Christian Science Practitioner

A Christian Science practitioner is what the tradition has instead of clergy at the bedside: a member who has made healing through prayer a full-time public ministry. The work is called treatment, and it is entirely mental and prayerful; the practitioner neither examines nor medicates, but prays from the standpoint the textbook teaches, that God is wholly good and that disease has no standing in spiritual reality, seeking the change of thought that Christian Science holds to be the substance of healing. Patients telephone or visit, may be members of any church or none, and pay a modest fee for the period of treatment, an arrangement the movement has kept deliberately professional since Mary Baker Eddy's day.

The path into the work runs through class instruction: Primary class, taught by an authorized teacher over roughly two weeks on the chapter of Science and Health called Recapitulation, equips a student to practice, and those who devote themselves to the ministry full time may apply for listing in The Christian Science Journal, the directory the church has published since the nineteenth century. Journal listing is the profession's credential, carrying the church's attestation that the practitioner is in good standing and available to the public. Alongside the practitioners stand Christian Science nurses, who give practical, non-medical care to those relying on treatment, a distinct role with its own Manual authorization and its own Journal listings.

The practitioner's place in Christian Science is fixed by the Manual of The Mother Church, the compact book of bylaws Mary Baker Eddy left as the denomination's governing instrument. The Manual sets the terms: who may advertise in The Christian Science Journal, the standards of conduct expected, the relationship between practitioners and the teachers who instruct them.

Teachers hold the higher credential, having passed through Normal class instruction, and each maintains an association of pupils that meets for continuing instruction; together the teachers and practitioners form the tradition's equivalent of a professional order, credentialed, listed and accountable, without constituting an ordained clergy, since Christian Science has none. The vocation's public history has two threads.

Within the movement, practitioners are the everyday evidence of its central claim, the healers whose published testimonies of recovered health fill the periodicals. Outside it, reliance on spiritual treatment in place of medicine has drawn recurring controversy, most sharply in court cases involving gravely ill children whose parents relied on practitioners, cases that produced convictions, reversals and continuing debate over religious exemptions in medical neglect law. The church's stated position is that members are free to make their own decisions about care and that Christian Science treatment is chosen, not imposed. The number of Journal-listed practitioners has declined markedly since the mid-twentieth century, a trend the church acknowledges, yet the role persists wherever the denomination does, and remains its defining office.