Endeavor Academy (Charles Anderson)

Endeavor Academy was founded in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin by Charles Buell Anderson (b. c.1926, d. 2008), initially registered in 1991 as "God's Country Place," then re-registered in 1992 as Endeavor Academy and the New Christian Church of Full Endeavor, headquartered in a converted summer-resort motel complex; by 1999 the compound housed roughly 500 residents. Anderson dated his "Spiritual Awakening" to a spontaneous 1979 experience, which he connected in his own retellings to landing with the US Marines at Nagasaki shortly after the 1945 atomic bombing, and to a 1971 near-death experience during which he said he was spontaneously healed of cirrhosis. Anderson taught an idiosyncratic reading of Helen Schucman's 1976 A Course in Miracles (ACIM) blended with New Testament and Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step material, and in a CBS News interview denied having "followers" while simultaneously claiming he was "returning to heaven" and that "everybody" would be going with him — describing himself as "the danger of eternal love."

CBS's 48 Hours ran two investigative segments — "The Academy: Miracle or Cult?" (1999) and "Leaving Endeavor Academy" (1999) — documenting ex-member accounts alongside the compound's daily teaching regimen. The Academy also pursued external legitimacy, representing ACIM at the 2000 UN Millennium World Peace Summit and the 2004/2009 Parliaments of World Religions, and produced a self-financed documentary, A Course in Miracles Unleashed (2008). Endeavor Academy separately won a 2003 US District Court ruling voiding most of the Foundation for Inner Peace's copyright claims over the ACIM text — on the grounds it had been generally distributed before copyright was secured — pushing most of the text, plus three early draft editions, into the public domain, and leading the US Trademark Office to cancel ACIM's trademark in 2005. Endeavor Academy now publishes its own edition, "The Advent of a Great Awakening."

Anderson died in 2008; per Wikipedia, post-2008 leadership "is unknown" in the public record, though the academy and its European and Latin American affiliates reportedly remained active. This database's separate "Endeavor Academy continuation online" entry names Anderson's widow Carmel Anderson and specific senior students as successors — a specificity not corroborated by the Wikipedia source used here; the discrepancy is noted, not resolved.