Creative Community Project

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Creative Community Project in Boonville, California was initiated by the "Oakland Family" of the Unification Church in the 1970s. Hailed by members as a major recruiting source, it was vilified by critics for its alleged use of deception and "love bombing".

Sometime before the summer of 1975, a second Creative Community Project household was established at 2269 Washington Street in San Francisco. Visitors and members traveled from Washington Street to Boonville on the weekends.

Mose Durst wrote:

When we were a young movement here in the Bay Area, for instance, I was inspired by a vision of Rev. Moon and a vision of God to form Creative Community Project (CCP). I wanted to reach out to professionals, professors, lawyers who were concerned about living a spiritual life. Most of those people couldn’t care less about God and certainly not a church. It wasn’t my desire to deceive anybody, it was just a vehicle I created because I felt it would serve a particular function. Later on I realized that there was no real Unification Church in the U.S. in 1972 when the CCP was founded. There were only small groups San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington. CCP was not a front for the church; it was really the other way around![1]
We called ourselves "The Creative Community Project" and used a former fraternity house on Hearst Street as a place to teach the Divine Principle at luncheon and dinner programs. We were inspired by an ideal and wanted above all to communicate that ideal to those around us who, so it seemed, had very little commitment to anything other than self-interest. Most people we encountered had only the foggiest sense of ethics, so we felt great meaning in sharing with them, through our dinner discussions and lectures, the significance of our own ethical ideals. Those who were serious and wanted to pursue those ideals further were invited to workshops at Boonville and, later, to other country retreats.[2]

Stefan des Lauriers wrote:

Past the Golden Gate Bridge we went under the double rainbows which were painted over the tunnel's entrance. Debbie sat very close, almost embracing me. I felt a motherly spirit about her. About two hours later after midnight, we arrived at Boonville. Crossing the swinging bridge the "brothers" went to the Chicken Palace; the "sisters" slept in green trailer. The next morning some one with a guitar came in and played the Red Red Robin. It was August the 9th, my first day with "the family." Our group had breakfast sitting in a circle. A few groups had broken off from the main circle. Debbie was always right beside me, holding my hand. At breakfast we shared our lives. They called it "Cereal Drama."[3]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Dialogcentret
  2. ^ The Work of the Church: In Service to God and to Humanity - To Bigotry, No Sanction - Mose Durst
  3. ^ http://www.musickingdom.com/novel/Chapter20.html



[edit] See also