We here at this church for decades have been a part of larger movements within American Protestant Christianity, that have had an open embrace for the new ways we can discern God to be moving and speaking though our times, while staying rooted in what is life-giving from our living tradition. We have been part of an ongoing church movement through the 19th century, and 20th and now 21st century, that has been responsive to the tremendous evolutions and revolutions, in how humanity understands life on earth, our place in the cosmos, human history, human sexuality and gender, and calls for justice, liberation, and equity.

         One personification of this is Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, who I mentioned in the children’s sermon as the first woman to be ordained since the early church. As a Congregationalist minister in the 1800s, she was an abolitionist, wrote for Frederick Douglass’s paper, she was a leader in the suffrage and woman’s rights movement. She published entire books responding to the new theory of evolution, saying that Darwin’s work was important, but distorted by his male-centric way of doing science. She said we’d have a different view of evolution if more women were allowed to become scientists. And she defended religion as being rational and compatible with the discoveries of science. 

         In the United Church of Christ, we say, “God is still speaking.” And we believe it is a matter of faith to be listening for the still-speaking God, and to be responsive to what is new about how the Divine is on the move.

We belong to a creative and living tradition.

         We belong also to a fiercely independent-minded tradition, for better and for worse.

What does it mean that we’re a Congregational church? This comes from a movement, centuries ago in England and the U.S. and elsewhere, that said that individual congregations should be in charge of their own affairs. This movement was pushing back against the abuses of bishops pawning people around, especially when those bishops were themselves pawned around by kings and queens, or those kings and queens were getting pawned around by the bishops.

That’s guaranteed to produce abuses of power. That’s guaranteed to trample over the humble heart-changing gospel of Jesus.  

         And Congregationalists for their part responding by taking the focus away from church hierarchy, and putting it on the local congregations, as well as on individuals and our freedom of conscience before God in how we work out our own soul salvation. Immediate, not church hierarchy as intermediaries.

         Congregationalists then developed looser organizations of churches, connected through bonds of covenant, but where no one entity of the church could tell anyone else what to do, or how to be, or even, eventually, as time when on, what to believe.

         One of the consequences has been that more freethinking movements within Christian thought and practice don’t get stamped out when they crop up within church communities, like the do from time to time. As a result, our churches were the first to ordain women, first to ordain openly gay clergy, and trans clergy, first to bless same-sex marriages.

         Now, one of the drawbacks of this way of organizing churches is that individual congregations can kind of drift away from each other and become isolated and things can get fuzzy. We have regional and national organization that have important roles, but it’s always up to the local church to be engaged with the larger sense of shared identity.

In the life of our local church here, the First Congregational Church of Walla Walla, in its 155 years of existence, there seems to have been different seasons where there has been a stronger or a weaker sense of connection with the larger body of our denomination.

The reason I’m making this the subject of the sermon this Sunday, and continuing next Sunday too, is that, in the season of life we currently are in as a local church, we have been, we are, and, I believe, will continue to be, really benefitting from our relationship with the larger body of our denomination and with the movement of the Spirit that has been going on through the United Church of Christ. And we will benefit from deepening that and from being clear and true and strong in who we are, why we are here, who are our allies and fellow workers, and how God is at work through us and through the larger movement we are but one expression of.

So, let me just share some about the identity of the United Church of Christ.

         The United Church of Christ was formed in 1954 by the union of four different American Protestant denominations with European roots.

One of the four was the Congregationalists. That’s why this church has such an elaborate name. First Congregational United Church of Christ of Walla Walla. It’s a congregational church – the first in town, there was a second for a while, but they dissolved into the first, and the “first” stuck for us (good for us). And then when this United Church of Christ formed in the 50s, the people of this church got together and discussed the matter, and voted to join the UCC.

One of the things these four streams that joined in the UCC had in common was this congregationalist value that local churches should be free from top-down power. But the other main reason for union was the desire for union. Sharing the value of having a big tent faith, a broad embrace, a spirit of toleration that comes from the knowledge that in the full scope of Divine truth we’re all cut from the same cloth. And this church really lives that out in how we embrace everyone who finds safe sanctuary here, weather you’re from a Catholic background, or Evangelical, or Adventist, or Jewish background, or non-religious background, or what have you.

This has been a key value of the UCC from the start:

In essentials, unity.

In non-essentials, diversity

In all things, charity.

If you go from one UCC church to the next, you’ll find quite a lot of diversity, especially in theological orientation and political orientation. You’d find quite a lot of charity, I think, for those differences. But what would be the unity you’d find? What are those essentials?

Purpose Statement of the United Church of Christ (from the Gospel of Matthew): 
To love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength and our neighbor as ourselves.Vision Statement of the United Church of Christ:
United in Christ’s love, a just world for all.

Mission statement of the United Church of Christ:
United in Spirit and inspired by God’s grace, we welcome all, love all, and seek justice for all.

         This is our way of distilling down the core of what it means to be followers of Jesus.

         You’ll recognize echoes from the Gospel of Matthew when someone asked Jesus this kind of question about the essence of faith:

         Someone asked Jesus:

“Teacher, which precept in the law is the greatest?” 

Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first precept. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two precepts hang all the law and the prophets.” – Matthew 22:36-40

         You’ll also recognize echoes from the Prophet Micah:

God has told you, O mortal, what is good.
   And what does God require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
    and to walk humbly with your God? – Micah 6:8

This is simple enough, deep enough, true enough, and open enough, to guide us and connect us as we live creatively and earnestly as a church community, as a school of love, within the motley movement of the United Church Christ.

Thanks be to God.