Life, Death, and Resurrection in the United Church of Christ
"He is not here, for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay." Matthew 28:6
Dear friends,
I’m starting this letter on the evening of Good Friday. It’s raining in Northeast Wisconsin, which feels right. The story of Jesus’s death hit me hard this year. The tears came this afternoon at our ecumenical Good Friday tenebrae service, after I’d read about Peter’s denial and returned to my pew with nothing more to do but listen and pray. I was so undone by my friend Terra’s reading of the crowd crying for Christ’s crucifixion that the Presbyterian next to me had to pass me a tissue. Reading Winn Collier’s exquisite reflection on Jesus’s death shortly before the service had set me up to feel our Lord’s suffering in my bones.
The Triduum is a fitting time to consider the United Church of Christ specifically, and liberal mainline denominations generally. These are matters of life, death, and resurrection.
I was ordained in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and have “partner standing in the UCC. I served a lovely yet declining Disciple church for the first five years of my ministry; it closed a few years after I left. Sixteen of my nearly 21 years of ordained ministry have been in UCC congregations.
I don’t love the metaphor, but I’m still an in-law in this ecclesiastical family. As I’ve been reading a spate of articles about the UCC over the last month I’ve weighed the wisdom of adding my voice to the conversation. I am not a cradle Congregationalist.1 I don’t want to come across as a critic of a tradition that is not mine to critique.
There is much that I love about the United Church of Christ as a denomination. I love our (small-c) congregationalism – we reject hierarchical structures and place the authority within the Body of Christ as expressed in the local church. I love that this local authority has allowed for the Spirit to move freely, unfettered by denominational strictures. I often remind new member classes that of course not every congregation affirmed Antoinette Brown’s ordination in 1853 or Bill Johnson’s in 1972. Local autonomy and trust in the Spirit’s guidance means that our first gay pastor had already retired while other denominations were still fighting about the dignity and belovedness of LGBTQ+ people. I love our remarkable legacy of advocacy for justice and inclusion, and that so very many of our congregations have done the work to become Open and Affirming. I love my extraordinarily funny and smart clergy colleagues. I love our Statement of Faith, especially the doxological version:
United Church of Christ Statement of Faith in the form of a doxology
We believe in you, O God, Eternal Spirit, God of our Savior Jesus Christ and our God, and to your deeds we testify:
You call the worlds into being, create persons in your own image, and set before each one the ways of life and death.
You seek in holy love to save all people from aimlessness and sin.
You judge people and nations by your righteous will declared through prophets and apostles.
In Jesus Christ, the man of Nazareth, our crucified and risen Savior, you have come to us and shared our common lot, conquering sin and death and reconciling the world to yourself.
You bestow upon us your Holy Spirit, creating and renewing the church of Jesus Christ, binding in covenant faithful people of all ages, tongues, and races.
You call us into your church to accept the cost and joy of discipleship, to be your servants in the service of others, to proclaim the gospel to all the world and resist the powers of evil, to share in Christ’s baptism and eat at his table, to join him in his passion and victory.
You promise to all who trust you forgiveness of sins and fullness of grace, courage in the struggle for justice and peace, your presence in trial and rejoicing, and eternal life in your realm which has no end.
Blessing and honor, glory and power be unto you.
Amen.
Ryan Burge, author of Graphs about Religion, recently published a post that was full of very bad news about the rapid decline of the UCC, titled The United Church of Christ is Running Out of People — Pastors. I intended to ignore it, and not just because it’s behind a paywall. I figured it wasn’t anything I didn’t already know. And to be perfectly honest, I’ve been opting out of conversations about mainline decline for a while now – with a few notable exceptions, such as when I reviewed Andrew Root’s exceptional book that pretends to be about church decline but really isn’t. But then someone sent me Anthony Robinson’s response to Burge. In addition to the thoughtful post itself, there are more than 90 comments as folks try to sort through this very bad news and how it relates to their own experiences.
If you’re interested in the numbers you should click through, and maybe even pay for the Graphs about Religion subscription. I ultimately did. A few statistics that stood out to me: there are now 70% fewer members of the UCC than there were in 1960, and we’re still losing about 2% total membership per year. The median worship attendance for UCC congregations is 39 people. About 3% of UCC churches have more than 150 people attending onsite on a Sunday morning. Only 1% of UCC congregations have more than 1000 members. (This includes mine – and is a dubious honor, if you ask Eugene Peterson, because he thought that was too big.)
A second post by Robinson spoke to my fundamental discomfort with the UCC and similar mainline denominations, even though I do feel utterly at home in my local congregation. (The beauty of local autonomy in the UCC is that there can be quite a bit of diversity between congregations.) He writes:
“I don’t think the challenge we face, and have faced for more than fifty years, is primarily one of resources (whether people or money). The heart of the matter is theological. As I note in response to one comment, much of the preaching I hear in mainline churches isn’t theological, i.e. centering God, of God’s nature and purposes, and what Jesus has done and is doing. It is, rather, about us. About what we should do, think or feel. That is to say, our preaching is more anthropological than theological. We may get “marching orders” (if only to do more “self-care”), but not much “amazing grace.”... By way of contrast, in sermons and churches, where theology outweighs anthropology, God is least some of the time the subject of the verbs. “God has promised . . .” “What Jesus does . . .” “By the power and in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, you are forgiven all your sins . . .” “In Christ there is a new creation; this is all God’s doing,” to quote Paul.”
Robinson’s words resonate on a soul level. They reflect the ways that the Triune God has been working and playing in my life over the years, radically transforming my faith and ministry. I wrote about this for the Christian Century when I was in the midst of our move to my current congregation:
For the first chapters of my ministry, I desperately wanted to believe in the God revealed in Jesus Christ. I just couldn’t quite suspend my postmodern incredulity long enough to do much more than desire belief. I aimed for integrity in the pulpit. At the very least, I preached what I wanted to believe, but my sermon manuscripts were littered with asterisks of doubt on every page. It was safest to proclaim orthopraxy and metaphorize the hell out of miracles.
But then, by the grace of God, I was encountered by the God who is God. I crossed over to the other side of the impossibly vast crevasse separating secular cynicism from wholehearted faith. I find myself unexpectedly trusting that everything God accomplished through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is true, trustworthy, and salvific. I find myself profoundly convinced of the reality of resurrection and ascension—which is to say that the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ are real, and that the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ comprehensively reorder reality.
In a lecture at the inaugural Doxology conference in 2022, Trygve Johnson referred to “the privileged lethargy and spiritual malaise of a Protestant liberalism that is dying from within for lack of a conviction and confidence in the resurrected and ascended Christ.” Hearing those words both hurt and healed my heart. I know that privileged lethargy. I lived that spiritual malaise. I suffered the internal death that emerges from Easter ambivalence. I’m still stunned that I’m not there anymore. Stunned and grateful.
I think this is why I am spending Holy Saturday writing about the UCC. I am desperate for mainline churches to shake off any privileged lethargy and spiritual malaise they might be experiencing. I pray for a renewal of conviction and confidence in the resurrected and ascended Christ.
And, for the love of God, I want this to happen without losing our passion for justice and inclusion. This is where my heart has often ended up broken and trampled. I may feel out of place in the UCC, but I also feel out of place when I seek spiritual friendship and pastoral support in circles where commitment to the crucified and risen Christ is a given. They are sometimes silent as Jesus suffers anew. They do not always affirm the LGBTQ+ Christians without whom the Body of Christ would be woefully incomplete.
Imperfectly and with absolute dependence on the Holy Spirit, my large and growing congregation of the United Church of Christ is endeavoring to be unapologetically centered in the good news of what God has done in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and to respond to that amazing grace with our whole lives.
I was educated in the tradition of liberal Protestantism and am constantly relearning how to be a different kind of pastor and Christian. This is why I need a broader community of conversation partners that doesn’t always share my commitments. This is why I both love and critique the denomination in which I stand.
The United Church of Christ loves to proclaim that God is still speaking. At the risk of ending on an anthropological note: we should listen.
In Christ,
Katherine
Congregationalism was one of the Christian traditions that came together to form the UCC in 1957, and both of my UCC churches have been rooted in this stream. The pilgrims were the OG Congregationalists.
As we anticipate celebrating Christ's resurrection and the joy that it brings, we celebrate and consider ourselves fortunate to have you as one of our pastors, Katherine. Happy Easter!!