wfn.org | Anti-racism rites launch new ecumenical group

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Note #7023 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

21-January-2002
02033

Anti-racism rites launch new ecumenical group

Churches Uniting in Christ is born at site of MLK assassination

by Jerry L. Van Marter

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — In an emotional two-and-a-half-hour worship service at Mt. Olive Cathedral of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, nine churches that have talked about Christian unity for 40 years joined in a covenant agreement that binds them as Churches Uniting in Christ (CUIC).

The next morning, on a clear, cold Martin Luther King Jr. Day, about 1,000 people — a mix of CUIC participants and locals led by Memphis Mayor Willie Harrington — marched from city hall to the Lorraine Motel, where King was assassinated in 1968. In that historic spot, the leaders of the CUIC churches signed a pledge to work to end racism in the United States, and called on all Christians to join them.

The ceremonies were the culmination of a weekend in which the Consultation on Church Union (COCU) voted itself out of existence and became a covenant fellowship known as CUIC.

"Imagine a 40-year courtship in which those who are to be wed finally agree on a date to publicly profession their relationship together," Bishop William H. Graves of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church said in welcoming worshippers to Mt. Olive. "Friends, we have finally made the date."

The 11th and final president of COCU, Jeffrey Newhall of the International Council of Community Churches (ICCC), said, "Today we celebrate a brave new beginning of a new journey. We don't know where it will take us, but now we know we'll all get there together."

COCU was founded in 1960 after a legendary sermon by Eugene Carson Blake of the Presbyterian Church (USA) at Grace Cathedral (Episcopal) in San Francisco. It began as a movement for organic church union, but over the years foundered repeatedly on differences over the ministry. 

COCU eventually abandoned the merger goal and thereafter looked for ways in which the member churches could establish closer ties without giving up their own identities. 

In 1999, COCU proposed a covenant relationship based on eight "visible marks" of unity among the churches, notably a "mutual recognition of each other as authentic expressions of the one church of Jesus Christ." The agreement also includes mutual recognition of members and ordained ministers and agreements to worship and celebrate the Eucharist together and cooperate in mission.

In his inaugural sermon, Bishop McKinley Young of the African Methodist Episcopal Church called CUIC "an ecumenical epiphany." Just as the disciples were transformed by their encounter with Jesus, so are CUIC member churches changed by their new covenant with each other.

"It won't be the same as it was before," Young said. "It's not our doing either — but Christ's presence with us in a new way, an epiphany, a new understanding of what it means to be disciples.
"This is our finest hour," Young said. "Don't blow it."

The Rev. Lew Lancaster, a retired ecumenical officer for the PC(USA) who was involved in COCU for 30 years, including a one-year stint as acting general secretary, said he found the ceremonies moving.

"This is not what we thought we'd be 40 years ago," he said, "but it is a culmination of all those efforts, and if these churches live up to these commitments, we've really got something here."

The Rev. Arthur B. Williams Jr. of the Episcopal Church, who presided over the Eucharist, agreed with Young that the demise of COCU and the advent of CUIC amount to more than a name change. "I'm more hopeful now than I have been before," he said. "This (CUIC) represents a renewed commitment by the churches to each other and to justice in our country."

Indeed, the Jan. 21 march and rally formed a seamless whole with the previous day's worship service, as representatives of the CUIC churches — and of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which is not a member but has signed on as a "partner in mission and dialogue" — stepped to the podium on the balcony of the Lorraine to affirm the Christian imperative to overcome racism.

The Rev. Michael Livingston, a Presbyterian who serves as executive director of the ICCC, said, "Today, on ground hallowed by God and made holy by the spilled blood of a prophet, we take to a balcony, not a pulpit, to proclaim that together we will eradicate racism."

The stated clerk of the PC(USA), the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, who grew up in Memphis, said he "never dreamed as a kid I would see this crossing of race, church and community lines in the struggle to eliminate the scourge of racism from our country's landscape."

During a press conference after the rally, Kirkpatrick said the CUIC action is only a first step. "The next step, and our biggest challenge, is in our congregations," he said, "to create a movement by all of our people to find unity in Christ that really gives them a passion and enthusiasm to find unity with all people."

CUIC's success, Kirkpatrick said, will be measured by "congregations no long behaving the way they used to — with CMEs, AMEs, Presbyterians and Disciples simply meeting separately, but realizing we are one church ... to make a different world, where justice and peace happen."

The nine member churches of CUIC are the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Episcopal Church, the International Council of Community Churches, the PC(USA), the United Church of Christ and the United Methodist Church.
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