What is Christian Science?
Christian Science is a Bible-based religion which emphasizes healing. The Christian Science Church, also known as The Church of Christ, Scientist, is a Christian denomination, with the Bible and especially Jesus’ teachings at the heart and soul of its practice. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy states: “Jesus established his church and maintained his mission on a spiritual foundation of Christ-healing.” This is the continuing mission of the Christian Science Church.
Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer and founder of Christian Science was a life-long student of the Bible. In February 1866, she slipped on an icy sidewalk and suffered such severe internal injuries that the attending physician did not expect her to live. This life-threatening injury compelled Mary Baker Eddy to turn wholeheartedly to God. She opened her Bible to an account of Jesus healing a man quickly and completely. A new sense of God, Spirit, as the only reality flooded her thought, and she was healed spontaneously. But she yearned to know how and why. For the next several years, she continued to search and find in the Bible the underlying laws of God that would form the basis of her teaching and practice of Christian Science.
Mary Baker Eddy’s lifelong spiritual search led to what she later characterized as a discovery. She saw that God’s laws are powerful spiritual mandates, always present and operating to heal, to redeem, and to bless humanity. To her, it was the practical Christianity that Jesus taught.
Since then, many have found that when they better understand their relationship to God through this Science of Christianity, their health is restored, and character transformed. And each healing inspires a heartfelt desire to help others know and experience how loved we all are by God.
The Christian Science Church was originated in the spring of 1879, when a small group of earnest seekers after Truth went into deliberations over forming a Mind-Healing church without creeds, to be called the “Church of Christ, Scientist.” They were members of evangelical churches, and students of Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy in Christian Science, and were known as “Christian Scientists.”
At that meeting of the Christian Scientist Association, on April 12, 1879, it was voted, “To organize a church designed to commemorate (to honor the memory of) the word and works of our Master (Christ Jesus), which should reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing”. Manual of The First Church of Christ, Scientist