HomeARC ML 0172
"SURVIVAL!"--MO
--From Moses with Love! June, 1972 NO.172--GP
Copyrighted June 1972 by The Children of God
P.O. Box 31, London WC2E 7LX, England or BP 752, 751423 Paris, Cedex 03, France
THE TRUE STORY OF "MOSES" AND THE "CHILDREN OF GOD", original Founders and Leaders of the Jesus Revolution, told for the first time by "MO" himself, author of the now famous "secret MO Letters"!--Their history, cause, beliefs, enemies, answers, secrets and warnings!
To our own Dear Loved Ones, Family, Friends, Associates, Co-Workers, Helpers, Parents, Grandparents, and even Strangers and Enemies of The Children of God:
INTRODUCTION AND MO'S REASONS FOR DESIRING TO REMAIN UNKNOWN.
Dearly Beloved in the Lord: Greetings in Jesus' precious name! It has been a long time since some of you have heard from me directly, personally, and most of you have never heard from me before, although many of you may have heard about me, either through your own children or friends or even from enemies who have given us widespread publicity during the past few months!
2. IT HAS BEEN OUR OWN PERSONAL DESIRE TO REMAIN UNKNOWN in person and in name to the world at large, and known only in the Spirit by our fatherly counsel in the form of our letters and writings to our own children, now known as the Children of God. We have felt it better to remain anonymous in this way as long as possible in order that we might fulfill the words of the great and courageous St. John, predecessor and introducer of our Lord Jesus Christ, when he said, "He must increase, but I must decrease!"--John 3:30.
3. IT WAS MY OWN PERSONAL PREFERENCE TO REMAIN AS UNKNOWN AS POSSIBLE, and that personal knowledge of me and personal acquaintance and contact with me should decrease as much as possible in order that we might glorify our Lord the more, and encourage our children the more, that He is with them even when I am not, in order that they might learn to depend more on Him rather that on me, as this is their only hope of survival, of which we're going to speak more later in this letter.
4. WE HAVE ALSO SEEN MANY GREAT MEN OF GOD AND THEIR MINISTRY DESTROYED THROUGH TOO MUCH EXALTATION by either their followers or the general public. It has therefore been our personal desire to minimize the possibilities of such glorification of the cult of the personality and to virtually eliminate it if possible by remaining almost unknown, both in name and in person, in order that we might say indeed: "To God be all the Glory!"
5. IT HAS ALSO BEEN OUR FEELING THAT, IF ANY CREDIT WERE TO BE GIVEN AT ALL BY OTHERS AND OUTSIDERS, IT SHOULD NOT ONLY BE GIVEN TO THE LORD BUT TO THE CHILDREN THEMSELVES, if to any, for it is they who by the help of God have done such a marvelous work in the world today in helping to rescue the youth of their own generation from the evils of their time: Godlessness, unbelief, confusion, paganism, drugs, violence, crime, and anarchy!--as well as shame, death, and despair!
GOD'S ANSWER TO TODAY'S PROBLEMS AND AN EXPLANATION OF SALVATION!
6. THE ANSWER TO ALL OF THEIR PROBLEMS HAS, AS USUAL AND AS ALWAYS IN EVERY AGE AND EVERY GENERATION, BEEN A VERY SIMPLE ONE: LOVE!--True Love, the Love of God and the love of their fellowman!--The Spirit of God's divine Love which helps us all to fulfill His Great Commandment to love one another! Jesus said the greatest commandments in the Mosaic Law were first to love God and then to love thy neighbor as thyself! Herein, He said, are all the Law and all the Prophets, or as Solomon said, herein is the whole duty of man: to love God and to keep his Commandments! Herein is the Children's Salvation and Message!
7. GOD'S ANSWER TO THE PROBLEMS OF TODAY AS WELL AS TO THE PROBLEMS OF THE PAST HAS ALWAYS BEEN SO SIMPLE, so childlike, so easy that many could not even believe it!--That the simple Love of God and each other could solve all of our problems! But that is still God's solution for today, even in such a complex and confused and highly complicated society as that of the world of today! It's still just that simple: If we love God, we can love each other, and even respect ourselves as His Creation! We can then follow His rules of life, liberty, and the possession of happiness, and all will be well and happy in Him!
8. THE WHOLE IDEA IS SO SIMPLE AND SO CHILDLIKE THAT JESUS HIMSELF SAID THAT YOU MUST BECOME AS A LITTLE CHILD to enter His spiritual Kingdom of joy and happiness, a blissful state of mind and spirit and even physical and material well-being--the spiritual Kingdom of God on earth! In fact, He told a learned Doctor of the Law, "Except ye become as a little child, ye shall in no wise enter into the Kingdom of Heaven!" He even said, "Except a man be born again, he cannot even see or understand the Kingdom of God!"
9. THIS, OF COURSE, WAS QUITE AND ENIGMA TO THIS OBVIOUSLY LEARNED AND LITERARY OLD GENTLEMAN, a "rabbi of Israel" to whom Jesus was speaking. To this very well educated teacher of the Law, Salvation was apparently in knowledge and great education and the wisdom of the ancients, such as the Torah and the Talmud. But here Jesus was telling him very simply, as our Children sing in their very popular theme song around the world: "You Gotta be a Baby to go to Heaven!"
10. IN OTHER WORDS, YOU MUST ACCEPT GOD'S SIMPLE AND UNCOMPLICATED, UNADULTERATED, UNEDUCATED LOVE AND TRUTH AS THE WORD OF YOUR HEAVENLY FATHER TO HIS LITTLE CHILD--YOU!--and through the acceptance of this Good News of His Love as manifested in His Son, Jesus Christ.
11. THAT THIS SIMPLE CHILDLIKE TRUTH WAS VERY DIFFICULT FOR THIS OVER-EDUCATED RABBI TO UNDERSTAND WAS OBVIOUS FROM HIS REACTION and overly-literal interpretation, wondering if Jesus was speaking of some kind of physical miracle of material rebirth. But Jesus quickly explained that he was not speaking of a physical rebirth from a fleshly bag of water, but a spiritual rebirth of man's spirit and spiritual attitudes performed by a supernatural miracle of the Spirit of God Himself!--the gift of a new spiritual heart, so to speak, from the Lord.
12. WHAT JESUS WAS DOING BY THIS WAS MAKING IT VERY PLAIN AND SIMPLE THAT WE CANNOT SAVE OURSELVES BY OUR OWN WORKS, OUR OWN GOODNESS, even our own attempts to keep His laws and to love Him, even our own endeavors to find and follow His truth. He was saying that Salvation is a gift of God performed by a miraculous transformation for our lives when we accept His truth in the love of His Son Jesus by the work of God's Spirit. All we have to do is receive Him, and His Spirit in us will then cause us to do the humanly impossible: Love God and man!
13. "FOR BY GRACE ARE YE SAVED THROUGH FAITH; AND THAT NOT OF YOURSELVES: IT IS THE GIFT OF GOD!--Not of works, lest any man should boast! For we are His workmanship!"--Ephesians 2:8,9. So you cannot save yourself no matter how good you try to be. You can't be good enough, you can't be perfect enough to earn merit or deserve the Heavenly perfection of His own holy Salvation by His own Grace, Love and Mercy!
14. "FOR ALL WE LIKE SHEEP HAVE GONE ASTRAY! We have turned every one to his own way; But God hath laid on Him (Jesus His own Son) the iniquity of us all!" Read the rest of this 53rd Chapter of Isaiah, the Old Testament Prophet, if you want a beautiful picture of the Love of God as shown in His Son Jesus taking the punishment of our own sins in Himself on the Tree! "For He was cut off out of the land of the living for the transgression of my people!... when thou shalt make His soul an offering for sin... and hath poured out His soul unto death... and he bare the sin of many!"
15. "AS MOSES LIFTED UP THE SERPENT IN THE WILDERNESS, EVEN SO MUST THE SON OF MAN BE LIFTED UP: that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that He gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life!"--John 3:14-16.
16. SALVATION IS JUST THAT SIMPLE! All you have to do is receive Jesus, God's Son, as your Savior by asking Him into your heart! You can do it right now, if you want God's answer to all of your problems and His love and happiness to fill your heart and life with joy unspeakable and full of glory with a new plan and purpose in living! He'll meet all your needs and solve all your problems! He's just that wonderful, and it's all just that simple! Why not try Him?
17. AS I USED TO TELL MY OWN NATURAL CHILDREN WHEN THEY WERE LITTLE: "God is our great Father in Heaven and we are His children on earth. We've all been naughty and deserve a spanking, haven't we?--But Jesus, our Big Brother, loved us and the Father so much that He knew the spanking would hurt us both, so he offered to take it for us! So God let Him and promised to forgive us if we would love and thank Jesus for it and let his Spirit live in our hearts and lives from now on and obey His Word by letting Him love others through us." It's that simple!
18. THEN I WOULD LEAD THEM IN A SIMPLE CHILDLIKE PRAYER, and you can pray it with us if you wish: "Dear Lord, please forgive me for being bad and naughty and deserving a good spanking! Thank You so much for sending Jesus, Your Son, to take my spanking for me. I now receive Him as my Savior and as Your Son and ask You to come into my heart and make me be good and love You and others by your Spirit. Help me to read Your Word and obey it and try to help others. In Jesus' name. Amen."
19. THIS IS THE PRAYER WE FIRST PRAYED AS A LITTLE TINY FAMILY OF SIX, just so simple and childlike, without a church or a building or a preacher, in the quiet sanctity of our own little home, a tiny little house trailer, with nothing but the Word of God and His Spirit as our Teacher!--And look how God has answered! Look how He's helped my children to help your children and the children of others to become God's Children--Our Children--Yours and Mine and God's! Hallelujah!
THE MIRACULOUS CHANGE OF SPIRITUAL REBIRTH.
20. GOD BLESS YOU FOR BEING WILLING TO YIELD YOUR CHILDREN TO HIM FOR GOD'S USE, THAT HE MIGHT HELP THEM TO HELP OTHERS and in so doing give you and us both many more children in His Spirit for His Kingdom! This has made both Him and them very happy, as well as bring joy and happiness and His wonderful Salvation and Love to many, many others! How thankful you should be for them and how proud you should be of them for their self-sacrificial love and service in saving multitudes of other young people by helping them to find the Lord and showing them the joy of a life of service for others! Thank God! May you never regret your own personal sacrifice in letting them go for God!
21. WE REALIZE THAT MANY OF YOU MAY HAVE MISUNDERSTOOD THIS INSTANTANEOUS, MIRACULOUS, AND SUPERNATURAL CHANGE of mind, heart, and life which occurs by the power of God's Spirit in this spiritual transformation which God calls being born again, or a spiritual rebirth, it is such a drastic change! Some of you have even been misled to believe that because of this sudden change and desire to live an entirely different kind of life that your children must surely have been drugged, hypnotized, brainwashed, kidnapped, or imprisoned, or they would not have so suddenly and somewhat dramatically left home, loved ones, school or job and entered upon such an entirely new and different kind of life!
22. HOWEVER, IF YOU WILL RECALL SOME OF THE BIBLE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE HEARD ABOUT SOME OF THE INSTANTANEOUS TRANSFORMATIONS of life, mind, and heart which befell some of God's greatest characters at some crisis time by the power of God's Spirit such as Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, some of the folks Jesus Himself called or healed, and his own Apostles, as well as many other men of God throughout history, you will realize that this is actually nothing new, but something which God has been doing throughout the ages in the lives of men!
23. SOMETIMES IT HAPPENS SO SUDDENLY AND SO COMPLETELY AND THERE IS SUCH A DRASTIC CHANGE THAT IT CAN BE VERY DRAMATIC AND MUCH MISUNDERSTOOD! Many have even been thought, like the Apostle Paul, to have suddenly gone mad, or "driven crazy by religion", there has been such a sudden change in their lives and their way of thinking, speaking, and living! Their whole attitude toward life and others has changed, and changed so suddenly that their friends, loved ones, or others have thought them to have suddenly had some traumatic psychological experience which has made such a personality change as to make them seem even schizophrenic!--and in need of psychiatric care!
24. SOME HAVE EVEN GONE SO FAR AS TO HAVE HAD THEIR OWN LOVED ONES PLACED UNDER A DOCTOR'S CARE OR IN A MENTAL INSTITUTION for observation to try to find out what's happened to them to make them such a different person! But let me remind you and reassure you that this has been a very common miracle of God throughout history! Jesus called it being born again of His Spirit, and Paul called it the new birth in which "old things are passed away and all things are become new" and "ye are become new creatures in Christ Jesus"! The Bible calls it "putting off the old man and putting on the new" and it is often such a remarkable transformation and actual personality change that God's Word often likens it to the death and burial of the old and a resurrection of the new to an entirely new life and way of living!
25. SO SALVATION, OR THIS DRAMATIC "CONVERSION" AS IT'S SOMETIMES CALLED, IS SOMETIMES QUITE A SURPRISE TO OUR LOVED ONES and former associates! The great St. Augustine had been a libertine and a profligate while in college. But then one day after his conversion, as he tells it himself in his own writings, he was walking down the street when one of his old girlfriends passed him by, and he didn't seem to recognize her. So she turned and called after him, "Augustine, it is I!" To which he replied, "Yes I know!--But I am no longer I!" As the Apostle says, "It is no longer I that live, but Christ that liveth in me, and the life that I now live, I live by the grace of the Son of God!"
26. SURELY YOU MUST HAVE HEARD OR READ SOMEWHERE in your life by this time of some of these remarkable conversions of great and famous characters, both in the Bible and out! Believe it or not, God is still alive today and just as powerfully changing your children!
27. THIS IS ACTUALLY THE SAME CHANGE WHICH IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE TAKEN PLACE IN YOU or me or others upon the declaration of our individual faith at the time of either our Bar-mitzvah, Confirmation, or Salvation, or Baptism. However, with some, these occasions are, merely traditional ceremonial formalities or customs and they do not really have a change of heart. With others, the change which has taken place is not as noticeable or is more gradually noticeable because they were already living a fairly clean, good, or exemplary life and this experience did not make a great deal of change in their looks, manner, or way of living.
MO'S LINEAGE
28. AS FOR MY OWN PART, MY FOREFATHERS ON MY MOTHER'S SIDE WERE BRANDTS, GERMAN JEWS no doubt related to Willy, the former German Chancellor! However, the three Brandt brothers, Adam, Isaac, and Jacob, and their families had accepted Jesus as their Messiah long ago, and as a result left Stuttgart, Germany and sailed to America in 1745, thirty years before the American Revolution!
29. AS PEACE-LOVING MENNONITE FARMERS, THEY SETTLED FIRST AMONGST OTHERS IN PENNSYLVANIA, and later moved to Ohio where my own Grandfather, Dr. John Lincoln, was born in an old farmhouse still standing near Somerset. One of the three huge German Lutheran oak-bound Bibles which those three brothers brought with them from Germany can still be seen at the museum in Columbus, Ohio!
30. MY GRANDFATHER'S MOTHER WAS AN ENGLISH LOVEBERRY, and his wife was a member of the Marquis family of French nobility. As a young farm boy, John was very bright, hard-working and ambitious and was soon teaching school at the age of nineteen. This soon proved too unexciting for his dramatical talents and he left school-teaching for the stage with a theatrical stock company which toured the Nation. He soon married Nina Lee Marquis, a member of the same company and quite a talented actress herself, who was not only a Marquis but also a direct descendant of Lighthorse Harry Lee of the Robert E. Lee's of Virginia, of Civil War fame.
31. ONE NIGHT DURING ONE OF THEIR SHOWS, MY GRANDFATHER FOUGHT A SABER DUEL ON STAGE as a part of what was supposed to have been a play. But the other actor, who had been drinking, took it a little too seriously and nearly killed my Grandfather! So immediately after the show, he became so worried about his spiritual condition in the event of his death, that he went out looking for a preacher to find out how to be sure of his Salvation.
32. ONE HIGHLY EDUCATED DENOMINATIONALIST HIGH PRIEST TOLD HIM IT WOULD TAKE HIM ABOUT EIGHT YEARS of theological training to find out, but that was too slow for him! He figured if he had to fight that duel again tomorrow night he needed to know now! So he finally found and old-fashioned Methodist preacher who led him to Christ on his knees on the spot!--And he was superbly happy!
33. HIS CONVERSION REALLY RESULTED IN A DRAMATIC CHANGE in his life, because he always did whatever he did with all his heart! So he figured if Salvation was good enough for him, it would be good for everybody, and he immediately launched into the Methodist ministry as a young, dramatic and flaming evangelist. To make a long story short, he went from circuit riding in the hills of Virginia where my mother was born, to a string of degrees and the eventual presidency of Virginia College, a more or less self-made man, but by the Grace of God. By his writings and investments he became a multi-millionaire!
34. AS THE AUTHOR OF SIXTEEN BOOKS, including "Turning Points in Life" and many others, the young Dr. John L. became a world traveler, popular pastor, and famous lecturer on the old Ridpath Chautauqua Circuit, where he often shared the same platform with such personal friends as James Whitcomb Riley, the world-famed children's poet, and William Jennings Bryan, of the famous Monkey Trial, and President Theodore Roosevelt, for whom he campaigned.--And his name is still to be found in "Who's Who", as late as the 1930s.
35. BY THIS TIME, HE HAD JOINED THE ALEXANDER CAMPBELL MOVEMENT OF THE DISCIPLES OF CHRIST, now known as the Christian Church and was one of the outstanding leaders of the movement, building and pastoring exactly 50 churches in his lifetime, including such famous edifices as First Christian of Toledo, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Melbourne, Australia, the largest in two countries.
36. BY WISE INVESTMENT OF HIS HIGH SALARIES AND ROYALTIES HE BECAME RICH ENOUGH TO HOB-KNOB WITH HIGH SOCIETY, and his daughter, Virginia Lee, toured Europe in style with Olga Busch, of the Anheuser Busch of the famous St. Louis Thomas brewing family, and John Charles Thomas, world-famous operatic tenor, her old flame. I mention these names because some of them, I'm sure, will be very familiar to some of you, especially some of you old timers, and to let some of you who may be doubters know that this thing was not done in a corner but comes from some considerable background!
37. WHILE A YOUNG SOCIETY GUEST IN THE FAMILY HOME OF THE LATE GENERAL WINFIELD SCOTT of American war fame, Dr. Brandt's daughter, Virginia, depressed over the recent untimely death of her dear Mother, and sickened with the superficiality of wealth and society, was prevented from taking her own life by the words of her Father from one of his sermons: "If you must throw your life away, why not give it to some good cause?"
38. SHE IMMEDIATELY VOLUNTEERED FOR SOCIAL SERVICE and was chosen to take Charles Crittenden's place when he died as National Field Secretary of the famous American Crittenden Homes for girls, and as such, raised millions of dollars for this work and founded many of these homes, particularly throughout the West, and became known as an authority on "the girl problem of America", speaking on the subject in such famous and unusual places as the Mormon Tabernacle, the only woman at the time who had ever spoken from its pulpit!
39. ENGAGED TO BE MARRIED TO BRUCE BOGART, A COUSIN OF HUMPHREY Bogart, the movie actor, and with their sumptuously wealthy home already furnished for their marriage, Miss Brandt was being given a gala farewell reception in Ogden, Utah, where she had built her last Crittenden Home. A handsome young Swedish professional concert tenor was invited to sing for the entertainment of this society bash, and during his rendition of "Oh, Promise Me" my aristocratic Mother promptly fell in love with this poor, young, Swedish immigrant, and eloped! She left her poor Bruce blind with shock, and the newspapers screaming headlines: "Society girl jilts millionaire to marry poor boy!"
40. MY FATHER, HJALMER EMMANUEL, was born near Kalmar Castle, in the Shmoland area of Southern Sweden (not Shmoo-land!), son of a poor shoe cobbler with a large family. His father and brother used to abet their meager earnings during the summers by traveling about Sweden as wandering minstrels, singing and playing their guitars and putting on acrobatic shows until they moved to America.
41. His older sister had gone to visit relatives in Nebraska and persuaded her father and family to follow. So AT THE AGE OF FOUR, MY FATHER WAS BROUGHT TO AMERICA in the horrible steerage compartment of an old freighter, under indescribable conditions, like many poor European immigrants of the late 1800s. They were so poor they had no silverware, so they ate from a common bowl in the middle of the table with their bare hands! They also had no chairs, and my Father could not remember sitting at the table until the age of twelve, at which time he was working in a coal colliery as a little boy sorting coal! There were no child labor laws and he worked hard!
42. FOR THE FIRST SEVERAL YEARS HE AND HIS WHOLE FAMILY SPOKE NOTHING BUT SWEDISH, since they lived in the nearly all-Swedish town of Oakland, Nebraska; and his father and mother, my Grandfather and Grandmother, "Far-Far and Mar-Mur", as we affectionately knew them in Swedish, never did learn to speak the English language, constantly contending that Swedish was good enough!
43. BY THE TIME I CAME ALONG, THE FAMILY HAD MOVED TO OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, WHERE I WAS BORN. There they had several prosperous businesses and owned considerable property, and my Father was a bookkeeper for the Southern Pacific Railroad and earned extra money as a concert singer on summer tours, which was how he met my Mother in Utah.
44. IMMEDIATELY AFTER THEIR MARRIAGE MY MOTHER CABLED HER FATHER, who was touring China at the time, and he invited my Father to sing for a series of meetings he was to hold upon his return, at Aberdeen, South Dakota.--And it was during those meetings, under my Grandfather's persuasive preaching, that my Father himself had one of those remarkable life-changing experiences and volunteered for the ministry!--Much to my Mother's horror, who by this time had herself become a blatant atheist during her college years at TCU!
45. THIS DRAMATIC AND CLIMACTIC CHANGE from a cigar-smoking, beer-drinking, wild-dancing, party-going, good-looking, and loose-living young man of the world to a suddenly sober, serious-minded, zealous, young, idealistic minister of the Church was almost too much for my Mother, for it was not at all the man she had married.--Much the same shock some of you have gone through when you have found your own children or loved ones likewise so changed through conversion!
46. NEVERTHELESS, WHEN SHE FOUND NOTHING COULD DISSUADE HIM FROM HIS TOTALLY NEW DIRECTION of life she decided to try not to discourage him any further, but to actually go along with him the best she could. So she accompanied him to Drake University at Des Moines, Iowa, for his theological training for the ministry of the Christian Church.
THE STORY OF GRANDMOTHER'S ILLNESS AND MIRACULOUS RECOVERY.
47. IT WAS THERE THAT MY OLDER BROTHER, HJALMER JR., WAS BORN, AND WHERE MY MOTHER'S BACK WAS BROKEN AND SHE WAS ALMOST TOTALLY PARALYZED IN A TERRIBLE ACCIDENT WHICH NEARLY KILLED HER and left her on a deathbed of agony for five years, a total invalid. The story is told in her own book, "The Hem of His Garment", which has now been read by millions, and which we'd be glad to send you if interested.
48. WE HOPE YOU CAN READ HER BOOK, AS WE HAVEN'T TIME HERE TO TELL YOU THE FULL STORY OF THE MARVELOUS MIRACLE GOD DID IN HER LIFE by restoring both her faith and her health in answer to my Father's prayers, one of the most startling and supernatural of total changes in the life of anyone that you could ever hope to hear!--after which she herself was a completely different woman than my Father had married!
49. ALTHOUGH MY MOTHER'S BACK WAS OPERATED ON at Still Medical College, Des Moines, Iowa, under the direction of Dr. Still, the founder of Osteopathy, and Dr. Charles Mayo, founder of the world-famed Mayo Clinic, with 19 other consulting surgeons in attendance, removing eight inches of the dorsal vertebrae of her spinal column in an attempt to relieve the paralysis, she became even worse. Despite the fact that her wealthy father, before he lost his riches in Chinese bonds and German Marks, spent a fortune on her case calling in specialist after specialist, they all agreed her condition was hopeless and she would soon die.
50. AT LAST, DRS. LUTRELL AND RIGDON OF SAN FRANCISCO BEGGED MY FATHER TO TAKE HER HOME to his poor pastorate in Ukiah, California, and let the poor woman die in peace! By this time, at the end of five awful years of suffering, she only weighed 78 pounds of skin stretched over a skeleton, her hair had all fallen out from strong medicines, she was almost totally blind, totally paralyzed, a confirmed morphine drug addict, stomach salivated, left lung gone from tuberculosis from being in bed so long, heart dying of angina pectoris and mitro-stenosis of the valves, unconscious most of the time, fed by the injection of liquids by a glass tube through a hole in her throat (before the days of intravenous injections), and much more dead than alive.
51. BUT MY FATHER NEVER GAVE UP HOPE, CONTINUING TO PRAY in simple childlike faith that God could still answer prayer and still do miracles, until one day my poor atheistic Mother cried out in the midst of her horrible suffering: "O God, if there is a God, please help me!"--And God answered her pitiful heart cry, and instantly faith came, and for the first time in her life she began to comprehend His Love and Salvation!
52. AT 8:00 ON SATURDAY NIGHT SHE WAS INSTANTLY RAISED by the Hand of God from that deathbed of total and hopeless invalidism to walk the floor for the first time in five years--a human impossibility even if there had been nothing wrong with her! And she walked to my Father's church the following morning and stood in his pulpit and told what a miraculous change God had wrought!--A sudden conversion from absolute atheism to total faith, and an instantaneous healing from complete invalidism to supernatural health! Hallelujah! God lives!
53. THIS SPECTACULAR EVENT STARTED A REVIVAL of faith throughout the churches of Northern California, and the news of it was "everywhere spread abroad, and the multitudes gathered together!" Mother began to be everywhere in demand as a very popular inspirational speaker telling what God had done for her and that He could do for others, and "many mighty miracles were done at the hands of the Apostles" under her ministry!--Unbelievers were converted and believers were healed, a ministry which began in that memorable year of 1918 at the age of 32 and continued almost exactly 50 years, until the age of 82 when she passed away quietly and peacefully in her sleep in her little cottage in California to her eternal and glorious reward!
54. ALTHOUGH HER OWN DOCTOR AND NURSE WERE CONVERTED, as well as half the town and a good deal of Northern California, through this mighty modern miracle of God and through this observable and provable evidence that God is still alive, well and working, there were still the skeptical, hard-hearted scoffers who refused to believe! As Jesus said, if they won't believe the Bible, "though one should come back from the dead, yet will they not believe!"
55. AT THE CLOSE OF MY MOTHER'S TESTIMONY THAT FIRST MEMORABLE MORNING in my Father's own church, his leading elder walked the aisle and shook his finger in my Mother's face and said: "Nina Virginia, I would rather have seen you, the daughter of Dr. John L., dead and in your coffin here today and heard your funeral, than to have heard you stand here this morning proclaiming the doctrine of Divine Healing, which is not in the annals of our church!" There are none so blind as those that will not see, and those whose minds are so made up they don't care to be confused with the facts!--so bigoted, so set in their ways, so rigid and unchangeable they prefer lies to the truth! Do you?
56. MY FATHER'S OWN DENOMINATION, THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH, OFFERED HIM A LARGER AND MORE LUCRATIVE PASTORATE IF HE WOULD STOP PREACHING AND PRACTICING "FAITH HEALING" as they called it, but he refused and resigned to launch out into an entirely new life of living totally by faith! He and my Mother entered into full-time evangelistic work together for most of the rest of their lives until he, too, passed away at the age of nearly 83, in 1966 in California, where their bodies are both buried side-by-side on a green hillside overlooking the sea and awaiting the Resurrection! Hallelujah!
MO'S HISTORY--FROM BIRTH TO DISCHARGE FROM THE ARMY.
57. ALTHOUGH THE DOCTORS HAD SAID MY MOTHER COULD NEVER HAVE ANOTHER CHILD, I WAS BORN NATURALLY AND HEALTHILY at an amazing eleven pounds in weight at home in a humble little cottage in the poor Melrose section of Oakland, California, on February 18, 1919--one of the last of the Aquarians, barely making it under the line that year! This was during the great Spanish influenza epidemic which killed millions only three months after World War I, but God spared me.
58. DEDICATED TO THE LORD AND NAMED BY MY MOTHER BEFORE I WAS EVEN BORN, I WAS PROPHESIED OVER MANY TIMES by many prophets of God as having been filled with the Holy Ghost from my Mother's womb, like John the Baptist, and many great things were foretold that I would do--some of which have already been fulfilled, thanks to God's miracle-working power through our children, the Children of God! It was prophesied at various times that I would be like Moses, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and even David in the kind of ministry God would bestow upon me.
59. SOME HAVE EVEN SAID THAT OUR MINISTRY WOULD BE A FULFILLMENT OF THE PREDICTIONS OF DEUTERONOMY 18:15-18; Psalm 68; Psalm 89; Psalm 132; Isaiah 55; Jeremiah 1, 30, 33; Ezekiel 2 and 3, 34 and 37; Daniel 9 and 10; Hosea 3; Zechariah 8; and Revelation 3:7-13. Some of these prophecies were pronounced over me identically, word for word, by different prophets in different places at different times who did not even know me or my name! Many of these are already being fulfilled! Praise God!
60. BE THAT AS IT MAY, MY EARLY YEARS GAVE LITTLE HINT OF ANY GREATNESS TO COME, OTHER THAN THESE REMARKABLE PROPHECIES. I was frail, shy, and very reticent, a veritable bookworm and recluse who preferred to retreat to the world of study of other times and other places rather than participate in the foolishness and horrors of the hard, cruel world around me. I loved to be alone and wander alone over the hills and through the woods and climbing mountains to observe and study for hours and days on end the beauties and wonders of God's Creation, and to listen to His still, small Voice explaining these things.
61. AS A RESULT, I WAS CONSIDERED A LITTLE ODD AND A LONER at school, who preferred the loner's sports such as hiking and swimming, in which I excelled, as well as top grades in all my studies. I finally graduated with the highest scholastic record in the 80-year history of Monterey Union High School in historic old Monterey, California, on beautiful old Monterey Bay, and honored by the California Scholastic Federation and with offers of scholarships at several outstanding colleges and universities.
62. I MIGHT HAVE GONE ON TO SOME SUCCESS IN THE FIELDS OF HIGHER EDUCATION, the only one in which I seemed truly talented and most likely to succeed, to become a college president like my Grandfather, or college administrator like my father and brother, Dr. Hjalmer E., who were B.A.'s, M.A.'s, Ph.D.'s, LL.D.'s, D.D.'s, etc. But my first love was still the Lord, and I desired to serve Him and others with all my heart in whatever capacity He thought me best suited or for which He was fitting me.
63. WE HAD TRAVELED FROM BIRTH IN PASTORAL AND EVANGELISTIC WORK with my parents throughout the United States and Canada, even during our school years, attending as high as nine different schools in one school year! We were usually very poor, and my earliest memories are of old cars, tents and trailers, like Gospel Gypsies on the road! Most of these activities were centered in the widely scattered areas of California, Texas, Oklahoma, Ontario, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and Florida, so this kept our little family much on the move.
64. WE SETTLED IN MIAMI, FLORIDA, IN 1924, where my parents built the largest Gospel Tabernacle in Southeastern United States, which was packed with about 5000 people nearly every night of a mighty spiritual revival campaign which lasted until the Boom burst in 1925 and the Great Hurricane struck in 1926 destroying the Tabernacle and much of Miami and killing over 2000 people and injuring multiplied thousands more, but not even hurting one of our members!
65. MY PARENTS TOOK THIS AS A SIGN THAT THEY WERE TO SPEND MORE TIME IN EVANGELISTIC WORK, but they still did not seem to get the point that God was evidently displeased with church buildings, so they rebuilt the old Tabernacle, which still stands at the corner of N.W. 5th Ave. and 33rd Street and was affiliated with the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the new denomination which they had since joined. They later also founded in Miami the Church of the Open Door, now known as Central Alliance Church, and for 15 years my Mother was the Voice of Meditation Moments, WQAM, the oldest religious broadcast in Florida.
66. BY THE TIME I GRADUATED FROM HIGH SCHOOL, THEY HAD RETURNED TO CALIFORNIA AND FULLTIME EVANGELISTIC WORK, in which I joined them. My Father soon retired from the field to join the faculty at Westmont College, which my brother and Mrs. Kerr (of the Kerr-Mason Jars) and other wealthy, conservative, fundamentalist, evangelical Christians, mostly Presbyterians at the time helped to found at Santa Barbara, California, under the direction of Dr. Emerson, former Dean of Wheaton College, Illinois, and designed to be the "Wheaton of the West".
67. THIS WAS IN THE EARLY FORTIES, DURING WORLD WAR II, AND MY FATHER CONTINUED ON WITH WESTMONT FOR TEN YEARS UNTIL HIS RETIREMENT. My brother went on to become a Superintendent of Schools and then Executive Vice President of San Francisco State and Oakland College, and finally Director of Personnel of Aerojet General, Sacramento, until his present semi-retirement in Grass Valley, California. His wife is still principal of Oakland High, largest in the U.S. My sister, Virginia, mother of a family of five, still lives in Huntington Beach, California, to which lovely little city my parents eventually retired.
68. MEANWHILE, JUST A FEW DAYS AFTER THE BOMBING OF PEARL HARBOR, I WAS DRAFTED INTO THE ARMY IN 1941, serving with the U.S. Army Engineers, Headquarters Battalion, at Ft. Belvoir, Virginia, home of the Engineers, until my Complete Disability Discharge because of heart trouble. The Army had notified my parents I was dying with double pneumonia at a temperature of 106 degrees and they feared my already enlarged and leaky heart, twice normal size, weakened by the strain, would collapse. I was unconscious for three days, but when I finally promised God I would try to serve Him faithfully for the rest of my life if He would save it, I was instantly healed in answer to prayer, to the amazement of all my doctors and nurses! They used to say I was the sickest boy they had, but got well the quickest! Praise the Lord!
LAUNCHING INTO FULLTIME EVANGELISTIC WORK, BUILDING A CHURCH AND BEING THROWN OUT.
69. HOWEVER, WHEN SENDING ME HOME FROM THE HOSPITAL THEY TOLD MY MOTHER MY HEART WAS SO BAD THAT SHE MUST KEEP ME IN BED, AND THAT I COULDN'T LIVE MORE THAN A YEAR. But I had promised God I would serve Him, so I told Him He'd have to take care of me if He wanted my service. So I refused to stay in bed, but instead launched into FULLTIME evangelistic work, and I got better instead of worse! I felt so good, in fact, that I got married in 1944 and had four children, and have survived for over 30 years until the present day, despite many heart attacks! The Lord has never failed to pull me through as long as I'm faithful to Him! He's been very faithful to me! Praise His Name!
70. IN FACT, IN 1949, IN THE BLISTERING HEAT OF THE DESERT SUMMER AT VALLEY FARMS, ARIZONA, I BUILT A LITTLE ADOBE MISSION CHURCH with my own hands, almost single-handed, where I pastored for over two years, the only church in the town, as an ordained minister of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, with a congregation of a little handful of a strange mixture of Southern Whites, Indians, and Mexicans. They didn't much like each other, and eventually the Whites didn't like me because of my integration policies and radical preaching that they should share more of their wealth with the poor, beginning with my little family, whom they failed to support!
71. ALTHOUGH I HAD BUILT THEIR CHURCH BUILDING WITH MY OWN HANDS and raised most of the money for its materials and our own support from outside friends, the denominational hierarchy controlled the property, and a few wealthy enemies who didn't like my preaching and my refusal to plaster that beautiful adobe controlled the Board, and soon had me thrown out with my little family of an expectant mother and three children!--Penniless, with no job and no home!
SICK OF THE CHURCH SYSTEM AND A RETURN TO COLLEGE.
72. BY THIS TIME, I WAS ALREADY CONVINCED OF THE INEFFECTIVENESS AND UNSCRIPTURALNESS OF THE CHURCH SYSTEM, AND ITS CORRUPT POLITICS I had witnessed as a young pastor, together with the overwhelming hypocrisy of its leaders and members! This final act of cruel injustice and ingratitude and their unconcern for the welfare of one of their own little pastors and his tiny young family made me so furious, embittered, and sick of the whole hypocritical Church System that I nearly became a Communist!
73. I RETURNED TO COLLEGE ON THE GI BILL determined to study philosophy, psychology, and political science, rather than religion, and became seriously involved in the study of Socialism and Communism. However, I soon saw that the purportedly unselfish goals of these political systems could never be achieved without the Love of God in the hearts of men, as in the pure Christian Communism of the Early Church, effected only by the power of the Spirit of God! Such voluntary sharing of the wealth with those in need could only come through Jesus!
74. NEVERTHELESS, I COULD ALSO SEE, AS I'M SURE MOST OF US CAN WHO THINK HONESTLY, THAT NOT ALL THE RICH WOULD BE WILLING TO SHARE their wealth with the poor from whom they have taken it; nor will all industrialists be willing to sacrifice their pollution to save our lives and environment; nor the politician his power; nor the militarist his weapons of war; nor the educationalist his Godless worship of man; nor the Church its hypocrisy; nor even the poor his wastefulness of violence, crime and immorality! Very few men are so idealistic as to be willing to give up their own sins in order to please God that they might try to save their fellowman!--Only a few! God help us to find those few!
75. THE VAST MAJORITY ARE NEARLY ALWAYS WRONG and wicked, according to God's Word. Therefore, the so-called democratic rule of the majority will never voluntarily bring perfect government and perfect peace on earth, a fair economy, a healthful ecology, a Godly education, nor a righteous religion! Only the direct and forceful intervention of God Himself with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to mete out His violent wrath upon the wrongdoers, to save His own Children from His enemies, and to set up His own Kingdom of totally righteous and authoritarian rule here on Earth will ever bring such a reign of perfection, with peace and justice for all!
76. ALL OTHER ATTEMPTS AT CHANGES FOR THE BETTER, WHETHER VIOLENT OR NON-VIOLENT, BY UNREGENERATE AND SINFUL MAN WILL ONLY BRING MORE UNREGENERATE AND SINFUL GOVERNMENTS, economies, pollutions, educations and religions and wars resulting from man's sinful heart! To truly change these instruments and ailments of man you must change man himself and his evil heart, something only God can do! Otherwise, you will only have revolution after revolution, war upon war, rich and poor, pollution and disease, the vain babblings of science falsely so-called, political religion, and regime after regime, and empire following empire--all in vain!--and waxing worse and worse! For man is not evoluting, but devoluting, without God, and the end is Hell on Earth!
ENDTIME PREDICTIONS OF THE BIBLE AND WHAT IS SOON TO HAPPEN!
77. AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE BIBLE PREDICTS!--That in the last days of man-made regimes on earth, a totally Godless anti-Christ world Government will arise led by a Devil-possessed dictator, Satan incarnate, who will bring a false peace on earth and a counterfeit utopia, and its price will be enforced worship of himself as the imitation Messiah! All of his worshippers will be branded with a number in order to buy or sell or obtain food or employment, and all others who refuse to cooperate will be hunted, persecuted, and slaughtered by his commandment!--a time of Great Tribulation!
78. ONLY THOSE WHO HAVE THE SEAL OF GOD IN THEIR FOREHEADS, HIS OWN CHILDREN, THE TRUE BELIEVERS WHO HAVE THE GENUINE JESUS IN THEIR HEARTS, WILL BE HIDDEN AND SPARED BY THE MIRACLES OF GOD until the Coming of Christ when they will join Him in the air!--the only way out will be up!-and the only ones saved will be us!--all those who have had this supernatural, regenerative rebirth of the Spirit by God's Love in Jesus, being born again by accepting Him in our hearts!--Have you?
79. IF YOU'RE INTERESTED IN A MORE DETAILED STUDY of all this, you can find it all in the Bible, especially in the Prophetic Books, particularly Daniel and Revelation. If you've already studied these and still cannot understand them, ask Jesus into your heart and God's Spirit to explain them to you. If you still
need help, we'd be happy to send you our own lessons on these subjects explaining simply the meanings of these Bible prophecies and the times of their fulfillment's along with charts and illustrations, if you'll help share the cost.
80. OUR ONLY HOPE OF SURVIVAL, THEREFORE, IS TO BE PREPARED SPIRITUALLY and even practically, with both the personal experience of Salvation--this change of heart by God's Love in Jesus--and by a working knowledge of His Word and what it advises us to do under such conditions of the difficult days that are coming. Do you know what's coming?--Will you know what to do when it happens?--Are you prepared for these emergencies, not only in Spirit but in practical preparations for times of Great Confusion, cataclysmic disasters, widespread chaos, Revolution, tyrannies of terror and times of travail and tribulation?--And do you know how soon to expect them, what to expect, and how to prepare for it? If not, it may be later than you think! Why not now?
81. AS A YOUNG MINISTER WITH YEARS OF EXPERIENCE IN THE CHURCHES, I could plainly see that the vast majority of the Church and even true Christians were totally unprepared for these certain eventualities so specifically predicted in the Scriptures and so soon to come! The present Churchianity System is giving them absolutely no preparation on how to survive these events, much less come through victoriously!
82. AFTER SEVERAL YEARS IN SEVERAL COLLEGES AND HAVING SUFFERED MANY THINGS OF MANY DENOMINATIONS, I came to the conclusion that it would be impossible to prepare Christians for what's ahead with the present methods of the existing Church System! Most Christians today do not know their Bibles, certainly don't get much in church, rarely, if ever, memorize Scripture for remembrance and encouragement, inspiration and instruction both now and after the Bibles are banned and burned, as before! Neither do they have time to go to Bible college to learn as much as they need to know!--Nor will the exposed and vulnerable Church System with its visible buildings and well-known clergy be any protection or any help in their hour of need, when their ministers are liquidated, their meetings forbidden, and their buildings closed, as has already happened in some countries today! What will you do?
83. WILL YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO, WILL YOU BE PREPARED TO SURVIVE, and will you know how to help others to do so as well as to continue to worship God and encourage others in the Faith during days not unlike those of the Catacombs Church of martyrs under Roman persecution? Are you even prepared for even lesser emergencies soon to come and their attendant losses of personal freedom and rights, which you seem to think endless? You don't have to wait for an atomic war or the sinking of California!--Are you even ready for the riots, the sabotage, the wrecking of utilities, the blowing up of your bank, the cutting off of your electricity and water, the problems of sewage and garbage disposal and of food and gasoline rationing and shortages of all kinds in a state of National emergency or even locally, and the brutality of martial law under the reign of terror of a military dictatorship of a dying Nation that has forgotten God! What will you do?
84. GOD HAS WARNED US THAT THESE THINGS ARE COMING, AND COMING SOON, particularly in America where many of you live. They have already happened in many other nations where the Church has already been driven underground! Will you be prepared to try to survive and will you know what God expects you to do under such conditions?
85. IN THE FACE OF THE IMPENDING THREAT OF A COMMUNIST WORLD TAKEOVER, America will probably overreact just as Germany did under Hitler, in an extremely radical rise of the fanatically reactionary RIGHT, in a final futile attempt to save herself from Communism, the rich from the poor, and the judgments of God through her enemies!
MO'S DESIRE TO LIVE LIKE THE EARLY CHRISTIANS AND HIS ATTEMPTS.
86. FOR THREE YEARS I TAUGHT SCHOOL, about the only kind of job open for the talents and education and idealism of an unemployed preacher! I took a junior high school class that no one else had been able to conquer and which had caused three other teachers to quit, and God helped me to learn how to make them love both me and the Lord! It was a tough fight, but I finally won, and when I left they actually wept to see me go! But during those days I learned what today's youth was all about and how to handle its many problems!--And I loved them!
87. I BECAME DETERMINED TO SAVE TOMORROW'S YOUTH from their terrible fate as innocent victims of a fiendish, anti-God, social, economic, educational, and religious System which had not only driven them to drink but also to drugs, crime, violence, and the brink of Revolution in rebellion against their unloving parents, their impersonal educational system, their routine job slavery, their cold and unsympathetic churches, and their unfeeling Government!
88. I SHOWED MY OWN CHILDREN HOW TO LOVE GOD AND THEIR FELLOWMAN by taking in waifs off the street and filling my house full of the poor, the needy, the helpless, and the unloved and restoring their faith in God and teaching them how to live for others. I shared what I had, and I did what I could, and taught others to do the same, and it worked!--True voluntary genuine unselfish Christian sharing really worked on a small scale, with charity beginning at home--the simple Communism of the Early Church was our ideal and example, and it worked for us just like it did for them! Praise God! Why not try it?
89. OF COURSE, IT TOOK US A FEW YEARS TO LEARN how to do it and how to operate in our tiny little home-schools of not more than a dozen or two students at a time, and how to make it really work. And during those years of trial and error, some of us had to work for a living to pay the bills and the rent and buy the food so we all could enjoy the benefits of a socialized existence. "From each according to his ability, unto each according to his need."--I had most of the ability, and it seemed they had most of the need, so I was truly blessed, as "it's more blessed to give than to receive"!--And I'm not sorry!
90. DURING THOSE YEARS, WE HAD TAKEN THREE MONTHS OFF TO TAKE THE WORLD-FAMOUS SOUL CLINIC PERSONAL WITNESSING COURSE under its founder, Fred Jordan, and his teachers, Lee Shelley, Charles Shepherd, Abe Schneider, and his sister, Lottie Snyder, and we owe much to these and their modern interpretation and application of the principles of the New Testament, as well as their insistence that the New Testament Church could live again like the Acts of the Apostles, if the Commandments of Christ were truly obeyed and Christians would forsake all to follow Jesus and go into all the world to preach the Gospel personally to every single creature, by faith, without church buildings or pulpits, ceremonialism or traditionalism, but just with the simple Love of Jesus and living in the simple way His first disciples did!--And it worked!
91. HOWEVER, WE ALSO LEARNED FROM THEIR MISTAKES! Except for his personal TV show, which I booked on over 300 TV stations and over 1100 radio stations for about 13 years, Fred's great Soul Clinic work did not last, except in the hearts and lives of those he had trained, like me. Although he had challenged the Church System by his message and methods of personal evangelism and New Testament living, he never really broke with obsolete Churchianity, but merely tried to reform it! When a crisis arose in his work, most of his students and missionaries left him and went back to their churches, and he had little left but me, his TV show, his family, a handful of missionaries, and empty buildings!
PROPHECIES OVER DAVID AND HIS MINISTRY FROM LATE 1940'S-1968.
92. IN THE LATE 1940'S WE HAD THREE TIMES RECEIVED THE PROPHECY OF "THE KEY OF DAVID"--Revelation 3:7-13--which was to foreshadow our future ministry as a witness against the churches, their failures and hypocrisy. In 1952 I received the Call of Ezekiel 2 and 3, which definitely confirmed it! In 1962 we received the "Message of Jeremiah", God's final warning to a doomed Nation and His pattern of action for His Prophets during such a time as its fall!
93. IN 1965, WHILE VISITING OUR LITTLE FAMILY AT THE RANCH IN TEXAS, MY MOTHER RECEIVED THE NOW-FAMOUS "WARNING PROPHECY" concerning the coming "Great Confusion", which you'll find in our little "Warning Tract" with explanatory Scriptures, and which predicted it would originate "out of Memphis", Egypt. Nearly a year later, this was confirmed by Jeanne Dixon's book, "A Gift of Prophecy" in which she related a vision which showed a young man coming out of Egypt who was to rule the world! In her later book, "My Life and Prophecies", a revision of the older edition, she interprets this young man as being the coming world dictator known as the "Anti-Christ" in the Bible!
94. IN 1966, ON ANOTHER VISIT TO THE RANCH, MY MOTHER PROPHESIED THAT I HAD RECEIVED THE UNDERSTANDING OF DANIEL "to know the number of the years unto the End of Desolations", which was fulfilled in "The 70-Years Prophecy", which we received in 1970, describing the exact number of years with their dates and events between now and the Coming of Christ--which you are welcome to have if you will write us and send a small donation to cover the cost.
95. IN 1967, WE AGAIN RECEIVED A CONFIRMATION OF OUR CHARGE TO THE WORK OF DAVID IN EZEKIEL 34 through another precious prophetess, Sister Gunn, who drove 3000 miles 'round trip from Florida to Texas to deliver it to us in great faith, excitement and expectation! This was followed by our return that year to California on the strength of another prophecy: "Thou shalt return unto the land of the Setting Sun with all thy family, and there it shall be told thee what thou shalt do."
96. AND THERE IT WAS, IN 1968 WHILE VISITING MY MOTHER IN HER LITTLE COTTAGE IN HUNTINGTON BEACH, THAT WE RECEIVED THE PROPHECY OF PSALM 68, just before her Homegoing, in which God promised us an almost unbelievably fruitful ministry: "...Thou O God, hast prepared of Thy goodness for the poor! The Lord gave the Word: Great was the company of those that published it! Kings of armies did flee apace!", etc. Surely this is now being fulfilled in our thousands of disciples in hundreds of Colonies in many countries around the Globe, as well as the tremendous publicity we have received from many great publishing companies, such as newspapers, magazines, books, radio, TV, etc.!
97. STILL, IT WAS NOT UNTIL LATER THAT YEAR OF 1968 THAT WE DISCOVERED EXACTLY WHAT GOD WANTED US TO DO. It had taken me 49 years (God's number seven times seven!) to find my life's work!--And there we found it among the poorest of the poor--the poor hippies of Huntington Beach! My mother had begged us to come help them, saying the church people didn't know how to handle them even though some of them were trying at a small Teen Challenge coffeehouse in the heart of this surfing capital of the world. They were too churchy for the hippies who were fed up with the Church, and the feeling was mutual: The churches didn't like them, either! In fact, it seemed nobody loved hippies!--They were the most hated, maligned, discriminated against, abused, harassed, persecuted, and down-trodden element in all American society!--which seemed determined to try to stamp them out!
THE REVOLUTION FOR JESUS BEGINS AMONGST THE HIPPIES OF CALIFORNIA.
98. BUT GOD LOVED THEM!--AND YOU LOVED THEM, BECAUSE THEY WERE YOUR CHILDREN, THE FED-UP PRODUCT OF OUR "AFFLUENT SOCIETY"! They had everything, tried everything, and it hadn't satisfied; so they were earnestly searching for the answers--the truth, love and peace which they knew must exist somewhere! As though by some God-given instinct, they kept searching for it hungrily in the love of sex, drugs, mystical religions, and even death! But they rejected the answer of the churches, because the churches had rejected them, and in the churches and even in their own good, church-going parents they had found only what they considered hypocrisy and vain show, not reality!
99. SO THEY WANDERED ABOUT IN SEARCH OF GREENER PASTURES, AS SHEEP HAVING NO SHEPHERD!--And as I wandered about amongst them, wondering about them, God spoke to my heart that all they needed was His Love and a good shepherd to guide them, and God asked me if I'd be willing to be that shepherd! I was startled and mystified by this revelation, and wondered what it could mean, as I hadn't the faintest idea of how to go about it! I had never been a drunk, or a drug addict, nor a sex pervert or a tramp, so I could hardly deal with their problems from personal experience. But I had been a sinner of the worst kind, and the chief of all sinners, as the similar Apostle Paul had said to himself: a self-righteous, hypocritical, holier-than-thou, church-going Pharisee, a staunch, bigoted, ultraconservative fundamentalist, a Pharisee of the Pharisees!
100. SO I FELT THAT I AND MY GENERATION, THEIR FATHERS AND MOTHERS, WITH OUR CORRUPT, SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, EDUCATIONAL, RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL SYSTEM WERE TO BLAME FOR THEIR PLIGHT. The anti-God philosophy of evolution, or Devil-ution, had sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind in its children! A society with no God has no principles, no authority, no rules, and no laws that are valid, no right or wrong, and every man does that which is right in his own eyes, and only chaos and anarchy can result, with its pitiful products living like animals, dog-eat-dog, and to Hell with the hindmost!
101. SO, THESE HIPPIES ARE YOUR CHILDREN, Beloved, the product of your society, your educational system, your economic system, your religious system, and your political system! You have reaped what you have sowed! It is your generation who are the real rebels against God and His Word and His Plan, as we have already stated so eloquently in our little dissertation on "Who Are The Rebels"! Your poor children are only trying to find their way back to the Truth, Love, Peace, and God of their forefathers, the Patriarchs, who lived in a comparatively peaceful, Godly and unpolluted world of the past! Even your kids' hair, dress, customs, drugs, religions, and wanderings are a rejection of your present, and an attempted return to a happier past!
102. SO IT SHOULD NOT BE SURPRISING THAT THEY WERE NOT ONLY QUICK, BUT GLORIOUSLY ENTHUSIASTIC IN THEIR RECEPTION OF AND THEIR RETURN TO GOD'S LOVE IN JESUS and the answers of His Word, which after all, are the answer to all mankind's problems, not only the hippies'! So when my children came to them with the loving message of God in Jesus and His Words, and tuned to the language of their music, they were more than happy to receive them!--And with their instinctive premonitions of the impending doom of God's judgments on a wicked world, they were more than ready to eat up His predictions of the immediate future, as I taught them the prophecies of the Bible! They were ready for Revolution, and had found its greatest fulfillment in the "Revolution for Jesus!"-as we were the first to call it!
103. TEEN CHALLENGE ITSELF, WHO WERE NOT HAVING MUCH SUCCESS WITH THE HIPPIES, with only two church-like meetings a week, soon turned the Club over to us who were packing the hippies in to capacity the other five nights of the week, when they were getting saved, filled with His Spirit and set on fire by His Word to go out into the highways and hedges and compel others of their friends to enter into the Kingdom of God!--And the Jesus Revolution began to roll like a mighty wave from these humble beginnings! Hallelujah!
OTHERS IMITATE AND FOLLOW IN THE WAKE OF THE JESUS REVOLUTION.
104. THERE IN THE TINY LIGHT CLUB, HIPPIE HANGOUT OF HUNTINGTON BEACH, WE WERE THE FIRST TO PROCLAIM IT A "REVOLUTION", a term which the churches denounced as they denounced this revolt from their System, but later accepted when they found how popular it had become, and even imitated its message and methods in an attempt to jump on the bandwagon and capture its young people, following the old criterion: "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em!" They later not only copied our shouts, meetings, slogans, finger signs, marches, beach baptisms, and other demonstrations, but such churchy sponsors as Duane Pederson of Hollywood Presbyterian Church's so-called "Jesus People", with his "Hollywood Free Paper", even tried to claim credit for starting the Revolution, though he certainly did give it impetus in the churches amongst church young people; as did also Chuck Smith, Pastor of Calvary Church of Costa Mesa, a disciple of my Mother's, where we had first appeared to inspire him when he had a congregation of only a handful. Thank God, he too, climbed on the band-wagon of God's Youth Revolution and is now reaping the benefits of it by the thousands by compromising with Churchianity and not being as radical as we are!
105. BRECK STEVENS OF BETHEL TABERNACLE of Redondo Beach, California, was also converted to the Revolution by my son, Jonathan, at the Light Club and returned to his own church to make it famous as the first Hippie church of the Revolution, as noted on a National TV network. And we hear some others caught the fire of the Revolution about the same time in the San Francisco Bay area where they had already opened some Christian hippie houses and coffee communes and were trying to give a faithful witness to the hippie culture.
106. OUR DEAR OLD FRIEND, DAVE WILKERSON OF TEEN CHALLENGE, however, with whom my children had worked in his coffeehouses across the Country as the head of an apparently rival church-oriented, Youth-for-Christ-rally-type of youth drug rehabilitation operation, eventually turned out to be a bitterly jealous and vindictive Johnny-come-lately to the hippie movement of the Jesus Revolution! By this time he was working mostly with his churchy cousin, Ralph, at the Anaheim Christian Center in youth rallies with mostly church kids, having seemed to have forgotten the beatniks and teenage gangs he once loved in New York City!
107. DEAR DAVE WAS EVEN OVERHEARD TO SAY IN ONE OF HIS RALLIES, AS HE LATER CONFESSED IN HIS BOOK, THAT HE DIDN'T HAVE MUCH FAITH IN THE POSSIBILITY OF SALVATION FOR HIPPIES, and that he'd only known of one or two ever getting saved in his whole ministry. He and his speakers made fun of them, ridiculed them, and cracked the typical System dirty jokes about them, and even forbade them to come to his meetings, and even wrote a whole chapter against us in his book, "Purple Violet Squish", naming us by name and saying that our way was just not the way to reach young people. Since then I understand, however, that he has repented and admitted that he was wrong about the hippies, and now he loves them and their Revolution--but still hates and lies about us, the Children of God, originators of the movement--poor fellow!
108. OF COURSE, DAVE AND RALPH WERE NOT OUR ONLY ENEMIES, neither were Chuck, Breck, and Duane our only imitators, but we had plenty of both, although in the beginning the enemies seemed to outnumber the imitators! So we decided on a campaign of en masse goodwill visitations to local churches to help them get better acquainted with us, meet us, and know we were really human beings and really Christians, although somewhat unusual, unorthodox, and different in dress and manner from the average church-goer.
VISITING CHURCHES EN MASSE
109. EACH SUNDAY MORNING WE WOULD GO TOGETHER TO A DIFFERENT CHURCH and try to sit together in fellowship wherever we could find room, which was usually the front seats, which are normally vacant in most churches, although in some of the more crowded churches we were compelled to sit on the floor. In most cases, we would join enthusiastically in the singing, listen attentively to the sermon, and encourage the preacher with our Amens!--and then mix in friendly fashion getting acquainted with the church folks after the meeting.
110. MOST PASTORS LIKED IT, WELCOMED US PUBLICLY, AND RECEIVED US with open arms, commending us for coming, exhorting us to keep up our good work with young people, and even inviting us back to conduct services for them, giving them a sample of our music and our testimonies. Our welcome was usually particularly warm in the larger, more liberal churches, but a little fearful in the more conservative ones sometimes.
111. HOWEVER, AS USUAL, ONLY BAD NEWS MAKES NEWS and the two or three churches where we were not only not well received but actually asked to leave or even cast out with physical violence--these were the occasions which received the most newspaper publicity and which gave us an undeserved bad reputation with some people. In an Episcopalian church, one of our boys shouted out unwisely during the Communion, which of course, stunned the congregation; but the members kept their cool, considering the childish source, and were still friendly afterwards. But this mild incident got the lurid headlines, "Howling Hippies Disrupt Church!", which served to frighten some other churches about having us!
112. A FEW OTHER CHURCHES, HOWEVER, WERE NOT SO KIND! Garden Grove Community threw us out bodily because they said we were not dressed properly, which angered both some of our children and some of the members, who walked out with us before the service, and we sat down quietly on the lawn together for the remainder of the meeting. We had not disturbed the service, as they later charged, but their ushers had disturbed it by demanding and enforcing our exit brutally! Later, Pastor Schuyler tried to deny this saying we were only asked to leave because we were blocking a fire exit, which was not true. He also added the slanderous libel to his newspaper statement trying to explain away the incident by calling me personally a "publicity-mad false prophet!" We could have sued him, but merely counted him as a poor, misled brother, although he wouldn't talk to me when I tried to phone and explain.
113. RALPH WILKERSON ALSO CALLED US VIRTUALLY THE SAME THING publicly from his pulpit, but when we tried to talk to him on the phone about it, he refused to speak to us. We then went together to his church with the witnesses who had heard him say it and tried to discuss it with him, but he again refused to see us and ordered us roughly cast out of his building so violently as to tear my clothes and sprain my ankle! In the only other incident, the Pastor of First Assembly, Santa Ana, threatened to throw us out when our praises got a little too loud. Otherwise, we were usually treated with great kindness, favor and tolerance!
114. HOWEVER, THESE WERE NOT UNLIKE THE RECEPTIONS WHICH JESUS AND HIS DISCIPLES and others of His followers like Paul, the martyrs, Martin Luther, John Fox, John Knox, John Wesley, etc., met in some churches. So we were not alone. When your very presence exposes their hypocrisy they even want to kill you, as some of these church people threatened to do to us! But these were the exceptions rather than the rule! Thank God for the many Christians who received us and were good to us!
115. MISINTERPRETATIONS OF SOME OF THESE OCCASIONS HAVE BEEN TOLD ABOUT US ACROSS THE COUNTRY, WHICH IS WHY I'M DIGRESSING HERE TO EXPLAIN the truth publicly to all of you for the first time, to try to stop some of the lies of the Devil. There may have been another incident or two along this line which occurred, I understand, in Northern California, with some young people who had formerly been associated with us, but for whom we were no longer personally responsible. But because of some of these misunderstandings, we have refrained from visiting churches since that time, unless specifically invited.
116. SOME OF THE YOUNG PEOPLE ASSOCIATED WITH US THEN GOT IN A LITTLE DIFFICULTY FOR INVADING SOME CAMPUSES where they were unwittingly trespassing, although we had strictly warned them against this, for which they were somewhat persecuted by the enemy and roundly reprimanded by me personally, but this also received some rather sensational news publicity, which was not altogether favorable and which some held against us and which we regret.
117. NEVERTHELESS, IF ANY OF THE ENEMIES NAMED ABOVE ARE EVER WILLING TO TELL US THEY'RE SORRY and apologize for their un-Christian actions toward us and stop lying about us, we would be most happy to forgive them, count them as brethren, and even work together with them for the Salvation of souls. Are you sorry, Fellas? Please let us know.
118. ALTHOUGH WE RAN A CLEAN CLUB WITH NO DRUGS AND LOTS OF SALVATION, DID THE KIDS A LOT OF GOOD, saving many of them from lives of debauchery and crime, many parents like some of you could not understand what we were doing and harassed the authorities into harassing us, while some of our churchy enemies literally persecuted us with a vengeance, finally getting our landlords to raise our rents on us, and thus drive us out of town.
CALIFORNIA GOING TO SINK?
119. SOME OF THE KIDS HAD RECEIVED SOME PROPHECIES THAT CALIFORNIA WAS GOING TO SINK ANYWAY, although no dates were set, and I myself, though agreeing with them did not make any specific prophecy in this regard, although I have been falsely accused of so doing.--But I still believe it's going to happen, especially after the way some Californians treated us! They really deserve to sink, but I'd honestly rather see God have mercy on them and save them if they're sorry!
1969--TRAVELS BEGIN ACROSS THE U.S.
120. ANYHOW, IN THE SPRING OF 1969 WE FINALLY FLED TO TUCSON for the Summer, establishing a sort of hippie church in good Brother Ware's former church building, known as the Lighthouse. Here we grew and prospered from about 50 to about 75 FULLTIME witnessing disciples until we left there in four separate teams to cross the Country with the Gospel of the Good News of God's Love for the youth of the Nation as far South as Miami, Florida, and as far North as Montreal, Canada. Coffeehouses were established in Texas, Florida, and Quebec, but all had to eventually close because of persecution. The Jesus Revolution was not yet nationally known, understood, or popular--especially us! But it was growing and soon to be headlines throughout the world!
121. WE ALL TRAVELED ACROSS THE NATION on our first big faith trip together, and we all finally arrived safe and sound 3000 miles away at dear Dr. Martin's campground in the Laurentian Mountains at Laurentide near Montreal. Here we had our first official convention and organized as a definite religious body and ordaining about 50 bishops, elders, deacons, deaconesses, etc., to lead the Work of reaching the youth of the world with the Love of Jesus! This was in the Fall of 1969.
SACKCLOTH VIGILS.
122. AT THIS TIME, ABOUT 100 OF US DECIDED TO REASSEMBLE FOR A SACKCLOTH VIGIL of mourning for the death of both the Nation and Senator Everett Dirksen at Washington, D.C. An honor guard of our red-robed prophets stood about his bier as his body lay in state in the rotunda of the National Capitol Building, while others stood about the National Capitol grounds and on the corners of the streets of Washington and demonstrated in front of the White House for peace, with their customary staves in hand and wooden yokes about their necks.
123. GOD HAD TOLD US TO WEAR THE RED SACKCLOTH, symbolizing mourning, and the yokes, the coming bondage, and to carry the staves as a symbol of His righteous judgments upon a wicked Nation that had forsaken her God--America! This was the first time we had appeared publicly in such a large demonstration, and it received some national attention through the news media.
124. WE WENT FROM WASHINGTON TO PHILADELPHIA TO DEMONSTRATE IN MOURNING FOR THE DEATH OF FREEDOM, at Independence Hall, historic place of the signing of the American Declaration of Independence by those famous freedom-lovers of 200 years ago!
125. FROM PHILADELPHIA, WE PILGRIMAGED TO DEMONSTRATE AGAIN FOR PEACE AND FREEDOM AND IN MOURNING FOR THE COMING DEATH OF THE NATION IN TIMES SQUARE, NEW YORK CITY, and in front of the U.N. Building, where none had ever been allowed to demonstrate before! We journeyed across Pennsylvania to demonstrate in Pittsburgh, and finally to Chicago where we demonstrated for peace and against the war throughout the Loop in downtown Chicago on a march and vigil during the famous Chicago [ALERT! CHECK FOR SANITIZATION: Eight ] Conspiracy Trial.
"MOSES AND THE CHILDREN OF GOD"
126. WE OFTEN STOOD BETWEEN THE POLICE AND THE VIOLENT DEMONSTRATORS, AS PEACEMAKERS, and the police of all of these cities were very patient and tolerant with us, and some of them even sympathetic and thankful!--And we always made news which helped get out God's message of warning to the world! In fact, we were first called the Children of God by a local newsman in Camden, New Jersey, who found us camped in a junkyard behind a truck stop and whose curiosity we had aroused. I was first called Moses in some prophecies of the young people at Laurentide, and the two names have since stuck with us, and we became known as "Moses and the Children of God"!
127. FOR SUCH A NOMADIC GROUP OF WANDERS IN THE WILDERNESS as we were then, the names were extremely appropriate and became popular with the news media, so we simply accepted them. We did not call ourselves this, as some of our enemies have claimed, but were called this by others, principally the news media, so we just accepted it as from the Lord that God had ordained it thus; it was His doing! We had never before heard of any religious group outside of the Bible being called by the name "Children of God" as a distinct religious body or denomination, so God must have been saving the name for us, as it is so fitting, since we're nearly all children, and certainly of God!
ON THE ROAD AGAIN.
128. SO WE JOURNEYED ON AS "MOSES AND THE CHILDREN OF GOD". It was now beginning to be winter, at the end of 1969, and a little cold in the North for camping out in tents, trailers, campers, vans, and buses, or sleeping on the frozen ground in a sleeping bag in the rain, so we journeyed Southward, camping for a while at one of the campsites of the famous explorers, Louis and Clark, on the banks of the Mississippi near Alton, Illinois. We drew quite a lot of attention from both passing sight-seers and the riverboats, with our huge Gospel signs and Scriptures on the sides of our trucks and vans.
129. MOST PEOPLE WERE VERY FRIENDLY, AND SOME EVEN BROUGHT US FOOD AND DONATIONS AND WARMER WINTER CLOTHING, and the authorities even offered us a better campsite at Pierre Marquette Park on the Illinois side of the River above Alton, where such famous explorers as LaSalle had once encamped. It was a thrilling and historical experience for the Children, and they all learned a lot and enjoyed it immensely, as they relived the lives of these famous explorers, and camping out much the same as they had amidst the beauties of God's glorious Creation!
130. BUT WHEN WE CAME INTO THE RURAL AND FEARFUL SOUTH of Louisiana and parked over an hundred strong in a public campground just 20 miles north of New Orleans, we were first received hospitably by the manager to whom we paid our rent; but after a day or two of quiet, orderly Bible studies under the trees, minding our own business and never even leaving the camp, we were suddenly surrounded by about fifty local police and accused of rioting and disturbing the peace! About 20 of us were hauled off to jail, but finally released, thanks to the Lord and the efforts of a good, friendly lawyer of the ACLU!
131. HOWEVER, THOUGH HAVING COMMITTED NO OFFENSE WHATSOEVER, WE WERE TOLD BY THE RUDE, CRUEL AND SURLY AUTHORITIES TO GET OUT OF THE STATE--which we promptly did without stopping, until we finally came to rest in campgrounds near Houston, Texas, which proved much friendlier and more tolerant and helpful toward young people. Here we spent the winter of the early months of 1970 at a series of campgrounds, having to move every two weeks according to their regulations, but steadily growing in numbers just from converts from the crowds who came out to see us, these strange new Gospel Gypsies!
132. WE ALSO RENTED AN OLD RIVERBOAT IN THE HEART OF DOWN-TOWN HOUSTON from a dear old barge captain, and turned it into another teenage Club, where our band played loud nightly in competition with other nightclubs surrounding us. Many young people were saved and delivered from drugs during those early Houston days and we received considerable publicity and were treated with much hospitality! God bless Houston and all you dear friends of ours there!
133. HOWEVER, WE SOON BEGAN RUNNING OUT OF CAMPGROUNDS AS WELL AS PATIENCE AND ENDURANCE WITH THE COLD, WET RAINY WINTER WEATHER, some of the poor kids sleeping in leaky tents and soaked bags on flooded ground! So I was inspired to fly to California to request the use of the old Texas Soul Clinic Missionary Ranch near Thurber, from its owner, my former boss Fred Jordan which he granted on the conditions that we would care for it, maintain it, improve it, and be of no further obligation to him, scrounging for our own food, etc. So in February 1970, we happily moved back to the old homestead where I had raised my own children for about six years, but now with about 120 more of yours and God's, to dwell there securely for about a year-and-a-half while we doubled our numbers to about 250, as we grew.
THE WORK GROWS IN TEXAS AND CALIFORNIA.
134. IT WAS WHILE GROWING AND LEARNING THERE AT DEAR OLD TSC that God began to give us the vision of His method of "Colonisation", a plan for spreading such Colonies throughout the whole world in order to reach the youth of the world with the message of God's Love before The End. We began to put this into practice by sending our first team of twenty-nine, a complete Colony with all the necessary personnel, to establish a new base in the old Soul Clinic Skidrow Mission in downtown Los Angeles at the invitation of Fred Jordan.
135. THIS WAS THE SPRING OF 1970 AND CALIFORNIA YOUTH WERE STILL RIPE AND READY FOR THE REVOLUTION FOR JESUS! Witnessing teams on Hollywood Boulevard, Sunset Strip, and in Griffith Park and other youth hangouts increased the population of the Los Angeles Colony to nearly 200 within a few weeks! Fred promoted his work and income through displaying these converts on his TV show, and he soon had raised enough money on their behalf to buy them two ranches in the Coachella Valley near Indio, California, and business was good for Fred!
LEAVING CALIFORNIA AND FRED JORDAN.
136. HOWEVER, THE POOR KIDS SOON FOUND OUT THEY WERE NOT PERMITTED TO USE THE LARGER OF THE TWO RANCHES with all of its better buildings and facilities which were reserved only for the weekends of the Jordan family and the hard daily work of the young people, while the Children of God themselves were nearly all crowded into the cramped quarters of a tin quonset hut on the small ranch, which was like an oven in the blistering heat of the desert summer!
137. WHEN THE CHILDREN FINALLY SAW THAT THEIR TV PROMOTER WAS RAISING HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS IN THEIR NAME and supposedly for their use and for properties for them to use, but were forbidden to use those same properties and getting very little of the money for their own meager expenses, they finally balked and began to question him about where the money was going and why they couldn't use the property bought for them with the gifts of donors to their welfare.
138. SEEING THE DANGER OF BEING POSSIBLY ACCUSED OF THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF FUNDS and not using the properties for the purposes for which he was granted tax exemption, our dear old friend Fred, immediately and wisely incorporated himself and his family and some of his employees in the name of the Children of God; Incorporated, with a grand total of only five trustees and not one of them actual members of the original Children of God who were doing the work!
139. HE THEREUPON ORDERED THE LEADERS OF THE CHILDREN OF GOD OFF OF HIS PROPERTIES, EVIDENTLY HOPING TO KEEP SOME OF THEIR FOLLOWERS, but they all followed their true leaders, to a man, and not one Child of God was left on one single Jordan property to tell the tale! He even had the sheriff escort some of them off the properties he had supposedly bought for them, and which their donors also thought they had bought for the Children of God! And I doubt if he has heard the last of this yet from some of his disillusioned and disappointed viewers, who thought they were investing their funds for the benefit of God's true Children! But according to 1Cor.6, we're enjoined to "rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded" than to take a brother to law, so we just quietly moved out and left our former friend with his own conscience, his debtors, the Government, and a bunch of empty buildings and properties he'd promised to use for us! Some of the poor kids came back from witnessing to find themselves locked out of the L.A. building with their stuff still inside, and had to camp out in the park for three days till they got it! I wonder what his donors thought of it?
GOD PROTECTS US FROM THE ATTACKS OF OUR ENEMIES.
140. TO MOVE ABOUT 500 DISCIPLES OFF OF THREE PROPERTIES ON VERY SHORT NOTICE WAS QUITE A HARDSHIP, but the Lord providentially opened for us the use of other properties at this time in the Northwest to which we transported most of these evictees at considerable expense and difficulty. Here, we found some of the leaders of the Jesus People who had invited us very receptive and hospitable, but some of their followers were not quite as enthusiastic, which soon erupted into some difficulties and false charges which received some rather unfavorable publicity which was later lived down.
141. A GOOD DEAL OF THE PROBLEMS IN THE NORTHWEST RESULTED FROM OVER-CROWDED CONDITIONS DUE TO THE SUDDEN INFLUX OF SO MANY EVACUEES from the Soul Clinic properties. Our enemies also took advantage of this opportunity to persecute us and malign us with many charges which were not true, and proven false by their own inability to find any evidence against us to warrant prosecution. Such ridiculous charges as hypnotism, drugs, kidnapping and incarceration were leveled at us by confused and frustrated parents who could think of no other reason why their dear little darlings should have suddenly wanted to leave home and join us!
142. SOME OF YOU PARENTS JUST DON'T SEEM TO UNDERSTAND the miracle of conversion, and the idealistic desire to devote one's entire life to God's service, despite the fact that this is common throughout history and the basic principle of the devotion of the disciples, martyrs, nuns, monks, ministers, missionaries, etc. In fact, many Catholic cloisters, convents, monasteries, and secret orders keep their participants under far stricter rules than we have, and some of them almost totally incommunicado, having said goodbye forever to the world and their loved ones at the convent or monastery gate and never expecting to see them again! Catholics of great sincerity and devotion seem to understand this, except when it comes to understanding why their children should want to join us in a faintly similar pattern!
SOME PEOPLE DON'T UNDERSTAND THE DEEP DEDICATION OF THE CHILDREN OF GOD.
143. NEITHER DO SOME PEOPLE SEEM TO UNDERSTAND WHY WE DON'T WANT TO WORK FOR MONEY BUT DEVOTE OUR ENTIRE TIME TO GOD'S SERVICE in prayer, praise, and Bible study and Christian fellowship, also like the monks and nuns, and service to God and each other in witnessing of His Love. But this, too, is explicitly commanded in many of Christ's exhortations such as, to love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself, to seek first the Kingdom of God, to forsake all and follow Him, and to go into all the world and preach the Gospel!--God's priorities!
144. IN SPITE OF ALL THESE VICISSITUDES, GOD HAS BLESSED AND KEPT US, PROSPERED AND INCREASED US, AND HELPED US TO SURVIVE, both the betrayals of friends and the onslaughts of our enemies! Praise God! He is faithful and never fails to keep those who trust Him! Even the persecutions have only resulted in scattering us abroad and in increasing us and making us stronger and wiser and more determined to survive for the sake of His Children and His Kingdom! Praise His Holy Name!
145. EVEN ADVERSE PUBLICITY AND CRITICISM HAS SERVED TO STIR UP MORE CONTROVERSY ABOUT US AND INCREASED THE PUBLICITY OF OUR MESSAGE and methods! As Paul said, "Nevertheless, Christ is preached, even though it be the Christ of contention!" God even causes the wrath of man to praise Him, and works all things together for good to them that love Him! Hallelujah! As Martin Luther said, "We will not fear, for God hath willed, His truth to triumph through us!" As God has told us, "They can't stop our rain!" It's God's battle and He's going to win it!
146. THIS SUDDEN FORCED EVACUATION OF ALL SOUL CLINIC PROPERTIES, although a hardship at the time, actually worked together for our good as the Lord has promised, and helped to accomplish what I had been advising the Children to do for some time: To scatter into hundreds of smaller Colonies around the world in which there are now thousands of us, sometimes growing at the rate of as high as one new Colony per day!
THE CHILDREN OF GOD MISSIONARY MOVEMENT.
147. WE HAVE BEEN GROWING AT THE RATE OF NEARLY 100 NEW DISCIPLES PER WEEK! These are not just church members who attend a little meeting or two a week, as in most denominations, but these are full-time workers, everyone literally a full-time staff member of a world-wide missionary organization which is witnessing to millions weekly with well over a million pieces of Gospel literature, and reaping nearly five thousand souls making definite decisions to accept Christ every week! Many of these join other Jesus groups or churches.
148. ONLY THE MOST DEDICATED JOIN OUR OWN RANKS in full-time service for the Lord, as you can see by these statistics--about one out of every 50 souls won to Lord. This is still a much higher average of full-time laborers--gained in proportion to souls won than you'll find in the average church! There you will find only about one Bible college trainee for the ministry out of 100 members, and out of all these students, only three out of 100 ever actually go into some field of full-time Christian service!
149. THIS MEANS THAT ONLY 3 OUT OF EVERY 10,000 CHURCH MEMBERS EVER REACH A FIELD OF FULL-TIME SERVICE for the Lord!--That's less than one out of every 3,000 church members, as compared to our one out of every 50 souls won! This is a phenomenally high record of total dedication amongst those that we lead to the Lord! Hallelujah! They said it couldn't be done--but we're doing it! We're getting Christians to forsake all, follow, live, act and preach like the Early Church--and we're getting the same kind of results! Praise God!
150. FURTHERMORE, WE DO NOT GIVE A MERE FIVE CENTS PER PERSON PER WEEK TO MISSIONS, LIKE THE AVERAGE CHURCH, NOR A MERE 5 PERCENT OF OUR TOTAL FINANCIAL BUDGET to missions, like the average church which spends 11 times as much, or 55 percent, on its buildings alone, plus another 30 percent for preachers' salaries, and the remainder for maintenance and miscellaneous! Neither do we give a mere 10 percent of our individual incomes to God to be squandered in such a fashion as this!
151. WE GIVE 100 PERCENT, OR OUR TOTAL INCOME, AND ALL OF OUR POSSESSIONS TO BE USED 100 PERCENT IN THE FIELD OF FULLTIME MISSION WORK FOR THE LORD! What a contrast! In other words, instead of giving only 5 percent of a mere 1/1000 (one-thousandth) of our income to missions, or only 1/20,000 (one-twenty-thousandth), or only one penny out of every two hundred dollars, we give all to missions, and it all gets there! That means that an investment in our work for the Lord is used 20,000 times as much for His service as the same contribution of the average church member!
152. AND SUCH A CONTRIBUTION GOES IMMEDIATELY INTO FULLTIME SERVICE AND 100 PERCENT OF IT USED FOR THIS MISSION WORK amongst needy youth, since we pay no salaries and no one is making a profit, and therefore, every penny is used on actual expenses of the Work! This is in contrast to the 1/3 (one-third) to 1/2 (one-half) or more deducted by most missionary societies for overhead, such as salaries and administrative costs--and with most non-religious charities the percentage is even worse, as high as 75 percent going to the commercial high salaried fund-raisers themselves! What a gyp! What a waste!
153. IN OTHER WORDS, YOU'LL BE DOING WELL IF FROM 25 TO 50 PERCENT OF YOUR GIFT TO OTHER CHURCHES AND CHARITABLE AGENCIES EVER ACTUALLY REACHES THE NEED OR NEEDY purpose or field for which you gave it! Whereas with us, every penny you give goes immediately and directly into full-time service exactly where you intend it to go and for the exact purpose for which you gave it--to helping lost youth find the Love of God and a new and better life free of drugs, vice and crime, and themselves helping other youth in turn!
154. AND YOUR RETURN ON YOUR INVESTMENT IN SOULS WON AND DEDICATED TO HIS SERVICE would be 60 times as high as that gained on the average church investment--or an actual return on your investment of 6,000 percent! That's better than any investment return I know of in any other business in the whole world, and it's not mere material gain but immortal and eternal living souls won for the Lord from lives of uselessness, hopelessness, despair and Hell to lives of useful, hopeful, happy and Heavenly service! Hallelujah! Where can you do better?
155. NOT ONLY THAT, WHEN YOU INVEST IN OUR CHARITABLE SERVICE, OUR YOUTH CHURCHES, OR FULLTIME YOUTH COLONIES, AS THEY'RE CALLED, YOU'RE HIRING MORE THAN 3 TIMES AS MANY MEN TO DO THE JOB in proportion to the number of women than you will get from your investment in your average church's missionary effort! Because, more that 80 percent of modern missionary work is done entirely by women! Whereas, in our ranks of youthful missionaries, you'll find at least two or three men to every woman!--A rather shocking difference between us and the average church, also, where nearly 2/3 (two-thirds) of the members are usually women compared to our exact opposite proportion of a predominance of men!
MARRIAGE, FAMILIES AND CHILDREN OF THE CHILDREN OF GOD--THE DIFFERENCE!
156. YET IN OUR COLONIES, OUR WOMEN PLAY A MUCH MORE EQUAL AND ACTIVE ROLE THAN YOUR WOMEN DO IN MOST OF YOUR CHURCHES! Ours are all serving FULLTIME in various responsible positions akin to that of pastors, assistant pastors, secretaries, evangelists, missionaries, child evangelists, teachers, nurses, dietitians, etc.! And in the spiritual ministry of the Church, they are counted as absolute equals as well, including the exercise of their spiritual gifts and talents such as prophetesses, interpreters, inspirationalists, etc. Only in the physical, material hard labor of some tasks do we recognize the superiority of the men as the stronger vessel, as well as in the home relationship of husband and wife, although there is equality here also in the Lord.
157. THE MARRIAGE RELATIONSHIP IS CONSIDERED VALID AND SACROSANCT and solemnized with the Holy vows of Biblical betrothal! Each couple is considered a team of co-workers for God's service, and the children are reared within the Colony and our own schools by their own mothers and fathers, nurses and teachers, in the true nurture and admonition of the Lord and His Word, as well as a knowledge of the history and sciences of the outside world.
158. BUT OUR YOUNG PEOPLE AND THEIR CHILDREN ARE ANYTHING BUT CLOISTERED or monasticized into total seclusion and exclusion from the outside world! They are almost daily on the streets of the world and in their parks and marketplaces mingling freely with other young people and their children, as they witness their faith to outsiders without restraint. They go two-by-two, just like the nuns and police officers of the rest of the world, and for the same reason, because in unity there is strength and, as the Scripture says, if one needs help the other can lift him up, and where one can chase a thousand, two can put ten thousand to flight! It's just plain practical sensible teamwork!
159. IN MOST OF OUR COLONIES, OUR CHILDREN SPEND MORE TIME WITH THEIR PARENTS THAN DOES THE AVERAGE CHILD IN A WORLDLY HOME where his parents go off to work and he goes off to some distant school where they are separated by miles, where they seldom see each other except for perhaps a few brief moments at the supper table where there is still little or no communication!
160. OUR AVERAGE COLONY IS NOT MUCH LARGER THAN WAS THE OLD-FASHIONED FAMILY HOME, usually containing not much more than a dozen members and where the children are in the same house with their own parents most of the day, or in the nursery or school in the same building, or usually not more than a few feet away. The parents can see the children any time they wish, be with them as much as they like when off duty, and you will frequently find the children playing around their feet even when the parents are on duty, which is certainly a closer relationship then you would find between most parents and their children at the parents' place of employment or even in the average home!
161. IN FACT, THE HOMEY ATMOSPHERE IS MUCH LIKE THAT OF THE HOMES OF OUR FOREFATHERS, which were usually large and filled with relatives, guests and friends--one big happy family! Of course, this was in a day when families loved each other and liked to live together, including great grandparents, grandparents, children, grandchildren, aunts, uncles and cousins, etc.! And all helped and worked together!--Unlike the selfishness of many families today, where the poor old folks are put away out of the way in a so called rest home and the children are frequently shooed off to a distant boarding school or summer camp, and the relatives are never tolerated for more than a few days' visit!
162. NO WONDER OUR CHILDREN LIKE OUR COLONIES! They're like a reconstruction of the old family or tribal home where everyone lived happily together in love, co-operation, and family harmony! Days were spent working in the nearby fields of the old farm or with chores about the house and grounds, in which everyone participated, and evenings in sweet fellowship, singing and Bible stories at Father's knee! There was no separation of family activities with everybody going his own way and doing his own things and just waving at each other as they passed! And there was no TV to preempt all family conversation! Let me tell you, we have much more family life, love and fellowship, than the average worldly home of today!--And this is why the kids love it!
WHY YOUTH LEAVE HOME.
163. NO WONDER THEY DON'T WANT TO GO HOME to what amounts to not much more than a rooming house where they seldom see each other and are alone in their rooms most of the time listening lonesomely to a radio, or sweating it out over superfluous and superficial studies! No wonder they would rather have the sweet love, singing, harmony and fellowship and co-operation and sharing of one of our homey Colonies than to endure the selfishness, contention, confusion and vain wrangling and jangling and fussing and fighting of the average modern so called home! No wonder kids leave home today in search of peace! They're looking for somewhere to get out of the madhouse and rat-race of modern "living" into the peace and quiet and harmony of the country and back-to-nature living with the love and companionship of those of like mind!
164. BESIDES THIS WONDERFUL HAPPINESS OF FAMILY LIFE, LOVE AND CO-OPERATION THAT OUR COLONIES AFFORD, they are also given an opportunity to feel needed, wanted, and have a purpose in living, someone to live for, someone else to love and help and be loved and helped!
165. TO SAY THAT THE REASON THEY PREFER TO STAY WITH US THAN TO GO HOME IS BECAUSE THEY HAVE BEEN KIDNAPPED, DRUGGED, HYPNOTIZED, AND IMPRISONED IS, OF COURSE, RIDICULOUS! But, of course, even if it were true, it would be nothing to the way that they have been kidnapped from their homes by the laws of compulsory school attendance; drugged to damnation by modern, Godless, and useless public education; hypnotized by TV, movies, magazines, and modern music; and imprisoned by modern curfews, child labor laws, parental jurisdiction laws, minimum marriage age laws, minor's laws, and draft regulations and military bondage! These have made our modern children virtual prisoners and slaves of the average home, school, and the military for at least a third of their lives!--This is freedom and liberty and equality?--It's slavery and death!--Bondage, slavery and death for a System they did not create but are forced to live for and die for whether they like it or not! This is Hell on Earth, and they're not going to tolerate it much longer!
TODAY'S CHURCHES AND THE CHILDREN OF GOD--THE DIFFERENCE!
166. AND THE CHURCH?--HA!--THE SO-CALLED CHURCH, to most young people, to about 99 out of 100 of them, is just an absolute ridiculous laugh!--A little holier-than-thou, do-gooder, social club and status symbol for the self-righteous, sanctimonious, pharisaical, superannuated hypocrites!--a useless, ineffective, weak and ludicrous, dead and dying, paganistic hangover from the superstitious past!--That's what most of your young people think of your churches! In fact, many of them are inclined to agree with the Communists, that so-called religion is nothing but an opiate for the people, a drug to which the System has addicted them to keep them pacified and under the control of the powers that be!--And they're certainly not far wrong, are they?
167. EVEN I, A STAUNCH, CONFIRMED DEFENDER OF THE FAITH AND CHURCHMAN OF THE CLOTH OF THE PAST COULD NOT HELP BUT SEE that the Church bore no more resemblance to Jesus and His disciples and the Early Christians than Capitalism does to Communism! Even I, whose very existence depended on the Church, could see that it was not what Jesus intended nor what God ordained nor the kind of a Church that could win the world and save mankind from destruction, much less set an example for a full life of satisfying Christian service and healthful, happy living!
168. YET I WAS SO CONCERNED ABOUT THE SOULS OF MEN THAT I DID EVERYTHING IN MY POWER TO BRING THE CHURCH TO ALL MANKIND, even outside of its customary sacred precincts, by showing religious pictures and putting on religious musicals in non-sectarian places such as the streets, the parks, the schools, the community halls, and even the hotels and bars in order to try to reach the 99 percent of the unreached who are still outside the forbidding walls of those cold and austere mausoleums for the dead, called churches!
169. I WAS MODERATELY SUCCESSFUL IN THESE EXTERIOR EFFORTS, frequently condemned by my religious peers and superiors, but my converts outside of those sepulchers full of dead men's bones, for some reason or other did not want to follow me back into their confines, gloom, and putrid stench of religious corruption, but for some reason or other preferred to remain free in the great outdoors, as free men, still longing to breathe free air! Can you blame them? They were not accustomed to being prisoners of the shibboleths of the Sanhedrin, not constricted by the tortures of empty ceremonialism, nor bound by the chains of the ungodly traditions of men! Neither did they care for the conformity of dress and the styles of vanity nor the monotonous obligations of endless rituals and "services" and income taxes!
170. NO! GOD FORBID! THESE NEW FREE SOULS, THIS NEW BREED OF CHRISTIANS PREFERRED TO BE AND TO LIVE LIKE THOSE IN THE BEGINNING, like Jesus and His disciples, free and unhindered by the sabbatical laws and formal templism of a religious System that had not only lost its meaning, but its God in a lifeless, loveless, endless round of theological hairsplitting and hierarchical politics and going through the motions of beating the air and accomplishing nothing!
171. THESE NEW CHRISTIANS WANTED ONLY TO LOVE GOD AND THEIR FELLOWS and to worship Him in the limitless cathedral of His beautiful Creation and to fellowship in the freedom of His spirit and Truth! For, as Jesus said, "The Father seeketh such to worship Him!"
172. SO WHO NEEDS CHURCHES?--And who was I--or who are you--to try to force them back into the moldy molds of the coffins of the dead? Why not leave them free; why should they be made to conform to your pattern? They only need to follow the ordinances of God's Word! For, as Jesus said, the time now is that thou shalt worship the Lord thy God neither in this place nor in that temple, but they that worship Him shall worship Him in Spirit and in Truth, for the Father seeketh such to worship Him--not in temples made with hands!--And thou shalt love the Lord thy God...and thy neighbor as thyself!--These are the two greatest commandments, and herein are all the law and all the prophets! Hallelujah! These are our Golden Rules!
173. SO WE BEGAN TAKING THESE DISCIPLES INTO OUR OWN HOME as a part of our own family and teaching them how to follow the Lord and live for Him FULLTIME. The meaning of the word "disciple" comes directly from the Greek: "a follower of the teaching, a student". So our little home was actually a small Bible school filled with students following FULLTIME the teachings of the Bible, and it is from this that our work has grown, on the very same pattern, to the tremendous proportions of today!--Every Colony actually a little church or family of young Christians in their family home!--With a real family atmosphere!
174. THE WORD "CHURCH" ITSELF COMES FROM THE GREEK WORD "ECCLESIA" in our New Testaments and literally means, not a building nor a cathedral or a place of worship of any kind, neither synagogue nor temple, but actually "the called-out ones, or the separated ones, the set apart ones"--or dropouts! The Early Christians were the dropouts of their day, the hippies of their day, the rejects of society, the dregs of humanity as far as the rest of the world was concerned: drunks, harlots, publicans and sinners, whom Jesus said are going to enter Heaven instead of the self-righteous Pharisees, the hypocritical church leaders of His day!--And today!
175. THINGS HAVEN'T CHANGED MUCH TODAY AND THE HEARTS OF MEN ARE ABOUT THE SAME: WE STILL HAVE THE PHARISEES with us, those self-righteous fundamentalist legalistic puritanical, avaricious, and merciless church leaders of today who finally crucified Jesus and will crucify us if they can! We also have the Sadducees still with us: the modernistic, liberalistic, unbelieving, humanistic worshippers of man, wealth and higher learning. But we also have still with us, thank God, the poor publicans and sinners, drunks and harlots, the common people and the hippies for whom there is more chance of salvation than for all the others put together! From these latter poor, down-trodden, exploited, abused, misused, and persecuted classes of the poverty-stricken masses, of whom the Church has made merchandise, come most of the rebels, revolutionists and true Christians of today, who hear Jesus gladly!
WHY SOME JEALOUS PARENTS FIGHT THEIR OWN CHILDREN.--WHO ARE THE GUILTY KIDNAPPERS NOW?
176. THESE ARE THEY WHO FOLLOW US AND THE GENUINE REVOLUTION FOR JESUS today and who are leading the dropped-out youth of today's generation back to God and the Bible and the Love of Jesus and the simple life and work of the Early Christians. It is from the ranks of these that most of our disciples come, most of whom have already dropped out of society and home in heart or in mind or in spirit or literally and who already hate the money-mad, science-worshipping, earth-polluting, and hypocritical churchy System from which they have come! We did not teach them to hate it--they already hated it!--And some of you caused them to hate it by your own love and worship and addiction to its selfish, sickening, Godless materialism, the religion of this world!
177. ON THE CONTRARY, WE HAVE TRIED TO PERSUADE THEM TO FORGIVE YOU, THAT YOU KNOW NOT WHAT YOU DO, AND THEREFORE THEY SHOULD LOVE you, have compassion on you, and pity you for your plight! They are so sick of you and your System of living that it's hard for them to differentiate between the two: the fiendish System and its pitiful victims! We have to teach them the difference between hating the sin and loving the sinner; hating the vicious System, and pitying its poor victims.
178. NEARLY ALL OF OUR DISCIPLES ARE GROWN YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN OF LEGAL AGE TO LIVE INDEPENDENTLY AND MAKE THEIR OWN DECISIONS and with a right to do as they please, with a few rare exceptions of very few underaged young people who must have notarized written parental permission to join us. These young people are not little children, as our enemies would have you believe, and who are continually trying to give the impression that we're snatching little kids from their parents, homes, and schools! This is not so! Most of our young people who join have already been away from home and at school, college, job, or in the military, or just drifting for some time before they come to us. Many of them have not even written home for years, and the first thing we beg them to do is to contact their loved ones or write to them, and nearly every Colony has a regular scheduled once-a-week letter-writing session set aside for this very purpose!
179. SO TO SAY THAT WE TRY TO SEPARATE "CHILDREN" FROM THEIR LOVED ONES IS RIDICULOUS! We have actually done more in most cases to bring them back together and once again into fellowship with and in communication with them than otherwise, as many of you know from experience. It has only been in the most exceptional cases where the parents have actually literally and illegally tried to forcibly and even violently interfere with their grown child's right to join us or where the parents have sometimes tried to kidnap their children by brute force and violence and against the grown young man or woman's will, that we've had to step in to protect our young people and have often had to call the law to protect us from such parental foolishness and dangerously illegal action!
180. ONLY IN A FEW EXTREME CASES, WHERE THE PARENTS HAVE THREATENED OR EVEN ATTEMPTED VIOLENT OR ILLEGAL ACTION against the young person or ourselves, have the young people themselves requested to be transferred to some other location out of danger of such action and so that the parents would no longer continue to harass, persecute and endanger the Colony. We have even often been advised to do this by the legal authorities themselves in order to avoid further unnecessary trouble with aggressive, selfish, jealous and over-possessive, over-protective parents, some of whom we've even had to put in jail! Beware!
181. SOME OF OUR ARCH ENEMIES AND LEADERS OF SO-CALLED FreeCOG HAVE ACTUALLY ATTEMPTED, AND SOMETIMES SUCCESSFULLY, TO ABDUCT THEIR YOUNG PEOPLE BY ILLEGAL KIDNAPPING FROM OUR MIDST! Some of these were even on occasions where the parents had promised and agreed not to take any such action if allowed to meet peacefully and alone with their son or daughter, but had promptly violated their rights at the first opportunity. These parents could actually have been legally prosecuted on charges of felonious assault, kidnapping and involuntary incarceration if their children had wanted to press charges, but they've usually been reluctant to do so, preferring simply to get away from their parents and keep their whereabouts unknown so their parents would no longer endanger them with such illegal action.
182. OF COURSE, SOME OF THESE SAME PARENTS WHO HAVE LIED, DECEIVED, USED VIOLENCE AND ILLEGAL FORCE AND ABDUCTION AND KIDNAPPING TACTICS to violate their own young person's grown rights as an adult--some of these same parents have accused us of the very actions of which they themselves have actually been guilty, whereas we have been innocent or they would have legally prosecuted us long ago, which they have not yet been able to do in one single case! They have not yet been able to prove any of their charges of drugs, kidnapping, hypnotizing, nor illegal incarceration, although the parents themselves have, some of them, been guilty of these very things in illegal attempts to force their children to leave us!
183. ONE FATHER WHO HAD BEEN VERY ACTIVE IN SUCH ILLEGAL ATTEMPTS and had accused us of kidnapping and hypnotism tried himself to kidnap his own daughter, and when she finally did visit home voluntarily, tricked her into going to a hypnotist to try to change her mind about us! Others, who have accused us of involuntarily imprisoning and drugging their children, have themselves brought arrest warrants for their children to have them put away under lock and key in mental institutions and heavily drugged in order to brainwash them of their new-found faith! So who is really guilty of these charges?--We, or some of you parents who have done these terrible things to your own children and then charged us with the very things of which you alone are guilty? The Devil always accuses God's saints of the very things which he himself is doing and of which his own people are guilty! This is like Hitler's advice to his henchmen to lie big when they lied so that people would be more apt to believe it, because they wouldn't think you dared tell such a big lie unless it were true!
184. THESE ARE SOME OF THE HORRIBLE TACTICS THAT SOME EVIL-POSSESSED ENEMIES OF GOD HAVE BEEN USING on us and their children and these are some of the lies they've been telling about us! As a result, we have been compelled in several cases to file criminal action and charges of felony and suits for damages against their libelous and slanderous attacks and preposterous defamations of character! These same parents, who themselves were guilty, have forced us to prosecute them to protect ourselves and put a stop to their lies, and we shall continue to do so long as necessary to protect their children, ourselves, the Lord's Work, and our good name! So far we have won every legal case in the courts, so I would advise such parents to desist and cease their costly, senseless, ridiculous, and illegal foolishness! Your children are now grown young men and women and have constitutional and legal rights to do as they please!--Don't try to stop them or us! We are legally incorporated as a non-profit religious and educational institution, and our operations and finances are above reproach and under the legal regulation and recognition of the State! Praise God!
185. SO IS IT ANY WONDER THAT THE PITIFULLY PERSECUTED AND ILLEGALLY ASSAULTED CHILDREN OF SUCH ATROCIOUS PARENTS SHOULD PREFER TO HAVE THEIR WHEREABOUTS REMAIN UNKNOWN TO THESE UNGODLY ENEMIES of the Children of God in order to avoid any further and unnecessary and even dangerous attacks of the enemy?--And with such insane parents on the loose, is it any wonder that the poor hounded leaders of some suffering Colonies prefer to be unseen, unknown, or at least out of the reach of such demented fiends who seemingly will stop at nothing illegal to vent their jealous wrath and evil vengeance on their poor children and us!
WHY MOSES IS IN SECLUSION.
186. DO YOU WONDER THEN WHY I MYSELF, THE ORIGINAL FOUNDER and leader of the Movement, who, though I retired from active participation and administration due to ill health and a serious heart weakness some years ago, still prefer to remain unknown, anonymous, and in the utmost seclusion for both my health and safety's sake when there are crazy people like those we've described running around with guns in their hands actually threatening to kill me if they can find me because of their insane jealousy over their children who have a perfect legal right to be in our Colonies?
187. WHY DO MOST TOP BUSINESS EXECUTIVES AND WORLD LEADERS PREFER TO REMAIN USUALLY INVISIBLE AND NEARLY INCOMMUNICADO as far as the general public is concerned except on the rarest occasions at which they are usually under tight security and heavy bodyguard because of their obvious enemies? And why do such recluses as the famous Howard Hughes prefer the anonymity and quiet seclusion of peaceful retirement and their whereabouts unknown as much as possible to the general public and particularly to their enemies rather than to have intrusions on their private lives and violations of their privacy by the curious public, news hounds, souvenir seekers, and dangerous enemies?--Especially when their health and safety and peace of mind are at stake!
188. MANY MEN AND PROPHETS OF GOD AS WELL AS LEADERS OF THIS WORLD HAVE SOUGHT PRIVACY AND QUIET SECLUSION FOR VARIOUS REASONS throughout history without being accused of being a fugitive from justice! There are no legal charges of any kind against me anywhere that I know of, and I have violated no laws of which I'm aware, or else I would have been notified of the same long before this, particularly by our enemies! So far, they have not only failed to find any justification or any evidence whatsoever of their evil imaginings sufficient to warrant prosecution; but they have also found it impossible to find any legal excuse to even file any kind of civil suit against me, or us, or their children, despite their constant boastings, lies, and rantings and ravings against us! Don't worry! If they could have found the slightest legal excuse with which to attack us in court they would have done so long ago, but their charges and boastings are nothing but malicious and vicious, libelous and slanderous lies!--Either pure fictional imaginations of their evil hallucinations, or a twisted, distorted and vile contortion of misrepresentation of some half-truth!
189. SO WHY SHOULD IT BE A MYSTERY TO ANYONE, UNDER THESE CIRCUMSTANCES, THAT WE SHOULD PREFER TO KEEP OUR IDENTITY AND WHEREABOUTS AS UNKNOWN AS POSSIBLE TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC? It is not because we have done anything wrong or of which we are ashamed, although we are certainly not perfect, and some of these enemies of God may yet try to think of something for which they might endeavor to blame me, as the Devil's crowd always tries to do to God's Children!
190. BUT I HAVE BEEN IN SUCH COMPLETE RETIREMENT FOR THE SAKE OF MY HEALTH AND SAFETY for the past few years, in such total seclusion in order to spare my life from any unnecessary excitement which might precipitate another dangerous heart attack, that I have been nearly bed-fast, almost a shut-in, and virtually confined to my writings since my complete retirement from public life in 1970! I have not even been able to see one of our hundreds of Colonies since the founding of our first one--our first large one--in Texas! I have even been separated from my own children almost entirely, most of the time! Usually I have not even been where they could reach me by telephone, even in case of emergency! My own communication has been either by means of the mail or an occasional courier most of the time of my self-imposed exile--and even then, through such a complicated system of forwarding that even my own children usually do not know where I am! They themselves are willing to accept this in order to prevent any breach of my security, endangerment of my health and safety, or intrusion on my privacy. God bless them!
191. THIS HAS NOT BEEN AN EASY SEPARATION for us who were together most of our lives, so I can sympathize with some of you bereaved parents who have not seen much of your children since they joined the Children of God! I haven't seen them, either!--In fact, not as much as you have! So I should have greater cause to complain for the separation and the exile from home into which my health, safety, and writing--and even some of you--have forced me! So quit belly-aching! Some of you are behaving more like children than your own, who are behaving more like adults than you are! I'm sorry for you, even as I'm somewhat sorry for myself! But there's not much that either of us can do about it! I don't want to go home now and neither do your children!--And we're all adults now, so why don't you grow up and let them grow up!
192. THAT'S WHAT I'M DOING! IF YOU WANT TO READ GOD'S REASONS FOR IT, READ ONE OF THE NOW-FAMOUS MO LETTERS WHICH ARE ABOUT TO BE PUBLISHED and which some of you may have already received, and which if you haven't we'd be happy to send you in return for a small donation of not less than a dollar to cover the cost! The one I have in mind which may help you understand my present voluntary exile is entitled "I Gotta Split!" and explains the reasons for which God sent me away, not only for self-preservation, but to give us time to preserve in writing the things which God has shown us and taught us during our years of experience in His Work, in order to pass them on to our children to help them continue working successfully for Him!
193. AS THEY WEPT WHEN I FIRST LEFT, KNOWING I WOULD LIKELY NEVER RETURN ALIVE, I told them that I had given them a good start but was now unable to carry on in active participation and direct administration and they would have to lean more heavily on the Lord to lead them, care for them, guide and direct them, and bring them to victory in our worldwide Mission. I quoted them the Scripture, the warning of the great Rabbi Gamaliel of old to the enemies of the Early Christians: "If this work be of man (or only of me, in other words), it will come to naught!--But if it be of God, no man can stand against it!"--not even me or you!--no matter how much you try!
WHY SOME PEOPLE PERSECUTE GOD'S LEADERS--HISTORY SHOWS THEY CAN'T STOP GOD'S MOVEMENT.
194. SO WHY DON'T SOME OF YOU LEAVE US ALONE IF YOU DON'T LIKE US?--Can't you believe God's Word and the advice of this great and wise Rabbi and trust God to take care of us one way or the other in His time? If this is merely my work and not of God, it's doomed to failure without your help or opposition!--But if of God, nothing can stop us!
195. SO WHY DON'T YOU SAVE YOURSELVES THE TROUBLE, TIME, ENERGY AND EXPENSE AND LEAVE US ALONE AND LET GOD DO WHATEVER HE'S GOING TO DO with us, good or bad?--It shouldn't take long to find out!--In fact, if you weren't so thick-headed and so woefully or willfully blinded by either the lies of others or your own stubbornness and lack of knowledge of the ways of the Lord, you surely would have seen long ago that these poor kids certainly never could have gotten this far this fast without the Lord's help! Even the whole world is RECOGNIZING the Jesus Revolution we started! Only a few of you stupid idiots are fighting it! It's about time you woke up! "Beware lest thou be found to fight against God!" You can't stop God's Rain of blessing!
196. OF COURSE, SOME OF YOU FOOLISHLY PROCLAIM THAT YOU'RE NOT FIGHTING THE KIDS--they're OK and doing a great job--which they are! God bless 'em!--and mostly without my help or yours, just the Lord's and a few of His friends! But you say you just want to destroy the kids' leadership! Now isn't that ridiculous!--When their original human founder and leader is nothing but a poor, retired, disabled war veteran, and you can't possible get at their Heavenly Leader, Jesus Christ!--and the kids themselves furnish nearly all of their own human leadership!
197. SO WHAT LEADERS DO YOU WANT TO DESTROY, AND WHY?--They've gotten along without me for years, and they'll never get along without God! So which leaders do you want to destroy, and how?--The poor little individual Colony leaders who are chosen from their own ranks and one of them themselves, and each one working independently and indigenously in his own community and only associated with the others in a non-organic spiritual fellowship? Who is it you hate so that you want to destroy or kill us as you threaten to do and claim you're bent on doing, you who are our declared and open bitter enemies? Who are you really fighting? You could kill any one of us, or even a lot of us, and God's Work would still go on, because He's our leader, and you can't lick Him no matter how hard you try! Your feeble and puny attacks against His Work are a laugh in His sight! He says He will laugh in the day of your calamity because you rejected His Word!
198. OR ARE YOU TRYING TO BE AS FOOLISH AS THE RUSSIAN COMMUNISTS who, after slaughtering millions of Christians and trying to stamp out the true Church of God in their midst, made a poster that I remember seeing as a lad showing climbing a ladder into Heaven saying: "We've wiped out the Church!--Now we're going to wipe out God!"--How silly can you get!--You can't even reach Him, you can't touch Him, because you have refused to love Him and believe Him!--And He's certainly not going to let you hurt many of his Children because He says: "Touch not the Lord's Anointed, nor do His prophets any harm!... For He that toucheth them toucheth the apple of mine eye!" In other words, you're trying to stick your finger in God's eye, and He won't like it, so you'd better leave Him and His Children alone! It won't work!
199. BESIDES, IF YOU SAY THE CHILDREN ARE SO GOOD AND THEY'RE DOING SUCH A GOOD WORK AND IT'S JUST THEIR LEADERSHIP THAT'S EVIL, how come God's Word says of leaders, "By their fruits ye shall know them!... And an evil tree cannot bring forth good fruit!" So if the Children, our fruit, are so good, how can we, their leaders, then be evil?--This is, of course, impossible!--As He says that only a good tree can bring forth good fruit! So why are you attacking the tree that God has planted, to destroy both it and its fruit, unless you're enemies of God!
200. BESIDES, YOU CAN NEVER DESTROY US ALL, any more than the mighty Roman Empire, with all its valiant legions, could destroy the hunted little Christians of the Early Church! They were like the many-headed monster of mythology of which it was fabled that every time you cut off one of its heads two more grew up in its place! The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the true Church, and the more you kill, the more will take their place!--Because you cannot destroy the immortal!
201. EVEN THE RUSSIAN COMMUNISTS FOUND THEY COULD WIPE OUT NEITHER GOD NOR THE CHURCH and that the more they defied God and massacred His people, the more the Church grew in ardor and indomitable fervor and determination to survive and carry on! The Communist Society of the Godless finally, in frustration, decided the only way they could stamp out religion was to leave its adherents alone and let them die of their own lethargy and capture their children by a process of compulsory systematic, atheistic re-education--just as America's public educational system is doing today in its Godless schools under a corrupt and Godless Government, more anti-God than Russia could ever hope to be and more subtly anti-Christian in its hypocritical religion than the Communists themselves!
202. EVERY MARTYR THE ROMAN COOKED AT THE STAKE OR THREW TO THE LIONS ONLY INSPIRED FAITH IN MANY MORE BELIEVERS UNTIL ROME ITSELF WAS OVERTHROWN! Every martyr who has been slain for his Cause has only inspired many more to rise up and take his place! In spite of all the wrath of bestial atrocious man against the Children of God during the coming world wide devilish dictatorship of the Antichrist regime, which will war on God's saints throughout three-and-a-half years of a reign of terror called in the Bible the Great Tribulation, the forces of evil will never be able to completely destroy God's true Children, and multitudes of them will still be here to joyously welcome Christ's Triumphal Re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere to destroy God's enemies in great vengeance with a great and terrible slaughter!
203. SO WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU OBVIOUSLY ON WHEN YOU'RE AVOWEDLY TO DESTROY EITHER GOD'S CHILDREN OR THEIR LEADERS?--You're on the losing side, my dear enemies, and you will never be able to get the job done, no matter how many of us you try to destroy or what your excuses are for doing it! And even if you do succeed in destroying a few of us to immortalize us and inspire us, God will raise up many, many more to take each of our places! You're fighting a losing battle!--In fact, you will not only lose, but if you keep bothering us too much, God will even turn on you and destroy you! I've seen it happen!
204. THE WICKED EVEN HAVE A BUILT-IN MECHANISM FOR SELF-DESTRUCTION, and your hatred will bring you nothing but disease, misery, and death, as God's Word so clearly indicates: "The wicked shall be turned into Hell, and all the nations that forget God!" And you'll go to Hell with them if you don't stop persecuting His people! And it won't be long before your Godless Nation is going to begin to feel the judgments of God! God has told us that your present "Great Society" shall come to travail and then bring forth Great Confusion, which will be authored by someone out of Egypt, with the help of another great Nation and some Eastern nations, and that very soon, through both the Reds and the Blacks! He has cautioned us to be prepared!--Are you?
205. I WOULD MUCH RATHER TEACH YOU HOW TO SURVIVE THAN TO SEE YOU SUFFER UNNECESSARILY OR EVEN DIE OF YOUR OWN NEGLECT! It might even pay you to leave the Country while God's judgments are being poured out upon it! It would certainly be well for you to prepare for what's coming!
HOLLYWOOD FREE PAPER--MORE SLANDER FROM OUR ENEMIES.
206. ANOTHER MATTER WHICH WE MUST MENTION amongst the lies which have been circulated about us is the now much-publicized and notorious forgery, known as the "Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship Letter". This was a complete fraud disclaimed utterly by Inter-Varsity, whose lawyers have denied that Inter-Varsity had anything to do with it, but that it was written by a girl student at one of the colleges where they operate, but a student who was not even a member of Inter-Varsity!
207. NEVERTHELESS, THIS GIRL FORGED THE LETTER and signed it "Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship" and sent it to Duane Pederson's "Hollywood Free Paper" who freely and widely published it, not only without authorization from Inter-Varsity, but without even checking with Inter-Varsity to see if the letter was authentic! As it turned out, it was an absolute criminal forgery for which the girl could have been charged but was not, and which Inter-Varsity had totally denied being responsible for!
208. IT CONTAINED VICIOUS DEMONICALLY INSPIRED AND RIDICULOUS LIES conjured up by an apparently twisted mind, and such far-fetched charges that anyone in their right mind should plainly have seen that it was the figment of someone's weird and far-out demented imagination! Just the same, the "Hollywood Free Paper" gladly published it in an attempt to discredit us, which brought immediate legal action from us and an encounter with our lawyers, so that they were compelled to apologize, print a retraction, print an official letter from Inter-Varsity's lawyers denying it and even giving us some space for rebuttal, for which we agreed to take them off the hook of a sure libel suit!
209. BUT STILL THIS LIBELOUS, INSANE AND CRIMINAL FORGERY CONTINUES TO BE PUBLISHED REPEATEDLY BY OUR ENEMIES AROUND THE WORLD in the good name of Inter-Varsity as an authentic condemnation of us by this reputed Christian youth organization! It is impossible to catch up with all the individual publishers of this criminal forgery or to file enough libel suits to stop them all, as they don't seem to care about its authenticity or Inter-Varsity's denial of it or the "Free Paper's" later apology for and retraction of it! Like the Devil himself, it doesn't seem to matter to these other so-called Christians and so-called Christian publications and organizations that this letter was a lie and a forgery--they just keep publishing it and repeating the lie!
210. LIKE THE MAN WHO SAID, "MY MIND IS MADE UP!--DON'T CONFUSE ME WITH THE FACTS!"--SOME PEOPLE STILL PREFER TO BELIEVE THE LIES they want to believe rather than the truth!--Like the almost equally now-notorious Kent Philpott letter published by the same so-called "Free Paper" and for which they were also later obliged to disclaim responsibility for, but which is still receiving wide circulation and repeated publication by our enemies. Although its authorship by a supposed Jesus People leader of Northern California was genuine, its content was again the most vicious and lying criminal charges against us, which were complete falsehoods!
211. THIS SO-CALLED CHRISTIAN AND FORMER FRIEND OF ONE OF OUR NEW MEMBERS WAS APPARENTLY SO FURIOUS AND JEALOUS OVER THE JOINING OF HIS FORMERLY HIGHLY-RESPECTED FRIEND that he visited two of our Colonies only to cause trouble and storming in and out in a rage, looking only for whatever evil he hoped to find, whether real or imagined, so he could use it against us! Finding none, he concocted this impure fabrication apparently either from hearsay or his own evil imagination! How can people who do not even know us write so much evil about us!
ATTACKS FROM OUR ENEMIES EXPOSED AND DENOUNCED.
212. THIS IS JUST ANOTHER SAD COMMENTARY ON THE DECADENCE OF CHRISTIAN CHARACTER AMONGST THE CHURCH-ORIENTED, and another proof that people just believe what they want to believe regardless of whether it's true or not or that all the outstanding evidence is to the contrary--like the lie of Evolution, and the derogatory misinformation published about us repeatedly by such writers as Ed Plowman of "Christianity Today" and Enroth, Ericson, and Peters of Westmont College, as well as a good many other so-called Christian writers!
213. ODDLY ENOUGH, IT SEEMS TO BE THE CLOSED-MINDED CHURCH-ORIENTED AND OBVIOUSLY BIGOTED PHARISEES OF THE CHURCHES, such as religious writers, editors and reporters of various religious and non-religious publications who are so enraged with jealousy as to so gnash upon us with their misguided literary teeth! The vast majority of journalists, reporters, and editors and news media from newspapers and magazines to radio and TV who have personally visited us and spent a great deal of time with us, even actually living in our Colonies for several days or as much as a week or two at a time, these who have really investigated with a sincere, open and unchurch-prejudiced mind and have really gotten to know us personally and well, these factual reporters of the world have given us the fairest coverage, done the most honest reporting and written some of the most glowing commendations of the true good that they found in our Colonies! Who are you going to believe?--The jealous Temple Pharisees of the kind who crucified Jesus, or the honest secular judges of the System who, like Pilate, have said:
214. "WHAT EVIL HATH HE DONE?... I find no fault in Him at all.... Ye have brought this Man unto me as one that perverteth the people: and behold, I, having examined Him before you, have found no fault in this Man touching those things whereof ye accuse Him!--No, nor yet Herod!--.... And from thenceforth Pilate sought to release Him, ... for he knew that the Chief Priests had delivered Him for envy!"
215. SO HERE IS AN HONEST ANSWER AND APPRAISEMENT FROM THE MOUTH OF A MAN OF THE WORLD who himself was not too interested in religious matters and who, in his wise judgment, knew that it was only in jealousy that these religious leaders sought to crucify Jesus! What a picture of this same situation today, in which the dying Church System has almost totally failed to reach the lost youth of this generation, but these religious leaders are absolutely green with envy and homicidal jealousy over phenomenal success with the same in having started a worldwide youth Revolution for Jesus outside of their sanctum sanctorums and for which they are now so furious they wish to destroy us! This is the real reason for all this religious criticism!
216. TIME AND SPACE WOULD FAIL US TO DEAL WITH ALL THE OTHER ATTACKS which have been made upon us falsely and unjustly, but we have felt it necessary here to refute those which have been the most common and the lowest and the most widespread. We think you should know the truth, for your own sake, so you yourself can make a fair judgment of these things and not from mere hearsay and lies of our enemies! It's up to you to make your own decision and we're only asking you to be fair, honest and sincerely knowledgeable of the true facts at hand.
217. THE SCRIPTURE SAITH: "HE THAT ANSWERETH A MATTER BEFORE HE HEARETH IT, IT IS A FOLLY AND SHAME UNTO HIM!"--and "Judge not that ye be not judged, for with what measure ye mete it out, it shall be meted unto you again!"--And if ye receive not the truth, we're to shake off the dust of our feet against you, like Sodom and Gomorrah!
218. WE REGRET TO HAVE HAD TO SPEND SO MUCH TIME ON SOME OF THESE PROBLEMS, but even Jesus and Paul and Martin Luther and many other men of God have occasionally been forced to reply to the false charges of their enemies in order to set the record straight, and to warn the wicked of his wicked way, and to deliver our own souls from the blood of those who may be deceived thereby! So now you know!
219. YOU MAY HEAR MANY OTHER LIES ABOUT US, BUT JUST CONSIDER THE SOURCE! Look who's telling them, and then you'll understand why! "And the Serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the Woman (the true Church), that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood!" But, thank God, "the earth helped the Woman... and swallowed up the flood which the Dragon cast out of his mouth! And the Dragon was wroth with the Woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the Testimony of Jesus Christ."--It's the same old Devil attacking God's saints!
COME AND SEE FOR YOURSELF OR WRITE FOR MORE PUBLICATIONS.
220. WHY DON'T YOU COME AND SEE FOR YOURSELF? The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, and one picture's worth a thousand words! The only way to know for sure is to visit us with an open mind and to talk to us face to face. Or if this is impossible for you, may we suggest that you read our magazine, "The New Nation News", which is published periodically and available for a donation and containing all the latest news from all our Colonies!--Or, as already suggested, you may want to enclose a minimum donation of 10 pence or 25 cents per copy for each of the latest "MO Booklets", the hitherto highly-secret and only privately published but now world-famous "MO Letters", which our enemies have been selling without our permission at ten dollars per letter, thus violating the copyright laws and the laws protecting the authors of private papers some of which they have stolen from us! So you're really getting a bargain!--But watch out!--Remember, they are copyrighted and must not be reprinted nor republished in any form or portion without written permission from us! We're about to sue FreeCOG for this, another violation of our rights by these enemies and an example of their criminal and illegal operations!
221. OR IF YOU WISH A COPY OF THE ACTUAL LESSONS AND BIBLE STUDIES WE TEACH IN OUR CLASSES IN OUR COLONIES, in order to know the real unvarnished truth about us and what we believe, how we operate, our message and method and organization and what our plans are for the future, as well as our interpretation and explanation of the complicated Bible prophecies and when, where, and how we think they'll soon be fulfilled, and how this may affect you and your children and us and your nation and your economy and the future of the world in general--if you'd like to know all this, may we suggest you make a small donation of at least three dollars for the first volume just now off the press, and be the proud owner of some of these valuable and incomparable genuine first editions of which there'll be more to come, God willing.
222. OR IF YOU'D LIKE COPIES OF EACH AND ALL OF THESE our publications--such as the "MO Letters", the magazine, and the books that are already off the press, the Lessons, and/or one of Grandmother's famous books, "Streams that Never Run Dry" or "The Hem of His Garment", her life story, now read by millions, may we suggest that you simply request the whole lot of all of these presently available publications for a minimum gift of only ten dollars plus 25 cents per MO Letter that you would like to receive!
223. OR IF YOU NOT ONLY REALLY WANT ALL THESE LATEST PUBLICATIONS HOT OFF THE PRESS AND TO BE PUT ON OUR MAILING LIST for notification of those yet to come and any other news we may have for you, but you also like us so much that you not only want to help us with all of the expenses of publishing and mailing these items to you, but also to assist in the great work we're doing for the Lord in delivering the youth of this generation and saving them with the Love of God, why don't you just throw in a little extra while you're at it, like maybe fifty or a hundred, and we'll be very grateful and God will bless you and keep you and make you a great blessing for your eternal investment reaping everlasting dividends in immortal souls! Amen? Hallelujah!
224. EVEN IF YOU'RE ONE OF OUR BELOVED ENEMIES, I'M SURE YOU'LL WANT TO BE KEPT WELL-INFORMED ON ALL OF OUR TERRIBLE ACTIVITIES, so don't miss this tremendous opportunity to get all the inside dope!--Oops!--I mean information! (Watch what they do with that one!) We used to give nearly everything away free of charge, but our printing bills and expenses are getting so high we found we can no longer afford it ourselves, so we're merely asking you to please help share those costs with us and help us all you can. Thanks, and God bless you!
225. MANY OF YOU HAVE ALREADY RECEIVED SOME OF THESE BECAUSE OF YOUR ALREADY LONG-STANDING FRIENDSHIP AND FELLOWSHIP IN OUR MINISTRY. Whatever you do not have, you may therefore request accordingly. Please make your checks or money orders payable to "The Children of God", and send them with your specified requests for which publications to either "Children of God Publications", P.O. Box 31, London WC2E 7LX England--or mail to the same at G.P.O. Box 3141, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00936, U.S.A. Those making your gifts to London kindly adjust them in British pounds at the current exchange rate of approximately two-and-a-half dollars to the pound. In other words, you who are donating in British pounds will be giving a minimum of about four pounds for the entire lot of publications mentioned above. Thanks for your help!
CHILDREN OF GOD TRAVEL AGENCY.
226. ANOTHER THING WE'D LIKE TO SUGGEST FOR YOUR OWN BENEFIT and the benefit of your children or any other friends and loved ones for whom you're concerned, is that we have inside information on impending trouble coming in the United States, probably this Election year and certainly not long after, which you may wish to escape by taking at least a temporary vacation in some other part of the world or helping your children take a world tour this year, as many other parents are, even parents of the world!
227. THE CHILDREN OF GOD ARE ORGANIZING A TRAVEL AGENCY WHICH WILL BE ABLE TO SECURE YOU EXTREMELY LOW FARES of as little as about two hundred dollars or less per round trip to Europe with guided tours of our Colonies for not a great deal more. So if you really want to see what's happening in other parts of the world, and get out of the dangerous U.S.A. for a while this year or for the duration or forever, we suggest you contact us for rates and information and guidance. We can tell you how to live abroad as I am living, for less than a thousand dollars a year, or you can support one of your missionary children overseas for the same! Of course, your accommodations may not have running water or an inside toilet or more than two meals a day, like mine, and you may have to do a lot of walking, but you sure couldn't live any cheaper! Some people say I live at the Statler-Hilton and buy my wife mink coats, but these are just lies like the rest of them! They even say I'm cruising the Mediterranean with my secretary, but since our clothes are donated and our savings limited, we really can't afford it!
WHAT IS COMING AND HOW TO PREPARE!
228. HOWEVER, IF YOU JUST CAN'T GET AWAY, MAY WE SUGGEST THAT YOU PREPARE FOR THE COMING EMERGENCY BY WRITING IN FOR OUR LITTLE LESSON ON "EMERGENCY SURVIVAL" and enclose a small donation to cover the cost. That's what I really started out to tell you in this letter, because I'm concerned about you, but I wound up telling you how the Lord has helped us and His Work to survive instead! As this letter is already too long and I don't think you could stand much more right now and I'm a little weary of writing it myself, I think we'd better save the rest for later!
229. SUFFICE IT TO SAY, JUST IN CASE I DON'T SURVIVE LONG ENOUGH TO SEND IT TO YOU, or the emergency should occur before you have a chance to request it, may we suggest that you immediately do at least following to prepare for it: Be sure you have some kind of place in the country that's well stocked with dried and canned foods, such as grains, beans, flour, sugar, and other staples, and its own independent supply of water, heat and light which are not dependent on electricity or other outside means of pressure or power!
230. YOU'D BETTER ALSO HAVE SOME MEANS OF TRANSPORTATION AVAILABLE, POWERED BY SOMETHING OTHER THAN GASOLINE, DIESEL OR BOTTLED GAS, because these will be in short supply or rationed or even utterly unavailable. Buy yourself and the family some bicycles, or a Stanley Steamer that runs on wood, or one of those ancient, but honorable, hay-burners, known as a horse and wagon! You should have enough gas left to get to your hideaway, so keep your tank always full so you'll be prepared for your getaway with the family at a moment's notice!
231. OF COURSE, YOU MAY NOT BE ABLE TO USE YOUR CAR ANYWAY, as the roads may be blocked or destroyed and the refugee traffic too jammed to make it! So you'd better keep those bicycles in shape, or those horses in condition, so you can hit out across country over rough terrain or back country roads if you have to, to get there!--Which means you'll need a very good country or state map which has all the smallest details of the smallest county roads, railroads, rivers, streams, bridges, hills, mountains, and other necessary landmarks to help you find your way across country off the main highways even if you have to go by foot! Because the main roads may either be restricted to military traffic only, or controlled by saboteurs who'll be wrecking the country, or the military, who'll be trying to save it, and unfit for ordinary use, destroyed, blocked, or jammed!
232. REMEMBER HOW THE BLACK-OUT TOTALLY PARALYZED NEW YORK CITY and the Northeast a few years ago! Don't get caught with your lights out like they did and with no food or water or any way or plan to flee the danger spots, such as the big cities! Be prepared! It is definitely going to happen soon, so you might as well get ready for it! It is said that even now your enemies have an anti-magnetic-field device which can totally paralyze all electrical fields, the sources of your electric power, such as generators and even electric motors, which could leave you totally without electricity, power, transportation water, etc., if used on your area, as some think it was used experimentally on New York and caused the famous Blackout! Think what that could do to the country!--Plus all the sudden sabotage of most major utility, transportation, and military installations!
233. YOU DON'T HAVE TO WAIT FOR AN ATOMIC WAR OR AN EARTHQUAKE to destroy your country! Your enemies could do it at a moment's notice if it suited their purpose, and unofficially, so you wouldn't know who was to blame, so how could you retaliate, or fight a guerrilla war!
234. DON'T THINK THAT SUCH DOWNTOWN GUERRILLA WARFARE CANNOT HAPPEN IN YOUR COUNTRY, like it's happened in Vietnam, Ireland, and other places, when aided, directed, and supplied by a powerful, outside anonymous enemy! It is the latest kind of civilian warfare to carry it home where it hurts and has proven its devastating effectiveness in such bombed-out cities as Belfast!
235. BESIDES THIS, THEY EVEN HAVE SMALL STRATEGIC WEAPONS NOW for use in civil warfare, such as {\b small atom bombs which can be placed in an attaché case and left in a downtown building to explode }later with enough power to level an entire block or more!--And who's going to know who's to blame? Belfast seldom knew which side was doing the bombing, even on that small a scale! So you can no longer count on any massive retaliation to save you, as you won't know who to shoot at!
236. OF COURSE, THEY'LL PROBABLY ROUND UP ALL THE POOR LITTLE HIPPIES AND BLAME IT ON THEM AS THE RED, RED RADICALS OF REVOLUTION! But if they pick up everybody with long hair under twenty-five and put them in those concentration camps they already have prepared for them, like Hitler did the Jews and the U.S. did the Japanese, they're bound to make a few mistakes in rounding up all the youth as enemies of the State, or potential or suspected enemies, and they might even happen to get your dear little sheltered darlings--or maybe even you!
237. SO IF I WERE YOU, I'D TRY NOT TO BE AROUND where they could find me or my family or blame it on us! How much better to get out in the country and away from it all if you can, and if you're ready, as we've warned you! If your family alone can't afford such a place, or even the poorest mountain cabin or bare piece of ground to camp on that has a little water, such as a pond, well, spring, stream, lake or otherwise, and far enough away to be out of trouble until it's over, why don't you go together with another family or two or more and chip in on a place jointly for a sanctuary a lot safer than your church building, which will be useless at such a time as this!
238. IN FACT, WE KNOW OF QUITE A FEW CHURCHES WHO THEMSELVES HAVE ALREADY GONE TOGETHER AND DONE THIS VERY THING, BUYING A CAMPGROUND out in the woods or the mountains away from it all to be used not only for camps, conventions, and recreation, but also for a refuge and retirement community in case of disaster, emergency, or old age! How much more useful would such a place be during such a time than all your fancy church buildings put together!
239. OF COURSE, IF YOU DON'T MAKE IT IN TIME, YOU MIGHT ALL TRY STOCKING YOUR CHURCH building with non-perishable foods, use the Baptistery for drinking water (better keep it full!), your candles for light, and you can always chop up those pretty pews and pulpit to build a wood fire in the middle of the floor, or furnace for warmth and cooking! Don't forget to open the belfry to let the smoke out!--And be sure everybody has a sleeping bag for those hard, cold floors, unless your church is rich enough to have padded pews and wall-to-wall carpeting!
240. IF ALL ELSE FAILS, AND YOU CAN'T DO ANY OF THESE, YOU COULD AT LEAST MAKE SURE YOU'VE GOT YOUR OWN BASEMENT STOCKED full of food and firewood, so you won't have to chop up the furniture, and some kind of a fireplace or charcoal grill to heat and cook on that's not run by gas or electricity, and non-perishable foods which won't rot before you can eat them when the deepfreeze goes off, and keep all your bathtubs and water-tanks filled for drinking water only!--No more baths!--You won't even be able to wash your face unless it rains, and it may be full of fallout!--Or you'll get hungry as a bum and thirsty as Hell!
Love, MO
Copyright (c) 1998 by The Family}
