Meeting the Children of God
Les and Gina Schorr (not their actual names), who had befriended me and who often chatted with me before services at Spring Branch Community Church, spoke with me at church on Sunday, December 7, asking if I’d seen the front page of the Houston Chronicle a day or two before. They said there had been an article and photo about some young people traveling around the country, living communally and sharing the Gospel. They told me they were camping in tents at Bear Creek County Park west of Houston. I’d not seen the article nor heard of them. They said they planned to visit them after lunch and that they’d already gone out to see them the day before to take them some toys for their kids and some warm clothes and blankets—there was a cold snap in Houston and it had been freezing at night.
I had already learned that Les and Gina had a desire to help others and to encourage people who were trying to share their Christian faith. They invited me to come home with them for lunch after the service, saying they’d drive out to the county park afterwards to visit the campers, adding that maybe I’d be interested in coming along. Pastor Joe Wall had left for an evangelism trip to India before Thanksgiving—he would be away until sometime in December. I think he may have asked the Schorrs to look after me while he was away.
I did join them for lunch and after that on that sunny but chilly afternoon we drove ten miles west of Houston to Bear Creek County Park, turned into the entrance and drove around to the campgrounds at the back of the park. I remember there were pools of water from the previous night’s rain here and there along the road. We rounded a curve in the wooded park and there in a very large clearing of brown and dry grass we saw many vehicles—a couple of rehabbed school buses, an enormous U.S. Army-surplus lorrie with a white star still on its doors, a small tanker truck for gasoline and perhaps fifteen cars, including half a dozen VW vans. These were circled, wagon-train style, in the open space in the center of which was a big olive-green U.S. Army tent, as well as a couple of smaller ones. The site looked like a mix between a hippie bivouac, a Boy Scout campout and a gypsy encampment.
Everything was orderly and neat—that was the Boy Scout aspect—and so it wasn’t exactly a little Woodstock, but because of the dress of the people there was a little bit of that feeling, too, so that one might be prompted to think, “Oh, hippies! Oh, radicals!”
Olive-green U.S. Army surplus jackets and sweaters, beards and berets–the de rigueur counter-cultural look of the late 1960s–the members of the Revolution for Jesus had a radical look.
Girls were wearing long dresses, guys had long hair and beards and were wearing surplus U.S. Army jackets—the radical, counter-culture look I’d seen on college campuses.
A gathering of the women in the group in its early days when there were only about 100 members–this photo is from late 1969, before it became known as “the Children of God.”
There were dozens of people, including families with children—and perhaps another half-dozen people visiting, as my friends and I were going to do. We parked and a couple of the denizens of the campsite came over to engage us in conversation. Glancing around, I saw that the oldest among the campers appeared to be, at most, in their thirties, but most were younger. Among them there seemed to be an air of mutual cooperation—everyone seemed to have a place and know what he or she was to be doing. A half dozen or so of their number appeared to be assigned to speak to visitors like us. The apparent poverty and simplicity of their life stood out and I was intrigued. As we talked with one of them and I looked out at the camp members from the edge of the site, I noted that many of them had a pocket New Testament dangling from a cord around their necks; the fellow who spoke to us had such a Bible in the pocket of his coat. My friend’s wife, Gina, spoke with a woman from among them and a tall Black fellow spoke to Les and me. He told us he was from Montreal and that his name was Ebed Melech. I thought, That’s a weird name. I learned they all had taken biblical names.
Ebed Melech was his Bible name–he was from Montreal and was one of two Black members of the group when I joined. Here he is, standing and speaking in a Los Angeles park a year after I first met him–this was late in 1970.
Ebed told us that in the Book of Acts the first Christians lived communally, selling their goods and using the proceeds in common so that they could further the cause of the Gospel. He said he and his comrades, his “brothers and sisters,” were imitating the Book of Acts, living as the earliest Christians did. Ebed told us that very few Christians lived the way the Bible showed the very first Christians had—communally—but, he added, this was plainly the Bible’s standard and it was certainly the way the earliest Christians had organized their lives. He then cited the second chapter of the Book of Acts as proof, quoting a passage for us with ease—he’d memorized it—and then he showed it to us, taking his pocket Bible from his coat. The passage was from the second chapter of Acts: “And all that believed were together, and had all things common. And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.”
Ebed was calm and self-assured and as we talked he quoted the Bible repeatedly from memory. I knew nothing about the Book of Acts and little about the Bible. Ebed insisted more than once that the communal living rule applied to all Christians at all times. It didn’t occur to me to challenge any of this, and I wondered at it, fascinated, thinking, How come I never knew this before? Les, who had been a Christian for a number of years and was clearly more mature in his faith than me, did not say much in reply to Ebed’s comments, but I saw he was not comfortable with Ebed’s reasoning. Ebed’s claim seemed to carry with it an indictment of everyone who called himself a Christian but was not living communally.
As Ebed kept talking to us, he showed us other verses in the small Bible and explained that everything they were doing was in imitation of the Book of Acts. He told us that the churches had compromised and were more interested in promoting lives of comfort and convenience than in following Christ with all their hearts. There was a persuasiveness to his argument, and though I knew little about the things he was saying, I was beginning to feel indicted for not being as dedicated to Christ as Ebed argued he and his colleagues were.
Looking around a little more as he talked I noted how Ebed’s fellows in the camp carried themselves. There seemed to be a strong unity, a sense of common purpose. It was not like my experience at church at all, where Christian faith was, indeed, a part of each person’s life, but seemingly not the whole of it. We only gathered on Sundays or occasionally on other days—people still had their private lives; but among these “hippie Christians” there seemed to be a strong collective purpose—everyone was pulling together and so there seemed an intense level of devotion to the Gospel and to one another.
The night I joined I was interviewed in the VW van of the man I thought at first was the leader. I learned he was only second-in- command. He’s pictured here with his wife–who was the leader’s younger daughter. My initial impression of them was that they were genial and inspiring leaders of what appeared to be as a group of “hippie Christians.”
But truly I didn’t really know anything about the level of devotion among the varied membership of Spring Branch Community Church—what individual members did in their private lives or in their businesses or work, wasn’t anything I had thought about. I knew the Pastor and the Schorrs and the carpenter who’d first brought me to his church, and they all were very devoted to Jesus and to sharing what they knew with others. But it was true—they were not all living communally, sharing all their things, carrying Bibles everywhere, memorizing them, and consciously arguing that they were living the Book of Acts.
Ebed explained that they had each decided to leave their old lives and follow Jesus with the group. Each had, he said, “forsaken all to follow the Lord”—that was the phrase he used and he’d then showed us there was a verse for this, too: Luke 14:33. He’d memorized it and quoted it for us: “So likewise, whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple.”
Ebed seemed to have rendered Les speechless. It became apparent to me that he knew the Bible well—better that Les did. Les at one point, trying to defend his own way of living, said, “Someone has to witness to the people in the skyscrapers.” Ebed, who was a good deal younger than Les, said that it was more of a witness to the truth and power of God to live together communally, trusting God to provide, following Jesus by faith. Les didn’t argue with him, either out of politeness or inability to know what to say. Meanwhile Gina was having a similar conversation with the young woman who was also a member of the group.
When we left after an hour or so, I wasn’t sure what had hit me. I was impressed that Ebed had memorized all the verses he’d showed us. He’d said with soft-spoken conviction something I didn’t know how to respond to—that the churches were compromised. Though he didn’t quite say so, his point was that he and his fellows were not compromised—the way they were living was proof. His claim was that they were exhibiting a better way to follow Christ than that exhibited by the churches. He indicated that theirs was the very best way to follow Jesus, since this was how the Bible showed the earliest Christians had followed Christ.
I began to think then, Is this how I should follow the Lord, too? I started to wonder whether or not the church in which I’d begun my Christian life was also compromised. Only an hour before, I was content with my new life as a believer in Jesus, attending church and working as an apprentice carpenter. Now that all seemed bland and something that needed to be examined and questioned. I was being challenged to consider how committed to Christ I really was.
Though this moment in late 1969 was three years before the Franco Zeffirelli film Brother Sun, Sister Moon came out—the 1972 movie was to be an immediate hit with the group—that film captured how I was after my first encounter with them. The film—about St. Francis and his friend, St. Claire, two young, idealistic people smitten with a love for the Lord—depicted their turning from what would have been a comfortable and privileged life that was nominally religious, to a holy rejection of parental worldliness and cluelessness about the meaning of human existence.
St. Francis and St. Clair from Franco Zeffirelli’s “Brother Sun, Sister Moon,” seemed to capture what so many of the young people in the Children of God yearned for–and what they thought they’d found in the group in its early years.
The Zeffirelli film was a story of the rejection of religious institutions which had compromised the holiness of Jesus and the godliness of the apostles. It indicted the phoniness of religious institutions, charging them with merely posing as true religion. And that’s just what Ebed was doing during that hour Les and I talked with him.
I didn’t say much as I drove back to town with Les and Gina; I was thinking about our conversation with Ebed and wondering about what he’d said about how the early Christians lived. How had so many who called themselves Christians gotten it wrong for so long? But here were people who had gotten it right—Christians were meant to live communally. It was almost unbelievable. I needed to think—to think! I didn’t question anything I had heard when we were with Ebed, and now I didn’t think about probing to find the source of what he had been telling us. I didn’t ask, Who taught you this? How did you all get started on this course? How come no one else is doing this? I asked no such questions and I was stunned by their conviction—they were so sure they had it right. I was thinking now that I’d met some people who were very unusual—people who understood the Bible correctly. And at the same time I was marveling that those who called themselves Christians apparently didn’t see what was plainly there.
Many years later I saw things differently. Ebed was completely sincere. His ideas were not his own, but something he’d been taught. I learned that some of these arguments were faulty, for not all the early Christians lived communally, as Ebed had insisted (and I soon was also to learn to insist). I learned that the New Testament record indicates it was only at Jerusalem that communal living was the case and the Jerusalem church in the Book of Acts was unique in this respect. John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim’s Progress, wrote of the uniqueness of the Jerusalem church described in Acts in a short book published in 1688, The Jerusalem Sinner Saved—that’s where I first saw this particular error plainly exposed, though I’d intuited it well before that.
But Bunyan argued that of all the wrongdoers and sinners in the world at the time, those in Jerusalem who had “killed the Prince of life and thus were the biggest sinners of all,” once they’d been converted, were the most devoted and sacrificial believers of all.
I understood before 2012, when I first read John Bunyan’s “The Jerusalem Sinner Saved” (1688), that communal living wasn’t required in order to live the Christian life, but it was only in reading Bunyan’s book that I understood with such clarity how greatly in error was the group’s teaching on this from the start.
He wrote of them, “such sinners, when converted, are apt to love Him most.” Quoting Acts 4:32 and 4:35—companion verses to the ones in Acts chapter 2 which Ebed had quoted to us—John Bunyan wrote of these Jerusalem Christians:
“`[they were] of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own. Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles’ feet.’ Now, show me such another pattern if you can. But why did these do thus? Oh! They were Jerusalem sinners.”[1]
These were the ones, Bunyan wrote, to whom God first sent his offer of grace and mercy after the resurrection. He wanted first to forgive and restore the worst of all sinners to Himself, and so started with those who had been most responsible for his crucifixion. Bunyan put it like this:
…the sense of this took them up between the earth and the heaven, and carried them on in such ways and methods as could never be trodden by any since….it was the Jerusalem sinners, when converts, that outdid all the churches that ever were.
So yes, they did live communally in Jerusalem, as it says in Acts 2 and Acts 4. But these two passages hardly prove that this was how all Christians should live now, nor did they prove that this ever was the way of the entire early Christian church—nor even that this was the case in Jerusalem by the time of the 15th chapter of Acts, perhaps two decades later. Nor did the New Testament ever teach this was required to make a person the purest kind of believer. Certainly communal life is not a bad thing and I can still say it can be a very good thing, but the Bible doesn’t say that to fail to live this way is proof of compromising the Christian message or way of life.
In the meantime, in the first thirty years after the resurrection of Christ there were New Testament churches forming as far east as Damascus and as far west as Rome, and there is simply no biblical evidence that they lived communally as the Jerusalem church did in its early years. Nor is there evidence that communal living among the earliest Christians was required anywhere.
But this was what Ebed believed, and everyone else in the group, too—and it’s what I was starting to believe as I listened to Ebed and as I was driving back to Les and Gina’s house, I was already taking this idea as true. Years later I would realize this was just the first of misinterpretations I absorbed in the group. By itself it wasn’t such a gross mistake, but it was used to bolster a major error: that the churches were all in error and we were about the only ones who were right. This was an error that cultivated self-righteousness among us, disdain for the churches, and an us-vs.-them disposition which tended all the more to seal us off in the group into our own little culture—our own little cult.
When we left their campsite that long-ago Sunday afternoon I was in a very different mood as we left than the one I was in when we’d arrived. I was trying to absorb it all and hardly knew what had just happened to me.
A view of the group’s camp about seven weeks after I joined–in early February, 1970, bivouacked 30 miles from Houston in a church yard in Hockley, Texas. From early 1969 until February, 1970, the group lived in tents and buses and moved from place to place like gypsies.
As we drove back to town we were no longer cheerful and talkative. We didn’t say very much at all. I think Les and Gina were feeling criticized by our time talking with members of the camping Christians and thus were defensive. It had been so unexpected, this sort of challenge Ebed and the group he represented had issued. Les and Gina did try to say that not all Christians were called to live the way this group was living, but I don’t think I paid much attention nor do I think they pushed it after having simply stated their opinion. Before long we were back at their house. I said goodbye and got in my car to drive back across town.
That night I was still trying to figure out what had happened—there was so much to take in. Since August—just four months before when I first believed that Jesus was the answer—I felt that no move for Jesus’ sake could be considered too much to make. Now I’d almost providentially—that’s how I was inclined to regard what had happened—come into contact with what seemed a golden opportunity to take my new commitment to Jesus Christ one step further.
That night I thought, Am I going to “forsake all” and follow Jesus with them? This was the end of the 1960s—the world seemed in turmoil and all around were radicals and countercultural arguments about dedication to principles and finding a better way to live, and now, all of a sudden, I had been presented with a challenge to do just that—and best of all, to do it for Jesus! The argument Ebed had made appeared to me to be about taking the next great step for Jesus. I knew that the next day at work I would be quite distracted by thoughts of what I had seen and what Ebed had said. I felt there was no way I could avoid making some kind of decision. I hadn’t realized it until then, but I was yearning to make such a commitment. Didn’t the desperation of the times demand an extreme commitment?
I would go to work in the morning, but after work—it was already dark—I went home, showered, threw some clothes into a bag and I drove out to their campsite. I was going to “forsake all” and follow the Lord with Ebed and his colleagues. They would become my brothers and sisters and for the next nine years and twenty-six days, I would live communally, believing there was no better way to serve and follow Jesus. How I awoke to the error of such belief constitutes no small part of my tale.
[1] John Bunyan, The Jerusalem Sinner Saved, or Good News for the Vilest of Men (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2005), pp. 50-51.