Founding
The origins of the Living Enrichment Center were in a church called The Truth Center that Mary Manin Morrissey and her first husband started in the living room of their small farm in rural Oregon in 1974. The church was not successful, and in 1979 Morrissey and her husband took the family and their ministry on the road, offering workshops on building self-esteem in churches around the country. After a year on the road, Morrissey founded a church in the Odd Fellows Hall in Beaverton, Oregon, after she felt she had received divine guidance to start a ministry. A church management consultant advised Morrissey and her husband to name the church after what they aimed to do; as they aimed to enrich people's lives, they called themselves the Living Enrichment Center.
In November 1992, Living Enrichment Center acquired the former Callahan Center, in Wilsonville, which consisted of a three-level 94,000-square-foot (8,700 m2) building on a 93-acre (380,000 m2) lot. The lot also included 13 cabins, with over 70 rooms, which were used for spiritual retreats conducted via the church's sister organization, Namaste Retreat Center. By 1997 the church were engaged in a campaign via a Portland Sunday TV message, advertising, and outreach programs, to grow the local congregation by an extra 200 members.
Read more about this topic: Mary Manin Morrissey
Famous quotes containing the word founding:
“... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The responsible business men of this country put their shoulders to the wheel. It is in response to this universal demand that we are founding today, All-American Airways.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)