Report of the ACOP, July 25, 2016

Report of the ACOP, July 25, 2016

I hope each of you has received the Maryland COMMITTEE ON PUBLICATION Newsletter for July 2017. If not, please let me know.

Please let me know of any newspapers in your area where COP news articles could be published. Therewill be no Maryland Committee on Publication Newsletter in August.

You might be interested in reading a commentary written by a survivor of Dunkirk in World War II, which was in a recent newsletter.

Many of you might know that the Boy Scouts of America are having a national Jamboree in West Virginia now and the Christian Science church has a chaplain and a booth to offer Christian Science literatureand will have a Sunday church service. At the last Jamboree, the Christian Science chaplain described the scouts that came up to the booth:“The two words I would use to describe the scouts visiting our booth: they wereserious, and they were innocentlyunprejudiced. They were not idly passing by. They were looking to learn about religions. Most came right up to us and said,‘So what is Christian Science?’ Probably 85-90% had never heard of it. Of the 10-15% that thought they had heard of it, I was surprisedat how widespread the confusion with Scientology was--about 30%thought we were Scientology. We corrected this misunderstanding right away, then gave about a 4-6 minute introduction to Christian Science.”

“After the initial introduction, they then started to ask questions, and we had a back-and-forth, sharing various testimonies, telling them about the church websites, reading favorite citations from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy to them,inviting them to the lecture, and so on. These teenage boys listened carefully, and asked smart questions. We talked with most groups about 10-15 minutes, and the most common response we got was "This isinteresting." And theygenuinelymeant interesting—theyemphasizedthe word interesting--they were clearlyintriguedby the whole idea of Christian Science. In fact, we started to notice that there were maybe 8-10 visitors a day who werereturnvisitors--and most of the return visitors brought their friends and said they had been telling their friends about what we'd said and they wanted us to tell their friends about Christian Science. Many had looked us up on the web and then come back with questions. Others who came back alone engaged in deeper back and forth conversation with us.”

Respectfully submitted,

Jack Clifford, ACOP