What the Church of Christ, Scientist, has to offer the world for all its ills is an understanding of the Christ, “the power of God unto salvation” (Romans 1:16). It offers the way of Spirit, the Science of pure Christianity. Everything offered to the world by the Church of Christ, Scientist—including its services, publications, Reading Rooms, lectures, and healing ministry—is designed to bring out the immortal truth that spiritual man is the son of the living God, and not a limited mortal.
The early Christian Church had its roots in this truth. Jesus built his church on Peter’s great recognition that the spiritual idea, or Christ, as perfect manhood, is the Son of God. Peter saw the spiritual idea incarnate in the life of his Master. He saw how Christ Jesus’ demonstrated godliness freed men’s bodies from deeply held convictions of the reality of matter, as when Jesus healed the sick, purified sinners, and raised the dead. Hence Peter could say, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus then told Peter that he would establish his church on the “rock,” the spiritual idea that is man’s real identity and nature, upon which Peter’s statement was based, and not on the personality of Peter. “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (see Matthew 16:13–20).
The opportunity available to every one of us is to practice Jesus’ religion, by building our life on the “rock,” the recognition of the healing and saving Christ, to demonstrate our true selfhood as God’s “perfect man,” which the Bible says is “the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13). As we express the character of Christ in increasing measure, seen in the God-blessed qualities of Christly hope, meekness, compassion, and wisdom and in a resultant diminishing of material mindedness, the world will more and more see the difference that Christliness brings to one’s life—healing individual difficulties as well as the complex issues associated with the world at large.
