Giovanna Wood 1942 –

“Gio” grew up on the Bruderhof, but in her early twenties, she struck out on her own, determined to reinvent herself. By the late 1960s she was running a daycare in an inner-city slum, and intent on building a new society, free of oppression. 

It wasn’t long before she found what she thought she was looking for: Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, a Korean cult that attracted thousands of young Americans in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She moved into a house with other members and quickly became a zealous recruiter for the group.

Over time, however, life among the “Moonies” began to lose its luster: “I saw brainwashing, corruption, the abuse of power.” On a visit home to say goodbye to her dying father, the scales fell from her eyes: “Suddenly I knew that Jesus was the only way for me, and the truth; that I was living a lie; and that my bondage to Moon was nothing but darkness.”

Soon Gio and a circle of similarly disaffected housemates, all members of the cult, were reading the Gospels together. By the mid-1970s, nine of them had left the Moonies and come to the Bruderhof. Extricating themselves cost a legal battle. For Gio, it ultimately meant a separation from her husband, Allen, a fellow Moonie. Shortly after their daughter was born, he chose a different path, while she decided to follow her calling with the community.

A teacher at the Bruderhof ever since her return, Gio recently retired from the classroom. But she still loves young people. Sometimes she will warn them against confusing freedom with rebellion: “I thought freedom meant setting aside old values, deciding for myself what was right and wrong, and using my own potential to make a difference in the world. Then I found Jesus. His teachings are not narrow, but based on love, and that love alone is freedom. That love and freedom is what I found here, and what I have come to embrace.”

In 2018, in a remarkable turn of events, Allen, who also left the Moonies in the 1970s and spent years raising cult awareness and working with ex-members of cults, returned to her. In June 2019, after forty years of separation, their marriage was restored at a festive ceremony of reconciliation at the Mount, a Bruderhof north of New York City where they now live near their daughter, Serena, her husband, and their five children.