Denomination Bucks Trend, Reunites After Fifty-Seven Years

Golden, CO…In an era when religious denominations are splitting into smaller and smaller sects, one just reunited after being split since 1954. Science of Mind®, also known as Religious Science, founded in the 1920s by philosopher Ernest Holmes, functioned as two competing organizations for more than fifty years. This week, delegates at their joint annual conference in San Diego approved reunification, called “integration,” with 98 percent of the vote.

In preparation for their integration, the two organizations, originally called Religious Science International and United Church of Religious Science, changed their names to International Centers for Spiritual Living and United Centers for Spiritual Living, respectively. Now that the merger is official, the new organization will be known simply as Centers for Spiritual Living.

 “We are a philosophy that teaches unity, so it is time for us to walk our talk,” says Rev. Dr. Kathy Hearn, Community Spiritual Leader for United Centers for Spiritual Living. “Our founder, Ernest Holmes, always believed the movement would come back together at some point, and the time is now.”

 “The time has finally come for our organizations to come back together,” echoes Rev. Dr. Kenn Gordon, President of International Centers for Spiritual Living. “We simply cannot go on teaching unity while remaining split.”

The merger has been in process for eight years, intensifying over the last three years, and using a shared leadership model that included almost four hundred volunteers working to create “modules” that reflect the functional departments of the new organization. These modules became the basis for the new corporate documents that were overwhelmingly accepted this week.

Science of Mind is part of the New Thought Movement, started in the mid-1800s by Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and continued into the twentieth century with the teaching of Emmett Fox, Napoleon Hill, Emma Curtis Hopkins, and Holmes. The cornerstone of New Thought is a teaching of unity, yet despite this, two factions of Science of Mind broke apart in the 1950s over organizational differences. “We have the opportunity here to heal the wounds of the past,” says Gordon.