“The Pureland of God”
After living as a self-described atheist, Hon-ming Chen, a thirty-eight-year-old sociology professor at Taiwan’s Chai-Nan Junior College of Pharmacy, experienced a religious awakening. Chen was the product of a nonobservant, working-class Buddhist household. He gave no importance to religion until God —taking the form of green, glowing globes—paid him a visit in 1992. God suggested that Chen had qualities needed to lead people to salvation. Following an unsatisfying and purse-draining experience with a teacher of UFO-based faith, Chen and a small group of followers established the Soul Life Resurgence Association. It grew from one church to four, as an agglomeration of Christianity, Buddhism, Chinese folk religion, UFOlogy, channeling, and broad principles of New Age philosophy. The SLRA became God’s Salvation Church in 1993, and predicted an apocalyptic reckoning that Chen called “the Great Tribulation of 1999.” In 1995, Chen began to urge the group to follow him to North America, “the Pureland of God,” where salvation awaited.
After a few months of church activity in San Dimas, California, early in 1997, Chen settled with his group in Garland, Texas. A church expedition to locate Jesus in Vancouver brought Chen some media attention, and once back in Garland, he announced Christ’s imminent return to Earth via spaceship. The momentous event would begin with Christ’s appearance on worldwide television on March 25, 1998. Just days later, on March 31, the ships, God, and Christ would arrive on Earth at Garland. Chen’s followers confidently declared that when God arrived, He would look like Chen.
Meanwhile, a woman in Taiwan became worried for her daughter, who had followed Chen to the States. Chen still maintained a token presence in San Dimas, and it was there, in the closing days of 1997, that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department came for the young woman and reunited her with her mother. The media took their cue from the sheriff, speculating that the young woman was on the verge of suicide, and that Chen practiced abduction, brainwashing, and extortion. CNN reported that Chen traveled in the company of two children identified by him as the reincarnations of Jesus and Buddha.
Chen faced no charges, but God’s Salvation Church did manage to raise the hackles of other residents of Garland. The talk of apocalypse brought reporters that seemed to be everywhere. Members of the church purchased some thirty homes in town, but Chen was denied a permit to build what Garlanders suspected was a landing site for God’s spaceship. Some locals were put off later by news of a January 1998 road trip to Lake Michigan led by “Teacher Chen.” Chen and thirty-two followers decamped at Gary, Indiana, where Chen declared the lake a holy site, and revealed that God’s spaceship would land there following the Great Tribulation of 1999, to save survivors. Reporters from Gary and Chicago covered the beachfront event. After that, Chen and his followers drove back to Garland.
The mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate group had occurred in California in March 1997, so reporters in Garland were naturally eager to exploit that angle in interviews with Teacher Chen and other high-ranking church members. The local police, perhaps egged on by the media, spoke publicly about a possible mass suicide of God’s Salvation members. Chen countered by revealing that God would appear on television, and later land His spaceship in Garland on March 31.
On March 25, 1998, the day scheduled for God’s television broadcast, Garland was a seething mass of police, concerned locals, and snoopy outsiders. The police declared an enormous area surrounding the homes of church members off-limits. At 3513 Ridgeland Drive, Chen and other church leaders held press conferences. The Garland police held press conferences. Everybody waited for God’s TV show.
God didn’t appear. A dedicated broadcast band set up by the church carried only static. Chen backtracked a little from his TV prediction, and massaged his message about God’s arrival, saying that whether God actually appeared on March 31 was irrelevant. A March 27 press release from the church said, “You yourself are God. God will help you become God.” God’s spaceship (which Teacher Chen had claimed to see in jet contrails above Garland) failed to appear on March 31. The atmosphere was subdued rather than hysterical. The police were relieved that no one, apparently, was going to commit suicide—though Chen did offer church members an opportunity to stone him to death.
Teacher Chen was discouraged but not defeated. God is within him, he said, as God is within everyone. To demonstrate, Chen stared into the sun for a long moment. (In an academic paper prepared at the University of North Carolina, Charles Houston Prather wrote, “Some reporters seemed less than impressed; one noted that Chen was blinking profusely after the divine demonstration.”) The greater part of Chen’s group left him, and many returned to Taiwan. Those that remained settled with Chen in small-town New York State in 1998. The same year, Chen self-published a short book with a long title, The Appearing of God and Descending of the Kingdom of God: Saving Human Beings by Means of God’s Space Aircrafts.
Further prophecies, including particulars about the international status of Taiwan, a pan-Asian war, and biblical-style floods across the region, failed to come true.