Christian Science Financial Ills Disclosed : Religion: Broadcasting programs have cost $259 million since 1984. Reserves have been depleted and $115 million has been borrowed from employee pension fund.

In an unprecedented public disclosure, officials of the Christian Science Church on Monday confirmed months of allegations that a controversial television venture had siphoned huge amounts of money from the church’s reserve account and pension fund.

At the church’s annual financial meeting, held at its headquarters in Boston, church leaders said they kept the television operation afloat in 1991 by wiping out the church’s $22 million in reserves and borrowing $115 million from the employee pension fund.

The 150,000-member church, best known for its devotion to healing illness through prayer, has for the past year been torn by charges of poor financial management. It has also been rocked by criticism over the publication of a book regarded in many quarters as contrary to church doctrine.

Monday’s meeting, attended by 4,000 members, marked the first time the church had offered a public financial accounting.

The church began expanding its broadcast efforts in the mid-1980s in an effort to broaden the visibility of the religion, which has been losing members steadily since the 1950s. More than a third of church members are believed to live in California.

The broadcast investments dominated the church to a degree that stunned many members.

On Monday, Treasurer John L. Selover said broadcasting programs had cost the church $259 million since 1984--more than a third of its total operating budget.

Shutting down the Monitor Channel will cost another $68.5 million, Selover said.

In past months, in response to a series of reports about excessive broadcast expenditures published by the Boston Globe, several church officials responsible for the broadcast venture resigned.

This spring the church announced that it would shut down its year-old Monitor Channel cable network, which had drained the church of $89 million, and lay off 362 employees. The church has also put its Boston television station, WQTV, up for sale.

Last week, officials said they will lay off another 100 church employees to slice overall church spending by another 10%, achieving an annual budget of $70 million. Anticipated revenue from gifts and investment from the fiscal year that began in May is $73 million.

Church officials, in remarks to the audience Monday, acknowledged the friction over the financial decisions.

“We’ll want to think together about whether our movement is in danger of being lost,” Nathan A. Talbot, president of the church, told members.

Still festering is disagreement about the church’s decision last summer to publish a long-rejected 1947 biography of the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy.

The book, “The Destiny of the Mother Church,” placed Eddy on the same level as Jesus Christ--an admiring comparison that Eddy had long discouraged.

Relatives of the book’s author, Bliss Knapp, had pledged a $97-million bequest to the church if it published by the book by next spring.

The money is tied up in court because of a lawsuit filed by two other institutions, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Stanford University. Knapp’s heirs stipulated that the museum and university would receive the bequest if the church failed to publish Knapp’s book as “authorized” literature and to display it in all church reading rooms. The lawsuit contends that the church has not met those requirements.