A visitor to a Christian Science Sunday service finds hymns, silent prayer, the Lord's Prayer with its spiritual interpretation, and then a long reading, and no sermon. Two Readers, lay members elected by the congregation for fixed terms, read alternately from the Bible and from Science and Health, following a Lesson-Sermon built around one of a rotating set of subjects. The lesson is prepared centrally and published in advance, so the same passages are read in every branch church in the world in the same week. The Readers may not comment, explain or add anything of their own, and the First Reader's role is to announce and to read rather than to lead worship in the ordinary sense.
The arrangement dates from 1895, when Mary Baker Eddy ended personal preaching in her church and ordained the Bible and Science and Health as its pastor, and wrote the provision into the Manual of The Mother Church. The reasoning follows from the rest of her teaching: if the truth to be conveyed is stated exactly in the two books, then a preacher's elaboration can only add personal opinion to it, and personality is what she wished to remove from the pulpit. Wednesday evening meetings supply what the Sunday service withholds, being given over largely to members rising to give accounts of healing, which makes them the church's most distinctive public gathering.