 It is a joy for me to introduce to you this evening our new General Minister and President the Reverend, Dr. John C. Dorhauer. Thank you for that warm welcome. You're very kind. I do want to do a couple of things before I begin. I want to bring some thanks, and I do at the risk of leaving out some folk, but I'm going to do it anyway. First and foremost, the man who has for about 10 years been my closest friend and confidante in ministry, Kent Salati. It's a short list of people now that I can share everything I need to share with in order to remain spiritually sound. Kent is on that short list. He's a brother to me. It's one of those moments where you meet somebody, and he said this earlier for the first time, and you know that you are lifelong spiritual companions. And so being here at this time with that man brings great joy to me. I want to thank the inimitable Deima Callister, with whom I spent a weekend two weeks ago in Kansas, Oklahoma, racing go-karts and talking about white privilege. Where's Chris Davies? Chris, so this is news to all of you. If you were at the presentation this afternoon, you heard me talk about stage one of a strategic plan that the board is undertaking, and that stage one would begin with the deployment of a task force of under 40s to help in the first stage of this strategic planning answer the question for the United Church to Christ to remain relevant in the next 10 years, what do we need to look like? And I put a short list of people that I wanted to be on that task force, and a list of one together that I wanted to chair the task force, and my first call was to Chris to ask her if she would chair that, and she said yes with enthusiasm, without hesitation. So the future of the United Church of Christ dressed in your hands, Chris. I feel pretty good about that. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to start by telling a story about a call, a misdirection, a manipulation, a promise, and a redirection. Then I'm going to talk about a couple of biblical passages that have been foundational for me, all serving as prelude to really what I want to talk to you about, which is the question why me. And what I'm going to do is answer that question as if the me in the question were the United Church of Christ. Why me? Why the United Church of Christ? So we start with the story of my call. I was the second child, but the first of six boys born in succession in a rather large, very strict Catholic household, and from the time of age you start thinking about what you're going to do when you grow up, I knew I was going to be a priest. Now I didn't have any doubt about that. When I finally spoke that out loud to my classmates, they laughed in my face. The only F I ever got was an F in contact. So the thought of me going into the priesthood was not something that fit with their image of who I was, but I knew that's what I was called to do. And so it was when I graduated from Catholic grade school, I went immediately into the Catholic Seminary right out of grade school and spent the next eight years in the Catholic Seminary. And here's what happened over those eight years. Everybody would start teaching to me, the doctrine, the canon law. And long before I thought I had the right to question any of that, my curiosity compelled me to ask questions about those teachings. And my experience was, and others have different experiences, but this was mine and it was important, that the questions are not appropriate, that these are the teachings of the church and they have been for 2,000 years, who are we and who are you to question that. I lived with that for a while and for a long time I thought, you know what, when I get ordained I'm going to change that. Yeah, you get the hilarity in that. As I matured a couple of things started to dawn on me, one, I wasn't going to change that. And two, a valve ordination in the Catholic Church would require a valve of obedience, which I was more than willing to offer, but for the fact that that valve of obedience would require me to teach the members of my church to hold fast to those things which I had not yet come to accept as true for myself. And I knew I couldn't do that with integrity. This is where the misdirection comes in. I thought that meant letting go of my call to ministry. That was painful. I was convinced that this was my calling and I was overcome not just with sadness and grief about letting go of that, but a tremendous sense of guilt that if indeed God had called me to this then why was I so willing to walk away from that. So after eight years in the seminary having made the decision not to go on, really what as I look back on it could have only been out of a sense of guilt, within two days of doing that I went and joined a missionary group, the Marianists. And it would take me two and a half months to complete all the psychological testing, to go to New York where I would learn Chinese language and Chinese culture and then be sent overseas to spend the rest of my life as a missionary in China. That was plan B. I had no idea there was a plan C. This is where the manipulation comes in. Only a week after I left the Catholic Seminary and within that week had joined the Marianists as a missionary. My wife served as the maid of honor. This is my wife now 31 years in my brother's wedding. It turns out my brother would marry my wife's best friend. And she tells me that when I read 1 Corinthians chapter 12 at my brother's wedding that's when she fell in love with me. Now I'm fresh out of seminary, eight years in an all-male celibate cloistered environment thinking I'm heading to China as a missionary. And a week later I'm reading that scripture passage. My brother and his wife go off on their honeymoon and they come back from the honeymoon. I had house set for them and they walk in the door and they say before you go we need to ask you something. Somebody came to us and wanted to know that now that you're not in the seminary would you be open to going on a date? I said okay. Then they went to meet me. That's my wife and said I'm not going to tell you who but somebody's asking. You see the manipulation part of the story? And so it was that my wife and I went to a Joni Mitchell concert and afterwards on the parking lot as I tell the story what happened is she attacked me. Now I'm willing to grant that having spent eight years in a cloistered celibate environment and getting my first kiss what felt to me like an attack probably wasn't. She certainly overwhelmed me. And I found myself falling in love with this woman and I mean I spent a summer not at all being able to figure out what in the world was going on in my life. I'm headed to China. How is this happening? And I went to all of my mentors and spiritual directors and elders and Al said the same thing. Jon you've been in an all male environment for eight years. You're out one week. You're going to throw away your whole pathway and something inside of me said it makes no sense but that's exactly what I'm going to do. And a year later we were married and here's the promise part of this. It wasn't just the vows that we exchanged. Those of course were promises but there was something else we did in that wedding ceremony that meant a lot to us that maybe wasn't fully understood by those who were there. We were very intentional about choosing this passage from Joshua 24 as our wedding verse. It reads it's the 15th verse of the 24th chapter. Choose this day whom you will serve as for me and my household we will serve the Lord. And we both were saying right there in front of everybody that our responsibility together is to follow the call of God wherever it leads us. That was the promise. Here comes the redirection. My first test, our first test of that came about three months after our marriage began and I was cooking dinner in our house for her family who was over for the afternoon when without introduction of any kind her brother walks into the kitchen looks me in the eyes and says just because you're no longer Catholic doesn't mean you're no longer called. Now I had been scratching my head for about two years wondering what you do with a degree in Aristotelian Thomistic philosophy and really having no idea what was about to be laid out in front of me. But the moment he spoke those words and went all the way back to my childhood and that sense of call and I knew I knew the moment he said that what would come next. And so they left I'm laying in bed with my wife that night I tell her the story and I say are you willing to go back in the seminary with me are you willing to let this unfold she didn't even hesitate. And so it was that now Lutheran this Catholic ended up looking all over the place for a seminary that would be consistent with our theology. In St. Louis the home of the St. Louis Cardinals. She was pregnant with our first child we didn't want to uproot the family. And then I walked on to the campus of Eden Theological Seminary where I met the dean of students David Greenhawn now president of Eden Theological Seminary. I was working with a painting contractor that's the answer to the question who's hiring with a degree in Aristotelian Thomistic philosophy paint splatters all over me staking the high heaven at the end of the day walking into the seminary dean of students and saying I'd like to come here. His first words to me John if you come here you're going to have to learn to question everything. Literally you had me at hello. I knew I was home. And I knew that my pathway had been redirected in ways that I could have never anticipated. The United Church of Christ became our spiritual home. It became what Dick Sparrow would call the church of our heart. Now I'm going to introduce those two Bible passages to you here and then I'm going to pursue an answer to the question why the United Church of Christ why us. The first passage was an assignment in my second year of seminary my first homiletics course and it was pick one of these eight passages exegete it and preach your first trial sermon. One of the passages was Acts chapter 10 verse number 34 and the moment I read the opening line I knew that that would not only be the passage I would exegete for the class this would become the passage upon which the entire foundation of my future ministry would be built. The passage reads it's the opening line to Peter's sermon to Cornelius truly I perceive that God shows no partiality I have come to believe now this is my belief you know it carries no more weight than I believe it that that's the single most important passage in the New Testament to set the context the church in that first 10 chapters of the Acts of the Apostles was engaged in its first big battle its first real controversy the first argument that threatened to tear everything apart and it of course was the argument about circumcision and ultimately a question about who's in and who's out and why and to what extent does adherence to the law govern whether or not you're in or out and in the one camp you had James in the Jerusalem council arguing that the law is the law we will abide by and in the other camp you had Paul who was saying things like there is no longer June or Greek slave nor free male or female while one in Christ and it was actually bringing people into the flock without asking them to be circumcised preaching even to the Gentiles and in the middle of all of that was Peter who is it's recorded throughout the Acts of the Apostles sort of flip-flopped and waffled on this depending on where he was but there's no question about where he was when we get to the oh the 10th chapter he had just had this dream about these animals coming from heaven take kill eat i cannot take kill and eat for these animals are unclean and then the voice saying what i tell you is clean don't you tell me is unclean now even that dream is in a context this is the Peter who had three times failed his test with Jesus on the night Jesus died i'll never deny you before the night's over three times you'll deny me i will never deny you and he did and i can just imagine in this dream that Peter's thinking he's being tested again and i'm not going to fail this test those animals are not clean i know it and i know it because you told me the narrator doesn't identify the voice that says what i tell you is clean don't you tell me is unclean but we all know whose voice that is and it's the same voice that convinced peter by law that they were unclean something's going on here some new thing is happening and at the time that the church was invested in this argument the holy spirit was no longer laying away on the sidelines this was the holy spirit's direct intervention in this debate saying to peter what i tell you is clean don't you tell me is unclean comes out of that dream three times he has that dream three times he hears the voice three times he responds the same way in three times the voice is what i tell you is clean don't you tell me is unclean he wakes up from the dream and there's a knock on the door from the servant of Cornelius will you come and preach to my family my Gentile family my uncircumcised family i got to believe that when peter said yes to that he did so with a bit of hesitation and discomfort but feeling like the dream had something to do with the invitation and he had some time over a couple of days journey to the home of Cornelius to work this out in his head and he declared his voice in this space of conflict when he spoke the opening lines truly i perceive now that god shows no partiality and then an amazing thing happened the pattern in the acts of the apostles which is repeated over and over and over again is the apostles preach the people are moved and converted they are taken into the waters for baptism at which point the holy spirit comes upon them hear the pattern breaks we are told that while peter was still preaching before they were baptized and therefore before they were circumcised the holy spirit came even upon the Gentiles which point peter stops his preaching takes the family out to the waters and baptizes them chapter 10 closes and chapter 11 opens up where peter is dragged before the Jerusalem council in James and asked to defend himself there is after all this controversy going on and james has already declared his position on it is it true peter that you baptized the gentiles is it true peter that you declared god shows no partiality because if you did we've got a problem now as brilliant as peter was in interpreting the dream and declaring that god shows no partiality what he says in his defense in chapter 11 is even more stunningly brilliant this is peter it is best he never got any better than this moment when peter says in his defense hey i had a dream i'm preaching and the holy spirit came upon the Gentiles if god gave them the same gift god gave us when we believe then who am i to hinder god peter's saying your problem's not with me it's with god and the question for the church in that time and from that time forward has always been not can you accept the other but can you accept a god who already has which is why the first answer to the question why the united church of christ is our fundamental belief that no matter who you are or where you are on life's journey you're welcome here we have covenanted with one another to reimagine what the church looks like when it's rebuilt and recreated in the image and likeness of a god who shows no partiality and as the holy spirit is looking to birth shalom all over the world the holy spirit will continue to invest herself in a people committed without equivocation or apology to rebuilding a church in that way and so when we look at the landscape of the future we know we already know that some of the churches that we have birthed and built for the sake of our mission are going to die and disappear and we're going to grieve that deeply but the mission for which this church was built is not disappearing and when the holy spirit asks the question who who is with me in preaching this gospel without apology without equivocation it's the united church of christ that will stand up first and proudly say we are here we will partner with you to build a church recreated in the image and likeness of a god who shows no partiality the second verse is one we all know any of you wearing your ucc emblem can read it right now with me stan chapter 20 verse 17 that day may all be one i've often asked myself if i were a dying savior i really haven't often asked that but when i exegeted this passage i became curious about that you know here jesus is on the night his last night on earth chapter 14 of the god town's gospel chapter 15 chapter 16 it's clear he's spending one last moment with his disciples and those three chapters record all of the things that he tried to teach them knowing he had one last chance with them to get it right and at the end of that in the 17th chapter he stops teaching and he starts praying this is where i've asked myself exegeting the text if i were a dying savior what would i pray for i'm not sure that i would have the wisdom to pray for their unity but by golly that's what it takes and then i asked myself why jesus being the wise one that he is he knew what would be the essential ingredient without which nobody would take our proclamation seriously he knew he knew that if our task was to preach the gospel to all the ends of the earth proclaiming the power of god's redeeming and transformative love if in doing that we couldn't demonstrate our love for one another then who would take us seriously and how many of us serving our role as evangelists preaching the gospel have heard said to us that you all are a bunch of hypocrites you talk about love but you can't love one another i hear that all the time and they're not wrong jesus knew that the only way this works is for us to find a way to love each other beyond our differences that they may all be one and so it was in 1957 that these four disparate bodies promised themselves that they would construct a table in such a way that when we got here none of the differences none of the controversies none of the conflicts none of the disagreements about theology or about politics would keep us from coming to this table as a unified body and if there's one thing our children and grandchildren already believe it's in the power of the human community to live as one in shalom with each other now what happened in 1957 was special and we know that built into our DNA not just because of what happened in 1957 but because of what happened to us hundreds of years before that we were the people to answer that call to be one but it wasn't enough we are living in a day and in a time when the call to bring the body of christ together is one is a noble calling but it's not a sufficient calling the body of christ unified must begin to behave in such a way that it sees itself as a part of a movement that includes other partners including other interfaith partners and when the holy spirit whose desire it is to reshape human community and the fulfillment of god's vision of shalom looks out and says who among us is willing to open their doors and their hearts wide it is the united church of christ built to fulfill that promise that they may all be one that says we're ready for this a story i told this story earlier last week paul russian bush wrote on the huffington post about demonstrations that were scheduled by white supremacists in at least 20 cities exercising their first and second amendment rights outside of mosques temples and muslim houses of worship and at the end of the article he he decried the fact that no religious christian body had yet spoken out about this and so it was by the end of the afternoon in conversation with my collegium partners ben guest jim mose and bentley debaard elaban that we crafted a statement that we immediately sent out to our conference ministers they immediately sent out to the churches and within a couple of hours on facebook things were already being organized that went out on friday and there were demonstrations of support all over the country by monday the memes that were spreading quoting that letter hit over 90 000 hits and in high rich missouri on sunday morning a muslim mother and father with their two children cracked open the front doors of the united church of christ in high rich missouri a small rural all-white church imagine you're that couple and you've never been in a church before and your experience of christians is that they condemn you they beat you with impunity and something tells you to open that door and walk into that sanctuary which they did about 10 minutes into the service imagine the courage it took not only to open the door but then to ask the minister if you may speak which is what they did pastor had the good instincts to stop the service and let them speak and they talked about a united church of christ that for the first time stood up and proclaimed its solidarity with the people of the muslim faith and all they wanted to say was thank you they stayed for the worship they stayed for the fellowship hour afterwards about a dozen families from the church have reached out to them in the day's sense and invited them in for dinner invited them back to worship asked them how they're doing this is the united church of christ the holy spirit is unwilling to invest in we know this we've got this and so when the question is put to us why us well the holy spirit says because you are the people built to do what makes shalom possible little that i know is a child growing up that i would one day stand before you your general minister and president i can't tell you what an honor and a privilege it is and i know the holy spirit and visions of future in which we matter because we will live out our commitment to unify the body and to recreate the church and the world and the image and likeness of a god who shows no partiality there have been a few surreal moments for me as your general minister and president one happened about three weeks ago when the pope was here and i found myself at the dais in the front of the national cathedral with the senator the good senator from rhoda island shelled in white house to my left and the ambassador from south africa on my right you know that old sesame street song one of these things doesn't belong here i'm still john doorhour my first church was a town of in a town of 220 people 10 miles from a gallon of gas and a loaf of bread you can't get here from there and then it dawned on me i'm the general minister and president of one of the most powerful agents of social transformation in the world's every now we belong we matter this is the united church of christ i am proud to call myself your general minister and president i am proud to lead us in a movement that has the capacity to change the world and we are going to experience some grief and loss over the next decade or two make no mistake about it but the holy spirit is already filling up the ground in which we will walk and in which our children and grandchildren will walk and our best days are yet ahead of us thank you for listening if you have questions for dr doorhoward please proceed to any microphone hi beautiful presentation please say your name and church before your question uh nancy baxter both two churches newington and center church um let's say having been in this denomination all my life i've lived through many ups and downs with it always been very proud of it seeing a lot of people leave because of it and my deepest concern as i hear especially us clergy concerned about justice i hear you concern about justice is in fact how we do justice to the people in the pews who are learning where we come from and why we are presenting jesus in this Atlanta um i think if there's an area that we're really weak in it's in uh maintaining the quality of the community that if we want people to go forward and join us in a wonderful mission whatever the church is called to um i think we need to really work hard at uniting one another in love at the same time thank you um a couple of stories both featuring william slumkoff and one of my heroes i got the the opportunity to spend a week with him he was leading preaching and teaching for change workshop that i helped organize and at the end of every day we would sit in his hotel room and he would sip his vodka and just tell stories imaginable and two things one was a story that he told that i'm going to have to edit for this audience he had finished a lecture at new york university where he sometimes taught and young woman came up to him afterwards and said i don't know how you get away with saying what you do from the pulpit and he looked at her and he said i get away with it because i'm a leaping good pastor that taught me a lot about what you're saying that it's one thing to be a prophet it's another thing to be a pastor and be called to a church and to love them right where they are so halfway through the week i wanted to impress him i was a young pastor and this is my hero and so i told a story of my prophetic witness thinking i would get a little pat on the head and he looked at me with that cup of vodka in his hand kind of wagged his head a little bit and said john true but not helpful i had to learn how to be a pastor for eight years in a rural community with a prophetic voice i had to learn again how to be a pastor with a prophetic voice in a small town in the bible belp of leaven in missouri when i finished my interview with the search committee for that church hugh quarry of mine would come to know was the patriarch of the church looked at me and said john you and i are never going to agree on anything but nobody will fight harder for your right to preach the gospel than i will and he was right about both things we would sit in sunday school after sunday school after sunday school together and prove that we wouldn't agree on anything but he truly had the spirit of what it meant to be a part of the body of christ when he created space for me to be the pastor that i was called to be every one of us is a part of a worshiping community that has people of a variety of viewpoints we're not asked to mitigate our truth or apologize for it we're asked to present our truth in ways that create space for other truths to also be heard and heard in a way that have the power to affect change within us and if we do that we can be what the spirit is calling us to be anything short of that and we miss the mark and i can tell you from experience i've missed the mark more than a few times but i think i've had the grace to be forgiven at the end of that and and learn the capacity to be loved beyond that and to be a different kind of person so thank you when you go into a mic please speak into the mic thank you matthew every i'm the senior minister at the store's congregational church and my question is not entirely unrelated i want to sort of drive at this question of our centering and grounding um you're not the first person in the united church of christ in recent years to speak about you know being a part of a movement that has other partners and and and the idea of church as movement and not institution and yet i'm wondering about uh as i recall your own quoting uh at general synod of the quote from the former um ncc president about denominations be having that vocation of of uh holding on to a particular piece that would otherwise be lost i'm wondering about that even further generalized to the church when when i hear a lot of language about being part of movement um get enough caught up in that that we lose sight of what it is that we have uniquely to offer as church um uh and even even you know as you use the language of the gospel what is the gospel what is the gospel for us and how are we grounded in that i'm i'm reminded of uh the interview about three or so weeks ago with uh nadia bolds weberrod fresh air um with terry gross and uh and uh we're we're nadia said at her church they don't talk about activism social causes all that because her people are out there doing that already they come to her church to hear about sin and salvation justification and sanctification the the font and the table uh you know word and uh and christ you know and i i just um wonder for us as the united church of christ how do we how do we move in the direction that you're speaking of while not losing our centering centredness in the fact that we are church and not simply a social movement so it is either true that the teachings of jesus and the worship of jesus in ways enlightened that enable us to enter the world and be a part of the human community with gentility compassion and kindness or it's something else i happen to believe that that's exactly what that pathway does for me and if we enter this movement with anything but clarity and pride about who jesus is to us we're of no use to the movement and if his teachings and his abiding presence are not there to sustain us in this movement we are of no use to those who are partnering with us but what has been too long the case for too many is that jesus is not presented as our pathway or a pathway but the only legitimate pathway to what we envision as a future show if we become that we're of no use to the movement so our devotion to the gospel our passion for the teachings of jesus our sustenance of the abiding presence of jesus through his holy spirit is there to sustain us as movement builders may be too strong a word as participants in a movement that has the capacity to change the world as we know it now we're going to encounter along the way those for whom the dow feeds them in that way and sustains them and opens up their heart and eyes to enter human community safely and compassionately and kindly and we're going to encounter those for whom the cabalist movement is their source of that and we're going to meet people on the way for whom a simple walk down a mountain pathway is what does it for them and who aren't sure that any god exists in their presence we will claim the legitimacy of our faith we will testify to the sustenance of our faith and that will feed us for the journey but we will be partners with many others on this way it's in bebo i'm the interim pastor at torrington church and i need your help with the question our church has been kind of attached loosely to the denomination and i get a history of the ucc explaining all the different parts and at the end of it a woman said to me i get it but if we had it all together as congregationalists already what did we get from the ucc so there's the question so i'm about to say it's true the congregationalists it's true of the christians it's true of the evangelicals it's true of the reformed it's true of the Methodist it's true of the Presbyterians it's true of the united turks Christ did none of us had it all together and the point at which we imagined we did is the point at which we've compromised our ability to fulfill our missional purpose and calling and the more we begin to realize that our unity at the table our unity across the walls of division that separate us is what enables our ability to fulfill our missional calling is the extent to which we will be relevant and credible in the future undertaking of our shared mission and what the congregationalists figured out is that those partnerships are essential it's at the heart of that simple prayer that they may all be one and as brilliant as the congregationalists were in creating a way to be church and fulfill the gospel call and the missional undertaking and by the way i'm a direct descendant of jenna howling who came over on the mayflower the raised catholic i am a died in the wool congregationalists as brilliant as they were they didn't have it all together there's a passage in x that says that they were all together in one place we can get back to that where being congregationalists in the congregational way is an important ingredient without which the body of christ can't be fully built but we can look across the aisle and see that the evangelical way is an essential piece of building the body of christ in such a way that without it we can't fulfill all that god envisions as possible it is this undertaking that will make the gospel come alive again in our time as it did in 1957 and then the other thing that i want to say is i'm not exactly sure how you phrase that what does the united church of christ have to offer us there are two responses to that you are the united church of christ and without you there is no united church of christ and i don't know how to say this without coming across is i'm not as interested in answering the question what do you have to offer us is i am the question that isaia was asked how are you called to serve and it is in wrestling with and discerning that question that the church and the gospel come alive i hope that doesn't come across as i don't know arrogant all right for aisle first microphone thank you hi john i'm bob from rocky hill congregational church um we're coming up on an ugly election season can you offer us a pastoral word to sustain us as a people of the church so from the days of the roman empire and its power over the fledgling way that was the the church when we knew it in that first generation through this day from the time of moses under the hand of the mighty pharaoh we have imagined getting government right determines the successful outcome of our missional endeavors and yet history teaches us that many more times than not we're going to get government wrong and the gospel continues to be preached and lives continue to be changed now i say that knowing as we all do that elections matter and that who serves in power has a direct impact on how people live their lives when your bush was elected and one of my brothers said to another one of my brothers that's the end of america as we know it then i remember when bill clinton was elected and that brother said to the same other brother this is the end of america as we know it good people we do good things