SANTIAGO, Panama (AP) — Indigenous farmer Jose Gonzolez recalled how his pregnant wife and five of his children were taken from their home by cult members in the remote hamlet of El Terron in Panama.

Gonzalez was out working his fields of taro and rice on Monday when the lay preachers of the “The New Light of God” came for the family and dragged them to an improvised church at a nearby ranch.

The family had been chosen by one of the lay preachers who earlier had a vision: everyone in the hamlet had to repent their sins, or die. There, the woman, seven of her children and a female neighbor were beaten into repenting. If they didn’t do so convincingly, lay preachers holding cudgels, machetes and Bibles would lay into them.

Gonzalez began a desperate campaign to save them. Outnumbered, he was able to retrieve two children — a girl of five and a boy of seven — from the church.