CHILDREN OF GOD MEMOIR
Joining seemed like such a great idea—what I thought I’d found seemed too good to be true to my young and adventurous and idealistic mind, but I am here to say that if something looks too good to be true, it very probably is just that–too good to be true. I can testify that despite all appearances to the contrary, such groups are absolutely contrary to human flourishing, though I must say it took me such a long time to see that.
There were still only one hundred “Children of God” when I first came upon them, camped out in Bear Creek Park west of Houston on a cold Sunday afternoon late in the year 1969. They looked a like gypsies and also like hippies and some resembled the bearded radicals seen much of in the late 1960s, wearing army field jackets and boots. A couple wore berets. A few of the guys wore robes made from army blankets—they looked like monks. They were all living in a motley collection of VW buses (such vehicles were emblematic of the times) and repurposed school buses and in tents—and there was one big surplus U.S. Army tent in particular where all the single guys slept at night and where everyone gathered for Bible studies and group meetings in the evening.
I met them on December 7th and the very next day I joined this company of hippie-looking, happy-seeming, Bible-reading, doom-threatening, occasionally sackcloth-wearing, “Revolution-for-Jesus”-talking people. I thought of them as Christian radicals. They were mostly in their late teens or in their twenties; a few were in their thirties. I was twenty. I had dropped out of Brown University ten months before and was working as a carpenter’s apprentice in Houston—my hometown—when I came upon them before they were even known as the Children of God. I was utterly charmed and captivated by what I saw. They were living communally in a kind of holy poverty in their collection of vehicles and tents, heedless in their campsite in a county park outside Houston of the uncomfortably wet and wintery weather.
During all of 1969 the first members of the Children of God lived in tents and moved from place to place like gypsies. This picture was taken near Hockley, Texas early in 1970, about two months after I joined. All the single guys in the group, about fifty of us, slept in the large tent.
They had been traveling around the country like gypsies in their caravan of vehicles for a year, telling people about Jesus—and sometimes holding sackcloth vigils warning of God’s coming judgments on America because America had forgotten God. One such vigil had been held among the thousands of protestors and demonstrators who had gathered in Chicago for the trial of the Chicago Seven in the fall of 1969, a few months before I joined. I heard all about it from the second in command of the group, a big guy with a great black beard—he was called Big Josh. He interviewed me—he was at his desk in a VW bus—the night I drove out to their campsite to join. I was taken to the door of the vehicle and told to knock. I did and was invited in.
Big Josh, second-in-command In the early days–1969. He then was married to Faith, the daughter of the leader of the group.
In the light of a Coleman lantern he asked me some questions—trying to see if I was a genuine candidate for joining them. I thought Big Josh was the leader at first—people didn’t talk all that much about Moses or “Mo” then, not when I first joined. But I soon learned that there was a Moses.
“Mo” was David Berg—Moses. He was the supreme leader, not big Josh. It all seemed very biblical—there was a Joshua and a Moses. But Mo was not at the campsite outside Houston when I met them on that long-ago December Sunday afternoon nor when I joined the next night—he liked to base himself a little bit apart from the operation he was guiding and so at the time kept hidden in a mobile home parked several miles away. I saw him for the first time two or three weeks after I joined.
I left the Children of God nine years and twenty-six days after I joined—I was in Santiago, Chile, at the time, living in one of our communal houses—we called them “colonies,” only now we’d changed the name to “homes.” I returned to Houston, where my parents lived, supposedly only for a visit and saying and thinking I’d return in a short while, but while I was home a number of things happened, and, indeed, before I’d left Chile some other things had happened that had affected me greatly and once I was home I brooded about these—including the suicide of the Peoples Temple group in Guyana—also in South America—only a two months earlier.
The entrance gate to Jonestown, in Guyana, where 918 people died in a mass murder-suicide in November, 1978.
My feelings about our leader were affected by what had happened at Jonestown—Mo had written things that were unsettling to me about it, things which seemed to be defending what had happened there, blaming the American government for pushing Jones and his people to such desperate measures.
Days before my scheduled return to South America I got sick with hepatitis and so delayed my return to Chile for some weeks. Then my return ticket became void—I’d flown home on a charter airline which suddenly had gone out of business. During these days I was aware that my disposition toward the group had changed, though I’d been afraid to admit it. Now, far from the group and with time on my hands, there was almost a kind of dread of returning, though I couldn’t admit it to anyone. After I’d been home for a while, deep down I knew it was over, and yet I couldn’t quite admit to myself that the spell was broken, even though it was. And it was like a spell, a sort of state of mind, a dream, a bubble I lived in, and had lived in for a long time. It had popped—this bubble—but I was still pretending to myself that it had not. I didn’t want to think about it all being over in part because I could not imagine yet what sort of life awaited me outside the group after all the years of living a life I’d so loved for so long, though the best part of that life was now several years in the past. Now, as I reflected on how the group had changed and began to talk to a few ex-members I was in contact with—people who had been in for a long time, as I had—I began to see that I had a very poor understanding of what was going on in the group, and especially behind the scenes with the group’s leadership.
But part of me went on behaving as though I was still going strong for the Children of God. I got a job to make money to buy a new ticket to go back to Chile and the group; that’s what I told myself and everyone else—and so I kept up the story that I was planning to go back. I didn’t want to admit the course I’d followed for nearly a decade was a bust. Saying I was going back to Chile preserved the illusion that it all wasn’t really over. I told myself and others that my extended stay in Houston was a furlough for the purpose of recharging and I kept up this illusion well after I’d raised the money I needed to buy a new ticket for Chile. This was how I tried to cope with all the feelings and thoughts I was experiencing. I had never thought I’d ever leave the Children of God behind and so I was completely unprepared for this. I knew of some others who’d left and who’d found being out too unbearable and thus they’d actually gone back in. I had dreams about returning to the group, but in the end I found I couldn’t—the “magic” was gone. I didn’t want to go back.
As I passed the one-year anniversary of my coming home I often thought of the Cause, of the good times, of things I had learned in the Children of God about life and people, the comradeship, the sense of common purpose, and the joy I had felt when I considered I was living so completely for the Lord. I found it difficult to face, but I knew the group had changed and that its focus had changed and that my feelings about it had changed. I was mourning, though, over what had happened to the group and to me—mourning the passing of what I’d loved.
In reflecting about the group I dwelt repeatedly on our leader—“Moses” David Berg. I now had doubts about him—something I never let myself have before. I reached a conclusion: his teachings were at the root of what was wrong. I saw that Mo’s continual damning of the churches, his fascination in exploring the spirit world and his obsession with sexual liberation were actually indications of something “off,” something strange I couldn’t put my finger on. I now felt he was not worthy of following, though I had followed him for nine years. I felt that Mo was not who he’d seemed to be and that he was what the Bible calls a “false prophet.” I began to believe that his charm—which had been so captivating and significant—was a disguise for what seemed more and more to me like a wolf-like nature. I didn’t want to believe these things, though, and went back and forth about my feelings regarding him. But finally I found myself sickened by what he now appeared to be—he was frighteningly full of repellant attitudes and had also become profoundly anti-Semitic—something I’d first noted a year before I left, but had refused to face. Now there could be no more waffling about him and that he was going into dark places.
David Berg–“Mo”–with his son Jonathan (later known as Hosea) in the mid-1960s, perhaps three years before he launched the Children of God.
But I wondered, where and how and why had he gone wrong? And what things had been good about him, and what bad? It was hard to tell. He’d been so inspiring, but no longer.
Another year passed and then another. I began to read books. I worked as a shipping and receiving clerk at a drugstore and then as a children’s shoe salesman at Saks Fifth Avenue. I brooded about the Children of God. When I occasionally saw other ex-members we talked about the group, about Mo, and about what had happened to us. I kept wanting to try to understand “what had hit me.” It occurred to me as I talked to my girlfriend—she was going through a divorce just before I met her, a process that had overwhelmed her—that my leaving the C.O.G. was a little like that, like an utterly upsetting divorce. I had been in love, the relationship had gone bad—Mo and the group he’d created was revealed as perverse and untrustworthy and unlovely—and now I was living with nostalgia, disappointment, anger, guilt and confusion—a little like my girlfriend’s mix of attitudes toward her ex and her marriage. Once the break has occurred, then one tries to figure out how something that seemed so wonderful could turn out to be a disaster.
Three years after leaving the Children of God (which had also become known at “the Family of Love” in the years immediately before I left) I returned to college full-time. After a year at the University of Houston I transferred back to Brown University in Rhode Island—the place I’d started college in 1967. I spent two years there; I was in my early thirties and a lot older than nearly all the other undergraduates. I was still confused about a lot that had happened with the group but I wanted an accounting to be made—I wanted to know what it had been worth. I suppose I felt that in order to really leave it all behind, to say goodbye to it, I needed to try to make sense of the experience by writing it down, and so I did—I wrote a memoir.
I sent the resulting manuscript to a number of literary agents and publishers and received some encouraging responses, but no one wanted to publish it. Two of these wrote me—quite independently of each other—that while it was a compelling story, each felt I didn’t seem to have resolved things. They wanted to know what I’d finally decided about the group, for they thought the memoir was ambivalent. I hadn’t seen this very well as I wrote it, but now I began to appreciate what they meant. The truth was that I was still confused, that there were things that were still unresolved. I put the manuscript aside and got on with my life, but I didn’t stop thinking about the Children of God.
And so thirty years passed. Then, five or six years ago, I started pretty much afresh, using that first effort as my starting point. I believe the result of that effort—my new memoir—is the accounting that my former effort failed to achieve. I think I now have a much better understanding of the Children of God, its appeal, its errors and wrongs, and my own years as part of it. But if I have managed this, it can be explained by several influences which came into my life since my initial attempt. Being older, being more experienced with life, getting a formal education and getting married—these have made a difference—and then there was one more thing, which I’ll come to in a moment.
Since I composed that first effort while finishing my bachelor’s degree in 1983-84, I went on to nine more years of study in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University and to a career as a college teacher, first as a Teaching Assistant at Harvard (for seven years of my nine years there), and then as a faculty member for eleven years at the University of Houston. These eighteen years as a teacher and scholar allowed me to get to know many students who were the same age I had been when I joined what turned out to be a cult. In my role as a teacher I grew to understand students more and more and as I did so I gained greater perspective on both the foolishness and sweet earnestness of youth—of my students’ and of my own during my years in the group. The nine years of graduate study balanced out my nine years in the Children of God; they weren’t an antidote, but they gave me the opportunity to read and think about a lot of things, including about cults and my experience with one.
I learned about the history of ideas and in doing so I learned something about the ideas of various religious groups who flourished over the centuries–including a bit about some rather strange groups. I thus began to realize that the Children of God and the ideas David Berg introduced as leader of the group, didn’t start with him at all; there were others who came long before him who’d had similarly unbiblical notions which they taught were the real truth about Christianity. For example, John Bunyan, who lived in the seventeenth century in England and who was the author of Pilgrims Progress, speaks in another of his books about a cult-like group he encountered as a young man; these were known as “the Ranters.” He describes them in his autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, where he records meeting one of their number who talked up ideas about free love and his liberty from biblical laws–so that he believed he could do as he pleased in any number of areas, particularly concerning sexual behavior. Bunyan describes how he was tempted by these teachings and confused by them, but says he managed to escape embracing them. (See Bunyan’s, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. W.R. Owens [London: Penguin Books, 1666, 1987], paragraph nos. 44 and 45 and the footnotes 22-23 on page 123).
I found it liberating, and bracing, really, to learn that Mo wasn’t such an “original”—that his wrong teachings about Christianity had a history going way back–that he was merely the latest in a long line of disreputable instructors about the Christian life posing as wise authorities.
My collection of books grew over these years, and as it did, in all my reading I habitually noted things which in some way were related to my cult days, even when that was often not my object in doing that particular reading. Thus I gathered insights which helped me understand what had happened to me and to my fellow cult-members, and these helped put my experience in historical context. I saw I needn’t fear Moses David nor let his teachings confuse me; increasingly it was plain to me that he was part of a long line of deluded teachers, or, to use a biblical term, a long line of “false prophets.”
Along with my formal studies and reading, just getting older and having a broader experience with life helped me, too, to see the Children of God in a clearer light. Being older can sometimes help one see oneself more clearly with fewer prejudices and more calmness. Furthermore, even when a person has grasped things better rationally, one can comprehend an experience more fully if one can talk about it with thoughtful and caring loved ones. The caring voice and counselor that has been the greatest help in aiding me to get to the heart of my cult experience has been my beloved Ruth, whom I met in 1989, a little over a decade after I left the cult, and to whom I’ve now been married for over thirty years. In Ruth I found a thoughtful hearer and sounding board, a wise commentator who has helped me to judge my Children of God years with new justice, penetration, compassion—and with new indignation. Reflecting on the cult with her has helped in so many ways.
Ruth and I met while we were both graduate students at Harvard University–she was in English and American Literature and I was in Government. On our second date, after speaking over dinner of my past religious experience in rather vague ways, mentioning only that I’d been with a rather strange religious group, she immediately asked, “It wasn’t the Children of God, was it?”
How did she know? Here we were, having our first meal together, and I was beginning to tell her just a little about my past, mentioning I’d been in a communal religious group, when she pinpointed it just like that! I couldn’t get over it! It turned out one of her housemates was a candidate for a doctoral degree in Religious Studies and he had a bizarre hobby: he loved to read about cults and talk about them, so that he was a walking “cult encyclopedia.” Ruth had learned of the Children of God by talking with him. Still, her guess, right out of the gate, that I’d been with the C.O.G. struck me as uncanny. She still amazes me with her perceptiveness–or with was might seem to be amazingly accurate guesses!
After our marriage, after I’d gotten my doctorate and after our daughter was born in Boston, I took a faculty position at a university back in Houston. Having come back from the cult from Chile with little, and mostly failed post-secondary-school education, my future was uncertain. I worked as a shipping clerk, a shoe salesman and a furniture refinisher and finally had taken the step of going back to college. From that, one thing led to another so that now I’d come back to Houston with a wonderful and lovely wife, a beautiful, sweet daughter, and with a respectable job as a college professor at the very University of Houston to which I’d first returned to college in the wake of my cult experience.
How had this happened to me? I had been an ex-cult-member, thirty years old, with no money and no college education and few prospects–I had nothing. Now, fifteen years later, I had all this! It seems to me almost impossible, so that I wonder at the goodness and mercy and providence of God. I had worked hard, but I didn’t deserve any of this. I hadn’t earned it, not really. For some reason beyond me it had all happened—it was God’s grace.
But as rich as these supports for my efforts as a the writer of a memoir—supports to do with getting older, with reading, with experience of life, and the blessing of marriage and family—have been, they were still not quite enough to allow me to leave the Children of God as completely and fully behind as I would have liked. And neither were they enough to allow as full an account as I would have liked of what my involvement in the group was all about. I left the Children of God (or, as it is often called, the “C.O.G.”) in January of 1979 (and by then it was known increasingly as “the Family of Love”), but even twenty-five years after leaving the group the teachings I had absorbed and my memories of the cult and its leader still intruded upon my thinking, my judgment, my habits and point of view. These intrusions often came uninvited, unwanted and almost unconsciously, even when I was least expecting them—and they had the power still to trouble me.
But one more thing happened to help me triumph more fully over the effects of the cult on my life and helped make my new attempt at a memoir succeed where my first effort had failed. In 2005, having moved from Houston to eastern Massachusetts, I was urged by my dear Jewish wife to try going to church. I had been reluctant to do so, largely because of the Children of God biases against all churches still held. I did some searching, though—at her urging—and I found a small church nearby. Surprisingly perhaps, it turned out to be such a key decision, for it has been this return to a place where long-buried Christian religious affections could be cultivated and encouraged, that has made the difference.
I was born into a Jewish home and was a Bar-Mitzvah in the Reformed synagogue to which my parents belonged, but I became a Christian in 1969, just over three months before I met the Children of God. By the time I left the cult my original Christian faith had been much affected, and not well, by my years in the group, though I was not aware of this; I still thought of myself as a Christian after I left the Children of God, but my life plainly demonstrated that I was not living as one.
Eleven years after Ruth and I had moved to Houston with our young daughter I was still a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Houston. I didn’t have tenure and had exhausted the limits of the notion of “Visiting” Professor, though over all this time I had the privilege and pleasure of teaching good students in the University’s fine Honors College. During this time Ruth and I were able to see our daughter begin to grow up. We also cared for my mother who eventually moved in next door to us. She died while living near us, in 2000. We very much enjoyed our lives in Texas, and during these years I also had the opportunity to become the director of a new program at my university—a partnership between the university and the Houston public schools that became quite successful: the Houston Teachers Institute. I was still a teacher, but most of my energy was now devoted to directing the Institute.
As Director of the Houston Teachers Institute (1998-2004), I met dedicated, admirable public school teachers working in tough schools.
I had a good administrative position and I could have stayed with that, but I felt there was still something missing in my life. I knew my restlessness wasn’t about job security or tenure or about the nature of my work with the Institute, but rather it had to do with deep spiritual yearnings, feelings that had animated me long years before. I had not forgotten my earliest Christian experience, the Children of God notwithstanding. But the effects of my time in the Children of God were still with me and hampered me.
It was a 25-minute drive to the university from our house, a drive I took daily. I drove our daughter to school regularly and when she started in a new school that was on my way to work, I began to visit a chapel I discovered was just across the street from her school. After parking and walking her to the school door, I began to walk over to that chapel—which was nearly always empty. I started spending half an hour each morning reading the Bible and just sitting inside to think and pray.
The chapel at St. Thomas University was nearly always empty during weekday mornings. Its entrance resembled the slit of a tent’s flap.
My “chapel time” began to stretch into almost an hour. At first this happened only a couple of days a week, but it soon became something I did daily, after which I went on to my work at the university. I was not yet willing to try regular attendance at any church, though I had made a few attempts; I was still too burned by the cult experience. Not having tenure at the University of Houston, I could not continue there in that capacity much longer; the “Visiting” aspect of my position had worn thin. My administrative post was still viable, but it was one for which I had to raise a good deal of money, including my own salary–though this was something I was doing successfully. But not long after my mother’s death I began to grow dissatisfied, though I very much enjoyed that part of my work that allowed me to help Houston public schoolteachers—most of those I worked with were serving in tough, inner-city schools. I admired and respected them. But in the end, with Ruth’s agreement, I decided to leave the Teachers Institute job to others. We moved back to New England to be closer to Ruth’s parents—they lived in Lexington, Massachusetts.
Living in a rented house in Concord, not far from Lexington, my plan was to take some time to write before looking for new work as a teacher in Massachusetts. I was thinking in terms of writing fiction, to put together a kind of narrative that would help me grapple with my past religious experience. Instead, Ruth saw me reading the Bible and the writings of the Scottish missionary, Oswald Chambers, among others, in an office I’d set up in our basement. I spent much of each day there. I didn’t seem to have a clear direction as months passed. Finally, upset with my directionlessness, Ruth told me, “You are becoming a hermit and it’s not good for you! You need to get out of the house. Why don’t you go to church?”
I had attended a welcoming little Episcopal church some of the time I was at Harvard, and Ruth had come with me there several times—and we were married there, too, by the fine man who was the Rector. But I’d been reluctant to go to church in Houston—I wasn’t very positively-inclined regarding organized Christian religion at the time, so foregoing church was not a big issue. I was still affected by the anti-church attitudes I’d absorbed so deeply in the Children of God. And yet now Ruth seemed to know that that was what I needed—some deeper way to express and honor my Christian faith. I took her advice.
I found a small evangelical church that met in a rented space right in our own town of Concord. The pastor who led the church had grown up in a Roman Catholic home and then had gone on to Bowdoin College where, in his junior year, he’d had a conversion experience that led him to become an evangelical Christian, to the dismay of his Catholic parents, though both later came around to his understanding of Christian faith.
The pastor’s weekly preaching was tied to exposition of the Bible in the tradition of the Protestant Reformation; in his sermons he went through one biblical book at a time. I became a regular attendee, always taking notes and thinking about what he’d had to say. Finally, after a year or so, I became a member.
In this little church–New Life Community Church in Concord, Massachusetts–week after week, I heard Christianity explained in a consistently persuasive way through sermons based in careful explanations of passages in the Bible. I had had a short primer in the faith during the brief time between my conversion and meeting the Children of God, but this had been a very short course, indeed—only some ten weeks. That experience had grounded me in an awareness of a Christianity independent of the cult, and I shall always be grateful that I had that, but it could not, in so short a time, ground me very thoroughly. Had I spent more time there, things might have been different, but less than three months after my first attendance there, I embraced, and was embraced by, the Children of God.
While I was teaching at the University of Houston in the 1990s the pastor who had been instrumental in leading me into the Christian life in 1969 before I met the Children of God, and with whom I reestablished contact, encouraged me to find a church where I could experience a degree of a Christian community. He didn’t push me to join his church. I tried rather tepidly to look for some place—including his church—but I was still prejudiced against churches, still confused about my own convictions, and still dealing with the aftereffects of my cult experience.
But now in New England, twenty-five years after leaving the Children of God, I found going to a small, evangelical church not only tolerable, but enjoyable and encouraging. Half a year after I began attending the church something novel began: I started to meet the pastor for breakfast at Helen’s in the Concord town center–just a little local restaurant–every Friday. He took the trouble to explain Christian discipleship to me, significantly supplementing what I was learning through his Sunday sermons with a generous expenditure of time; these one-on-one Friday breakfasts with the pastor went on for four years.
Helen’s, in Concord Center. I had breakfast with the pastor here every Friday for four years and learned about Christian discipleship.
This was a time of growth in faith for me. The pastor faithfully set aside this time for me each week–and we got to know the owners and waitresses pretty well, too. They knew what we wanted for breakfast practically without asking. With his encouragement, I began the practice of reading through the Bible annually; this gave me a breadth and depth of understanding I had not had before. I found reading various theological writers and biographies of respected Christians helpful and I took a few courses at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, located not far from Boston.
I started to lead a Bible study in our home–we met one night every two weeks, and this continued for well over a decade. The pastor of that little church in Concord also gave me the privilege of preaching in his church, prompting still more earnest study of the Bible. Over the next dozen years I was able to give the Sunday sermon three or four times a year—usually when he needed someone to fill in when he was away. Preparing these gave me a deeper and richer understanding of Christianity. In all this I had the support of the church and its pastor on the one hand, and my wife’s support and encouragement on the other, even though she is not a Christian.
Interestingly, at this time Ruth began serving as the Jewish chaplain at one of Boston’s largest hospitals and earned a degree as a rabbinic chaplain through a Jewish seminary—so both of us were experiencing a sort of rededication or renewed religious commitment.
It has been my growing knowledge of genuine Christianity which I have just described, that provided the rest of the antidote to the twisted teachings, wrongly taken out of the Bible by “Moses” David Berg as he formed and led the Children of God. And this has helped me assemble a memoir which is, I think, more on the mark than my first effort decades ago.
I must conclude that finally the way I have been able more fully to leave adverse effects of the cult behind has been through steady, lengthy, consistent involvement with genuine biblical Christianity as a member of a biblically centered church fully committed to the gospel of Jesus Christ; this is what began to wash away the things still lingering from my cult experience and this is how I have been healed more fully from the damage caused by the false Christianity of David Berg. In my memoir I seek to explain this more thoroughly.
I had opportunities to begin a more dedicated Christian life in earlier years after leaving the cult—I knew two very fine Christian leaders, one in Houston, Texas, and one in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who wished to help me toward it—but I had to overcome internal hurdles before I was ready to avail myself of such opportunities.
With my forthcoming memoir my aim is to comfort and strengthen those who have had such experiences as can rightly be called “cultish.” There are many such people; one respected source estimated some years ago that there are over 2,000,000 people just in the United States who are at any given time members in such groups.[1] The same researcher estimated there are 20 million people who have been involved at one time or another in recent years in cults in America. I suspect the real numbers are larger than these.
I think the overriding theme of my memoir is the overarching providence of God, a God who is merciful, just, true, wise and good—who can be trusted despite the wrongs done in his name by those who have used that name for selfish and perverse ends. This is the God who made heaven and earth and who knows our hearts and thoughts–and who is a God of love and justice.
Earthrise, as photographed from the moon by American astronauts. Apollo astronauts.
It’s been now been over four decades since I left the Children of God. The outfit has changed its name three times since I joined—it is now called “The Family, International.” It still exists in much-diminished numbers, spreading false teachings about Christianity, though disguised quite effectively as something it is not—for cults always operate through a disguise. Thousands have been in and out of it—something like 32,000 people, by one report; I was just one of them. Once there were more than 8,000 in it at one time; today there are perhaps 1,200, or so their literature says, last time I checked. But there are other false teachers out there–the delusions and deceptions of wolves in sheep’s clothing have not stopped propagating. The Children of God-Family, International, are just one more manifestation of this phenomenon. I have sounded a warning about these generally, in what I have written, and in particular about the “house” that David Berg built.
But finally my memoir about my years in this group is an opportunity for me to point to the mercies of God–the God who rescued me by means of His inscrutable providence from such deceptions and delusions. He is a God who can bring astonishing peace, forgiveness and deep and lasting joy out of the darkest times and most difficult circumstances represented by the abusive influence of cults.
[1] Margaret Singer, Cults in Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace, Revised Edition (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003), p. xvii.
