Religion: Protestant Merger

Church unity (for years the object of some of the best Protestant thought, hope and effort) advanced one cautious step last week. Two U.S. Protestant churches, each the result of a successful merger last decade, announced they had taken the first step toward merger. One is the Congregational Christian Churches (1,049,575 members), which in 1931 united the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers of 1620 with a Methodist offshoot founded in North Carolina in 1793. The other is the Evangelical and Reformed Church (685,571 members), formed in 1934 by combining the Evangelical Synod (a Midwestern fusion of Lutheran and Calvinistic thought, not to be confused with the Evangelical Church, which is Methodistic) and the Reformed Church in the U.S. (a Calvinistic-German-Swiss group strong in Pennsylvania and Ohio, not to be confused with the “Dutch” Reformed Church in America, which centers in Manhattan).

The final merger probably will not take place before 1946. Dr. Douglas Horton, general secretary of the Congregational Christian Churches, cautiously called for “a long period of cultivating mutual acquaintance.”

Both denominations are already burdened with unwieldy, double-barreled names from their previous mergers. So the joint committee proposed dropping all four in favor of “United Church of America,” though their prospective joint membership is about 5% of U.S. Protestantism.

Provocative question raised in many a churchgoer’s mind by this and other incipient mergers: once church unity is achieved, what is a United Protestantism going to do with it?