Ray Phillips is a member of First Congregational UCC in Albuquerque. Here he shares his story about becoming active in the SWC, meeting many wonderful people, and he invites you to do the same by serving on a SWC Committee.
My wife, Martha, and I returned to New Mexico in 2018 after being in Maine for 34 years and various other places before that. I had grown up in Los Alamos, NM, where I attended the United Church until I went off to college. I never really understood why it was called “United” when there were so many other churches in town. I knew little about what was happening as the UCC was being formed and I certainly never was aware of what the UCC’s national organization did and certainly nothing about a regional organization. That changed when we became active in our church in Maine.
As many readers of “In the Loop” know, Martha and I have been active not only in our church in Albuquerque but in the Southwest Conference of the UCC. Why would we get involved in the regional conference so soon after joining our church in Albuquerque? Partly because the Conference Minister of the Maine Conference of the UCC, Rev. Deborah Blood, alerted the SW Conference that we were on the way here and likely to be interested in serving at the Conference level. We got pulled in.
In Maine, both of us were extensively involved in our church, Waterville First Congregational UCC. Waterville is about 20 miles north of Augusta, the capital of Maine. Maine is packed full of UCC churches and even more with “Congregational” in their names. That Yankee spirit of independence led some Congregational churches to decide not to join with the majority of the Congregationalists in uniting with the other denominations to form the United Church of Christ. As we travelled around Maine it was always interesting to see those little white Congregational churches near small downtowns with no UCC insignia. I am sure they had their reasons for not following the UCC path. By way of aside, my grandfather, Rev. Dr. Ray E. Phillips, presided at the second General Synod of the UCC, where the votes of the congregations on whether to join were reported and the UCC actually became a denomination of member churches. But I won’t delve further into his interesting history here. It is a long story.
There are so many UCC churches in Maine that it has its own Conference, and there is an additional organizational level between the Maine Conference and the local churches. These are the Associations of the Maine Conference of the UCC; our Waterville church is a member of the Kennebec Association, there being 12 UCC churches along the Kennebec River. [Our daughter, when she was still in junior high and high school, represented the Kennebec Association at two General Synods of the UCC. She was the youngest UCC delegate ever. She later served on the national Nominating Committee and then the Executive Board. In our family, she is the one with the national experience.] Some of those churches of our Association are very close together. Directly across the river from Waterville is Winslow, with its own little Congregational UCC church, almost within a stone’s throw of where the Waterville church was before urban “renewal” forced it to rebuild way up Main Street. Most towns along the whole river from the north woods all the way down to the coast at Brunswick have UCC churches. There was a tradition of socializing between nearby churches and we got to know wonderful people and very old buildings throughout the area. Naturally, we became active in the Kennebec Association and then in the Maine Conference. We became involved in the “Conference Deacons” program, an effort to establish more and better communication between the churches and the Maine Conference. Each Conference Deacon (or, in our case, a couple working together) had five nearby churches not including their own to visit regularly and share information about Conference activities and share with Conference leadership innovative ideas or concerns about the Conference from the individual churches. We found it to be a great deal of fun visiting “our” churches. The pastors at two of them were spouses of faculty colleagues of mine at Colby College. Every church is different and we loved meeting people and learning about how they were managing the challenges. Almost all are struggling to survive. Some haven’t. One is a small federated church, where they share space and organization with a Methodist congregation, alternating back and forth between denominations as pastors come and go. When it is the UCC side’s turn, the whole congregation votes on whom to hire as the pastor. When it was the Methodist side’s turn, the Methodist hierarchy assigns a pastor. Yeah, it is awkward. But they make it work and in some significant ways the diversity strengthens them. After we left, our own church in Waterville sold its big building on the hill and moved into a very small space. Change has been difficult but essential.
The Christian community that we are all involved in is not just our local church, as important as it is. Our Southwest Conference of the UCC is a lot more spread out with fewer individual congregations than we experienced in Maine. We have different challenges being in community here in New Mexico, Arizona, and El Paso, Texas. One tremendous benefit we have in the SW Conference is the racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity. Maine is the whitest state in the US and, having grown up in New Mexico and attending college and graduate school in California, it was always rather jarring to be without that diversity. But even in the SW Conference, we struggle to decenter whiteness. We have work to do.
There are opportunities for more of our congregations’ members to become involved in the SW Conference of the UCC. We on the SW Conference Nominating Committee, where I am completing my final term, strongly encourage anyone with an interest in working with wonderful people from elsewhere in our region to make a positive difference in how our churches, the Conference, and the national organization put into practice what we hold dear in our Christian faith. In this and recent issues of In the Loop we have been describing the various committees where there are opportunities to serve, and you will find a link that you can use to express your interest. I encourage you to do so. When I was invited to join the Nominating Committee, I was hesitant because I didn’t at that time know too many people beyond my home church. It has been an enjoyable learning experience and, as I leave it, I am making way for someone else to join. Will it be you?