Holmes founded the Institute of Religious Science and School of Philosophy in Los Angeles in 1927 and spent the next two decades resisting what his own success was doing to it. He had built, as he saw it, a teaching that anyone could take back into their own tradition, and he was reluctant to charter churches, ordain ministers or acquire the machinery of a denomination, on the ground that all of that would harden a method into a creed.
The machinery arrived anyway. Chapters became churches, practitioners were licensed, ministers were trained and ordained, and the movement eventually divided into two organisations that spent decades apart before partially reuniting. Holmes accepted the outcome late and without much enthusiasm, and the movement's literature is candid about his hesitation.
His wider influence runs well past his own congregations. The vocabulary of affirmative prayer, of thought as causative, and of a lawful rather than a bargaining relation to the divine passed from Religious Science into the American self help and prosperity literature of the mid twentieth century and from there into common speech, usually without attribution. The atlas records him as the founder of a specific movement and as one of the more traceable sources of a much larger and vaguer body of popular belief.