Christian Scientists: Her Growing Daughters

Next to a conclave of cardinals, probably the most secret religious assembly is the annual meeting of The Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist. Last week more than 7,000 of the faithful showed up in Boston to hear the yearly report on how their made-in-America faith is doing. Names and church standing were carefully checked before admission tickets were granted, and reporters of other faiths were barred from the four auditoriums where the proceedings were held.

The curbs help keep secret such statistics as membership figures, but they do not hide internal dissension: there is none. Christian Science is autocratically governed by a board of five directors with lifetime tenure who make all the major decisions for the church. Among them is the choice of Christian Science's president, who serves for a year as chief spokesman for the faith. The leader presented to this year's meeting was German-born Edward Froderman, a trustee of the church's Publishing Society, who gave up a vice-presidency of a Chicago bank 15 years ago to work as a fulltime practitioner of Mary Baker Eddy's healing doctrine.

Quickening. Mrs. Eddy passed on, as Christian Scientists put it, in 1910, but her spirit looms heavily over the church. Christian Science still affirms her central belief that evil—including physical illness—can be conquered through faith and understanding, although members are free to consult doctors if they want to, as Mrs. Eddy herself did. Along with the Bible, her major work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, is regarded as divine revelation, but there is never any theological debate in the church about how it should be interpreted. Christian Scientists feel that there is no need to modernize her teachings, and, says Board Chairman Inman Douglass, "within the church organization there is no controversy on this point, no differing of opinion, no liberal and conservative wings. No, nothing like that."

Christian Science in the past has often seemed as sober and conservative as its best-known creation, the daily Monitor (circ. 190,000). Now there seems to be a measurable quickening of the church's missionary impulse, both at home and abroad. U.S. "branches" of the Mother Church total 2,449, up 106 in a decade, and foreign branches now number 819. Best outside guess at membership: 400,000. Forty new Christian Science clubs have been formed on U.S. college campuses.

Modernization. Lately, too, a number of relatively young members have taken over responsible positions in the church and tried to modernize its approach to evangelism. Among the signs of change: the $700,000 Christian Science Pavilion at the New York World's Fair, a paperback edition of Science and Health.

Says Harvard-trained Robert Peel, of the church's Committee on Publication:

"Like many small groups, we started with a great deal of persecution and were put on the defensive. But as the movement has grown, Christian Science has begun to reach out to society as a whole."