The Global Church Era · 1914-present · Philippines; N. America; Korea; Mexico
Iglesia ni Cristo; The Way International; Unification Church; La Luz del Mundo
An open theological question
Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.
About This Movement
Four separately founded bodies are carried together here for the map's economy, not because they share a confession — they do not, and each is described from its own published texts. Iglesia ni Cristo was registered in the Philippines on 27 July 1914; its own history presents Felix Manalo as God's messenger for the last days, and its magazine Pasugo has published its teaching since February 1939. The Way International began as Victor Paul Wierwille's Vesper Chimes radio ministry in 1942 and took its later name in 1955; his Power for Abundant Living appeared in 1971 and Jesus Christ Is Not God in 1975, a title that states its own position. The Unification Church, now the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, was founded in Seoul on 1 May 1954 by Sun Myung Moon, whose Divine Principle appeared in Korean in 1966. La Luz del Mundo was founded in Guadalajara on 6 April 1926 by Eusebio Joaquín González, and is led by an apostle in succession from him.
Sources
- Iglesia ni Cristo: Pasugo/God's Message (Feb 1939-, Tagalog and English); the 1914 government registration; the last-messenger teaching in the church's own doctrinal articles (primary)
- The Way International: Wierwille, Jesus Christ Is Not God (1975); Power for Abundant Living (1971); current statements-of-belief (primary) — The founder's own book title states the movement's core doctrinal position directly.
- Unification Church: Divine Principle (Wolli Kangnon 1966; ET 1973); Moon's published speeches corpus (primary) — The movement's own scripture-plus-interpretation, at the center of its theology.
- La Luz del Mundo: the church's own Apostleship confession (founding 1926; succession through Samuel and Naason Joaquin in its own publications); the 2022 California guilty plea and sentencing of Naason Joaquin Garcia (primary) — The criminal court record is a legal proceeding, not the church's own confessional material - a different kind of evidence, read on its own terms.
- Eileen Barker, The Making of a Moonie (Blackwell, 1984); the NRM-sociology literature (secondary) — Academic scholarship on Iglesia ni Cristo, The Way, and La Luz del Mundo is notably thin relative to how large these movements are.
- CHC vol. 9 (reference)