UPFRONT June 5, 2006 Issue

Where I want to be, what I want to practice

WARREN BOLON, SENIOR WRITER

When I saw the sermon's title in our local newspaper, I knew I would have to go to that Sunday evening service—with all the enthusiasm I might feel at being ordered into hand-to-hand combat. You see, at a neighboring church, an evangelical branch of a mainline Protestant denomination, the minister was to preach on "Why Christian Science is not Christian."

That night I took a seat in the back of the sanctuary, maybe to make a quick escape easier. But my strategy wasn't necessary. The minister, whom I knew slightly from attending interfaith association meetings as a representative of my Christian Science branch church, never noticed me. He launched right into a sarcasm-tinged portrayal of Christian Science as "a non-Christian cult." The sermon was full of inaccurate and distorted statements about my own church's theology and worship, and personal attacks on Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy. Very little he was saying matched the spirit of Christianity I knew in my heart, or had seen in the several congregations I'd been part of over the years, or had studied in accounts of Mrs. Eddy's life and her discoveries. There was no recognition that we all read the same Bible, love the same God, pray the same Lord's Prayer.

And then, at least as I recall it now, the minister paused. He said there was one thing that Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science "got right." It was that healing through prayer is important to a full practice of Christian faith. He explained that Christians are not true to Christianity as long as they're accepting "a truncated gospel"—the good news of Christ's coming without the good news of Christ-healing in one's life.

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