The family of five spent the next several years on the road, holding revivals at churches across the United States. Virginia’s story of her miraculous healing always drew crowds, usually between four thousand to ten thousand strong. Turnout was so great, and her words were so moving, that she was invited to stay as a full-time preacher at a church in Miami, Florida.
After fifteen years in Miami, Virginia missed her time on the road, and by the late 1930s, she returned to her role as a traveling evangelist. David, my grandfather, was the only one of her three children interested in pursuing a life in the ministry, so she took him on the road as her driver and assistant, staging massive events and tent revivals at venues all over the country.
GRANDPA’S REBELLION AND REDEDICATION
In 1941, at age twenty-two, David was drafted into the army. He could have gotten out of it; ministers and divinity students were exempt from service. But he was tired of being under his mother’s thumb and wanted some adventure. In boot camp, he contracted double pneumonia, and, the way he told it, the doctors didn’t have much hope he’d live, so he promised God that if he was healed, he’d devote his life to God’s service. And just like his mother, David claims he was immediately and miraculously healed, to the amazement of all the doctors and nurses.
David was given a medical discharge due to a heart condition and rejoined Virginia. He enjoyed being on the road but was frustrated with his modest role as his mother’s assistant. He, too, wanted to preach. Yet God told him to be patient and that his time would eventually come.
The two were visiting California when Grandpa met my grandmother Jane Miller, at the Little Church of Sherman Oaks, where she was working as a secretary. A petite brunette and a devout Christian, Jane was born in Kentucky and raised in a Baptist home. The two eloped in July 1944, and two years later they had their first daughter, Deborah, followed by a son, Aaron, in 1948. That same year, David was ordained as a minister of the Christian and Missionary Alliance and was sent to Valley Farms, Arizona, a sandy desert town about sixty miles south of Phoenix.
The congregants were a mix of southern whites, Native Americans, and Mexicans, all of whom were struggling to get along. He further exacerbated the tension with his preaching by urging integration and advocated that those of means share more of their material wealth with those less fortunate. David’s inclinations would become more apparent later, but he was just beginning to formulate his ideas of Christian communism based on Acts 2:44. His message infuriated the white members more closely associated with the church’s leadership, and he was eventually expelled. The experience permanently soured him on organized religion. Disappointed but undeterred, David took his family of six back on the road—including my father, Jonathan “Hosea” Emmanuel, who was born in 1949, and his younger sister, Faithy, after whom I would later be named. They eventually ended up in Huntington Beach, California, where David’s parents had now settled in retirement. David found odd jobs to support the family, including a stint as a teacher and bus driver at a local Christian school. But he was profoundly unhappy, and in 1951, he turned to the Lord for direction and received a revelation that set him on a completely new and different path. He became convinced that God wanted him to drop out of the “system”—basically, the established church—and take to the road to save souls for Christ. So, he abruptly quit his job and enrolled in a three-month course at the Soul Clinic in Los Angeles, a missionary training school founded by the Reverend Fred Jordan.
GRANDPA JOINS FRED JORDAN’S MISSIONARY SCHOOL
Jordan was one of the nation’s first television evangelists, and he opened the Fred Jordan Mission in 1949, where he ministered to the poor and homeless, and ran his missionary training school. Jordan’s message resonated with my grandfather, particularly his belief that God was everywhere, and parishioners did not need to assemble in a church building to communicate with the Lord.
The Reverend Jordan had a huge impact on David, and the two would work together in various capacities over the next fifteen years, which dictated where and how he and his family lived. Part of David’s missionary training included a period at Jordan’s Texas Soul Clinic, or the Ranch, located in Thurber, Texas, where his converts were subjected to a military-style boot camp to prepare them for the hardships they would face as missionaries.
My father was three years old when my grandfather moved the family to the Ranch the first time. They stayed there for two years before heading to Florida, where David and Jane opened a branch of Fred Jordan’s missionary training school in Miami.
In Miami, they lived communally, sharing a big house with other people who were also training to be missionaries, and spent summers traveling around the US, evangelizing with their parents.
Witnessing on the road was a family affair throughout my father’s childhood. While my grandmother Jane had initially worried that having four small children meant her days assisting in the ministry were over, she soon realized that even as a mom, there was a role for her. She noticed that people were more receptive to her husband’s message when he was accompanied by his cute kids, so she fashioned their children into a singing group to perform along with his sermons. They performed in churches, on the street, and on Fred Jordan’s radio and TV programs.
Everything was going fine for a while, but David’s fiery sermons, calls for disciples to “forsake all” to become Christian missionaries, and aggressive “marketing” tactics landed him in hot water with the area’s church leaders. Every Sunday, he sent his children and a few of his missionary students to the local churches to distribute religious literature, instructing them to blanket the buildings and all the cars in the parking lots. These antics infuriated church leaders, who sent local law enforcement after him. He needed to get out of town, so just after my father had completed the eighth grade, David announced they were leaving Miami to hit the road again, thereby marking the end of my father’s formal education.
WARNING MESSAGE OF THE END TIME
The family loaded into their twenty-eight-foot Dodge motor home, which David lovingly named the Ark, and returned to the Ranch. Virginia visited the Ranch twice to deliver urgent prophecies to her youngest child. First, “The Warning Message” said the Coming of the Antichrist and the End Time were imminent. Second, “The End-Time Prophecy” claimed that David would have “the understanding of Daniel” and ability to forecast the Coming of Christ.