A Small Body with Outsized Influence

Divine Science has remained a genuinely small denomination throughout its history, never approaching the congregational size Unity or Religious Science eventually reached, and its churches persist today in the United States only in small numbers concentrated chiefly around its original Denver and San Francisco centres. Its historical significance within the New Thought movement rests almost entirely on the teachers and ministers it trained rather than on its own congregational reach: individuals formed within the Divine Science system went on in a number of documented cases to found or lead considerably larger New Thought organizations elsewhere, making Divine Science something closer to a seminary or training ground within the wider movement than a mass denomination competing directly with its own graduates' later, larger institutions. This out-of-proportion influence is the specific reason historians of American New Thought treat Divine Science as more significant than its modest membership numbers alone would suggest to an observer looking only at present day congregational counts. Its own institutional continuity has been maintained chiefly through a small number of long-standing congregations and a seminary function that persists in reduced form, carrying forward a body of teaching considerably older than either Unity or Religious Science in its organized form.