United Church of Christ

The United Church of Christ did not begin as one thing splitting into pieces, the way many American denominations did. It began as two already blended traditions choosing, after decades of quiet conversation, to become one. The first was the Congregational Christian Churches, itself an 1931 union of the historic Congregationalists of New England, self-governing since the Pilgrims and Puritans of the seventeenth century, with the Christian Connection, a small non-creedal movement born on the American frontier. The second was the Evangelical and Reformed Church, formed in 1934 when the Reformed Church in the United States, tracing to German and Swiss settlers of colonial Pennsylvania, joined the Evangelical Synod of North America, a body of German Lutheran and Reformed background shaped by Prussia's own nineteenth century church union.

Bringing these two already merged bodies together meant joining two different systems of church government: the Congregational Christian Churches' fiercely local, congregation first polity, and the Evangelical and Reformed Church's more connectional, synodical structure inherited from continental Europe. Negotiators worked through a Basis of Union that let each local church keep title to its own property and the final say over its own affairs, a compromise letting congregational independence and connectional cooperation coexist rather than compete. Delegates ratified the union at the Uniting General Synod, held in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1957, and the United Church of Christ was born describing itself as united and uniting, a denomination assembled from parts that were themselves already assemblies.

The United Church of Christ inherited its instinct for inclusion from both halves of its 1957 merger, but nowhere is it stated more plainly than in its own 1959 Statement of Faith, which the denomination describes as a testimony of faith rather than a test of faith. No member and no local church is required to subscribe to it word for word in order to belong, a deliberate choice tracing back through the Congregational Christian Churches to New England Congregationalism's own refusal to bind conscience to any single creed.

That refusal had already produced one landmark before the UCC existed at all. On 15 September 1853, the First Congregational Church of South Butler, New York, ordained Antoinette Brown, making her the first woman ordained to the Christian ministry by a mainstream American denomination. Congregational ministers present were reluctant enough that the ordination itself was performed by a visiting Methodist, Luther Lee, but the local church's own authority to call and ordain whomever it judged fit for the pulpit went unchallenged, a principle the UCC would draw on again more than a century later.

In 1972 the Golden Gate Association in California ordained William R. Johnson, an openly gay candidate, the first such ordination on record in a mainline Protestant body. The General Synod took up the wider question of marriage in 2005, resolving in favor of equal marriage rights for same-gender couples years before most other American denominations, and years before the United States Supreme Court reached the same conclusion nationwide.