Myrtle Fillmore: Mother of Unity

Mary Caroline "Myrtle" Page Fillmore (1845 – 1931) was an American who was co-founder of Unity, a church within the New Thought Christian movement, along with her husband Charles Fillmore. After the births of their first two sons, Lowell Page Fillmore and Waldo Rickert Fillmore, the family moved to Kansas City, Missouri. Two years later, in 1886, Charles and Myrtle attended New Thought classes held by Dr. E. B. Weeks. Myrtle subsequently recovered from chronic tuberculosis and attributed her recovery to her use of prayer and other methods learned in Weeks' classes. In 1889, Charles and Myrtle began publication of a new periodical, 'Modern Thought', notable among other things as the first publication to accept for publication the writings of the then 27-year-old New Thought pioneer William Walker Atkinson. In 1890, they announced a prayer group that would later be called 'Silent Unity'. In 1891, Fillmore's 'Unity' magazine was first published. Although Charles had no intention of making Unity into a denomination, his students wanted a more organized group. He and his wife were among the first ordained Unity ministers in 1906. Charles and Myrtle Fillmore operated the Unity organizations from a campus near downtown Kansas City.

Thomas E. Witherspoon is a Unity minister who now serves at Unity at the Lake in South Lake Tahoe, California. Witherspoon was formerly a newspaper editor and publisher, as well as an editor at Unity School of Christianity. Among the numerous magazines to which he has contributed articles are Daily Word, Unity Magazine, and Wee Wisdom. He also wrote The Peace That Passes All Misunderstanding, published by Unity Books in 1988.