This page was created by Craig Dietrich. 

The Father Divine Project Main Menu "Inside the Kingdom": The Evolution of the Peace Mission "A Greater Picture of ME": The Peace Mission Archive Since the late 1930s, Father Divine and his followers oversaw the documentation of the Peace Mission's own history and public pronouncements in a weekly newspaper, with wire and tape recordings, film and photography. "I Know You Are God": A Database Documentary by Will Luers About The Father Divine Project

Introduction

10
"God married his church"

In April, 1996, The Peace Mission Movement celebrated The 50th Wedding Anniversary of Father and Mother Divine. Within a two week period, seven Holy Communion Banquet services were held at various Peace Mission properties in the Philadelphia area. 

The seventy-one-year-old leader of the Movement, Mother Divine, arrived at the banquet services by limousine, wearing a gown in a style reminiscent of a luxurious wedding in the late 1940s. She greeted the invited guests of Father Divine and then took her place at the head of the long table next to the place set for her "personally absent," but still spiritually present husband. 

Guests from the city's private and public sectors joined followers and co-workers in re-enacting a "divine"celibate union that, to the believers, was a union of races, nations and  most importantly a union of Heaven and Earth. For the hundreds of elderly believers still in the Movement, the marriage was not only between God and his "spotless virgin bride," but between God and themselves, his own church. Peace mission believers, male and female, continue to wear a wedding ring in recognition of this 1946 bond.