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| parents = | children = }} Karen Elva Zerby (born July 31, 1946) is the current leader of the new religious movement formerly called the Children of God, now renamed The Family International (TFI). She also goes by the names Mama Maria, Maria David,〔 and Queen Maria.〔 ==Biography== Zerby was raised in evangelical Pentecostalism; her father was a Nazarene minister, and she is credited with bringing the "fundamental Pentecostal principle of being 'spirit-led'" into the church she eventually came to lead. Going by the name Maria she joined the group, then called ''Teens for Christ'', in 1969. After becoming a secretary to David Berg, the group's founder, a sexual relationship started between the two. Eventually Berg left his first wife and Zerby became his wife. Soon after leaving Miller, Berg told the group about a prophecy called "The Old Church and the New Church", which was viewed by some as his justification for leaving his first wife. In 1975, while living in Tenerife, Spain, Zerby had a son, Ricky Rodriguez.〔 Rodriguez's childhood (Berg was his stepfather) was recorded in a book called ''The Story of Davidito'', which was meant to be an example to other members on how to raise their children, and featured photos of Ricky Rodriguez being sexually molested. The book is controversial for its encouragement of child sexual abuse.〔 The church leadership in this period was highly secretive, living in remote locations and being barely seen by anyone; Zerby was known to the church's followers mostly from cartoons in the Berg-penned ''MO Letters'', as well as the various nude photos of Zerby which Berg included in his publications.〔 In January 2005, Rodriguez killed his childhood nanny Angela Smith (a former member of the cult who sexually molested Rodriguez); hours later Rodriguez committed suicide. In a video recorded the night before, "he said he saw himself as a vigilante avenging children like him and his sisters who had been subject to rapes and beatings". Apparently, he had been looking for his mother and for his stepsister: "He wanted to see his mother prosecuted for child abuse, and to free Techi from the group". By the mid-1980s Zerby began to issue edicts of her own. Throughout the 1980s she dictated and enforced elements of discipline, ending for instance a training program for children she deemed too harsh.〔 With David Berg's health declining in the late 1980s, Zerby, having been groomed for the position, essentially took over the leadership position in 1988, and in 1994, at Berg's death, she married Steve Kelley, another cult leader, and assumed the spiritual leadership of the cult.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Karen Zerby」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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