[Issue-In] Who is the Light and Salt? Shincheonji Church of Jesus Exposes The Current Condition of 'Criminal Pastors'. 12,000 Cases In 10 Years.

[Daily Cheonji=Reporter Sookyung Kang, Seongwan Kim and Jisol Lee] #Case 1. A Cambodian girl – aged only 12 years – confided in a Korean pastor, swallowing a pill he gave her. This pastor filmed an act of sexual intercourse with this young girl and even forced her parents to remain silent about it. As many as nine girls have suffered in the same way - all aged between 12 and 17. In October 2016, Cambodian police swiftly arrested this pastor (Pastor Park), sentencing him to 14 years in prison and $70,000 in damages.

#Case 2. A middle-school girl in Grade 7 died from domestic abuse. She had been abandoned and was found at home one year later with bones as white as a mummy. In March 2015, 40-year-old Pastor Lee had beaten his daughter for as long as 7 hours up until the point of death in Bucheon, Gyeonggi province, leaving her corpse at home. Pastor Lee and his wife beat their daughter until their wooden stick broke. They repeatedly hit her palms, calves and thighs 50~70 times all at once.

#Case 3. Attempted murder. A sentence of 5 years in prison was delivered to Pastor Hwang, former secretary of the Korean Presbyterian Church of Jesus, who was arrested for stabbing a fellow pastor with a knife in November 2015. After Pastor Park, who was his closest friend, took over Hwang's position after revealing his corruption, Hwang stabbed Park in anger. He had previously appeared with a gas gun in an assembly, which raised controversy.

#Case 4. Pastor Yonggi Joh, who had founded Yeouido Full Gospel Church that has grown to become the largest church in the East with one million followers, ordered the church to buy 250,000 stocks of the I-Service company - owned by his eldest son Heejun Joh, former C.E.O. of Gookmin Daily - at nearly four times above the 2002 market value of 24,000 Korean Won per share. This has cost Yeouido Full Gospel Church 13.1 billion Korean Won in damages. The eldest son, Heejun Cho, was also convicted of involvement in this case of embezzlement.

Shincheonji Church of Jesus, The Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony (Shincheonji church of Jesus, The chairman: Man Hee Lee) has released statistics about crimes committed by pastors of the Korean churches, which will be expected to make an impact.

According to the Statistics of Crimes Committed by Korean Pastors, revealed by Shincheonji church of Jesus, pastors committed nearly 12,000 crimes from 2008~2018; of which 7000 are from the Seoul and Geyonggi provinces.

In the last 3.5years, from 2015-July 2018, 531 pastors from Seoul‧Gyeonggi provinces have received sentences: 182 in 2015, 140 in 2016, 130 in 2017 and 79 by July 2018. Fraud accounted for the largest portion of crimes at 18% (97). This was followed by burglary (68), sexual assault (32), personal injury (31), defamation (29), assault (28), embezzlement (26), traffic incidents (20), forgery (20), obstruction of business (18) and false charges (11). There were many obstructions of justice, violations of both the Building Act and the Public Election Official Act, and also cases of insult. Furthermore, there were 112 cases of murder and miscellaneous charges. By region, 223 were committed in Seoul, 259 in Gyeonggi province and 49 in Incheon.

In actuality, this is not the first time that pastors' crimes have been revealed. According to previous statistics published by the Public Prosecutor's Office in 2012, the number of violent crimes committed that year - including murder, arson, robbery, rape etc. - stood at 25,485. 25.2% (6414 cases) were committed by people in positions of religious authority. Among them, the majority of crimes (2840) were committed by Christians, followed by 1939 crimes committed by Buddhists.

Earlier this year, the 'Me-Too Campaign (Campaign against sexual crime)', triggered by sex crimes within the judicial circle, led to a growing interest in sex crimes within the religious circle. People were astonished to know that pastors were the culprits involved in the majority of crimes involving sexual assault.

According to statistics published by the Public Prosecutor's Office, 29,289 sex crimes were committed in 2016. One-third of them occurred within the religious circle and 4131 cases from within the Protestant denomination. The number of sex crimes committed by pastors of the Protestant churches is more than half that of religious subdivisions, about four times that of Catholicism and 1.7 times that of Buddhism. Moreover, according to the statistics on the 'number of convicted sex-related crimes by professionals from 2010~November 2016', published by the National Police Agency, people in religious circles recorded the highest number with 681 among 5261 professionals. The occupation of those responsible for committing the most sex crimes were protestant pastors.

Pastors haven’t refrained from committing such wrongdoing. Crimes continue in spite of pleas urging for their eradication and immediate disciplinary action to be taken within the church. Diagnosis of a more fundamental cause is required.