One of the perennial issues among scholars who study emergent religious movements is the question of a given movement's long-term viability, particularly its perceived ability to weather the passing of the founder. Another, related question is a movement's perceived growth-potential, which is viewed as a sign of its vitality.

MSIA has already experienced a smooth transition of spiritual authority from John-Roger to John Morton. Some members were surprised that Morton was picked to receive the mantle of the Mystical Traveler, but no one fundamentally questioned the transition. Also, as a corporate church structure, MSIA functions independently of John-Roger and John Morton, indicating that the process sociologists refer to as the "routinization of charisma" (the passing of charismatic authority from the founder to the organization) is already well underway. If J-R were to pass on tomorrow, I am confident that the day-to-day functioning of MSIA as an organization would continue with few ripples. This is especially likely because John Morton has already taken on some of the spiritual leadership of the group.

As for growth, in the 1970s MSIA expanded rapidly until it had grown to about five thousand members. At that point growth in total numbers stopped. Over the years people have come and gone, while overall membership figures have remained about the same. In terms of this nonexpansion, MSIA presents a profile of being like a traditional community in the Hindu tradition centered around a guru and his intimate disciples. Normally, this kind of a movement does not attempt to grow beyond a close community of teacher and students. As one MSIA participant told me,

People can come to seminars, but there are certain people that are here specifically because they've done a number of lifetimes in which they have acquired a particular kind of training. They're here for a very specific kind of ministry. I don't think MSIA is supposed to be big in numbers. I think it's just what it is, and, to me, [size is not a criterion of] success or failure.

This individual further portrayed MSIA as one among many "mystery schools," and only a certain number of people on the earth belonged to this particular school. Using this model as a lens through which to view MSIA, it is not surprising that the group has essentially the same number of members as it did twenty years ago. From another point of view, it is clear that MSIA has the capacity to become much larger. The Sikh religion, for example, began as a traditional guru-based community and later expanded to become a world religion.

Over the course of this study, I asked many different people how they viewed the future of MSIA. After collecting a wide range of different responses, the overall impression was what I can only describe as a Movement-wide ambivalence about growth. This ambivalence about growth reflects MSIA's ambivalence about action in the world more generally. In other words, as the organization's name indicates, MSIA is concerned primarily with the development of the kind of inner awareness that leads to Soul Transcendence. For the sake of reaching this ultimate goal, students are taught to remain detached from more worldly goals and purposes, a teaching reflected in the passage cited above.

Simultaneously, students are encouraged to be active in the world, and to contribute to the goal of transforming the world into a better place. John-Roger has stated many times that, "Service is the highest form of consciousness on the planet." MSIA participants consistently develop ministerial service projects that include feeding the homeless, tutoring, teaching, visiting the elderly, the sick, the imprisoned, and the lonely. In addition to these practical, physical ministries in their communities, MSIA participants are encouraged to pray for and to visualize improved conditions in their families, neighborhoods, countries, and the world, for the highest good of all.

One of the very first pieces I read in the New Day Herald, MSIA's in-house newspaper, was an article about how Light Bearers (meaning MSIA members as well as people following other, similar paths) were contributing to the upliftment of the world - a spiritual activity reflected in such external events as the fall of the Berlin Wall. To cite a passage from this article:

A trip to Russia in 1988 was followed closely by that country's leader moving toward openness in all parts of his domain: USSR, Baltic countries, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and even Rumania! J-R spent some time in Poland, met Lech Walesa, and Walesa emerged as an eloquent and humorous spokesperson for change. We connected with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, J-R visited South Africa, and dramatic positive change has been taking place there between the races.

Then there's the Berlin Wall. The videotapes came back from the 1988 trip with participants singing, "J-R put a worm in the Berlin Wall, the Berlin Wall, the Berlin Wall, J-R put a worm in the Berlin Wall, and the wall came tumbling down!" The worm in this passage refers to the "Light Worm" of positive, spiritual energy that John-Roger asked MSIA people to visualize eating away at the Berlin Wall.

Clearly the author of this piece believes it was the activity of J-R and MSIA that tipped the scales on everything from remarkable changes in South Africa to the fall of the Iron Curtain. This belief, which most readers of the New Day Herald presumably share, reflects both a faith in the efficacy of the activity of Light Bearers and a belief that Light Bearers should, in fact, be working for a better world. While John-Roger himself rarely addresses such matters, he has occasionally portrayed MSIA - or, at least, members of MSIA - as playing a key role in the history of the unfoldment of the planet; for example, from The Christ Within:

It is our destinies this time on the planet to lift the consciousness of the world and actually prepare it for the golden age that is now approaching. Those of us in MSIA are that golden bridge from the consciousness of yesterday to the consciousness of tomorrow.

Though this belief does not contradict the directive to focus one's energy on achieving Soul Transcendence, clearly there is potential for tension between MSIA's other-worldly goals and its this-worldly ideals. For instance, as I asserted earlier, I sense that the organization's ambivalence about growth is ultimately rooted in the teachings' ambivalence about action in the world.

Toward the end of this study, I had a long interview with John-Roger and John Morton. By that point, I already had answers to many of my earlier queries. There were, however, still unanswered questions regarding the future of MSIA. As a consequence, much of the interview was taken up with questions about this future, including questions about MSIA's potential for future expansion. What follows are some of the relevant excerpts - edited for readability - from this interview:

Lewis: As I look back over the couple of decades of MSIA's existence, what I see is that in some ways it's like a traditional Indian movement centered around a guru - one that does not attempt to grow beyond a small community of teacher and students. But in other ways I look at MSIA and feel it has the capacity of becoming much larger. Sikhism, for example, is said to have begun as a Sant Mat group, and it eventually became a world religion.

So as I've looked at MSIA, I've asked people like Paul Kaye and Mark Lurie [members of the Church presidency], "Do you see yourself remaining around the size of five or six thousand people, or do you see yourself really expanding and becoming more and more a force on the planet, having more members and growing into a different kind of organization?" Let me set the stage for this question a little bit more.

Some of the older students who have been with MSIA for a long time don't like the fact that it's not as informal as it used to be. The organization has gone from something like a small group of people hanging out around J-R to more and more of a formal organization. Some of these older students dislike the fact that some of the earlier physical intimacy has been lost. But at the same time, now that it's less centered on J-R's personal presence, it has more of an expansive possibility. So, what is your vision, or visions, of the future?

John Morton: I don't have a clear vision that's so identifiable. I have a sense of what I'm looking at, from here forward. In other words, the question to me would be, What's up ahead for MSIA?" And maybe I'll only be able to get to next week. And you'd say, "Well, I was really interested in something like five, ten, twenty-five years from now." And maybe I'll be able to see something beyond that.

I don't have a direct answer other than the way I look at what happens to people is that they are Spirit-directed. The people who stay with us and endure are people who have a spiritual contact. They get a real inner experience that holds them and sustains them. It's absolutely what happens to each individual if they're really going to partake in the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness. So I have to defer the answer to the Spirit. That is what I look to, what we answer to.

Someone could say, "Well, that's easy for you to say, because anybody can put on a hat, a turban, or a robe and declare whatever, and some people will believe it and some people won't believe it." You can get people to do all kinds of things based on what you say. People will respond to forms of rhetoric and do all kinds of things. I think there's plenty of history to support that point.

But I don't look at what we teach as an artificial hodgepodge, which is what John-Roger's been accused of doing. Church critics charge that he has taken things from Sant Mat or Eckankar or Christianity - that he grew up as a Mormon and then he dabbled in this and then he dabbled in that,, and he read this and he read that', and he 'ust kind of concocted it. They say, "You don't really have any substance, you 'ust have something that's a shell." But that's not been my experience.

What you're asking is, "Is this a growing movement in which more people are going to participate?" And I think, of course, why not? Because there's a fountain here, there's something that's rich and nourishing of the Spirit, and it's available to people, so why wouldn't they?

Presently I think that there are a lot of distractions that keep the Movement at a status-quo level. In the last ten years the number of people on Discourses has been relatively constant. If you look at it in terms of geography, it shifts around. But the actual base of people on Discourses, studying towards initiation and that type of thing, is relatively the same. Has the information shifted significantly? No. You can see some shift over the years, but the essential message, the essential direction, is the same.

We have a mission statement for the Church,, which is, in part, "making the teachings available to those who are looking for them." The most important segment of that are the people already involved in MSIA. They're still looking for the teachings, and what we do is set up opportunities through classes, through the Discourses, through the taped seminars, so that people can continue partaking of the teachings in various ways.

We've also been looking at how to make the teachings available to people beyond the core group [of current members], but not so that it interferes or distracts from somebody having an essentially spiritual contact. How do we make the teachings available? Is it a pure form of delivery? Is it a clear messenger? I look at myself. I'm a messenger. J-R is a messenger. Other ministers are messengers, to greater or lesser degrees. And then the Discourses are messengers. The classes are messengers. Those are all part of delivering the information. And we're constantly working on, How do we do that in the best way so that people have as pure, clear, and direct contact as we can? What is the essential teaching here, and how do you partake of it?

I took at someone like Woody Guthrie or Willie Nelson you know, somebody who pays their dues. Why would they sing for years and years, constantly having to hustle, and then one day everybody wants to hear their music and they're buying their records by the millions? What happened? Did the sound of their voice shift or something else happen? What I see is that something about who they are shifted. That's what I see more than anything. It wasn't that their talent suddenly took this leap. It's more like that the context of their life shifted, and people heard them. It's like their soul, their spirit, who they are, started coming out through the music.

There are plenty of examples of singers where people can say, "Well, they don't have a particularly good voice," Joe Cocker, you know, or other people. It's almost like you can listen and be disturbed by it. But there's something else that comes through. They sing with their heart, their presence, and that's what makes the difference. And I have a sense there's something like that in what we're doing. Whatever is not allowing the teachings to transmit on a mass scale where people really respond to it in large numbers isn't so much about their content.

And it's not going to be, "Oh, yeah, the day we started doing this methodology, then everybody got what we were doing and really responded in huge numbers." Because we've done a lot of things to - let's call it market ourselves - to make MSIA presentable. For the most part, when we try to do things according to a technique, it's worse. If we try to advertise or promote ourselves, in some way it turns people off. If here's what we're doing, that we just say, "Here we are, here's what we're doing," that seems to be the best method. To encourage people to trust themselves in their own experience, that's still the best way for people to have the contact. A person has their own experience, shares their experience in some way, and the other person picks up on it and starts responding to it.

I got involved in the Life 101 series. I used to be confounded that J-R has very good practical information that doesn't have to be about a religious practice. He's got so much good common sense, and he has a way of relating it that's very personable - a lot of anecdotes, a lot of personal experiences. Why don't people respond to them, just on that level? Life 101 was another experiment. Other people had come forward in an attempt to take the information and put it into a form that people respond to. And then when it happened that J-R was suddenly a bestselling author, to me it was like, "Well, here we are." I don't have an answer as to why then and not earlier. It clicked. It worked. It struck a chord that people responded to.

Lewis: But it really didn't bring that many new people into MSIA.

John Morton: This is true. One of the things we do is make information available. If everybody lived by the set of principles taught in MSIA, we'd have a really wonderful world. I look at the basic teachings about living -in the world and I say, "I can't find a finer set of just straightforward, practical, everyday teaching information." Not that I've done exhaustive research, but I've read a lot of sources. I keep coming back because this is the one I resonate with.

Lewis: What I sense - and I've said this to other people so I may as well say it to you guys, too - is a Movement-wide ambivalence about growth. There's the desire to keep the intimacy of the early days, and there's also the desire to reach out further. I sense this at all levels of the organization. It's as if at an energetic level there's an ambivalence. It's almost like if you were to grow and expand, you would have to give therapy to the whole organization. This is not to say that you should grow. Maybe that would dilute whatever there is here so much that it would become just so much blah-blah-blah. Maybe it shouldn't grow. But at present, because of this energetic thing, it's like no matter what you do you're going to remain the same size.

When I talked to Paul Kaye, he said, "As president of MSIA, I really want to see it grow and grow and grow." But he also said, "As a personal, individual seeker after soul consciousness, I don't care." Now when the president of an organization can make that kind of statement, it realty says something. And it's not just Paul, it's everybody.

J-R: It's hard to call us aggressive about recruiting members when you see the prevailing attitude. It's incongruent when people say, "Well, you have secret recruiting things." We say, "No, we don't; we don't have any." We're a group of notorious nonjoiners. Everybody maintains their own individuality.

John Morton: My experience, and I consider that John-Roger says something quite similar to this, is that this is something that's being done from the Spirit. We don't have much of a position, and we don't have issues, because that's not really how we function. Then again, on a practical level we organize and we identify certain principles and we have guidelines, but the guidelines don't have teeth. We're not enforcers. We don't exile people from the Church because they have blasphemed or anything like that. It's like we don't take those kinds of issues.

When people attack us, it's like attacking a phantom. We might as well laugh. You could tear this body from limb to limb, but you're not going to get at the source because it's not this body. And it's not J-R's body. So for someone to go, "Well, all you have to do is wipe out John-Roger and John Morton, then it will fall apart," is silly. I couldn't tell you whether the organization itself would survive, because it's really not meant to survive any longer than it's useful. There was a day not so long ago when it didn't exist, because it wasn't useful. Then a day arrived when it started becoming useful to organize and we organized, and we have run into all of the anguish and the friction that comes from being an organization. An organization has a certain kind of a nature that's like a beast. It's ugly, in the sense that it is misrepresentational. In other words, the organization does things that misrepresent the Spirit. Something gets lost in the translation [from the Spirit to the physical level]. But, in order for us to be able to accomplish anything, we have to express through an organization.

Lewis: There's another issue that impinges on this question that may be a key here. When sociologists of religion classify religious groups, as dubious an enterprise as that is, they distinguish groups as world-affirming and world-denying. World-denying meaning a movement that is more focused on the salvation of individual souls, and world-affirming is more focused on transforming the planet.

J-R: Personally, I think that's baloney. You can transcend your soul right here, in this physical world, and be in an enlightened state of consciousness and deny nothing. See, MSIA doesn't fit into the sociological matrix of how you're defining groups. There's a reason why most of the membership in MSIA are in the Spirit. They're only here to get something that kicks them off, like a pizeostarter for a flame. They come in and they go, "Oh, wow! Oh, I got it." They don't need to come back again.

Other parts of the interview relevant to the question of the future of MSIA dealt with such issues as to what might happen once John Morton became sole spiritual leader of the organization. One line of speculation I had entertained was that perhaps John's leadership style would be more suited to a large organization than J-R's, so that real growth in size might not occur until after John-Roger had passed on. This line of questioning was met with the same basic response I received throughout the entire interview, namely that MSIA just does what it does and, if the Spirit wants it to grow larger, then fine. If the Spirit wants it to remain the same size, fine. And even if the Spirit wants the organization to shrink, then that would be okay too.

While this response may seem like the final answer to the question about MSIA's prospects for future growth, I interviewed one longtime member during the final stage of this research project whose observations seemed to throw light on the question at a whole new level. Her remarks seemed the appropriate note on which to end this study:

The Movement isn't for everyone because there's no one in the organization who you can make responsible for your faults and failings. There's no one you can go to who's going to solve it for you. There's no grading system. There's no discipline, in the sense of requiring you to do certain things and to be a certain way in order to be in the Movement - it's absolutely a matter of taking responsibility and being self-motivating.

I don't know how many people can get excited about something like that. I think if a lot more people became interested in MSIA, it would be because something had changed in our social consciousness so that more and more people would want to take responsibility for their own lives - so that they wanted to not just talk it, but to walk it in their everyday lives, and really hold themselves accountable for their choices and for the lives they had built.

I also think that as we in the organization start to come into a sense of solidity in ourselves - a sense o f trust in our own truth - that we will begin to reach out more into the world and share. As we are more out in the world and people like me are just standing in quiet ways, doing service in the world, people might come to the Movement in that way - NOT to become a devotee of a teacher, but to come to a discipline, one that has a lot of different tools for self-transformation. I think more people might come to MSIA in this way.

About the Author

Professor James R. Lewis is Chairperson of the Department of Religious Studies at the World University of America. He has an extensive background in the academic study of religion and is a world-recognized authority on controversial religious movements. He publishes and edits a scholarly journal on nontraditional religions. He also directs AWARE, an organization devoted to investigating current religious controversies.

Many of Professor Lewis's publications reflect his wide ranging interest in non-traditional religions. He is, for example, the general editor of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of New Religions (soon to be published by Prometheus Books). He is the author/editor of academic anthologies on the Branch Davidians (Rowman & Littlefield) and on the New Age movement (SUNY Press). The State University of New York (SUNY) Press has also published his The Gods Have Landed: New Religions From Other Worlds and his Magical Religions and Modern Witchcraft.

Professor Lewis's Astrology Encyclopedia (Gale Research/Visible Ink Press) received American Library Association and New York Public Library awards. He has also written the Encyclopedia of Afterlife Beliefs and Phenomena, the Dream Encyclopedia, Alien Images: Popular Culture and UFOS, Modern Witchcraft A to Z and Angels A to Z. Finally, he has been a consultant for Eastern Mysteries (Time-Life Books), and for such popular TV Specials as "Ancient Prophecies."

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