Important information for those attending Annual Meeting 1976
Irrespective of what you've been reading here the past few months, Annual Meeting will not begin at 10 a.m. this year. The new time is 9:30 a.m. on Monday, June 7. And it promises to be a fresh, forthright meeting, firmly rooted in the vision of divine Science Mrs. Eddy saw and gave to the world.
The theme, "Show Me, Shepherd," sets the tone for the meetings and will be a recurring idea that binds all the sessions together.
Below is a timetable of major events of Annual Meeting week, followed by other important information concerning registration, child care, tours, and so forth:
MONDAY, JUNE 7:
9:30 a.m.—Annual Meeting— Show Me, Shepherd
1:30, 3:15, and 5:00 p.m— Special Interest Sessions—". . . how to go . . ." (See topics in March journal, p. 167.)
TUESDAY, JUNE 8:
10:00 a.m.—General Session— ". . . o'er the hillside steep . . ."
7:30 p.m.—General Session— ". . . how to gather, how to sow . . ."
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 9:
9:00 a.m.—General Session— ". . . how to feed Thy sheep." Poems by Mrs. Eddy, p. 14.
A brief statement of the aims of each meeting appeared in last month's Church in Action section, pp. 227-228. Interspersed throughout the meetings will be a few talks and reports from the Field, each showing how the higher vision of Christian Science is now being fulfilled.
Any member of The Mother Church —from age 12 up—is welcome to attend these sessions. Seating will be in the Extension and in nearby buildings equipped with closed-circuit television.
FRIDAY WORKSHOPS
The regular Friday workshops will be held as usual during Annual Meeting week. (Please see the Notices section of this issue, p. 294.)
REGISTRATION AT HYNES AUDITORIUM
Mother Church members may obtain tickets for Annual Meeting and the other meetings at Hynes Auditorium on Sunday, June 6, from 1 to 6 p.m., Monday, June 7, from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., all day Tuesday, and Wednesday morning. (No registration will take place on the Church Center plaza this year.) Please bring your membership identification card (mailed with your per capita tax form) or other type of membership identification.
If you have family or friends with whom you would like to sit, or who cannot easily register for themselves, you may register for them, provided you bring with you definite proof of their membership. If such identification is not in hand, these members must register in person.
PROGRAM AND GENERAL INFORMATION SHEET
During registration everyone will receive an Annual Meeting program with an agenda of the sessions and a list of times and locations of all Special Interest Sessions. A general information sheet with tour schedules, places and times for quiet study, locations of local restaurants, a map of the area around the Church Center, and so on, will be available beginning Thursday, June 3, at all information desks and also at registration.
CHILD CARE DURING ANNUAL MEETING WEEK
During all general sessions and the Special Interest Sessions, children up to age 12 will be cared for at Hynes Auditorium. The child care area (in the first floor exhibition hall off the lobby) will open one hour before Annual Meeting and half an hour before all other sessions. Parents who preregister their children by May 15 will receive more details of child care hours by mail. Please send the names and ages of the children and the meetings when they are to be cared for to:
The First Church of Christ, Scientist
Local Activities Division, C10
Christian Science Center
Boston, MA, U.S.A. 02115
Children not preregistered should be registered at Hynes on Sunday, June 6, from 1 to 6 p.m., or on Monday, June 7, from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m. Thereafter they can be registered at Hynes 30 minutes before each session.
Parents may get their tickets to the meetings at a special table adjacent to children's registration. Please watch for the signs. Again this year, it is necessary for a parent leaving a child for more than one meeting to serve in the child care area during one session.
During the Sunday morning service, June 6 (at 10:45 a.m.), the Children's Room in the Extension will provide care for children below Sunday School age. During the Sunday Spanish service (at 9:30 a.m.), the Sunday evening service, and the Wednesday evening testimony meeting (both at 7:30 p.m.), the Children's Room in the Extension will provide care for children under 10.
GUIDED TOURS
Guides will conduct tours of the Church Center during Annual Meeting week, including the weekend before Annual Meeting. However, tours of the Extension, Original Mother Church, and Sunday School building will take place only when these buildings are not being used for other purposes. Tour schedules will be listed in the general information sheet available at information desks and in the Visitors' Tour Center (off the Lobby of The Christian Science Publishing Society) from Thursday, June 3, onward.
From Saturday, June 5, through Friday, June 11, chartered buses will be taking visitors to Mrs. Eddy's homes and other important landmarks in her life. The "ticket office" will be a commercial bus parked on Huntington Avenue near the Church Administration building. It will open on Friday, June 4, at 1:00 p.m. to give tour information and to sell tickets for tours and also for bus transportation to local Christian Science lectures being given in the area the weekend before Annual Meeting. The "ticket office" will remain open daily throughout Annual Meeting week.
ACCOMMODATIONS IN BOSTON
An important reminder—Hotel rooms may not be available unless your Housing Form applications reach the Greater Boston Convention and Tourist Bureau by May 1. Likewise, unless dormitory requests reach the school of your choice by May 15, space may not be available there either. (See the November 1975 Journal, page 652.)
From the Directors:
Extensive renovations at Chestnut Hill and Arden Wood
In a letter dated January 15, 1906, and published in the Sentinel of October 7, 1916, Mrs. Eddy stated her desire to found an institution called "Sanatorium." She wrote, ". . . that it be a resort for invalids without homes or relatives available in time of need; where they can go and recruit.
"Our cause," she continued, "demands a wider circle of means for the ends of philanthropy and charity, and better qualifications for practical purposes."
The seed which Mrs. Eddy sowed in 1906 has since grown and borne fruit in the form of 36 accredited care facilities for Christian Scientists here and abroad, all deserving of the support they receive from the Field.
The purpose of this report is (1) to bring you up to date on the extensive renovations now under way at the Christian Science Benevolent Association, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and at the Arden Wood Benevolent Association (formerly the Christian Science Benevolent Association on Pacific Coast) at San Francisco, California, and (2) to alert you to the need, particularly at this time, for financial support of these two major renovation projects.
The Chestnut Hill Sanatorium was opened in 1919. Since then few improvements to the buildings have been made, aside from minor modernizations and redecoration of guest rooms. Annual operating losses have been subsidized for many years.
A thorough study of the situation to determine the wisdom of bringing the building up to present-day standards or replacing it, showed the following:
—the number of rooms was too great for the demand for nursing.
—while surplus rooms could be used for rest and study, the demand fluctuated so greatly, and the average occupancy was so low, that a secondary use of these rooms was needed.
—the original layout of rooms for nursing caused considerable hardship on the nursing staff because the rooms were small and facilities inadequate for bathing and caring for guests.
—the high cost of building a new facility made it necessary to reexamine possible uses of the present one.
It was decided to renovate only that part of the building required to supply the demands of the New England region for nursing care and to explore the usefulness of the rest of the building for sheltered care, rest and study, and a limited number of rooms and suites for general care or residential living. Renovation of the final third of the building would wait for determination of the kind of use most needed. Besides the renovation of guest rooms, work will include improvements in the heating and air-conditioning systems, modernization of two elevators, a new consolidated office and reception area, and a new ambulance entrance.
A contract was signed and work commenced in February. The total cost will be $1,200,000 with completion scheduled for September of this year.
Trustees of Arden Wood Benevolent Association in San Francisco worked out similar plans, and major renovation has begun there too. That contract is for a little over $2,000,000 and covers the entire building.
Contributions supporting these renovations will be gratefully accepted and may be sent to Marc Engeler, Treasurer of The Mother Church, for the Chestnut Hill project, and to James Reid, President, Board of Trustees, Arden Wood Benevolent Association, 400 West Portal Avenue, San Francisco, CA, U.S.A. 94127, for that project.
How one growing branch looks at membership
It was easy to feel the profound joy and gratitude in a report we received from a branch church in Virginia. They spoke of the increased growth of their membership over a 14-month period. They had welcomed a sizable number of new members, and nearly half of them were joining a Church of Christ, Scientist, for the first time.
The report shared some of the reasons applicants gave for wanting to join their branch: its love and friendliness; the enthusiasm and activity; the enjoyment of the Sunday School by their children; and one first-time member mentioned being impressed over a period of time by the high quality of character and purpose expressed by the membership as a whole.
Their membership committee, the report said, has daily worked metaphysically on three different topics:
—Friendliness, love, and welcome
—The inclusion of young people both in the Sunday School and in the community in our larger concept of church
—Overcoming resistance.
It was a fine report, a delight to read. But it didn't go far enough. We wrote back and asked if they could be more specific in telling us how they worked. Their response follows.
"As we thought about the scope of our responsibilities, a previous change of name from interviewing committee to membership committee indicated to us that we needed to embrace all aspects of membership in our metaphysical work. Therefore, we decided to choose a topic each month that we would emphasize in our daily metaphysical work and our committee meetings.
"We began with the nature of God as Love and our church as the activity of Love, divine Principle, already embracing through the Christ each individual in our church membership, congregation, and community. We saw that man isn't alienated or excluded from Church either through ignorance or sin and that all are inseparable from the comfort, healing, and complete salvation of Christ, Truth. We realized that the warmth, joy, and affection of divine Love could not be inhibited but are expressed abundantly by each member and constitute a welcome for and unity with each individual who is led to our services.
"This emphasis was used for a number of months. Then we sought to enlarge our awareness of young people's place in our church. We knew that in Science man is the complete, mature, ageless expression of God and therefore each young person in our Sunday School and in our community was already one with Church and could never be separated from it by any counterattraction. We reached out lovingly to embrace young people in our recognition of their completeness and the completeness of Church.
"Finally, we spent some months eliminating the belief of resistance to Truth, to Christian Science, and to church membership. We knew that animal magnetism had no avenues through which to induce apathy, misunderstanding, or competition for time and effort wherewith to cause resistance in our members, the congregation, or the community. We knew that in the true temple or Church nothing could enter 'that defileth ... or maketh a lie' Rev. 21: 27. and therefore our church included in its membership only ideas of God, harmoniously expressing Him in unity and mutual blessing, and that Church—God's infinite idea— included the community and everyone in it."
Redesigning your Reading Room? Some thoughts on where to begin
In preparing the article in last month's Church in Action section on Boston's new Boylston Street Reading Room,See April journal, pp. 232-233; we talked at some length with those responsible for its planning and design. The following ideas might prove helpful to any branch planning to design a new Reading Room or refurbish their present quarters.
Updating the Reading Room should go beyond merely redecorating— painting a wall, rearranging the furniture. It can be an opportunity to reevaluate the church's commitment to the Reading Room, to rethink its role and better understand its mission and purpose.
Obviously, space, location, and funds are sometimes predetermined, but they needn't be limiting factors. The greatest resources we have are ideas. The beautiful thing that takes place in design is that the more you clarify what you want to accomplish, the more obvious the design needs become. When you've determined your objectives, the ideas bring the design solutions along with them.
Whether you feel one of your members is suitably equipped or you hire an architect or designer, someone has to translate your ideas into form. Of course, the clearer your ideas are, the more clearly the forms will evolve to reflect them.
So, the place to begin is not with "How many pieces of our present furniture will we have left over?" or "Where can we use this old desk we've always had?" Begin with the spiritual ideas you want the Reading Room to express—qualities, such as welcome, openness, expectancy, warmth and simplicity, that will provide an appealing framework for presenting Christian Science.
This is not to discourage using what you have "in the house" but to suggest complementing the furniture you have with new pieces that make the space more functional or that improve the impression it gives to the stranger. Rather than "This chair (lamp, table, or bookcase) is my favorite and I'm not going to let us part with it!"— replace the self-interest of old comforts with what the Reading Room needs to convey. The forms, the contents, and their placement in the Reading Room become visual statements of what kind of activity takes place there. These visual items need to express the same quality of response you're expecting from the visitor.
People relate visually, whether we want them to or not. And our Reading Room, whether we intend it or not, becomes a public exhibit. So we have to ask ourselves, What do we want our Reading Room to communicate? Mrs. Eddy tells us, "The picture is the artist's thought objectified." Science and Health, p. 310. The Reading Room can represent the collective thought of the church objectified, communicating an irresistible message of beauty, freshness, and vitality.
Fruitage from 1975 Regional Youth Meetings
Here's clear indication of the excellent overall quality of the 20 Regional Youth Meetings that were held in many parts of the world last year . . .
One planning committee member wrote, "I was forced to pray without ceasing during the time of the meeting because of [my] responsibilities. This has changed my life. Every part of my day is now a moment when joy and healing are close at hand."
Some other blessings included losing morbid thoughts of suicide and death; a performer's healing of nervousness; office squabbling stopped; a job found; shedding addiction to drugs and smoking. One young woman was able to rely on God for protection when an intruder got into her apartment. This helped her to see, too, that she didn't have to relocate to find security. And a student who had for some time felt rushed and depressed became happier through a better understanding of Soul.
Churches have reported fine fruitage, too—more active, loving support from those who attended Regional Youth Meetings, and more young people applying for membership. One branch has enjoyed more constructive committee meetings, growth in their Sunday School, and more activity in their Reading Room, and attributes most of it to their support of RYM planning.
Regional Youth Meetings will continue to be held, and The Mother Church, cosponsor of each of these meetings, welcomes inquiries from the Field about planning and hosting. An area wouldn't normally be eligible to have more than one RYM in a three-year period (except overseas). For more information, write:
The First Church of Christ, Scientist
Department of Branches
and Practitioners
Field Meetings Coordinator
Christian Science Center
Boston, MA, U.S.A. 02115
How a society in Germany came out of 'isolation'
For more than 20 years a society in the western part of Germany rented quarters for its church services, Sunday School, and Reading Room. Although near the center of town, they were located on a street little used by automobile or pedestrian traffic. Still, as far as space and rent were concerned, the quarters were fully adequate and reasonable.
The members over the years had become used to their isolation and it wasn't until their landlord wanted to sell the building—and quickly— that they began to look in earnest for a better location. Their intent was to have a schoolroom for church services and rent a small apartment for the Reading Room.
As the relocation committee examined possibilities—supported by prayer and the members' trust in Mind's, God's, direction—they found just what they were seeking for the Reading Room. Just before they signed a lease, however, another offer of rooms was received, completely unexpected, meeting all their needs. And right in the center of town "where church quarters and Reading Room really should be," their report explained.
The rent was considerably higher than they were accustomed to paying; still they accepted immediately. Because their former landlord was pleased they were able to vacate so quickly, he agreed to pay the difference between the old and new rents until their lease on his building ran out. Necessary structural changes and a complete renovation were accomplished so quickly and harmoniously that within four weeks they were completely resettled.
The record number of visitors at their old Reading Room has now become the average figure in the new location—positive evidence of progress.
"Gratitude on the part of the members of the society for everything they have experienced and attained is very great," they report. "Divine Love has truly met our need."
An easy way to update Sunday School library
What's a superintendent to do who has an outdated Sunday School lending library? Simple! Let the need be known.
That's what worked in Maine. An inventory was taken to determine what new volumes, booklets, records, and so forth were missing and then a letter was sent to the membership listing specific needs. The response was immediate.
"Not only was every item received," the church reports, "but we obtained duplicates, too, as well as contributions to purchase additional copies as new items become available."
They have also sent each pupil in the Sunday School a complete list of what's available and an attractive bookmark reminder encouraging the young people to borrow whatever interests them.
Subscription Edition valued at $400
Occasionally, owners of copies of the Subscription Edition of Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy write the Publisher's Agent to ask the value of this volume for insurance purposes. When the Subscription Edition was published in 1941, it sold at $100. This price has now been increased to $400 when copies are placed with the Publisher's Agent for resale.
Those who wish to sell their copies will want to know that the Publisher's Agent has a continuing offer to repurchase any copy of the Subscription Edition for $400, less the cost of any necessary repairs.
Copies purchased by or donated to the Publisher's Agent will be made available to churches, libraries, museums, Christian Science Students Associations, individuals outside the United States, and individuals within the United States—in that order —to achieve greater public display of this edition and a more even geographic distribution. All copies sold by the Publisher's Agent will be priced at $400.
Branch churches and individuals wishing to place their names on a waiting list to receive offers to purchase a copy of this edition may write the Publisher's Agent. In recent years, the supply of books has been sufficient to meet only a very limited demand. The waiting list is long, and it could be many years before a copy of the Subscription Edition is available.
Church dedication —a happy event
It's cause for celebration when a branch church or society can announce to friends and neighbors that its building has been fully paid for! And it's quite natural for church members to wish to share their joy with the community by inviting the public to the dedicatory service. Announcements marking this special occasion in church history were recently placed in local newspapers by the following churches and societies:
OLD SAYBROOK, CONNECTICUT (First Church) June 30, 1974
CONCORD, CALIFORNIA (First Church) May 18, 1975
RHINELANDER, WISCONSIN (First Church) July 13, 1975
WAKEFIELD, WEST YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND (First Church) September 14, 1975
SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH (Second Church) September 28, 1975
LONGMEADOW, MASSACHUSETTS (First Church) September 28, 1975
BIRMINGHAM, WEST MIDLANDS, ENGLAND (Fourth Church) October 5, 1975
WEXFORD, WEST MIDLANDS, (Society) October 5, 1975
MILL VALLEY, CALIFORNIA (First Church) October 12, 1975
DREXEL HILL, PENNSYLVANIA (First Church) October 12, 1975
KINGSTON, ONTARIO, CANADA (First Church) October 19, 1975
LARGO, FLORIDA (First Church) November 2, 1975
NEW MILFORD, CONNECTICUT (First Church) November 9, 1975
MARTINSVILLE, INDIANA (Society) November 9, 1975
MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN (Society) November 9, 1975
SINGEN-HOHENTWIEL, FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY (First Church) November 9, 1975
