The Children of God

1971 was a record year in many ways: The number of disciples more than trebled to 1,600 full-time members; colonization became a reality with over 40 colonies being established; and the COG began its invasion of the rest of the world, establishing secure beachheads in several European countries.

Of course, such rapid growth and expansion led to some difficulties too, not only the apparent ones of housing, feeding, and maintaining so many people without any “visible” means of support, but also the deeper problems of petty bickering, pride, and putting self-interests above the Lord’s work.

On May 10, 1971, Jethro and his right-hand man Abner roared off on motorcycles to check a pond near the ranch buildings for possible drinking water. Texas was months into a drought, and TSC’s usual water hole was mostly baked clay. Abner ended up in the hospital that evening with a skull fracture, thrown from his bike at a turn in the road that Jethro had negotiated with ease. Abner went to be with the Lord that night.

Two days later, TSC received a letter from Dad in Europe, postmarked the 6th of May—four days before Abner’s departure! In this letter, “Stand in the Gap,” Dad told of a vision he had seen of the COG’s spiritual city on fire within, smoldering with jealousy, covetousness, bickering, selfishness, and internal discord, causing a great gap to open in the spiritual wall and making a place for the enemy to get in and destroy the city, the work of the Lord, the Revolution. Suddenly in his vision a great, shining, silvery knight jumped up in the gap of the wall and called the people to rally ‘round to fight the enemy without. As soon as the citizens of the city joined him, the fire went out by itself. In his letter, Dad quoted the Scripture from Ezekiel, “And I (the Lord) sought for a man among them to make up the hedge and to stand in the gap before Me for the land, that I should not destroy it” (Ezekiel 22:30).

What a shock it was when that letter came in the mail! The Lord had chosen Abner to be that man! It shocked and sobered everyone to the reality of what their pettiness and bickering and selfishness were doing to the work—and it woke them up to the reality of the prophecies that Dad was writing them in his letters, direct prophecies from the Lord!

Later when Dad had received the news of Abner’s homegoing, he was deeply grieved over the loss and was lying awake in the middle of the night, desperately asking God why it had happened. And the Lord showed him:

“First the Lord said that He had invited Abner home to help Him take care of us, as the Lord had already shown us in that scripture He gave us, Ezekiel 22:30.

“Evidently he was that great silver knight who arose to call us to defend the gap in our spiritual wall caused by the fires of internal dissension, as shown me in that vision! Praise the Lord! How wonderful are the ways of the Lord—but they’re not past finding out if you ask Him!

“He showed me how that, as he lay there on that hospital bed, the Lord had told him that He needed him to represent us in His heavenly court to plead our cause and help take care of us and defend us, because the Lord was angry with some of us for our sins. And Abner had consented to go—to accept this promotion to higher responsibilities for our security in the spiritual world—to fulfill God’s call for someone to stand in that serious gap! Thank God for dear, faithful Abner!”

Returning secretly to Texas a few days after Abner’s homegoing, Dad called in the leaders most responsible for the state of affairs and raked them over the coals! He also emphasized the need for real unselfish love, and shared a revelation of how COG members were to be one large family unit, the church, with Jesus as its head:

The history of communes shows that the most successful communes either abolished all private relationships entirely and required total celibacy, or abandoned the private marriage unit for group marriage.—Because they found that the private family group was always a threat to the larger family unit as a whole. … The family marriage, the spiritual reality behind so called group marriage, is that of putting the larger family, the whole family, first, even above the last remaining vestige of private property, your husband or your wife! We do not minimize the marriage ties, as such. We just consider our ties to the Lord and the larger Family greater and more important. … We are not forsaking the marital unit.—We are adopting a greater and more important and far larger concept of marriage: The totality of the bride and her marriage to the Bridegroom is the Family! We are adopting the larger Family as the family unit: The Family of God and His Bride and children.

… If your spirit was perfect before God, everybody in the Revolution would be your brother and your sister just as much as your flesh-and-blood, and every child you would feel just as responsible for and love just as much as God loves.

Just as the COG was starting to launch into all the world, other communes in the Jesus movement were showing signs of falling apart or being absorbed back into mainstream churches. Almost as soon as the Lord began an actual spiritual revolution among the discontented hippie generation, the old-line churches began to exploit it for their own advantage. “Newsweek” reported in its March 22, 1971, edition:

In truth, behind their hip argot, bell-bottomed trousers and fashionable long hair, many of the evangelists who have attached themselves to the Jesus movement preach the same law-and-order message to the young that (Billy) Graham directs to the kids’ parents. Like the fragile flower children before them, the real Jesus people may disappear as fast as they emerged, victims of adults who are looking for new bodies to fight old religious wars for spiritual survival.

Though this new church-sponsored Jesus People movement, with church backing, encouragement, and financing, began to boom, much of it was only transitory, a new fad. However, many Jesus People still managed to walk a tightrope of independence between what they saw as the lazy church system and what they felt was the COG’s excessive, radical, 100-per-cent fanatical commitment. It was a difficult situation for these independent Jesus People houses.

In June of 1971, a prominent Jesus People leader and founder of several communes in the San Francisco Bay area and the Southeastern United States, wrote: “The Lord helped me to see that the... Jesus People Movement was already becoming corrupted. ... I could no longer go along with the phoniness of the bumper stickers and Jesus Freak T-shirts that did nothing but make Jesus another fad for the world. ... I found that both my wife and I fell captive to covetousness. ... I had come to the dead-end road of being a professional preacher with a well-respected ministry, but in truth, at the age of 25 I was turning into a hypocrite and a Pharisee.”

“Let’s face it,” he wrote, “the majority of churches are dead and built on the foundation of rituals and manmade guidelines (where) the blind lead the blind every Sunday morning.” So instead “I felt a strong urge to go to Texas and visit the Children of God colony that I had seen on the NBC ‘First Tuesday’ program, in hopes that they might have the solution. ... You see, we had come to the end of our rope.”

David had spent nearly nine years in penal institutions, 3½ years in Eastern religions, and finally, only four years after his conversion to Christianity, was at the point of a nervous breakdown and a marital breakup; the burden was too much for him. He showed up at the front gate of TSC in May of 1971, stayed long enough to see the results of their dedication, and, liking what he saw, asked the Children of God to come and take over his work, which they agreed to do.

Most of his 75 or so disciples were former freaks and rebels who jumped and danced for joy when the COG arrived They had never seen anything quite like that first little team of five headed by Faith and Hosea, who arrived in Atlanta on the 13th of June, just one day after David had returned there.

Ho, Faith, and team gave the House of Judah a real Revolution, and most of them loved it! But their patrons and a few of the disciples were not able to take the new wine, and they eventually left.

So controversy raged in Atlanta over the decision of so many in the House of Judah to switch from half-hearted service to full-time discipleship with the Children of God! Amid the furor, it didn’t take long to see that these new disciples would have to go elsewhere for more peace and quiet, not to mention training. Within a week or so, a busload of brethren from Cincinnati arrived to completely restaff and repopulate the Atlanta houses (there were three), and the original inhabitants left on two old school buses under cover of night, with just a few belongings in hand in order not to arouse further ire and suspicion!

This done, the new Atlanta disciples were on their way to a belly-busting plunge into revolutionary Christian life and doctrine at the TSC and Zion colonies in Texas—but first with a real taste and sample of revolutionary witnessing at the Louisiana “Festival of Life” pop festival.

Like many of the other pop festivals the COG attended to share God’s love, and feed the hungry, Louisiana proved to be a rip-off for the kids. The “hip” promoters, who were promising a musical and ideological utopia, not only failed to come up with the “big name bands” (or even adequate toilet or drinking facilities, for that matter), but even managed to make their exit with about $40,000 of the “people’s” money! And instead of the re-gathering of the tribes of the mystical, mythical Woodstock Nation, the hippies were treated to a security force of burly, chain-swinging bikers throwing their collective Harley Davidson weight around!

The COG had forces there from seven colonies in Texas, in addition to the new Atlanta disciples, with enough free food to feed the entire festival, which is virtually what they did! They circled their motley assortment of vans, buses, trucks, etc. wagon-train-style, set up outdoor kitchens to prepare the food, serving lines to distribute it, and installed their own band, led by Jeremy Spencer, on top of a big city bus to give them an entirely different kind of food for their souls!

Even Jerry Rubin, the then much-persecuted, non-leader of the Yippies, had to admit as he looked at the festival’s flop, “The Children of God are the only ones here who have it together.” Faith and others spent a long time talking with him and a friend right there in the middle of the happy little Gypsy island—and it was no small surprise to Jerry when camp was broken up at the end of the festival, and the big city bus pulled away with his friend on board, his life completely changed, going back with the COG to Texas to serve God full-time.

And he wasn’t the only one! Hundreds of those desperate, frustrated kids saw that the kids in the COG were realizing the dream they only talked about and hoped for, and were ready to listen to what was presented, and to accept the answer and the Answer Man, Jesus! And 25 of them decided to live their dreams in loving service to God with their fellow disciples.

June 1971 was a time of cataclysmic change for the still-young movement in terms of growth and expansion. It was also the time when Dad shared with the COG a fantastically-exciting spiritual truth the Lord had showed him. In a series of Letters beginning June 20, 1971, he told all the disciples about Bible prophecies regarding God raising up His shepherd, David, at the Time of the End—prophecies written thousands of years ago about Dad, personally, and his work!

Up until this time he had always regarded Sister Gunn’s interpretive prophecy of Ezekiel 34 and the “Key of David” prophecies as scriptures given originally to others but applied to him solely for encouragement; he had never thought that when God spoke of David in these prophecies that He was actually talking about him. But only a few months previously a brother had written him, all excited about this passage, to say that the Lord had showed him that it was about Dad. Dad said he tried to laugh it off, but he was frightened about it, that maybe it was true—not that it was just in application or appropriation or parallel, but that it was a specific, direct prophecy regarding him and his work.