Ministers Size up Symbolic Nomads

By Post News Services, The Houston Post, Texas

January 3, 1970, North America

It was about dark on Wednesday—the end of a day, the end of a year, the end of a decade—when the band of “Christian revolutionaries” rolled their Jeeps into Spring Creek Park near Tomball.

They had found a new home—for one week.

There is perhaps no more typical symbol of the main theme in the story of religion in the 1960’s than this scene, to which Houston ministers responded both critically and with praise this week.

The theme has been called “provisional, mobile, questioning, inventive, heterogeneous, open-ended.”

THE WORDS accurately describe “The Children of God,” some 100 such mobile young people and adults, who began the new year in the Houston area after meandering 1,500 miles.

The group claims, like the biblical writer, that “here we have no continuing city. Church buildings, they say, “are a lie and abomination.”

“Churches of today say come down and get, get, get,” said one of their leaders, called Joshua. “We say come and give. Put Jesus Christ in your life seven days a week and not just on Sunday morning or Wednesday night.”

Although some of them wear long hair and beards, they are clean and neat—except when they don sack-cloth as a sign of mourning.

“They’re a good, Christian group,” said the Rev Donald Jeter, a Pentecostal Church of God minister. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re the finest kind of Christians around.

“A lot of people have tagged them as hippies, but the dress helps them fit in. I know that they witness to beatniks, and that they’ve helped a lot of them to get off dope.

“LET’S FACE IT—what are the institutional churches doing for our young people?” Rev Jeter asked. “A lot of them just throw dances for them, and some even encourage pre-marital sex. But these kids have a strict system of discipline.

Rev Aurich acknowledges that such groups are the expression of a restlessness in the “established church.” He further analyzed the movements in this way:

“Many of the kids are from affluent homes. The father had to hustle to make it. Now that they have arrived at such a comfortable level, their kids are reacting against the very industriousness of their parents.”

But Rev Aurich’s primary criticism of “The Children of God” was their general tone of mourning and judgment.

The last group teaches that theirs is the last generation and that revolution, either from without or within, will soon destroy the nation.