Jesus Freaks (6 page)
Authors: Don Lattin
David and Jane Berg sit in front of three of their children (l-r) Aaron, Faithy, and Hosea in this 1964 photo. (Their oldest daughter, Deborah, is not pictured.)
IT WAS JUST
a small item in
Alliance Witness
, the official publication of the Christian and Missionary Alliance.
Information has been received concerning the homecoming of Mrs. Virginia Brandt Berg, in Huntington Beach, Calif., on March 15. Her death in her eighty-second year concluded more
than fifty years of evangelism, gospel broadcasting and writingâ¦. She is survived by a daughter, Virginia, and two sons, Dr. Hjalmer Berg and Rev. David Berg, director of Teens for Christ in Huntington Beach.
1
Mama Berg was dead, but mom was right. There was a sea of lost souls ready to be saved along the California coast.
Things had not been going well for David Berg since his 1966 falling out with Fred Jordan, his old boss from the American Soul Clinic. Berg had traveled around the country in his mobile home with Jane and the kids, singing hymns and preaching about how all the churches were corrupt and the Endtime was at hand.
Berg started using the name “Teens for Christ” in 1966, pushing his two sons, Aaron, nineteen, and Hosea, seventeen, into the limelight. “Here's some good news about teens for a change. They like to witness instead of Watusi, preach rather than protest, and win rather than sin,” Berg wrote. “Would you like to have them at your church? Contact or write them
today
. Tomorrow may be too late!”
2
Early photos of the troupe confirm Kent Philpott's memories. They show Aaron and Hosea in dark suits, white shirts, and ties. Berg had yet to realize that suits and ties were on the way out and the counterculture was on the way in. By the end of 1967 he and his family were broke and on the way to live at Virginia Berg's house in Huntington Beach.
What would one day become The Family got its start when Berg's kids got a job singing one night a week at the Light Club, a youth ministry in Huntington Beach started by Teen Challenge, an arm of the Assemblies of God, one of the nation's largest Pentecostal denominations. Before long, they had taken over the ministry.
His mother's death in March 1968 set David Berg free. He started sounding like a prophet, not an assistant pastor stuck in his mother's shadow. Berg had finally found a following with his radical denunciation of “the system”âthe established churches, the government, the business world, and all those clueless parents. It was us-versus-them. He was the Endtime Prophet. They were the established churches. They were the government. They were the corporations. They were all those
parents who just did not get it. Berg was still growing up, still rebelling against mother. Notice how a fifty-one-year-old Berg uses the words “our parents” in a sermon delivered to “the kids” on March 8, 1970:
The parents want them to follow in their footsteps in a selfish dog-eat-dog economy in which they not only murder one another, but they conduct massive slaughters of whole nationsâ¦.
The young people are sick and fed up with what really amounts to a pagan, cruel, whore-mongering, false Christianity. They're trying to return to the peace-loving religions of old, including ancient Christianity, and the parents will have none of itâ¦.
We are the true lovers of peace and love and truth and beauty and God and freedom: whereas you, our parentsâ¦are on the brink of destroying and polluting all of us and our world if we do not rise up against you in the name of God and try to stop you.
3
Early newspaper accounts on the Light Club began to worry local parents and church leaders. One night a reporter observed a sandal-clad David Berg performing “betrothal ceremonies,” including one between a twenty-one-year-old man and a sixteen-year-old girl. Faithy Berg explained the ceremony to the reporter. “It's as good as getting married,” said Faithy, who was just seventeen years old and already betrothed. “You make the vows and everything. I guess it's like an engagement, but stronger.”
4
Locals started calling the club “the hippie church.” It was at 116 Main Street, just a few steps from Huntington Pier. There were colored lights, Bible verses written on the walls, patches of used carpet, folding chairs, and a half-dozen large telephone cable spools for tables. There was an elevated stage that served as a combination altar/bandstand.
Potential converts walked in off the beach, passing under a white peace dove emblazoned over the door. The Light Club opened nightly at 8
P.M.
and kept going until past midnight, fueled by free coffee. Aaron and Faithy would strum guitars and sing pop songs interspersed with spiritual phrases.
Before long, the proselytizing would begin one-on-one. “How are you? Do you know Christ?” It could get intense, especially for those who just came for the free sandwiches. “They are always pushing this religion on us; they never leave us alone,” one visitor complained. “When you go in every night, it gets on your nerves.”
5
Berg's early followers took his message to the beaches, parks, and college campuses of southern California. They demonstrated at local churches and accused them of heresy. In late 1968, six of the Endtime Prophet's Christian revolutionaries were arrested and charged with trespassing when they refused to stop handing out religious tracts at a Huntington Beach college. Berg responded by sending eighteen robed members of his teenage shock troops back to the college to picket. Berg stayed in his car during the picketing and watched from afar.
“We had sit-ins, march-ins, protests and everything the kids loved,” Berg would later brag. “Everything that was radical. It was just going great! Terrific! And I loved it! I was master-minding the whole thing from behind the scenes with Jesus!”
6
At first, most people saw Berg's flock as just another part of the Jesus movementâhippies and political radicals who saw Jesus of Nazareth as the symbol of true revolution. “It was happening all across LA and California,” said Shula Berg, an early convert who would later have a child by Berg's oldest son, Aaron. “God's spirit was coming upon people. God was trying to reach the hippies and do a whole new thing with the church. The church had no clue what to do.”
7
David Berg's children brought many early devotees into the foldâespecially Aaron, who wrote many of the songs that would inspire the first wave of converts. He would also foreshadow the madness that would soon envelop The Family. “Aaron was the big show in Huntington Beach. Here was this guy, writing songs, playing guitar. He'd start singing and his hair, blond and curly, would stand on end. He looked like Einstein,” Shula recalled. “Aaron was like an encounter with God. Revivals are started by spiritual anointing, a power encounter with the presence of god. Aaron had that spirit.”
In his own account of the early days, David Berg credits his younger son, Hosea, for gaining control of the Huntington Beach club. “He was begging me to come down and teach the hippies the BibleââLike
you taught us, Dad!' But I said, âWell, I'll have to come down and see first.'
So I was trying to get to know the hippies and see what they were like, hanging around all their haunts. I grew a little beard and I put on some old ragged sneakers, a ragged pair of pants, an old ragged black jacket, my beret and dark glasses and I probably looked like a pusher or something! The police used to really give me the eye when I passed by. But that seemed to be the style, to dress as ragged and as bummy as possible. Only they wore a lot of freaky clothes too, and I got to where I was finally wearing a Japanese kimono, a little more fitting to my style.
So I came into the club one night, sort of staggering in like some old bum. I wanted to see what it was like, because I'd never been there and [Hosea] wanted me to come down and teach. I thought, “Well, I ought to scout out the land a little bit first.” So I staggered in the door and saw a spot over in the corner that was vacantâyou had to step over bodies and everything to get to itâI threw myself down in the corner. And this nice little blond boy beside me, I remember him yet, he said, “Hi Dad, what's your bag?” I didn't even know what a bag was then.
8
After a few undercover visits, Berg decided to reveal himself. He waited one night until the Light Club was packed with seventy-five singing, clapping converts.
[Hosea's wife] was singing so I waited till she came to the end of her song and she was just leaving the stage. I knew [Hosea] was probably waiting to introduce me. So I flung the door open and I leaped in and I thundered at the top of my voiceâand I can yell pretty loudâ“Revolution for Jesus!” And then they roared: “For Jesus!” I said, “Come on, you can do better than that! When I say, “Revolution!” you answer me back, “For Jesus!” So that got to be our battle cry and the way I introduced myself every night from then onâ¦. I really had the age barrier
to break, because they didn't trust anybody over thirty. I had to really prove I was one of them.
David Berg took off his tie, let his hair and beard grow, and began to preach “the gospel of rebellion.” Some of his early sermons sound like they were written by a teenage rebel, not a man in his early fifties. They were as much a rebellion against all those stupid parents out there than they were a prophetic witness against social injustice.
People never cut their hair until the past hundred years. Men had beardsâ¦. Sandals and bare feet were popular throughout the ages. What are the parents complaining about? They're complaining that their children are returning to the customs of their forefathers. It's the parents who are the rebels. The kids want to return to the pattern of the cooperative, socialistic, communal living of the tribalism of their forefathers. That's the most ancient and longest lasting of any economic systemâthe economic system of tribalismâancient socialism.
9
Berg's tribe was growing, and he was about to find another way to break the age barrier. In January 1969, he met and began seducing Karen Elva Zerby, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of a conservative Tucson preacher. Karen was a few years older than many of the teenage converts, but she didn't look like it. “When she lets her hair fall down, she looks like she's about fourteen,” Berg recalled years later. “When I used to take her out places with her hair down they looked at me like I was really robbing the cradle!”
10
Like David Berg, and his mother, Virginia, Karen Zerby was a preacher's kid. She was born in Camden, New Jersey, on July 31, 1946. Her dad was a Methodist minister who served in the Wesleyan and Pilgrim Holiness churches. Her parents moved to Tucson in 1964 when Karen was eighteen.
Her younger sister, Rosemary, said their father was stern, but loving. “We did get paddled and it did hurt. But it was always fair. We knew we deserved it. He talked to us about it. But it was never anywhere but on the bottom. He didn't whip us. He wasn't beating us.
He was a great father. My father is one of the best men I have ever met.”
11
Karen enrolled at the University of Arizona after her family moved to Tucson, but she dropped out after a year to work as a legal secretary and help her struggling parents pay their bills. “Karen was their first child. She had always been good to them,” Rosemary recalled. “They loved her. They loved all of us, but she was the first. She had always been there for them. My younger sister and I were the goofballs. Karen wasn't. She had always been the best of the three of us.”
Karen agreed. “I was taught by my parents and church that it was displeasing to the Lord to smoke, drink, dance, wear make-up, jewelry or have short hair, attend movies or even watch
TV
. We didn't have a
TV
until I was sixteen, and we listened to radio seldom,” she said. “To me, obeying my parents was obeying the Lordâ¦unlike my sister, two years younger, who was very rebellious.”
12
Karen was very idealistic and very religious. Rosemary remembers her walking back and forth under the trees in their large backyard every morning, reading her Bible. She took her Bible to her job at the law firm. This was the late sixties, a time when few young people did that kind of thing. “Karen had never held hands with a man until she met The Family,” Rosemary said. “She would maybe bring someone from the church and we'd sit and eat. She went out with other couples, but she hadn't even held hands with a guy. She felt it was not the right thing to do.”
According to Rosemary, Karen's dream was to minister to all the teenagers she saw hanging out on the street in Tucson. She had gone from church to church to find someone willing to sponsor her in that ministry, but no one seemed interested. Then, one day in January 1969, she met the Teens for Christ at an evangelical convention in Phoenix. Two of Berg's children, Faithy and Hosea, were singing at the assembly and telling local preachers how to reach counterculture converts. After the meeting, Karen ran into Faithy Berg in the ladies room.