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.