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.
