Jesus Freaks Read Online Free PDF

money. 1
    John Lincoln Brandt married Nina Marquis, who came from an old Indiana family that claimed Daniel Boone as one of its ancestors.John and Nina had five children, including David’s mother, Virginia, who was born on May 27, 1886, in Ronceverte, West Virginia.
    Virginia Brandt Berg’s own ministry began with the Florence Crittenton Mission, a national network of homes for wayward girls. That’s also how she met her husband, Hjalmer Berg, a striking Swedish tenor who had come to perform at a Crittenton Home social event held in Virginia’s honor in Ogden, Utah.
    Hjalmer was born into a large, poor family in southern Sweden. His father was a shoe cobbler. Before they immigrated to America, his family made extra money during the summer in Sweden as wandering minstrels putting on musical and acrobatic shows. Hjalmer kept up that tradition in the United States, where he got a job as a bookkeeper for the Southern Pacific Railroad but earned additional income as a concert singer on summer tours.
    Inspired by his famous father-in-law, the Reverend John L. Brandt, Hjalmer Berg interrupted his railroad job, went to a seminary in Iowa, and was ordained a minister in the Disciples of Christ, a Protestant denomination that grew out of the antidenominationalism of the Campbellites. He and Virginia moved to northern California when Hjalmer landed a job as the pastor of a Disciples of Christ congregation in Ukiah, a lumber and farming community north of San Francisco.
    David was the youngest of Virginia and Hjalmer’s three children, and as his mother tells the story, he should never have been born.
    On Christmas morning, 1911, his mother was on her way home from the hospital with her first son, Hjalmer Berg Jr. Christmas had always been her favorite day of the year, and this day seemed no different as she rode home in the morning light. Then, without warning, tragedy stuck. Virginia was thrown from her carriage onto a curbstone, breaking her back in two places. “How strangely God works,” she would later write in her most famous sermon. “How swiftly, unexpectedly, tragedy can walk across life’s path.” 2
    Her next five years, or so the story goes, were full of agony, pain, suffering, and despair. She was paralyzed from the waist down, lying on rubber cushions, her face gaunt, her body emaciated. She and her husband had long prayed for her suffering to end, and then, on a Saturdaymorning in 1916, Virginia woke up in the bedroom of their home. “At that very moment I was healed! The paralysis had gone from my body! I felt cool and rested and sat upright in bed.”
    On the following Sunday morning, to the amazement of the Ukiah congregation, Virginia Brandt Berg walked into the sanctuary of her husband’s church. It was a journey she would later describe in her sermon, “From Deathbed to Pulpit,” a story that would launch Virginia’s career as one of the nation’s first woman evangelists and host of a pioneering Gospel radio show called “Meditation Moments.”
    David would learn the tricks of the traveling evangelists at his mother’s side. Tricks, or at least a few lies, had found their way into Virginia’s famous sermon. Deborah Berg, Virginia’s granddaughter and David’s oldest child, would later point out that the famous lady evangelist had been attending graduate school at Texas Christian University and having her second child during the five years she claimed to have been a bedridden invalid in Ukiah. That child, the couple’s only daughter, ran away from home and eloped at age sixteen. Hjalmer Jr. turned away from the church and became an atheist. That left young David as the only child to continue Virginia’s evangelical career.
    David Brandt Berg was born in Oakland, California, on February 18, 1919.
    â€œAt first he was a fat and robust little fellow,” his mother wrote in a letter to a friend. “But I overfed him