01:00 AM EDT on Saturday, June 19, 2004

BY RICHARD C. DUJARDIN
Journal Religion Writer

PROVIDENCE -- They see themselves firmly in line with the original Mayflower Pilgrims, a people committed to the idea that religious liberty entails a congregation's right to decide how to worship and what to believe.

The National Association of Congregational Christian Churches holds its annual meeting here starting next weekend, and on one thing all agree: you won't be seeing delegates passing resolutions on any of the things that have been tearing other denominations apart.

There will be no resolutions about the war in Iraq or conflict in the Middle East. No pronouncements on abortion, or whether gay marriage or even homosexual behavior itself can ever be deemed acceptable in Christian terms.

The Rev. Alice Murphy, pastor of Colebrook Congregational Church in Connecticut and the incoming chair of the association's executive committee, acknowledges that the approach is quite a bit different from what you'll find in the 1.2 million-member United Church of Christ, which also proclaims a link to the early Pilgrims but has had no qualms about approving a variety of positions, mostly liberal ones, at its annual conferences.

"But that's not our polity," she says. 'We never make any statements on behalf of the churches -- because we can't."

In simple terms, she says, the association, with 85,000 members and 450 churches nationwide, does not even pretend to suggest it can tell local congregations what they should do or believe.

It's a tradition rooted in history going back to when a group of Separatists, facing persecution in Europe, fled England and then Holland in the hope of finding a better climate for their beliefs in the New World and, in 1620, landed at Plymouth Rock.

More than three centuries later, in 1948, some of those claiming to be the Pilgrims' spiritual heirs felt their freedom threatened anew, this time by a movement to merge the nation's Congregationalist churches with some of the churches of the Evangelical and Reform tradition. Some, including Riverpoint Congregational Church in West Warwick, suspected that the merger would erode their traditional autonomy by pushing them to a system of governance closer to the Presbyterian model.

By 1955, two years before the new United Church of Christ was actually formed, the "anti-mergers" concluded that their attempts at stopping the merger had failed and opted out to form a new association that would protect local autonomy.

Next week's session at the Providence Biltmore will be the group's 50th annual meeting, and the Rev. Larry Bernier, Riverpoint's pastor, says that as members look back on the last half century they appreciate how the association has helped them maintain their independence. Whereas in the UCC decisions as to who gets ordained have fallen to regional conferences, the NACCC has held to the old principle that it's the congregation, and only the congregation, that decides who will be ordained.

An umbrella

The hands-off policy has provided an umbrella of sorts, allowing fundamentalist churches to find a home alongside very liberal churches that are almost Unitarian.

You would think that maintaining fellowship would be difficult, says Murphy, "but we do remarkably well. Sure, there are issues that our very conservative people have problems with that show up on our forums on the Internet. But they don't always speak at meetings. Occasionally they do."

Nonetheless, Murphy says there have been changes over the years. The original push to create the association came mostly from liberal churches in Wisconsin, but she thinks you'll find that today the churches in the association are becoming more conservative.

Jim Hopkins, a member of Riverpoint and chairman of the host committee, says the churches today are as diverse in their worship styles as in what they believe. "We have churches that do loud music and have prayer and praise services, and we have churches that are more traditional."

This year's four-day meeting, set to begin next Saturday, is the first in New England in five years. It comes at a time when the association's membership has been generally holding steady.

According to the Rev. Richard Taylor, an expert on church membership who pastors the Beneficent Church in Providence (not a member of the NACCC), many of the individual congregations have declined in membership over the years, but the association has made up for the losses by gradually adding churches.

At the four-day session next week, organizers expect some 300 delegates and alternates from 24 states, including California and Alaska, to draw inspiration and reflect on how they can better support one another. And amid the business sessions, Bible lectures, seminars and workshops, the delegates will be exploring such topics as how to reach out to people who are grieving and how to better understand the Dead Sea Scrolls.

On the latter, they will have some high-powered advice. Their Bible lecturer, James A. Sanders, president of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center in Claremont, Calif., is an author of 29 books and he oversaw the publication of the most complete collection of archival films of the Dead Sea Scrolls. On Monday, moderator and statistician Don Bentley will lead a seminar on the history of the discovery of the scrolls, and how statistical reasoning may shed light on who wrote the scrolls and how they came to be.

One church, one vote

It may be important to note that in the NACCC, often referred to as the "Three C's" churches, all the churches have one vote -- whether it's the 1,500-member First Congregational Church in Los Angeles, once the largest Congregational church in the world, or a church like Riverpoint, with less than 100 members.

Linger around these meetings long enough, says Hopkins, and you'll hear certain "buzz" words -- faith, freedom and fellowship. The faith, he says, is the faith that they share. Freedom is the freedom of each local church to organize and worship God as it sees fit. And fellowship is the churches getting together to do the things that they can't do by themselves.

The last of these may be the association's principle reason for being, he says, making it possible for the churches to work together to create Sunday School programs and send missionaries out into the field.

Although Beneficent, the downtown's most famous Congregational church, is part of the UCC and not the association, it will be providing the setting for the worship services. That's partly because it has the available worship space -- provided, that is, that crews working on a $2.3-million renovation finish the elevator to make the sanctuary handicapped accessible -- and because the church's minister, Mr. Taylor, has had a relationship with the association in his roles as vice president of the Congregational Christian Historical Society and a board member of the Congregational Library in Boston.

Then too, says Mr. Taylor, Beneficent has had a tradition of opening its doors. When then-Providence Auxiliary Bishop Bernard Kelly spoke from Beneficent's pulpit in 1965, "I believe it was the first time a Catholic bishop had spoken in a Protestant church in the United States," he said. "We also had the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople do a communion service here. John Murray, the founder of Universalism, spoke here, as did Bishop Asbury, founder of American Methodism."

The theme of this year's conference is "So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another."

The keynote address, set for 3 p.m. Saturday, will be by the Rev. D. Elizabeth Mauro, of the Rockland Congregational Church in Maine, who among her former jobs worked as a training facilitator on issues of spirituality for hospice volunteers, sexual assault and domestic violence crisis workers and childhood sexual abuse survivors.

Even though the rules keep the delegates as a body from issuing pronouncements in the name of the association, the incoming chairman noted that delegates often do have ways of expressing themselves through such organizations as the social justice-oriented Washington Gladden Society, which will be having a luncheon meeting.

The planning for the sessions has largely been the work of a cross section of churches in Massachusetts and Connecticut, along with the one church in Rhode Island. In all, the association has 115 churches in New England.

"This looks like it will be a fairly peaceful meeting," Murphy predicts. "but we never know what will be brought up from the floor."

If her prediction of a tranquil meeting proves accurate, perhaps the most intriguing story to come out of the sessions will revolve around Pastor Craig Walker of the Desert Congregational Church in Twentynine Palms, Calif. Diagnosed with cancer, Walker underwent three months of radiation treatment in 2001 that caused him to miss the meeting that year in Lansing, Mich.

He has vowed not to miss this one, and set out by bicycle from Huntington Beach, Calif., on May 1 with plans to bike his way across the country to Plymouth Rock and then back to Providence in time for Saturday.

As of Wednesday night, Mr. Walker had biked his way to Jamestown, N.Y., having ridden 2,591 miles.