Appointment and Status in Church
Readers in The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts (more simply termed The Mother Church) are appointed by its governing panel, The Christian Science Board of Directors. Readers in The Mother Church serve a three year term.
Readers in branch churches are elected by the members of each branch. The term of office depends on the by-laws adopted by the branch church in question.
Christian Science churches have no ordained clergy; the Readers in these churches are ordinary members and are treated as such. The only potential distinction is that all Readers in branches of The Mother Church are required to be members of The Mother Church. Other members of branch churches might or might not also be Mother Church members.
Read more about this topic: Reader (Christian Science Church)
Famous quotes containing the words appointment, status and/or church:
“Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered “men’s work” is almost universally given higher status than “women’s work.” If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In another culture, perhaps right next door, the reverse may be true, and basket- weaving will have higher social status than house-building.”
—Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Excerpted from, Gender Grace: Love, Work, and Parenting in a Changing World (1990)
“He prayed more deeply for simple selflessness than he had ever prayed before—and, feeling an uprush of grace in the very intention, shed the night in his heart and called it light. And walking out of the little church he felt confirmed in not only the worth of his whispered prayer but in the realization, as well, that Christ had become man and not some bell-shaped Corinthian column with volutes for veins and a mandala of stone foliage for a heart.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)