A few years back, I was praying about my Christian Science healing practice. At the time, my practice was largely made up of Christian Scientists, and I really wanted a new frontier, one where I was reaching more of the public. This led me to the inner city of my hometown of St. Louis. I approached a couple of fellow Christian Scientists, and we talked about the possibility of starting a church there, and thought that maybe we could try something new.
Somewhere in my heart I was yearning for, I guess most of all, simplicity. My branch church experience had always included long business and committee meetings, and it often occurred to me, “If everyone would devote this much time to healing and to prayer, think what our movement would be like—if it were just simpler, if there weren’t so much infrastructure and so much stuff to do.” I certainly was not opposed to serving church, but I just wanted to peel away the add-ons that maybe weren’t necessary.
So I began to study the Church Manual. And I made three lists. One was for the requirements the Manual specifies that are only for The Mother Church. One was for the requirements for branch churches. And on the third, I listed the things we were doing that we thought of as requirements—some of which weren’t even mentioned in the Manual, but that we’d just been doing because of tradition or the way we’d always done it.
I saw how simple church could be, but also how completely open the door was for trying fresh and new things. One result was that I started writing music to some Bible verses, and a wonderful platform for sharing fresh music began, with some fellow members joining in on the effort.
Three of us got together, and we started out in a storefront—renting the space on the first floor of a two-story building. We held Sunday School first with the few pupils that we had, and then we’d have our church service. Two years later we became a Christian Science Society, and shortly afterward, we were renting the whole building, and were able to rent out the apartment above us. We now have a Sunday School full of pupils and a wonderfully growing and active membership.
We’ve welcomed a lot of young people. We get them involved immediately—bring them into soloing, Sunday School teaching, serving as Readers even, because we have an informal rotating readership. In our services, we’re experiencing the Christ right there, that moment. “We’re ‘being church’ ” is an expression I like to use. We’re not even so much trying to do something for the world; we’re just being the presence of church in our community and trusting that it’s having a genuine healing impact on our community. I don’t want to sound trite, but it feels really fun. It feels really alive. Somebody came up to me the other day after church and said, “This rocks!”
It’s so wonderful to come to church and feel as if there’s nowhere else you would want to be. There’s still a dignity about the services. We’re following the Order of Services in the Manual, and we’re doing a good job of supporting its By-Laws, but it just feels like we’re less concerned with “Are we doing this right? Are we going to mess up?” There’s a great spontaneity to church.
From the beginning, it was natural to love everyone and to be inclusive, to have a level playing field where there really was no hierarchy of membership, but just participants. That’s literally what we call them—everyone is a participant.
And church membership is actually pretty easy. We compiled one page of bylaws—and have kept it at that. Our bylaws say that to be a member, you are studying the Bible and Science and Health and you’re striving in your life to demonstrate the truths they contain; and that you want to join with this community of people who are working to demonstrate these truths. It’s a self-enforced integrity in holding to this commitment—that this is what you want to be doing.
A man who had a cancerous growth on his face, which he covered with a bandage, had been coming to church for about six months, and he had a complete healing that he shared at a testimony meeting. He said it was the simple sense of just being so bathed in the love that was expressed at church that had healed him. Walking into our services week after week, he felt that immediate and tangible love. And it’s not that you can’t have that in a traditional church—you can. But essentially, that’s the only measure to me of whether we’re doing things right.
The rest of it—being informal, being current, whatever—comes naturally, but it’s not the main issue. The main issue is, Are we healing? Do we love each other? Are we joyous in our sense of church? Are we growing? I can say this, too: You walk into one of our services, and you never feel like church is dying out. You just feel this great hum of vitality and activity, and like this thing is going.
Last fall, I had the opportunity to be with a group of students—Christian Scientists—on a trip to India. One night we were sitting around talking, and they asked me, “Is there even going to be a church for us? Will there even be one for us as we go along?” I was so grateful that my immediate and sincere response was, “Are you kidding? You guys have an open door. The possibilities are endless and limitless for what church can look like.”
