Church of Christ, Scientist

Heritage

Mary Baker Eddy dated her discovery of Christian Science to her recovery, while reading the Gospels, from a severe fall in 1866; she published Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures in 1875 and founded the Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston in 1879. The Mother Church — The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston — was established in its present form in 1892, with branch churches worldwide, and in 1908 Eddy founded The Christian Science Monitor.

Theological family

By self-description, Christian Science is the Science of Christianity: God understood as divine Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth and Love; creation as spiritual; and sickness and sin healed through prayer as Jesus healed. Trinitarian churches differ with Christian Science over the nature of God, Christ and matter; this record reports the self-description and the difference, and adjudicates nothing.

Who decides what

The Mother Church in Boston is governed by the Christian Science Board of Directors under the Manual of The Mother Church, Eddy's governing document; branch churches are democratically self-governed within the Manual's framework. There are no clergy: elected readers lead services, and Eddy designated the Bible and Science and Health as the church's only preachers.

What a first-time visitor would find

A Sunday service of hymns, prayer, and a Bible lesson-sermon — passages from the Bible and Science and Health read by two readers, the same lesson studied in every branch church that week; Wednesday evening meetings add testimonies of healing. Reading rooms, open to the public, are the church's storefront presence in many towns.

What it has always cared about

Healing as the church's reason for being; the weekly Bible lesson studied privately before it is heard publicly; an unusually orderly polity under a single written Manual; and journalism — the Monitor was founded to injure no man and to bless all mankind.

Its gift to the wider church

The Christian Science Monitor, seven-time Pulitzer winner, is the church's unambiguous gift to the country: proof that a religious body could found a newspaper of record on principle. And the church's insistence on taking healing seriously pressed the wider church to recover its own prayer for the sick.

Commonly confused with

With Scientology, constantly and wrongly — the two are entirely unrelated; with New Thought bodies such as Unity and Religious Science, which grew in the same era and share vocabulary but are organizationally and doctrinally distinct, a distinction Christian Science itself insists on; and the name leads some to expect a science-and-religion discussion group.

Range of views inside it

Branch churches share the same lesson and order of service worldwide, so variation is modest by design; members differ in how they relate Christian Science practice to medical care, a matter the church describes as individual choice.

Where Church of Christ, Scientist churches are on the map

246 Church of Christ, Scientist congregations appear on The Church Map, across 40 states.

• California — 55
• New York — 17
• Washington — 14
• Illinois — 10
• Michigan — 10
• Virginia — 10
• Oregon — 9
• Massachusetts — 8
• Connecticut — 7
• Missouri — 7