Branch Church News
"Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habitations: spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes" ( Isa. 54:2 ).
Boston's Back Bay, the neighborhood surrounding The Mother Church is a colorful cross section of humanity. Here in its luxury apartments or humble rooming houses live professional and business people, students and dropouts, workingmen, and the elderly retired—people of every race and many nationalities.
A Sunday School teacher in the Christian Science Sunday School has a priceless privilege in guiding youth to understand their inheritance of spiritual individuality. The sixteenth century philosopher Francis Bacon cites the poet's saying "no pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth.
Members of a branch Church of Christ, Scientist, in Louisville, Kentucky, could hardly help noticing that attendance in their Sunday School not only was small but was rapidly growing smaller. Young people were continuing to leave Sunday School at age twenty and not enough new pupils were taking their places.
The Christian Science Reading Room, as an integral part of the Church of Christ, Scientist, is designed to send forth a light that blesses all within its radius, embracing the community in universal Love. Its purpose is to make Truth available to all mankind; its mission—healing.
"Sunday School here is routine. Nothing like our class at all.
A church that in the thirties served a mostly white community may in the sixties face a wholly new frontier of racial, national, or cultural groups. Such a church has very much to learn about ministering to these people if it is to survive and grow.
Mary Baker Eddy once said, "From the interior of Africa to the utmost parts of the earth, the sick and the heavenly homesick or hungry hearts are calling on me for help, and I am helping them" ( The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 147 ).
The following resolutions, drafted by a five-man student committee, were adopted by a voice vote of approximately 5,000 young Christian Scientists attending the 1967 Biennial College Meeting in Boston, August 24-26. The students came from 1, 128 colleges and universities in 32 countries.
All Christian Scientists know that their religion is practical and provable. They know too that the ability to prove it does not depend on depth of human knowledge or academic study.