Shin Kesshoku Kyoiku Uchi no Kyoiku

The Fosterite Inner Church is the concealed priesthood and leadership core of the Church of the New Revelation. Beyond the public church, it controlled keys, records, and policy, reserved inner mysteries for its initiated members, and made admission into its deepest community depend on careful selection and shared ritual. Its structure reveals how Fosterism organized authority and intimacy behind its public message of salvation.

Identity and Structure

The Inner Church was not ordinarily named as a separate institution. It consisted of the most dedicated members: priests, lay leaders, keepers of keys and records, and makers of policy. They were considered reborn and beyond sin, assured of their place in heaven, and participants in mysteries unavailable to the broader membership. Direct admission to heaven was reserved for this inner circle.

The distinction between the Inner Church and the public-facing middle church was functional as well as spiritual. The middle church served a broad population, while the inner body held institutional authority and guarded the movement’s most exclusive practices. Foster expanded the organization without simply enlarging this core, preserving a boundary between mass religious participation and inner initiation.

Selection and Membership

Foster personally chose members in the early period, looking for people who resembled his own forceful, convinced character and, among women, the qualities he associated with his priestess-wives. Candidates were expected to be dynamic and committed; jealousy was treated as an obstacle that members needed to overcome or be capable of overcoming. The account presents sexual openness as part of the Inner Church’s distinctive communal culture, not as a requirement attributed to every member of the public church.

Selection was governed by rules intended to prevent the group from reproducing conflicts Foster associated with earlier American movements. Married candidates had to enter as couples, while unmarried candidates were expected to be sexually attractive and assertive. Foster also required the number of men to equal or exceed the number of women, and did not reserve women exclusively for himself, including women he had legally married. These practices were presented as a deliberate answer to possessiveness and jealousy, which Foster believed could lead to violence and organizational failure.

Foster limited the rate at which the inner core grew. A local revival that produced a couple suitable for the movement’s form of Heavenly Marriage could satisfy him; if it produced none, he allowed the congregation to develop and sent a priest and priestess to support it. He also personally assessed potential couples when possible, sometimes alongside a trusted priestess. The public middle church could therefore expand without automatically conferring access to the Inner Church’s intimate practices or authority.

Rites and Admission

The movement’s initiatory structure connected the Inner Church’s selectiveness with a graduated process of training and belonging. Mike alone could recognize some people as ready to share water unusually early: Sam and Ruth, for example, were chosen when they had only just entered the Third Circle and later became a priest and priestess. Dawn and Patty could occasionally identify candidates for special advancement and training, though the account describes such decisions as exceptional and usually made in consultation with Mike.

For most members, progression continued through the inner circles toward the Eighth Circle and then the Ninth, identified with the Nest itself. The formal Sharing-Water service was more than the everyday sharing of water: the Nest gathered to receive new brothers, usually a couple, as permanent members. The ritual thus marked a transition from training and partial inclusion to lasting membership in the community.

The Innermost Temple embodied this process. It was a large, circular room with a central pool, where new brothers were received into the Nest. At an Eighth Circle ceremony, candidates entered a ritual space and were welcomed into the next stage of practice; the movement’s description of this progression links bodily participation and shared language with a change in social identity. The account also stresses preparation: new members were expected to learn the language and acquire discipline, with help from the group rather than being treated as ready simply because they had arrived.

Public Church and Inner Boundaries

The contrast between the Inner Church and the middle church shaped the movement’s growth. The middle church offered a place for the wider population, while the inner core retained policy-making functions, guarded records, and controlled access to the movement’s mysteries. This arrangement allowed a large public organization to coexist with a smaller body whose members undertook more demanding forms of commitment.

The Inner Church’s importance lies in that combination of religious hierarchy and communal initiation. Its authority was not only a matter of titles: it rested on selection, training, and a sequence of rites that made belonging increasingly consequential. The distinction between public salvation and inner admission therefore defined both the organization’s leadership and the limits of who could enter its deepest shared life.