Mr. Lee has long courted controversy. He has been dogged by lawsuits, protest rallies and allegations of preaching heresy, splitting apart families, as well as going after rival churches. He has survived them all, commanding a messianic charisma over the 245,000 followers who he says the church has in South Korea and abroad.

Until now, Mr. Lee’s Shincheonji has been one of the fastest-growing religious sects in South Korea. He has employed an aggressive proselytizing program that has unnerved mainstream Christian denominations who liken the church to a cult. He has often staged large-scale outdoor events that remind critics of massive propaganda rallies in North Korea.

Like North Korea, the church has its own calendar, counting the years from the day Mr. Lee founded it in 1984. It hosts its own “Olympiad,” filling a stadium with worshipers from around the world. It features military-style honor guards, taekwondo exhibitions and other group performances similar to North Korea’s Mass Games. Often dressed in snow white and carrying his trademark hand-held folding fan, Mr. Lee likes to snap a military salute to his adoring crowds.

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“Shincheonji has been growing rapidly despite the persecutions” from the mainstream Christian churches, Mr. Lee said in an interview with the newspaper Kyeonggi Ilbo last June. “Why? Because we have a doctrine. We are not a traditional church.”

Mr. Lee was born on Sept. 15, 1931, in a poor farming family in Cheongdo, a county near Daegu. He says he began praying with his grandfather at a young age although he didn’t go to a church. He fought in the Korean War in the 1950s as an army sergeant.

He worked for another religious group deemed a cult by mainstream churches before starting his own Shincheonji Church of Jesus, Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony in 1984. Shincheonji means “new heaven and new earth” in Korean. In his sermons, he promises “an end to the crime- and corruption-ridden world and a new era.”