End of Days by Sylvia Browne

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 9th, 2022 in Stories

Jeffrey Lundgren was born in Independence, Missouri, in 1950 to parents who were active in a Mormon splinter group called the Reorganized Church of Latter-day Saints. His father was a strict disciplinarian with a passion for firearms, a passion he eagerly shared with his son. His mother, by all accounts, was a rigid, fairly distant woman.

Jeffrey was a rather chubby, unattractive, inexplicably arrogant boy without a shred of talent for sports or other activities that traditionally inspire admiration among schoolmates. What he did have an uncanny talent for was memorizing and reciting endless biblical passages, and he learned very early in life that the appearance of an unusual closeness to God—even if it was utterly insincere and acquired only by rote—was an easy way to establish his popularity and self-proclaimed superiority.

He was attending Central Missouri State University when he met and began dating a fellow RLDS student named Alice Keeler. Alice was a shy loner who’d grown up with a father who was often depressed and violent toward her and her siblings when using his vast array of multiple sclerosis medications, and a mother who worked long hard hours to support the family. An RLDS leader had once told her that she would meet and marry a prophet of true greatness, so when she began dating and became pregnant by Jeffrey Lundgren, she assumed he must be that prophet of true greatness and became his slavishly obedient wife.

After four years in the navy, Lundgren was unsuccessful at any number of jobs because of his arrogance and irresponsibility. He was also an abusive husband and serial philanderer, while Alice stood by her man, bore his four children, and continued clinging to her marriage, assuming there could be nothing but hell to pay for walking out on an RLDS prophet of true greatness.

In the meantime, Jeffrey was becoming disenchanted with the RLDS and decided to form his own sect, essentially a splinter group of this Mormon splinter group. He proclaimed himself the one whose divine mission it was to unearth the truth in the Holy Bible,

and his childhood talent of reciting endless biblical passages worked just as effectively to attract followers when he was an arrogant, abusive, philandering, flat- broke father of four. Those followers were classic examples of perfectly decent, earnest, devout people who simply bought into the very skilled act of a very skilled fraud. One of them in later years said that when Jeffrey Lundgren came along, he felt for the first time as if he’d found a family where he belonged and where he was wanted. Another made this simple, tragic statement: “I felt like everything I’d ever done, I’d failed at. Jeffrey made me feel as if finally I could do something right, and something important, by following him and doing God’s work.”

His growing flock began donating money to support Jeffrey and his family, but he quickly grew dissatisfied with the modest donations and announced that according to orders from the Bible itself, it was time for him and his family to move to Kirtland, Ohio, where God would be endowing him with his true messianic power.

Kirtland, Ohio, wasn’t a random destination for Jeffrey Lundgren. Based on a “revelation from God,” Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon Church, had a huge, magnificent temple built there in 1836, and Jeffrey and Alice Lundgren quickly secured jobs as tour guides at the temple when they moved to Kirtland in 1984. It didn’t take long for Jeffrey to become dissatisfied with his meager tour guide salary, and he began dipping into the temple’s donations and profits to the tune of what’s estimated to be from $25,000 to $30,000.

Jeffrey’s job as an RLDS guide gave him access to visitors from around the country, and during tours he would teach and preach his own unorthodox, messianic, self-absorbed version of the scriptures. His proclamations of himself as a prophet and the reincarnated Christ, along with an arrogance that the vulnerable and naive translated as spiritual superiority, began inspiring followers to move to Kirtland to learn at the feet of this charismatic man who promised them salvation from the impending Armageddon.