This Sunday’s merger vote

July 10, 2025

By Rev. Rick King

This Sunday is the big day—congregational votes at New Life Presbyterian and Falcon Heights Churches on the Plan of Union and a big step of commitment to ultimately merge our two churches into what’s called a federated church.

A federation is a form of union in which the parties involved retain a degree of self-governance. The United States is a federation, and the federal government requires certain things of individual states and leaves certain other things up to states to decide. The current controversy over U.S. governance has to do with how much autonomy states should retain and how much the federal government can require states to do.

As I said in a previous column, in the Minnesota Conference, fully 17 percent of UCC churches are interdenominationally merged in some way, whether a federation or some other type of union. There are UCC-United Methodist churches, UCC-Presbyterian (USA) churches, and at least one that’s a merged UCC-American Baptist church. And in at least one case, there’s one comprised of three denominations (UCC and two others).

The UCC-Presbyterian (USA) is the most common dual-affiliation union in liberal mainline Protestant Christianity because, for all the differences we may note between ourselves and the Presbyterians, we’re from the same Reformed branch of Protestantism and decide things congregationally and democratically.

And finally, leadership teams in both our churches have not taken this decision to merge lightly; we didn’t fall into it. Remember, both churches have engaged in lengthy and thorough congregational discernment for well over a year and a half.

In meeting with our denominational leaders over the past year, they’ve expressed their thanks that our churches are doing this. But the decision to merge originated with our two churches, not those denominational officials. It “bubbled up” through a process of taking stock of where both our churches are in terms of vitality and sustainability, of developing several sustainable scenarios or paths for our congregants to consider, listing the pros and cons of each scenario, and then working each out to its logical conclusion as much as we could.

And then last May 18, in another special congregational meeting like the one coming up, those gathered that day voted unanimously in favor of considering the merger path.

Your leaders and I hope you’ll attend and vote at the congregational meeting this Sunday. Thank you for entrusting leadership of this process to us.