  The financial characteristics of sects are challenging topics. The present
paper concerns the Antoinist Cult community (ACC), which has appeared at the
end of the 19-th century in Belgium, have had quite an expansion, and is now
decaying. The historical perspective is described in an Appendix. Although
surely of marginal importance in religious history, the numerical and analytic
description of the ACC growth AND decay evolution per se should hopefully
permit generalizations toward behaviors of other sects, with either longer life
time, i.e. so called religions or churches, or to others with shorter life
time. Due to the specific aims and rules of the community, in particular the
lack of proselytism, and strict acceptance of only anonymous financial gifts,
an indirect measure of their member number evolution can only be studied. This
is done here first through the time dependence of new temple inaugurations,
between 1910 and 1940. Besides, the community yearly financial reports can be
analyzed. They are legally known between 1920 and 2000. Interestingly, several
regimes are seen, with different time spans. The agent based model chosen to
describe both temple number and finance evolutions is the Verhulst logistic
function taking into account the limited resources of the population. Such a
function remarkably fits the number of temple evolution, taking into account a
no construction time gap, historically explained. The empirical Gompertz law
can also be used for fitting this number of temple evolution data, as shown in
an Appendix. It is thereby concluded that strong social forces have been acting
both in the growth and decay phases.
