More Than One Fourth of UCC Pastors Are Women

A recent news article reminded readers that "the United Church of Christ (UCC) has sent a clear message for women who believe they are called to the pastorate: Answer the call." And the article further reported that women in the UCC have done so at a rate that ranks the UCC as a leader among Protestant denominations for the ordination of women.

According to the UCC website, more than one-fourth (27 percent) of all its pastors are female; the denomination's clergy now includes 2,832 ordained women. The numbers seem to be fairly consistent across individual UCC conferences. For example, of the 624 ministers in the UCC Connecticut Conference, 236-nearly 38 percent-are women, according to the Rev. Ron Brown, associate conference minister for clergy concerns. These numbers promise to grow significantly, according to Patricia Liberty, an interim pastor at Southington's First Congregational Church, who recently told myrecordjournal.com, "More women are being ordained than men."

According to a study at http://www.hartfordinstitute.org/, the UCC ranks second of 15 Protestant denominations in percentage of ordained women. The top denomination? The Unitarian Universalist Church-in reality a non-Protestant denomination because of its rejection of fundamental Protestant doctrines-ranks first with 30 percent female clergy.

The UCC formed in 1957 through the union of two denominations, the Evangelical and Reformed Church and the Congregational Christian Churches. According to the 2007 yearbook, the United Church of Christ has approximately 1.2 million members and is composed of approximately 5,518 local congregations. The UCC is one of many among the mainline denominations that has, in recent years, been on a pronounced leftward theological trajectory. At its 2005 General Synod, the UCC affirmed "same-sex marriage," with more than 80 percent of delegates approving. Buoyed by the California Supreme Court's recent overturn of the "gay marriage" ban in that state, the UCC's California-Nevada Conference recently reaffirmed its support of "same-sex nuptials."

And like most of the mainline churches, the UCC has experienced a steady decline in membership over the past few years. According to the UCC's Statistical Handbook released early in this decade, the denomination's membership declined in 1999 by 19,406 members (1.37 percent), with 77 churches either withdrawing or closing-with the withdrawing churches taking 6,387 members with them.

Sadly, the UCC's embrace of liberalism seems to confirm the thesis of Dave Shiflett's 2005 book Exodus: Why Americans Are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity. Shiflett provides compelling circumstantial and statistical evidence in favor of his argument that cultural accommodation is creating a pronounced numerical hemorrhage within mainline churches, one that is pushing members toward churches that hold a high view of Scripture.

"Americans are vacating progressive pews and flocking to churches that offer more traditional versions of Christianity...Most people go to church to get something they cannot get elsewhere. This consuming public-people who already believe, or who are attempting to believe, who want their children to believe-go to church to learn about the mysterious Truth on which they Christian religion is built. They want the Good News, not the minister's political views or intellectual coaching. The latter creates sprawling vacancies in the pews. Indeed, those empty pews can be considered earthly reward for abandoning heaven, traditionally understood."

Wayne Grudem, in his book Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism? makes a congruent case that compromise on biblical authority in the area of gender roles in the church will only lead a church or denomination further from biblical fidelity.

The sad but true recent history of the UCC certainly does provide significant anecdotal evidence that a drift away from God's Word is never slight and never leads to authentic, "other-worldly" discipleship. This is one fundamental reason why CBMW will continue, by God's grace, to press the case for fidelity to Scripture on gender roles in the home and church.