Hi, Larry.
I joined November '71 7 left July '74.
I had rejected the Gospel a dozen times or so in high school, and probably another dozen times in college, and was pretty attuned to the counterculture, but had seen some really freakish and scary stuff in Yoga (heavily demonized). A simple Christian guy in my dorm rebuked one of those spirits silently, and felt its terror, and then its rage as it left my body.
I reasoned that if that was real, so was the God by whose name the Yoga reality was overcome. I put Jesus a whole lot higher on my "Ascended Masters" list--I didn't get saved yet.
I had worked in the medical tent of a week-long rock festival the COG were at. They fed me oatmeal, but they really annoyed me, so I ignored them. A 16-hour shift was worked at the festival--8 in the tent, 8 picking up overdoses and getting them back to the tent, then 8 off. I had to rush an emergency to a hospital on the last day, and had no further contact with the COG till I was back at school. I diid have a couple of psychics tell me some weird stuff they predicted was going to happen, which did cause me to eventually join, against mine and my family's better judgement--I really broke my Dad's heart.
The COG found me on campus back at NTSU, in Denton, Texas, learned my schedule, and recruited me, by their usual hardcore "love-bombing" (yes, I know the term belongs to the Moonies), and appeal to the counterculture BS they claimed to enbody.
I joined them completely unsaved. That happened while memorizing the "Set Card" so I could eat (no new memory verse, no food!). It turns out I had a really high IQ, and practically a photographic/eidetic memory--I memorized THOUSANDS of verses--I was quiet about it; though. I also got baptized in the Spirit on my own, on guard duty in Brownsville. I grew up in Latin America, so I translated Lit for the first teams into Mexico and Central and South America.
My Dad was the American head of the Oil and Gas Exploration of the company working for the Mexican monopoly. TF leadership assumed they could work him as a "king"--they couldn't, and I lost favor. I was the head provisioner for Mexico City, and then Cuernavaca, then the "Selah" farm out in Toluca, where the Radio was, connecting the Berg, et al. I saw him in Cuernavaca--he had an evil look; I swear.
God went to a lot of trouble to plant a lot of "seeds" to deliver me from the cult. That's another story.
When I got out on Independence Day, '74 (God's sense of humor!), my pregnant wife and her son and I traveled to Eugene, Oregon. There, we soon began to fellowship with "Shiloh Youth Revival Centers" people--very "hippier than thou", and very stuck on the insistence of the superiority of communal living as the best way to discipleship--their leadership (still trying to buy up and entire town and own it TODAY--just got the alumnus email!) got greedy, and got kicked out, and went back up under Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa, California as a renewed and healthy ministry.
The leader of Shiloh was John Higgins--doctrinally correct (especially compared to David Berg) but with somewhat of a "Hippie Messiah" complex; if you will (still appears to have it--he wants to purchase the entire main street of the new "totally Christian" town-in- the-making.)
John Higgins and a guy named Lonnie Frisbee were practically the very first two Jesus people; technically, Larry--Don Lattin researched all that in "Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge". Lonnie Fribee led John Wimber into the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and that started the Vineyard (along with some Calvary Chapel influence.
I have attended the Vineyard in Houston, Texas, for over thirty years, now.
They (Frisbee and Higgins)got together in '63, NOT the 1968 "Jesus Revolution" Berg and his follwers claimed for themselves. Frisbee preached in Africa to huge crowds, but got messed up back in the States by the "Shepherding Movement", and backslid back into his pre-marriage gay lifestyle, got AIDS and died.
Higgins built a HUGE Bible School outside of Eugene, Oregon, and raked in a LOT of cash from new disciples in cities all over the country. They had a "one purse" doctrine, which left all but a very few very poor.
On the communal thing--Linda Meisner, Russ Griggs, Jack Sparks, The JPUSA/Servant Band, German Jesus People, etc., all made the same mistake. Like Walter Martin, the cult expert, once said, "Christian communes hardly ever have worked out, throughout history--some kind of self-righteousness, selfishness or perversion kills them--some false doctrine, or overemphasis...", or words to that effect.
When Christ was born, there was "no room at the inn". Similarly, fifty days after the Feast of Tabernacles, Jerusalem was crowded, too, and 8,000 plus people had just entered the Kingdom of God, and would soon be traveling back to their respectives homes all over the known world.
And they worked when they got there--no mooching, busking, lying/begging, etc.
And, by the time Paul wrote the Thessalonians, to tell them that, if they insisted on abusing the Lord's Supper by using it to overeat and get drunk, that they had "their own homes" to do that in"--prooftext for no more communal life necessary for "100% discipleship".
The "Jesus People" bought into Berg's doctrines in more ways than one--communalism forces a situation where their are seducers who "are sensual, separating themselves, and NOT having the Spirit". End of story.
'Later, Larry. Enjoy your project.