It has been almost a year since General Synod 32, and I am amazed at how often I think about it. In particular, my mind still wanders to and rolls around one resolution and all the discussion around it. “Stewardship of Exhibit Space as a Resource for a Mission of Justice” looked like a pretty benign resolution by name. As I looked through the materials in the weeks before traveling to Wisconsin it didn’t strike me as a resolution that was any different from the various resolutions with social justice at their heart, like “Denouncing Acts of Violence, Hatred, and Racism Carried Out in the Name of Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist Ideologies” or “Protection of Immigrant Children and Their Families.”

What I didn’t read clearly enough was that this particular resolution was directly pointed at an organization within the UCC. It wasn’t aimed at not allowing, say, Westboro Baptist Church set up table and literature. It took aim at a player on the same team.

The way that the United Church of Christ is structured, local churches are not expected to take direction from the top down. Instead, as anyone who sits through a UCC polity class will hear a zillion times, “the local church is the basic unit of life and organization of the United Church of Christ.” This means that while we do have a direction we take denominationally, each church has full autonomy to adopt or reject what works for their local setting. This is why Open and Affirming, something we are known for denominationally, isn’t a standard statement in every UCC congregation. While there is great denominational support and encouragement for every church to become “ONA,” it is not mandated.

I use the example of Open and Affirming because it ties into what this seemingly boring resolution had lurking within it’s fine print. According to the 2019 Statistical Profile of the UCC, 31% of our local churches have gone through the process to become Open and Affirming. That means there are a lot of churches that, for myriad reasons, are not officially designated as such. (This doesn’t mean that there are not wonderfully inclusive churches that aren’t ONA. Like I said, there are a zillion reasons why we aren’t at 100%.) However, there is another designation some UCC churches have that runs in a similar-yet-opposite vein, and that is Faithful and Welcoming.

Faithful and Welcoming (FWC) is the conservative response to Open and Affirming. Faithful and Welcoming churches are the ECOTs, or the Evangelical, Conservative, Orthodox, or Traditional churches within the denomination. I know, I know, we love our acronyms. If one looks at their website and what they’re about, it’s almost impossible to see why the ECOTs might cause such a stir with an exhibit hall space, until you reach the second to the last point on their “About” page, which is, “Advocate for an historic understanding of sexuality and marriage.” Ah, there it is.

Part of our UCC heritage is that we have a German Evangelical current running through the “Four Streams” that came together to become who we are today. As the UCC determined what kind of organizational structure we might have as we melded the German Reformed, Congregational, German Evangelical, and Christian denominations, we held tightly to the Congregationalist value of autonomy at the local church level. This accounts for the wide variations in our churches today—you won’t find cookie-cutter worship experiences or even Christologies from one church to the next, making for wonderful diversity and expression across the denomination. It also means that a church with an over-arching message at the national denominational level can have dissenters at the local level, and those churches are still fully embraced as a semi-dischordantly harmonious part of the whole. You know, until a resolution comes up that bars one expression of faith within the UCC from participating in the exhibit hall. Then there’s not so much harmony.

This resolution popped into my head the other day as I was chatting with my incredible friend Ellie. (Seriously, please do yourself a favor and bookmark her blog. She’s amazing.) We were chewing on the conundrum of when it becomes a divisive act of hate to exclude people who we disagree with based on their (probably divisive and hateful) different points of view. How are we able to love our neighbor when their point of view hurts us or the people we love? Are we failing at it by fighting against them? I know that it seems maybe too meta-progressive to go down that kind of rabbit hole, but that’s where we tend to go when we talk.

The goal of the resolution was to keep the exhibit hall a safe space for the many LGBTQ folks at General Synod, and to basically align our spaces with our denominational tagline, “a just world for all.” However, in doing so, it excluded a group from within the fold. The discussion for this resolution was heated, with many people coming forward to express the pros and cons of drawing such a divisive line. There were personal testimonies and pleas for the delegates to vote in favor of the resoltuon to keep the exhibit space safe and free from harmful hate speech. There was a statement by the ONA Coalition that was circulated on fliers that said that they did not support the resolution, saying, “But our ministry of radical transformation will not succeed—and we will not reach our goal of a “100% Open and Affirming church”—if we evict from public spaces the congregations that are not yet ready for an ONA commitment” And then there was, of course, the FWC movement’s own request that they continue to be granted the same space as anyone else from within the denomination would be, as they made their way from one regional gathering to the next.

The resolution was eventually tabled, and it was decided that there would be a behavioral covenant that would be developed by the various Historically Underrepresented Groups (HUGs) within the UCC.

How extravagant can our welcome truly be? Does allowing a group that has taken a position against the LGBTQ community to set up a banner and hand out pamphlets do more harm than uninviting them to the table—a table that they still find value in sitting at, despite theological differences? Are we doing a disservice to the queer clergy, lay leaders, and members of our denomination who have come to us because we are a safe(r) place for them to be the people God created them to be? When does tolerance become complicity? When does justice become a weapon and create more division?How has our local church autonomy, which gives each church a unique flair, hampered or helped our denominational direction and unity?

I don’t have answers to any of this, but I do appreciate that our organizational structure is such that it opens up a space where we have to pause and think deeply on what it means to embody both the unity implied in our mutual recognition of Jesus Christ as the sole head of the church AND the work it takes to truly realize a just world for all. Oliver Powell wasn’t kidding when he wrote that the United Church of Christ is a “beautiful, heady, exasperating mix” and to be honest, until we can truly know the answers to these questions, I wouldn’t have it any other way.