Local Church Coming of Age as a Prophetic Voice
Written by Curly Stumb for our 20th Anniversary
And the words of the prophets are written on the church walls, and portico doors, and breaking a sound of silence.
Tamara Franks, pastor at High Country United Church of Christ, urged gathered persons to linger after worship on a recent Sunday, to converse, to listen intently to each other. “Offer hope and healing for our authentic selves,” she said. Breaking the silence around authentic being, and believing that ALL people are created equal and in the image of God stand at the heart of the church’s theology.
The congregation, conceived and birthed in the High Country at the outset of the 21st century, boasts, in its 20th year of being rooted as a “Justice Seeking Church.” The Church Council is preparing a celebration — on the weekend of August 27-28— to mark this passage of time. Pam Hodges, Council Moderator said, “Three years ago, I entered the doors at HCUCC in search of a faith community that was making a difference in the world. What I discovered was a group of people who offer extravagant welcome to everyone without exception. The congregation’s members at HCUCC offer their time, talents and resources to make a difference in food insecurity, LGBTQ rights, creation care, harm reduction, mental health, and sexual abuse.”
Persons driving by the church campus will notice solar panels on the facility’s roof, offering visible expression of environmental justice conscience. Doors framing the church portico say: “God’s doors are open to all.” Rainbow colors break the silence.
The prophets in High Country United Church are not the familiar names like Amos, Hosea, Isaiah or Jeremiah of Hebrew biblical times, but a Renee, Joseph, Steve, Jeanne, Tamara, and more.
Listen, says Renee Boughman, executive chef at F.A.R.M. Cafe and a member of HCUCC. “Why is healthy food more accessible to the wealthy?” “Everybody deserves to get good food and not feel like it fell off a truck,” Boughman said to “Our State Magazine.” She talks about an evolving trend in food charity, “of doing good with food that really is good.”
Listen to the poetic words of another HCUCC member, Joseph Bathanti, a former N.C. poet laureate who, in his most recent book of poems, documents mountain top people as “invisible people at a precarious moment in time.” Rooted in social and restorative justice, Light at the Seam contemplates the earth as fundamentally sacramental, a crucible of awe and mystery, able to regenerate itself and its people even as it succumbs to them. Bathanti references the third day of Creation in Genesis when Jehovah whispered,
Let the dry land appear,
then the transcripts of what followed
Ever after. Gone.
Listen also to the words of a church member who celebrates a resolution overwhelmingly passed by the United Church of Christ General Synod in 2005, which opened the door to marriage equality. Steve Wright said, “My partner Dwight and I had been together in a loving relationship since 1975 (for 40 years) when we decided to get married. Unfortunately, Florida did not allow us to marry in that state. However, after time spent at our summer home in Boone in 2015, we applied for our marriage license after the Supreme Court made gay marriage legal across the United States. With the support of High Country United Church of Christ, our family and friends, we are now celebrating our 48th year together! It is our firm belief that you should be able to love whomever you choose with the blessing of God and the Federal Government!”
Listen also to another church member, Jeanne Taylor, who offers an historical context for how the United Church of Christ has paved a path toward marriage equality in North Carolina. “On October 20, 1972, we made a personal commitment to each other. Never in our lifetime did we believe that the opportunity for legal marriage would exist.” Tayloe said it was demoralizing when Amendment One appeared on the North Carolina ballot in 2012. “We were extremely gratified by the very public stance taken by our congregation, High Country United Church of Christ, in opposition to this legislation. We were further encouraged when the United Church of Christ denomination legally challenged NC Amendment One (General Synod of the UCC et al vs. Cooper) in 2014.” On November 15, 2014, Susan Sage and Jeanne Tayloe were legally married in the State of North Carolina at High Country United Church of Christ.
The United Church of Christ has often advocated societal changes well before a public consensus, much less a religious one. HCUCC is rooted in that denomination where the UCC was the first, or an early mainline denomination to advocate for many stances on justice.
1839 created a defining moment for the abolitionist movement. Enslaved Africans break their chains and seize control of the schooner Amistad. Their freedom is short-lived, and the ship’s owners sue to have them returned as property. The Supreme Court ruled the captives are not property, and they regained their freedom. This abolitionist victory helped create momentum for the formation in 1846 of the American Missionary Association, an agency that later became part of the national mission structure of the UCC.
In 1853 a small Congregational church ordained the first woman pastor. Congregational churches (early Pilgrims in New England) are now part of the United Church of Christ as a result of a 1957 merger. She was the first woman since New Testament times ordained as a Christian minister. At her ordination a friend, Methodist minister Luther Lee, defends “a woman’s right to preach the Gospel.”
1959 ushered forward an historic ruling that airwaves are public property. Southern television stations were imposing news blackouts on the growing civil rights movement, and Martin Luther King Jr. asked the United Church of Christ to intervene. Everett Parker of the UCC’s Office of Communication organized churches and won in Federal court a ruling that the airwaves are public property. In 1972 the United Church of Christ’s Golden Gate Association ordained the first openly gay person as a minister — The Rev. William R. Johnson — in an historic Protestant denomination. In the following three decades, the UCC’s General Synod has urged equal rights for homosexual citizens. September 17 -18, 2022 will mark the 40 th anniversary of a Warren County civil disobedience campaign that launched the Environmental Justice Movement. The story of “environmental racism,” a term coined by Ben Chavis of the United Church of Christ, began in the late 1970s when a group of residents in Warren County organized and began to protest the state of North Carolina’s designation of a landfill in their county for the disposal of PCBs, a toxic chemical substance whose production was banned by Congress in 1979. With a population that was roughly 62% black, no other county in the state had a higher percentage of black residents than did Warren County.
