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Waitsfield United Church of Christ ...........4334 Main Street (Rte 100)
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Rev Nancy McHugh 496-9511
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UCC in the Media: A Chance to Educate Below are three texts. The first is the full page ad placed by the national UCCin the New York TImes on Wednesday April 2, 2008 Below that is the text of an ad in USA Today explaining that the UCC plans to tackle the issue of race in a "sacred conversation".
Below that is an article from the April 7, 2009, New Yorker magazine on Rev Jeremiah Wright and the Trinity UCC church in Chicago from which he recently retired Presidential candidate Barack Obama is a member of the Trinity UCC church and Rev Wright fiery sermons have been quoted in the media as campaign news. This prompted the UCC ad. The New Yorker article does not address the current media story, but rather looks at Rev Wright's background, the traditional of black preaching, and the relation to other black churches, especially Louis Farakan's Black Muslims. As I lay in bed reading the New Yorker articles, my three year old Miranda woke up, looked at the cartooon of Rev Wright and pointed at him saying, "I like that man." Some people who are unaware of the UCC believe from news stories that it is a radical black denomination. This is an opportunity for us to educate and invite. RIck Rayfield
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from New York Times 04-02-08 full page ad page A13
Much has been said about the United Church of Christ in recent weeks, much of it hurtful for many in our country, including members of Trinity UCC in Chicago. That is why we are eager to share the broad and diverse story of the United Church of Christ, one that we celebrate. With all Christians, we rest in God’s amazing grace and hear God’s voice in the words of Scripture. Yet, the UCC is unique to some because we do not require uniformity of belief. We are a church of open ideas, extravagant welcome and evangelical courage. Our passion for democracy extends to both government and church, where decision-making rests within each congregation. We support liberty in our pulpits, just as we affirm the individual conscience of our 1.2-million members to agree, disagree and wrestle with life’s biggest questions in a spirit of love. Our story is this nation’s story. We are the people of the Mayflower. More than 600 of our 5,700 congregations were formed before 1776. Eleven signers of the Declaration of Independence were members of UCC predecessor bodies. As early abolitionists, we came to the aid of the Amistad captives and founded hundreds of schools across the South after the Civil War. We were the first mainline church to ordain an African-American (1785), a woman (1853) and an openly gay pastor (1972). We were also the first to form a foreign mission society (1810). Our multi-ethnic membership includes persons from every immigrant group, as well as native peoples and descendants of freed slaves. Our unity is not dependent upon uniform agreement, but in our shared allegiance to Jesus Christ. Ours is a risk-taking church, because ours is a risk-taking God. God is still speaking,
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Full Page Ad in USA Today April 11, 2008
Let's Talk about Race "Sacred conversations are never easy," the ad proclaims, "especially when honest talk confronts our nation's painful past and speaks directly to the injustices of the present day. Yet sacred conversations can, and often do, honor the value of diverse life experiences, requiring an openness to hear each other's viewpoints."  
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(That's Rev Wright with the Mike, Obama in the back row, Frederick Douglass I think in front, and Louis Farakan to the right)
Annals of Religion Project Trinity The perilous mission of Obama’s church. by Kelefa Sanneh April 7, 2008 Jeremiah Wright situates his ministry in a lineage of black liberation and deliverance. “I have never seen so many white people here in my life!” It was Good Friday on the South Side of Chicago, at Trinity United Church of Christ, which has been Senator Barack Obama’s church for about twenty years and the most notorious congregation in America for about three and a half weeks. The preacher was in the pulpit, recalling a scene outside the church earlier in the week. He gestured at the reporters who had come to take notes. “I hope you’re tithing,” he said. As millions of people with no particular interest in African-American religious institutions now know, Trinity is home to the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. Since March 13th, when “Good Morning America” broadcast clips of Wright at his most incendiary, he has been an unlikely political celebrity, half of an American odd couple: the fiery, noisy, sixties-influenced spiritual adviser to a Presidential candidate who is supposed to be cool, quiet, and new. Wright’s greatest hits found a home on the Internet and on cable news. There are those seven words he uttered, days after September 11th: “America’s chickens? Are coming home! To roost.” And there’s the way he rewrote a classic Irving Berlin lyric: “Not ‘God bless America.’ ‘God damn America!’ ” But by the time the scandal broke Wright was already gone. He had announced his retirement at the age of sixty-six, preaching his last sermon at Trinity on February 10th, and he kept out of sight while the controversy deepened.
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Wright was born into the pulpit. His father, Jeremiah A. Wright, Sr., was a preacher, the leader of the Grace Baptist Church of Germantown, in Philadelphia. The younger Wright started his undergraduate career at Virginia Union University, his father’s alma mater, and, after a few years in the Marines and the Navy (he was a medical technician), he graduated from Howard University, in 1968, with a degree in English. Seven years later, he earned a master’s degree from the University of Chicago. Even during Wright’s early years at Trinity, political provocation was part of his approach, although some of his gestures—like the “Free South Africa” banner he hung across the old church building in 1977—don’t seem terribly controversial now. On Chicago’s South Side, they probably never did. Although Cone’s work had a major influence on him, Wright was carried along, too, by his own research and inclinations.
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