Sect members hope for ‘miracle trip’ abroad
Seventeen people including four women and a child, have been sleeping outside the Mwalimu Nyerere International Airport in Dar es Salaam for the past four days hoping to fly abroad including Iran, without passports or air tickets.
Astounded airport officials and other travellers watched in disbelief as the group complete with luggage and believed to be from a shadowy religious sect, prayed for a miracle to fly to “other countries where God wants us to go and preach”.
“We have no passports or air tickets but just our bibles. God sent us here to go and spread his word and we are waiting to go as he wishes. We will fly to different destinations,” one of them told The Citizen in an interview. According to the group their bibles would also serve as visas to every country they planned preach.
[…]Mr Kibunde Masige, who said he was from Mwanza, explained that they had been instructed by Jesus Christ to camp at the international airport where they will find an aeroplane to take them to different countries to preach.
[…]Branding themselves “remnants of the Seventh Day Adventists,” they met at the airport after each one of them was shown the way there through prayer. They were sleeping out in the cold and eating from well wishers. Their followers, they claimed, also sent them money.
They said they were from Mara, Mwanza, Shinyanga and Mbeya regions and wanted to go and preach in foreign countries “because the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus Christ was downing [sic].”
A security officer at the airport, Mr Julius Muungwana, said the group had camped inside the airport building for two days before they ejected from the compound after they drew attention and became a nuisance to travellers.
Theologically, Seventh-Day Adventism (SDA) is a cult of Christianity due to the movement’s continued promotion of doctrines that are contrary to the gospel and unorthodox in nature.
In recent years various factions have formed within the Seventh-say Adventist Church, ranging from those who wish the movement would fully enter into the ‘evangelical mainstream,’ while others prefer to hold on to various heresies.
The SDA movement has been the birthing ground for a large number of offbeat sects and cults, including the ill-fated Branch Davidians.