The Impersonal Pastor

A visitor to a Christian Science Sunday service finds hymns, silent prayer, the Lord's Prayer with its spiritual interpretation, and then a long reading, and no sermon. Two Readers, lay members elected by the congregation for fixed terms, read alternately from the Bible and from Science and Health, following a Lesson-Sermon built around one of a rotating set of subjects. The lesson is prepared centrally and published in advance, so the same passages are read in every branch church in the world in the same week. The Readers may not comment, explain or add anything of their own, and the First Reader's role is to announce and to read rather than to lead worship in the ordinary sense.

The arrangement dates from 1895, when Mary Baker Eddy ended personal preaching in her church and ordained the Bible and Science and Health as its pastor, and wrote the provision into the Manual of The Mother Church. The reasoning follows from the rest of her teaching: if the truth to be conveyed is stated exactly in the two books, then a preacher's elaboration can only add personal opinion to it, and personality is what she wished to remove from the pulpit. Wednesday evening meetings supply what the Sunday service withholds, being given over largely to members rising to give accounts of healing, which makes them the church's most distinctive public gathering.

The Manual of The Mother Church is a small book of by-laws, first issued in 1895 and revised by Eddy through dozens of editions until shortly before her death in 1910. It regulates the whole church in detail: the reading of the Lesson-Sermon, the terms of Readers, the conduct of practitioners, the discipline of members, the relation of branch churches to the Mother Church in Boston, and the composition of the self-perpetuating Board of Directors that governs it. Several of its by-laws carry an unusual attachment, a requirement that a named action be taken only with Eddy's own written consent or over her signature. While she lived, these clauses concentrated authority in her hands.

After she died they became a problem with no obvious solution, since a rule requiring the consent of a person who cannot give it either freezes the action permanently or must be read as having lapsed, and the church's own officers disagreed about which. The disagreement broke into open litigation between the Board of Directors and the trustees of the church's publishing society in the years around 1920, a conflict remembered as the Great Litigation, which the courts resolved in the Directors' favour and which left the consent clauses in place. The same question, what a church may lawfully change when its constitution was written to be unchangeable, has resurfaced in different forms since, and it is inseparable from the doctrine of the impersonal pastor, which was itself a decision to fix in text what other churches leave to living judgement.