David Berg

David Berg

David Berg (born February 18, 1919 in Oakland , California , USA , † October 1, 1994 in Portugal ) was an American preacher and founder of the Children of God religious community .

Life

His father Hjalmar Berg, who came from Sweden, was a preacher in a congregation belonging to the Christian Church . He had to give up his office because he made the healing experience of his wife Virginia, née Brandt, the focus of his preaching. The couple then started their own evangelism team.

Already at his birth - so Berg in his biography - there were a number of prophecies. In 1952 he received a “call from Ezekiel”, in 1962 a “message from Jeremiah”, and in 1965 a warning about the coming end of the world , which was repeated in 1970. He became a preacher like his father and, like his parents, built his own evangelism work.

In 1944 he married Jane Miller from Kentucky , whom he left in the early 1970s in favor of a young girl named Maria (actually Karen Zerby). From his marriage to Jane he had four children, Linda ("Deborah"), Faith ("Faithy"), Jonathan ("Hosea") and Paul ("Aaron").

In the 1960s, Paul, Jonathan and Faith gathered young people on a tour of the USA, whom they named "Teens for Christ". David Berg himself had evangelized among the Californian hippies and created his “revolutionaries for Jesus” from them. With them he met his children's “Teens for Christ”. Together with his followers, he moved from California through the United States based on a vision of one of these youths that California would sink into the sea. In autumn 1969, he created an organized community, the Children of God, in the Canadian region of Laurentides .

Now called "Mose" by his followers, later called "Mose David" or just "MO", he developed the plan of a "world colonization", according to which the world should be covered with "colonies" (communities of the Children of God). The original colony originated on a ranch near Thurber in Texas , which his colleague Fred Jordan had made available. Colonies quickly emerged in many major cities in the USA and, since 1971, in Germany as well.

Berg now separated from Jordan and withdrew from the public. Fierce arguments soon began between parents whose children had joined the Children of God and the leaders of this community. Berg, whose whereabouts remained unknown, only communicated with the outside world through his numerous letters and protected himself against attacks by the parents of his young followers. In early October 1977, two letters appeared announcing his resignation as a prophet, but a spokeswoman for the Children of God called the letters a forgery.

Teaching and practice

According to the book Not Without My Sisters , David Berg (Mo) taught that the world would end in 1993 and only the Children of God would be spared God's wrath. For this, the children born in the sect would have to grow up free from the "system". In the camps for children and adolescents, they were brought up with extreme rigor; the slightest “mistake” was followed by severe penalties. They had to study the "Mon letters" that u. a. Showed pictures of sex with children and babies and depictions of the cruel criminal practice of the Children of God. (Most of these letters were later disposed of to destroy evidence.) Insubordinate children were forced to do hard labor, humiliated, isolated, and physically abused in front of others. Many women offered themselves to "flirty fishing", i. that is, they tried to lure men into the sect with sex. David Berg equated love with sex; Sex was freely practiced in front of and with children. Families were separated from one another so that the children did not experience their parents and siblings as families, but should consider the Children of God as their family. Many sect members saw no way out of total control and committed suicide.

literature

• Horst Reller (Ed. For the VELKD working group on behalf of the Lutheran Church Office): Handbook of Religious Communities. Free churches, special communities, sects, ideological communities, new religions. 2nd edition Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, Gütersloh 1979, ISBN 3-579-03585-1 .
• Celeste Jones, Kristina Jones and Juliana Buhring: Not without my sisters. Trapped and abused in a sect - our real story . Rheda-Wiedenbrück 2008.

Web links

• Literature by and about David Berg in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about David Berg in the WorldCat bibliographic database