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At the risk of stating the obvious, the United Church of Christ is a Christian denomination.
We have always been followers of the way of Jesus with a deep passion for bringing the Bible to the people, willing to stand up against the excesses of our own extended church family, but with humility because you never know who God will speak through next. Our ecumenical passion was bigger than the rest of Christianity’s. We are always reaching out to other Christians, including those who dismiss us. We are rebellious reformers, but also the first to call the warring factions together, trusting in the promise “that they may all be one.”
Ecumenically, we stand in the Reformed tradition that was not very traditional when it started. Some of our forebears were willing to be burnt at the stake so that people could read the Bible for themselves in their own language. The reformers didn’t do it to draw attention to an educational equity issue, or a justice issue, or even a class revolution, although all those things can spring forth when people try to follow Christ because the Holy Spirit is never asleep. But let’s be clear: the motivation of those early reformers, and to the current reformers who gather under the UCC tent to worship something other than themselves, was not to boost a political party, or to be first among ecclesiastical franchisees to produce the next spiritual happy meal, or even to create a list of “historic firsts" for a marketing campaign that I imagine our forebears would hate. They risked their lives and their relationships with the institutional church, not to create a new list of merit badges for secular forces to run through the church for some higher good. No, they did it all so that future generations could hear and read the gospel of Jesus Christ as they had. They were willing to bet it all on the idea that God was still speaking. And they didn’t make that up as a tagline, they found it in their worship and practice as Christians.
So when someone says, the “UCC stands for Unitarians Considering Christ,” don’t laugh and go along. Don’t make the joke yourself. Instead take a moment to respect the people who came before you, and ones who will come later and continue to shape Christian history.
As a result of that history, we in the United Church of Christ, enlightened by the mighty cloud of witnesses of all our streams, may take stands early and often that the rest of the church finds offensive. So be it. I can accept that we were meant to risk being the unpopular church within the larger body. What I can not accept is that we were made to be quickly dismissed by other Christians as somehow less serious, less rigorous, less Jesus-y, simply because we accept that people of other faiths are beloved by the God who created us all. That doesn’t make us Unitarians. It makes us Christian. What I can not accept is that the reformers who came before us and are yet to come, risked it all so that we can be the butt of a joke, unfunny to everyone except the ones who tell it. We accept the job that has our name on it, and we trust that the spiritual wanderers who long for it will find us.
We play our part not to save the church, not to take down the church, but also not to get the entire church throughout every era of Christian history to finally declare us right in the end. We play our role, with humility. But let’s not overdo it.
So United Church of Christ take on your Christian mantle, not with pride, but with a sense of duty to a tradition older and deeper than our present moment. When members of our own Christian family call us “Unitarians Considering Christ,” speak up and call them to behave better.
That crack is not harmless. For one thing, it is disrespectful to the Unitarian Universalists who have their own deep practices and history that are not about watered down Christianity, but about a unique movement in the religious landscape.
More importantly for the UCC, or for any of us who are engaged as Christians but find ourselves in a minority, a condescending crack calling one branch of the family “not really Christians” doesn’t just hurt us. We could handle that. The problem with the wise crack is that it diminishes the wideness of God’s mercy throughout the church.
If we in the UCC don’t believe we’re part of something larger than ourselves, we can laugh at the joke. We could even make the joke ourselves, which is a practice I have observed in too many of our UCC settings where pastors or church leaders sheepishly shrug and make the joke themselves before someone else does.
Don’t do it.
At the risk of stating the obvious, the United Church of Christ is a Christian denomination, and Christianity would be worse without us.
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