National Association of Congregational Christian Churches
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The National Association of Congregational Christian Churches (NACCC) is an association of about 400 churches providing fellowship for and services to churches from the Congregational tradition. The Association maintains its national office in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee. The body was founded in 1955 by former clergy and laypeople of the Congregational Christian Churches in response to that denomination's pending merger with the Evangelical and Reformed Church to form the United Church of Christ in 1957.
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[edit] Origins and History
Central to their opposition was the belief that the merger would create unwieldy bureaucracies that might impinge upon the historic freedom of the local congregation, one of the few ideas that have united this otherwise theologically diverse fellowship. These concerns drove activists, beginning after World War II when talks between the national entities of the two merging denominations reached the point of preliminary organization planning, to persuade local Congregational Christian churches to refuse their support to this movement. These clergy and laypeople first organized at a meeting in Evanston, Illinois, in 1947 to express their concerns about not only the possible loss of autonomy on behalf of individual churches, but also their contentions that the General Council of the CC Churches possessed no authority to enter its churches into any legal union with another denomination. Other related issues were control over missionary funds and a possible diversion of some of them into ministerial pension annuities; fears of imposition of creeds, confessions, and neo-orthodox theology onto their ministers (who generally favored a 19th-century liberal, tolerant outlook); and ownership of church property in cases of congregations withdrawing from the proposed UCC.
When the CC national General Council adopted a "Basis of Union" with the E&R Church in 1948, the dissenters organized into two groups: the Committee for the Continuation of Congregational Christian Churches, formed by the pastor of Los Angeles' Congregational Church of the Messiah, Harry R. Butman; and the League to Uphold Congregational Principles, led by a Hartford, Ct. pastor, Henry Gray. These two groups conducted an extensive pamphlet and church-meeting campaign to forestall the merger process, despite the General Council's and the E&R General Synod's revision of the Basis in favor of explicit congregational autonomy. Their counterpart on the pro-UCC side of the denominational merger debate was the then-current CC general minister and president, Douglas Horton.
When these efforts only produced a small minority of sympathizers, some "continuing" clergy and laypeople in a Brooklyn congregation decided to take legal action, suing CC moderator Helen Kenyon in 1949, in order to place a legal restraint on the process. Some years later, after appellate courts reversed the lower court's finding in favor of the merger opponents, the activists turned instead to forming a new fellowship, with no legal claims to any portion of the assets of the majority; all Congregational-heritage colleges but one (Piedmont College in Georgia) approved the UCC merger as well, which finally took place in 1957 (Piedmont finally joined the UCC in the early 2000s while keeping its NACCC affiliation).
[edit] Current Ethos and Practices
During the 1960s through the 1990s, the newly-christened NACCC slowly built a network of, or formed alliances with, voluntarily-supported missions and agencies to replace those lost in the UCC merger. One distinction between the NACCC and UCC is the former body's refusal to engage in political activity on behalf of its constituent churches. By its governing ethos, the NACCC refrains from taking political positions of any kind, while the UCC biennial General Synod and the denomination's Justice and Witness Ministries often make politically liberal (or, as one of its "renewal" lobbies, the Biblical Witness Fellowship, terms it, "leftist" [1]) statements that are usually contrary to the beliefs of some of its more conservative congregations. Since the General Synod's decision in 2005 to support the rights of same-sex couples to marry, several dissenting UCC congregations have found their way into the NACCC, giving the denomination a considerably more theologically conservative complexion than in past generations. However, the denomination seems to remain firm in its resolve not to abandon its apolitical heritage.
[edit] Relations to other Congregational Bodies
Another Congregational denomination whose member churches mostly stayed out of the UCC, the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference, came into being not primarily because of church governance disputes, but because of decades-long opposition to the dominant liberal theological orientation in the main part of American Congregationalism. Founded in 1948, the CCCC (or "4C's", colloquially) had no relation to the "continuing" movement per se, although some congregations may belong to both bodies simultaneously. The body requires its member churches to subscribe to, as its name implies, a standard evangelical statement of faith; neither the NACCC nor the UCC requires its congregations to adhere to any specific doctrinal position.
In fact, some NACCC congregations have actually retained nominal ties to the UCC, via the latter's listing of special "schedule" categories of membership. Resulting from the submission of the UCC Constitution and Bylaws to each individual Congregational Christian church for approval (a condition of membership to all UCC associations and conferences), those congregations who did not vote at all or voted disapproval but who did not take action to withdraw from their associations (or conferences, in the absence of associations) remained listed in that denomination's yearbook. As of 2008, 110 churches continue to hold this status in the UCC, although not all of them are NACCC members.
[edit] Miscellanea
The NACCC has congregations in 39 states, with strong concentrations in California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
One notable feature of the NACCC's governance is a process by which congregations taking exception to measures passed by the NACCC's annual meeting may seek a referendum vote in order to have the legislation vetoed. This appears to be a unique practice not found in any other American Protestant denomination.
[edit] See also
[edit] Sources
- Living Theological Heritage of the United Church of Christ, Volume Six: Growing Toward Unity, Elsabeth Slaughter Hilke, ed., Barbara Brown Zikmund, series ed., Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2001, pp. 615-658.
- Yearbooks of the National Association of Congregational Christian Churches and the United Church of Christ. Online at http://nasecure.org/membership/findchurch.php# under "Churches—NA Yearbook."
