WITH the coming of June, the time is at hand for the Annual Meeting of The Mother Church. Although the Church Manual by Mary Baker Eddy does not require the presence at these gatherings of any members but those who are the Church officers, the Annual Meeting should mark an important milestone in the journey Spiritward of every Christian Scientist.
From time to time our beloved Leader sent messages to her Church, some of the most important of which were read to the members at the Annual Meetings in June. The tenor of these messages is epitomized in these statements from her letter to The Mother Church in June, 1899 (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany. 125): "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." Should it not be the privilege and duty, therefore, of every Christian Scientist to institute at Annual Meeting time a wholesome review of his mental processes and to check his spiritual unfoldment in the light of these statements?
Once a year the officers of The Mother Church present reports of their stewardship and at the same time listen to words of counsel and Christly admonition from the newly elected President. Let no student of Christian Science who does not attend the Annual Meeting fail to follow these proceedings, a full report or excerpts of which appear in the various Christian Science publications. Thus may one unite with his brethren assembled in Boston in sharing the inspiration of the occasion, and in rededicating and reconsecrating himself to selfless service in this holiest of causes.
