Beliefs Of The Summit Lighthouse
By Elizabeth Clare Prophet
I would like to tell you a little bit about our Church and its beliefs.
First of all, our roots are in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Mark Prophet's Spiritual Journey
My late husband, Mark L. Prophet, who grew up in Wisconsin, was a Pentecostal. He was devout from childhood, having been so raised by his mother. His father died during the Depression, leaving Mark and his mother alone to make their way. And so they were very much church-oriented.
I remember visiting the childhood home of Mark Prophet and being shown the attic room where winter and summer he would kneel before his little altar. God was everything to him, and Jesus was his Lord and Savior and is today.
As a young man he received all nine gifts of the Holy Spirit and he continued his spiritual path through the years when he was in the United States Air Force during World War II.
Elizabeth Clare Prophet's Spiritual Journey
My childhood was similar. All I wanted to know about when I was a child was God. And when my parents couldn't give me enough, I would ask my friends to take me to their churches.
I loved devotion. I loved Jesus. I loved the saints. I loved God.
And I thought that all people walked and talked with God and Jesus Christ as I did. But I found out when I was about 20 that a lot of people do not and that they have not had that intimate experience with the Lord.
As early as I could read, I was reading the Bible. And as I would read the Bible alone in my room, I would ask Jesus what certain passages meant. And my Lord would answer me and give me the teachings of the deeper mysteries of God.
And when I would go to church and hear the wonderful pastors preaching their sermons, Jesus would explain to me that they had not been given the full teaching that he had given and that this teaching must be brought forth again in this time, 2,000 years later.
I wondered how that would come about and how he would bring that teaching to the world, which the people must have in these critical times.
Beliefs of the Summit Lighthouse
We regard the saints in heaven as those who have graduated from earth's schoolroom, whom God has received. They are the other stones - "lively stones."
We call them Ascended Masters, whereas Christians call them saints. We do not worship the Ascended Masters but we recognize that they are our elder brothers and sisters and that they can help us on the path of life.
An Ascended Master is someone like you or me who has completed his assignment on earth and returned to God through the resurrection and the ascension of the soul.
I believe that we are all on a path of perfecting our souls, of doing good works, of balancing our karma and fulfilling our reason for being.
I differ with orthodox Christianity in that I teach karma and reincarnation, that the soul is a continuum, that we have lived before from the beginning with God and shall continue by his grace.
So I see our divine plan outpicturing itself in succeeding episodes and I see the bodies we wear simply as coats. And when the coat gets worn out, that doesn't necessarily mean that our mission is through.
We believe in the communion of saints, here below as Above.
And we believe that this communion comes through the agency of the Holy Spirit and through the Sacred Heart of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and that it is ordained.
In our communion with the saints we do not engage in mere psychicism or clairvoyance or channeling, as is the fad these days.
But we believe that through the agency of the Holy Spirit, and only through that agency, it is lawful for us to receive teachings that are not written, which Jesus promised to send us through the Comforter, who would bring to our remembrance all those things that he taught us 2,000 years ago.