Early Church Work
While at Harvard, Knapp helped organize informal services among Christian Scientists. Initially held as receptions at the home of William P. McKenzie, prominent lecturers on Christian Science such as Edward A. Kimball of Chicago, Illinois, and Irving Tomlinson of Concord, New Hampshire, addressed these gatherings. Later after his graduation, Bliss and his cousin Edwin Johnson were instrumental in encouraging Mrs. Eddy to establish a church-sanctioned way to hold services at colleges and universities. Mrs. Eddy's response dated February 12, 1904, was a letter including her proposed changes to the By-laws of her Church known as the Manual of The Mother Church, which, with a few changes, would allow for the establishing what today are known as Christian Science College Organizations (in Article XXII Section 8). Harvard University thus became home to the first such Christian Science college organization and held the first lecture sponsored by such an organization, which was delivered by Judge Septimus J. Hanna in December 1905.
In his last year at Harvard, in March 1901, Bliss was notified by William B. Johnson, Clerk of the Mother Church that, "by recommendation of our Beloved Teacher, the Reverend Mary Baker Eddy, and the unanimous vote of the CS Board of Directors, you have been made a First Member of The First Church of Christ, Scientist."
Immediately upon graduation in June 1901, Mr. Knapp entered the public practice of Christian Science healing. In 1902 he was appointed Assistant Superintendent of the Children's Sunday School of the Mother Church.
Read more about this topic: Bliss Knapp
Famous quotes containing the words early, church and/or work:
“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“Now, honestly: if a large group of ... demonstrators blocked the entrances to St. Patrick’s Cathedral every Sunday for years, making it impossible for worshipers to get inside the church without someone escorting them through screaming crowds, wouldn’t some judge rule that those protesters could keep protesting, but behind police lines and out of the doorways?”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1953)
“All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently.... Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)