WHEN I FIRST BEGAN ATTENDING Christian Science Sunday services ten years ago at what is now my home church in Nairobi, Kenya, many things about the services struck me as stiff and cold, lacking in spontaneity. There were two lay readers instead of a pastor preaching from a pulpit. The readers stood behind lecterns instead of roaming around the pulpit during the sermon. Even the hymn singing seemed stiff and formal.
I learned that the order of service was fixed and hadn't changed in a century: three hymns interspersed through the service; opening selections from the Scriptures; silent prayer and the Lord's Prayer; and the reading of a "Lesson-Sermon" from the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures—the book by Mary Baker Eddy, which, along with the Bible, serves as the denomination's pastor. The two readers at our church read with warmth and understanding, but I still came out of those services with a feeling of coldness.
Although the first services I experienced lacked the gripping emotional elements I had seen in other Christian churches, the message I heard—as strange to my ear as it seemed then—somehow resonated with me. It was only much later that I came to appreciate the effectiveness of this form of worship, one that appeals more to one's thought than to the emotions. One in which content is more important than its method of delivery.
