Life in the Family: An Oral History of the Children of God

Life in the Family: An Oral History of the Children of God James D. Chancellor James D. Chancellor is W.O. Carver Professor of World Religions and Christian Missions at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He served for one year as a visiting scholar at the University of Manitoba and has lectured at theological institutions in Trinidad, Singapore, and the Philippines. He has published articles in The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology and Review and Expositor.  To order a copy of Life in The Family, please contact: http://www.amazon.com. (Life in the Family was published in September, 2000 by Syracuse University Press. ISBN 0-8156-0645-1).

Life in the Family: An Oral History of the Children of God is written from a unique insider’s perspective—including interviews with more than seven-hundred Family members—James D. Chancellor charts The Family’s course since its emergence as the most controversial group to grow out of the Jesus People Movement in the 1960s.

Intense confrontation with the legal, religious, political, and educational establishment marked the movement’s activities from the beginning. The young disciples heeded the call of their prophet to flee a soon-to-be-destroyed North America. Dispersed throughout Europe, Latin America, Africa, and East Asia, they virtually disappeared from the American landscape. In the late 1980s, The Family had gone through extreme theological and lifestyle changes, including a radical reordering of their sexual ethos. The Children started to come home. Now a worldwide counterculture of some twelve thousand members, the movement’s colorful history reveals a profoundly religious group that has tested the limits of human experience.