Emmanuel Movement

The Emmanuel Movement was a psychologically-based approach to religious healing introduced in 1906 as an outreach of the Emmanuel Church in Boston, Massachusetts. In practice, the religious element was de-emphasized and the primary modalities were individual and group therapy. Episcopal priests Elwood Worcester and Samuel McComb established a clinic at the church which lasted 23 years and offered both medical and psychological services. The primary long-term influence of the movement, however, was on the treatment of alcoholism.

Elwood Worcester (1862–1940) was the originator of the Emmanuel movement philosophy. He was raised in an educated middle-class family which fell into poverty as a result of business reversals and the death of Worcester's father. After high school, Worcester went to work at a railway claim-department office. One day, while alone in the office, he had an experience of the room filling with light and heard the words, "Be faithful to me and I will be faithful to you." After discussing the experience with his priest, Algernon Crapsey, he became convinced that he was called to the ministry. At the time he was supporting his family, but he later entered Columbia University on scholarship and earned a bachelor's degree with highest honors.

As a candidate for orders Worcester was required to attend a recognized seminary, in spite of his own conviction that he would be better prepared by attending a German university. He was able to satisfy the requirements for the first two years of General Seminary in New York by studying the texts and passing examinations. He then graduated from the Seminary after only one year of full-time attendance and immediately left for Germany to enter the University of Leipzig. After an initial year devoted to classical studies, he spent two years studying with Franz Delitzsch, foremost Hebraist of the day, and psychologists Wilhelm Wundt and Gustav Theodor Fechner. In his autobiography, Worcester recalled that the liberal German academic tradition, which "tends to weaken and remove the false opposition which has grown up between the things of the mind and the things of the Spirit," was the inspiration for much of his later work.

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