MCGI After-Service Detention: How Blocked Exits Enable Coercive Fundraising

This paper examines reports of “locked-in” practices in MCGI locales after worship services—where members describe being prevented from leaving for one to two hours while financial targets, pledges, and “commitments” are pursued. The central claim is institutional, not personal: when a high-control organization enters post-founder decline and faces a tightening cash-flow problem, it may convert time into leverage. A closed door becomes a fundraising tool. The paper frames the practice through three lenses. First, a rights and legal lens: deprivation of liberty without lawful authority is incompatible with basic liberty protections in international human rights norms and the Philippine constitutional tradition.[1][2] Second, a power lens: Foucault’s discipline helps explain how architectural control (exits, guards, surveillance) produces compliance; Gramsci’s hegemony explains how “duty language” normalizes what would otherwise be recognized as coercion.[3][4] Third, a political-economic lens: the practice is interpreted as a crisis response to declining intake, rising resistance, and the weakening of charismatic authority previously capable of extracting labor and giving without overt force.[5] This working paper invites verification, critique, and falsification through process tracing and event-log replication.