Hi Friends -

The movement that the Fillmores began was a fresh and Spirit-led response to fear-based Evangelicalism and primitive medical practices of the 19th Century. It was a religious reform movement and a medical reform movement, raising up the teaching and healing practices of Jesus to challenge the established power of both ministers and doctors. The Fillmores called their movement "practical Christianity" and implemented their movement through a magazine, a prayer ministry, and a loose affiliation of dedicated disciples they called "truth students." This post and the About page is a manifesto for the Fillmore movement.

Their religious reform movement upended the church by separating the person of Jesus from the Christ. They declared the Christ, the 2nd person of the Trinity, was the true image and likeness of God, that the Christ was placed in the human race at creation, and that the Christ was unknown to human beings until the time of Jesus. Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, was the Wayshower who awakened our inner Christ and brought it into conscious awareness.

The Fillmore's medical reform movement, along with Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science, upended the doctors by demonstrating the healing power of an awakened inner Christ that has aligned the Spirit, soul, and body of the individual and established oneness with God, the transcendent Father. Health and wholeness are experienced when an aligned individual experiences oneness with God.

The Fillmores conveyed the teachings and practices of Jesus to their truth students through metaphorical and anagogical interpretation of the Bible and a metaphysical worldview. However, we have come to a point where the movement founded by the Fillmores is embracing a historical understanding of the Bible that is spiral and evolutionary, and a form of metaphysics that is non-theistic and Christless.

Historical and evolutionary Bible interpretation may speak eloquently of consciousness and oneness, but it lacks the transforming love and moral gravity that the Christ Idea brings—the awareness that the Divine is not only in us but seeks to work through and as us. Also, without the Christ as the living, thriving center of metaphysics, the Fillmore teaching loses its redemptive and transformative core. It stops short at Mind Science and dead-ends into another expression of religious intent that may improve the human experience, but does not bring about the fullest expression of the inner Christ and the transcendent Father, nor the life abundant of which Jesus spoke.

Historical Bible interpretation and non-theistic metaphysics can be effective pathways to human progress. So we do not reject the “all pathways” idea of universalism. Whatever model is actually producing spiritual fruit will, in time, produce more fruit, abiding fruit, and fruit that glorifies the Father. Improvement can indeed be discovered through disciplined mind-work, and as more light is received, more is given. But these are supplements to the Fillmore teachings, not a substitute for them. That universalism may be effective does not necessarily mean we are experiencing fullness of kingdom living here and now, nor the fullness of the unseen cosmos of then and there.

Suppose the movement founded by the Fillmores moves toward a brand of universalism that sidelines Christ. In that case, it risks repeating the same mistakes that fundamentalist religion has made in the opposite direction—only this time, instead of worshipping form, it worships abstraction. The strength of the Fillmore movement is not found in brand conformity but in the divine diversity of Christ-conscious individuals who bring their own light to the One Light. We firmly believe that the metaphysical framework taught by the Fillmores must remain fully Christ-centered if it is to stay truly transformative.

Sunday, October 26, 2025