The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

Many veteran Temple members realized that the affiliation was a sham, just one more distasteful thing Jones had to do for the socialist cause—“We all knew that the Disciples of Christ thing was just for the tax write-off, nobody took it seriously, Jim least of all,” former follower Alan Swanson recalls—but the Temple filed annual membership and income reports to the denomination office. These had to be reasonably accurate—the Disciples of Christ office could always send examiners to check. By 1973, Peoples Temple of Redwood Valley claimed 2,570 members, with only thirty listed as regularly “non-participating” in services and church programs. Its annual income was estimated at $300,000 (the equivalent of approximately $1.7 million today), with so much expended on its own outreach efforts that only $1,080 remained to be forwarded to the Disciples of Christ in support of denominational operating costs and activities. Peoples Temple was finally on sound financial footing. As church operations expanded, so did Jones’s demands on its members. Jones had their money and personal possessions, but he also wanted their time.