"Not marble, nor the gilded monuments"

It may well be that one thing Christian Science needs is more church and fewer churches. Church as defined on page 583 of Science and Health.

Perhaps there has always been too much "Look at what our success and gratitude have built" and too little church. Not because of insincerity or lack of love for Christian Science, but because of an overly zealous pride and vanity in "our wonderful monument in stone" to Mrs. Eddy and her great Discovery.

If memory serves, Mrs. Eddy only attended a service in the extension to the original Mother Church once, but certainly not more than a very few times. She did not even attend the dedicatory service, but sent her message to be read. The grand I.M. Pei-designed Church Center in Boston, with its high rise building, colonnade building, and lovely reflecting pool, announced with self-confident joy and fanfare in the late 60's (or thereabouts), is now empty or rented out, so one hears.

Large, grand edifices all over the world, some probably built nearly a century ago, close almost monthly it seems, or cling to existence with a few pewsful of financially henpecked members. No sinful behavior or gross failing is being implied. Just the suggestion that in the zest of building "our" testimony in marble, in matter, the true purpose of church may have gotten mortared in with the cornerstone.

A handful of Christan Scientists, hearts glowing with the definition of church lived, meeting in a rented room or a tool shed, can be a church, and the kind of church that just might beckon "honest seekers" to inquire within.