Have you ever thought of your church as its community's answered prayer? The prayer may be unspoken, perhaps only a nascent desire. Yet every community, and the world itself, long for peace and healing. That longing is a kind of prayer, and it's the kind of prayer to which your church was designed to respond.
Whenever a branch of the Church of Christ, Scientist, springs up in a town or city anywhere on the globe, there stands a visible witness to divine Love's provision for the human need. Your local church exists to bring comfort, to show Christ's way of freedom from sin and suffering. Your church exists to glorify God.
It's vital to think of our churches in their immediate relationship to the communities that they serve. The doors should open outward, the love of the members embracing their neighbors—neighbors who actually have names and faces, who walk down the same street on which the church itself is located, who go to the ballpark on Saturday afternoon, who get their hair cut at the barbershop around the corner, who may be confronting challenges and hurts and sadness, as anyone might.
