UCC Activist Anticipates Increased Exodus in Wake of 'Gay Marriage' Affirmation
by Ed Thomas
July 12, 2005
(AgapePress) - A Protestant denomination with more than a million members and approximately 5,800 congregations in the United States continues to struggle with its future after a resolution approving same-sex "marriage" was passed at a recent meeting of the church's rule-making body. But the executive director of a renewal movement within the United Church of Christ says it was not unexpected.In a resolution titled "In Support of Equal Marriage Rights for All" [PDF], delegates to the UCC's General Synod last month in Atlanta affirmed equal marriage rights for couples, regardless of gender, and declared that "the government should not interfere with couples regardless of gender who choose to marry and share fully and equally in the rights, responsibilities and commitment of legally recognized marriage." The resolution also encouraged UCC congregations to "work against legislation, including constitutional amendments, which denies civil marriage rights to couples based on gender."
David Runyon Bareford is with Biblical Witness Fellowship (BWF), a group that calls itself the unofficial voice for evangelical renewal within the denomination. He says that while the UCC has been "going liberal" for quite some time, many of the delegates who voted for the same-sex marriage resolution in Atlanta are nominated by governing bodies that, in his opinion, are skewed. For that reason, he says it would not be surprising to find 80 percent of those delegates voting in favor of that -- "but that does not mean that 80 percent of the membership of the United Church of Christ is in favor of that," he adds.
Bareford says there are many conservative congregations within the UCC that have been fighting the denomination's liberal leaning since 1977, when his organization was formed. And he points out that it was many of those congregations -- from the Northeast, Ohio, and the Southwest -- that proposed at the meeting a resolution supporting traditional marriage. That resolution failed -- prompting Bareford to say "we're not despondent about the possibilities, at least for the local churches."
"We continue [to be] hopeful that we will make inroads, if not at the denominational level, certainly at the local church level," the renewal advocate says, "and we are seeing hundreds of formerly moribund UCC congregations come back to strong, evangelical life and become wonderful evangelical churches."
At this point, he says, many more of those conservative, evangelical congregations are likely to consider voting to leave the UCC -- which he notes is losing more member churches than any other denomination. According to the BWF website, the UCC has lost more than a quarter-million members and 500 congregations since 1990.
Ed Thomas, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
