page_title: Elizabeth Clare Prophet
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Elizabeth Clare Prophet / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Elizabeth Clare Prophet in front of the chapel at the summit of Croagh Patrick, Ireland, 1980.
context_page_description: Elizabeth Clare Prophet was an American spiritual leader, author, orator, and writer. In 1963 she married Mark L. Prophet, who had founded The Summit Lighthouse in 1958. Mark and Elizabeth had four children. Elizabeth, after her second husband's death on February 26, 1973, assumed control of The Summit Lighthouse.
  In 1975 Prophet founded Church Universal and Triumphant, which became the umbrella organization for the movement, and which she expanded worldwide. She also founded Summit University and Summit University Press. In the late 1980s Prophet controversially called on her members to prepare for the possibility of nuclear war at the turn of the decade, encouraging them to construct fallout shelters. In 1996, Prophet handed day-to-day operational control of her organization to a president and board of directors. She maintained her role as spiritual leader until her retirement due to health reasons in 1999.
  During the 1980s and 1990s Prophet appeared on Larry King Live, Donahue and Nightline, among other television programs. Earlier media appearances included a feature in 1977 in "The Man Who Would Not Die," an episode of NBC's In Search Of... series.
context_section_description: In the summer of 1958, Wulf took a co-op job as a camp counselor in a French immersion school in Vermont. She was in charge of a number of high school girls between 15 and 16 years old and her role was to discipline them. She described the experience as frustrating and said she ended up praying to God she might never be put in a position of authority over others.
  In the fall of 1958 she served an internship at the United Nations as secretary for Leo Rosenthal, a UN photographer. Her experience at the UN showed her that many of the ambassadors were not there to solve the world’s problems. Rather they were engaged in power politics and manipulation of the world’s economies. When she left after three months, she was depressed, and held the opinion that, to solve the world’s problems people would need to change their concept of themselves and God.
  After moving to Boston in 1959, she worked as a secretary for the Christian Science church and the Christian Science Monitor. According to Prophet that is where she learned much about the publishing operations, organization, and administration of a church on a worldwide scale. This would help her later in running her own church.
  Wulf claimed she had realized she was intended to be a messenger while meditating with Mark L. Prophet at a public meeting in Boston on April 22, 1961. He had come to teach what he called "the Ascended Masters". She later claimed to have received a vision, while meditating with him, that her role in life was to pass on a higher teaching to further humanity's spiritual evolution. She confided to Mark the next day she was also to be a messenger like him. He accepted her as a student at his mystical school, The Summit Lighthouse. She said she received another vision in June of that year by way of a visitation by the Ascended Master, El Morya, who told her to go to Washington, D.C. to be trained as messenger.
  After she attended her first conference in Washington in July, Mark Prophet returned to Boston in August to help her move to Washington to begin her training under him. After her first marriage ended in divorce, they married in 1963 and, upon his death on February 26, 1973, Prophet assumed leadership of the organization. In 1981 the Church Universal and Triumphant purchased the 12,000-acre (49 km²) Forbes Ranch just outside Yellowstone Park, near Gardiner, Montana. In 1986, Prophet relocated her headquarters to that property.
caption: Elizabeth Clare Prophet in front of the chapel at the summit of Croagh Patrick, Ireland, 1980
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