In 1897, Matthew George Easton’s “Illustrated Bible Dictionary,” third edition, employed three Old Testament Hebrew words and one New Testament concept to define religious ambassador by essential function: tsir, meaning “one who goes on an errand,” melits, meaning “interpreter,” malak, meaning “messenger,” and as the given name “designating those who are appointed by God to declare his will.”
In 2021, the board of directors of The National Spiritual Alliance of the United States of America, Inc., chose the Rev. John Midura to be the first-ever TNSA Ambassador to Spiritualists at local, state, regional, national and international churches and organizations, as well as to individuals and groups of like-mindedness.
TNSA was founded in 1913 and is based at G. Tabor Thompson Temple in Montague’s village of Lake Pleasant.
Modern Spiritualism describes itself as a philosophy, a religion and a science. It marks its birth March 31, 1848, when teenagers Kate and Maggie Fox communicated with the spirit of a peddler claiming to have been murdered in the farmhouse where they lived near Rochester, New York. The news spread like a California wildfire, spawning a religious movement that arrived in Lake Pleasant in the early 1870s.
By 1874, the village campground was dominated by Spiritualists who organized as the Massachusetts Liberalist and Spiritualist Association, then incorporated in 1879 as the New England Spiritualist Campmeeting Association. NESCA disbanded in 1976; however, TNSA’s ongoing presence makes Lake Pleasant the oldest continuously existing same-site Spiritualist center in the United States.
Midura was born in March 1953, and raised in Chicopee and Holyoke. From birth, he was influenced by Roman Catholicism and described his mother, aunt and maternal grandmother as “very religious.” He attended grammar school at Mater Dolorosa, staffed by Franciscans, where he met parish priest the Rev. Leonard Pakulski, “who took me under his wing. He was a tremendous individual who truly believed” what Jesus professed “in the Sermon on the Mount.” Midura spent his junior and senior years at St. Francis High School, a minor seminary near Buffalo, New York, graduating second in his class.
Although he’d had “intentions of entering the novitiate,” Midura said, he opted to try “normal life” first. He went to work at a Holyoke factory and began full-time self-funded studies at then-Western New England College in Springfield, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 1975.
Midura amply sampled secular employment, including 10 years as vice president of administration and sales for Brockway Leasing and Transport in Springfield and 14 years as Business and Operations Manager and Chief Financial Officer of Goodwill Industries of the Berkshires in Pittsfield. However, from childhood on, he’d had an inner feeling that he belonged in a sacred setting.
Midura and husband Dan Frank live in North Adams and have been married 17 of the 35 years they have been together. Knowing Roman Catholic views regarding LGBTQ individuals, Midura explored, then was ordained by the Reformed Catholic Church International, which describes itself as “A spiritual community as Christ meant one to be!” RCCI is ultra-inclusionistic, meaning the hand of spiritual friendship is literally extended to all. He also completed Morris Pratt Institute courses and is a certified Spiritualist Healer, Medium, Minister and Teacher.
In 2008, Midura joined TNSA. He was president, 2012-2018, Thompson Temple pastor, 2018-2019, and this year became treasurer as well as “Ambassador to the Spiritualist World.”
As he conceives ambassadorship, Midura likens TNSA to the Sun and Spiritualist clusters to its solar system. He’s already traveling Spiritualist highways and byways of New England and New York, then will venture farther afield to Spiritualist strongholds throughout the nation, such as Florida’s Southern Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Ground Association, New York’s Lilly Dale Assembly and Indiana’s Camp Chesterfield.