The value of something lies in its fulfilling the purpose for which it was designed. I worked for a time as an engineer in the manufacture and marketing of twist drills. (Twist drills are the curly-looking steel rods that fit into hand tools or machine tools to make holes.) I learned that when production engineers and other users are offered a new type of drill, they usually say, "Let's see what it can do." It's not the drill's appearance or technical specification they're interested in. It's the hole the drill can make. Twist drills are designed to make holes.
But what have twist drills to do with Christian Science branch churches? Perhaps they can provide an analogy.
Branch churches have a designed purpose. Each has the same distinct intent—in the words of the Manual of The Mother Church by Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science: to "reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing."Man., p. 17. Christian healing, then, in the broadest sense, is the specific purpose of the whole Church of Christ, Scientist— The Mother Church and all its branches.
