History & overview · every faith gets one
Speak the decree out loud, fast, and the light answers.
The Ascended Master teaching as Mark L. Prophet and then Elizabeth Clare Prophet delivered it: a hierarchy of masters — El Morya, Saint Germain, Jesus — who dictate through a messenger, and a practice of decrees spoken rapidly aloud, held to direct the violet flame at the world's trouble and one's own. The Summit Lighthouse was founded in Washington DC in 1958; the church was incorporated in 1975 and moved to the Royal Teton Ranch in Montana in 1986.
In 1989 the church's vice-president Edward Francis — Elizabeth Clare Prophet's husband — and a staff member, Vernon Hamilton, were arrested and convicted of buying semi-automatic weapons under false names. Federal agents seized sixteen weapons and about 120,000 rounds of ammunition. The purchases were part of preparations for a period the church expected to be violent, and in March 1990 members entered fallout shelters at the Montana ranch on Prophet's prediction of nuclear war. The prediction failed. The church later acknowledged as much and Prophet stopped setting dates.
Why it is filed this way
The teaching descends from Theosophy through Guy and Edna Ballard's I AM Activity of the 1930s, and the church says so. It is carried as a root here only because neither of those lines is yet on this tree.
Much reduced. Elizabeth Clare Prophet withdrew from leadership in 1999 with Alzheimer's disease and died in 2009. The Montana community dispersed; the body now runs as a publishing and teaching organisation under a president, a board and a council of elders.
The founding
Mark Prophet founded The Summit Lighthouse on 7 August 1958 to publish dictations he said came from the master El Morya. After his death in 1973 his wife Elizabeth Clare Prophet continued as messenger, and incorporated Church Universal and Triumphant on 1 May 1975.
Its founding is bound to Mark L. Prophet, then Elizabeth Clare Prophet — 1958 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A ladder of light — the I AM Presence above each person, the ascended masters on the rungs between.
The divine. God is the I AM Presence, individualised in every person, and is approached through the ascended masters rather than addressed directly. Jesus is one master among several, ascended rather than unique, which is the point on which Christian bodies part company with the teaching..
Death and after. Reincarnation until the ascension — the soul returns until its karma is balanced.