The United Church of Christ took a step July 14 to deepen its relationship with a very old friend.
The UCC’s General Synod, meeting in Kansas City, voted to be in “full communion” with its longtime partner, the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, or the Protestant Church in Germany.
Delegates approved a resolution to that effect by a vote of 641 for, 1 against and 11 abstaining. The relationship now awaits the German church’s vote on a similar resolution.
Full communion is not a merger or union. Rather, the World Council of Churches has laid out a vision for this kind of relationship between churches. It involves:
• common confession of Christ
• mutual recognition of members
• common celebration of the Holy Communion
• mutual recognition and reconciliation of ordained ministries, and
• common commitment to mission.
More on full-communion relationships, including those that the UCC shares with other denominations, can be found here.
The UCC, its German partner and their forerunners have ties of history and friendship dating back to the 19th century.
The two have formally been “Kirchengemeinschaft” or “church fellowship” partners at their national levels for decades. They have kept this fresh and updated through changes in denominational structure in Germany. They have supported each other in such ministries as the fight against racism.
And they’ve long been friends locally and regionally as well. A number of UCC local churches and Conferences have direct partnerships with German counterparts.
“This resolution that we passed today of full communion is just awesome,” said the Rev. Barbara Kershner Daniel, ordained for 40 years in the UCC. She has seen the partnership firsthand as pastor of churches of German American heritage in Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Evangelical Reformed UCC in Frederick, Maryland, from which Kershner Daniel retired in 2023, has had youth partnerships with churches in western and eastern Germany since 2015. “Also, we’ve had exchanges with adults,” Kershner Daniel said. For example, on Jan. 6, 2021, the day of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, “our German partners joined us for a prayer service that evening.”
“We share so much history together, so many concerns that are the same around justice and the climate and peace,” she said. “I’m just so grateful that our colleagues in Germany will know that they have our full participation and support as we move forward together in ministry.”
A similar testimony on the Synod floor came from delegate Nikita Fischer of Dubois, Indiana. She spoke of the ongoing relationship between the UCC’s Indiana-Kentucky Conference and the EKD. “We have a program called the young ambassadors which I was very grateful to be part of,” Fischer said. “I just wanted to speak to the immense love and embodiment of Christ that the EKD has so gratefully shown us.”
The UCC and the Evangelische Kirche evolved, in part, from the same 19th-century German root. When five streams of Christianity united in 1957 to form the UCC, two of them were German American. One was the Evangelical Synod of North America, a blend of Reformed and Lutheran traditions. Through that history, the UCC and the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland trace their history to the same church.
Christopher Cole of Watertown, Conn., urged the Synod to approve the full-communion resolution. He chaired a committee of delegates who reviewed the resolution and recommended a yes vote. ““By standing together in full communion, we become stronger in our witness,” he said. “We amplify our commitments to justice, peace and the care of creation. We deepen our capacity to respond to global challenges, not as fragmented voices but as a united body proclaiming the gospel of love and liberation.”
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