Jesus People USA (JPUSA)

JPUSA formed in 1972 from a travelling Jesus-movement team and settled in Chicago, pooling income under a common purse, housing members in the Friendly Towers complex, and building ministries — shelters, a seniors' home, Cornerstone magazine (1971–2003), the Cornerstone festival (1984–2012), and the pioneering Christian rock scene around Resurrection Band. Sociologist Shawn David Young describes the community as one of the most significant surviving expressions of the 1960s-70s Jesus movement, blending Christian socialism with countercultural evangelical practice.

Ronald Enroth's 'Recovering from Churches That Abuse' (1994) drew on more than seventy hours of interviews with over forty former members to document harsh discipline, controlled courtship, and pastoral 'covering' authority inside the commune; JPUSA elders had lobbied Enroth beforehand to drop the chapter, and afterward accused him of flawed methodology, a dispute academics split over — Trinity Evangelical's Ruth Tucker defended JPUSA, while Wellspring Retreat director Paul Martin backed Enroth's findings. A 2001 two-part Chicago Tribune series, 'Commune's Iron Grip Tests Faith of Converts', added ex-member accounts of authoritarian control, including a mid-1970s practice of 'adult spankings' introduced by leader Jack Winters and abandoned after about four years, which JPUSA later called a mark of its own 'spiritual immaturity' at the time; the Tribune reported that scores of members left the community after the book's publication, while JPUSA's own response accused the paper of anti-religious bias.

In January 2014 a lawsuit was filed against JPUSA and its parent Evangelical Covenant Church alleging children had been sexually abused by members over decades and that leadership covered it up; the case was dismissed for want of prosecution in March 2015, a procedural outcome that did not adjudicate the underlying allegations. The same year, the documentary 'No Place to Call Home' drew more than seventy former members forward with abuse or assault accounts from their time in the community; the Evangelical Covenant Church states child-protection policies were subsequently implemented and related legal claims settled by 2019. JPUSA issued a public apology to those harmed in March 2023, and a 2024 follow-up documentary, 'Love Song: No Place to Call Home — Ten Years Later', paired with an open letter from survivors pressing for continued transparency in the accountability process.

Now affiliated with the Evangelical Covenant Church, smaller and looser than its roughly 500-member peak, and with the Cornerstone festival long ended, JPUSA is scored at the High band's lower edge: a documented harm history and genuine communal demand from its authoritarian-era decades, set against a present-day community that has publicly apologised, cooperated with reform, and operates openly rather than behind the earlier era's 'covering' discipline.