The First Church of Christ, Scientist

The building Christian Scientists call the Mother Church was not built all at once. The first structure on the site at the corner of Falmouth and Norway Streets in Boston was a comparatively modest granite edifice in the Romanesque style, dedicated in 1894, seating roughly a thousand people. It was already the second home of the congregation Mary Baker Eddy had organized in 1879; the church needed a permanent building of its own once membership had grown past what rented halls could hold.

Growth did not stop with the new building. Within a decade the original edifice was full past capacity on the Sundays and Wednesdays the denomination's branch churches everywhere still hold as their standard meeting days, and the congregation resolved to build again rather than relocate, adding to the existing structure instead of replacing it. The result, dedicated in 1906, is the domed Extension that most visitors now think of as the Mother Church: a much larger auditorium, more than four times the seating of the original building, built directly onto it so that the small granite church of 1894 still stands, physically attached, inside the footprint of the larger complex that grew up around it.

The two buildings together, plus the later Christian Science Publishing Society building and the reflecting pool, form what the church calls the Christian Science Plaza, still an active place of worship rather than a preserved monument, and still the constitutional head of every branch Church of Christ, Scientist in the world.

"Mother Church" is not simply an affectionate name for the oldest or largest Christian Science building. It names a specific constitutional relationship laid out in the Manual of The Mother Church, the governing bylaws Mary Baker Eddy wrote and continued to revise until her death in 1910: every other Church of Christ, Scientist anywhere in the world is organized as a branch of this one church in Boston, and none of them, including the Mother Church itself, has an ordained minister.

Services are led instead by two Readers, a First Reader and a Second Reader, who read aloud from the Bible and from Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures according to a weekly lesson-sermon set centrally for every branch church to use on the same Sunday, so that a Christian Science service in Boston and one on the far side of the world are, on any given week, reading the same passages. The Mother Church itself has no additional authority over a branch church's local property or membership; what it holds is the constitutional center of a structure without ordained clergy, the source of the shared lesson-sermon, and the seat of the Christian Science Board of Directors the Manual establishes to govern the denomination's central affairs.

That arrangement, uncommon even among churches that reject a professional priesthood, is why the building's common name describes a relationship rather than merely a rank: every branch traces its authority back to bylaws issued from this one address.