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De Jesus's gospel flows from an experience he had in December 1976. After a hardscrabble youth in Puerto Rico, where he often stole to feed his heroin habit, he moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, and ran a Bible-based treatment center for drug-addicted street toughs. But soon he lost faith in conventional churches. "I was getting tired of all the legalism and hypocrisy," he explains. "I kept thinking, Christianity should be something better."
Then one frosty December night, he says he awoke to find himself flanked by two brawny men with stern expressions who told him: "The King of Kings is coming to anoint you." Before he knew it, he was standing in a luminous marble corridor where trumpets blared and a spectral figure crept toward him. Then the apparition merged with him, and he began to hear a man's voice in his head.
"He said, 'Open your Bible,'" De Jesus recalls. "So I opened to Romans 6. And he said, 'Read that ... that means you're dead to sin; sin can't reign in your life.'" The experience left De Jesus transformed. "Ever since that day, I can't learn from anybody — and I mean no one," he says. He now believes that was the night of Christ's second coming.
In the years that followed, the voice continued to offer new revelations. Then in 1986 it said, "Move to Miami. There you'll have a bridge to all nations." So at age 40, De Jesus, his then-wife Nydia, and their five children came to the Magic City, where he secured a fifteen-minute daily slot on WVCG-AM (1080) and began preaching his controversial message.
Before long, other ministers were railing against him from their radio pulpits. And this worked to his advantage. After he had been on the air three months, De Jesus rented a Hialeah warehouse, filled it with 300 chairs, and invited listeners for a weekend seminar. To his surprise, he says, 500 people turned up. "Just like that," De Jesus marvels. "Creciendo en Gracia was born."
In the years that followed, the church increasingly revolved around De Jesus. Then in 1998 he claimed to be the reincarnation of the Apostle Paul. The following year he proclaimed himself "El Otro" — a demigod who would lay the foundation for the Lord's return. Finally in 2004 he named himself Jesus Christ and the ultimate authority on the gospel. Today no one but him — and his right-hand man, Carlos Cestero — are allowed to preach. And De Jesus always dictates the message. Instead of regular sermons, most followers around the world watch videos or simulcasts of these men projected on a screen behind the pulpit.