

That’s when I realized all the kindness they had shown me was fake. I thought to myself, “How can salvation or heaven exist in a place where you can’t even ask honest questions about the Bible?”

Although I regretted the money I had spent on tithes, I decided to chalk it up to life experience and stopped attending the church that very day.

After that, they wouldn’t leave me alone. They called, texted, and even came to my house. Even when I politely asked them to leave, they stayed outside my door for about 30 minutes. I was scared, so I called the building security office. When the security guard told them to leave immediately, the deacon and evangelist who had come with her finally left, visibly shaken.

What an ordeal. There truly are all kinds of people in this world."