John E. Fetzer and Constance Cumbey - - Fighting either for or against the “New Age”

Personal Update:  My husband has been hospitalized since Saturday night.  His blood sugar had dropped to a dangerous level.  Please pray for our family!  Barry has been a rock to me during the 38 years of my labor and research!  Thank you!

UPDATE:  Barry was discharged from the hospital after 4 nights there.  He came home late Wednesday night.  He is doing much better and thanks you for your prayers!

Constance

Constance

John E. Fetzer and Constance Cumbey - - Fighting either for or against the “New Age”:  Two former Seventh Day Adventists originally from the Fort Wayne, Indiana area – very, very different paths!

The immense ironies have not escaped me.  One of the greatest perpetrators of the New Age Movement came from the same corner of Indiana where I was born and raised, although he arrived much earlier than myself (1909 vs. 1944).  That was John E. Fetzer.   One sounding the major warnings against the New Age Movement, myself, also came from that same corner of Indiana.  John Fetzer was born in Decatur, Indiana.  I was born in very nearby Fort Wayne, Indiana.  Ironically,  for formative years of our respective lives, we were both once Seventh Day Adventists.  Out of curiosity, I searched online for mentions of our respective selves in SDA archives.  The following is from the James White Library of Andrews University, the flagship Seventh Day Adventist university located in Berrien Springs, Michigan.  Mr. Fetzer (1909-1991 and myself (1944 - present) took very, very different paths.  Ironically, I only learned of Fetzer’s Seventh Day Adventist background after reading a by now well publicized book by Brian C. Wilson, a professor of Comparative Religions at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  Kalamazoo, Michigan is where John E. Fetzer was headquartered for many years and where he built his business empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  Kalamazoo is the home of the Fetzer Institute recipient of the huge fortune left by Mr. Fetzer on his death in Hawaii in 1991.   Mr. Fetzer left his immensely large fortune to propagate and propagandize the New Age Movement.

Ironically, all I knew of Fetzer until 1988, the year Marilyn Ferguson called me to brag that she was enroute to his very large New Age conference was that he (Fetzer) was a long time Detroit Tigers baseball team owner.  Marilyn Ferguson called  me with a nearly bragging, "ha ha" voice to say she was enroute there and so were many others.  This was his "Healing the Whole World" Conference John Fetzer held in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  Prominent figures from around the globe -- New Age and globalist elites were to be in attendance.  Indeed they were.  They included such New Age luinaries as Marilyn Ferguson, Maurice Strong, Robert Muller (the UN Muller, not the famous Special Prosecutor),

Marilyn Ferguson and I were rivals -- literally competing for souls.  She for the New Age Movement, myself against same.  I met her personally on a few occasions and was even in her home on 3 different occasions at her her invitation and urging .  The New Agers were anxious to check me out, but considered me a very real threat.   I know Marilyn Ferguson was a dedicated New Ager for most of her adult life.  I personally overheard her very worried mother who happened to be in her house one of the two different days I was there plead with her daughter Marilyn to go back to Jesus.  Over the years I had several encounters with Marilyn Ferguson, including but not limited to a live television debate against her on an Marilyn Ferguson and I met on several occasions.  She sent my publisher, Huntington House a threatening letter.  When that moved neither them nor myself, she next sent me a letter somewhat more conciliatory.  We had breakfast in a Windsor Ontario Restaurant in 1982.  In 1984 I was surprised to be called by her secretary and invited to come to her home in Los Angeles, California for the first New Age “World War IV” party.

I said I would let them know.  I called Bill Keith, president of Huntington House,  my publisher and told him of the sudden invitation for an event only two days away.  Richard Trosclair, his partner, called they called me back saying it was very important I be there.  They would make the arrangements for the flight.  I called a fellow researcher, Sylvia Beadleston McKevey in San Jose who agreed to fly up to Los Angeles and join us.  We both stayed with another researcher friend Betty Irwin in the Los Angeles Palos Verdes area.  On Sunday afternoon we three made our way to Marilyn Ferguson’s home at the top of Mt. Washington in L.A   The New Agers were obviously curious to look me over.  It was quite a disparate collection of backyard with name-tag attendees.  Indeed, Timothy Leary was one of those present in her backyard party.

I was at her home on two future occasions -- one was in early October 1987, right after a major earthquake in the LA area.  There I met her mother, justifiably worried about Marilyn being involved in a movement denying Jesus, and I met her husband and children along with the family parrot.  The next time I had a live encounter with Marilyn Ferguson was in the early Spring months of 1988.  An Indianapolis TV station producer called to ask me to debate her on a live television program.  Apart from that, we had many long telephone conversations from time to time over the years.  All calls were initiated and placed by her.  Motives are some times difficult to gauge, but I suspect she respected me.  I also assume she was calling to try to find out how much I knew.  Certainly, she learned that I knew plenty.  Most certainly she could never say she was not fully and politely warned.  Marilyn Ferguson could be a very likeable and personable individual.  I’ve prayed that when she died on October 8, 2008 in Banning, California at only age 70, that maybe she better late than never had accepted her worried mother’s warning -- one that I personally heard her give in October 1987.

As to John E. Fetzer, I learned from Dr. Wilson’s book that he graduated as valedictorian from Emmanuel Missionary College in Berrien Springs, Michigan.  While in attendance there he organized and ran its first radio station.  That station he later purchased and relocated it to Kalamazoo, Michigan changing it from its religious format to a more secular one.

I am suspecting that John Fetzer may have known much more about me than I did about him, most likely starting in the year 1982, the year my work detailing the hidden dangers of the New Age Movement went very public.  Now that I've delved into online historical documents of the Fetzer Institute, the John E. Fetzer Memorial Trust, and the Franklin Fetzer Fund, I'm even more convinced of that.  I'm further suspecting that John Fetzer may have been a major contributor to the travel and advertising costs of Tara Center, including funding the worldwide Newspaper ads that ran on April 25, 1982.

I faced tremendous challenges and foes in outlining the horrifying plans that New Age activists were not afraid to put in print.  They were riding high in 1982.  Between 1975 and 1982 and for many years thereafter, another personality, Benjamin Creme, an Englishman of what he claimed was Jewish and Scottish descent toured the world in style proclaiming first that a new “Christ” was coming and after July 19, 1977, he was here. 

I am now suspecting that John Fetzer was a major contributor to what had to be the enormous travel bills for Benjamin Creme and his claimed messianic cause.  I now know from books publicly placed on the market and documents available online from the Fetzer Institute of Kalamazoo, Michigan, that former Seventh Day Adventist long since turned to New Age spiritualism and beyond studied and read Creme along with his nephew, Bruce Fetzer, also from a Christian heritage.

John Fetzer was one of America’s wealthiest men.  Childless from his marriage to another Seventh Day Adventist, Rhea, he left his entire vast fortune to be used for propagating New Age beliefs and their goals of a New World Order, a New World Religion, and to secure acceptance for a new “messiah” they freely admitted was not Jesus.

The irony also has not escaped me that Fetzer also might have been a large factor in the treatment I received from those in the Evangelical community trying so hard to persuade the Christian world first that there was no New Age Movement.  When that effort failed, there were major attempts to redefine it -- denying both its obvious Luciferic and political aspects.  The effort was to tell Christians that it was not a threat to Christianity and the other monotheistic religions of the world, Jews and Moslems included.

If you have not already read my now several years old articles on the internet about “The Hijacking of Evangelicalism”, you might want to now retrieve and read them.  If you have already read them, you will want to review them.   I am about to update them with information I have gained on Fetzer’s possible role in that process -- in his close personal relationship with Paul N. Temple and Temple’s Institute of Noetic Sciences.

It is now my growing suspicion that Fetzer may have even paid a substantial portion of the cost of producing the world-wide newspaper ads ran in a half million dollar campaign.  I am also suspecting he had helped to pay Benjamin Creme's obviously heavy travel expenses.  Those ads ran in upwards of 20 major papers on April 25, 1982.  They proclaimed that their new “Christ” would be introduced to the world within two months.  They firmly believed they would do so. 

It is my belief that with the help of God, we took them and that campaign by surprise and they have been delayed for upwards of 37 ears -- between 1982 and 2019. 

It is further my belief that they are now on the march and sanctifying the New Age belief system complete with Alice Bailey (Lucifer Publishing Company, Lucis Trust) via attempting to confer public sainthood on John E. Fetzer and his “spiritual” work.

Where have the Seventh Day Adventists been on this?

I did a little digging on the internet tonight.  I also found this quote from a Kalamazoo site:

Fetzer Institute

But most of the money went to the John E. Fetzer Foundation, which he established in 1962. Called the Fetzer Institute today, it sponsors research into what Fetzer called the connections between body, mind and spirit - another interest of his from his youth. In August of 1987, Fetzer moved his foundation and its staff of nearly 30 to new headquarters overlooking Dustin Lake on West KL Avenue in Oshtemo Township. The structure is an equilateral triangle shape representing the three connections he believed in. His interest in parapsychology and spirituality began at an early age, and he claimed to have had several spiritual experiences that influenced his later life. While spending a year bedridden with complications of influenza, he made this commitment, "If I am permitted to live, I will devote my life to the spiritual work of the Creator." For the next 73 years he did. . . .^[1]

Well, as I read the texts that John Fetzer and I were both raised with, he was doing mirror image opposite work to that of the Creator.  More accurately, he was following every biblically forbidden spiritual practice as well as the “Thou Shalt have no other gods before me” from the 10 Commandments.  What led him that way?  Was it an excuse to him that his mother once confessed to having visited a fortune teller?  Ironically, my own mother once confessed that to me.  There was a time in her post Seventh Day Adventist years that I was dismayed to find her with a Ouija board.  These were religious practices condemned by the Seventh Day Adventist Church.  They were also clearly condemned by Scriptures. 

Is there Seventh Day Adventist fault in these deviations from the faith?  Maybe.  I’m reading into the Fetzer experience as outlined by biographer Brian C. Wilson that Fetzer equated some of his own “spiritualism” to Ellen G. White, the prophetess of the Seventh Day Adventist Church.

Maybe there was far too much emphasis in the Seventh Day Adventist Church on the writings and “visions” of Ellen G. White and too little on the plain wording of Scripture.  I am thinking that I remember little emphasis on Deuteronomy 18 that contained an explicit list of spiritual practices forbidden to the Israelites as they entered the land that the Lord took from others for pursuing those practices.  Here is the express language taken from the King James version of the bible.  It reads just about the same way in every other version:

When thou art come into the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations.  There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.

For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord : and because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee.

Thou shalt be perfect with the Lord thy God.

For these nations, which thou shalt possess, hearkened unto observers of times, and unto diviners : but as for thee, the Lord thy God hath not suffered thee so to do.

The Seventh Day Adventists also, following the teachings of Ellen G. White, characterized many of the Gnostics as the true Christians -- the “true church” that went underground for a period of 1,260 years.  I heard this teaching many, many times during my youthful years in the Fort Wayne, Indiana Seventh Day Adventist Church.  Thankfully, we also sang “give me the Bible, holy message shining.”  Fortunately for me, that part stuck.  There were others, like David Koresh, John Fetzer, and others now deeply ensconced in the occult who interpreted things very differently or in the characterizing the Roman Catholic Church as the Beast of Revelation, missed other scriptural indicators of what the real beast would eventually bring forth -- as foretold in Revelation Chapter 9, the rise of the occult.  Another sad indicator of that was a site for a former Seventh Day Adventist I found on the internet.  She had formed her own church devoted to radical feminism, goddess(es) and all.  She calls herself “Katia” and is now openly into all forms of the occult, radical feminism, Eckart Tolle.  Here is something she wrote:

I went to Seventh Day Adventist schools and boarding schools during all my childhood and teen years. They teach a love for the Cathars big time. Our elementary school teachers made us read stories and color pictures of Waldensian and Albigensian children walking perilous mountain cliffs, hiding from the Inquisition on pain of death, carefully writing out copies of the Bible.

I left the Adventist church as a young adult because they don’t acknowledge the Divine Feminine, but I still have a friendly attitude toward some of their doctrine. I have been studying the Gnostic Cathars more in depth than usual lately and found some old notes I made last year. I realized the Adventists have a lot in common with the Cathars — who were called Waldensians and Albigensians in their day, only the Roman Catholic Church called them Cathars, originally a derogatory term meaning “purists” or “pure ones.”

Here is what I jotted down last year when I realized the uncanny similarity between the SDA’s and Cathars / Waldensians / Albigensians. The SDA founder, Ellen G. White, visited the Cathar / Waldensian valleys area in Europe (Italy and France border area) twice in 1885 to 1887 while she was in Europe. Chapter 4 of her famous book, The Great Controversy, is about these cool heretics. Adventists really really honor heretics!, good for them.^[2]

Here’s what she is doing today, per her blogspot/website:

Author: Katia

Katia is a consecrated independent sacramental bishop. She directs the online Esoteric Mystery School and Interfaith Theological Seminary. Check it out at NorthernWay.org.

 TO BE CONTINUED.  Paul Walter has copies of Hidden Dangers available on his website.  Alternatively, you may download a free electronic .pdf version from Archives.org.

                       

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^[1] http://www.kpl.gov/local-history/biographies/john-fetzer.aspx.  This is the website for the Kalamazoo Public Library.

^[2] https://www.northernway.org/weblog/?p=45 or tinyurl https://tinyurl.com/y5gnuff9.  The blogger calls herself “Katia” and she is obviously well-versed in SDA theology and teachings as well as her unfortunate and obvious involvement in the occult, sanctified in her mind by its equation to her own belief set.  Her article goes on to discuss other parallels.  I looked up Ellen G. White’s own comments in my copy of “The Great Controversy” and did note that she had indicated that those fleeing had been subject to some degree to pagan influences.