By Justice Alone?
I am a Christian, and the United Church of Christ is my church. I have attended churches belonging to other denominations on occasion, but I have never belonged to any church that wasn’t part of the UCC. I never will. I was ordained in the UCC in 2002. I served as pastor of a UCC church for nearly thirteen years. I’m retired now, but I still have active ordained ministerial standing in the UCC. The UCC is of course a human institution. For all her very human faults I love and appreciate the UCC and what she has given me and so many other people less privileged than me.
I thank God for my UCC, but these days I’m feeling compelled to ask: What is it about the UCC that I love and thank God for? There are several different answers to that question. I guess what I appreciate most about the UCC is the way we respect individual freedom of conscience. We do not try to dictate to people what they must believe in order to belong. We are a Christian denomination, but we don’t tell people that Christianity means only one particular thing. We are noncreedal. We don’t require people to recite the Nicene or any other creed to belong to our church. We UCC pastors, when we’re at our best at least, seek to walk with people on their spiritual journey and to help them wrestle with their questions of faith.
Closely related to our tradition of individual freedom of conscience is our polity of autonomous institutions. Yes, we now say that all of the people and institutional expressions of the church are in covenant with one another, but local church autonomy has been a feature of the UCC since its foundation (which covenant has not, at least not explicitly). Local church autonomy was the longstanding polity of the Congregationalists, and the UCC adopted it and fully embraced it. No person or institution outside any of our local churches has the right or the authority to dictate to any local church what they must believe, how they must be organized, or how they must conduct their affairs. Because of that local church autonomy many of our congregations have taken progressive positions on matters of social and economic justice that local churches in more connectional denominations have not always been able to take.
I love our deep historical roots. Yes, the UCC was formed only in 1957, but its predecessor denominations have roots that go back a lot farther than that. I grew up in the UCC’s Congregationalist predecessor denomination, and it’s the predecessor of the UCC with which I am most familiar. Congregationalism goes back to England in the sixteenth century. Congregationalists first came to North America on the Mayflower in 1620. Our history since then has hardly been free from sin. We treated Native Americans as badly as any other Euro-Americans, which is to say we treated them horribly, sinfully. We held witch trials in which charges grounded only in ignorance and misogyny were made against innocent women. We preached a strict form of Calvinism that loved to threaten people with eternal damnation if they didn’t believe the right things. For example, in 1741 the Congregationalist theologian and pastor Jonathan Edwards preached the famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a hellfire and brimstone sermon about the dangers of false belief. We outgrew that theology a long time ago, or at least most of us did. Still, that theology is part of our history. Like all other humans and all other human institutions the UCC has a lot of which to repent.
Yet there is another side to our history. We honor individual freedom of conscience, but we also have a strong tradition of being among the first Christians to stand and speak out for justice. We take this characteristic of our being again mostly from our Congregationalist forebear. In 1785 a Congregational church ordained the first Black minister in a mostly white denomination. Many leading Abolitionists were Congregationalists. A Congregational church ordained the first woman ordained in any church since New Testament times in 1853. One of our local churches and its regional body ordained the first openly gay man to be ordained anywhere in 1973. Starting in the 1970s many of our local churches have become “Open and Affirming,” that is, they fully embrace and affirm the equal human rights and dignity of LGBTQ people and welcome them into the life and leadership of the church. These are but a few of the justice milestones of the traditions that make up the UCC. We don’t all agree about everything, but as a whole the UCC has been and is the Christian denomination most on the front lines of many different social justice movements.
For most of my life I have shared the UCC’s commitment to social justice. Being a person committed to social justice and being known as a person committed to social justice have been part of my self-identity for many, many years. The first call I ever discerned from God was for me to become active in the Open and Affirming movement in the UCC. I knew of no reason why God should be calling me to that work, but I have no doubt that God was doing precisely that. I have long believed, taught, and preached Jesus’ Gospel of creative, assertive nonviolence. I have opposed every war my country has been in since Vietnam. The UCC’s commitment to justice fits well with my own faith-based conviction.[1]
Which leads me to the reason I’m writing this essay. I have become concerned that the UCC has gone overboard in its drive to be the social justice church. I don’t mean that the UCC has taken any wrong positions on social justice issues. I mean that advocating for justice on multiple fronts has become very nearly the only thing that the UCC is about. This overemphasis of the UCC is apparent nearly every time you open the denomination’s website, ucc.org. I did that as I was writing this text. The home page of ucc.org for Wednesday, May 8, 2019, has these items. A series of screens that scroll across the top of the page deal with the UCC’s upcoming General Synod. These screens begin with an introduction to the Synod’s keynote speaker Matthew Desmond. Clicking on that screen takes you to a brief introduction to Desmond. We learn that he is the author of a book titled Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Thus the main thrust of the 2019 General Synod, the UCC’s semiannual national gathering, is one of social justice. The next screen has the headline “Summer Communities of Service,” another social justice emphasis. The third screed is notification about a Saturday night “Dinner & A Show” featuring the Choir of Trinity United Church, the UCC’s largest predominately Black congregation. The screen says: “Proceeds from the concert benefit Justice and Local Church Ministries.” Once again we see that the main theme of this year’s General Synod is one of social justice. The next screen says “Just Act.” Clicking on that page takes you to a screen with the headline “The 3 Great Loves Daily Action Calendar for Creating a Just World for All.” Again a social justice emphasis. The fourth screen says “Season Two Podcast For A Just World.” More social justice. The fifth and last screen says “Into the Mystic.” That caption doesn’t sound like the screen is necessarily about social justice. It isn’t as much about justice as the other screens. It is about a podcast by the UCC’s General Minister and President John Dorhauer. Another entry on the homepage, however, has a picture of Dorhauer with the caption “Into the Mystic: The Spiritual Practice of Earth Care.” Thus, the UCC turns even something supposedly about mysticism into something about a social justice issue, namely, caring for the earth. These items appear on the UCC homepage for May 8, 2019, but log onto ucc.org most any day and you’ll find the same emphasis. The UCC has become a denomination much more concerned with justice than it is with any other aspect of the Christian faith.
Let me say again: There’s nothing wrong with a Christian church emphasizing social justice. That’s a big part of what Jesus did. It is a big part of what God calls God’s people to do. The problem I’m having with the UCC these days is not that it preaches social justice. It is that social justice has become just about the only thing the denomination is about. Yet there’s a lot more to the Christian faith than social justice. All Christians must be committed to social justice, but all Christians have other needs that Christianity can address very effectively as well. Christianity is first of all a way that people find a connection with God and live their lives in connection with God. Christianity challenges us to do the work of peace and justice, but it also offers spiritual solace and strength in a world that to often overwhelms us with its burdens and hurts. In Christianity we know that God loves us and every other person, indeed God loves all of creation, unconditionally. In Christianity we can find hope in the face of fear, comfort in the face of grief, courage in the face of doubt, grace when we know we don’t deserve grace. The rituals and sacraments of the Christian faith inspire us and bring us peace. They connect us with our God of transcendent love. They connect us with the spiritual dimension of reality. They connect us with that which is ultimately real, that which is ultimately true. Without those gifts of the faith our spirits and our lives are shallow and flat. Without those gifts of the faith the world really will overwhelm us.
The UCC can and on occasion does bring her people all of these gifts of faith, but sometimes it seems like they get overshadowed by our commitment to social justice. One reason that that happening is a problem is because one of the great truths of the faith is that unless our work for peace and justice is firmly grounded in our faith we have no chance of doing it effectively or for the long term. Jesus says I am the vine, you are the branches. John 15:5. If we as the branches lose our intimate connection with Jesus Christ and God as the vine we can do nothing, as Jesus also says. We Christians need the support of the church if we are to establish and maintain that intimate connection. We need to be guided in prayer. We need help with discerning God’s will for our lives. We need the water of baptism and the sacred food of the Eucharist if we are truly to be Christians. We need all of the gifts of the Spirit, not just a commitment to social justice. The UCC could do a much better job than it usually does of offering us everything we need from our faith. I pray that she will begin to do that soon.
[1]
There is one thing lacking in the UCC’s peace and justice commitments, namely,
an express commitment to Jesus’ way of nonviolence. Most of my UCC clergy
colleagues are committed to nonviolence, but the denomination has never formally
renounced all violence. The UCC is not one of the historic peace churches. I
wish it were.
