Centers for Spiritual Living / Religious Science
Centers for Spiritual Living / Religious Science belongs to the Metaphysical, New Thought and Swedenborgian family of churches.
Governance: association.
The New Thought communities teaching Ernest Holmes's Science of Mind — affirmative prayer as a practiced discipline.
Heritage
Ernest Holmes published The Science of Mind in 1926 and founded the Institute of Religious Science in Los Angeles the following year; the movement he began grew into two organizations — the United Church of Religious Science and Religious Science International — which reunited in 2012 as Centers for Spiritual Living, headquartered at Golden, Colorado.
Theological family
New Thought by self-description: one infinite Intelligence in and through all things, humanity as its individualized expression, and thought as creative — taught as Science of Mind. The movement honors Jesus as a supreme wayshower rather than confessing him as trinitarian Christianity does; the difference is reported here, not adjudicated, and many centers describe themselves as spiritual rather than Christian.
Who decides what
An association: each center is largely self-governing under licensed ministers and practitioners credentialed by the home organization.
What a first-time visitor would find
A Sunday celebration service with contemporary music, meditation, an inspirational talk on Science of Mind principles, and affirmative prayer — spiritual mind treatment — offered by licensed practitioners; classes in the Holmes curriculum run through the week.
What it has always cared about
Affirmative prayer as a teachable practice; healing of mind and circumstance; and the dignity of every person as an expression of the divine.
Its gift to the wider church
The practice of affirmative prayer, articulated by Holmes as a repeatable discipline, has influenced the vocabulary of hope and intention far beyond the movement itself.
Commonly confused with
With Unity, the Kansas City New Thought body with a more explicitly Christian devotional idiom; with Divine Science, the third historic New Thought school; and with Christian Science, an older and organizationally unrelated body from which New Thought is distinct.
Range of views inside it
Centers range from strongly spiritual-but-not-religious in tone to warmly devotional; the shared textbook is The Science of Mind, and the shared practice is treatment.
A note from the mapmakers: Nothing here may be asserted of a specific center. No US congregation count is published for the body in RCMS 2020, and none is offered here. Whether a given center describes itself as Christian varies; sentences drawn from this record must not assign that label for it, and yield to the center's own materials.
Sources: The Science of Mind (Ernest Holmes, TarcherPerigee) · Centers for Spiritual Living — about (Centers for Spiritual Living, Golden CO) · Encyclopedia of American Religions (J. Gordon Melton, Gale)
More of the Metaphysical, New Thought and Swedenborgian story · Find these churches on the map