Kirkpatrick, Buchanan praise UCC for its theology, inclusivity
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, December 18, 2003
The United Church of Christ, maybe a smidgeon more liberal than the Presbyterian Church (USA) and her other sister denominations, recently asked what others think about the shrinking denomination of congregational churches.
With some exceptions, the UCC took it on the chin. Two notable exceptions were responses from Clifton Kirkpatrick, stated clerk of the PCUSA, and John Buchanan, a former General Assembly moderator who wants the PCUSA to follow the UCC’s trailblazing unBiblical theology that permits the ordination of practicing homosexuals.
J. Bennett Guess, editor of United Church News, compiled the responses from Kirkpatrick, Buchanan and other outsiders.
Kirkpatrick was quoted as saying, “The UCC is a church that is not only ‘united’ but about a ‘uniting’ ministry,’ both among the churches but also in its witness for reconciliation in the world.”
Guess reported that Kirkpatrick said the UCC’s strengths are “its faithful congregations, its ecumenical witness and its passion for justice.” Kirkpatrick also told Guess that the UCC’s commitments to justice and ecumenism are historical and on-going.
But, like the PCUSA, the UCC’s strengths do not include strength in numbers. According to the World Christian Database posted on the Web site of Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, the UCC lost 29.85 percent of its members between 1970 and 2000. That’s worse than the 23.87 percent decline in the PCUSA during the same 30-year period.
Guess said Buchanan, co-pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago and co-founder of the Covenant Network, suggested that the UCC should parade its liberal agenda — notwithstanding the fact that that agenda has been a major factor in its shrinkage rate.
He quoted Buchanan as saying, “[Y]ou, like us, don’t have much of a national profile. No one is paying attention to us anymore. … If I was the marketing director for the UCC, I would say it outright, ‘We are the mainline, open and inclusive community.’ The UCC has a noble and wonderful theological and ecclesiastical tradition. I’d parade that out front.”
Buchanan also told Guess that, “The UCC is an honest-to-God representation of the radical inclusion of the New Testament. You uphold the liberal end of the Reformed tradition in ways that sometimes we [Presbyterians] can’t. I sort of look at you with respect and a little bit of longing.”
Buchanan’s exposure to the UCC came from two UCC schools he attended, Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., and Chicago Theological Seminary. “I love the UCC,” he told Guess. “They are responsible in part for my education, so I have a deep affection for this theological tradition that took me in.” He described the UCC as a combination of “generous liberalism and serious incarnational worldliness.”
Guess drew a similar response from the Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest and a religion professor at UCC-related Piedmont College in Demorest, Ga. She recalled how a UCC pastor once described the denomination as being “long on inclusivity and short on theology.”
“Taylor, however, was not troubled by the definition,” Guess reported, quoting Taylor as adding, “If I had to choose, then I’d choose that too.”
Some of the respondents attributed the UCC’s lack of a high profile nationally to its name, which is confused with other similar denominational names. That prompted Buchanan to tell Guess, “I think you ought to rename yourself.”
Guess’ summary did not quote any traditional Presbyterians who might suggest that the UCC, like the PCUSA, is abandoning its Biblical and Reformed foundation and letting a changing culture set its agenda.
But there were critics.
The Rev. Edmund Gibbs, a professor of church growth at Fuller Seminary, an evangelical school in Southern California, told Guess: “For some reason, you tend to inherit the worst elements instead of the best, and drift towards the lowest common denominator instead of the highest.”
Gibbs suggested another approach: “Jesus did not say, ‘Stand at the church door and whistle at wandering sheep.’ No, we’ve got to become the seeker church, not just the seeker-friendly church. We must become not just the welcoming church, but the infiltrating church.”
“The UCC is so ‘inclusive’ that one is hard pressed to imagine someone who would not be accepted for membership,” the Rev. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., said. “As Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy comments, ‘The most liberal of America’s mainline denominations, the UCC marries gays, or ordains witches, and prefers sit-ins (just name the cause) to evangelistic rallies.'”