To Be or Not to Be...Dual-Denomination.That Is the Question!

We start 2026 as one congregation, one people of God, a merger of Pilgrim and Riverview Park. A lot of wonderful work has been done by so many people to get us to this point, and we have more work to do, as we consider whether or not to be a dual-denomination congregation, one that has a foot in both the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

We’ll be discussing that question at our annual meeting on Sunday, January 25. To help us prepare for that consideration, I thought I’d do a quick recap of some of the points I made during my series of sermons this past fall on the differences and similarities of the two denominations.

Both the UCC and the DoC have historically worked to bring about Christian unity. For the UCC, that meant the coming together of four Christian traditions in 1957: The Evangelical Synod of North America, Congregational Churches, Christian Churches, and the Reformed Church in the United States. Much of the UCC’s roots can be traced back to Europe.

The DoC didn’t start out as a denomination, but rather a movement of Christians that sought to take away what they saw as dividing us, including denominational requirements. This movement was started on the frontier of the U.S. in the late 1700s, but it became a formal denomination in 1968.

Both denominations work to make the gospel real and applicable to today’s world. We can see that in their “tag lines.” For the DoC, that’s “A movement for wholeness in a fragmented world.” For the UCC, it’s “God is still speaking.”

To make the gospel real and applicable, both denominations embrace compassion, diversity, and justice. For example, both denominations are committed to being anti-racist as well as open and affirming to the LGBTQ+ community. And both denominations work together through the Global Ministries partnership to reach out to the wider world in service to all those in need.

Both denominations are strongly based in congregational leadership, meaning that decision making ultimately rests with the local congregation, rather than with state, regional, or national church leaders.

Both denominations emphasize the importance of baptism and communion as their two sacraments, although they do differ somewhat in practice. In the UCC, the frequency of communion varies, from quarterly to monthly to weekly, while in the DoC, communion is celebrated weekly. We have made the decision here at Pilgrim to celebrate communion weekly, like other UCC churches.

For baptism, the UCC celebrates baptism of infants with the sprinkling of water, while the DoC practices baptism by immersion at a later age, when someone can decide for themselves to be baptized. Typically, this starts around the early teen years.

A number of congregations around the country are dual UCC-DoC denominational churches, and they have managed to celebrate our similarities and come to an understanding on our differences. For example, with baptism, a congregation might just accept whatever form of baptism someone or someone’s parents want to celebrate.

If we were to become a dual-denomination congregation, we would need to work out other administrative issues, such as how to handle both denominations’ special collections. But, these would not be difficult to settle.

While this is an important decision, I don’t know that there is a “wrong” decision. Whatever Pilgrim decides, we will still be doing the important work of spreading the Good News of God’s love and justice, and being the presence of Jesus in the world. Of that I have no doubt!