My Church outside of church

Flávio Colombini - The Christian Science Sentinel June 5, 2006
São Paulo, Brazil

A few years ago, I was feeling very eager to extend my church activities beyond the church edifice.

After giving Bible classes at a juvenile prison for over a year, I embarked on a second journey of “Church outside church” when I volunteered in a local public hospital. I went there once a week during visiting hours, going from room to room and offering to read passages from the Bible and to pray with the patients. Many patients accepted my offer and gladly listened to me reading psalms and other passages from the Bible, and rejoiced to pray the Lord’s Prayer out loud with me. Some patients just listened to me in awe, as if I were an angel visiting them, and others started happy conversations with me, asking questions and telling me about their faith in God to heal them.

I was often amazed at their receptivity to the Word of God and to the love I was bringing to them. When I entered a room, the patients were often sad, but when I left, they were usually happy—or at least had a smile on their face. Because of their great response to my visits, I felt I was really making a difference and at least sharing some spiritual comfort with them.

Sometimes, relatives who were visiting asked me to pray for patients, and then I would silently pray by their side. I didn’t give them specific Christian Science treatments since they were receiving medical care, but I did recognize God’s loving presence there, and its ability to cast out all fear. I would spiritually sense God’s infinite love for each and every one of those patients, and I would also pray to see them myself as healthy, spiritual children of God, reflecting harmony and perfection. So in this way I was praying not to change them but to change my view of them, and to try to see what God was seeing there. This process of thinking also helped me not to be scared by the images of sickness that I sometimes saw, and to maintain my joy in the midst of sorrow, so that I could bring joyful and uplifting thoughts to the patients.

One woman who spent about a month at the hospital, whom I visited three times, told me that when I was talking and praying with her, she felt an immense joy and peace filling her, and she thanked me so much for the work I was doing. I felt really grateful for that.

I only did this volunteer work for a few months. But the experience stands out to me as a great opportunity I had to follow the Christ’s leading, and to take Church as “the structure of Truth and Love” (Science and Health, p. 583) with me to that hospital.

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