Authors: Don Lattin
Little David graduated from Buena Vista Grammar School and went on to Robert E. Lee Junior High and Miami High School. He would later recall how “the rough kids at school” made much of his youth “an agony and a torture.”
7
At age sixteen, Berg got his driver's license and replaced his father as Virginia's chauffeur and right-hand man. Despite their disagreements as to the joys of childhood sex, David and Virginia Berg were closeâextremely close.
I was a grown teenager about nineteen, or perhaps twenty, and she was a middle-aged woman of around fifty-five at the time. We were very busily engaged in the Lord's service together, traveling alone together because my father had said he was too old and too tired and had quit the evangelistic road to settle down to a business of his own in California.
She and I were holding this meeting for a small Alliance church in northern Californiaâ¦. One cold night we were sleeping
together in the big double bed that [the local pastor] had rented for us, and which rather shocked us when we saw the room! But we hardly dared complain knowing how poor he was and what a small pastorate he had and that he probably couldn't afford separate rooms.
One cold night we woke up in the middle of the night with no heat and quite cold. Apparently, I must have been stirring and my mother must have been cold and realized that I was cold too, so suddenly in an almost impulsive movement she threw her arms around me and snuggled me real tight. My back was to her at the timeâI was lying on my right side and she on her right sideâso that as she embraced me and pulled me close against her bosom, she tucked her knees up under my knees and wrapped her body around mine!â¦
My first reaction was absolute terrified shock to think that my mother would get so close to me and wrap her arms around me and her very body around mine in such an almost sexual embrace. It certainly was a loving embrace and affectionate and perhaps she meant nothing by it whatsoeverâ¦but I think for the first time in my life I had sexual feelings about my mother!
And in those days when very young I was quite virile and potent. I can remember having her snuggle and feeling her warm soft body against mine, her bosoms against my back. She had on a nightgown, a very thin nightgown. She was still a beautiful woman at fifty-five, charming and although a little on the plump side, quite pretty and very attractive [and there she was] with her bosoms against my back and her arms wrapped around me and almost her legs wrapped around me. I suddenly got quite an electric sexual jolt that I had never expected before, and I was almost immediately erect!â¦
Perhaps if I had not been so conservative and extremely narrow minded in my theology and religion at that time and so absolutely frightened of my mother's seeming abandon at the moment I might have [been] a little bit more responsive. Perhaps [I could have] satisfied both of us and our mutual tremendous
sexual needs. It could have developed into a beautiful sexual relationship.
8
By then, David had been driving his mother back and forth across the country for several years. “I had been more faithful to her than her own husband,” he confided. “We had a very beautiful, marvelous wonderful mutual spiritual and filial relationship which was beyond what any actual fleshly sex could have ever been.”
Since his father had resigned his pastorate in Ukiah back in the summer of 1917, Hjalmer and his wife had been spending less and less time together. Virginia was clearly the star attraction of the Berg Evangelistic Dramatic Company.
Life on the road was hard on David. He never graduated from high school in Miami, but later managed to get his diploma at age nineteen at Monterey Union High School on the central California coast, where his older brother worked as a teacher.
Other young men Berg's age were valiantly marching off to World War II. David was in his twenties and spent the war years helping his mother with her revival meetingsâjust as he'd always done. Writing in his diary on March 28, 1941, Berg confessed that he “awoke with a deep desire to strike out on my own, at least to âprove myself.'
“Took stock of my abilitiesâwith not very encouraging results on the side of job experience and health. Fair intelligence and singing voice. Can speak if compelled to. Knowledge of spiritual things. Inclined to feel inferior because of poor physique. Never had a job, was always different from the other boys.”
9
Writing in his diary later that year, Berg reveals how a government agent told him that the best way to stay out of the war was to get ordained and “enter a plea of mother's dependency on my help.” Five days later, on September 25, 1941, Berg writes that he was “ordained today by Dr. Jay C. Kellogg, President of the British-American Ministerial Federation. I'm now a full-fledged minister!”
During the war Berg obtained conscientious objector status with the Army Corps of Engineers and a disability discharge because of a heart ailment.
Two years later, he met his wife, Jane Miller, the secretary and youth director at an Alliance congregation in southern California, the Little Church of Sherman Oaks. He was there helping his mother stage revival meetings. They eloped and married in Glendale, California, on July 22, 1944, and took off to Palm Springs. Deborah, their first child, was born September 10, 1945, followed by their first son, Aaron, on June 21, 1947.
Berg was ready to head out on his own. But he was still working as his mother's song leader in 1948 when the Berg Evangelistic Dramatic Company rolled into Richmond, California, for yet another round of revival meetings. “I knew them both quite well,” said the Reverend Charlie Dale, the pastor of the Richmond Alliance Church from 1945 to 1952. “Virginia held lots of meetings in our church. She was a good preacher and an intelligent woman. David was uneducatedânever really went to college or seminaryâand always seemed closely tied to his mother.
10
“David was ordained [into the Alliance churches] in 1947 or 1948,” the old preacher recalled. “I remember that because I gave him a suit of clothes for his ordinationâa zoot suit.”
Berg started his first and only position as an Alliance pastor when he was assigned to a struggling church in Valley Farms, Arizona.
Valley Farms was born out of the Great Depression, one of thirty-seven communities created by the Resettlement Administration, a federal agency established in 1935. One of the most controversial experiments of the New Deal, the idea behind this part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's recovery plan was to relocate struggling families to cooperative farms and “garden cities.”
By the spring of 1940, the federal government had spent $817,000 to build sixty simple homes and a grocery store/community center in the sun-baked fields outside Florence, Arizona. Government photographs designed to show off the program's collective accomplishments depict children picking flowers outside a freshly whitewashed adobe home, neatly stacked bales of hay in a new barn, and dairy cattle poking their heads through a new fence. Another image, “Leaving the Grocery Store at Casa Grande Farms,” depicts three women and a
young girl wearing their Sunday best as they emerge through the front door of the new community center.
Berg arrived eight years later with Jane and the first of their two young children. The Depression was over, as well as World War II and the collective experiment at Valley Farms. Berg was almost thirty years old and finally able to step out of his mother's shadow and into his own pulpit.
Sometime between Christmas and New Year's Day, Berg sent out his first fundraising letterâto his mother's network of supporters.
This was intended to be our Christmas greeting to you, but we have been so busy moving, getting settled, and taking up work here that we have been delayed in getting it off to you. We hope you have had a very blessed Christmas season! Our own hearts are simply welling over with praises to Him this season for all the manifold blessings with which He has showered us, especially the glorious opportunity which He has given us here in Valley Farms. We are preparing to build a church in this churchless community, just such pioneering missionary work that we have been longing to do, feeling keenly the Lord's command to go out into the highways and byways and compel them to go inâ¦.
How grateful we are for our training in the evangelistic field for this type of work, especially the lessons learned in living the life of faith and for Mother's inspiring example and teaching along this line! She is now in Santa Barbara with Dad preparing for another evangelistic tour.
11
At the Colorado Springs headquarters of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, it's hard to find any records or any person able to shed light on what happened following Berg's appointment to lead the flock at Valley Farms. But something happened at Valley Farms. There was a sex scandal or a political controversy or something. David Berg got kicked out of town and was never the same again.
His appointment to the church was reported in the February 5, 1949, edition of the denomination's official publication,
Alliance
Weekly
, which lists his name among six “New Workers” sent out to missionary assignments around the country. His name reappears in the magazine two years later, in the May 5, 1951, edition under the “Transfers” section of the church news column. There are twenty-seven transfers reported in the column. Only two pastors, including Berg, are listed as “Unassigned.”
The Christian and Missionary Alliance was founded by the Reverend Albert Benjamin Simpson in 1887. Simpson was a Presbyterian minister swept up in the faith healing, holiness, and apocalyptic Christian revivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the year 2005 the Alliance would claim nearly 2,000 churches attended by 420,000 people in the United States. Internationally, the denomination reports another 18,000 churches and three million members in eighty-four countries.
No one at the Christian and Missionary Alliance could shed light on this early chapter in the life of David Berg. Officials at the denomination's Colorado Springs headquarters said any documents would have been kept at its South Pacific District office in Riverside, California. Don Brust, the district superintendent there, said he could find no records explaining whatever happened to David Berg or his flock.
Harold Mangham, who preceded Brust as district superintendent, remembers the congregation, but not Berg. “Yes, we had a church in that community,” Mangham said. “It was an interesting place. Roosevelt set it up. It was kind of like a kibbutz that you might find in Israel.” Mangham said he made several visits to Valley Farms and remembers that the congregation was still struggling when he left his post in 1987.
Two young women who were assigned to Valley Farms in 1947 preceded Berg as the first missionaries sent out by the Alliance. One of them was Betty Findley. “We were just missionary girls back then, but we had a large youth group and held six meetings a week at the community center,” Betty recalled. “We used to call the place âLittle Russia.' People didn't have their own thingsâthey were all together. They farmed together, and I guess they shared the profits.”
Findley stayed at the Valley Farms cooperative until she left to marry and has just a vague memory of the man who would succeed
her. “He came after I left, but I remember seeing him at some of our revivals. I didn't really hear anything against him, but I'd like to know why he left, too.”
12
Charlie Dale recalled a story about how David dug a big hole for a swimming pool on the church property, then used the clay to make adobe brick for a little chapel. Deborah Berg remembers her father collecting bricks from nearby ruins to build his church. Berg stated his intentions to build a church at Valley Farms in his Christmas fundraising letter of 1948. Services were being held in the home of the “women missionaries who preceded us here,” he wrote, until “a modest chapel can be erected on the adjoining lot.
“The entire property is being purchased at a very reasonable figure on long-term payments,” Berg wrote. “We expect to begin building the first little church in Valley Farms next month, the Lord willing. Far removed from the nearest towns with churches, this village is sorely in need of such a Gospel Lighthouse, especially for the sake of the young people and children.”
13
Valley Farms is a ninety-minute drive from Tucson via the Pinal Pioneer Parkway, a road that winds through desert landscape dotted with sagebrush and saguaro, the stately cactus and proud symbol of the Arizona highway. Most of the sixty homes built by the Resettlement Administration stand today in various states of disrepair. Some have been abandoned. Others have been expanded in an architectural style inspired by generations of poverty and an absence of building codes.
Berg's adobe church was still there. Along its sides the original adobe peeked through cracked pink plaster. Several of the windows were boarded up. There was an old dishwasher, toilet, and other trashed appliances piled near double doors that once led into the sanctuary. A cross of white bricks adorning the building's beige facade confirmed its history as a house of worship, but the Christian beacon was mostly hidden behind an overgrown shrub. There was no evidence of a swimming pool in the backyard, just a weedy lot facing a golden field of freshly cut hay.
No one answered the door, but a neighbor working on a truck provided some information. “It hasn't been used as a church for years,”
he said. “There were some Mexicans living in there, but I think the place is abandoned.”
Ruby Webb was the only Valley Farms resident left from the time Berg was there. Ruby lives in a trailer down the street from the abandoned church. Her place faces a dusty parking area and the only sign of the town's collective pastâa brick monument with an old plow and faded letters. “Welcome to Valley FarmsâEstablished 1934.”
Ruby moved here in 1941, but had been alone since her husband, Floyd, died in 2002. She said the old collective spirit of Valley Farms died a long time before her husband. According to the local gossip, the church that David Berg built was a drug house in its most recent incarnation. “You used to know everybody in town,” Ruby sighed. “Now you have to lock your doors.”