A Teacher
Jack Ensign Addington
Abundant living through constructive thinking
The transmission
Jack Ensign Addington was an American lawyer turned New Thought minister, lecturer, and author who left a successful legal practice to enter the ministry.
Over roughly two decades of active ministry he founded two large city churches before devoting himself to teaching and writing in the practical-metaphysical tradition. With his wife, Cornelia Addington, he co-founded the Abundant Living Foundation, which carried his teaching to thousands of students across the United States and Canada through radio broadcasts and the monthly Abundant Living magazine.
Addington wrote more than a dozen books on applied New Thought, including The Perfect Power Within You, Your Needs Met, Psychogenesis: Everything Begins in Mind, and The Hidden Mystery of the Bible, framing spiritual principle as a practical method of “constructive thinking” and prayer for meeting life’s needs.
He taught that mind is causal - that everything begins in mind - and that disciplined, affirmative thought reorders outer circumstance. After retiring to Montana, he died in 1998.
What they gave
Constructive thinking: Systematized affirmative, disciplined thought as a repeatable method for meeting needs and improving life.
- Psychogenesis: Taught the causal primacy of mind - “everything begins in mind” - as the basis of healing and supply.
- Mass transmission: Reached a wide lay audience through radio and the Abundant Living magazine and foundation.
- Practical scripture: Reinterpreted biblical teaching as a metaphysical psychology of constructive thought.
In their words
Setting goals gives direction to life. If you don’t have goals, you have no direction. You’re going to drift and get nowhere.
Choose what you really want, for you will surely get it. Choose your thoughts carefully for each thought is a seed planted in the creative medium of life.
It is a law of mind that that which you can conceive of, believe in and confidently expect must become your experience.
That which we believe about ourselves is sure to become our experience. It is up to us to do our part.
There is no limit set by Infinite Mind; the individual sets his own limits.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Religious Science / Science of Mind and the wider New Thought metaphysics descending from the Emma Curtis Hopkins lineage; the constructive-thinking and prayer-therapy current.
- Influenced: The Abundant Living Foundation and its readership; practitioners of constructive-thinking and affirmative-prayer practice.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Your Needs Met1966
- Psychogenesis: Everything Begins in Mind1971