The UCC Is Only
Nominally My Denomination
I am a cradle Congregationalist. My mother, may she rest in
peace, was raised in the Congregationalist church in Valley City, North Dakota.
It was her mother’s church. Her father, after whom I am named, was Roman
Catholic; but the family raised their four daughters in the Congregationalist
church not the Roman Catholic one. Congregationalism is a Protestant Christian
tradition with roots in England going back to at least seventeenth century CE.
The Pilgrims who, for better or for worse, settled in New England beginning in
1620, were Congregationalists. The tradition was originally Calvinist, though
it hardly is Calvinist anymore. The Pilgrims didn’t come to North America to
establish religious freedom for anyone but themselves, but they came.
Three features distinguish the Congregationalist tradition
from other Christian denominations. I will address two of them here.[1]
It’s not that those two aren’t true of some other denominations to one extent
or another as well, but they are central to Congregationalist identity. One is
a commitment to social justice. This commitment has been central to
congregationalism at least since the late eighteenth century. The
Congregationalists ordained the first Black person ever ordained in a predominantly
white Christian denomination. They were leaders in the Abolitionist movement.
They ordained the first woman ordained in any Christian denomination at least
since very early in the Christian tradition. They were leaders in the social
Gospel movement. Since the 1970s, they have been leaders in the movement they
call Open and Affirming, that is, in accepting people of all sexual
orientations and gender identities as fully equal children of God, something I,
by the way, fully support. Social justice has always been central to Congregationalist
identity.
The other thing that has long characterized the
Congregationalist tradition that I will address here is the emphasis it has
placed on having highly educated and trained clergy. We see this emphasis early
in the Congregationalist tradition in North America through the fact that
Congregationalists founded both Harvard University and Yale University primarily
for the purpose of educating clergy. Even today, most Congregationalist, now
UCC (see below), clergy have MDiv degrees from fully accredited seminaries.
Many of them have either a D.Min or a PhD beyond their MDiv degrees. Back in
the 1990s, when your humble author first thought of becoming an ordained UCC
pastor, an accredited MDiv degree was among the standard requirements for
ordination. That’s why your humble author took the time, did the work, and paid
the cost of obtaining such a degree.
In the 1930s, the Congregationalist churches merged with a
small denomination called simply the Christian Church. It was at least loosely
related to today’s Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), with which the UCC
maintains a close relationship. In 1957, the Congregational Christian Churches
merged with the Evangelical and Reformed Church to form the United Church of
Christ (UCC), the denomination into which your humble author was ordained and
in which he served and, to a limited extent, continues to serve. The Congregationalist
traditions of social justice and educated clergy continued when the
Congregationalists, or at least most of them, became part of the UCC.
The UCC today has warped or abandoned the Congregationalist
tradition of social justice and educated clergy in ways that offend your humble
author profoundly. I’ll address social justice first. It’s not that the UCC
doesn’t stand for social justice. It does, and it does so in clear and powerful
ways. The problem with the UCC’s commitment to social justice is that that
commitment has essentially displaced Christian spirituality within the
tradition. At least for the national leadership of the denomination, today the
Christian faith is about social justice and about nearly nothing else. Yet the
Christian faith, while it does indeed command us to be committed to social
justice, is more than that commitment. The Christian life, in addition to being
a life committed to social justice, is a life of prayer. It is a life lived in
communion with God the Holy Spirit. It is necessarily a life of prayer and
other spiritual exercises.
Yet the UCC today places virtually no emphasis on those
foundational elements of the Christian life whatsoever. Your humble author,
though he is not and never has been a Roman Catholic, has an MDiv degree from a
Jesuit University. He knows more than perhaps most Protestant clergy about the
deep, rich spiritual traditions within Roman Catholicism. Prayer and other
spiritual practices bring people closer to God and God closer to people; and,
after all, the primary purpose of any religious faith is precisely to do that,
to bring people and God closer together. It’s not that all UCC people have
abandoned spirituality. Many of us have not. But a look any day at ucc.org, the
denomination’s web site, will reveal a concern with social justice and will
rarely address any other aspect of the Christian faith. The UCC’s abandonment
of spirituality as the foundational part of the Christian faith is one primary
reason why I say that the UCC is only nominally my denomination.
The other reason is, if anything, even more important. For a
long time, the UCC’s standards and processes for ordination have been contained
in something called the Manual on Ministry. The version of that manual that was
in effect when I applied for ordination provided that an accredited MDiv was
the primary, though not the only, criterion for ordination. Several years ago a
UCC institution called MESA (Ministerial Excellence, Support, and Accreditation)
put out a new Manual on Ministry. The word seminary and the phrase MDiv degree
appear in that manual rarely if at all. That manual provides, essentially, that
the denomination will ordain anyone who isn’t a child sex abuser to any
ministry of whatsoever type anyone wants to pursue. It eliminates types ministry
other than ordained ministry, which used to be limited to ministries of word
and sacrament. Now it isn’t limited to anything. Rather than require an MDiv
and limit ordination to women and men pursuing ministries of word and
sacrament, the Manual on Ministry now provides a long list of what it calls the
Marks of Faithful and Effective Authorized Ministers. It tells regional
committees on ministry, which have long been the institutions through which a
person becomes authorized for ministry in the UCC, to judge candidates for
ordination by applying to them an unspecified number of unspecified Marks of
Ministry by an unspecified method to an unspecified standard. It leaves the
requirements for ordination vague at best and completely undefined at worst. The
manual specifies no educational requirements for ordination whatsoever. Your
humble author served for many years on his regional committee on ministry. He
could have continued to serve there. The new manual ministry drove him off the
committee and very nearly out of the denomination. What it does to types of and
qualification for authorized ministry in the denomination is simply
inexcusable.
I remain authorized for ministry in the United Church of
Christ. I came to ordained ministry relatively late in life, but for over more
than the last twenty years, being an ordained UCC minister has been a core part
of my identity. I don’t intend to resign my standing the denomination. But I
say that the UCC is only nominally my denomination because I have come to be so
out of step with what it has done to authorized ministry and because of its
neglect of the people’s need for spirituality, not just for a commitment social
justice.
The UCC remains, as it has long been, a denomination of
refuge for people who have quit or been driven out of more conservative,
biblically literalist churches. I value the UCC greatly for that truth. There
is, however, much that I no longer value about it. I won’t leave it. I am,
after all, a cradle Congregationalist. There is no place else for me to go.[2]
Nonetheless, I mourn what my church has become in at least the two ways I have
specified here. Will the UCC change in those regards? I certainly doubt it. But
I am old (78 as I write), and I won’t be around all that much longer. So I hang
on, celebrate some things about the UCC, mourn others, and continue to live my
spiritual life within the UCC. That’s all I can do, and it’s all I will do for
the rest of my life.
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