(This was written first for Living in Covenant, the newsletter of Michigan UCC Covenant Association.)
I’m struggling today to figure out just what it means to be Church.
In the United Church of Christ, the highest governing body of each Conference or Association rests in the representatives who come together to make decisions and move us forward.
The Michigan Conference Annual Meeting is in October each year, and, among other things, this is time we consider resolutions proposed by congregations, ministries or cohorts imagining how the church may respond to the circumstances in our world.
Please try not to yawn; I’m getting to a point. A crisis point, in fact.
In our Conference, we have a thing called the Prophetic Integrity Mission Area Team, a bunch of volunteers charged with preparing resolutions for consideration by the Conference. PI-MAT receives resolutions on vital issues of the day, works them over, then passes them to the Board of Directors, the final stop before the Conference Annual Meeting — which then involves hearings and recommendations and amendments before a final yes or no vote. That’s a lot of steps before adoption, clearly an indication that we take seriously our call to speak publicly to community and world issues.
PI-MAT is also charged with developing guidelines for those resolutions, and reviewing the guidelines periodically, to ensure they are serving the mission of the Conference.
This year, PI-MAT wrote and recommended to the Board some key changes to those resolution guidelines, intended to make it easier for folks to submit resolutions for Conference consideration. I am a member of that team. The revisions we recommended would open us to more conversations of vital interest in our communities and world and would open the process to folks who may find it daunting or debilitating to want to write such a thing as a resolution.
Among other things, we agreed and put forth that the whole Conference, not just the board or a single committee, should have greater voice in determining the mission, direction and prophetic voice of the church. We want PI-MAT and the Board to enable more resolutions, not serve as gatekeepers.
Bottom line: we think the church needs to talk more about things that matter, and we thought the resolution guidelines in place were needlessly discouraging folks from submitting things.
Then, at its July meeting, the Board of Directors shelved those new guidelines.
What aren’t we talking about? Well, at this year’s annual meeting, there aren’t any resolutions to be debated. So, we aren’t talking about anything at all. With all the challenges and crises in our world, Michigan Conference will not be considering any new prophetic approaches to mission or ministry. We will not be raising our collective voices.
That seems like a lost opportunity, because there are so many things that ail us: Racial justice. Over-policing. Climate Crisis. Covid vaccines and global equity. Billionaires in space. Religious exemptions to human rights. Mass evictions on the horizon. Is there really nothing we should be talking about?
There was one resolution PI-MAT forwarded for consideration, but the Board has turned its back for the second year in a row. Here’s that story:
There is a guideline that says resolutions “shall not be written in a manner that brings into question the Christian commitment of those who disagree with the authors.” The Prophetic Integrity Team proposed change says instead that resolutions “shall be written in a voice of love and justice, reflecting the passion of Jesus and the prophets.”
Another guideline requires that resolutions “avoid conflicting, ambiguous, and inflammatory language,” which is itself ambiguous enough to serve little purpose other than as a means to reject things we don’t want to talk about. If we had a nickel for every time a passionate conversation has ended because someone said “don’t take that tone with me”… So the team proposed striking that requirement, too, believing that “shall be written in a voice of love and justice,” seemed Jesus-like and sufficient to encourage folks to stick to issues and not devolve into name-calling, right?
How fragile have we become that we refuse even to discuss vital community and world issues if someone fails to use the most conciliatory tone possible? I’m not sure conciliation won’t eventually kill the church altogether. Are we aware how often racial justice calls are pushed aside by white people’s “tone policing”? Do we think the world will stop burning if we all just talk more politely about the fire?
So, for more than two years, some folks have been trying to get this Conference to consider the damage that animal consumption does to the planet. (Full disclosure: I and Woodside Church initiated the resolution, which garnered other signers and a near-unanimous approval by PI-MAT. You can read the final version here. A similar resolution is wending its way through our other denomination, the Alliance of Baptists. Fingers crossed!)
The resolution was rejected by the Michigan Conference Board last month. Members cited as “inflammatory language” the words of Black women discussing the devastating treatment of animals, like this line: “I thought of the economically oppressed workers at killing plants and wondered if people who kill and cut all day could still make love at night.” The board labeled problematic and “questioning the Christian commitment of those who disagree” this line: “Living in love is our greatest commandment, but animal consumption violates that in myriad ways.”
Perhaps it does call our faith into question. So does scripture over and over again. And so has the church every time it has called for a shift in our worldview or perspective. We violate our call to “live in love” kinda constantly, but no one is served, no faith journey is served, by our failure to name it and talk about it.
If this were our standard, that a resolution cannot bring into question the Christian commitment of those who disagree with the authors, would we have worked to end slavery, opposed war, protested the death penalty, prosecuted war crimes, decried the inhumanity of forced sterilizations, stood with refugees, boycotted capitalism, or even said out loud that Black lives matter?
And if that is our standard, that a resolution “not bring into question the faith of those who disagree,” how will we ever read scripture, the prophets, even Jesus himself?
If you are a member of a Michigan Conference UCC congregation, you may want to vote against this resolution; you will not have that opportunity. You may agree that the resolution is on its face offensive. But wouldn’t it have been great to be able to talk about it? The church is supposed to deliberate and determine what truth means, not bury uncomfortable topics, or just agree to disagree (a damnable approach if ever there was one), or reflexively acquiesce to the false equivalency of the “good people on both sides” who see the world differently.
The Board of Directors has done us no favor by rejecting these amended guidelines or refusing to allow this resolution to come for debate.
With no resolutions, no great debates about what it means to be the church or how to live faith in the world, I wonder that our Conference meetings will just become weekends of peremptorily congratulating one another on a job well-done. And our faith will be the casualty.
The job isn’t over yet. There is a lot of talking yet to do.