From Street Ministry to a Closed Prophetic Movement

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

David Berg began in 1968 the way many countercultural ministries of the era did, running a coffeehouse outreach called Teens for Christ among young people on the fringes of Huntington Beach, California. What set his group apart was not its start but what he built once it had followers: rather than remain a local mission, it became Children of God, an organization whose doctrine he issued personally and continuously through a stream of circulated letters that eventually numbered in the thousands. Berg wrote as Moses David, a name that separated the author from any single face or fixed location, and used the letters to redirect the group's theology, its communal living arrangements and its recruiting practices as he saw fit. That mechanism, a founder governing an international membership almost entirely through his own written word rather than through any independent structure, is what distinguishes Children of God from an ordinary new church: authority stayed personal and largely unaccountable for as long as Berg lived, and the movement's later controversies traced directly back to instructions issued this way. Berg was born on 18 February 1919 in Oakland, California, to parents who were themselves evangelists, and by the late 1940s he was ordained in the Christian and Missionary Alliance, which later expelled him over doctrinal disputes and alleged misconduct before he worked under evangelist Fred Jordan at the Soul Clinic.