wfn.org | Malayang is new UCC evangelism secretary

[powellb@ucc.org]

Dec. 2, 1996
Office of Communication
United Church of Christ
Andy Lang, press contact
(216) 736-2215
E-mail:  langa@ucc.org
On the World Wide Web:  http://www.ucc.org

Jose A. Malayang is new general secretary for
evangelism in United Church of Christ

      CLEVELAND--The new officer for evangelism in the
United Church of Christ says churches can grow if they
reach out to new ethnic communities in the United
States.
      "The U.S. population is changing," says the Rev.
Jos? A. Malayang, 58. "The minority is becoming the
majority. The church has to respond to these
demographic realities."
      But Malayang, who emigrated from the Philippines
in 1970 and became a U.S. citizen in 1980, says every
congregation in the 1.5-million-member United Church
deserves support.  "Eighty-two percent of the UCC's
decline is not the result of congregations leaving the
UCC, but of falling membership in churches that have
stayed," he said in a recent interview. "That suggests
we need to give more energy to helping existing
churches. We need to learn from the churches that have
turned things around."
      Malayang will take office in January as General
Secretary for the Division of Evangelism and Local
Church Development -- a branch of the UCC's U.S.
mission agency, the United Church Board for Homeland
Ministries. He was elected in November at the Homeland
Board's annual meeting in New Orleans.
      Malayang was pastor of a rural congregation in
Richmond, Michigan -- St. James and St. Matthew --
from 1974 to 1988. Most of its members were white --
the descendants of German homesteaders who had
organized the small "evangelisch" church in 1858. In
1988 he was called to serve as Associate Conference
Minister of the UCC's Southern California Conference,
a jurisdiction where a dozen different languages are
spoken in UCC congregations every Sunday morning. In
1994 he joined the staff of the UCC's Office for
Church Life and Leadership.
      Membership decline in the UCC is a fact,
Malayang says, but "the church does not need to
panic." The UCC must seize the opportunities offered
by growing racial-ethnic membership and the experience
of once-declining churches that have reversed the
trend.
      "One of our major tasks is to connect with our
churches, to send the message that we can trust each
other and work together," he says.
      "The Great Commission is to go out and make
disciples of all nations," he says. "One of the
challenges of the Division is clarification of our
message. What are we saying to the world about our
faith in Jesus Christ?
      "We don't need to compose a new message or
reinvent a message, for we have the message, eternal
and true: that God loves the world and acted (and
continues to act) to give it life and to offer it
salvation in Jesus Christ through the empowering,
transforming activity of the Holy Spirit.
      "Can we reclaim this message? Can we reclaim the
centrality of Jesus Christ as the head of the church?
Is that center the source of all our decisions?"
      Effective evangelism in local churches will not
exclude the UCC's historic commitment to social
justice, Malayang said. "I've always had a problem
with dualism -- the separation of spirituality from
the material world. Spirituality and social activism
are twin elements of who we are. Social activism
without spirituality is empty and has no foundation.
Spirituality without social activism offers no
leavening for the world. Jesus blended both. He said,
'the Spirit . . . has anointed me to bring good news
to the poor . . . to proclaim release to the captives
. . . to let the oppressed go free.' The spirit is not
upon us simply to develop more spiritual life --
although that is good -- but to be part of the
redemption of the world."
      Malayang was born in 1938. He earned his
bachelor of theology at Silliman University in 1961
and his bachelor of arts at the University of the
Philippines, Manila, in 1965. In the United States, he
earned a master of education in 1972 at Wayne State
University, Detroit, and continued his studies at
McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago and the
Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. In 1991, he
received his doctorate of ministry at the School of
Theology of Southern California in Claremont.
      He has been married for 36 years to Fabiana
"Bennie" Yrad. They have four children and two
grandchildren. The Malayang family live in Elyria,
Ohio.
      The United Church of Christ, with more than 1.5
million members and 6,100 congregations in the United
States and Puerto Rico, was formed by the 1957 union
of the Congregational Christian Churches and the
Evangelical and Reformed Church.
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