In the Preface of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the book that sets forth the divine Science of Mind-healing that Jesus practiced, Mary Baker Eddy wrote, “Future ages must declare what the pioneer has accomplished” (p. vii). This editorial launches an occasional series that looks at how the life and ideas of this extraordinary woman have pointed the way, and continue to point the way, to follow Christ in our individual and collective progress Spiritward.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Mary Baker Eddy was one of the most recognized women in America. Her discovery of Christian Science just over thirty years earlier had not only led her to write Science and Health but also brought about thousands of instances of modern-day Christian healing; the organization of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, along with hundreds of branch churches; and a publishing company producing a variety of publications. These undergirded a movement that crisscrossed the United States and was gaining interest abroad.
Yet her work as Leader of the Christian Science movement was not done. Though she had already accomplished so much worthy of admiration, it was precisely at this juncture that she did something unusual. In two separate addresses to church members she set out a model for leadership that reformed and elevated traditional approaches. “Follow your Leader only so far as she follows Christ,” she said in her Message to The Mother Church for 1901 (p. 34). One year later she wrote, “I again repeat, Follow your Leader, only so far as she follows Christ” (Message to The Mother Church for 1902, p. 4).
