Reports controversial religious sect operating out of West Leederville moving out

An alleged cult that has been operating out of an office building in West Leederville is apparently on the move after community backlash and a council crackdown on its operations. Neighbours, ex-members and parents of devotees of the Shincheonji Church have been hoping for this departure for quite some time after a lengthy battle to shut down the practice on Cambridge Street. They claim the church is a “doomsday cult” that targets and recruits international students and young Christians through the guise of a “non-denominational Bible studies group”. It’s only around the nine-month mark that these students are told that they have joined the South Korea-based Shincheonji Church of Jesus — a religious sect primarily centred around its founder, Lee Man-hee, a messiah-like billionaire who is believed to be the “promised pastor” of the New Testament. But counsellor Sally Phu, who has been working with former SCJ members in Perth, says it’s past the point of return for many of its already devoted members. “No matter what information you’re presenting to them that points towards it being a cult — they’re not going to see it that way because they’ve already been trained to see it as a good thing,” she said. As members dedicate more and more of their time to the teachings, it’s not long after that SCJ becomes the central focus of their lives, with university studies, careers and personal endeavours abandoned, lying to their friends and family in the process. “Going to university, working for a career or forming a loving family, all those things are discredited as meaningless so that you can just focus on the church’s goal,” ex-member Matthew Thomas said. “So having to go back after years of thinking how meaningless that life is is a massive readjustment.” SCJ’s departure from its Leederville teaching hub follows the Town of Cambridge’s decision in July to refuse a change-of-use application that would have allowed the SCJ — known locally as the International Education Office — to use its West Leederville office space as an educational establishment. “In my view there’s a number of planning issues here that I think are fairly substantial; one is that the purported application for use is not perhaps the use that is actually being perhaps contemplated,” mayor Gary Mack said during the council meeting in July. The building space on Cambridge Street has now been re-listed for lease by managing agents Tsokos Property Subiaco. According to neighbours, Shincheonji is still operating out of the building, but say the number of attendees has come to a slow. “I’m glad that they’re going, but no we don’t know where they are” a neighbour told Post Newspapers.