New Religious Movements
Church of All Worlds
Neopagan Organization
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Origin 1962 to 1968
A Neopagan religious organization begun informally in 1962 by Missouri college students Tim Zell, later known as Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, and Lance Christie, who took its name and its idea of a "water-sharing" spiritual family from Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. Formally incorporated in 1968 and granted federal recognition as a tax-exempt religious organization in 1970, it became the first Neopagan church to receive that status in the United States, giving the wider Neopagan movement an early legal foothold. Its theology centers on pantheistic reverence for the Earth as a living being, described through a concept the group calls the Gaia thesis, developed within the organization before a similarly named idea was independently proposed in science by James Lovelock. It continues today as one of the oldest continuously operating Neopagan organizations in the country.
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Origins
Origin Period Place of OriginWestminster College, Fulton, Missouri, United States 1 FounderTim Zell (Oberon Zell-Ravenheart) and Lance Christie 1 Status
Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 1 Legal StatusThe first Neopagan church granted federal tax-exempt religious status in the United States, in 1970, a precedent later Neopagan and Wiccan organizations relied on. 1 Learn More
Water-Sharing, Grokking, and a Legal Church
The Church of All Worlds began, on 7 April 1962, as two Westminster College students in Fulton, Missouri sharing water. Tim Zell, later known as Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, and Lance Christie took both the ritual and the church's name directly from Robert A. Heinlein's 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land, whose fictional Church of All Worlds practiced exactly this water-sharing rite of spiritual kinship.
What began as an homage to a science fiction novel became something more durable. Zell filed for incorporation in 1967, and the Church of All Worlds was granted federal tax-exempt religious status in 1970, the first Neopagan organization in the United States to hold it, a legal precedent later Neopagan and Wiccan organizations relied on when seeking the same recognition. Its theology drew on Heinlein's own coinages, immanent divinity expressed as "Thou art God" and a pantheism summarized as "all that groks is God."
The Church's influence reached well past its own membership through its newsletter, Green Egg, launched in 1968. For years it served as the central forum where the wider, scattered American Pagan community actually talked to itself, and it was instrumental in spreading the very term "Neo-Pagan," which Zell is credited with coining for the family of new religions taking shape around him.
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