The Oldest Denomination and the Movement It Shares

Divine Science predates Unity and Religious Science as an organised body, its convergence in San Francisco and Denver in the 1880s and 1890s coming before either the Fillmores' Kansas City ministry or Holmes's Los Angeles institute. Albanese's history situates Divine Science, alongside those two younger denominations and older still Christian Science, as members of a single loosely organised New Thought family, sharing enough doctrinal ground, an omnipresent, wholly good God and a confidence in the practical power of recognition, that an umbrella body, the International New Thought Alliance, has coordinated among them since the early twentieth century despite each denomination keeping its own separate ministers, congregations and institutional leadership. The Encyclopedia of American Religions records that this shared network has meant a practitioner or teacher trained in one New Thought denomination can often move into ministry within another with comparatively little friction, the underlying metaphysics being close enough that institutional boundaries have mattered more to organisational history than to doctrine itself. Divine Science's own distinct contribution within that shared family has been less a difference in teaching than a claim to priority, presenting itself in its own literature as the first of the organised New Thought bodies to state the omnipresence doctrine in a settled, congregational form rather than only in the writing of an individual teacher.