By Dick Sales

Of course the biggest reason to be a part of Beloved Community Church is to be found right on 41st Street and 2nd Ave. South, and that is how it should be. But Beloved is what we are in part because we are also part of a larger group of churches known as the United Church of Christ, one of the newest and oldest denominations in America.

In the next few issues I’ll suggest some of the perks that we enjoy as part of UCC. First, did you know we are the direct descendants of the Pilgrims who came in 1620 to America in search of freedom to worship as they felt called to do rather than conform to the Church of England? And one of their ‘mottos’ was “God hath more light to unfold from the scriptures.” That doesn’t shock you because we today have modernized the old motto when we say “don’t put a period where God has put a comma.” The UCC encourages innovative ministry (did I hear somebody say ‘amen’?).

Those Pilgrims also pioneered. Through voluntary associations they started schools and colleges, missions to Native Americans and world mission based  in America. The Pilgrim churches became the Congregational Churches and spread through the northern states true to their name as each local church was responsible for its own life and the local churches gathered together to do things that one group couldn’t do alone. In the years before the War Between the States, many Congregational Churches were staunch abolitionists and, after the war, the American Missionary Association started hundreds of schools for the freed slaves, sometimes at great risk to the teachers.

When I came on the scene in 1956, I worked for a year in a church in Connecticut that had been in existence since 1679 before I went overseas to work in Africa where our missionaries had served African people since 1835. So we have one tap root that goes back four hundred years!