United Church of Christ

Eboo Patel addressed the UCC General Synod today, calling on our church to be a community of bridge-builders, developing and growing a structure of leadership for today’s pluralist America.

He encouraged the church to “build young people who are interfaith leaders.”  With all due respect to Eboo (whom I have met on a number of occasions and am deeply infatuated with his work), I’m wondering if he’s met many of the congregations in our church.

With around 2% of our clergy being under age 35, we certainly don’t have a lot of young people in pastoral ministry.  With one of the highest average ages among American church groups, the United Church of Christ has occupied itself with many of the issues that face its demographic position: ’60s and ’70s style community organizing, ’60s and ’70s style justice issues, ’60s and ’70s style leadership development.

We’re open-minded, non-scripturally-literal folk — we don’t focus much on ecumenism and inter-faith efforts not because we’re closed-off, but because we simply don’t know how. After it was apparent that we would not be a United Church as in other places like Canada, Australia and India, where a majority of the national Protestant bodies came together to create one unified church structure, we moved on to other things.  We quit talking about our own faith.  Rather than attempting to explain what we are, we took up our identity as what we are not: we became an anti- church.

And so we developed the status quo.  We continue doing what we do because we simply don’t know what else to do.  People died off, and we wring our hands in lament over a society that doesn’t refill the pews like it used to.  Hot damn, we actually have to do something to get people to come in the doors!  (Even scarier, we might even have to go outside them ourselves!)

I was reading a study not too long ago (I’ll Google it sometime and link from here) about how the majority of clergy surveyed identified as introverts.  In the same study, lay church members placed the primary responsibility for outreach, membership development and recruitment (I hate the word “evangelism”) on the pastor’s shoulders.  Hello?  Does anyone else see a disconnect there?

Growing up, I learned the two things one doesn’t speak about in polite conversation are politics and religion.  As I went through college, the two most popular topics among my peers were politics and religion.  In the case of the latter, we all were finding our own ways in the world, accompanied by our own canons of experiences, books, and resources, because so many people didn’t know where to go!  I have a number of under-30 friends who sought out advice and counsel from Christian pastors, only to end up claiming Buddhist and Muslim labels for themselves and initiating themselves in those faiths because their laypeople and clerics would speak directly to their beliefs! What a telling statement about so many of our churches today.

To the UCC, I hope that we keep Eboo’s challenge to us as we reimagine our church.  The early Christian church of Paul’s day was deeply influenced by its encompassing Hellenistic culture of the time.  Our own UCC has been deeply influenced by the American culture of the 1960s and 1970s.  What does the church of the 2010s look like, and how do we build our leadership and structure our organization for the rapidly-changing, quickly-evolving future?

(Side note: this article and its follow-up from the Massachusetts Conference are over eight years old, but I believe a good, quick read to illustrate the demographic and financial structural flaws of our current system in the UCC and why it is absolutely imperative to change tracks.)

One of the things that attracted me most to the UCC was its diversity of thought within the denomination, and its deep and abiding partnership with other traditions both inside and outside the Christian faith.

In other countries like ours, the 20th Century included a number of united and uniting church movements.  The United Church in Canada included the vast majority of Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregational churches in that country — and there was even talk and preparation for the Anglicans to join in.  The Uniting Church in Australia has a similar story.  The United States, though, never fully realized the movement.  That’s OK.  We’ve still got room in the UCC even for those who cling to their own labels and definitions.

Some challenge us because we have no prerequisite acquiescence to a set theology or creed.  But how wonderful it is to join together with those who do!  We are able to teach and learn from each other as we are on the great pilgrimage of faith.  On Sunday mornings, one is bound to find as many theological outlooks as there are individuals in the pews.  But we are not a group of individuals, instead we join together to fully engage and employ our God-given intelligence to attempt to understand God better, to more fully be about God’s work in our lives and in the life of the world around us through our discipleship.  In a community like ours, how can we help ourselves from reaching out across sectarian lines?

So, yeah.  We play well with others.  Its a really neat thing.

Read the first installment of this series.

One of the things that I love about the UCC, and that I think we do exceptionally well in comparison to the other mainline denominations, is we’re creative.  Now before the Lutherans start litigating about their creative forces, and the Presbyterians start pontificating about their artistic following, let me remind you I’m not here to start a war.  This isn’t an all-or-nothing summarization.  But you’ve got to admit, the UCC is creative.

Our structure breeds creativity.  Worship is not standardized among the congregations in our church; you’re free to use (or avoid) the UCC Book of Worship… or the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, or the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship, or the Evangelical Lutheran Worship, or Joe’s Book of Pub Rules, or Sally’s Order for School Playgrounds.

Furthermore, Christian Education is equally diverse.  And there’s a growing movement for bringing in the visul arts  — probably because after centuries of whitewashed walls, we’re ready for some living color.  And then there’s our national structure itself.  Describing it as *creative* would be an understatement!

We’re a denomination leading the way for the use of technology in evangelism, mobilization and advocacy.  Church House is twittering, facebooking and blogging.  And for heaven’s sake, we’ve successfully replaced an image of suffering and death (the cross) as our church icon with a comma.  A comma!  It signifies not the end, but a continuation; not resolution, but open-ended freedom.

As a denomination committed to social justice, it makes sense that we breed creativity.  Tough decisions require creative solutions.  The UCC is definitely a place where the right brain need not check itself at the door.

“If you believe love should be uncritical, you may soon be thinking that I do not love this church. But my experience has been that to be a member of the United Church of Christ is, almost by definition, to be a critic of it. To be uncritical is to be the real oddball in this church. Perhaps to be uncritical is to be un-Christian”. -From “The United Church of Christ Tomorrow”, THEOLOGY AND IDENTITY: TRADITIONS, MOVEMENTS, AND POLITY IN THE UCC (Pilgrim Press: 1990), ed. Dan Johnson and Charles Hambrick-Stowe

I have a love-hate relationship with institutional church.  For any of those people who know me even slightly well, they will attest to the convoluted paradigm that is my absolute devotion to structured religious practice within the covenantal church standing next to the uncompromising commitment to the institutional ideal — what should be, what could be, what ought to be instead of what presently is.

To be certain, I have faced my own personal series of dark nights where the church was little more than a cannon aimed in my direction.  But the enduring power of the faithful assembled wouldn’t let me go.  Time and again I come back to this place with all of its faults and failures, roll up my sleeves, and say to those around me, “Let’s get to God’s work among God’s people.”

Because of my commitment to that ideal, I couldn’t in good conscience remain in the faith tradition of my upbringing.  As a confessional tradition, it takes its cues and inspiration from ancient statements of faith, 15th and 16th Century methods of interpretation and practice, and holds a certain suspicion to those models which emphasize freedom in the Gospel.  I don’t say this to reject that community’s faith; far from it, there are myriad good and faithful people who work to build the Beloved Community on earth there, and I am shaped and molded by their tradition more than I can ever unravel.  But in the end, my instinctive understanding of religious freedom for the sake of Jesus Christ led me down a different path of searching and discerning before I arrived in my home in the United Church of Christ.

I love the UCC.  I love that I can walk into two local churches sitting next door to each other and receive a completely different message.  I love that I can talk with two UCC members and receive eight different opinions.  I love that I can be about faithful risk, challenging the structures which define us, while maintaining solidarity with those around the edges.  I love that I can (even ought to) challenge church leadership yet stand side-by-side at the wonderful Table of Grace and receive heavenly food to sustain each of us.

I love the ideal of the UCC: a church rooted in no fewer than four Christian traditions in North America but affected by so many more, that celebrates its diversity in all of its forms while requiring uniformity of none.

There is much to celebrate in the UCC, but yet I am constantly reminded of where we fail.  In our attempts of inclusion, we fail to name — and even sometimes reject outright — those who we are purposely or indirectly excluding.  In our attempts of promoting religious freedom, we reject those who, in their freedom, subscribe to or promote a more conservative Christian faith.  In our attempts of promoting diversity, we provide a narrow definition rather than subscribing to the comprehensive whole.

One of my requirements as I work toward ordination is to take a course on UCC History & Polity.  I’m enrolled in that this semester and after one class period, I can speak with certainty that its going to be one of two classes that will pull me and stretch me in ways I can’t name now.  Over the course of the next few postings here, I’m going to address first three things that are cause for celebration in our beloved church, followed by three things that hinder us in our work.

For those who are “church people,” especially who might be involved in the life of the UCC, I hope that you will join the conversation.  For those who are “people of the world,” I hope you will also join the conversation and keep us grounded in the here-and-now of our work together.  Finally, for those of you who can’t stand church talk, I hope you, too, will join the conversation and let us know what it is we have done to push you away.

We’ll see where this goes.  I’m excited.