Visiting a United Church of Christ Church

In the June 21, 2007 Chicago Sun-Times was an article on Barack Obama: “Presidential hopeful Barack Obama belongs to the United Church of Christ, one of the country’s most racially diverse and liberal Protestant denominations — the first to ordain an openly gay minister and to call for equal marriage rights for all people, regardless of gender. The UCC prides itself as being “out front” on social justice issues, battling civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights ahead of the mainstream. One Sunday hymnal equally celebrates male and female images of God.”?ⁱ Wikipedia says that the United Church of Christ has 1.2 million members and that individual churches have authority over doctrine.ⁱⁱ

I was curiouos. What does a bastion of Christian Liberality look like? So recently I went to a local UCC church to see this bastion of liberal Christianity promoting civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, abortion, and other issues. The church, called Pittsburgh Trinity looked like many other small churches. The service appeared very similar to Presbyterian and Lutheran services I have attended with a few exceptions. As far as similarities there was an opening prayer, announcements, scripture readings, numerous hymns from the New Century Hymnal and a sermon. The announcements included a reference to the upcoming Pentecost celebration as the birthday of the Church. Some prayers ended with “In Jesus’ name” while others were to the Creator. In the middle of the service was an infant baptism where the baby was dabbed with water in the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The ending song, a “scattering song”, was full of references to being filled with the Holy Spirit and Jesus.

There were a few subtle differences: the opening prayer to the Lord of the Universe was credited as a prayer from an Islamic tradition. Perhaps because it was Memorial Day weekend or perhaps not, the children’s service was very secular. The only teaching to the kids was concerning the flag of the United States and how great it was to live in our great country. The sermon referred to Joshua 4:1-8 as an example of making a memorial and then focused on Memorial Day. The prayer hymn was America The Beautiful. Other than one comment that I’ll address below there wasn’t anything that wouldn’t be in many more conservative services.

There was a reference in support of Barack Obama’s comment to the Notre Dame students that concerning abortion we share a lot in common and we need to start there. This was obvious pro-choice support for a pro-choice president. But, other than that, in a church publicized for its openness to racial, civil, and sexual gender issues there were not any apparent hard-core activists in this particular church. This was an all white, mostly older population that looked comprised of conventional families. I’m sure that with more interaction there would be more discussion of these issues, but this church looked like any of a number of more conservative congregations that I’ve seen.

One thing that is remarkable to me is that, without researching beforehand, this church looks like so many churches where it is impossible to understand at first glance where the church stands on so many doctrines because the service looks so innocuous. And even with research, since each church is fairly autonomous, it is impossible to know where they stand without an in depth investigation into that particular church. I stopped to chat for just a minute with the pastor at the end of the service but with people milling out you can’t really get into anything, just “hi” and “thanks”

It really becomes easier to see how people slowly accept different doctrines over time because becoming part of a church is such a gradual process in so many instances. And churches look so alike with services that could almost be automatically interchanged between them.

i. http://www.suntimes.com/news/elections/437415,CST-NWS-obama21.article
ii. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Church_of_Christ

Original Christianity

This web is a look at primitive, original Christianity, how it developed over time into innumerable denominations and divisions and how original Christianity compares to current practices. It is a resource for looking systematically at the beliefs and practices in the original Christian church, numerous movements and churches since, the modern Christian church, with discussion about how all these changes happened and especially focusing on how well each of these compares to scripture.

Why?

"Jesus Christ is Lord" is the common belief of billions of Christians. But there are tens of thousands of denominations. While ancient denominations like the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox claim to be the original and consequently "true" church, innumerable churches and denominations have started citing error in these ancient bastions and/or the leading of the spirit to reform the church and restore the church.

There are numerous disputed issues. Cessation doctrine (prophecy and the gifts of the spirit ended with the apostles), infant baptism, the inerrancy of Scripture, the form of Church government, the role of women in the church, and currently, the acceptance of homosexuality are just some of the many disputed doctrines that cause the Christian body to be so divided.

The Reformation movement performed an invaluable service. But instead of simply reforming the church or simply working to create one more correct alternative church the Reformation movement worked to increase the number of disputes over scripture and consequently the number of splits has increased exponentially.

The problem with looking at all the denominations is that it can become confusing to just compare this church or denomination to that one. The complexity of looking at all the theological implications can become overwhelming. For many busy people that means just making the best, less than fully educated decision they can, and staying with the church of their heritage or finding a church where they feel they can grow. Just finding the information can be an overwhelming task. Putting it into some understandable framework is an even more complicated task.

This web site, rather than trying to just compare all the current positions on the differences goes back to the beginning (primitive, original Christianity) and evaluates Christianity starting at that point. This includes looking at the gospel accounts, but also includes looking at early church documents as well as other ancient documents, both secular and religious. (There is also a section on Philosophy because its profound impact on Christian theological development.) The articles have numerous references to works both in print and online.

Next the web site looks at the developments in Christianity from original Christianity forward to see how the church developed over time comparing each development with what we know about original Christianity. The goals are:

To trace the development of the church from start to now to see how the church at large wound up with all these competing churches/denominations today, and

To equip people with the knowledge of original Christianity to enable people to make an informed decision on what is the true faith and practice of the church Jesus Christ started.

For an overview of the articles by category, go to the Table of Contents Page.

This is a work in progress. My prayer is that sharing my journey is helpful to you and that together we can grow in the faith that Jesus Christ made available some two thousand years ago.

Also Please Pardon our Dust. There are hundreds of posts and some of them still have typos. If you find typos You can contact Mark at [email protected]. Please be so kind as to mention the name of the post as well as to copy and paste the section with errors. Thank you and God Bless You.

Visiting a United Church of Christ Church

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