God is in the details

In a colorful landscape of Spanish mission, Victorian and craftsman-style structures, the Ventura Center for Spiritual Living doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb: It emerges on the skyline like some beautiful artifact of an era predating modern settlers. It is perhaps the only building in the county whose architectural sensibility can be described as “Mayan.”

Architect Robert Stacy-Judd was commissioned by the First Baptist Church to draft this lush design. His well-documented fascination with Mayan culture and aesthetics led him to create a church that paid tribute to the Mayan’s terraced pyramids and intimidating, hilltop religious structures, while integrating shades of Art Deco. Completed in 1932, it is the church that Stacy-Judd himself was married in.

The church changed hands in 1952, becoming the Ventura County home to the Church of Religious Science, recently renamed the Ventura Center for Spiritual Living.

This is not to be confused with Christian Science, which is similar in name only. While Christian Science focuses on the power of spiritual healing, inspiring followers to avoid medical technology, the Church of Religious Science is considered part of the New Thought movement that began in the late 1800s.

The new congregation found a kindred soul in Stacy-Judd’s masterpiece, noting that the Mayan civilization was one of great achievement and general peace. Similarly, the Mayan religion was monotheistic and focused on the concept of the soul’s immortality.

The Science of Mind

\"Every religion has dogma,\" Reverend Bonnie Rose said when explaining the philosophy behind Religious Science. \"I try and push past the dogma, to look at the spirit versus the letter of the law. We teach spiritual laws, like in nature. Certain things in life are based on that sense of order,” she said.

The congregation is populated by people of various backgrounds, whom Rose characterizes as \"former Christians, some Jews, [those from] Eastern religions as well.\"

\"Generally,\" she adds, \"people who tend to be a bit rebellious.\"

Rose came to the church not from seminary, but from a theater background. During a Broadway-based, national tour for a production of Lettuce and Lovage, she and her husband had an epiphany of sorts.

“There was life beyond New York!” she said, laughing.

She believed her spiritual journey would lead her to become a hospital chaplain. She was well into her training when a position at the Ventura County Church of Religious Science presented itself.

Rose had a Christian upbringing prior to finding Religious Science, and although the church appears to have sprung from a mainly Protestant background — the religion’s founder, Ernest Holmes, was a student of Emma Curtis Hopkins, a leader in New Thought and the teacher of a method she called \"Scientific Christian Mental Practice\" — the Church of Religious Science is interdenominational. As Rose puts it, sermons, integrated texts and beliefs depend on the minister's bias and background.

\"We believe that Christ was a principle,\" Rose said. \"Jesus was a great example of one who realized oneness with God.\"

A church pamphlet elaborates: “We have many teachers of truth. We believe in the teachings of Jesus, the Christ. Jesus was one who taught and lived the principles we teach. He was the example. We use his teachings to understand life, love and forgiveness.”

The structure of sermons leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Rose reports that a \"non literal translation of the Bible\" is often used, and that leaders in each church bring their own experience and creativity to religious study. Rose herself draws on both the New Testament and concepts from Sufism.

In short, she says, \"We bless all paths to God.\"

All are one

The widely recognized religious text is Holmes’ The Science of the Mind, first published in 1926, revised in 1938. It serves largely as an instructional tome on meditation and prayer, as well as self-guided healing.

Like other denominations that spring from the New Thought movement, Religious Science takes a largely monistic approach in its philosophy, a belief in a basic interconnectedness in life and nature.

\"It's more traditional to see God as a person, a guy with wild hair, bad attitude,\" she said, but adds that within church, they explore perceptions of God as \"energetic,\" and that \"incarnations of God, the energy we call God, are everywhere.\"

\"Religious science has been accused of being a feel-good religion\" Rose said, arguing that it the religion is actually one that demands “rigorous examination.”

\"We're really welcome to question anything — there's no such thing as excommunication,\" she said.

The church’s doctrine is heavily concerned with the power of thought and the idea that followers consciously create their experiences, and in this way influence their destinies.

As a church in the New Thought tradition, Religious Science is often set apart from older and more ingrained religions. This individuality is complemented by Stacy-Judd’s design.

According to Becky Burnham, president of the Center for Spiritual Living’s board of trustees, Stacy-Judd claimed that his church was “the only Mayan architectural ecclesiastical building in the country.”

It is a unique distinction for a uniquely distinct landmark.