“Dear PoPville,
So, this is a new one for me. I work in a shared workspace in Foggy Bottom that has of a lot of small offices working on the same floor of the building (mostly lawyers and similar professionals with a handful of employees). The company we rent from occasionally leases out the large conference room on our floor for all kinds of one-off meetings…but nothing as strange as what I saw yesterday.
At first, I didn’t think anything of the group of young, well-dressed people setting up in the conference room, until they started playing new age music and set up this extremely bizarre banner outside of the door.
I googled the phrase (heavenly culture, world peace, restoration of light), and the results definitely pointed to this being some kind of cult, but not with a ton of legitimate U.S. news coverage as it’s originally based in South Korea. This was probably the most informative link I found, which described their recruiting processes as taking the form of Bible studies and free Korean lessons. It seemed like they were hosting some kind of interfaith seminar that claimed to be affiliated with/sanctioned by the State Department, which makes zero sense to me. Here’s the EventBrite page.
This group seems like it came out of nowhere, and its promises of “world peace” are incredibly vague, and they seem to try to affiliate themselves with government organizations they aren’t really associated with. Even their social media presence seems off to me…like they just kind of showed up in town one day, with mysterious no-name figureheads. I definitely saw this guy from their Twitter and Instagram posts in my office, but I can’t find any info on his name or his leadership status in this group. I’ve also linked a video of the group chanting “world peace” on the count of three… yep (led by the guy described above). I also found it odd that they listed the event as being open to the public, because it’s not possible to enter this office building without checking in at a security desk, and I don’t exactly see them leading around random large groups all day.
Is it just me, or is this super bizarre? There were about 25-30 people in attendance, all of them seemingly in their early to mid-20s, and more than a handful appeared to be international students, so I’m a bit worried this group might be preying on vulnerable young people who are far from home, and I’m curious to know if anyone else has had any interactions with them.
Thanks for reading, let me know if you’ve heard anything about this group before?”