Mary Baker Eddy's 19th-century New England, churchgoers typically knew their Bible inside out. Good preaching was considered one of God's greater gifts. Churches were, socially and spiritually, at the center of urban and small-town life.
Worshipers held reserved family pews, dressed much more formally than today, and addressed one another as Miss, Mrs., and Mr., or as "Brother" and "Sister". But it was early Christianity's "house churches" that were the model for the fledgling Church of Christ, Scientist—people gathering informally in homes, probably around dinner tables, to pray, sing, and talk about the "good news" of Jesus' life and words, and the healings he accomplished.
Christian Scientists' earliest services were held in Good Templar's Hall in Lynn, Massachusetts. From late 1878 through the completion of the Original Mother Church in December 1894, Mrs. Eddy preached in her homes in Lynn and in Boston's South End, and in a succession of increasingly larger public halls in Boston.
