Address of the Minister & President to the 205th Annual Meeting

GREETING. The grace of our Savior Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

INTRODUCTION. Just look at you! Look at you! What a hopeful, faithful, remarkable, and peculiar people you are!

Sunday after Sunday all across the Conference, you gather in sanctuaries to do a strange and wondrous thing: to turn your attention to an invisible God …a God whose presence with us and whose will for us, is not always as evident as we might like …a God in whose Still-Speaking voice we believe, but whose voice we sometimes strain to hear above the world’s noise. You receive no material gain for this activity …in fact, when you are doing it right, you leave poorer than when you arrived!

No wonder it is hard for the world to understand the life of a Christian. By the world’s standards, the life of the Christian is perplexing indeed.

(Insert: film clip from the movie "Waking Ned Divine." A boy is talking to a priest, asking him about who he works for and if gets paid. The priest remarks that he has never met Jesus and that his payment is more "of the spiritual kind." The priest asks if the boy thinks he might be drawn to the church. To this the boy replies, "I don't think so. I don’t think I could work for a man I'd never met and not get paid for it.")

That’s us. We work for a guy we’ve never met – at least not in the way that boy means. And, not only do most of you not get paid for it, we all pay to do it!

I thank God for this peculiar, glorious, hopeful, delightful, and faithful people! Through you and your ministries, God's love is manifest and multiplied in myriad ways, times and places.

PURPOSE OF OUR GATHERING. So, what is it that this peculiar people have come to do and be in this place in these two days? Certainly, we come to do the business of the church …and to hear from each other, and to learn from each other.

We have also come to experience the church as larger, more diverse, complex, exciting, far-reaching and far flung than the slice of church we each experience on Sundays.

There is, however, a greater purpose, to our Annual meeting. In The Acts of the Apostles, Luke writes about the earliest beginnings of the Christian church. He describes how they gathered “all together in one place”. And it was at those times, when they had all come together into one place, that the Holy Spirit descended and claimed them, changed them, and commissioned them.

The Holy Spirit likes it when we come together in one place. We have come, then, to please the Spirit: to invite and invoke the Holy Spirit’s presence, challenging the Spirit to claim us and change us. May it be so.

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE YEAR. I would like to turn now to some highlights of this past year …times in which we have been claimed and changed by God’s Holy Spirit. This is certainly not an exhaustive list. There are numerous initiatives and ministries I will not be mentioning, as they are being reported on at other points during this meeting.

Amistad: A significant initiative of the Conference was our sponsorship and hosting of the visit of Freedom Schooner Amistad to Boston Harbor for a two-week visit last October. It was a chance to remember and reclaim this story of freedom and courage that, in some ways, can be pointed to as the defining organizational story of what became the UCC.

Amistad was visited daily, by Boston-area school children, by families and individuals. On our UCC Day, over 8000 of us gathered for a remarkable celebration. During the course of the Freedom Schooner’s visit, we pinned our UCC colors to the mast of justice …claiming the biblical imperative that we cannot be righteous if we do not do justice.

We were determined that Amistad would not be an end in itself, but a springboard for renewed commitment to justice and overcoming racism. Out of Amistad’s visit there grew two new Conference task forces: the Race and Justice Task Force and the Public Education Task Force. Also, as a direct result of Amistad, countless congregations have renewed the cause of justice: working on refugee resettlement, addressing modern day slavery and overcoming racism. In addition, one of the resolutions coming before this body grew directly from the visit of Freedom Schooner Amistad: a resolution concerning seafarer’s rights.

Bringing Amistad to Boston Harbor - funding it and surrounding it with programs - involved hundreds of individuals, hundreds of churches and dozens of organizations. I would like to mention a few people who led us all: the co-chairs of the Amistad to Boston Host Committee: Beverly Morgan-Welch and Dick Harter; the chair of the MACUCC Amistad Committee: Peter Southwell-Sander; the Administrator for both committees: Joanna Bickford; the two people most responsible for the worship event at Fleet Boston Pavilion: Wendy Miller Olapade and Susan Dickerman; and Bill Fleming who prepared for, and then provided daily hospitality and assistance for Amistad’s crew.

Secondly, let me tell you about the SE Area Visitation Program: Over a year ago, one of our clergy, Paul Clayton, helped convene a Think Tank on Our Churches Wider Mission. The purpose of the Think Tank was to ask the question: why is OCWM decreasing? While there are a variety of compelling and complex answers to that question, we determined that the primary reason is a lack of relationship. The majority of the people in our churches do not feel a strong relationship to the wider church: the Association, the Conference, or the National Setting. (I hope and trust that those of you here are the exception to that rule.)

With the leadership of Paul Clayton and Dale Hempen, an experimental program was created in the SE Area. This involved recruiting and training teams of visitors, who by appointment on Sunday mornings, visited nearly every congregation in the SE Area. They attended worship and, after worship, met with church leaders, to listen, ask questions and learn.

The program was felt to be so successful that it is being replicated in many other Areas and Associations.

Minnie Seaside Rest: Thirdly, I am delighted to report that this past year our Conference received as a gift from the Office of Global Ministries, one of the buildings at Craigville Conference Center: Minnie Seaside Rest. The gift of this building is the result of the skill and work of our Conference Attorney – also our parliamentarian – Dick Osterberg.

Legal matters: Speaking of lawyers, this brings me to the fourth matter I would like to share with you. In this litigious society in which we minister, at any given time, the Massachusetts Conference is named in lawsuits. It is among the more hidden parts of my job to manage these with all possible dispatch and discretion. I typically work with our United Church of Christ Nationwide Special Counsel, Donald C. Clark as well as local counsel, with the UCC Insurance Board, with other named defendants and their church and pastor, with the Area Minister, with alleged victims when possible, and with the media.

We recently won a significant case involving First Amendment rights. The plaintiff argued that hierarchical churches with bishops, have the structure necessary to credential and discipline clergy. And, conversely, because of our congregational polity, we don’t. Fortunately, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court literally grabbed the case from a lower Appeals Court and, in a unanimous decision, decided in our favor.

If we had lost this case, it would have wreaked havoc for us, for our way of being church, for our Church and Ministry Committees, and would have been precedent-setting across the country …with potentially dire implications for all non-hierarchical denominations.

Our Nationwide Special Counsel works on behalf of the Conferences and Covenanted Ministries of the UCC, providing coordinated oversight of common legal concerns. This is just one more example of the resources provided for our individual churches by the wider church at Conference and national level.

Same Gender Marriage: On May 17, 2004, same gender marriage became legal in the Commonwealth. This ruling has taken nearly everyone by surprise. For some, it is great good news. For others, it is a cause of great dismay. Conference staff and Commissions have sought to minister to and with the entire Conference of churches through a broad variety of opportunities for conversation and learning.

Our clergy and churches are in remarkably different places on this matter. Last night I told the story of a gathering of 50 UCC clergy. Out of those 50 clergy, ten indicated they would officiate at same-gender marriages. Fifteen indicated they would not. Twenty-five didn’t indicate either way. This is the UCC.

There is no bishop to tell the ten that they can’t, or the fifteen that they must, or the twenty-five that they should make a decision. It is the unique genius of the UCC that we are able to move in different directions at the same time, as long as we agree on this: that Jesus Christ is the sole Head of the Church. There, despite our diversity, is our true unity.

Next, I want to mention Our Church's Wider Mission. It is the fuel that empowers the United Church of Christ to reach around the world in mission and ministry. It also supports the basic infrastructures of our denomination – and I have mentioned just a few of the many resources and ministries of the Conference and the national setting. Thank you, friends, for your support of Our Church's Wider Mission. May I ask that you continue to support this vital line item in your local church budget? OCWM is not keeping up with inflation and it is not keeping up with costs. About a 3rd of our churches increase OCWM each year and that's fabulous. Thank you! But it is also true that fully 2/3rds do not …some keeping level year after year, while others decrease support. As you build your local church budgets, please consider proportionately increasing your gift to OCWM as your own congregation's needs increase.

Evangelism and new churches. I want to report that, who have the reputation of being shy evangelists, are learning to find our voices of witness and invitation. Our efforts at evangelism, church growth and new church starts are bearing fruit: Hope Church in Jamaica Plain is booming. The Hispanic Community Church of Boston has 75 members in worship each Sunday. A new church start exploration in Lowell gathers 40 people each Saturday night. Renewal efforts in Chicopee are growing that church. And, since our Annual Meeting last year: two congregations voted to join the UCC in Massachusetts: United Church of New Marlborough and Ashby Congregational Church.

Let Justice Roll. National Council of Churches asked us recently to be the local sponsor of the only interfaith event to be taking place during the Democratic National Convention. It is part of a national non-partisan Poverty Mobilization Campaign entitled Let Justice Roll. The event, hosted by Old South Church in Boston, is aimed at bringing poverty and hunger issues to the fore in this election year, and encouraging voter registration. I hope that many Boston churches will send groups to take part in this event and hear Jim Forbes of Riverside Church, New York speak. I encourage local churches to consider whether to hold a non-partisan voter registration event, perhaps in collaboration with some of the other religious and secular groups who are also engaged in this important piece of community action and witness.

The Still Speaking Initiative: I am delighted and proud that we have with us as our keynote speaker, the author of the God is Still Speaking Campaign, and a personal friend, Ron Buford. Ron is a profoundly faithful, persistent and inventive Christian. The Still Speaking Initiative is an effort to renew the entire life of our denomination, from local churches through to the national setting: calling us to be more faithful, bolder, more generous and more courageous in our Christian discipleship and in our witness to the world. There will be further opportunity later today to introduce the Still Speaking Initiative to you, so let me confine my closing remarks to this.

Martin Luther, the great Reformer, agreed with St. Paul, that faith comes through hearing. At heart, the Still Speaking Initiative is a profound challenge to the whole United Church if Christ to renew our commitment to listen for and to the voice of the Still Speaking God.

BLESSING. As we are gathered to do the work of the Church:

May God’s face shine upon us;
May Christ’s peace rule among us;
May the Spirit’s fire burn within us, claiming and changing us. Amen.