Man'yōsekai Kōkai

The Church of All Worlds, founded and pastored by Mike, is at once a legally constituted church, a Martian-language school, and the institutional doorway to the Nest. Rather than asking newcomers simply to profess belief, it trains them in a language and discipline intended to change how they understand truth, intimacy, and community. Its central work is slow admission: public curiosity is sifted into study, study into readiness, and readiness into a lasting place among the Nest’s members.

Identity and Purpose

Jubal’s account makes the institution’s apparent contradiction explicit. The Church of All Worlds is not, in the usual sense, a church devoted to bringing people to God or rescuing souls. Mike instead presents it as a legally and morally genuine church whose teaching is practical truth, not a demand for faith. Its members believe souls cannot be lost; the work is to learn what can be checked and lived, rather than to accept an assertion on authority.

That practical teaching depends on Martian. Mike’s explanation is that the truths the community conveys cannot be fully stated in English, any more than a symphony can be rendered by writing down its notes in another medium. Learning the language is therefore not an optional ornament to membership: it is the demanding means by which members acquire the concepts and discipline the Church offers. The school’s purpose and the church’s purpose are joined, even when outsiders find the combination difficult to categorize.

Structure and Recruitment

The Church occupies a large, labyrinthine Temple containing a public auditorium, smaller rooms for invited meetings, and extensive living quarters above the main hall. The residential entrance is on a separate street, and access proceeds through several automatic doors and a remotely controlled bounce tube. The arrangement gives the living area considerable privacy and makes entry more deliberate than attendance at a public meeting. Within the Temple, the public congregation and the Nest’s domestic life occupy connected but distinct spaces.

Mike’s recruitment process uses nine circles, though prospective members are not told at once how many stages lie ahead. At public meetings, he combines performances of sleight of hand with the authority people attach to the Man from Mars. He presents these as limited miracles, then invites those who genuinely want to learn to take the next step. Behind the performance, he is assessing the audience: only a portion seem capable of further training, and an inner helper relays where promising candidates are seated so that the organizers can decide whom to approach.

The outward show thus serves as a filter rather than the substance of the teaching. Mike uses a skill acquired during his time with a carnival, but the decision about advancement depends on his judgment of potential and willingness to undertake the work. The staged mystery of the circles preserves the difference between casual spectators and candidates ready for more sustained instruction; the Church does not disclose the next threshold before a person is prepared to encounter it.

The Nest and Its Teachers

The Nest is the Church’s residential, communal center, described as resembling a monastery. Its membership includes ordained brothers and sisters as well as novices who have not yet learned to think in Martian. At the time Ben visits, the community numbers almost twenty. Members teach the language and support the novices, while the living arrangement embodies a form of shared life that contrasts with the surrounding city.

Patricia teaches beginner classes and helps novices. Dawn and Jill, each a High Priestess, also teach and work to show Fosterites that membership in the Church need not conflict with their existing faith. Their work connects the Church’s language training to a wider public: prospective members may come from other religious communities, and the high priestesses help them understand the Church as an additional commitment rather than an automatic renunciation of belief.

The community also makes its teaching visible in material arrangements. Ben sees bowls of cash marking the transition between the Nest’s money-sharing practice and the surrounding Terran economy. Mike’s fortune supports the arrangement, a fact Ben recognizes even as the bowls present a practical interface between the two systems. The Church’s communal ideal is not merely a set of statements; it is enacted in how the Nest handles everyday resources and receives those arriving from outside.

Initiation and Membership

Water-sharing is both a recurring expression of trust and a formal means of recognizing a durable bond. Jill explains its seriousness when she and Mike offer water to Patricia: accepting is voluntary, and a person who has religious or personal reservations should decline. Patricia chooses to take part. The ritual makes mutual trust and partnership explicit, while the community treats the bond as enduring rather than casual.

Progress through the circles does not follow a rigid rule that only the highest-ranking teachers can identify readiness. Mike may invite someone to share water before that person reaches the Seventh Circle. Sam and Ruth, for example, were offered water shortly after entering the Third Circle and later became a priest and priestess. Dawn and Patricia may occasionally recognize someone for special promotion or training as well, though they generally consult Mike. The Church’s order therefore combines staged instruction with individual judgment about when a member can take a further step.

The eighth circle begins the practice of sharing and growing closer; the ninth and the Nest bring the initiate into the community as a whole. The formal Sharing-Water service ordinarily welcomes a new brother or couple before the assembled Nest, but Ben is already treated as a member before his service is held. His pending ceremony is given priority as the community prepares to welcome him fully. The rite marks not just an inward belief but a change in social standing: the newcomer is received into a group that offers continuing instruction and support.

The initiation is designed to move at the pace of the learner. Ruth recounts that she and Sam struggled through the language and inner circles, and that the first experience of thinking in Martian brought difficult self-recognition as well as a renewed desire to share water. She was still frightened before their formal welcome into the Nest and nearly asked Sam to turn back. In the Innermost Temple, the couple entered the pool where the members were waiting to receive them. Her account presents initiation as a passage from fear and uncertainty into a community that promises help at every stage, not as effortless or instantaneous conversion.

Significance and Tensions

The Church’s public and private forms work together. Its auditorium, persuasive performances, and staged invitations attract and sort visitors; its language lessons, circles, and water rites require patience and repeated participation. Mike explicitly rejects haste: he screens large crowds over time, selects a smaller number for further attention, and expects only a few to enter the Nest. His longer aim is to train members who can establish additional Nests, allowing the community to spread through a gradual process rather than a sudden mass conversion.

This arrangement also reveals the Church’s tension between charisma and institution. Mike’s status as the Man from Mars helps draw an audience, and his performance supplies the public meeting with its spectacular element. Yet miracles are not treated as sufficient instruction: even entry to more advanced teaching requires the work of learning Martian. Authority is organized through circles, offices, teachers, and rites, but Mike remains the person whose judgment most often determines readiness. The result is a community built around a singular founder while preparing members to teach and form communities beyond his immediate presence.

Jubal reacts skeptically to the Church’s clerical titles and Mike’s elaborate qualifications, but he also recognizes its legal standing and its substantial language-school function. That contrast captures the institution’s unusual position: it adopts recognizable religious forms and operates as a church, while insisting that its purpose is neither conventional conversion nor the promise of salvation. Its distinctiveness lies in making language, disciplined learning, and shared life the route into a community whose deepest teachings are meant to be practiced, not merely professed.