Welcome to The First Spiritualist Church of Onset Church

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MEET Reverend KATHLEEN

​Reverend Kathleen Hoffman is the pastor of our church, the First Spiritualist Church of Onset, Massachusetts. She is internationally recognized, certified medium, teacher and healer. Reverend Kathleen is also a Reiki Master/Teacher, Spirit Artist, Certified Hypnotherapist, she is attuned to the Marconi healing frequencies, spiritualist medium, a Feng Shui Consultant and is also certified to access the Akashic Records, through the pathway prayer process and a graduate of Radiant Healing School. She began her spiritual work more than 25 years ago and over time has become well known for her gifts of clairvoyance, clairaudience and transfiguration. She has been recognized for her spiritual work as a feature in many newspapers, television (Awake In The Dream with Penelope Chatterton) and radio programs throughout New England and other states. Reverend Kathleen has served on church and camp boards including positions of assistant pastor.

​The Reverend completed her courses through the American Federation of Spiritualist Churches, and is certified through the First Spiritualist Church of Onset. She has been Empathic since childhood, having the ability to know what people were thinking as early as four years old. As a young child she would draw people's faces leading her to her path of Spirit drawing, years later.

Reverend Kathleen has attended classes on spirituality with some of the most prestigious mediums in the world. The late Reverends Gladys and Kenneth Custance, John Carol, Rita Berkowitz and Mediums from England, New Zealand and other parts of the world. She is innovative in developing new curriculum for mediumship, healing, and has created a variety of new ways to teach Spiritualism. She continues to teach and educate in her weekly classes and workshops here at church and at other churches and educational centers throughout the country. She is a coordinator of outreach and education for a victim's service center and is a trainer for the criminal justice system and has her License in Drug and Alcohol Counseling. Kathleen has many other certifications both in healing and the human services field and has dedicated her life work in the human services field, by empowering adults and children of various ages to open to their highest potential and their life's purpose. ​

 ‘We’re still inspired’ after more than a century

 Tucked away on the end of a quiet side street off Onset Avenue, the First Spiritualist Church of Onset has ministered to its congregation for well over a century.  The church building dates to 1903, said Pastor Kathleen Hoffman, an ordained minister and certified medium.  She added, “People still come by and say, ‘I didn’t know you were still here.’”  The church is year round, she said. In the beginning it was a summer camp, like the older, distinctive On-I-Set Wigwam Spiritualist Camp, 9 Crescent Place, which was built in 1894 and remains very much extant today, as well.

“This is our place where thousands and thousands of Spiritualists have walked,” she said during an interview at the church. Those visitors included the famous, like Emmet Fox, minister of New York's Divine Science Church, who drew thousands to hear him preach during the Depression.

The First Spiritualist Church of Onset’s mission has remained constant since its inception: to minister to “people seeking solace and comfort for their loved ones who have passed to the spirit side. And this is where they would get their insight and connection.”

The church at 17 Highland Ave. is a tangible link to the Onset past where Spiritualism took hold in the late 19th century and flourished for decades.

 “Spiritualist Onset, Talking with the Dead by the Sea:”

“In 1877 when Eastern Massachusetts Spiritualists came to Onset Bay Grove to commune with the spirits by the sea, they founded what would become one of the nation’s leading Spiritualist summer camp meetings. For the next 40 years, Onset attracted the most prominent speakers, lecturers, mediums and proponents of the Spiritualist world, who lent credibility to the movement in New England.

“At the same time the infrastructure of hotels, restaurants and recreational options needed to sustain these Spiritualists was established, laying the groundwork for the villages twentieth century expansion and resort development.”

Its draw, in fact, as a resort development supplanted what had been a Spiritualist mecca.     Frank Mulligan "Wicked Local"