They stayed at the Ranch until the fall of 1967, when Virginia asked David to bring his children to California to witness to the hippies. Only his eldest daughter, Deborah, stayed behind. She had married her childhood boyfriend, Jethro, with her father’s blessing when she was sixteen, and the two remained in Texas, where they started a family of their own.
Despite being in her eighties, Virginia had been spending her days passing out peanut butter sandwiches and talking about Jesus to the hippies, surfers, and homeless who gathered at Huntington Beach Pier, the Haight-Ashbury of Southern California at that time. Passionate in her belief that these young people needed to be saved, she urged my father and his two siblings, Aaron and Faithy, just teenagers themselves, to try to reach them.
HIPPIES AND JESUS FREAKS
At the Light Club, a coffeehouse near the pier, my father and his siblings began drawing crowds of young hippies with their musical performances and free sandwiches. It was here that David finally found his flock. These idealistic young people had already turned their backs on the system. They didn’t need to be convinced to leave their old lives. They needed a mission, a direction, and a place to belong. David started showing up at the Light Club in the evenings to preach his progressively more radical sentiments. He grew his hair and beard long, wore a beret, and took on the look of a radically hip evangelist; everyone called him “Dad.”
His words resonated with these young people, and they embraced his unorthodox message of “dropping out of an evil system”—by forsaking everything, including money, education, jobs, and families, and devoting all their time to serving God as missionaries, God’s highest calling. He also emphasized living communally, like disciples of the early church (first-century Christians); Christian communism; and the End Time and the Warning Prophecies about the coming punishment of America, which was popular during the Vietnam War era. They took him at his word, showing up with their backpacks, ready to dedicate their lives to God as disciples. They emptied their pockets, turned over bank accounts and trust funds, swore off drugs and alcohol, and instead got high on Jesus as their Savior.
GRANDPA FINDS HIS PEOPLE
Virginia Berg’s death in the late spring of 1968, just four years after the passing of her husband, Hjalmar, proved a turning point for David. It was as if he became unfettered from any remaining need to abide by traditional norms and doctrines. He began railing against the church system, organized religion, institutionalized education, the federal government, capitalism, and even parental authority, all very popular sentiments for his audience of young people. He was out to start a religious revolution, and his new disciples were ready and willing to follow him anywhere. The End Time was imminent, and he needed to save as many souls as he could before the Tribulation, the Second Coming of Jesus and the Wrath of God.
With hundreds of hippies showing up at the Light Club, the group began to garner local media attention, which was at first positive. Here was a group of Christians who were motivating hippies to clean up their act and get off drugs! Soon the family began receiving invitations from preachers who wanted to start youth ministries, including one from an old missionary friend in Tucson, Arizona. David happily dispatched my father and Esther, one of the group’s first recruits. She was a nineteen-year-old who had just completed her freshman year at Kansas Wesleyan University and had been searching for a group that would allow her to serve God as a missionary.
THE OTHER WOMAN
Among the new recruits at the Tucson church was Karen Zerby, a shy, bucktoothed Nazarene minister’s daughter in her early twenties who had recently graduated from college and was a trained stenographer. Zerby was so enthusiastic that my father recommended she travel to Huntington Beach for training at the Light Club. She did, and almost immediately, she became David’s secretary. In the months to come, the two would begin a secret affair and start living together in the Ark, which he now shared with his wife. Though Jane appeared to accept her husband’s new intimate partner, my aunt Deborah recalls her crying often and doing her best to avoid being in the trailer with Karen.
David was stepping up his recruitment efforts in California, sending disciples to local universities to witness to students and distribute literature. But university administrators were not happy with the group’s presence on their campuses and called in police to have them removed. With law enforcement now involved, journalists began highlighting the conflict and the group’s more radical teachings. To avoid further negative publicity, David, Jane, and some of their disciples fled to Tucson, where they joined up with my father and Esther. Deborah rejoined her father here, bringing her husband and three children.
THE JESUS PEOPLE MOVEMENT GROWS
Once in Arizona, David decided to send teams of disciples on the road to witness, but he wanted the leaders of each team to be a married couple. So, he asked my father and another male disciple if one of them would marry Esther. In working with her for the past year, my father had been impressed with her dedication to the Lord, and he felt God’s call to marry Esther. As both men said yes, the decision was left to Esther, who chose my father.
My twenty-year-old father and nineteen-year-old Esther headed a team of disciples to New Mexico to witness at a university there, and then on to El Paso, where they were married on May 16, 1969, with my grandfather, an ordained minister, presiding over the ceremony.
BECOMING MOSES DAVID AND THE CHILDREN OF GOD
From there, they fanned out across the United States and Canada. At one point, there were 120 people on the road, traveling in more than ten vehicles. A local journalist who caught up with them in St. Louis dubbed them “The Children of God,” a name they kept. The reporter likened David, leading his ragtag group through the wilderness, to Moses, prompting David to adopt the prophet-leader name of Moses David (later shortened to Mo) because, like biblical Moses, who led the Israelites out of Egypt, he was leading his disciples out of the “System.”
Moses David instructed his followers to take a new biblical name to demonstrate they were being reborn as Children of God and leaving their old life behind. Jane took the name Eve and became known as Mother Eve, and Karen Zerby took the name Maria. From then on, all new disciples, or “Babes,” as they were called, from the biblical reference to “babes in Christ,” were required to change their names when they joined.