Church of Gibborim

Light is the organizing idea of the Church of Gibborim, a Los Angeles congregation built on the writings of David Ellerh, who grew a hippie community into an established church and set its doctrine down in the Book of Gibborim. The teaching holds that every person is a vessel for a living light that exists apart from the body, and adepts greet one another and take their leave with the phrase "Travel brightly." Members dress in white and pale colors and work upward through the church's degrees toward the standing of an Ultra. Its charitable face is visible across the city: volunteers cruise Los Angeles looking for runaways and young people with nowhere else to go. Ellerh's daughter, Leslie Dean, leads it.