His commentary is filled with misinformation about the UCC - most likely fed to him by someone from within the BWF or the IRD, who each have a long track record of distortion and revisionist history concocted to stir up dissention within the ranks of otherwise content congregations.

Please do not misunderstand me: congregations within the United Church of Christ argue and fight with each other, and with their sister congregations, often. We always have. This is in part due to the fact that there is a lot at stake in our arguments, our dialogue, and our conversation. What I mean to say is that there is no structure within the denomination that forces choices upon us. Each congregation is it's own fully autonomous and governing body. Each Association and Conference of churches is also free from the constraint of choices forced upon them from local churches or our National offices. No one voice represents the whole. And so local churches, Conferences, and National bodies all have something at stake in each and every debate.

It is also due in no small part to the simple fact that we are not a "Liberal" denomination - whatever that might mean. Though always characterized as such by those who, from the radical right, perceive anyone who uses anything other than a literal interpretation to read the Bible, the United Church of Christ - like many Mainline churches - has conservative, liberal, and moderate members in EVERY one of our churches. Our collective choices are not often the same ones demanded by our all or nothing, one way or the highway covenantal partners in the Biblical Witness Fellowship: but that does not prove the accusation that we are a "Liberal" church.
We are a multi-faceted, richly variegated tapestry of liberal and conservative, young and old, gay and straight, traditional and contemporary: all God's children whose viewpoints are never identical - precisely because we have no established prerequisite of thought, opinion, or theology that predetermines our sense of your worth, your value, or your credibility as a Christian. And while this does produce lively and engaging debate and dialogue, it does not cause us to demean each other in quite the way The Biblical Witness Fellowship, the IRD, and now Chuck Colson all do.

The kind of vitriol and animosity engendered by the Chuck Colson's of our time alter the reality of life in our local churches by quite a bit. In his address, Colson asks why the UCC continues its "effort to drive out conservatives from Mainline churches." No body, no institution, no entity within the United Church of Christ has ever done anything of the sort. In fact, throughout its history the UCC and its predecessor bodies have stood at the front of the ecumenical movement, embracing unity with all partners in faith and believing that theological and ideological differences can be overlooked for the sake of Christian unity (which should never be confused the kind of Christian uniformity demanded by the radical right).

Colson goes on to chastise John Thomas for blaming outsiders on the demise of his denomination rather than "examining its own mistakes." And he offers this criticism as if it is a given that because John Thomas publicly named the IRD as an attack agent on our churches, it can only mean that John Thomas sees that as the only cause of a net loss in members in the UCC over the last decades.

How sad for Chuck that his world can so easily be reduced to such simplicity; and how sad for all of us that he cannot countenance the possibility that an ecumenical partner - which has indeed been losing members on a steady decline like all Mainline churches - would not have exhausted every possible and reasonable explanation and remedy for that decline. Would that we could reduce the whole matter to a few choices we have made in recent years that Chuck and others are offended by - but we all know and believe that our world, that our church, is so much more complex than that. And shame on Chuck for making such a public and ill-founded attack on a partner in mission and ministry.

Finally, Chuck asks whether as members of the church in our time we ought follow the Bible, or rewrite our beliefs to be culturally relevant - implying that what the UCC has done is abandon fundamental principles of scripture in order to create the church in a way that, while culturally relevant, is Biblically errant.

Well, the United Church of Christ is, and will always try to be, relevant. The word cultural is a canard used by the right to imply "secular" as opposed to biblical, or faithful, or spiritual. It is a red herring, meant more to distract than advance a rational debate. If faith, if the church, if Biblical interpretation cannot remain relevant then it becomes meaningless.

Chuck knows this. There is no such false choice as the one proposed by him, that one either interpret the Bible literally or become dependent for one's meaning and purpose on a culture that does not know God. His prison ministry is a noble effort to be relevant. He should acknowledge that the United Church of Christ's campaign to tell all that "no matter who you are or where you are in life's journey, you are welcome here" is not only relevant - it is reflective of a Gospel message preached often by the one we know as the Christ.

So shame on him for this new attack. And shame on The Biblical Witness Fellowship for abandoning their covenantal partner and giving voice to one more intent on its demise.

Digg
del.icio.us
Newsvine
Reddit
stumbleupon
Facebook