Second Document
Since ancient times, those who
would be faithful have been chided for failing to recognize the deeper reality
in what they witnessed. (Luke 12:54-56)
We are pastors and lay persons who hold the United Church of Christ in great affection but who are deeply troubled by what we see. We are challenged by the word of God that we hear in scripture and by the witness of the living Word, Jesus Christ, who declares that “there will be one flock, one shepherd.” (John 10:16c)
Yet we see anything but oneness as we look upon the world. The human community is beset by the sins of extremist views and arrogant presumptions, bereft of the sacrificial healing found when persons and groups set self aside to strive for the good of all and prioritize the needs of the weakest and least.
· Divisiveness between peoples and nations is magnified by conflict among communities of faith, contradicting claims to moral guidance and spiritual superiority.
· Divisiveness in our nation’s political discourse has polarized citizen from citizen, belying any sense of national unity and making a mockery of the example we claim to set.
All this has found too eager an echo in our beloved denomination, shining the clear light of God’s judgment on our continuing human sinfulness and obscuring our witness to the world. The symptoms can be seen in the losses of congregations and members, in the ongoing financial struggles, and especially in the continuing perception of distance between “national” and “local” and the observable tension between progressive and traditional elements.
We do not wish to adjudicate between factions or assign blame. We believe, instead, that the time has come to try another way than confrontation and debate. That way is to be found in the words of Jesus himself, which have been our motto since the founding of our denomination, “that they may all be one.” (John 17:21)
In truth, we firmly believe that all parties hold this unity as their goal and purpose. Yet, in our attending to other things, we have lost focus on our oneness in Christ – not only as a goal but as a necessary expression of faithfulness.
And so we believe that it is time to recall ourselves to first principles, to reclaim as our own the example of our forebears who spoke of unity in essentials and diversity in non-essentials but asserted the necessity of charity in all things and manifested that witness in embodied unity.
The ancestors of the United Church of Christ had a history of finding common ground in spite of their differences, beginning with the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563, the Cambridge Platform of 1648 and the Six Principles of the Christian Connection, a commitment to setting aside separate judgments in order to live in harmony with one another, as in the Uniting General Synod of 1957. To challenge the habitual antagonisms of our time requires of us the same commitment to unity in loving relationship.
How might this unity be achieved, in a time of fractious division? We believe the first step is silence.
We humans are not good at being silent. We are self-aware enough as those made in the image of God, self-confident enough as the recipients of God’s love and mercy, to realize that we have some sense of what is right and what is wrong.
We are also compassionate enough to care about the needs of others, the sufferings of others, the oppression of others. And we are often outraged enough to want to make a difference. We are grateful for the witness of many who have taken positions and spoken out in faith, for individual lay persons and clergy in congregations across the land and in high church office, who have called us to examine ourselves and our actions. We know that these examples, known and unknown, follow Christ’s exhortation to care for “the least of these.”
But sometimes we are just proud enough to believe that only our perceptions are correct, forgetting the limitations of human imperfection and the community’s necessary role in confirming the call of God. In such times, even when we believe we are doing rightly or that we are offering a lesson to the larger body, we are straining our relationships and threatening the wholeness of the body.
We take comfort in believing that we are neither the first nor the last to suffer this fate. We look with hope to the communities to whom the apostle Paul wrote, particularly the churches in Corinth and Rome. Paul recognized that both sides of an issue could have scripture on their side, that both could reasonably claim to be faithful. But in their arguing, they were destroying the very community each fought to preserve.
Paul declared, “Let us therefore no longer pass judgment on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of another.... Let us then pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding.” (Romans 14:13, 19) And Paul reminds the Corinthian church particularly that “love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful.... It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Corinthians 13:4c-5, 7)
With all this in mind, we propose the following:
· We do not ask for individual members or congregations of the United Church of Christ to relinquish personal opinions, convictions, or commitments. We rejoice to be part of a Church whose members are ever at liberty to act as they choose, as they believe the Spirit guides them, as they understand the will of God and the example of Christ. (Romans 14:5b, 22; Philippians 2:12c)
· We do ask that those at the national settings of the United Church of Christ – General Synod, members of the Collegium, and other officers and offices – act constructively and with generosity of spirit to engage parties with whom there is disagreement, pursue every opportunity for dialogue, and work to create new solutions to problems. We ask that leaders and members of local congregations and representatives of interest groups likewise act in ways that make for constructive, sensitive, and creative resolution. (Matthew 5:23-24)
· We ask that Synods, Conferences, Associations, and their agencies study, teach, listen, and debate but refrain from actions or statements, especially those that occur by vote in gathered meetings or which appear as proclamations by official representatives. It is especially these, which have sometimes been perceived to lack broad input or consultation, that alienate rather than unite our congregations and members.
· We ask that, in all settings, language and its usage change –
o that any statements further our efforts at finding the common ground on which we might stand with one another
o that we rigorously avoid implications of judgment on others but not ourselves
o that we expunge from our vocabularies, public and private, labels that diminish, devalue and demonize any of God’s children (Matthew 5:22; Romans 14:10)
· Especially we ask that thinking change –
o that we do not define ourselves in opposition to others, in what we are that others are not and vice versa
o that we recognize our identity to be most fundamentally anchored in the One who supped with all
o that we realize we are called to follow Christ into the discomfort of listening to those who challenge us, puzzle us, frighten us, even anger us
o that we remember Christ’s command to “love our enemies” as a call to alter not only words and actions but hearts, until our spirits are unburdened of the very concept of “other.”
We understand that what we are asking may seem to some an abandonment of the past. The United Church of Christ has a history of “taking sides,” of which we can often be proud. But our taking sides has sometimes meant setting us one against another. We do not expect that we will forever refrain from actively engaging the world as a denomination, but we believe that we must do so in this moment, in order to preserve the unity of our denomination at all, in order that we might remember “who we are and Whose we are.”
We understand that what we are asking may be seen by some as an abandonment of those in need, as indifference to injustice. But such a perception assumes that compassion is present on only one side of an issue, or that injustice can be corrected only through conflict and corporate action.
We believe that it is an error to assume that those of a different opinion than ourselves have no heart or no head and that their way must be wrong. We believe that it is a failure of trust in God’s transforming power to rely only on adversarial means. When we do these things, we are not merely “in” the world but sinfully “of” it. (Romans 12:2)
We believe, in this day of divisions, that Christ calls us out of the hubris of our assumptions, opinions, frames, worldviews, and secularized understandings and into the diaconate of His ever-widening table fellowship, at which we are called to serve all who hear God’s invitation. This expressed, embodied, incarnated unity is our first priority, and the United Church of Christ has ever declared it so.
In recent public statements and campaigns our denomination has proclaimed that “God is still speaking.” We believe this is true, and we believe it is time for us to listen in the courage of silence – a silence born not of fear but of faith, a silence that sets aside the preoccupation with self in compassionate regard for one’s neighbor.
Let us “be still” that all God’s people might again hear and know this still-speaking God.