In the spring of 1886 Myrtle Fillmore, then in her early forties, went with her husband to a lecture in Kansas City given by E. B. Weeks, a speaker in the mental healing line. She had been told she had inherited tuberculosis from her family and had been ill for years. What she took away was a single sentence, which in her own retelling ran that she was a child of God and therefore did not inherit sickness.
She repeated it. She talked to her own body, organ by organ, apologised to it for what she had believed about it, and kept at this daily for about two years, at the end of which she was well and remained so for another forty five years. That episode is the origin story of the Unity movement, and both Fillmores treated it that way: Charles, who was sceptical, investigated the healing before he accepted the teaching behind it.
Neighbours began asking her to pray for them, which is how the work started, and the demand grew faster than anything else the couple were doing. Out of it came Silent Unity, a ministry that undertakes to hold anyone who asks in prayer, in confidence, without charge and without requiring them to join anything. It has operated continuously since the 1890s, by letter, then by telephone around the clock, and it remains the part of Unity that reaches most people.