Why did Mary Baker Eddy disband her church in 1889?

Soon after the publication of his book Persistent Pilgrim: The Life of Mary Baker Eddy in 1997, author Richard A. Nenneman spoke at a lunchtime event to employees of The Mother Church (The First Church of Christ, Scientist) in Boston. Asked if there was an area of Mary Baker Eddy’s life that needed more scholarly research, he answered that indeed there was: the pivotal year 1889, when she moved away from Boston and disbanded the church she had founded 10 years earlier. As a graduate student at the time, I addressed this as the topic of my master’s thesis. But I only had access to published works as resources. This article takes another look at the question, primarily through archival sources (original documents) from The Mary Baker Eddy Library.

It is important to remember that by 1889 the Christian Science movement was more than the church that Eddy had founded in 1879, with herself as Pastor. Multiple related activities existed. One was the Christian Scientist Association (CSA) of the pupils she had taught, organized in 1876. Members of the CSA had voted to organize a church in 1879. The Massachusetts Metaphysical College was chartered in Boston in 1881. Eddy served as its only President and taught all but six of the classes there for the next eight years. Another activity was the National Christian Scientist Association (NCSA), formed in 1886, made up of pupils from any teacher in good standing who desired to join. Yet another was the monthly magazine The Christian Science Journal, begun as a bimonthly publication in 1883. A more minor activity that began about the time the church disorganized was the Christian Science Dispensary Association, a forerunner of the Christian Science Reading Room. 

Did Eddy want to be less involved with organizational chores in the growing movement at this time? An early inkling of her thoughts came in a letter to Ellen Brown Linscott in 1886. Eddy’s discovery of Christian Science had come 20 years earlier, after her healing of severe injuries from a fall in February 1866:

I want more liberty to do my Master’s will; and to this end I want a Clergyman for my pulpit, an editor for the Jour[nal] and a Teacher to take my place in the Mass[achusetts] Met[aphysical] Coll[ege]. I have wanted this many a year!… 

Now if my dear students do not send me candidates to fill these places they will be vacant and the Cause disorganized.¹  

Here was a plea for help from the leader of a movement, three years before she took action.

By May 1889 Eddy was 67 years old. This time she wrote openly to her church: “For good and sufficient reasons I again send you my resignation, which must be final of the Pastorate of the Church of Christ, Scientist, Boston, and recommend that you secure a Pastor to enter upon this labor in early Autumn.”² At this point, she still held out hope of finding someone to take her place. And, in fact, ex-Congregationalist Rev. Lanson P. Norcross became Pastor in August 1889.

Soon after, Eddy announced her intention to the entire movement through the June edition of the Journal, stating that she was going to retire from the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, place the Journal in other hands, and resign as Pastor of the church:

This change is made for two reasons: First, because my duties have accumulated to such a degree, and I believe my students should and can fill these positions themselves; Second, to fulfill other duties that demand both my attention and retirement.³

Those “other duties” remained to be named.

Regarding the college, she wrote to the CSA in October, stating that she was dissolving the organization for two additional reasons besides retiring as teacher. First, it was “because new students whom others have taught may not receive the reception that [my] students have received from this associated body.” Second, because it was “more in accord with Christian Science for you to unite on the basis of Love ….”⁴ Not only did Eddy not want her movement to remain overly reliant on her; she did not want her own students to be perceived as better than those taught by others. Notably, when she dissolved the association she retained the charter for the college. Eddy asked in the same letter that the association continue meeting, without formal organization. This may be an indication that it was the organizational structure that she felt was problematic, more so than the activities of the CSA.

Two years later in her autobiographical sketch, Retrospection and Introspection, she reflected on the closing of the college: “The question was, Who else could sustain this institute, under all that was aimed at its vital purpose, the establishment of genuine Christian Science healing?”⁵ The implication is that there were untold “slings and arrows” faced alone by the leader of the movement, and that there was no one at that time to step into the breach.

As the date approached for a membership meeting of the Boston Church of Christ (Scientist) on December 2, Eddy wrote to the members on November 28. She concluded that she had been patient over the past seven years with “straying sheep”—students who had turned against her—and that it had not worked out well when she had put students in the church pulpit. It was therefore time to disorganize: “So I admonish this Church after ten years of sad experience in material bonds to cast them off and cast her net on the spiritual side of Christianity.”⁶ As an incentive to vote the way she requested, Eddy promised to give a plot of land to build a church edifice at a future date, a central part of all that happened in 1889. This land had been purchased in 1886 but foreclosed in July 1889, because the church couldn’t pay the mortgage. Eddy herself bought the mortgage, concerned that the title to this land needed to be protected. But she apparently didn’t see her personal ownership of the land as the right or permanent solution.⁷ 

At the meeting the members dutifully resolved, among other things, that the regulations and by-laws of the church were “null and void,” and voted to dissolve. The one exception involved the portion in Article I that retained the name of the church.⁸ The group continued as a “voluntary association,” without much change to its activities. It is likely that Eddy herself did not know what the exact next steps were, as she was accustomed to acting on faith. Like Abraham willing to sacrifice his son Isaac,⁹ she was willing to dissolve the church organization she had struggled and sacrificed to nurture over the past decade, knowing that a solution would become apparent. She may have been looking, in part, for an answer that would keep safe the title to the land for a church edifice in Boston. 

On the heels of that vote, another meeting took place on December 6 to dissolve the Dispensary Association. This institution had only just been formed on May 31, 1889, when Eddy had been thinking of disorganizing the church. The rooms this organization rented were called Christian Science Rooms and Dispensary, where one could obtain literature and free Christian Science treatment.¹⁰ 

During this period of disorganization, it is instructive that Eddy and some of her students continued to prepare for construction of a church building. A December 18 trust deed conveyed land for a church in Boston to three Trustees and established a separate, five-member Board of Directors, responsible for maintaining church services and employing a Pastor to preach strictly in accord with Christian Science. These Trustees and Board were superseded by the Christian Science Board of Directors, created by another Deed of Trust in 1892.¹¹

The ties to most of the institutions she had established were now looser; Eddy was apparently hoping that her personal involvement with these activities would be minimal. She left Boston for her native state of New Hampshire. To what would she devote her time?

Since its first publication in 1875, Eddy was frequently revising her book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. The 50th edition, which she now embarked on, stands out as a notable edition. While the importance of this revision is beyond the scope of this article, it must be acknowledged as a factor in her decision to disband the structure of the movement. Referring to herself in the final edition of the book, she wrote that “she closed her College, October 29, 1889, in the height of its prosperity with a deep-lying conviction that the next two years of her life should be given to the preparation of the revision of Science and Health, which was published in 1891.”¹² She did not waste any time getting started on that work.

The following spring, Eddy wrote to her student Caroline Frame, declining an invitation to get together while also noting that she wanted her students to do their own thinking and talking. “I am in a spot on my book that renders it very difficult for me to be absent one day until it is printed,” she explained.¹³ Just as she had devoted three years of her life between 1866 and 1869 to understanding her initial discovery, keeping “aloof from society,” she similarly devoted nearly two years to the revision of her textbook.¹⁴  

There still remained one major institution in early 1890: the NCSA. Eddy turned her attention to it that May. This organization’s first meeting had taken place in 1886, and it was open to members of the various associations of the pupils of teachers of Christian Science, with the purpose to give these students “equal footing” and to “promote unity and brotherly love.”¹⁵ The group had held significant meetings in Chicago and Cleveland, and she might have felt that the extensive logistical planning that went into these events distracted her students.

On May 23 she issued a request to disorganize (or at least adjourn) the NCSA, so that each member could “work out individually, and alone, for himself and for others, the sublime ends of human life.” She continued, “You can then organize associations, and churches, and be able to hold these organizations together, until in turn, your students will sustain themselves and work for others.”¹⁶  

Of all the institutions Eddy founded in Boston, starting in 1879, only the Journal remained essentially untouched.¹⁷ However, even though organizational structures were dismantled or changed, most of the activities they had regulated continued to function. For example, church services were carried on in Boston and elsewhere, and continued to be listed in the Journal as well. When Eddy moved from Boston, she left her student Joshua Bailey as the magazine’s editor.

After the 50th edition of Science and Health was issued in 1891, Eddy turned again to church structure in 1892. Writing to her Board of Directors that March, she instructed them to dissolve the old church and take out a new charter for The First Church of Christ, Scientist. She still wanted them to hire a pastor and stipulated that he or she would read from Science and Health.¹⁸ Interestingly, the instructions in this letter were not carried out, and it is likely that it was not sent. However, Eddy and the Board were definitely in communication about reorganization at that time. But she had not yet arrived at the full solution regarding the conduct of church services. That decision did not come until 1894.  

On September 1, 1892, a Deed of Trust gave the land originally purchased in 1886 to the Christian Science Board of Directors, on which to construct a church. The Board, created by the deed, constitutes “a perpetual body or corporation” for the purpose of building a church edifice on the land.¹⁹ 

A few weeks later, on September 23, The Church of Christ (Scientist) was reorganized with 12 members, as The Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts.²⁰ While the government of its predecessor was democratic, church government in this reorganization was divided between Eddy, the Board of Directors, and the First Members.

In late 1894, with construction almost complete on the Original Edifice of The Mother Church,²¹ she wrote, “I, Mary Baker G. Eddy, ordain that God’s Word, the Bible, and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, shall be the Pastor of the Mother Church.”²² The fact that this declaration came five years after the church disorganization suggests that she had been praying for direction as she went.

Perhaps the clearest indication of Eddy’s motives in 1889 appeared in a 1906 statement: 

I left Boston in the height of prosperity to retreat from the world, and to seek the one divine Person, whereby and wherein to show others the footsteps from sense to Soul.

There was never a religion or philosophy lost to the centuries except by sinking its divine Principle in personality….²³  

By her actions—protecting the land for a church edifice with deeds of trust, ordaining the Bible and her book as pastor in 1894, publishing the Church Manual in 1895—she succeeded in avoiding the trap of personally influencing the movement, setting it on a firmer foundation for the future.

Multiple factors influenced the decision to disorganize the church and the accompanying institutions that made up the movement in 1889. One was that Eddy needed a break after 20 years of hard work. Another was that she needed to devote focused effort to a major revision of Science and Health. A third was that she did not want the Christian Science movement to be reliant on her personally. A fourth—and perhaps most important—motivation was that she acted on faith. Leaving Boston at “the height of prosperity” did not make conventional sense. But she was used to listening for divine direction and did not hesitate to follow it. 

There is little question that Eddy’s faith was vindicated. A mere 15 years after her move, she had an actual church edifice, with the construction of an extension underway. Services were conducted by laypeople who read from the Bible and Science and Health—a “dual and impersonal pastor.”²⁴ Able executive boards took on the role of running the church and its publishing activity under her guidance, lessening personal dependency on her and providing for future succession. Subsequently, in September 1895, a church manual that she authored and that still governs the organization today would codify expectations for members. 

Eddy continued to revise Science and Health for the rest of her life, as she honed her understanding of the Science she had discovered. As to following divine guidance, it was her fervent hope that, by her example, her followers would “go, and do…likewise.”²⁵

Eric Nager holds a master of liberal arts from Harvard University Extension in history and has taught as an adjunct history professor at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama. He served for 30 years in the US Army Reserve, in which his final tour was as Command Historian of the US Army Pacific. He currently works in the Treasurer’s Office of The Mother Church.