General Synod Reflections from Pastor JT

The theme from General Synod 2025

This month, I attended to our connection with the wider church as a visitor at General Synod our national church gathering, as did Darlene Wong as a voting delegate.  One of my takeaways from the gathering was an actual physical takeaway; I bought a few copies of the freshly minted United Church of Christ Manual on Local Church.  Commissioned by the 2019 General Synod gathering, and published just last month, the Manual on Church is a kind of guidebook, an informational one-stop-shop for questions individual churches might have about how to function. As it says on the cover page, “The Manual on Local Church is for all settings of the Church to use, to fully live into their covenantal responsibilities and privileges under the Constitution of the United Church of Christ.”

As you read the Manual on Church, there’s one word that keeps coming up over and over and over again: covenant.  In the United Church of Christ, we are bound together by an active commitment to be in relationship with each other, which we define as covenant.  Don’t think of our connections to each other like a requirement as in a contract, but rather an intentional willingness to support each other that we choose each and every day.

We see this in practice in how our church functions: our major decisions are only made through official church meetings in which every active member of the church has voice and vote.  The same is true in our association: every church can send lay delegates in addition to clergy to association meetings, each with voice and vote to make major decisions together.  And though it might be too cumbersome for us to send a delegate from each UCC local church to General Synod, each conference does send a diverse delegation meant to represent the many differences among the churches, with the hope that each perspective has a voice and vote represented in the national gathering.  How engaged we are in the process depends on the choices we make as an individual congregation.

And the process works in reverse as well.  The delegates of General Synod vote on resolutions throughout their time together, discerning God’s calling deep within the issues of the day.  For example, this month at General Synod, the delegates approved thirteen different resolutions.  Some of them were resolutions called Prudential Resolutions, meaning a resolution addressing matters of policy, structure, and procedures.  A great example of this were the twin resolutions to recognize full communion with churches in Puerto Rico and Germany, meaning that we recognized the ministerial authorization of both churches as the same as our own, and we will work to partner with them on ministry matters in the future.

Other resolutions at General Synod are called Resolutions of Witness, meaning a resolution concerning a moral, ethical, or religious matter confronting the church, the nation, or the world.  A great example from this General Synod was a resolution on the Recognition of the Continually-Evolving Language of Mental Health.  It is a resolution calling on congregations to be aware of how language changes over time, sometimes quickly, and that ignoring these shifts in language may cause harm to individuals in our congregations, particularly as it pertains to mental health.

Because this resolution passed, you might ask, “well, what does this mean for our church?”  That’s where our covenant comes in.  Because of how our polity works, we are not required to follow this or any other Resolution of Witness to the letter.  Instead, we are invited by our covenants with each other and with the wider church to read each Resolution of Witness and discern how we might engage with them in our local context.  You can read up on the resolutions passed at this General Synod

, and see which resolutions speak to you so that we might discern what action to take.

Not every resolution has a deep connection with every local congregation.  Some churches may not see a way to engage with a resolution right now, but we still have a responsibility to our covenant to learn about the resolutions and see where we might find ourselves in them.  And though our individual local church may not engage with a resolution right now, our covenantal relationships mean that there is some part of the UCC working through that resolution, whether it be an individual, a local church, an association, a conference, or the national setting.

This aspect of covenant always gives me hope.  I love that I’m a part of a church that thinks it’s important to understand how the words we use now may need to evolve in order to help our fellow children of God feel comfortable and safe in our community.  I love that I’m a part of a church that gives the whole church the opportunity to be a part of the discussion and vote on the issues that confront our church and our world these days.  And I love that I’m part of a church that gives me, gives us, the choice on how best to engage with these ideas in our own communities.  That’s what our covenant is about, promises we make to each other that knit us together into one body even as we bring all the diversity of our many parts to that body.

This is why I love going to General Synod every two years (and newly changed to every three years).  It’s a way to remind ourselves of the covenants we share with each other.  We get to engage in those covenants through our local church, through our association, through our conference, through the national church, and through the ways we interact with the world at each and every setting of our church and our lives.  The more we engage in these covenants, the more we’re able to engage with the work of the Holy Spirit as faithful witnesses to the gospel of love that starts with Jesus Christ.