Jesse Jennings, founding minister of Creative Life Spiritual Center, grew up in the Morningside Heights section of New York City, where his mother worked as Assistant to the President of Columbia University. From the 1940s on, Jesse's aunt and grandmother attended lectures by legendary teachers Florence Scovel Shinn, Neville Goddard and Emmet Fox, then in the mid-1960s discovered Religious Science, through the teachings of Drs. Raymond Charles Barker and Stuart Grayson at Lincoln Center. In the 1970s his family relocated to Texas, and while home one summer from college (St. Edward's University in Austin) Jesse himself became interested in Religious Science, and began to study with Dr. Ben Winter. After receiving his Practitioner's license in 1983, Jesse co-founded a study group, in suburban north Houston, that would eventually grow into the Center he serves today. He enrolled in the Ernest Holmes College School of Ministry in Los Angeles (now known as the Holmes Institute for Consciousness Studies), graduated as a Religious Science Fellow in 1986, and, having served the customary two-year period as a licensed minister, was ordained in September, 1988, by the United Church of Religious Science (UCRS).

For 20 years, he has been a featured speaker and workshop leader in churches and at conferences across the country, while his extensive leadership on a national level has included chairing conferences and conventions, developing curricula for use in UCRS churches, and serving on the Executive Board of the International New Thought Alliance, and the UCRS International Board of Trustees, which he chaired from 1994 until 1996. The honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity was conferred upon him by the United Church of Religious Science during its 70th Anniversary convention in February, 1997.

It's as a writer that he is best known to many, having provided an annual set of "Daily Guides to Richer Living" to Science of Mind magazine since 1989, and his column, "The Way It Works," with questions and answers on practical metaphysics, has run monthly since 1991, as have regular feature articles; altogether he has published over 200 articles and essays in a variety of publications. In 2002, Tarcher/Putnam published his compilation of the work of Religious Science's founder, The Essential Ernest Holmes.