Church of All Worlds

The Church of All Worlds is the religious community Mike establishes to carry a discipline that, as he explains to Jubal, cannot be taught through ordinary schools or colleges. Its defining work is not simply to invite belief but to teach people how to learn, practice, and live together: shared water marks trust and lasting partnership, while the Nest gives that commitment a communal form. The Church’s rites make religious belonging a process of study and relationship rather than a declaration of conversion—and its recurring need to relocate turns that practice into a means of persistence under pressure.

Purpose and Principles

The Church’s public identity as a religion is useful but incomplete. Sam calls it a church because it performs the functions of one, while recognizing that its theology only partly resembles established faiths. He joined after being a committed atheist and, despite his Jewish background, became a high priest through the Church’s discipline. His account makes room for different religious histories: his wife Ruth is religiously Jewish, and her progress through the training was faster than his. The Church’s work does not require members to abandon such differences.

Jubal identifies the sharpest distinction between this Church and the faith in which he was raised. In his view, that faith could treat conversion and confession as sufficient for salvation, without requiring sustained learning. The Church, by contrast, begins with willingness to learn and requires hard study afterward. Sam affirms Jubal’s understanding. Mike later explains the larger purpose behind that demand: he used religion as a way to draw people toward knowledge and discipline that were available beyond his own upbringing in a Martian nest. The religious structure is therefore both a genuine communal form and a means of making an unfamiliar practice accessible.

Rites, Study, and Membership

Shared water is the Church’s central enactment of trust. When Patricia Paiwonski is invited to share water with Mike and Jill, Jill explains that the bond means mutual confidence, candor, and partnership. She compares its seriousness to baptism and marriage, while making clear that Patricia may decline and remain their friend. Mike reinforces that invitation: accepting must be a free choice, not something Patricia does against her religion or her conscience. Patricia chooses to join them. In this scene, the rite’s force comes not only from the commitment it establishes but from the explicit right to refuse it.

The Church’s welcoming practices extend beyond a single ceremony. Patricia shows Ben Caxton the Innermost Temple, a circular, unfurnished room centered on a pool where new brothers are received into the Nest. She invites him to share water or simply swim; when he declines for the moment, she accepts that waiting is appropriate. The room thus stands ready for initiation without turning readiness into compulsion. Ben’s hesitation is treated as part of a process whose timing matters.

That process has stages, but the stages are not an inflexible timetable. Duke tells Ben that Mike may recognize a person’s readiness to share water before the person reaches the Seventh Circle. Sam and Ruth, for example, received water after entering the Third Circle and later became a priest and priestess. Dawn and Patricia may occasionally identify someone for special advancement and training, though Duke says they do not make such decisions as early as Mike and generally consult him. The eighth circle begins a further phase of sharing and growing closer; entry into the ninth circle and the Nest is marked by the service called Sharing Water, attended by the whole community. Ben is already regarded as part of the Nest, yet the Church still plans a welcome service for him, setting other business aside to recognize his place formally.

Ruth describes what that gradual preparation meant for her and Sam. As they advanced to the Third Circle, Sam learned the language quickly while Ruth studied so as not to be separated from him. When they began to think in the language, Mike recognized their progress and gave them water with Jill after a Third Circle service. Ruth recalls that the experience brought a painful reckoning with attitudes she had held about other women and about her husband, but it also intensified her desire to continue sharing water and growing closer. The inner circles offered help rather than instant transformation: Mike moved them forward as rapidly as they could manage because he understood that they needed support and wanted them to reach the safety of the Nest.

Ruth’s account culminates in their Nest service. She had wanted admission but feared that she could not join herself to the larger group, and she nearly asked Sam to turn back before they arrived. In the Innermost Temple, the light fell on her as the robes were removed and the Nest called the couple into the pool in Martian. She stepped in and submerged; afterward, she described herself as not having come up, and said she did not want to. She reassures Ben that he will learn the language, acquire discipline, and receive help from the community. The scene presents admission as a passage from fear and uncertainty into a belonging sustained by collective welcome.

The Church’s ceremonies can also make advancement visible to participants. During a gathering for candidates entering the eighth circle, Jill appears to Ben and the others in the image of Mother Eve in a garden beside a serpent. She opens her arms, and the first candidates move forward. Mike kisses the first woman in line, and her robe vanishes; he then kisses the first male candidate, whose robe likewise disappears. Patricia leads Ben away so the candidates can proceed to the Temple of the Eighth Circle without interruption. The episode links staged religious imagery to a carefully ordered rite, while Ben’s departure underscores that witnessing a ceremony does not itself make him one of its candidates.

Membership and Community

Mike’s authority in the Church centers on recognizing readiness and guiding members through training. His decision to welcome Sam and Ruth at the Third Circle is presented as exceptional, not as a rule that makes the other circles irrelevant. Other leaders can sometimes recommend special promotion, but the Church’s account of such decisions remains attentive to individual preparation. The resulting community includes priests and priestesses, advanced pilgrims who may later rejoin it, and newcomers who need instruction and support.

The Church’s approach to intimacy is part of that communal ethic. Mike tells Jubal that the Nest’s members live together in peace and happiness without bitterness or jealousy, and presents their closeness as evidence that the discipline can work. He also describes human physical love and the joining of bodies and minds as a distinctive source of richness. This is Mike’s explanation of what the Church’s teaching can preserve and share; the evidence does not make every member’s experience identical. What the Church’s practice does show is an effort to bind intimate relationships to trust, mutuality, learning, and a wider community rather than treating them as isolated private arrangements.

Persecution and Adaptation

By the later account, the Church has attracted organized opposition. Bishop Oxtongue preaches against what he calls new heretics, while carefully distinguishing them from several established groups, including the Fosterites. In a subtropical resort city farther south, complainants bring charges against a pastor and others associated with the Church, alleging public lewdness, maintaining a disorderly house, and contributing to the delinquency of minors. The county attorney initially expects little follow-through because similar complainants have failed to appear in earlier cases. Their spokesman says that Supreme Bishop Short will provide backing, converting the prosecution from a familiar threat into a coordinated attempt to stop the group.

Jubal, living farther north, has not yet learned of that particular incident, but news of other troubles has already disturbed him. Despite his own rule against consuming the news, he subscribes to a clipping service tracking reports about the Man from Mars, V. M. Smith, the Church, and Ben Caxton. His effort to limit what he hears fails to keep concern at a distance: he stares out at snow and an empty swimming pool, then asks Anne to rent a small tropical atoll and put his house up for sale. The domestic detail gives the Church’s pressure a second scale: persecution affects not only its organized public life but also the people who worry about its members from afar.

Sam’s response to repeated opposition is neither to insist on maintaining one name nor to treat closure as the end of the work. He says that the Church is already closed and imagines its congregation reopening under successive names: the One Faith, the Temple of the Great Pyramid, and the Brotherhood of Baptism. Each displacement, in his account, can leave behind a hard core of disciplined members as well as advanced pilgrims who may be contacted and brought back together later. The names can change; the work of training and maintaining a community continues. He expects the troubles to worsen before public opinion becomes tolerant, but argues that Mike is in no hurry and that repeated rebuilding can eventually make the group too strong to persecute.

Significance and Later Vision

The Church’s structure joins private commitment to collective resilience. Its water rites make relationship an explicit act of trust; its circles give members a gradual path of learning; and the Nest offers a destination that is both a shared life and a recognized place within the community. These elements answer different problems at once: a newcomer may hesitate, a member may need help mastering the language and discipline, and a congregation may face pressure to disband. In each case, the Church’s answer is a practice of patient preparation and renewed belonging.

Mike describes the institution as a vehicle for transmitting knowledge that cannot simply be inserted into conventional education. Its religious appearance appeals to curiosity and the desire to be entertained, but he says that the essential discipline is available to others just as it was to him. The Church is therefore neither reducible to a disguise nor limited to its formal theology. It is a structure built to let people encounter, study, and practice a way of life together. Its ability to relocate without surrendering that work completes the picture: the congregation can be driven from one place, but its members can preserve the discipline and make a new community elsewhere.