The World Mission Society Church of God (WMSCOG) with Anthony Forte

A decade inside the Korean doomsday cult WMSCOG, an arranged marriage, and the exit that followed

Aug 03, 2026

Anthony Forte spent more than ten years inside the World Mission Society Church of God, rising from a new recruit stopped on a Queens, NY, sidewalk to a leader who trained others to recruit the way he had been recruited. He joined at 25, during a stretch of his life when he felt behind everyone around him. He stayed through an arranged marriage. He left only after the research he did during the pandemic exposed cracks in a doctrine he had built a decade of his life on.

I sat down with Anthony on Cults, Culture & Coercion to trace how a Bible study invitation in Astoria turned into ten years under someone else’s control, and what it took for him to get his mind back.

Inside the World Mission Society Church of God

The World Mission Society Church of God, known to researchers in this field as WMSCOG, teaches that Ahn Sahng-hong, a Korean man who died in 1985, was the second coming of Christ, and Zahng Gil-jah is “God the Mother,” a living deity based in South Korea. Members are told they must accept both figures, keep the Sabbath and Passover, tithe, and recruit new members to earn a place in heaven. Anthony rose through recruiting and teaching, eventually overseeing a team of members, before he found his way out.

He was 25 and between chapters of his life when two members stopped him on the street and asked whether he had heard of God the Mother. He tried to walk away. They kept talking. He agreed to a Bible study at Starbucks, and this single conversation carried him into the group for a decade.

The Recruitment Nobody Sees Coming

Anthony told me the process worked because nothing alarming came first.

“It just seemed like a nice group,” he said. “They keep in touch, and then little by little, the weirder things were introduced. But it didn’t start off that way.”

Members walked him through fifty Bible studies, layering specific commitments onto simple, agreeable ideas: Saturday is the Sabbath, Passover involves bread and wine, and only this church teaches these things correctly, so members need the church for salvation. By the time female Jesus and a living deity in South Korea entered the picture, a pattern of small, sequential commitments already held him in place, a textbook example of what I call the BITE Model of Authoritarian Control™, the framework covering the behavior, information, thought, and emotional control tactics keeping members inside authoritarian groups. Anthony was baptized the same night he was recruited, before he had asked a single question about what membership would require of him.

Arranged Marriage, Doomsday, and a Racial Hierarchy

A year into membership, leaders promoted Anthony to team leader and turned the conversation toward marriage. His pastor pushed him toward a Korean member who would need a visa sponsor, framing marriage as a path to greater blessings. The wedding took place in October 2012; the same year the group had told members would mark the end of the world.

“I only have two more months on Earth anyway,” Anthony remembered thinking. “Might as well do this big action and please God, so I have a better chance to get into heaven.” He and his wife communicated mostly by text for quite some time, since she spoke little English. “It was very difficult,” he told me, “to marry a stranger.”

The World Mission Society Church of God also ran on a racial hierarchy that Anthony had to help enforce for group photos sent to leadership in Korea: white members in front, then Latino members, then Black members. Though they elevated white members in photographs, they taught that Korean people and Korean culture were the most godly. “It was Korean supremacist, is how I label it,” he said.

COVID, Free Time, and Cracks in the Story

The pandemic loosened the group’s grip in a way nothing else had. Locked into hours of Zoom meetings but with unfamiliar free time, Anthony started fact-checking a teaching called Daniel’s Prophecy, borrowed from the Seventh-day Adventist church that the group’s founder had once belonged to. The numbers didn’t hold up. A claim that every pope wore a crown inscribed with VICARIUS FILII DEI, which had Roman numerals equating to the number 666, turned out to be false. A claim that three of ten biblical tribes had fallen understated the real number, five.

“The more I looked into history, the more I realized that their teachings weren’t true,” Anthony said. “And then when one thing started to crack, other things started to crack too.”

Questions inside the group carried consequences instead of answers. A member who raised a doubt with a team leader watched it travel up the chain to the group leader, then the church leader, then back down again, until, in Anthony’s words, “the whole church is monitoring you.” He kept his doubts from his wife for close to a year, afraid of losing what he had been told was God’s protection would cost him his health or his safety.

Suing the Critics, Rebuilding a Life

Anthony pointed me toward a legal fight I remembered well. The World Mission Society Church of God sued the operators of examiningthewmscog.com, a site built by former members and outside researchers documenting arranged marriages, coerced abortions, and family separation inside the group.

“Everything was true,” Anthony said of the site’s claims. “They tried to silence them by going through this litigation process.” The suit against site contributor Michele Colón was thrown out, and Colón countersued with a SLAPP lawsuit (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation).

Anthony left the church in 2021, moved out on his own, and separated from a marriage he came to see as never rooted in love. He credits ex-member podcasts, and a fellow former member named Kelsey, whom he reached before he left, with getting him through the hardest months.

“Finding community of ex-members has been probably the best part of my healing journey,” he said. “Nobody else gets it.”

The Pattern Repeats

I have heard versions of Anthony’s story from members of the Moonies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Scientology. Each group insists that its own doctrine, its own leader, and its own path to heaven sets it apart from every group before it. The World Mission Society Church of God is only the newest name in a pattern I have watched repeat for fifty years. The tactics repeat because they work: a slow build of commitments, tight control over information, a hierarchy dressed up as divine order, and a threat hanging over anyone who leaves.

Anthony closed our conversation with a message for anyone still inside a group like this one: do the research, ask the questions leadership discourages, and trust real information is worth more than any promise a group makes about your soul. Listen to the full conversation for the parts of Anthony’s story we couldn’t fit here, including how he has worked to rebuild trust with the people he once recruited.