During a stop in Louisiana, the police raided the group’s campsite. They found a few people who had arrest warrants out on them from different places, mostly on drug charges from before they joined the Children of God. Some of the disciples were arrested, and the rest of the group was warned to get out of town, so they left and set up camp in various parks around Houston.
Needing a safe place for his growing caravan, Moses David reached out to Fred Jordan to ask permission to bring his disciples to the Ranch in Thurber. Jordan agreed, on the condition that he and his disciples would care for the property and make improvements to the existing buildings, which had fallen into disrepair. So, in January of 1970, all the teams gathered at the Ranch, including my father and Esther, who was now eight months pregnant with my half brother Nehi.
THE RANCH
The group settled in at the Ranch and enthusiastically set about making the run-down buildings livable. Hippies, flower children, high school and college dropouts, Jesus People, former drug addicts, and homeless people viewed this as an opportunity to live communally and create their own family to serve God and save the world. Moses David ran the place in the same militaristic style Fred Jordan had employed to operate his missionary training school. It was a challenge to train young people from vastly different backgrounds to live and work together harmoniously. Everyone was on a strict schedule, early to bed, early to rise. The days were filled with construction, cooking, cleaning, and prayer, as well as reading and memorizing the Bible; disciples were expected to memorize up to three hundred verses within the first three months.
Shortly after settling, Moses David began sending teams across America to gather more disciples, expanding the number of people at the Ranch from 160 to 250 in a year. The new disciples psychologically severed all personal family and social ties to devote themselves fully to their new family in Christ, citing Luke 14:26: “If any man comes to Me, and does not hate his own father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.” Still, David encouraged his followers to write home and allowed friendly parents to visit the Ranch to keep them from turning into enemies.
MY MOTHER IS A HIPPIE DROPOUT
My father and Esther had been together for two years when they first met my mother, Ruthie, who joined the Children of God in the summer of 1971. Whereas Esther had grown up a soft-spoken church girl, my mother was a bohemian, outspoken, uninhibited ex-hippie. She was born on Long Island, New York, the middle daughter to Evelyn and Gene Jones. As a crack pilot in the air force, Gene moved his family around a lot to various military bases. Hawaii was Ruthie’s favorite of all the places she’d lived. With her dark frizzy hair and deep surf-girl tan, she was often mistaken as a Hawaiian during the three years they lived there.
After Hawaii, the family moved to Atlanta, Georgia, in 1964, right in the middle of the civil rights movement. As a teen, my mother sat in the back of the bus, where only Black people were supposed to be, and often got kicked off for her protest. While her idealism and rebellion could get her into trouble, she focused her energy into her passion, dance. At seventeen, she was accepted into the Atlanta Ballet company, but she had her sights on adventure and Broadway, and a few months later, she ran away from home.
Her father hired a detective, who located her in New York City, sleeping on the couch of an actor who at least respected the fact that she was underage. Her father agreed to let her stay in the city if she would move to a women’s hotel. Eventually, she got her own apartment, found a job waitressing, and was hired to dance in the off-Broadway show Kismet, and later in a summer season of musicals in the Pocono Mountains.
Around the time she was finally booking real work, she started getting into marijuana and psychedelic drugs. She dropped out of the shows and moved to a cabin in upstate New York with other hippies, searching for a spiritual path. She bounced around for a while, attended the Woodstock festival, and then hitchhiked across the country, landing in San Francisco, where she experienced a horrific trip after dropping LSD poisoned with strychnine. She phoned her father, Gene, who sent her a ticket to come stay with him and his new wife in Atlanta. That was the last time she ever took psychedelic drugs. Soon after arriving in Atlanta, she called her best friend to announce her plan to join an ashram in India, but her friend instead invited her to meet the Jesus People group she’d joined in Atlanta called the House of Judah. Ruthie agreed, and during the visit, she realized she’d found the way to fulfill her childhood dream of serving God.
MY MOTHER JOINS THE JESUS PEOPLE MOVEMENT
Six months into my mother’s time with the House of Judah, my aunt Faithy, my father, and Esther came to meet with the group in Atlanta. My mother was captivated by their passion and joy. She and thirty others hopped on the prophet bus heading to the Ranch to join the Children of God. My mother had been looking for something to give her life meaning. She also craved a close family, affection, and praise that she didn’t have growing up with two kind but emotionally repressed parents, common in people who suffered the horrors of World War II. She found all this and more as a disciple of Jesus with the radical Children of God.
My mother did her Babes training at the Ranch during the summer of 1971. From the beginning, Moses David pushed God’s “Drop Out” message, but now his forsake-all requirements and the militaristic lifestyle started bringing unwanted attention. Parents of some new followers accused him of running a cult and brainwashing their children. My mother’s very worried dad, Gene, visited the Ranch to try to get her to leave, but at nineteen she was legally an adult, and she convinced him that it was her choice to stay with the group. But some concerned families went so far as to alert the authorities and hire professional deprogrammers to try to get their kids back. Media coverage turned negative, with parents and former members alleging brainwashing, censorship of mail and phone calls, and cult-like subservience to Moses David’s family, as well as (unfounded) allegations of drugs, hypnotism, and kidnapping.
Then, Moses David got a call from God to send missionaries overseas to pioneer more fruitful fields. “America has had its chance,” he told his followers. As he prepared to send four-and six-person teams overseas, far away from oversight, he needed to deal with the issue of sex, which was currently permitted for only those who were married. He called an offsite meeting at a motel in Dallas with his four children, their spouses, and a few other couples who were considered top leadership.
THE “LAW OF LOVE” MEANS SEXUAL FREEDOM