Marshall Vian Summers (born January 28, 1949)[1] is an American religious leader and spiritual teacher[2] who offers retreats, online broadcasts and events[3] in the United States and abroad.
After studying music and English at the University of California, Berkeley, he became a teacher of the blind and claimed he began to develop sensitivity to "inner guidance," or gut feeling of knowing, that would lead him to go into the wilderness of the American Southwest to experience an encounter with what he related to as an Angelic Presence that instructed him to record messages that have come to be referred to as divine revelation.
[13] The content of the material is regarded as a (or the) "New Message from God," which posits a time of impending dire crisis for humanity—on the threshold of emergence into a highly competitive Greater Community of intelligent life,[14] yet socially dissolute and environmentally compromised.
[23] Key components of this communication include warnings of an incursion upon Earth called the Intervention,[24] and pronouncements about the future involving global upheaval[25] and interaction between the human race and extraterrestrials which, Summers claims, are from "the Greater Community.
"[27][28] The New Message Sanctuary in Boulder, Colorado, USA, a gathering place for The Society, broadcasts services via the Internet and since 2012 has presented its materials on line, as part of a free school claiming 2902 students and 112 countries represented,[29] a ready answer to criticism in regards to capitalizing off the Word of God.
[35] Portions of the New Message have been translated from English into 34 other languages including Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Bangla, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Kiswahili, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Vietnamese.