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Dear Folks:
In my confirmation class, and then later in seminary, I learned that the UCC was formed by “four streams”— Congregational, Christian, Evangelical, Reformed. Congregationalism goes back to the Pilgrims, Christian was a uniquely American frontier denomination, and the Evangelical and Reformed churches were German, arriving in the decades before the Revolution (Reformed) and the decades before the Civil War (Evangelical). In mid-20th century, they came together to form the United Church of Christ.
The story of the mergers missed an important fifth stream, the Afro-Christian Convention and the Black Congregationalists in North Carolina and Virginia. The more numerous Afro-Christian Churches were part of the Christian Church, today known as the Disciples of Christ. The Black Congregationalists were seeded by northern abolitionist Congregationalists through the American Missionary Association, which developed schools and colleges to train Black people into Congregationalism. When the Congregational and Christian denominations merged in 1931, the Black Congregationalists and Afro-Christians, while part of the big-tent denomination, were kept separate from their white counterparts; it was finally in 1950 that the two groups joined together in the Black Congregational Christian Convention of the South, and when the UCC was formed in 1957, they found themselves part of this new united and uniting church.
Their struggles have included being Black in a primarily white denomination and the differences between the historical traditions of Black Congregationalists and Afro-Christians. The lasting legacies include Franklinton Center at Bricks, North Carolina, which was formed out of the Franklinton Christian College and the Congregationalist Bricks School. The Franklinton Center has been supported by the UCC’s Justice and Witness Ministries, and became its own 501( c ) 3 in 2015.
“Regardless of when and how you enter the Black sacred cosmos space in the United Church of Christ, you will be blessed by the giftedness of the Afro-Christian Church, now embraced as the fifth stream. The lesson for all who will listen is that to ignore a story doesn’t negate the truth of its existence; to silence a story does not prevent the power of the story to live; and to discover a story doesn’t make it yours unless you embrace it. As long as there are some who remember the story, remember to tell the story, and stand watch over the story, the story lives.”
In Peace and Prayer,
Pastor Tony
[1] Iva E. Caruthers, “Flowing as an Everlasting Stream for Spiritual Transformation: A Global Model of Ubuntu for Justice and Liberation: in Afro-Christian Convention: The Fifth Strea og the United Church of Christ, Yvonne V. Delk, ed. (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2023), p. 120.
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