Currently on the front page of ucctruths.com is a set of theses about the decline in church membership in the United Church of Christ. These theses were posted on a message board by a Rev. Robert Tucker, and those who visit the website are invited to share their responses to them.

This is the second thesis:

Thesis Two. For leaders who tout openness and inclusivity, national staff are singularly and incredibly unwelcoming of divergent ideas and practices and people and organizations that run counter to their views. The sharp divide between the stated piety of inclusiveness and exclusionary practices is infuriating.

I don't know Robert Tucker, nor can I speak about his views on this subject. For all I know, he may just be mimicking or citing what he hears others saying. Regardless, he is correct in identifying this as a concern raised by many who are uncomfortable with some of the more liberal positions taken by the United Church of Christ.

This has been a common tactic used by trained activists: accuse those whose tolerance has grown larger than your theology allows of being themselves intolerant.

It is an effective strategy, and one that ingeniously places leaders of more progressive faith communities squarely on the horns of a dilemma. Option one: give in to the activists and accede to all of their demands, one of which is to abandon the theology that mandates the openness that fuels their anger and animosity. Option two: maintain those policies and practices that emerge out of your theology but which anger conservative activists, thereby confirming their suspicion that you are intolerant.

The problem here is that a fallacy exists of which those who develop these strategies are fully aware. And the fallacy is the notion that to be tolerant you must agree with me. Disagreeing with me is evidence of your intolerance.

After the United Church of Christ began running its ejector seat ad(adhttp://www.ucc.org/commercial.html), Mark Tooley (staff member of the IRD) wrote an essay that accused the UCC and its leaders of arguing that every other church was intolerant. In that article he makes the claim that the UCC is in fact the land of the exclusive and intolerant:

"Despite all of its welcoming and affirming, the UCC has lost one million members over the last 40 years, or over 40 percent of its original membership. Like the Episcopal Church, the UCC remains overwhelmingly a denomination of the white, upper-middle class. Minorities and working-class whites have not been ejected by the UCC but are not attracted to its brand of New England-style liberal Protestantism." (http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=9636)

In response to that, the Biblical Witness Fellowship began running on their web-site a page called "The Fellowship of the Ejected." The claim was that the UCC had left a wake of people who were ejected from the denomination because of their theological beliefs, and the site was a place for them to tell their story about such rejection. After months of leaving this page open, two people wrote in to tell their story. (see my article on this: This week in the Biblical Witness Fellowship .)

Yesterday, I spoke with a local UCC pastor who was reflecting with me about his frustration with a member of his church. The pastor would be considered by many folk to be a liberal, and the member of whom he was speaking would be considered a conservative. The member was expressing to the pastor his frustration with the pastor's intolerance. The pastor - a most tolerant and beneficent individual, to be sure - was expressing his frustration that despite all his efforts to be open to all, he would be accused of intolerance.

The point here is that too many people confuse legitimate disagreement with intolerance. While it may not feel affirming and personally comfortable to know that your pastor, or your denominational leaders, do not espouse your particular theological foundations - their right to have, to hold, and to act on their own theological presumptions is what is one of those things that have long characterized the United Church of Christ. Because of this, tolerance has always been one of their primary virtues: the only way to hold such a body together is to be open to all divergent thoughts and opinions. The UCC is not a doctrinal denomination that forces theological litmus tests on its adherents.

What so angers the conservatives among us is that their attempts to make us homogenous, to recreate us as a theological monolith with conservative underpinnings have all failed. And not because the UCC is intolerant, but precisely because they are not and don't want to be. And certainly not because the UCC is controlled by national leaders who refuse to hear any diversity of thought or opinion. The UCC is one of the most democratic organizations anywhere: our direction is determined by independent delegates whose debates and votes are public. The truth is that throughout our history, conservatives - who are always present and always welcome - have never been able to build enough of a constituency in this admittedly progressive denomination to alter its historic commitment to diversity of thought, theology, and opinion.

Their reactions to that include a misguided attack on leaders who will not give in to their demands to conform. And while some will buy what they are selling about intolerance among the leaders of the denomination, those who are able to think for themselves see this very differently.