My best prayer tends to happen when I have the quiet confidence and assurance of God’s immediate presence. At those moments, I know that God is All-in-all, divine Love, and that each one of us, as God’s ideas, is spiritual and complete. Anxiety disappears, replaced with a precious sense of my oneness with God, Soul. I know that healing is occurring. My involvement with church aids this healing prayer—in feeling more of God’s presence—and that is why I choose to participate in church.
Yet when thinking about serving church, I find it helpful, even encouraging, to remember the difference between the divine idea, Church, or God’s structure, and the everyday human institution. The human institution, by its very nature, can never be completely perfect. Even Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, recognized this when she wrote, “… it is vain to look for perfection in churches …” (No and Yes, p. 41). On the other hand, Eddy understood that the divine idea, Church, is so much bigger and more widely embracing—that it is “the structure of Truth and Love; whatever rests upon and proceeds from divine Principle” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 583).
It is impossible for anyone ever to be outside of God’s comforting, divine idea, Church. For each one of us to be included within the structure of God is part and parcel of God’s nature. Our “within-ness” is not determined by age, sex, wealth, place of birth, character, culture, or even religion. Any human characteristic or identifier is irrelevant to the absolute truth that we are included in God’s Church.
