A plumb line does not argue. It hangs from a fixed point and it waits. Every wall in the world is free to lean; the line simply reports how far. And when a builder tells you he never claimed to be building a wall at all, the line does not move. It hangs there still, and the leaning is measured all the same.
This is the fifth denomination examined in Measured and Found Wanting, the Virginia Christian Alliance series that lays God’s Word against the record of the mainline churches. We have walked the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Methodist Church, and most recently the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. We come now to the United Church of Christ (UCC), and we come to it differently, because this house was built differently. The United Church of Christ marriage vote is the earliest of the mainline surrenders we have examined, and the strangest, because the body that cast it claimed no authority to bind anyone by it.
Three things govern what follows:
- On July 4, 2005, the United Church of Christ became the first mainline Protestant denomination in the United States to endorse the redefinition of marriage — by a resolution that binds no congregation and changes no standard.
- The warrant it claimed was not conscience. It was continuing revelation: a Still Speaking God, and yet more light and truth still breaking forth from God’s holy word.
- Martin Luther was quoted from the floor against the vote. They recorded it in their own minutes. Then they voted.
The Concession We Make First
We will not build an argument on a misunderstanding, so we state the strongest objection to this article before we make our case, and we state it in the denomination’s own words.
On the Saturday morning of that General Synod, before any of this came to the floor, the Moderator gave the delegates a review of polity. The minutes record what he told them. The United Church of Christ speaks to its local churches and not for them. It is not a denomination that dictates policies, procedures, or beliefs. Article Nine of its Constitution provides that no power vested in the General Synod shall invade the autonomy of Conferences, Associations, or Local Churches.
That is true, and it is not a technicality. The resolution adopted three days later amended no ordination standard. It authorized no liturgy. It struck no words from a book of order. It bound no one at all. A United Church of Christ congregation that rejected the action on July 5 was in exactly the same standing on July 6 as it had been on July 3.
So the reader may fairly ask what there is to measure. If the body never claimed authority over doctrine, how can it be charged with abandoning it?
Why the Concession Becomes the Charge
Here is our answer, and it is the finding of this article. The house with the least binding authority drifted with the least resistance. In the Episcopal Church a canon had to be struck. In the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) a constitutional standard had to be amended and ratified by presbyteries. In the ELCA a two-thirds threshold had to be removed before the vote could carry. Each of those bodies had a wall, and the record of the falling is the record of the wall coming down.
The United Church of Christ had no wall. There was nothing to strike, nothing to amend, nothing to ratify. There was only a vote, and the vote was taken. That is not a lighter charge than the others. It is a heavier one.
The Long Road to the United Church of Christ Marriage Vote
Nothing in the United Church of Christ marriage vote happened that had not been thirty-three years in preparation. The pattern will be familiar to readers of this series, because it is the same hand played at the next door.
In June of 1972, at a congregation in San Carlos, California, an association of the Northern California/Nevada Conference ordained the first openly homosexual man to the ministry of any mainline Protestant denomination in America. He founded a denominational caucus the same year.
In 1975 the Tenth General Synod pronounced that all persons are entitled to full civil liberties and equal protection under the law without discrimination related to sexual preference. Two years later the Eleventh General Synod went further, urging that the states legislatively recognize that traditional marriage is not the only stable living unit entitled to legal protection. That is 1977 — a full generation before the vote, and already the object was marriage itself.
In 1985 the Fifteenth General Synod called congregations to declare themselves Open and Affirming. In 1993 the Nineteenth called the church to greater leadership in ending discrimination against homosexuals. In April of 2004 the Executive Council called the church to action and dialogue on marriage — the study phase, arriving on schedule.
We know each of these dates because the 2005 resolution recites them. The body kept its own receipts and stapled them to the front of the document. Task force, study, statement, vote. The reader who has followed this series has seen this sequence four times already.
The Words They Adopted
The resolution behind the United Church of Christ marriage vote states its own theological warrant. It is worth reading slowly, because the mechanism is not hidden in a footnote. It is a clause in the preamble:
WHEREAS we proclaim ourselves to be listening to the voice of a Still Speaking God at that at all times in human history there is always yet more light and truth to break forth from God’s holy word
The garbled construction in the middle is in the enacted text as printed. We reproduce it as it stands rather than repair it, because it is theirs.
Read the claim. Scripture is not the settled standard against which the question is decided. Scripture is a source from which more is still breaking forth — and the more that breaks forth is permitted to arrive at a conclusion the delivered text does not permit. The word of God becomes a quarry rather than a foundation.
Readers of the ELCA installment will recognize the function immediately, though not the form. The ELCA licensed its departure by dividing conscience — by declaring that faithful people, reading the same Scripture, could reach opposite conclusions and both be honored. The United Church of Christ licensed its departure by asserting that the Scripture itself was not finished speaking.
Two different keys. The same locked door, opened.
The Redline That Was Refused
There was a wall available on the day of the United Church of Christ marriage vote. Someone offered to build it, and the body declined.
A separate resolution had been submitted to the same Synod, titled Marriage is Between One Man and One Woman. It went to the same committee. That committee recommended its defeat. It came to the floor on the evening of July 4, an amendment was offered and defeated, the question was called, and the resolution was defeated. The minutes record no tally and name no sponsor.
Two other exits were offered and closed. A delegate from New Hampshire moved to retitle the main resolution in support of equal rights for all in covenanted relationships, and to replace the language of marriage with the language of covenant throughout. He agreed with the theology, he said; he wanted the statement to stay bold while leaving the word alone. The amendment was defeated. A delegate from Pennsylvania moved to postpone the vote to the next General Synod — two years to study, to catch up, to pray. A further motion sought merely to postpone until the following morning. Both were defeated.
And then this. A delegate from Michigan moved to insert into the resolution an acknowledgment of the pain and struggle its passage would engender within the gathered church. That amendment carried. The words stand in the enacted text to this day.
They wrote the cost into the document. Then they adopted the document.
Luther at the Microphone
The minutes of the Twenty-fifth General Synod record that a delegate from the Massachusetts Conference, speaking for the denomination’s own Human Sexuality Task Force, told the body that the resolution was put forward with no biblical warrant. He then quoted Martin Luther: that our conscience should be held captive to the word of God. He granted them their Still Speaking God. And he answered that the word of God is still the same.
Stop on that. In our final ELCA installment we showed the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America citing Luther’s confession at Worms in an endnote to its own social statement — the founder’s words enlisted to license the departure from the founder’s principle. Here the same confession is spoken aloud from the floor, in the opposite direction, by a man trying to stop the thing.
Same reformer. Same sentence about a conscience captive to the word of God. Two denominations, four years apart, in different rooms. Both heard it. Both voted anyway.
Luther’s point was never that conscience is sovereign. It was that conscience is bound — captive, chained, unable to move — because the word of God has already spoken. A conscience captive to a word that is still speaking is a conscience captive to nothing at all.
The Cost They Were Told, in Advance, by Their Own
A minister from the Indiana-Kentucky Conference rose during the debate and asked the Synod to weigh the ethical implications against what it would cost the denomination. The minutes record him naming it: churches, income, members, morale. He expressed hope that the Synod would allow two additional years for the members to catch up, to think, to study, and to pray. He said there would be long-term implications for the church if action were taken then.
He was not a prophet. He was a pastor doing arithmetic. But the arithmetic was correct, and we will lay his warning beside the denomination’s own membership tables in the second half of this study.
Scripture had already settled the matter he was raising.
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. — 2 Timothy 3:16–17, ESV
Complete. Equipped for every good work. Not a partial deposit awaiting supplement, not a first installment on a revelation still in progress. Paul’s word to Timothy is that the man who has this has enough. A church that requires more light than the God-breathed Scripture supplies has not discovered a deficiency in the Scripture. It has developed an appetite the Scripture will not feed.
Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. — Jude 3, ESV
Once for all delivered. Jude wrote that sentence to a church already learning how convenient a still-unfolding faith could be. New light that contradicts delivered light is not light.
It Reached Virginia
The United Church of Christ marriage vote is not a story from somewhere else. The Southern Conference of the United Church of Christ covers eastern Virginia and all of North Carolina, and the vote landed there within weeks.
Suffolk Christian Church, a congregation one hundred forty-five years old, agreed by more than a two-thirds majority in the fall of 2005 to leave the denomination. Its minister told the Associated Press that the marriage vote had not been the congregation’s only disagreement with the national body — but that for many of his people, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In the Berkley section of Norfolk, New Hope Congregational Church voted to withdraw; its minister said he could not go along in support of something he did not believe Scripture sanctions. A pastor emeritus of congregations in Norfolk and Suffolk predicted that others would follow, and observed that this is Bible country.
The conference administrator put a number on it. As many as twenty-five congregations had left since the vote. Six new congregations had formed in the same period, leaving the conference with roughly two hundred thirty. We print both halves of that figure, because both halves are true and because a reader who found the second one on his own would rightly distrust everything else we told him.
Not every Virginia voice went the same way, and honesty requires that we say so. A minister in Virginia Beach welcomed the resolution, calling it an affirmation of mutual respect and a positive, progressive, courageous step. That is the case at its strongest, made by a neighbor rather than a stranger. We will answer it directly in the second installment. We will not pretend it was never made.
The Same Amendment, Twenty-One Years Later
One more line from that record deserves the attention of every Virginian reading this. The resolution urged congregations to work against legislation restricting marriage, including constitutional amendments — and in 2005 Virginia had exactly such a campaign underway, bound for the ballot that fall. A denomination meeting in Atlanta asked Virginia churches to fight a Virginia marriage amendment. Twenty-one years later this Commonwealth faces an amendment on the November ballot that would undo the one they lost. The enemy does not retire. He returns to the same door with the same hand.
And Still the Line Hangs Straight
We have brought no charge against the United Church of Christ marriage vote that the denomination did not enter into its own record and publish over its own name. The trajectory is recited in its own resolution. The mechanism is a clause in its own preamble. The refusals are in its own minutes. The Virginia departures were reported while they happened.
We take no pleasure in the accounting. There are believers in those pews who love the Lord Jesus Christ and who never voted for any of this — who were told their conscience mattered and then discovered that the word to which conscience was to be captive had been declared unfinished. Our grief is for them.
The second installment hangs the plumb line against what was built here, and sets the warning that was spoken on that floor beside the numbers the denomination has published every year since. The verdict there is Scripture’s, not ours.
And we say now what we have said at the end of every one of these studies, because it is the only thing that has ever moved a soul. No column of figures has converted anyone. No argument, however sound, has ever raised the dead. The Holy Spirit alone draws a man to God. We lay out the record because we are commanded to watch and to warn — and then we ask the One who alone gives sight to open eyes, in that denomination and in our own hearts.
Next in series: “Weighed and Found Wanting: The United Church of Christ” — the verdict of Scripture, the warning they were given, and the cost that came.
For Further Study
- Minutes of the Twenty-fifth General Synod of the United Church of Christ, Atlanta, Georgia, July 1–5, 2005 — the floor record, the committee actions, and the defeated resolutions cited above.
- “Resolution in Support of Equal Marriage Rights for All for General Synod 25,” Action 05-GS-26, adopted July 4, 2005 — the enacted text, including the Still Speaking clause.
- United Church of Christ Summary Statistics 2023 — the denomination’s own annual reporting of congregations, membership, and Christian education enrollment.
- Associated Press, “Virginia church leaves United Church of Christ,” January 12, 2006, drawing on reporting by The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk — the Suffolk congregation’s departure and the Southern Conference figures.
- The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, reporting of January 2006 on the Southern Conference departures — the source of the statements by the ministers in Norfolk and Virginia Beach and by the pastor emeritus quoted above. The newspaper’s original pages are no longer accessible; the relevant passages are preserved at length in Albert Mohler’s contemporaneous commentary, which quotes the reporting directly.
- Prior installments in this series: series introduction · ELCA Part One · ELCA Part Two · ELCA Part Three · ELCA Part Four
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Virginia Christian Alliance.
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