• In the early years of The Christian Science Board of Lectureship, the Church Manual provided that lectures could be given as part of Wednesday testimony meetings at branch Churches of Christ, Scientist.
• The Church of Christ, Scientist at one time had a Board of Missionaries. The By–Law establishing that body appeared in the 1895 first edition of the Manual, three years before The Christian Science Board of Lectureship was created. Missionaries could be sent to places where there were no Christian Science healers or teachers, and could give public lectures. The Board of Missionaries was dropped in 1906.
• Reflecting the era's taste for longer and rhetorically elegant public speeches, some early Christian Science lectures lasted two hours or more.
• Many early lectures were written for a single occasion. Mrs. Eddy early on encouraged the practice of repeating a core message, adapting it to the moment and community. She also saw value in lecturers' providing advance copies of lecture texts to local newspapers. Speeches were considered major social/educational/inspirational news events in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Consequently, it was commonplace for newspapers to reprint even multi–thousand–word lectures.
