UCC General Synod – Wednesday, June 24

This morning the love of my life, Linda, and I will leave the rolling farmlands of Amish country in southeastern Pennsylvania and head northwest to the Great Lakes.  Our pilgrimage will take us to the Twenty-seventh biannual General Synod of the United Church of Christ.

We will gather in Grand Rapids at a gathering that carves a week (give or take a day or two) out of the lives of 3,000+ people who are about as varied as any religious gathering in America, I would think – European, African, Native American, and Asian by ethnic origin; liturgical and free by worship preference; intentionally spread across the spectrum by age; hailing from most if not all 50 states and the District of Columbia; congregational and connectional in polity; progressive, moderate, and conservative in politics, ethics, and theology.

Every one of them has a story.  Here’s mine.

Perhaps the greatest irony of my own story is that my parents are both graduates of Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina.  If I’m a 2 or 3 on a 1-10 conservative-to-liberal scale in the UCC, I would be a 9 or a 10 at my parents’ alma mater.

But Mom and Dad graduated from BJU just about the time that the movement self-identified as Evangelicalism in America split from the Fundamentalists.  Both groups were committed to the authority of the Bible and the message of salvation through Jesus Christ alone, but Evangelicals were far less separatist and more committed to engage the culture and spread the faith, instead of just defending it.

So my parents joined a post-World War II missionary boom.  Mom was pregnant with the first of their five children when they sailed across the Atlantic, through the Suez Canal into the Indian Ocean, landing in Karachi to follow God’s call to spread the good news of Jesus in what was then West Pakistan.  Dad had grown up in India, where his father served as a Methodist missionary for half a century.

Denominational differences fade into the background when Christians find themselves in a predominantly non-Christian country.  I grew up and went to school with missionary kids who were Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, and Anglican.  Sunday worship may be in a Pakistani church, or it might be in a liturgical setting in one of the Anglican communities well established before Evangelical missionaries arrived.

An ecumenical spirit also pervaded my adolescent years back in the States, and my undergraduate training at Columbia Bible College in Columbia, South Carolina.  While most of my theological input and Christian community were on the conservative side, sectarian labeling and arrogance were still distasteful. The quest for distinguishing “essentials” from “non-essentials” within the Christian heritage was implanted early and deep.

I met my bride at college, and we married three weeks after graduation.  We took a job at a UCC church in Reidsville, North Carolina, working with youth and Christian education.  The church had lost a fourth of its members when it voted to stay in the UCC, and in our early years there I remember thinking I probably would have voted with those who left.

Sometime during our five-year ministry in Reidsville, however, Linda and I realized that there were many congregations in the UCC who wanted and needed a pastor like me.  I now realize there were even more than I knew at the time.  Our sense of calling to the UCC pastorate was never about changing or renewing the denomination – it was about shepherding churches, one at a time, who simply wanted what we now call an ECOT (evangelical, conservative, orthodox, or traditional) pastor.

So here we are, thirty years later.  I’m sixteen years into my second pastorate, and loving it.  Corinth Reformed Church voted to take UCC out of its name, but not out of its identity.  Half of our congregation would rather not be UCC – but we’re still here.  And in the past few years I’ve connected with enough other ECOTs in the UCC to form a fellowship we call Faithful and Welcoming Churches.

I’ve been reading Jeremiah in preparation for GS XXVII – see Sunday’s blog.  It would be an understatement to say that God is annoyed with his people in Jeremiah’s blog.  God is angry enough with Judah to instruct Jeremiah repeatedly to stop praying for the nation.  It’s too late.  Judgment is coming.

Some ECOTs think that way about the UCC.  But what I notice in my reading is that even though God tells Jeremiah he is through, Jeremiah keeps loving, keeps weeping, keeps speaking, and keeps praying.  And he stays right there, because that’s where God called him.

I’m not big enough or wise enough to know everything God thinks about the UCC’s faults and blind spots.  Or my own.  I can’t think God’s thoughts.

But I resonate when Jeremiah says (10:23), “I know, O LORD, that a man’s life is not his own; it is not for man to direct his steps.”  I’m not in the UCC because I chose it.  (I’m enough of a Calvinist to believe that I’m not even Christian because of my own choice.)  My heredity and background shaped my personality, my priorities, my profession, and my perspectives.

I wonder sometimes, “What if I had been born into a Muslim family?  What if I had been reared in a progressive UCC church?  What if my heredity and/or environment had given me a different sexual orientation? What if I had not married someone who shares my ECOT values and considers our calling a partnership?”  A lot of “what ifs” could be added to the list.

I must be honest enough to say, “I don’t know.”  But a man’s life is not his own, and I did not and do not direct my steps.  I take the life and experiences God has given me, and move ahead one step at a time.

The next step takes me to Grand Rapids, where I will listen, love, pray, and bear witness to Jesus Christ and his eternal Word as best I can.