Lord Our Righteousness Church / Strong City (Wayne Bent)

Bent, previously a Seventh-day Adventist pastor, led a 1987 split from that denomination and led the resulting fellowship first from Sandpoint, Idaho, before relocating roughly 80 followers in 2000 to a rural compound in Union County, New Mexico, that members named "Strong City." That year he announced he had become "Michael Travesser," the embodied Messiah, and doctrine escalated toward an imminent end of the age; members ceded personal decisions -- including relationships, work, and childrearing -- to directives Bent delivered as divine revelation. The group fixed 31 October 2007 as the start of the Day of Judgment, a date it reinterpreted spiritually rather than abandoned when nothing visibly occurred. British journalist Alex Hannaford visited the compound in 2004 investigating reports the group was contemplating mass suicide, and Channel 4 later aired a documentary, The End of the World Cult, covering the group and its 2007 prophecy; a shorter cut, Inside a Cult, aired on Australia's ABC and the National Geographic Channel in the United States, filming the community as the criminal case unfolded.

In April 2008, New Mexico State Police removed three minors from the compound following an investigation into reports that Bent, then in his late sixties, had taken teenage girls and women to bed unclothed in a "consecration" ritual he and followers described as spiritual union rather than sexual contact. Arrested weeks later, Bent was charged with three counts of criminal sexual contact of a minor and three counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor; membership had by then fallen to around 50. Following a trial that began in November 2008, a jury convicted him on 15 December 2008 of one count of criminal sexual contact of a minor and two counts of contributing to a minor's delinquency, acquitting him on the remaining three charges. He received the maximum available sentence of 18 years, with 8 years suspended, requiring at least eight and a half years served before parole eligibility.

Bent's post-conviction history includes a genuine reversal at one appellate stage that the record should state precisely: the New Mexico Court of Appeals unanimously overturned all of his convictions in June 2011, ruling that the grand jury which indicted him had not been legally assembled and that the trial court therefore lacked jurisdiction. The New Mexico Supreme Court reversed that ruling in October 2012, reinstating the convictions, and Bent served roughly four further years before being paroled in February 2016 following a cancer diagnosis that threatened hearing in his left ear. He resumed publishing writings and videos through the group's website -- including a book-length account of the prosecution titled The Little Book, after a passage in the Book of Revelation -- and Strong City has continued on a much smaller scale since his release. The case remains a documented instance of a standard high-control arc: denominational schism, a leader's self-declared messiahship, a specific and later-reinterpreted apocalyptic date, and a sexualised "consecration" doctrine that produced a criminal conviction under total spiritual authority.