Church and School of Wicca

The Church and School of Wicca

Logo of the Church and School of Wicca
Formation	1968
Type	New Religious Movement
Headquarters	Hinton, West Virginia, USA.
Founders	Gavin and Yvonne Frost

The Church and School of Wicca was founded by Gavin Frost and Yvonne Frost in 1968. It was the first federally recognized Church of the religion known as Wicca in the United States. It is well known for its correspondence courses on the Frosts' unique interpretation of Wicca. The Church and School are located in Hinton, West Virginia.

The Church of Wicca was founded in 1968. Gavin Frost was a British-born aerospace engineer. While working for an aerospace company in southern England's Salisbury Plain—an area replete with prehistoric monuments—he became interested in the druids. His wife Yvonne was an American with a background in Spiritualism. He then claimed to have been initiated into a Wiccan group in St. Louis, Missouri. When living in St. Louis they developed a correspondence course through which to teach others about Wicca, advertising these courses as the "School of Wicca". They argued that by spreading their religious teaching in the form of a correspondence course, they were reaching a wider range of people than initiatory-based forms of Wicca, and that this would be necessary in order for the religion to become a "strong religious force". They believed strongly that Wicca should be presented publicly, believing that the secrecy observed by some Wiccan group brought mistrust and persecution from wider society.

"The people who really get in trouble are the people who are semisecret; that's how rumors start. Be public. The government will defend your right to the bitter end, because that's the way we're set up in the U.S. But if you're private and secret then people will come around and burn down your barn in the middle of the night. And then who will defend you."

The Frosts had adopted the term "Wicca" in the late 1960s, when it was gaining increasing usage within the Pagan Witchcraft community as a name for their religion. The pair resisted using the term "Pagan" until the late 1970s. In 1975, Yvonne stated that "I do not consider myself a Pagan. I do not worship any nature deity. I reach upward to the unnameable which has no gender".

In conjunction with his lawyers, Gavin secured religious recognition for his School from the Internal Revenue Service in 1972; this resulted in his Church becoming the first recognised church of Wicca in the United States. Later that year they began working on their Church and School full time. Gavin appointed himself as its archbishop, and Yvonne as a bishop, and they awarded themselves doctorates of divinity through the Church. The couple moved first to Salem, Missouri—where they ran a pig farm—and then to New Bern, North Carolina in 1974. There they tried to establish a survival community, but it failed to materialise. In he late 1970s they began holding an annual "Samhain Seminar", in which workshops, rituals, and lectures took place, primarily for students of their correspondence course. In 1996 they relocated to Hinton, West Virginia.