Christian denomination seeks boost from Obama

CLEVELAND - He is a dynamic, charismatic leader who has transcended racial and ethnic divisions to capture the imagination of the nation's youth.

For the Cleveland-based United Church of Christ, a graying denomination that has lost more than 40 percent of its members since the 1960s, Barack Obama is a godsend.

Church leaders expect more people to come knocking on UCC doors as their most widely known member raises awareness of the denomination through his Democratic presidential campaign.

Some church officials consider him a walking billboard for a denominational advertising campaign welcoming believers of all races, ages and sexual orientations.

Unlike John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1960 or even Mitt Romney's GOP bid this year, where fears of anti-Catholicism or anti-Mormonism were palpable, the UCC is happy with the attention.

Even the news this week that the Internal Revenue Service is investigating a 2007 talk on faith and politics by Obama to the church's General Synod was taken in stride.

Church officials see it as a free-speech issue protecting the right of politicians to relate their faith to their public responsibilities.

"Obama's campaign has given us in the United Church of Christ a wonderful opportunity to tell our story," said the Rev. John Thomas, church president, in an e-mail exchange from Geneva, Switzerland, where he was on church business.

The church can use the good fortune.

Like many other mainline Protestant denominations, the UCC has seen its membership fall - from 2.07 million in 1965 to 1.2 million at the end of 2006.

Since 2004, the denomination has aggressively advertised on radio and television. The campaign, called "God Is Still Speaking," portrays the church as open to everyone, from racial minorities to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

The attention Obama brings to the UCC is almost all positive, experts on religion and politics say, because both share similar political views and Obama's message of inclusion fits with the denomination's advertising campaign. Religious conservatives who would be turned off by liberal politics probably would not be interested in the denomination, observers say.

"This is free publicity, for the most part," said Furman University political scientist James Guth.

UCC leaders agree.

"While it is exciting for many of us to have a member of our church running for president, what excites many of us the most is seeing a candidate who is promoting progressive values based on his Christian faith," Thomas wrote in his e-mail. "Obama reminds us that Christianity is not owned by those on the far right politically, but can provide a spiritual foundation and moral vision for those across the political spectrum."

The hope is that the interest eventually will fill more seats on Sundays.

The Rev. David Schoen, evangelism director for the denomination, said he has heard reports some people are coming to UCC churches because of Obama's connection.

Obama is "re-engaging young people in looking at the church again, maybe for the first time," he said.

The sense of excitement and pride in the possibility of a black member of their church becoming president extends to the pews in churches such as Mount Zion Congregational Church, a predominantly black congregation in Cleveland.

"This is a historic moment," Levina Johnson said after a recent Bible study. "Where we've come from, and where we've gone, I feel it's a miracle."

The Rev. Paul Sadler, pastor of Mount Zion, expects his church will benefit from having Obama as a role model.

"I absolutely think that people will join, especially as they see him living out his faith," Sadler said.

So far, few members are fazed by the criticism the denomination has received. The attacks on Obama's home church in Chicago for being "racist" since it proclaims itself "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian" is mobilizing members in defense of the candidate, some said.

In a church news release, Thomas denounced the attacks as part of an "absurd, mean-spirited, politically motivated" smear campaign against one of the denomination's most active congregations.

He said Trinity United Church of Christ is proud of its Afrocentric heritage as churches from different ethnic and theological backgrounds are proud of their heritage.

At a community supper at Plymouth Church of Shaker Heights, a predominantly white UCC congregation, Shelli Smith said she had not been aware of Obama's affiliation until she read of the attacks on Trinity.

The news made her "kind of proud" of Obama and his relation to a denomination that offers a place for diverse groups of people to worship, she said.

"Barack is more of a uniter," Smith said.

"I've always kind of thought we take in strays. It's kind of like a melting pot."

In 1957, with the merger of the Evangelical and Reformed Church and the Congregational Christian Churches.

The denomination's roots reach back to the Pilgrims, Puritans and German settlers, some of the first Christian communities of New England and the American frontier.

As of the end of 2006, 1.2 million. The denomination's numbers have decreased from 2.07 million in 1965 to 1.68 million in 1985 to 1.47 million in 1995.

There are 5,518 congregations. Sen. Barack Obama's church, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, is the largest, with an estimated 8,000 members.

Affirming that Jesus Christ is the head of the church, the UCC claims as its own the faith of the historic church expressed in the ancient creeds and reclaimed in the basic insights of the Protestant reformers.

Yet the UCC also affirms the responsibility of the church in each generation and community to make faith its own in reality of worship, in honesty of thought and expression, and in purity of heart before God.

The local church calls its own pastors and makes its own decisions about worship, theology, programs and budget.

The denomination has been at the forefront of several civil-rights issues, including endorsing same-sex marriages.