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Celebrating our history without wearing labels

Everyone at CUCC is duly proud of the rich activist tradition within CUCC and the predecessor United Church of Raleigh. Those who attended the Novemberfest celebration Saturday evening reveled in stories and memories from a tiny bit of that past which includes the renowned Institute of Religion that ran from 1940 to the late 1950s. And we have a growing archive of memorabilia from that era at the historical archive on our website. (Just yesterday Mary Pruneau passed along to me a substantial stack of old yellow newspapers that contain articles about Institute of Religion events in the 1950s.)

In light of that history, some of us refer to CUCC as a "liberal church." Occasionally I have found myself correcting such a statement by saying, "Wouldn't it be better to characterize us as a church with lots of liberal members?" Am I splitting hairs here? I don't think so. There are lots of folks, myself included, who are not as enamored with the "liberal" tag as they once were. If this sounds like heresy to you, I would urge a close reading of Ross Douthat's column in the NY Times this past Sunday. I would hope that CUCC is an inclusive enough church to appeal to someone of Douthat's persuasion. And someone of that persuasion is not likely to be drawn to a church that wears a label, even though they might benefit hugely from association with the wonderful members who wear that label proudly.