An African professor at Amherst College shares how the healing through Christian Science of an "incurable" disease led him to help grow a branch church in his native Nigeria.
WHEN ROWLAND ABIODUN LOOKS back on his healing of diagnosed leukemia, he can't help but recall the casual strolls he took past a Christian Science church in Canada during the late 1960s. As a graduate student in art history at the University of Toronto, he found most of those strolls uneventful—but one made him stop in his tracks. It was the subject for that week's Bible Lesson-Sermon, on a sign out front: Is the Universe, Including Man, Evolved by Atomic Force?
Drawn to the question, he poked his head into the church the following Sunday to hear what the discussion was about. But he only lasted five minutes. "They weren't talking the kind of science I expected," Abiodun now says, smiling. "I was interested in physical science." And though he still occasionally dropped by the church's Reading Room to pick up The Christian Science Monitor daily newspaper, he pushed aside the probing question about man's relationship to the universe.
