Article June 30, 1923 Issue

A Complete Demonstration of Church Membership

GRACE NIXON STECHER

The questions are sometimes asked, Why should it be necessary to unite with both a branch church and The Mother Church? Why is not membership in either one or the other sufficient identification with the Christian Science movement? One who thus questions has not as yet perceived the proper relation of the branch churches to The Mother Church. The Mother Church is as the parent vine, the branch churches being its branches. The latter can in no sense take the place of the former; neither can they be separated from it. And the one is necessary to the completeness of the other.

Christian Science is the second coming of Christ: it is the Comforter, which Jesus promised would come again, when he said, "But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you." When Christian Scientists realize this, their loving desire is to share it. It is then that they band themselves together in churches. Mrs. Eddy tells us in the Church Manual (p. 17) that the purpose of the Christian Science church is to "reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing." If The Mother Church could geographically cover the entire world, there would be no need for branch churches; but as this is a physical impossibility, the need of the field must be met through the formation of branch churches, which necessarily operate under local forms of government, but always in perfect consonance with the Manual of The Mother Church.

To unite with The Mother Church, then, is to ally one's self with the greatest moral force in the world to-day. But uniting with this church means vastly more than enrolling as a member and paying punctually one's per capita tax. If one unites with an army, he identifies himself not only with the army as a whole, but also with a company of that army, so that he may be a working unit in it. If one so identifies himself with The Mother Church, he should show his willingness to become at the proper time a member "in spirit and in truth" by identifying himself also with a branch church. This rule works both ways. If one begins his demonstration of church membership by uniting with a branch church, as is usually, and when possible preferably, the case, his membership would not be complete until he had united with The Mother Church. If there had been a better way of giving the truth about the second coming of Christ to the world than through the church which Mrs. Eddy established, she would have given it to us, for she was working under divine orders.

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