Lebanon
Her alarm won’t go off for another hour, but her internal clock wakes her up anyway, and so she gets ready in the dark: slipping on an ankle-length skirt, smoothing her long dark hair, putting on her glasses, picking up the lace chalina that will cover her head. Shortly before 5, she and some of the other missionaries leave their houses in downtown Lebanon and head to the basement church where they pray.
“It sounds kind of crazy, but my body’s used to it,” Cardenas said of her lifestyle, over nachos and buffalo wings one night after church. “I have a lot of energy. And I take a nap at work.”
The church, nestled below the cluster of businesses at 31 Hanover St., is part of an evangelical denomination of Christianity that may be obscure in the Upper Valley, but elsewhere in the world is the subject of both praise and scrutiny: Iglesia del Dios Vivo, Columna y Apoyo de la Verdad, La Luz del Mundo — or La Luz del Mundo, the Light of the World, for short.
The church is based in Guadalajara, Mexico, with a strong presence throughout Latin America. Cardenas and 11 other Light of the World members, many of them Salvadoran-American, moved to Lebanon in November 2016 after volunteering for their mission. They have been trying to recruit followers, and save souls, ever since.
Some Lebanon residents might have seen them at Colburn Park, singing hymns and carrying a banner, or might have seen their car, which is emblazoned with the letters “NjG,” superimposed onto one another, as in the New York Yankees logo.
“Why Lebanon? We get asked that a lot,” said Yonatan Ovando, another missionary, before a recent Thursday night service. The church holds three worship services a day: one at 5 a.m., one at 9 a.m. that’s specifically for the women, and one in the evening at 6:30, with special services on Thursdays and Sundays.
“The truth is … Lebanon, New Hampshire was chosen by God,” he said. “But we’re not here to impose on people. We’re not here to say we’re right and you’re wrong. We’re just here to tell people the good news about salvation. The good news about salvation — that’s how I like to put it.”
At the heart of the Light of the World is the belief that this salvation lies with a man, Naason Joaquin Garcia, who is a living apostle of Jesus Christ. In Ovando’s eyes, Garcia is the direct mouthpiece of God and the embodiment of spiritual perfection.
“He is still flesh and bone, like you and me. He still gets tired, he still fatigues,” Ovando said. “But he is perfect, because Christ lives through him.”
The Light of the World considers itself the only true Christian church, a “primitive” church that’s modeled after the earliest form of Christianity and so eschews the trappings of its more contemporary iterations, particularly those of the Catholic Church. Light of the World does not, for example, employ images of the crucifix. Hymns are sung without musical accompaniment. People sometimes speak in tongues.
And whenever they kneel down in church to pray, something happens that might take observers by surprise if they didn’t know it was coming.
The worshippers break down in tears.
‘Bad People and Good People’
The Lebanon church is a modest one, but the missionaries have made it their own: carpeting its floors, decorating it with faux flowers, printing text on its walls.
On the left, the side where male worshippers or “brothers” sit, block letters spell out MY TIME HAS COME — what Garcia said when he announced that God had spoken to him and elected him as the next apostle, Ovando explained. On the right, where the sisters sit: SECURE IS THE SHEEPFOLD.
Up in front behind the pulpit, and the two faux bouquets that flank it, the wall is painted a deep royal blue. The logo features the superimposed letters NjG, the initials of Naason Joaquin Garcia. The “j” is fashioned to look like a candle, whose flame lands just by the fire alarm.
At the pulpit Thursday night, Rafael Avelar was leading part of the service, at one point engaging in a kind of call-and-response with his fellow worshippers.
“God is … guiding us to where, brethren?” he asked.
“Eternity!”
Keyla Sanchez tip-toed in a few minutes late — since the members work day jobs, they attend worship services as their schedules allow. But she made up for lost time: During the hymns, her strong, clear vibrato anchored the voices on the sisters’ side of the aisle. During the sermon, she and others called out as they were moved: “Amen, praise the Lord,” Sanchez whooped. “Amen! Glory to God.”
The crying is a way to “let it all out,” she said later. A spectacle of faith without shame.
“When we pray, we’re not looking around to see who’s looking at us. If we’re sad, we’re going to cry; if we’re happy, we’re going to cry. It’s a manifestation of our soul,” she said. “Our soul is the one having that communication with God.”
Of course, the only person on Earth who can enjoy a direct conversation with God is the apostle, Garcia, members said. Garcia succeeded the previous apostle — his father, Samuel Joaquin Flores — when he died in 2014. Flores had been the apostle since 1964, succeeding his own father, who founded the church.
The founder was a military man, born Eusebio Joaquin Gonzalez in the western Mexican state of Jalisco in 1896. According to church doctrine, God spoke to Gonzalez personally one night, aligning the stars to spell out his new God-given name:
“There is a man here whose name will be Aaron!” God said, according to the church hymnal. “I will make it known throughout the world and he will be a blessing!”
Gonzalez then set about the subversive work of traveling around to different Mexican states, spreading the word. It was subversive because Mexico was (and still is) a predominantly Catholic country, and because the year was 1926 — the same year that saw the start of Mexico’s Cristero War, a series of bloody conflicts over religious freedom. According to Jason Dormady’s book Primitive Revolution: Restorationist Religion and the Idea of the Mexican Revolution, neither Catholics nor the Mexican government were very fond of Gonzalez’s evangelizing, so at first he and his handful of followers — he started with 10 — met only in remote locations.
Since then, Light of the World has become one of the most prominent native evangelical churches in Mexico. It has between 1 million and 7 million followers, depending on who’s making the estimate, in more than 50 countries.
But success has not come without its controversies.
Shortly after the 1997 Heaven’s Gate massacre, in which 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed suicide at the behest of their leader Marshall Applewhite, the Mexican theologian Jorge Erdely accused the Light of the World of using cult-like practices that could result in similar tragedy.
Flores denied that he had any intention of harming his followers, and church officials posited that Erdely’s claim was grounded in prejudice rather than evidence.
Still, critics — including what some pundits described as a jealous Catholic Church, which for a while seemed to be hemorrhaging disillusioned members right into the Light of the World — have accused the apostles of fostering more a cult of personality than a church of God. Many of the church’s major holidays celebrate apostles’ birthday, for example. And some religious scholars have suggested that the Light of the World exploits its followers spiritually and financially; the majority of them have historically come from poorer backgrounds.
But the most vitriolic critics are not the scholars. They are the apostates.
On Reddit.com, a website that allows members to create forums to discuss certain topics, there is one forum called “exlldm.” (LLDM stands for La Luz del Mundo.)
One thread, written as an open letter to those still in the church, goes: “You are being manipulated. You are being programmed. You are being brainwashed. You are being controlled. You are being extorted. You are being talked down to. You are being made to feel small. … WAKE UP TO REALITY AND STOP BEING A ZOMBIE SLAVE TO A FAT MEXICAN GUY … WHO THINK (sic) GOD TALKS TO HIM.”
In 1998, the Los Angeles Times reported on the detailed accounts of former church members who had accused Flores of sexually abusing or raping them when they were minors. One of them, a man named Moises Padilla, alleges that after speaking out against the church, he was kidnapped and stabbed 57 times.
But by the time these allegations came to light, the statute of limitations had long lapsed, so nothing could be done legally, the Los Angeles Times reported at the time. The church denies the claims.
Asked about criticisms of the church, Sanchez laughed.
“You want to be careful what you read online,” she said. “There’s always bad people and good people. And those bad people are always trying to stop that work, that work that is our God’s work. … You really want to stick to the official websites.”
But negative press about the church, printed in the United States and elsewhere, hasn’t seemed to curb its growth. It had always, scholars noted, presented itself as an underdog — a righteous victim of persecution from rival churches and nonbelievers. Jesus, after all, was vilified, too.
“Those allegations were done many, many years ago,” Sanchez said. She reiterated that there are “bad people” out there, who are trying to derail the holy work of the apostles and their followers.
And she trusts her gut feeling, which is that Flores was innocent of any wrongdoing.
“I know what is true. I can’t explain it,” she said. “But this is my opinion and what I think.”
Spiritual Family
For one part of the service, Sanchez stood up at the front of the room to share her testimony, her eyes welling up when she noted the risk of social rejection that comes with being in the Light of the World.
“Our friends and family might leave us because of what we believe and what we do,” she said. “They don’t understand.” But, she concluded, the most important thing is feeling secure in one’s salvation. And anyway, as several members said in interviews, the church provided another kind of family, a spiritual family.
After the service, four members of the church — Cardenas, Sanchez, Ovando and Avelar, the members most comfortable with their English — stayed behind for an interview. They were all strikingly young: all 20 except for Avelar who, at 28, is one of the mission’s older members.
They didn’t seem like “zombie slaves.” They were funny and laid-back, personable and warm.
“I only look young because I just shaved,” joked Ovando, self-consciously running a hand along his jaw-line. As he did this, the sleeve of his crisp black suit contrasted with the dried white paint on his knuckles, left over from a house-painting job earlier that day.
The Lebanon missionaries do not receive financial support from their parent church, so they work day jobs to cover the rent and utilities of their worship space in addition to their housing costs. With many of them clocking full-time hours, the worshippers subscribe to the mindset of work hard, pray hard.
That first winter, though, “it was tough to find a job,” Avelar acknowledged. “I’m used to doing construction work, and there’s not a lot of construction work in the winter.”
Sanchez also struggled to find work, despite her credentials as a licensed nursing assistant: Her first job here was at Margarita’s.
“I bounced around a bit,” she said. It wasn’t until three months ago that she started working in the radiology department at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center — a job she loves because it allows her to put her scientific background to use.
Before moving to Lebanon, “my plan was to do nursing. It was what I wanted to do. I found the medical field so interesting,” Sanchez said. It was a way to satiate her curiosity about the natural world: “I loved to see all these things happening, and I wanted to figure out why they happen.”
Her favorite subject was psychology, because she likes to think about why people do what they do. She loves crime shows, Bones and CSI and especially Dexter, for this reason.
“It was scary” to change her life so much, she said. “It’s still scary sometimes.” But she likes her job. She likes the people she’s met here. And she likes doing God’s work.
Cardenas also enjoys her job at Home Depot’s customer service desk.
“You know when she’s working because you can hear her laughing across the store,” said Ovando, who also works there. “She is an energetic person.”
So energetic, in fact, that when she gets home from work, she launches right into cleaning the house, or exercising, or cooking an elaborate, multi-course meal.
“I make my mom’s recipes. Spicy but good,” she said. “I’ve always been in the kitchen, ever since I was 10 years old. When my mom would be off in her room or something, my sister and I would be cooking dinner for ourselves.”
But the kitchen wasn’t the only arena where the Cardenas girls learned important life skills. Growing up in Idaho, they were the only Light of the World members. Their uncommonly demure clothes made them stick out from the other children, who — as children are wont to do — zeroed in on the sisters’ difference in appearance, and mocked them for it.
“We were bullied very badly,” Cardenas recalled. And confronting her tormentors, explaining that she dressed the way she did because modesty was a tenet of her religious beliefs, only seemed to make things worse.
Years later, in high school, her bullies apologized, which she appreciated.
“But it did still cause a lot of emotional problems,” especially for her sister, Cardenas said. “It’s much better in Lebanon. … Here I get stares, too. But in Idaho it was like, bad stares.”
Though the Upper Valley is primarily white, and certainly unfamiliar with the Light of the World, the young missionaries insisted they haven’t encountered any bigotry firsthand. People aren’t really hostile, they said. Just curious.
“I’d be lying if I said no one had ever been a little rude,” Ovando acknowledged. “But we don’t get sad. We don’t get discouraged. We know that we are here to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Avelar chuckled, recalling what one passerby had said to him: “We’re not racist. We’re just not used to seeing you around here.”
Though Cardenas, Sanchez, Avelar and Ovando were all born into church, “we’re not necessarily here because of our tradition. We’re here of our own choice,” Sanchez said, adding that at 14, children raised in the church can decide if they’d like to continue.
“Hopefully, at that age they’re old enough to tell right from wrong.”
Future of the Mission
Some call it a cult; others call it a creed. The definitions of both can be slippery, subjective. But whether or not the alleged darker side of the Light of the World holds up to scrutiny, the Lebanon missionaries are devout in their personal truth. It’s what gave Sanchez the courage to alter the course of her life. It nourishes Cardenas’ seemingly bottomless reserves of energy. It’s what kept Ovando warm that first Upper Valley winter, which was “so cold,” he joked, “I almost met my Creator.”
After the church service on Thursday night, Cardenas and Sanchez used their phones to pull up images of some the most impressive Light of the World churches. The one in Guadalajara — considered the church’s international headquarters — resembles a many-tiered wedding cake that’s beginning to topple over, decked out with flashing neon lights and a multi-colored interior.
The church in Houston, one of the biggest Light of the World churches in the United States and where the Lebanon missionaries all met, is a commanding Greco-Roman structure, gated and pillared, that was built and funded by church volunteers, and under Flores’ leadership acquired a large zoo-themed ranch. Each year, hundreds of thousands of followers make a pilgrimage to Guadalajara or Houston — throngs of followers dressed in white, bifurcated into brothers and sisters in veils.
Sanchez and Cardenas thumbed through images of churches across the country and the world, pointing out their favorites. To the Lebanon missionaries, those more palatial houses of worship reaffirm the glory of their apostolic mission, and of God. Above their heads, for the umpteenth time that night, wind whooshed through the air duct that snaked around the ceiling.
“We’re looking at another space tomorrow,” Ovando said, visibly excited. It’s above-ground for one, and is also ideally located, near the Kilton Library in West Lebanon. “It’s a great space.”
“It’s an expensive space,” Avelar reminded him.
But coming from a church that’s skyrocketed to millions of followers in less than a century — despite controversies and scathing criticism — the young missionaries may have good reason to feel confident in their mission of bringing the Light of the World to the Upper Valley.
In one of their hymns, the chorus goes:
Who will they be? Who will sing the glorious song,
Who will they be? Wearing vestments that are whitened;
Who will they be? Those who will reign with the Redeemer,
Who will they be? Those who accept your authority.
The last prayer of the service that night was the most emotional yet. Fists rubbed at eyes as the weeping grew in volume and intensity, crescendoing from whimpers into wails and heaving sobs. When it ebbed out, with one final sniffle, the silence felt very loud indeed.
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at ejholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.