Daryl’s Blog: the national church setting

Is This Any Way To Run A Church?
Well, it is how we have always done it… Sort of.


For whatever reason, First Central has a long history of involvement in the wider church—that includes the clergy, lay folk and somehow the whole congregation. Frankly I do not know how far back this tradition extends, but it pre-dates the formation of the United Church of Christ. The last national meeting of the Congregational Christian Church was held in Omaha in 1956 when the vote was taken to join with the Evangelical and Reformed Church to become the United Church of Christ the next year in Cleveland.

Currently five independent boards, each with their own corporate structures and governing boards contribute to the operation of the national board. In recent times Susan Fortina and Bill Switzer served on the Boards for World Church Ministries and Justice and Peace Ministries, respectively. I currently serve on the Executive Council (EC), the board that conducts the business of the General Synods between bi-annual meetings.

No one keeps score, but odds are we hold some sort of record for membership on the Executive Council of the UCC over the last fifty years. Don Klohr served on the first Executive Council in 1957. Ray Straun served as a lay person in the late 1980’s and was replaced by Jody Ondick-Batson. During Jody's six-year term David Ruhe became the Moderator of the General Synod and thus served with her. Winston Baldwin not only served on the EC, but came to Chair that body during the reorganization of 2000 when we restructured from eleven instrumentalities to four covenanted ministries. (Thank you Winston. How did you ever survive that?) In 2005 I replaced Winston on the EC and serve until the 2011 General Synod.

Serving on the Executive Council requires some serious familiarity with the nuances of how our strange “up-side down” polity is supposed to work—or how we wish it worked. We are not the only denomination with “congregational” polity (most Baptists and even the Missouri Synod Lutherans claim it in some form), but it can be argued that we invented it and we are certainly passionate about it. Most of our serious church discussions include a discourse about “autonomy” and “covenant” (the glue that is supposed to hold us together).

I do not yet lose much sleep about the national church’s almost forty million dollar budget, although I think about it a lot. I do spend many a late hour thinking about governance and structural problems that we have not yet solved in more than fifty years. The budget IS a real problem, but I doubt we can fix it in the direction we are going. If you see Don Klohr and I in a serious conversation, you can bet that is what we are discussing.

After more than fifty years the lines of authority and accountability for the church still do not really meet at the top! We consist of five independent legal corporations that have difficulty coordinating accounting practices, never mind acting together in visioning, planning and setting priorities for the UCC, and our constitution leaves our President and General Minister, and our Treasurer in legal ambiguity.

I have been asked to try and make sense of all of this here in this blog. It will take some explaining. I will discuss our polity, our long commitment to affirmative action and our habit of being on the leading edge of change. I also will have to explain the rapidly growing problems that we share with most other denominations as our OCWM giving continues to plummet, church attendance continues to decline across the entire spectrum, and we enter into the very different world of the post-modern church.

Next: Why we cannot seem to fix this problem.

Daryl Malena