Leaving the United Church of Christ?
Many United Church of Christ congregations were shocked by the recent decisions rendered by this year's General Synod, particularly the resolution which encouraged churches and pastors to give their blessing to same sex marriages. Some people are doggedly determined to stay in the UCC as a witness for the light. Others want to leave the UCC.
My concern is that some churches are acting too quickly and risk splitting their churches in half. I am concerned to hear of churches that were outraged by the Synod resolutions in July and are alI riled up and ready to leave the UCC before winter. As fired up and mad as some of us are, is it really wise to risk the division of your church?
My advice is to invite both UCC and non-UCC speakers to address your concerns. Don't just study what happened at the most recent General Synod. Study the resolutions that have been coming down the pipe for the last 40 years.
Also, the most important thing a pastor can do is to keep preaching the word of God, and do not make the mistake of sprinkling your sermons with UCC anecdotes. That will only exasperate the congregation when what they need the most at a time like this is what they have always needed: the power and encouragement of the word of God.
Here is a recommended format:
1. At the next quarterly or annual meeting, vote on the formation of an affiliation committee. The goal of this committee should be A. To affirm the church's faith in the creeds and teachings that the church was founded on. B. to assimilate information about the past, present and future of the UCC. C. To look into groups that may or may not be a better fit for the church to be in. The committee should meet once a week at first, then after a while, cut back to once a month.
2. Form a mission committee to research other missions to support other than OCWM. Look into good mission agencies such as Samaritan's Purse, Frontiers, New Tribe Missions, Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, Campus Crusade, and of course, Biblical Witness Fellowship.
2. It is recommended that the affiliation committee also look into getting some DVDs of dynamic Bible teachers to feed and strengthen the group. Order some DVDs from Adrian Rogers, James McDonald, Alistair Begg, Tony Evans, Greg Laurie, Joseph Stowell, and Rick Warren and tapes from Chuck Swindoll. Expose the affiliation committee to ministries outside the UCC to see if they scratch an itch and challenge the people. Our church sent leaders to an association annual meeting. Then we sent them to a CCCC annual meeting and a Willow Creek Leadership Summit. No comparison. The local association meeting was boring (one preacher preached a sermon in Swahili) and without any scriptural reflection. I brought my brother in law along, and he said, "Don't ever do that to me again," unquote.
The other two meetings were awesome and inspiring. Give the affiliation committee a taste test. When you show the DVDs, open them up for all in the congregation to watch.
Our church members became more and more bonded together as we did this. It was a fantastic time. Not only did we feel like we were on an adventure of a lifetime, but lifelong friendships were cultivated.
3. Present your findings at the next annual meeting. Decide whether or not you need another year to study and learn together. If so, appoint a couple more members of the church to be on the committee. There should be no rush to bring things to a vote. Make sure that the pastor and the church are on board.
4. Look into health insurance providers to cover your pastor. Consider Blue Cross/Blue Shield, United Health Care, Touchpoint, Kaiser Permanente, and a good dental plan like Dentacare or Humana. If you are looking at affiliating with a different denomination, check out their health benefits are pension plans for the pastor. Go to a local financial consultant about life insurance for your pastor. Perhaps there is a member of your congregation who can give the minister some options to consider.
5. If you are in between pastors, it is recommended that you get a pastor who is doctrinally sound and sympathetic to the work of the affiliation committee. Go through the Biblical Witness Fellowship, or the CCCC, or the EA, or a respected seminary. You might be able to find a good evangelical pastor through your local UCC Association, but they are getting tougher and tougher to find. And now, with all the uproar, local associations are going to be clamping down on the kind of pastors they will be willing to take under care.
6. Leaving the UCC can be a good thing. It was for our church in Potter. But it is not something that you have to do to be in the will of God. You could stay in the UCC and rage against the dying of the light. You can be a prophetic voice in a denomination that desperately needs to hear the voice of God once again.
7. Perhaps you are a member of a church that is unhappy with the UCC. But your church is more moderate than conservative. You may want to look into groups such as the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches, which has all the diversity of the UCC, but they don't issue the divisive church wide resolutions that the UCC does. Like the UCC, most NACCC congregations are moderate to slightly right of center.
Ephesians 4:3 says to "Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace." If you do things in a rush, you will be in danger of violating this verse from Ephesians. Taking the extra time to make sure that your people and your leaders are all on board will have been well worth the effort.
I write these things because I made some of the mistakes. I put UCC anecdotes in my sermons - that was a mistake. We pulled out about a year or so after we formed our dream team, and even though the vote was 101-18 in favor of leaving the UCC, it would have been even higher if we would have taken an extra year or two.
We lost one member family and two years later, another family left. But we gained many more families and got previously inactive members more involved with the church.
About 3 weeks after the church voted to pull out of the UCC, the committee on church and ministry called me in and asked if I intended to retain my credentials in the UCC. I told them that I had obtained EA standing because I anticipated that the NE Wisconsin Association would probably terminate my standing, and that is exactly what they did.
But instead of being sad, I walked out of that meeting rejoicing! Looking back, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I would have just kept my mouth shut and not said anything. My ordination adviser told me that I was thinking only of myself and my church, and that if I was unhappy with the UCC, I should leave and pastor a non-UCC church and leave the Potter church alone. By taking that route, I would still have credentials in the UCC.
But what he didn't realize was that our church had been unhappy with the UCC for a long time and had long ceased being involved with Association activities. Once I mentioned a couple of things that were going on, we voted 88-0 to stop OCWM giving.
Also, when it comes to heresy, I have a hard time keeping my mouth shut. Those who know me know that I am a flexible guy, and I am not domineering in any way, shape or form. But when it comes to the faith once and for all delivered to the saints, I am tenacious. Jude 3 says that we need to be.
Later on, I felt some sadness. I had some good friends in the UCC that weren't on board with what we did, and it strained our relationship. One UCC minister said that he never wanted to speak to me ever again because of my devious and sinister scheme to steal Peace Church from the UCC. Another one decried my fall into fundamentalism.
Some members of the church want to go on with the ministry of the church and want the episode of the leaving of the UCC to be a distant memory. But others are hoping that other area churches will do what we did.
And some are open to joining a new association at some point, when the time is right. I am watching the developing situation in the UCC carefully. We would like to be in fellowship with churches that are experiencing what we did. And churches with whom we have historic denominational ties. We want to do this in a spirit of fellowship and love without becoming a refugee camp for embittered, disenfranchised congregations.
Let me also add by way of clarification that it is not my desire to see the relationship between a church and its denomination go sour. Nobody wants to see an ecclesiastical divorce any more than they want to see a marital divorce. But UCC churches across the nation are in crisis, and my desire is to provide a guide that will help them to keep their congregation together and unified no matter what is decided with regard to the denomination. It may be that leaving the UCC is the right decision for a specific church, and sound advice on how to go about it is hard to find.
Conversely, it may be that staying in the denomination is the right decision for a specific church, and the process I propose can help a church be more confident and unified in their conviction that they are called of God to be a prophetic voice calling the church back to an orthodox, historic understanding of scripture, sexuality, marriage, and missions.
Sincerely, Marc Axelrod
Write me if you have any questions. God bless.
Rev. Marc Axelrod
Peace Evangelical and Reformed Church
Potter, WI
imabeliever85@charter.net
PS: We left the UCC in early 2001.
posted by Marc Axelrod at 8:47 PM
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