Posted on 03/25/2016 4:41:33 PM PDT by ReformationFan
VOL is publishing this story because the UCC is even more progressive than The Episcopal Church and therefore says a lot about the future of The Episcopal Church. The UCC is making big staff cuts, and there is an internal report forecasting an 80 percent decline in membership by 2045! The average age of an Episcopalian is now in the mid-Sixties. There are no millennials coming along to fill either pulpits or pews. Nearly half of all pulpits now cannot afford a full time priest. David Virtue
If times are tough for oldline Protestant denominations, they are dire for the United Church of Christ. The 60-year-old denomination announced staffing changes during the UCC Board of Directors meeting held March 17-19 in Cleveland. The changes follow the announced resignation of a top staff member in February and an internal report predicting an 80 percent decline in membership by 2045.
According to newly-installed General Minister and President John C. Dorhauer, there are "multiple financial challenges that could impact the well-being of the national setting" (terminology for the denomination's national-level staff).
"In discussion about the staffing change, Dorhauer noted that the national setting staff has decreased from over 300 in 2000 to just over 100 today," a staff report of the Directors' meeting relayed. Dorhauer also assured the board that he would "distribute the workload fairly among the staff."
Among the departures was the resignation of J. Bennett Guess, Executive Minister of the UCC's Local Church Ministries and a member of the UCC's four-person Collegium of Officers. Guess, the first openly gay person to serve as a national officer of the church, was elected to a four-year term in 2013. The departing official is resigning his position on April 8 to assume a role as vice president of the UCC's Council for Health and Human Service Ministries.
Guess had worked for the UCC's national setting holding several positions since 2000, first as Justice and Witness Ministries' communications minister and, later, as editor of United Church News and the UCC's news director. In 2007, he was named the UCC's communication director. The board voted not to immediately replace Guess, but to appoint Dorhauer as the acting executive of Local Church Ministries for a period of six months.
That there are staff cuts isn't a huge surprise -- oldline Protestant churches such as the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and others have been cutting national staff as their adherents' numbers decline. But two-thirds of national staff gone in the past 16 years is a singular distinction even among the UCC's struggling peer group.
According to The United Church of Christ: a Statistical Profile (Fall 2015), the denomination had last year 5,116 congregations and a U.S. membership of 943,521 persons. Founded in 1957 as a merger of the Congregational-Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reformed Church, the United Church of Christ has lost more than half of its membership in the intervening years.
In June of 2015, the denomination announced that it had entered into an agreement with a Georgia-based property management firm to sell its headquarters and an adjacent hotel that the church owned. The UCC will lease the building back for another two decades. The denomination relocated its headquarters to Cleveland from New York in 1990, a move that was expected to both reduce expenses and bring the church's national leadership closer to the bulk of its congregations, which are concentrated in the upper Midwest and northeastern United States.
Last summer, UCC Center for Analytics, Research and Data (CARD) studies were released that confirmed dire forecasts. The first, Futuring the United Church of Christ: 30-Year Projections, showed that over the next three decades, the number of UCC congregations will decline from over 5,100 churches today to approximately 3,600 churches. During the same time period, the number of UCC members will drop precipitously, from 1.1 million to just under 200,000 adherents.
The report does not forecast a corresponding decline in total ordained clergy (including retired and emeritus clergy), but does report a drop in those clergy that pastor churches from just under 4,500 in 1985 to 3,000 today, declining to a projected 1,250 by the year 2045.
Entropy gets us all in the end. ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOrEvildfLs&index=27&list=RDGKeP2LQDsAw
The UCC was already going wobbly when I was in high school in the early Seventies. If not for the fact that they still were affiliated with a number of high power colleges, universities and prep schools, I think they would have gone downhill much faster.
You are correct. “ United Church of Christ... The 60-year-old denomination...” is very un-Biblical. I had a superior at work one year who belonged to United Church of Christ and he just wanted to dominate every religious conversation. I learned the UCC is infiltrated by thieves like the Russian Orthodox. How to remove the thieves? Return to the sources in the Bible.
The ex battle ax mother in law is a member of the UCC church in St Charles Illinois.
I used to go on occasion to humor the ex wife.
Anything goes there. Call it anything you want... except church.
Bizarre is not the word for it.
What’s fun to watch about these declining churches is what members propose to do about it. It’s often along the lines of “If we showed we were truly committed to social justice and had real outreach efforts to minorities, the young people and minorities would flock to us!”
In short, double down on what’s not working now.
At a Congregationalist (United Church of Christ) church in a deeply conservative area not far from, here, the parishioners were furious. Many had been members long before the denomination went radical. So they kept the older hymnals along with the "Black Hymnals."
Theological liberalism is just another way of saying “trendy secularism”. Such churches abandon their faith, then question their doctrine to the point where they have none.
Eventually they realize that pretending to be a religion is just a waste of time.
The UCC was one of the key religious members of the Hanoi Lobby during the war, along with the Marxist-dominated Boards of the United Methodist Church and the United Presbyterian Church.
They also supported the Black Panther Party and lots of Marxist united fronts, among other anti-American activities.
So sad that the most gay-friendly denomination is going broke. You’d think that all those wealthy gays would be pouring money into their church.
Oh wait. All they got was a bunch of gay pastors and the pews emptied.
Now their members can come home to The church that Christ founded...Catholicism
Remember the racist/treasonous “Trinity” UCC was the spiritual home of The Won for two decades.
Try this from a UCC hymnal. How beautiful 2 continents and islands in the sea. That dream of peace, non violence, all people living free. Americas, Americas! God grant that we may be a hemisphere where people here all live in harmony. Cry, don’t laugh.
Read an analysis on FR years ago that endowments and wealth held by many of these denominations are large, and leadership appears to be incentivised to not grow their churches since the endowments would mean more per capita for the dwindling numbers of members who remain.
Very interesting and sounds logical. If a small denomination like United Church of Christ is awarded millions in grants, then perhaps and maybe the members would like lower the number of grant recipients.
Judas was upset when Mary Magdalene spent money on perfume for the Lord’s feet and wanted to get the money back by spying on the Lord for money. Shows how powerful greed can be.
I grew up as a member of the First Congregational Church in a very nice, conservative small town in NE Minnesota. I left in 1969 at 19 to join the Navy and really didn’t get back to the church until about 2009 and it had become a UCC a number of years before. The building looked the same but I simply did not recognize the service or the hymnals or the fellowship. I’ve never really been all that religious but I nearly cried at the difference. I haven’t been back.
This guy use to pastor a UCC church where I live. He was as far out there as you can get. The Power Team (Christian strongman act) did anti-drug assemblies at the local schools. He wrote a letter to the paper complaining because they were also doing shows at a local church and presenting the Gospel. It wasn't enough for his church to never present the Gospel, he didn't want kids exposed to it anywhere. It was pretty obvious who's team he was really on.
Just write Ichabod on the doors of those churches and be done with it.
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