Adventism is a branch of Protestant Christianity that believes in the imminent Second Coming of Jesus Christ. It originated in the 1830s in the United States during the Second Great Awakening when Baptist preacher William Miller first publicly shared his belief that the Second Coming would occur at some point between 1843 and 1844. His followers became known as Millerites. After Miller's prophecies failed, the Millerite movement split up and was continued by a number of groups that held different doctrines from one another. These groups, stemming from a common Millerite ancestor, collectively became known as the Adventist movement.
The Christian countercult movement or the Christian anti-cult movement is a social movement among certain Protestant evangelical and fundamentalist and other Christian ministries and individual activists who oppose religious sects that they consider cults.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church (SDA) is an Adventist Protestant Christian denomination which is distinguished by its observance of Saturday, the seventh day of the week in the Christian (Gregorian) and the Hebrew calendar, as the Sabbath, its emphasis on the imminent Second Coming (advent) of Jesus Christ, and its annihilationist soteriology. The denomination grew out of the Millerite movement in the United States during the mid-19th century, and it was formally established in 1863. Among its co-founders was Ellen G. White, whose extensive writings are still held in high regard by the church.
Jehovah's Witnesses is a nontrinitarian, millenarian, restorationist Christian denomination. In 2023, the group reported approximately 8.6 million members involved in evangelism, with around 20.5 million attending the annual Memorial of Christ's death. Jehovah's Witnesses believe that the destruction of the present world system at Armageddon is imminent, and the establishment of God's kingdom over earth is the only solution to all of humanity's problems.
A new religious movement (NRM), also known as alternative spirituality or a new religion, is a religious or spiritual group that has modern origins and is peripheral to its society's dominant religious culture. NRMs can be novel in origin, or they can be part of a wider religion, in which case they are distinct from pre-existing denominations. Some NRMs deal with the challenges that the modernizing world poses to them by embracing individualism, while other NRMs deal with them by embracing tightly knit collective means. Scholars have estimated that NRMs number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Most NRMs only have a few members, some of them have thousands of members, and a few of them have more than a million members.
The Jesus Army, also known as the Jesus Fellowship Church and the Bugbrooke Community, was a neocharismatic evangelical Christian movement based in the United Kingdom, part of the British New Church Movement. The name Jesus Army was used specifically for the outreach and street-based evangelism for which they were known. The Jesus Fellowship was founded in 1969, when Noel Stanton (1926–2009), at that time the lay pastor of the Baptist chapel in the village of Bugbrooke near Northampton, East Midlands, was inspired by a charismatic experience which led him to successfully expand the congregation, largely by appealing to a younger generation of worshippers. As the new church grew and became more charismatic in nature, many of the original congregation left to continue worshipping in more traditional churches. The Jesus Fellowship grew considerably and by 2007 there were approximately 3,500 members in around 24 congregations in various cities and towns of the UK. The Jesus Fellowship frequently engaged in evangelism in public places, seeking through outreach to demonstrate the love of Jesus and the moving of the Holy Spirit. The Fellowship used various slogans, in its early days adopting "Love, Power & Sacrifice" and later "Jesus People, Loving People", and the name "Jesus Army". The church announced in May 2019 that it "will cease to exist and the current National Leadership Team will be stepping down from their roles once the winding up of the central Church has been completed". Members had voted on 26 May 2019 to revoke the Church's constitution, after a decline in membership to less than 1,000 following claims against its founder and two other then members of the church of a history of sexual assault during the 1970s. It was planned that the Jesus Centres charity the church created would continue to operate and that individual churches would become independent congregations. Fewer than 200 people were still living in communal households of the Jesus Fellowship. In October 2021, Companies House certified the change of name from Jesus Centres Trust (1165925) to JCT - Joining Communities Together Limited. Since December 2020, the Jesus Fellowship Community Trust has existed as a residuary body with the sole purpose of winding up the administrative affairs of the Jesus Fellowship Church.
John Gordon Melton is an American religious scholar who was the founding director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion and is currently the Distinguished Professor of American Religious History with the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University in Waco, Texas where he resides. He is also an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church.
Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship is an evangelical Christian student movement with affiliate groups on university campuses in the United Kingdom. It is a member of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. The UCCF endorses a conservative evangelical form of Christian theology.
Joslin "Josh" McDowell is an evangelical Christian apologist and evangelist. He is the author or co-author of over 150 books.
Walter Ralston Martin was an American Baptist Christian minister and author who founded the Christian Research Institute in 1960 as a parachurch ministry specializing as a clearing-house of information in both general Christian apologetics and in countercult apologetics. As the author of the influential The Kingdom of the Cults (1965), he has been dubbed by the conservative Christian columnist Michael J. McManus, the "godfather of the anti-cult movement".
Jan Groenveld was an Australian Christian countercult activist. She was a member of the Latter-day Saints Church and the Jehovah's Witnesses. She spent fifteen years in these and other organisations before leaving them in 1975 and resolving to make more information about what she saw as "cults" available to the general public.
The application of the labels "cults" or "sects" to religious movements in government documents usually signifies the popular and negative use of the term "cult" in English and a functionally similar use of words translated as "sect" in several European languages. Government reports which have used these words include ones from Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, and Russia. While these documents utilize similar terminology they do not necessarily include the same groups nor is their assessment of these groups based on agreed criteria. Other governments and world bodies also report on new religious movements but do not use these terms to describe them.
Another Gospel: Cults, Alternative Religions, and the New Age Movement is a non-fiction book discussing new religious movements and the New Age movement, written by Ruth A. Tucker. The book was published in 1989 by Zondervan, a Christian publishing house. Another edition was released by the same publisher in 2004.
The Challenge of the Cults and New Religions: The Essential Guide to Their History, Their Doctrine, and Our Response is a Christian countercult non-fiction book about cults and new religious movements by Ron Rhodes. The book was published by Zondervan on September 1, 2001. The book defines cults and new religions by examining case studies of twelve groups chosen by Rhodes. The book includes a foreword by Lee Strobel, author of the book The Case for Christ.
Robert Passantino, was an American author and journalist who wrote on subjects related to Christian apologetics, philosophy, and the Christian countercult movement.
Freedom of religion in Singapore is a guaranteed constitutionally protected right. Article 15 of the Constitution of Singapore states: "Every person has the right to profess and practise his religion and to propagate it." and allows believers the freedom to assemble and worship without limitation or interference.
Personal Freedom Outreach (PFO) is an evangelical countercult organization that serves to "educate Christians about the dangers and heretical doctrines of religious cults, to use the Gospel of Jesus Christ to reach members of those cults and to warn Christians of unbiblical teachings within the church itself."
New England Institute of Religious Research (NEIRR) is a countercult ministry located in Massachusetts which provides information on groups which it considers to be cults. It provides training, counseling, and assistance to individuals who are involved with such groups. The organization also runs a retreat center called the Meadow Haven Retreat and Recovery Center.
The Kingdom of the Cults, first published in 1965, is a reference book of the Christian countercult movement in the United States, written by Baptist minister and counter-cultist Walter Ralston Martin. As of 2019, the book is in its sixth updated edition.
The People's Organised Workshop on Ersatz Religion (POWER), also called the People's Organised Workgroup on Ersatz Religion, was a British anti-cult organisation founded in 1976 based in Ealing, London. Some believe that POWER is a front organisation by large new religious movements (NRMs) meant to delegitimise other anti-cult organisations like Family, Action, Information, Rescue (FAIR). POWER functionally disappeared in 1977 but caused major controversy within its roughly one-year lifespan. The organisation published a brochure called Deprogramming: The Constructive Destruction of Belief: A Manual of Technique, which advocated for mass deprogramming of cult members, including methods like sleep deprivation, food deprivation, forced nudity, kidnapping, and "aggressive sex".
