After the passing in 1910 of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the rapidly increasing Christian Science movement, the governing Christian Science Board of Directors of The Mother Church in Boston faced the daunting task of unifying the sometimes unruly and overly exuberant members of a faith noted for its efforts to reintroduce healing to the religious scene. This essay demonstrates that over the next fifteen years the Directors skillfully consolidated their authority and so established centralized control over the fastest-growing religious group in the United States. Divisive litigation between the Directors and the independent-minded Trustees of the Christian Science Publishing Society, 1919–1921, was resolved in favor of the Directors and so provided the capstone for their efforts to bring order to the new faith. In their actions, the Directors often followed business and societal practices, as a means of attaining routinization of charisma.

In 1889, Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, asked her fractious Church of Christ (Scientist) in Boston to disband. No scholar has studied this “Church of 1879,” the predecessor of the present Mother Church founded in 1892, nor analyzed the members of this religious body. Therefore, after briefly discussing Eddy’s journey of faith, this article delves into pertinent affairs of her early, struggling church and investigates the largely forgotten people from most levels of society who comprised her initial flock. Many of Eddy’s actions to curb unruly personalities or undue adulation of herself followed sociologist Max Weber’s theories about the “routinization of charisma.” The headstrong membership, coupled with unreliable preaching by invited clergy and confusion over competing metaphysical groups, led Eddy to disincorporate her first church and found the more centralized Mother Church—The First Church of Christ, Scientist—in 1892. This article shows the institutional birth of an American religion.