The Family: Where Does It Fit?

J. Gordon Melton

As a second generation of leaders emerged in Fundamentalism in the 1940s, those leaders who still found themselves within the larger denominations controlled by Modernists suggested that conservative Protestant leaders needed to examine their separatist position and begin a new engagement with modern culture from the standpoint of their strong affirmation of Christian fundamentals. The great majority of Fundamentalists accepted that position and took the name Evangelicalism both to describe their emphasis upon evangelism of the world and to distinguish themselves from the image of the Fundamentalists of the 1920s and 1930s. Denominations and local churches who wished to identify with the movement could become members of the National Association of Evangelicals, the evangelical equivalent of the National Council of Churches.

Evangelicals emphasized the traditional doctrines of Protestant Christianity and the need to call the world's attention to the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ. Evangelicalism emerged in strength with two fairly separate wings. The Baptist/Presbyterian wing grew directly out of the Fundamentalist Movement of the 1920s. It emphasized doctrinal purity, Bible study, and the proclamation of the gospel.

The second wing was called Pentecostalism. It grew out of the Methodist Church and was distinguished among Evangelical denominations by its belief in the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The baptism of the Holy Spirit is a particular religious experience in which Christian believers feel that God's Holy Spirit comes into their life and empowers them for service. The baptism experience is usually manifested by the individual's speaking in tongues, i.e., the person begins to verbalize what appears to be a new language which the person did not previously know. The experience of the Holy Spirit also generally led to the person demonstrating one or more of the gifts of the spirit in their life. These gifts, enumerated by the Apostle Paul in the biblical book of I Corinthians include healing, prophecy, discernment of spirits, and the working of miracles. The Baptist/ Presbyterian wing of the movement generally believed that the gifts of the spirit operated during the first century but had ceased to operate once the church was well established.

Once the hippie street people culture emerged on the West Coast, Evangelical ministers from both wings of the movement began work trying to evangelize what they saw as a lost generation of young people. Prominent leaders of what became known as the Jesus People movement came from the Southern Baptist Convention, the Presbyterian Church, various Pentecostal denominations, and independent evangelical ministries. Through the 1970s, independent Jesus People ministries were soon established across America, primarily in the urban areas where a community of hippies could be found.

The Jesus People movement developed several distinctives. First, it emerged around a set of communes. Communal living had emerged spontaneously among the hippies, many of whom had adopted a lifestyle that included poverty. Communes, at first an economic necessity, then became a preferred way of life. Jesus People soon discovered their Christian communal roots. Protestantism, in reaction to the communal religious orders of Roman Catholicism, had generally eschewed communal structures in favor of middle class values. The Jesus People began a new era of appreciation of communal living among Protestants. Secondly, the hippie converts to the Jesus People retained their hippie subculture distinctives. They had long hair, enjoyed psychedelic art (while rejecting psychedelics), wrote their own rock music, and generally challenged the average middle class Christians with whom they came in contact to accept them as Christian brothers and sisters. Most were finally accepted. Most Jesus People ministries were eventually absorbed into more established denominational structures. As they aged, most hippies also shaved, cut their hair and gave up the more visible aspects of hippieness.

The Children of God

David Berg, the founder of the Children of God, was primarily associated with a conservative Protestant evangelical group, the Christian and Missionary Alliance. The Christian and Missionary Alliance, founded in 1897, was an association of evangelists and missionaries who placed a primary importance on converting the world to Christ. Its founder, Albert Benjamin Simpson, propounded what he termed the four-fold faith proclaiming Christ as Savior, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King. Simpson was one of the founders of the modern divine healing movement, having experienced a personal healing while a pastor in the Presbyterian Church. His teaching strongly affected the Pentecostal movement, which absorbed much of its emphasis on healing from him.

Berg also associated with Teen Challenge, the organization he was working with at the time he began his work in Huntington Beach, California, where he converted the first people who would later constitute the Children of God. Teen challenge had been founded as an independent ministry by David Wilkerson, a minister with the Assemblies of God. The Assemblies of God is one of the largest Pentecostal denominations in America. Wilkerson had caught the attention of the nation in the 1960s by his ministry among New York street gangs. It was only natural that he would develop a ministry to the street people. Berg was also associated for many years with Fred Jordan's Soul Clinic. The Soul Clinic was an independent evangelical ministry which had conducted rescue mission work in the inner city of Los Angeles for many years as well as other ministries at several locations around the country.

When Berg founded the Children of God, he brought with him the consensus beliefs of American Evangelicalism as represented by the Christian and Missionary Alliance, Teen Challenge (and the Assemblies of God), and the Soul Clinic. These beliefs were shared by the Jesus People movement. The Children of God affirm the Bible as the Word of God, the Triune God, the Fall of Humanity, and the deity of Jesus Christ. It teaches the way of salvation that comes by the grace of Jesus Christ through repentance of sin and faith in Him. As Christians they accept as their basic mission the duty to evangelize the world. Every member of the Family is dedicated to this mission and spends the largest block of their time each week in that activity. They also believe in the imminent second coming of Jesus Christ and the added urgency given to their missionary work because of the near end of the world. The imminent second coming was a common belief of the Jesus People Movement and is shared with relative degrees of emphasis by the evangelical movement. From the pentecostalism of the Assemblies of God the Family also believes in the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and its members occasionally speak in tongues. It also believes in the gifts of the Spirit and its members claim the gifts of healing and the discernment of spirits.

In terms of its history the Family is representative of the Evangelical Movement, and in its primary beliefs and practices follows the Pentecostal wing of that movement. As with every other group, it has developed some peculiar beliefs and practices. In the case of the Family, in spite of sharing the overwhelming number of its beliefs and practices in common with all evangelical groups, several of its peculiarities have tended to push it to the edge and even separate it from fellowship with other evangelical churches.

Its peculiar beliefs include its reception of messages from the spirits of the departed, the prophetic role of Father David, and the living out of what is termed the Law of Love. The Family's initial break with the rest of the Jesus People came in the early 1970s. Few within the Family today remember the cause of that break concerned their belief in communicating with disembodied spirits. This belief was first spelled out in several letters concerning Abrahim, a Gypsy spirit guide, who spoke to Father David at various times.' Father David's relationship to Abrahim smacked of spiritism to many Evangelical leaders.

Second, the Jesus People rejected the Children of God because of the assumption by Father David of the position of a prophet and reception of revelations which they considered above and beyond the text of the Bible. Typical of such offending document is MO letter #93, "Heavenly Conversation," in which he asserts his special place as a prophet of God and calls upon the Children of God to believe his words. Father David's role in the Family's thought is still a matter of concern to Evangelicals.

Not at issue in the early 1970s, but by far the most important issue which today separates the Family from main body of Evangelicals, is their allegiance to the Law of Love and the sexual behavior which flows from it. While almost never a matter of doctrine, Evangelicals have placed great emphasis upon a sexual code which limits sexual activity to a single partner with whom one shares a monogamous marriage. Thus Evangelicals part company on the Family's allowance of heterosexual relationships between consenting adults which otherwise conform to the Law of Love. In may ways, of course, Evangelicals and the Family are very much alike and would agree on a variety of sexual issues. Both condemn abortion and homosexuality. Evangelicals disagree on birth control, but most have no problem with it. Evangelicals would welcome the emphasis upon family values so emphasized in recent Family policies and the "no sex" policy concerning minors.

The Family practice a form of spiritual or Divine healing. They believe that the Lord will heal people in answer to prayer. While this is no substitute for medical attention, it is a regular practice. They inherited this practice both from their reading of the Bible and from the growing healing movement which was initiated in Great Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century. That healing movement had its early major exponents in the Church of England and the Episcopal Church in the United States.

Albert Benjamin Simpson, a Presbyterian minister, was healed through the ministration of Episcopalian Charles Cullis. Simpson went on to become the major voice in spreading the healing ministry in Holiness and Pentecostal churches in both America and England. Through the these several churches the prayer healing ministry has spread through all of Protestantism and into Roman Catholicism. The practices of the Family in this regard (including the deliverance ministry of exorcism) is identical with that practiced in these other churches, though, of course, it takes on a slightly different flavor in each group.

Q: Is The Family like other communal groups?

Along with the rest of the Jesus People movement, the Family adopted a communal life style quite early in its existence. For some, communal life was briefly abandoned in the period from 1978 to 1981, but today it has matured into a stable structure. As with all Christian communal groups, the Family looks back to the New Testament church as its model. It believes that the church described in the New Testament, which held all things in common, is a pristine model which God intended each generation to follow. The communal life style has both practical and personal spiritual benefits.

As a communal group, the Family fits into a history of communalism which has been an integral part of the Christian church in every era, but especially since the formation of the religious orders in the Roman Catholic Church in the early middle ages. Today the Roman Catholic Church, the largest of all Christian bodies, nurtures literally hundreds of communal groups consisting of people who have adopted an ordered life in order to dedicate themselves to God and their mission for Him in the world. At the time of the Reformation, most of the Protestant groups rejected communalism, but groups of free churches, part of what is popularly called the Radical Reformation (Mennonites, Brethren, etc.) adopted and have perpetuated a communal lifestyle. After three hundred years the Hutterites, an international Mennonite group, now has over 150 colonies located in several different countries (though most are in Western Canada and the American Northwest).

America became the home to a number of Christian communal groups in the nineteenth century, the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Coming (popularly known as the Shakers) being the most successful. Protestant Christian communal groups have existed more-or-less to the present, however, in the last thirty years a marked increase in what are termed "covenant communities" has been noticed. Many were spawned by the Pentecostal Charismatic movement of the 1960s and others by the Jesus People Movement.

Communal groups can be classified by their means of production and consumption. All communal groups have to have a means of gaining the resources by which to live and all groups have to dictate rules by which those resources are allocated to the members. Communal groups are usually defined by their adoption of a community of consumption, i.e., the community allocates resources more-or-less equally to the members according to need, and excess resources are placed at the service of the group as a whole. Communal groups most frequently strive for a community of production, i.e., a system of economics by which all the members work within the group to gain the resources upon which the group lives. This community of production contrasts with communes in which each member is employed outside the community and brings their salary checks to the community treasury. Religious communes which Complex marriage was based upon a system of natural birth control used in the community which prevented unplanned birth. Each month, a man would have sexual relations with one woman. Each month a different woman would be chosen. No man or woman would have intercourse with more than one woman during any given month. Particular relationships were strongly discouraged. The administration of the system was given into the hands of the older women (perceived to be lowest in the sexual pecking order) and thus gave them a great deal of power.

The Kibbutzim which grew up in the modern state of Israel developed a system of what would be considered free love. Sexual relations with consenting adults were allowed rather freely, and children were raised communally in a free atmosphere of positive sexuality. Both Oneida and the Kibbutzim criticized the common pattern of sexual relationships based on monogamous marriage. They both offered a means of separating love and sex from economic considerations and the joys of children without the economic and time consuming burdens of constant child care. In each system, adults had a guaranteed job and home irregardless of their personal attachments. Children were raised communally and thus parents were free during the day to pursue their assigned activities and had time in the evening to spend with their children. If parents separated, children were assured of care and the continued presence of both parents, and the mother had no break in support.

The Children of God have evolved as a fairly typical communal group. It grew out of the communalism which was an essential part of the Jesus People Movement. It has a system of communal production and consumption which is similar to that of Roman Catholic and Anglican orders. Its system of sexual relationships was presaged by that at Oneida, and is closest to that of the contemporary Kibbutz movement in Israel.

J. Gordon Melton is Director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion and Specialist in Religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The author of such standard reference works as the Encyclopedia of American Religions (19871992) and the Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America (1992). Dr. Melton is widely recognized as a leading authority on non-mainstream religions.