Editorial July 3, 1926 Issue

Business Meetings of Branch Churches

Ella W. Hoag

There is probably no place in all the activities of the Christian Science movement where there is a greater call for self-abnegation than in the business meetings of its branch churches. Here is where the members are brought together for the purpose of considering all sorts of important questions—questions which are of vital concern to the proper advancement of the Cause of Christian Science. It is in these meetings that the officers are elected to whom the administration of the affairs of the individual church are to be intrusted. It is here that all points most essential to the progress of the Cause in the individual community come up for discussion and decision.

It must be remembered also that there are brought together in these meetings persons in nearly every stage of individual spiritual growth and development. There are present those who may only recently have attained to the privilege of membership, those who are so young in their acquaintance with the practice of Christian Science that they may believe that a Christian Science church business meeting is to usher them into the very precincts of heaven itself. Why not, say they, since all who will be present are endeavoring to acknowledge and be governed alone by the one perfect divine Mind, which is always present? True enough! And no church membership should ever lose sight of the expectation of the blessedness of having each and every meeting thus directed.

There may also be present members who have not yet learned that the responsibility of church government rests entirely on the shoulder of God, divine Principle, not on their present undemonstrated, limited understanding of Him; who, forgetting God's omnipresence, may even imagine that all wisdom would depart from the meeting were they to leave. There may sometimes be others present who "have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge," and who would push everything forward in a more or less self-willed manner. They fail, perhaps, to realize that all things must "be done decently and in order;" that patience must be allowed to "have her perfect work" in churches as in individuals, that the churches also may become "perfect and entire, wanting nothing."

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