History
In 1985 the United Church of Christ's General Synod adopted the Open and Affirming (ONA) resolution, encouraging UCC congregations to welcome (or consider welcoming) gay, lesbian, and bisexual members into their life and programs. Following subsequent General Synod resolutions affirming transgender members of the church, the welcome was extended so that, today, an ONA covenant typically welcomes members of any "sexual orientation" or "gender identity and expression."
The 1985 resolution had no legislative authority over individual congregations, which are autonomous, but set in motion a movement that spread rapidly in the church.
The resolution allocated no funds to support an ONA program in the UCC's national office. As a result, the UCC Coalition for LGBT Concerns launched an ONA program in 1987, headed by the Rev. Ann B. Day and Donna Enberg, which raised funds from individual contributors, sympathetic congregations and private foundations. To this day, the ONA program and the official list of ONA settings is managed by the Coalition, a voluntary organization independent from the church's national office.
New York City's Riverside Church, under the pastoral leadership of the late Rev. William Sloane Coffin, was the first in the UCC to be listed as ONA.
According to the UCC Coalition for LGBT Concerns, more than 1,000 UCC congregations and other settings are listed as officially Open and Affirming as of February 2012. A number of the UCC's 38 conferences, many new church starts, all seven seminaries affiliated with the UCC and six UCC-related campus ministries have adopted ONA statements.
Read more about this topic: Open And Affirming
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set in. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)