The Children of God The Family Author:J. Gordon Melton The Family, as the Children of God were first known, emerged in the late 1960s out of the "Jesus People" movement that attempted to reach a popular subculture. Jesus People came from the broader Evangelical movement, rooted in nineteenth-century questions of faith and authority in the larger American Protestant sphere. The challenges of science... more » to traditional Christian belief united fundamentalists of the 1960s into a broad movement. Initially, David Berg, who founded the Children of God, worked with an inner-city rescue mission in Los Angeles. It was there that he recruited troubled teenagers to his Pentecostal movement and to his gypsy spirit guide named Abrahim. Over the years, the group grew into a free-love experiment, relocated to Europe, underwent a moral reformation, and became a global phenomenon.« less