Is the end of the world near or far away?

In the article entitled The end of the world in 2019, one of the highlights of this edition, our colleague Humberto Werdine weaves timely considerations about a nonsense in our midst, about a supposed prophecy attributed to Chico Xavier, regarding the extinction of the planet in which we live. According to supporters of this idea, only 26 months separate us between today and ultimate tomorrow.

Let the reader, however, not worry: "There will be no - says Humberto Werdine - end of the world in 2019", as he, with peculiar objectivity, shows in his article.

Although with different motivations, the fact inevitably refers to what occurred in late 1999 in the city of Maringá, a fact that we have already discussed in this magazine.

Eighteen years ago, a well-known evangelical leader announced for months that the earth would disappear between December 24 and 31 of that year, when Jesus would take his faithful followers with him. The year in question was 1999 and the 3rd Millennium was announced.

When the news, initially released in the city of Maringá, spread to the state, the media alerted society to the dangers and damages related to this type of prediction. Obviously this was not the first time that similar events occurred in the world, and certainly not the last, because naive and cultureless people are easily deceived by those who have the surrounding verb.

The fact is that countless faithful of that church divested themselves of their possessions - houses, farms, cars - donating their financial resources to the institution's cashier, without realizing that the leader who deceived them actually objected to something rather than what they naively imagined.

Jesus had said, in the so-called prophetic sermon, that many false prophets would be heard in the world, and this is what actually occurred.

As soon as the month of December 1999 arrived, the pastor evidently did not wait for the day he had announced with such conviction, attributing it to a revelation received from the Holy Spirit himself, and weeks before the "end of the world" by him predicted, traveled far away, taking his wife with him, and leaving the faithful of his church, of which he was the chief ruler, with no direction. A few days later he sent a letter of resignation from London to the post of president of the institution he had occupied for 25 years.

When the news was disseminated, thousands of believers moved to get information about the pastor, whose attitude astonished everyone, especially his fellow directors, who did not know at first whether the church's finances had been affected.

What a mistake! It was not just the pastor who disappeared; the church’s money was gone, too!

Immediately, in the face of the coup, the successors of the pastor sought to exclude the institution of responsibility over the unfortunate prediction. "At the very least, we have to apologize to the faithful for believing in a disastrous attitude, which was said to be a prophecy," one of them said at the time.

The Order of Evangelical Shepherds of Maringá also condemned the attitude of the fugitive leader. "Our outrage is how people were used," said Nilton Tuller, one of the founders of the Order. "The Bible says that in the end times there would be false prophets and he is one of them."

The following year the pastor returned from England and tried to resume his church's command, but his peers prevented him. He did not settle and went to court without success. He founded a new church, which, as if nothing had happened, already expanded in the same region where so many were deceived. There was no apology and nobody compensated for the loss of those who sold homes, farms and cars, preparing for the "end of the world" that did not happen.