I teach the senior class in Sunday School. This is the second year that we have had an outing to visit our church's Reading Room. Except for one student, none of these people had ever been in our Reading Room. I got in touch with our librarian and got permission to take these students on a Sunday after church. (We did go out for doughnuts first!) Our Reading Room is closed at that time, so we had it all to ourselves. The students were quite interested in our Bible Time-Line that is painted on the wall. They enjoyed the computerized Concordance and the ease of looking up the words in the Bible and Mrs. Eddy's writings. In addition we have computer software for looking up topics and authors of articles in our periodicals. We also watched the film for Sunday School teachers, "Lighting Fires." Some of the students recognized friends. It was interesting to hear their comments on that film. All in all, they came away very enriched. They have had friends who challenged them about their beliefs, and now they feel that if they can't answer a question, they can invite their friends to Sunday School or tell them they can visit the Reading Room. I have to admit I have had some lively classes with these new friends visiting, and it has been a real joy.
I might mention, too, that in the past two years, five students have done reports in high school and college on Christian Science. Each of these students had been a challenge in class, asking a lot of questions and doubting a lot of things, but this experience became a wonderful growing time for all of us.
When they were writing these papers, they got in touch with the Committee on Publication office in their area, and one even wrote to The Mother Church in Boston and received marvelous information that was so helpful. I might also add, every one of them got an A!! Even their teachers said they understood more about Christian Science and had a lot of misconceptions corrected.
