History & overview · every faith gets one
One law only — love — read out to its last consequence.
Founded as a coffeehouse ministry to street kids by David Berg in Huntington Beach in 1968 and known for most of its life as the Children of God: a hippie-era evangelistic movement that grew into a worldwide network of shared households run by Berg's mailed letters. Its doctrine reduced the law to a single command to love, and from 1974 to 1987 it practised flirty fishing — using sex to evangelise and to raise money. Berg died in 1994; in 2010 the leadership dissolved the communal homes, and the group now exists mainly as an online network.
From 1974 until 1987 the group practised flirty fishing, in which women members used sex to recruit and to raise money. Berg's letters of the same period also sanctioned sexual contact between adults and children; the practice was formally forbidden in 1986 and adult–minor contact made an excommunicable offence. Police raided communities in Argentina, France, Spain and Australia between 1989 and 1993; most criminal proceedings were dismissed. In a custody judgment given in the Family Division of the English High Court in 1995, Lord Justice Alan Ward found that the group had permitted the sexual abuse of minors and severe corporal punishment, and made the child's placement conditional on the group repudiating Berg's teachings on the subject, which it did. On 8 January 2005 Ricky Rodriguez — Karen Zerby's son, and the child whose upbringing the group had published as a manual — killed a former member who had abused him as a small child, and then himself.
Why it is filed this way
The communal structure ended in 2010 in a reorganisation the leadership called the Reboot. Members no longer live together and the shared economy is gone; the movement continues online under Karen Zerby and Steven Kelly.
The founding
Berg, a former Christian and Missionary Alliance pastor in his late forties, took over a coffeehouse ministry to runaways in Huntington Beach in 1968. Within two years the group had left California on a prophecy of earthquake, taken Bible names, and begun living by Berg's circulated letters, which became its working scripture.
Its founding is bound to David Brandt Berg — 1968 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A world in its last days, and a movement inside it that answers to the post.
The divine. Trinitarian in form, with an unusual amount of the devotional weight moved onto the Holy Spirit, addressed as female, and onto Jesus as a lover rather than a judge. In his lifetime Berg was held to be God's endtime prophet, and his letters carried the authority that follows from that..
Death and after. The rapture, the millennium and a resurrection body — expected soon, and dated more than once.