Tag Archives: Cosmic Church of Truth

Making an Old Church — with Its Many Past Lives — Home

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Having renovated this old church and made her home here, Jennifer Raines says she’ll never live anywhere else. When Mike Bennett lived here in 1970, it was a “Jesus Freak” hippy commune. A young Vietnam vet named Larry Colton, missing for more than 40 years now, lived here too. A Haitian church destroyed by arson was the last congregation to call this old church home. What lives this building has lived!

Spiritual Lighthouse Church

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It was home, in the old days, to Southern preaching, bluegrass mandolin, and séances. Bluegrass gospel musicians Billie and Gordon Hamrick were staunch  Southern Baptists, but Billie had “psychic visions.” The line of Spiritualist pastors here, almost all women, dates back to training by the famous psychic Edgar Cayce. In one of Jill Cook Richards’s first séances at the church, she says, her guardian angel came to her.

New Story: The Cosmic Church of Truth

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In that little blue house in North Riverside, the spirits spoke through Ethel Tunks and told her she and Harold should found The Cosmic Church of Truth. A headline told readers, “Take a tour of the city’s nether world from séances to a visit to a haunted house.” Half a century later, though the Tunkses are gone, The Cosmic Church of Truth continues in its fourth location.