Special Feature

The Moderator’s Letter from America

I am in St Louis on the Mississippi, attending the National Council of Churches, the sixth and last stage of my moderatorial visit to our three partner churches in the United States – the United Church of Christ (UCC), The Christian Church (Disciples) – our Churches of Christ - and the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA). With my husband, Kees, who has kept a photographic record and contributed from his wide experience to many a discussion, I have talked with the national staff in Louisville (PCUSA), Indianapolis (Disciples) and Cleveland (UCC) and spent one weekend with a large local UCC in Framingham near Boston, and another with the Grace Presbytery in Texas. We have enjoyed the renowned warmth of American hospitality and experienced a little of the size and diversity of its landscape and climate:  the brilliant autumn colours of New England, and the summer heat of Texas in November.

We were here for the presidential election.  Virtually all the national staff we met and most of the local ministers were voting for the Democrat candidate, John Kerry and we experienced their apprehension before the election day and their depression, even in some cases, desperation in the days that followed.  It is very ironic that in a country where the separation of church and state is enshrined in the constitution (for example no religious education is allowed in the state schools) there should have been so much  about God and Christian values in the rhetoric of the campaign.  It was also strange to us that the two key issues should have been the legality of gay partnerships and of abortion – not the economy, not the soaring costs of health insurance or of housing.  Local ministers talked of their pastoral concern for their divided congregations and one told, with some pride, of how he had used his church’s regular ‘issues group’ to get Democrats and Republicans in the congregation to talk together, listen to each other, and go away still friends.  We in Britain are, I think, more private about our politics, or are we just more indifferent or cynical?  As Christian citizens our way may not be the more faithful.

All three of our partners are the fruit of unions which have taken place since the Second World War.   Two of these unions – the PCUSA and the Disciples – are a healing of the deep racial division which was the fruit of slavery and of the segregation which followed the bitter and bloody Civil War of the 1860s.  Although this is not the kind of uniting we have experienced, the ways in which these partners seek to celebrate diversity and empower the minority has much to teach us in today’s multi-cultural and multi-ethnic Britain.  The Disciples, in particular, have been committed to having 20% of the members of each of their national boards (like our committees) from  the ethnic minorities in their membership.  They have now increased that to 30%.  Only 10% of their membership is African American, or Native American, or Asian Pacific.

The UCC is a union of the congregationalists who claim the Pilgrim Fathers as their founders and a German immigrant Reformed and Evangelical Church.  Its current concern is with its identity as a united church – have we heard that before? They see inclusivity as a key mark of their identity and they seem to have the reputation of being one of the most liberal of the main line churches.  Their Justice and Witness staff (like our Church and Society) is impressively large, mainly women and mainly from the ethnic minorities.  They ordained their first openly gay minister 30 years ago and for the last 20 years local churches have been invited to declare themselves ‘open and affirming’ so that gays and other marginalised minorities will know they are welcome.  About a third of the local churches have done so.  The newly installed associate pastor in Framingham where we spent a weekend is openly gay.  With the help of a professional advertising agency they are ‘marketing’ their church in a most attractive and imaginative way, taking as their slogan “never put a period where God has put a comma”  - a snappier version of the Pilgrim Father: John Robinson’s saying:  “God has yet more light and truth to break forth from his Word.”

The size not only of this country but of the churches is, at first, quite overwhelming.   So is the wealth – local churches with more than one minister, and a paid musician, administrator, and youth worker seem not at all unusual.  But ministers are locally paid in all three churches and we met a range of emotions from disbelief to envy at our system of central payroll and all ministers paid the same.   However, under this surface of difference, we have many issues in common.  They too are declining and worrying about money and priorities.  We passed empty offices in the national office of the Disciples and part of the sombre atmosphere at the UCC central office was because of recent redundancies.  Although Grace Presbytery has a church with 5,000 members in Dallas, it also has rural churches of 15 members.  How to close churches and how to plant new churches is both a pastoral and a missionary issue for them and us.   However, there is an energy and an urgency in their concern to build up new congregations which I think we lack.  National grants  for planting a church are time limited, and the membership has to reach 100 within four years to be viable since it has to pay its minister.  There is an assumption that the church, if it is to be true to itself, is about growth.  

And what of worship and spirituality in local church life?  We saw church life as perhaps it used to be with us – the centre of the members’ social life as well as their worshipping life and the source of so much charitable work in the community, from giving food and nappies to a nursery school for the poor children there to seeking to build affordable housing.  Sunday School is for all ages so for an hour on Sunday mornings adult groups also gather for Bible Study, or to study a book together.  All ages are in church, with plenty of professional men and women.  However, they too are worried about an ageing profile and the fact that the young are now doing other things on Sundays.

All three churches are both excited and exercised about the fast growing number of new immigrant churches who are wanting to join them – Hispanic, Korean, African from various countries, Indian, Philippino, Brazilian.  Of course this is growth and new life – but are the Hispanics just dissatisfied Roman Catholics or Pentecostals  rather than committed Disciples?  Do these presbyterians want to play a full part in the life of the PCUSA and become self-sufficient financially, or  do they just want the small stipend which the presbytery is offering to the pastors of such congregations?   I was impressed at the care the Grace Presbytery gave to this kind of new church development, with a couple of volunteers who had established good relations with the congregations, worshipping with them regularly. 

Wherever we went we were asked why we had come – not in an unwelcoming way but puzzled.   I explained about Assembly Moderator’s overseas visits -  but began to realise that the US churches’ main overseas relations were with churches in the developing world who needed their help or needed the Gospel.  We, with our European partner churches who are in a similar economic and cultural world, have a different experience of partnership – in addition to our relations with partners in the developing world.  To be the one big power in the world today is not actually an enviable position.  It is fraught with dangers and temptations – which our partners are well aware of.  It is too easy for us in Britain to criticise – the big power is always fair game, as we were in our colonial heyday.  With a common Reformation heritage and our many close family ties within the one Body of Christ  I am sure we can help each other to be more faithful as churches in this changing, challenging world.  And it would be fun because they are such lovely people.