The Peoples Temple was a cult founded by James "Jim" Jones, in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1956, terminating in Guyana, in 1978, under the guise of an agricultural project community. Jones’ first church in Indianapolis was called "Wings of Deliverance", but it was renamed Peoples Temple Church Full Gospel in 1959. It integrated blacks with whites as it socially expanded in 1960 when Jones and other pastors organized a soup kitchen for poor. Since Jim Jones suffered from a mental condition known as megalomania (delusions of grandeur), his main objective was to control the people minds. In order to attract desperate people who needed emotional support of a leader to guide them, he faked healing during services.
To escape FBI and media harassment, he decided to move the Peoples Temple congregation to Guyana in 1972, in South America, where he founded an agricultural community, which he named Jonestown. More than 950 Peoples Temple members, including women and children, moved down to this community to start a new life under the guidance of Jim Jones, "the bridge" between them and Jesus. In his delusions, he preached as he were the only and safe way to salvation. In 1978, in the maddest of all lunacy, he convinced the community to commit mass suicide by drinking cyanide diluted in soft drink. As a result 909 people, including 200 children died. All this time, Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple cult were being monitored by Congressman Leo Ryan, who was shot dead by armed cult members at an airstrip nearby on the same day of the mass suicide.
