Organisation and Present Reach

Eckankar is organised as a centralised religion under the Living ECK Master and a governing body, with its Temple of ECK and international headquarters at Chanhassen, Minnesota, dedicated in 1990. Members progress through a graded series of initiations, study monthly discourses, and gather in local centres for worship services, HU chants and community classes; there is no requirement to abandon a prior religion on joining. Estimates of membership are modest and imprecise, ranging from the tens of thousands into low hundreds of thousands worldwide, with communities in North America, Europe, Africa and elsewhere and a notable presence in parts of West Africa.

Scholars of religion classify Eckankar as a new religious movement, and specifically as one of the family of Western groups derived from the Indian Sant tradition of inner Light and Sound. Its history has included controversy over the originality of Twitchell's writings, some of which researchers have shown to draw closely on earlier authors, and over the contested succession of the 1970s. The movement presents itself today as a living, non-exclusive path centred on personal spiritual experience rather than on inherited membership.