Stopping At The Crossroad – Will You Be One With EVM, or One With God and Christ?

There is a question being asked quietly in homes from Quezon City to Winnipeg, from Dubai to Daly City, from Ho Chi Minh to Berlin, and in every district of every country where the Iglesia Ni Cristo has a locale. It is not asked out loud, because asking it out loud gets you a visit from the district minister and a line drawn through your name in the registry. But it is being asked, and it is the same question everywhere:

How much longer?

How much longer do I keep giving to an administration that has never once opened its books? How much longer do I sit through lessons that mention “unity with the administration” more often than they mention loyalty to Christ? How much longer do I pretend I did not notice that the brethren who disappeared from the pews were the active members and officers who were honest ones!

Today we are releasing the music video for “One With God and Christ,” and it was made for the people asking that question. It was made by the Defenders of Truth worldwide, our brethren in the frontlines, and our trusted brothers and sisters as our trojan horses in the deep.

Where the Church stands in 2026

Let us take stock, because the Central Office certainly will not.

Seventeen years into the reign of Eduardo V. Manalo, the Executive Minister’s own mother and brother remain expelled. The family home at 36 Tandang Sora is gone, fenced off and starved in 2016, then demolished around the people still living inside it on March 2, 2017, on the same day thirty-two people including women and children were rounded up by police without a warrant to produce. The ministers who exposed the corruption of the Sanggunian in 2015 are scattered across three continents, some of them recognized as refugees by the Government of Canada because a tribunal looked at the evidence and called it what it is: persecution with the means to harm or kill their critics.

The administration’s answer to all of this has been lawsuits. One hundred seventeen prosecutions, petitions, and appeals against critics, by our count, including forty-four libel cases against one man. Convictions obtained: zero. Their defamation case against CBC was thrown out in Winnipeg in 2025 and thrown out again on appeal this May, with the court putting the Church’s intimidation tactics on the record for anyone to read.

Meanwhile the “non-political” Church that once treated politics like something you scrape off your shoe now stages rallies at the Quirino Grandstand, hands out Special Envoy titles to its Executive Minister, and delivers its bloc vote to whichever candidate is polling the highest. The Philippine Arena stands as a monument to what can be built when nobody is allowed to ask where the money came from or went.

This is the Church you are being told to be “one with.” Not one with God. Not one with Christ, but One with EVM. That is the slogan, printed on the shirts and shouted at the rallies, and it tells you everything about where the loyalty is now expected to go.

The man they are most afraid of

Of everything the administration has buried in seventeen years, there is one thing it has never managed to bury completely, because it is still alive. It has a name, and the name is Felix Nathaniel “Angel” Manalo.

Bro. Angel has been in detention since March 2, 2017. Nine and a half years. Charged with illegal possession of firearms found in a raid on a house he had been begging the police to protect for two years. He was denied bail by a city prosecutor’s office that somehow found the son of Ka Erdy more dangerous than the convicted murderers and drug lords who have walked out of Bilibid under the same Republic Act that was never applied to him. Nine and a half years without a conviction, while the men who abducted ministers in July 2015 have never spent a single night in a jail cell.

Now, at last, there is movement toward his release. And watch what the Central Office is doing with it.

They are not saying, “Justice was delayed and we are relieved it is finally being served.” They are not saying, “Whatever our differences, a man should not sit in jail for nearly a decade without trial.” They are saying, through their spokesmen, their bloggers, their O.W.E. (One With EVM) armies on Facebook and TikTok, that Angel’s release is political. A favor from some politician. A ploy by the “detractors.” A move by enemies of the Church timed to embarrass the administration. Anything, anything at all, except what it actually is: the correction of an injustice that was deliberately manufactured, deliberately prolonged, and deliberately protected by the most powerful and vindictive religious institution in the Philippines.

Let us name the propaganda for what it is. It is black propaganda, and it is being launched pre-emptively, before Bro. Angel has even walked out the gate. What is this  administration afraid of when he does?

For nine and a half years, the Central Office has had the luxury of a brother who cannot answer. Every lie told about him, every “hidden agenda” invented and puppeteered thru Bro. Edwil Zabala, every whispered insinuation in the ministers’ meetings about what Angel “really wanted,” has gone unanswered because the man was behind bars and his lawyers were fighting simply to keep him alive. That silence has been the administration’s most valuable asset. It allowed them to write the history of 2015 without a witness for the other side.

Was he a witness  in 2007 and 2008 when Ka Erdy wrote his directive for an election and had it filed with the SEC? Was he there in the first week of September 2009 when the directive was buried. Does he know what was said in that house, who said it, and who was paid to forget it.

Surely, he watched his mother, in her late 70s, fleeing for her life and desperately asking for help in social media. He was there as his family and the families who supported them were denied food, water, and electricity in their own home by an organization run by his own brother. He watched a man die in his living room because the administration would not let a doctor through the gate.

Eduardo V. Manalo has spent years, and more of the brethren’s offerings than any of us will ever be allowed to count, making sure none of that is ever said out loud by the one person who can say it with authority. That is why the propaganda machine is still running- Discredit the witness before the witness takes the stand. It is the oldest trick in the Sanggunian’s book, and they are reaching for it because they have nothing else.

The flock that became a mob

The saddest part of this is not the Sanggunian. We expect nothing from them. It is what some of the brethren have become.

Two decades ago, if you had told an ordinary INC member that the widow of Ka Erdy would be expelled and in hiding for her life, that Ka Erdy’s son would sit in jail for nine years without trial, that ministers would be abducted by armed men on the orders of the Church’s own Administrator, they would have wept. Today, tell the same things to a member who has been marinated in seventeen years of EVM’s lessons and the reaction is not sadness nor tears. It is a sneer. “Tiwalag.” “Detractors.” “May hidden agenda.” “Kasalanan nila.”

The apostle Paul warned Timothy about this. He said the time would come when people would not endure sound doctrine, but would gather to themselves teachers who tell them what their itching ears want to hear, and would turn away from the truth toward fables (2 Timothy 4:3-4). We are living in that time, inside that Church. The brethren are not being fed the words of God. They are being fed a steady diet of persecution complex, enemies everywhere, unity at all costs, and the greatness of one man. And because that is what their ears have been trained to itch for, that is what they now demand. The administration no longer has to force it on them. They line up for it.

A flock follows a shepherd. A mob follows a mood. What we saw at EDSA in August 2015, tens of thousands of brethren screaming at a Justice Secretary for the crime of investigating an illegal detention complaint, was not a flock. What we see now, brethren cheering the continued imprisonment of Ka Erdy’s son and calling his release a conspiracy, are not characteristics of a good flock. The shepherd has been replaced by a power-hungry, egotistical cult leader who requires not only obedience but adoration, and the flock has been reshaped in his image. It has become a mob.

Standing out in a field of sheep

And yet… In the middle of every mob, there are people who do not join the chant. You can see them if you know what to look for. They are the ones at the rally who are not shouting. The ones at the worship service whose amen is a half-second late because they were actually listening to what was said. This is the deacon who quietly stopped attending the “unity” meetings,  the minister who no longer signs the expulsion papers with enthusiasm and the overseas brother who still sends his offerings but has started asking the locale treasurer for receipts.

They stand out because they have noticed something the mob has not: the voice leading this flock is no longer the voice of the Shepherd.

Our Lord said it plainly. His sheep hear His voice, He knows them, and they follow Him. A stranger they will not follow, but will flee from him, because they do not know the voice of strangers (John 10:4-5, 27). The Church was built on that principle. Ka Felix taught it. Ka Erdy taught it. And for the awake and aware inside the INC today, that teaching has become a mirror, because the voice coming from the Central Office is a stranger’s voice. It does not sound like the Shepherd. It sounds like a man who wants his ring kissed and to be worshipped.

The administration knows who these people are. It has always been known. A congregation that is seventy percent mob and thirty percent awake is a congregation that could turn, and so the thirty percent must be found and dealt with. This is what the “R2-01a” forms were for. This is what the surveillance of Facebook accounts is for. This is what the informants in every locale are for. The awake are identified, then isolated, then given a choice: recant, or be expelled. Those who will not recant are excommunicated. Those who are out and do not shut up are sued. Those who are sued and still do not shut up are dealt with by whatever means the Sanggunian deems necessary, and we have buried a few brethren to know what that phrase means.

The road less taken

So the awake arrive at the crossroads, and the administration has spent seventeen years making sure that one of the roads look like a cliff.

Stay, and keep your family, your friends, your community, your sense of belongingness, and the version of salvation the Central Office has been selling. The price is your silence and, eventually, a battle with your conscience.

Leave, and lose all of it. Parents who will not answer the phone. Siblings who cross the street to avoid you. A locale full of people you have known since childhood who now treat you as a leper. And, they tell you, your soul is hopeless because outside the corporation registered at the SEC there is no Church, no Christ, and no salvation.

That second road is the one Christ called narrow, and He said few find it (Matthew 7:14). He did not say it was safe. He did not say it was comfortable but  He said it leads to life.

Those of us who took it can tell you honestly: it was as treacherous as they promised. Some of us lost our livelihoods. Some of us were followed and intimidated. Some of us fled the country with our children, a suitcase, some with only a back pack and did not know where we would sleep the next week. Some of us sat in immigration hearings on the other side of the world and had to explain to a stranger why a Christian church would want to hurt us, and watched the stranger’s reaction as the documents were read.

But we were not walking blind. We had heard a voice calling us out, the same voice that had been drowned out in the Central Temple by the chanting, and that voice did not stop at the crossroads. It went ahead of us on the road. It found us places to live. It put brothers and sisters in our path whom we had never met, in cities we had never seen, who had walked the same road a year or five years earlier and were waiting. It gave us the courage we did not have on our own. And it brought us, one by one, to the same place: standing together, in the open, defending the truth.

Two kinds of dynamic leadership

The administration likes the phrase “dynamic leadership.” They have used it for every anniversary since 2009. Fine. Let us talk about dynamic leadership, because the Church has had it, and anyone with a keen eye and an honest faith can see the contrast.

Ka Felix Manalo built a church from nothing, in a colony, under persecution from the Catholic majority, with no money and no protection, and by the time he died in 1963 it had spread across the entire archipelago. He did it by preaching. He did not have a bloc vote to sell. He did not have an arena. He did not have a Special Envoy title. He had the Bible and the conviction that the words in it were true, and people followed because they could see the truth being lived.

When Ka Felix passed away, Ka Erdy took that church and made it worldwide. Forty-six years. Locales on every continent. Chapels in cities where no Filipino had lived a generation earlier. He did it with dignity, with restraint, with an aversion to politics so complete that a candidate who wanted the INC’s vote had to prove himself worthy of it rather than simply outbid the competition. The world looked at the Iglesia ni Cristo under Ka Erdy and saw discipline, order, sincerity, and a leader who did not make himself the center of the story. It respected what it saw. In some places, it was admired

Under Eduardo V. Manalo the Church is known worldwide, but not for what it was known for under his father. It is known for the videos of an eighty-year-old widow begging for help. It is known for the abducted ministers. It is known for a Canadian television documentary about a dead man and a church that harasses journalists. It is known for rallies that shut down EDSA, for bloc votes delivered to the highest bidder, for a defamation case so weak that two Canadian courts dismissed it, and for a brother in jail. It is known for a leader who imprisoned his own brother, cast out his own mother and siblings, demolished the house his father lived in, and dismantled his predecessor’s legacy piece by piece, all for the sake of power, wealth, and the absolute adoration of people who have been trained not to ask questions.

Our Lord Jesus Christ did not teach His disciples to lead this way. He washed their feet. He told them the greatest among them must be the servant of all. He told Peter to put away the sword. The apostles did not build arenas or run for envoy. Paul worked as a tentmaker so he would not be a burden to the churches he founded. Nowhere in the Gospels or the Epistles is there a model for what the Central Office has become. There is, however, a model for it in the Old Testament, and it is not a flattering one.

When the Spirit departs

Saul was the first king of Israel. He was chosen by God, anointed by the prophet Samuel, and given everything: the throne, the army, the loyalty of the tribes, the blessing of heaven. He was, in the language the Central Office likes, the legitimate administration.

And then he disobeyed. He was given a clear command and he did what he wanted instead, and when he was confronted, he made excuses and blamed the people. And Samuel told him what the disobedience had cost:

“For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. Because thou hast rejected the word of the LORD, he hath also rejected thee from being king.” (1 Samuel 15:23)

Here is the part every brother and sister at the crossroads needs to understand. Saul did not stop being king that day. He stayed on the throne for years afterward. He kept the palace, the army, the title, the ceremonies. To anyone looking from the outside, nothing had changed. The administration was intact. But the Bible records what had actually happened, in one sentence:

“But the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul.” (1 Samuel 16:14)

The Spirit left, and the king stayed. The institution continued. And from that day forward, everything Saul did was driven not by God but by fear, jealousy, and a consuming need to destroy the one man he suspected of being God’s real choice. He hunted David into the wilderness. He slaughtered the priests of Nob for helping him. He surrounded himself with men who told him what he wanted to hear and killed the ones who did not. He was, to the end, “the Executive Minister,” and he was, from that moment, alone.

We are not the first to see the parallel. We are simply the ones willing to say it. An administration that set aside a written command from its own founder’s son and installed itself by force of position; that has spent seventeen years hunting a brother into a jail cell and a mother into destitution; that surrounds itself with a Sanggunian of flatterers; that treats every critic as an existential enemy to be destroyed; that has never once, in seventeen years, produced a single act of repentance, correction, or humility. This is not the behavior of a leadership on which the Spirit rests. It is the behavior of Saul after Samuel walked away.

The building is still there. The title is still there. The brethren still file in every Thursday and Sunday. But the Spirit of the Lord does not live in a title, and it does not stay where the word of the Lord has been rejected. The synagogue that remains is but material, and no longer spiritual.

Defenders of the truth, worldwide

When the majority chose to be one with EVM, some of us chose to be one with God and Christ. We did not plan to become a movement. We were expelled one at a time, in different countries, most of us not knowing each other, each thinking we were alone. And then we found each other, first through this blog, then through the ministers who fled, then through the court cases, the documentaries, the refugee hearings, the worship services in living rooms and rented halls from Vancouver to California, Vienna to Melbourne and more.

We are collectively known as the Defenders. Defenders of truth, defenders of the flock, defenders of what Ka Felix and Ka Erdy actually built before it was taken and repurposed. We hold no office. We own no arena. We have no envoy titles and no bloc vote. What we have is the record, and the record is on our side: every court that has looked at the evidence has ruled the same way. And, most of all, the record in the book of works, and the book of life in heaven.

Every week, more brethren find us. The overseas member who finally did the math on the offerings, the minister’s wife who saw what the Sanggunian did to a family in her locale and the young people who grew up on the lessons and then grew up on the internet now  notice that the two do not match. They arrive angry, or frightened, or grieving. Some of them arrive still half-believing that they are damned. We tell them what we were told: it is alright. You did not leave God. You left a building where God was no longer being obeyed. You are not cut off from Christ. You are cut off from the synagogue of a man who put himself in Christ’s place.

They stop being afraid. And then they start to defend.

To EVM and the Sanggunian

You will not like the video and we know you will file something as you always do. We will add it to the ledger with the other one hundred seventeen and wait for the court to dismiss it like the rest.

But before you do, consider the timing. The propaganda you are running against ka Angel’s release is not working on anyone who is not already in the mob, and the mob may never leave you anyway. What you are actually accomplishing is teaching the awake, the thirty percent, exactly how frightened you are of one man’s testimony. You are confirming for them what they already suspected: that the man who has been silent for nine and a half years may have something to say, and that you have spent every one of those years making sure he could not say it.

Saul spent his final years hunting David. Jezebel used the courts and the seal of the king to seize a vineyard from a man who told her no, and had the prophets hunted down. Both were certain God was on their side. Both discovered, too late, that the throne and the Spirit are not the same thing.

And so, we wish you luck!

To everyone else

Please listen to the song. Watch it. Share it. Send it to the brother who stopped answering your messages, the sister who defriended you when you were expelled, the minister who you know still has a conscience underneath the uniform. Send it to the cousin who cheered when Bro. Angel was arrested and has not thought about it since. Play it every time someone says the letters E-V-M.

And if you are standing at the crossroads tonight, and you have been standing there for years, and you have heard the voice calling you out and have been too afraid to follow it: the road is real, but it is inded narrow, and it is hard, but believe me, it is worth it! Others have walked it ahead of you and they are waiting on the other side with open arms.

That is what this song is about. It is the defenders of truth worldwide’s theme song. When you are ready to leave the synagogue, walk. We will be there and so will God and Christ!

Special thanks to all the talented and courageous men and women who created the lyrics, melodies of the song and visually brought it to life as I know a lot of our brethren will be able to relate to this beautiful song. Enjoy! 

~ Antonio Ramirez Ebangelista