United Church of Christ views from the sides
I shared my post below from June 20th on the 50 year vision of the UCC on another UCC minister's web site chuckcurrie. That led to some give and take, which I am posting below:
Mr. Loar, with all due respect, you offer a dark vision of our church that I cannot in my experience and knowledge of both our history and present agree with.
David and Chuck, appreciate the comments...and Chuck, the respect! :-) My context, 58 years(lifetime) in the E&R/UCC, 32 yrs local UCC church ministry, (and also an Eden grad), while at Eden worked for the American Friends Service Committee as a staff member in the Midwest to inform church folks about the Vietnam War and to encourage actions for peace in Southeast Asia and internationally, the first UCC Peace Intern in 1972, involved with the former Office for Church Society in many veins on domestic and internatial justice and peace issues, including human rights delegation to E Germany & Hungary in 1986, in Nicaragua during the US contra war in 1987, UCC representative on the most amazing ecumenical economic and community development ministry ever -CORA/Commission on Religion in Appalachia in the 1980's. Attended 7 General Synods. Former conf staff associate minister. Two of my former congregations were within the top five highest per capita giving OCWM churches in the denomination. The present congregation I am serving has gone through major transformation in the past 7 yrs and is growing spiritually and numerically, but also is reaching out to a vast array of hurting people through social change and social service. At the heart of our journey though is a faith in the life changing grace of Jesus Christ. The motto of our church is "Its not about us." Thus, we do not focus on the story of Fairlawn West or the story of the UCC. Rather, we focus on the living Christ who is changing us all from death to life. We (myself, Fairlawn West UCC, the UCC and so on) will die. My read is we (UCC and the US church as we have known it in the 20th Century) are at points of great disintegration which is why we are trying more and more to project ourselves into the public arena. In the "old days" when justice action was done via the UCC we did not build up that it was the "UCC" doing this. Rather, Christ was doing it through we servants.
David Loar,
God bless you for all the wonderful work you have done. Christ is still working through his congregations -- whether they are UCC or not. We have been forced to project ourselves into the public arena due to the rise of the Religious Right in our country. To not respond in kind would eventually lead to our silence. How else could the church have responded?
You say we need to respond "in kind" to the Christian right. Didn't Jesus choose a different way to respond the principalities and powers? Instead of responding in like fashion, he offered a way that to the world seemed weak and vulnerable, to death. And yet,.... I think we have as Pogo said "we have met the enemy and he is us." In adopting in response in like fashion, we have allowed the so-called "religious" right to set the terms. Like the Pharisees, Sadducees, and temple elite of Jesus' time, they sought to set the terms for even those who opposed them. I think we have done the same. That was the genius of ones like M L King, Gandhi, Dorothy Day and others. In the fashion of Jesus of Nazareth they were more creative and found a "higher" way in which to respond...but then it wasn't really a response. It was the mission from the beginning.
Labels: United Church of Christ
posted by Hobart @ 6/25/2007 06:24:00 AM
0 Comments
That's a really depressing perspective on the UCC. I think the UCC is staged for growth in the next 50 years. My congregation is extremely vibrant -- in fact we've added more new members this month then we did all of last year. Also David, why do you think that our ministers paid more of a price with their prophetic leadership in the 1960s than they do now? I think our pastors are doing some very fine work indeed and I'm proud of all the many beautiful things the UCC is doing.