The Church Manual of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts, written by the beloved Leader of the Christian Science movement, Mary Baker Eddy, provides for an annual meeting of The Mother Church each June (see Art. XIII, Sect. 1). While only the officers are required to attend, each year the original edifice of The Mother Church and the excelsior Extension are thrown open to throngs of visiting and local members who gather to hear the heartening reports from headquarters and the Field.
At one of these happy home-comings, Mrs. Eddy, in her message to The Mother Church, said to her followers: "Have you learned to conquer sin, false affections, motives, and aims,—to be not only sayers but doers of the law? Brethren, our annual meeting is a grave guardian. It requires you to report progress, to refresh memory, to rejuvenate the branches and to vivify the buds, to bend upward the tendrils and to incline the vine towards the parent trunk" (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 125). Therefore, whether or not Christian Scientists from all parts of the Field can be present personally at these important annual gatherings, should not each member of The Mother Church strive to be with his brethren in spirit and share in the inspiration of this sacred occasion?
Many branch churches send messages of greeting to The Mother Church, and the reading of some of the outstanding reports of growth and healing from the Field is received with enthusiasm and deep interest. One cannot think of The Mother Church without her hundreds of loyal branches. What is a tree? Just a trunk? Is not a tree composed of roots, trunk, branches, and leaves? So the great Christian Science movement finds its activity and expression in the parent vine and its branch churches deeply rooted in the soil of Christ Jesus' Christianity. As a tree is said to breathe through its leaves, so this redemptive organization lives and breathes through the spiritualization of thought and deed of each member.
