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Trigger warning: Psychological abuse, human trafficking, modern slavery, and sexual abuse of minors. If any of those topics are likely to upset and disturb you, we recommend reading a different piece on A Little Bit Human.
In this article:
- Megachurch pastor Apollo Quiboloy runs a church called the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.
- Except, it’s not really about Jesus Christ, it’s about Quiboloy who claims he’s the appointed son of God and new owner of the universe.
- Quiboloy has been charged with conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion, sex trafficking of children, and bulk cash smuggling.
- The pastor has since fled to the Philippines. Local authorities say they’re waiting for an official extradition request from the U.S.
You’ve likely heard of cults and all the wacky (read: illegal) stuff they do in the name of faith.
Even on a normal-ish day when they aren’t hiding their dead leader’s corpse in a compound, you can count on cults to brainwash and emotionally blackmail their members into accepting financial, psychological, and even sexual abuse.
This is why, as terrible as this sounds, it’s not surprising that a man who claims to be the appointed son of capital-G God and owner of the universe has been involved in raping and trafficking minors in exchange for the “salvation” of their souls.
Here’s everything you need to know about Apollo Quiboloy, the guy named after a god who took it a little too seriously.
Apollo Quiboloy Claims to Be the “Appointed Son of God” and “Owner of the Universe”
Apollo Quiboloy isn’t exactly the biggest name in the megachurch scene. He’s no Joel Osteen, that’s for sure, and that’s because his church mostly recruits from the Filipino immigrant and Filipino-American community in the U.S. Stateside, Quiboloy and his church operates in California and Hawaii, two of the three states with the largest Filipino communities.
Before he started his own church, though, Quiboloy was a member of the United Pentecostal Church, a Oneness Pentecostal Church based in Missouri. This was where Quiboloy had a first taste of what power over a crowd of worshippers felt like.
After converting under the Philippine arm of the church, Quiboloy and his brothers quickly rose through the ranks as religious leaders.
For a time, it seemed like it would be a pretty sweet gig. The United Pentecostal Church doesn’t bar their ministers from marrying, something that their Filipino rival, the Catholic Church, didn’t permit.
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But Quiboloy chaffed under the existing teachings of the United Pentecostal Church. Though he was finally a preacher with his own modicum of power, Quiboloy found that this did not give him the freedom to preach his own teachings.
By 1979, he was expelled from the church for “unorthodox teachings.”
It’s not clear why he managed to return to the church the following year because the guy was practically committing heresy in the church at this point. It might have something to do with him having been the leader of one of the most powerful youth organizations inside the church.
If Quiboloy had the same magnetism he does now as he did then, it’s not far-fetched to think that the church backtracked to prevent an exodus of their youth followers.
Quiboloy was made pastor of the Agdao Church in Davao City, the same city current Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte is from. Though he didn’t know it at the time, Quiboloy would go on to provide the support (and votes) of his own church to Duterte.
This appointment didn’t last either. If you’ve read our previous article on Amy Carlson, the Mother God of Love Has Won, you’ll know that cult leaders tend to have a narcissistic streak a mile wide.
This put Quiboloy at odds with his fellow pastors until the United Pentecostal Church decided to just kick him out. When he left, he took with him 15 UCP members who became the first followers of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.
To most of his countrymen, Quiboloy is, to put it mildly, a joke. He’s the subject of countless memes that riff on his wild claims. Like that one time when he claimed he could stop a typhoon but didn’t, saying that people “could have gotten angry again” because the weather forecast didn’t come true.
As funny as all that sounds, Apollo Quiboloy is, as ABC News puts it, “the most successful of the world’s self-labeled saviors.”
Quiboloy is the owner of a jet valued at $15 million, an amount he’s managed to scrounge up through cash smuggling, collecting tithes from a congregation mostly made up of domestic helpers, and, when that wasn’t enough, the slave labor of his “church workers.”
The Kingdom of Jesus Christ Church Used “Church Workers” as Slaves
When we picture slavery, we typically think of the state-sanctioned kind that’s enshrined in law, but most of the world’s slaves aren’t legally bound to their enslavers. Rather, they’re enslaved because they’re forced to work for little to no pay because the enslaver exerts considerable control over them.
This form of modern slavery is what Apollo Quiboloy’s Kingdom of Jesus Christ perpetuates against its members.
The Kingdom of Jesus Christ operates in multiple countries with a considerable Filipino population. This vast network of churches and the financial support of U.S. donors have made it possible for Quiboloy to operate a human trafficking ring under which members were forced to work inhumane hours to earn money for the church.
The scheme involved bringing church members into the U.S. from the Philippines and confiscating their passports once they arrived. With no way to leave the country, members had no choice but to comply with the church’s demands.
Why not go to the police then? Reporting megachurches and cults for their activities is easier said than done. These organizations and their teachings are structured in a way that effectively holds their members psychologically hostage.
It’s kind of hard to go against a group when they tell you that you’ll damn your soul to hell if you do so. Plus, the church was telling these people that the money was going to the Children’s Joy Foundation, a charity that claims their earnings go to poor children.
But most of it likely went to Quiboloy’s jet. Or his house in Calabasas.
Church members who had a knack for earning money for the Kingdom of Jesus Christ were entered into sham marriages with U.S. citizens to keep them in the country and working for the church. Permanently.
Members in other branches of the church don’t fare much better. Reynita Fernandez, who now lives in Singapore, told Rappler that she was only 14 years old when she became a full-time worker for the church.
She says they were made to meet solicitation quotas under the guise of charitable foundations. At one point, she would pick up money thrown by gamblers into a cockfighting ring.
Other workers like Arlene Caminong Stone were told to pretend they were orphans and deaf-mutes to receive donations.
Fernandez briefly left the church but returned in 2016 out of fear of being “cast into hell”. Now a worker in Singapore, she led Quiboloy’s fund-raising groups in the country.
From 8:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M., she and her fellow devotees would roam the city for donations which they were told to under-declare to Singaporean authorities.
The church workers collected anywhere from $200 to $300 dollars per day but would declare the amounts as only roughly $14.
She also explained how the church smuggled its money from country to country. Apparently, Kingdom of Jesus Christ officials would send about $4,000 a week to the church’s Philippine headquarters by splitting it into smaller amounts which would then be remitted.
In the grand scheme of things, $4,000 a week is chump change for a megachurch which is why ex-members like “Fatima,” who was assigned to Hong Kong, were ordered to raise 300,000 HKD. Meanwhile, quotas for members in the U.S. were as high as $10,000 to $50,000.
Naturally, Apollo Quiboloy’s attorney says it’s all nonsense. Lawyer Michael Jay Green claims it’s all part of a ploy by ex-church members to get Quiboloy in trouble with U.S. law enforcement.
Going off of that logic, they were also the people behind the $350,000 found in Quiboloy’s jet along with parts of military-style rifles. Felina Salinas, the only U.S. citizen in the group, is a business manager for one of Quiboloy’s Hawaii churches and was tasked with under-declaring the money to customs officers.
These dirty jobs were still pretty clean compared to what Quiboloy would ask of other members, though. Beautiful young women, whom Quiboloy called his “pastorals,” were made to perform domestic and sexual slave labor while enduring domestic abuse.
“Night Duties” in Exchange for Salvation and Disneyland Tickets
If you were an attractive woman with at least a middle-class background, you stood a chance to be among Apollo Quiboloy’s “pastorals.”
The pastorals were followers that Quiboloy handpicked to be his secretary/bedmate/domestic helper. One woman, who was married to a well-off pilot, was tasked with sheltering and feeding members of the church and supplying them with $18,000 dollars.
The unmarried and underaged pastorals attended to Quiboloy personally. They gave him massages, cooked his meals, cleaned his homes throughout the U.S., and performed “night duties.”
The night duties, framed by Quiboloy and his teachings as a form of service to God, involved having sex with the self-appointed messiah.
Quiboloy would threaten the girls with eternal damnation if they didn’t “agree” to sleep with him. But can you really consent when you’re being coerced with divine retribution?
As of November 18, 2021, the Federal Grand Jury has expanded the initial 42-count indictment for labor trafficking, visa fraud, and solicitation for a bogus charity to include conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion along with sex trafficking of children.
The report released by the Central District of California reveals that the trafficked pastorals were between the ages of 12 and 25 years old. Of the five victims rescued, three were only minors when they were told to engage in sexual relations with Quiboloy.
Standard cult practices so far. But it gets stranger when you find out that Apollo Quiboloy’s Los Angeles church was raided in 2020 by the FBI for a human trafficking probe and he still received a check from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).
He wasn’t the only one. At the time, then-president Donald Trump was trying to garner support for his reelection by giving a huge chunk of the PPP loans to churches throughout the U.S.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that he got his hands on COVID money, though, considering that Quiboloy has declared that there we’ll get something “much worse than the Omicron virus” if the FBI doesn’t get off his back.
