Is there a difference...

[CanIHunt]

Between the "Churches of Christ", "Congregational" and "United Church of Christ" or are those just three different names for same Church?

 

[Korah]

Between the "Churches of Christ", "Congregational" and "United Church of Christ" or are those just three different names for same Church?

The latter two are basically identical, with the last being the new name for the groups that merged to form it.
Church of Christ is a Fundamentalist group with a free-will theology in opposition to the Calvinism from which it sprang around 1800.

 

[CanIHunt]

Thank you. What does free-will theology mean? Are there any other major differences in their belief system?

 

[Korah]

In spite of being (or at least claiming) to be so New Testament in their nature, they overlook the Predestinarian (but not Calvinistic) nature of Paul's teaching and instead insert 1800 US frontier-culture American agrarian individualism. Like anybody else, they believe what they want to believe. They're only "New Testament only" to the extent it fits early 19th Century Border State mentality.

 

[CanIHunt]

ok thank you for the response.

 

[RevTellez]

The United Church of Christ was formed when two Protestant churches, the Evangelical and Reformed Church and the General Council of the Congregational Christian Churches united in 1957. This union adopted an earlier general statement of unity between the two denominations, the 1943 "Basis of Union". At this time, the UCC claimed about two million members. In 1959, in its General Synod, the UCC adopted a broad "Statement of Faith". The UCC adopted its constitution and by-laws in 1961.

 

[Korah]

Waiting for the other shoe to drop....
Namely how many UCC adherents are there now. Mainline denominations have been in retreat for decades. The UCC is the most liberal "mainline" denomination, so how bad are the numbers?
I'm not gloating. As a Higher Critic and anti-Calvinist I'm the ultimate apologist for Mainline Christianity. Except now Mainline has gone too liberal for even me. I'm ELCA, but looking for something more conservative.

 

[RevTellez]

At the end of 2012, there were 5,154 active congregations of the United Church of Christ with a total of 998,906 members. Churches and members were concentrated largely in the Midwestern / Northern states of Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and the New England states of Connecticut and Massachusetts with 53% of membership in these six states alone

 

[Korah]

Thank you.
Do you happen to know whether any UCC "parishes" (er, "congregations", right?) in the Sacramento-Fairfield axis of the Central Valley in California happen to be enough less liberal that I might want to check them out? I do know that one in Sacramento is ministered by a lesbian, so presumably not that one. (Theoretically I would not object to a "non-practicing" lesbian if she is sufficiently Creedal and "neo-Biblical" for me. I just now invented that term to mean someone taking the Bible seriously, but non-Calvinist and in the light of Higher Criticism bracketing some of the Old Testament.)