What might Christian Scientists learn from evangelical Christians, especially as it relates to fostering church growth? Doesn’t Mrs. Eddy’s church manual suggest friendliness (more…)
Posted on this website, in addition to the Ananias welcome letter I co-authored with others, are a number of essays relating my decision (more…)
May I send you a gift copy of my favorite devotional book, worth a moment as you begin each morning with Bible study and prayer? (more…)
A leading theologian of the past century gave the following summary of the diluted and distorted salvation message proclaimed by liberal (more…)
Satan’s destructive intentions for us and his deadly struggle against Jesus were never made clear to me in 40 years of studying Christian Science, though they are evident throughout the Bible. (more…)
In the new movie “Fireproof,” Caleb is a fire captain and Katherine is PR director for a hospital. Their marriage is crashing after seven years. Whose fault is it? (more…)
No dialogue for now. My Christian Scientist friend of many years, dubbed “Wes” in the preceding post about blindness to the Bible, has deflected my overture for a discussion of our differing beliefs. (more…)
Relying on a textbook they call the Key to the Scriptures and on six tenets that seem to uphold the Scriptures, many faithful Christian Scientists are unaware of how radically their religion reinterprets the Bible (more…)
How is your life different now in following biblical Christianity, from what it was before in following Mary Baker Eddy? What did you mean when writing in your book, “I can recognize the shortcomings of my former religion while still appreciating the good”? By what points of entry can a former Christian Scientist establish dialogue with a Christian Scientist who is beginning to question? Keying on Jesus’ example, how does one go about speaking the truth in love to Mrs. Eddy’s followers? What is your approach in praying for yourself and others who have come from Christian Science to the Cross, and in praying for those who still follow Christian Science? (more…)
How can there not be one word about Jesus in a newspaper story marking 100 years of worship services for a Denver-area church of Christ, Scientist, an article hundreds of words long and written by a well-established Christian Science practitioner? (more…)
To me, Christmas means exactly those “tidings of joy to all people” that the angel told the shepherds in Luke 2:11. But to Mary Baker Eddy, based on her well-known article by the same title, it means something quite different. (more…)
“Would ye ascend the mountain… and drink from its living fountains?” So asks the mysterious Stranger to a group of laborers in the valley at the beginning of Mrs. Eddy’s brief, biblically resonant tale entitled “An Allegory.” Recently I met a Christian Science couple (more…)
Rocky Mountain News religion writer Jean Torkelson has been a friend of mine for years. She’s quietly devout in her Catholic faith (more…)
(Author: Kate Jones) When Christianity is presented as a science, the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ is diminished and pasteurized into something unrecognizable. I spent the first forty years of my life living under the false pretense that I was actually a Christian. I was not. (more…)
Adam, a young businessman not quite 30, raised as an evangelical Christian, thoughtful, well-read, and free-spirited, contacted me recently at the suggestion of a mutual friend. He was concerned about his grandmother, Carolyn, nearing 80, a lifelong Christian Scientist (more…)
(Journal entry, June 1998, John Andrews) I found an admirable God in the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy in the first 40 years of my life. But then I found a truly awesome God, the Adorable One, in the pages of the Bible. This God soon took me by storm.
This was a larger God, a God who was willing and able to do amazing things that Mrs. Eddy’s God could not or would not do. I just had to follow this wonderful God. I just had to give myself to him totally.
This God could and did make the whole world around us, the actual physical universe. That God whom Mrs. Eddy presented did not make any of it.
This God could and did create the human me, all of me, body and mind, heart and soul, the person that I am here and now, and all the human beings that people my world. That God, again, did nothing of the kind. (more…)
“So foolish was I and ignorant; I was as a beast before Thee.†– Psalms 7 3:22
“And the disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.” – Acts 11:26
(Journal entry, July 1997, John Andrews) I did indeed think I was a Christian. I called myself one, and I most earnestly claimed to be a follower of Jesus Christ.
I tried to center my life on God as he did. I lived by his Sermon on the Mount and the Ten Command-ments. I went to church every week and read the Bible every day. I ordered my thinking by the Lord’s Prayer, even worked at healing by prayer after the Master’s own example.
But I had never really come to know Jesus Christ. Not recognizing Jesus as God incarnate, how could I enthrone him as Lord in my heart? John’s self held that throne.
Affirming my own perfection and denying sin, how could I receive Jesus as the loving Savior who died on the cross for me personally? John was in no need of saving. (more…)
(By John Andrews) I received Christian baptism on the eve of Easter 1993 at St. Gabriel’s Anglican Church in Denver, having resigned my lifelong membership in the Christian Science church several months before.
After I met Carl Gans in 1998, and we realized how similar our journeys from Mrs. Eddy’s teachings to the Cross had been, he suggested we co-author an open letter to Christian Scientists.
That was the origin of the Ananias statement, which circulated on paper for several years until this website was established about 2002. Along the way, David Petteys and Sonia Zawacki joined us as signers of the letter.
We’re now adding a blog to Ananias.org, for convenience in posting other written materials old and new, linking to relevant sites, and fostering discussion both among ourselves and with anyone who wishes to respond. (more…)