Last Sunday evening, December 7, a plump pastor named Lee Minemann interrupted services in the largest Protestant church in Guadalajara, Mexico. Taking the podium, Minemann announced that Samuel Joaquín Flores, who is considered by his followers to be a living apostle of Jesus, was near death.
At the time, I was sitting in a little brick church near Raleigh, N.C., with some 60 members of Samuel Joaquín’s movement, Iglesia La Luz del Mundo, or LLDM. The pentecostal Iglesia may be Mexico’s largest homegrown religious sect, and most of the parishioners in North Carolina were from immigrant families. As is common in the La Luz del Mundo diaspora, we were sitting in rows of chairs watching the Guadalajara service Livestreaming on a pair of TV monitors mounted to either side of the altar.
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