From TMC Youth Forum

This was a Forum entry at TMC Youth Church Unconfined:

I'm new to CS, living in an area without a church, but will be moving to a churched town. I've been looking forward to that and also am a bit apprehensive.

I have attended CS services and they have been a chore to get through. I study the lesson throughout the week and know that given my ways of prayer and study I could enter into what is being said if there were time between each reading. This is me. Silence is wonderful for me. However, I don't think more silence would do much for most newcomers.

'Speaking' to newcomers seems like a very important thing. Christian Science is a radically different approach to life. And the language can seem so very outdated until one has 'gotten it', so to speak.

I was around CS for 15 years before I began to grasp what is offered. I think it's a good idea to explore how CS can have services and events that are geared to people who haven't 'gotten it' yet. It was a close friend who offered me a few passages from S&H, just the right ones at just the right time, and who also directed me to spirituality.com (where I could read articles that used a different language from Mrs. Eddy) that helped me to finally see what this is. And since then I just have to have it in my life. And the language is no longer a barrier.

As I was reading Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth for the 2nd time recently - which is not CS but relates well and has had a very large readership this year - I wondered if CS churches could use things like this in the popular culture as outreach to a larger community than CS currently reaches. Another thing in popular culture that lends itself to great discussion of MBE's teachings is What the Bleep Do We Know? Even the movie The Matrix - which can seem rather dark - provides a wonderful opportunity for exploring MBE's teachings. I'm sure that there is much, much more in popular culture that is appealing to people's desire to live in the Spiritual reality of life, or their awareness that the culturally held views of life and meaning are not providing satisfaction. The media that is appealing to these people could be used to create conversations and bridges.

Mrs. Eddy's discovery, her writings, the movement are so incredible. I had come across the notion that matter isn't real - and thought that to be true - quite awhile before I understood that that is what the CS teachings offer me, a way to understand that and integrate that very freeing knowledge into my life. Now that I've discovered that CS offers me a way to study the Spiritual Reality on a daily basis and see it grow in my awareness I think that it has a potential audience that is far more vast than it is reaching.

In looking at how SOME services and events might be geared to newcomers CS can begin to tap into an audience that is hungry for its message. I think that this can be done in ways that honor what has been and is, while creating new possibilities.

http://www.tmcyouth.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2318