In the church I wrote about last week, George Dohm served as the perfect example of an aggressor. That the church voted to disaffiliate with the United Church of Christ in November of 2003 can be tracked all the way back to his hiring. To be sure, there were warning signs and indications that George was preparing for just such a move. His first church was a new church start in the United Church of Christ which - though funded by UCC money - he refused to refer to in newsletters, ads, and signage as having anything to do with the United Church of Christ. The church closed not long after he left. His second church was just outside of the St. Louis metro area and shortly after his resignation from the church the church took a vote to leave the denomination. The vote failed by a narrow margin, but many of the disgruntled members left the church in anger.

All of this is to say that George had a history when he went to Redeemer in South St. Louis. By the time I came into the judicatory office of the Missouri Mid-South Conference, George had resigned from the church but promised to return when his disciples there completed the takeover. His aggressive tactics began as far back as his first week on the job: the choir director I spoke with in May of 2003 revealed to me that in the first week George told him that he would have the church out of the UCC in a short while, and that he could "leave right now with over half of the members." I wrote last week about George continuing to meet with the leaders months after he left the church, and coming back to preach about the evils of the UCC in July of 2003.

George is the prototypical aggressor. There are many such pastors serving churches all over the country. They have been trained to deploy tactics and maneuvers designed to divide and conquer congregations. George's mentor was none other than Mark Friz, formerly a pastor ordained to serve the United Church of Christ and recognized throughout the Mid-West as the one to call when you want to learn how and why to take out a church. Mark claims that he never calls a church to talk about a take-over, but that he could quit his current position as Pastor at St. Paul's Evangelical Free Church (formerly St. Paul United Church of Christ - they voted to leave the UCC a few years after Mark's arrival from the church in Wellington, MO which - to no one's surprise - also voted to leave the United Church of Christ) and spend the rest of his life speaking at churches that have asked him to come and talk about leaving the UCC.

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Knowing how crucial the role of an aggressive pastor can be, David Runnion-Bareford, the Executive Director of the Biblical Witness Fellowship (a `Renewal Group' of the UCC), works to maintain a listing of what he calls "Godly Pastors' in what is known as the "Pastoral Referral Network." This private list of clergy is kept secret from the wider church. Clergy are invited to fill out an application to enter the Network and be shopped around by whomever it is that executes these maneuvers (no one has admitted to it, though the address to which you send the applications happens to be the same address of the pastor of the UCC church in Candia, NH: one David Runnion-Bareford). Envelopes are sent to Search Committees with the names of candidates active in the Pastoral Referral Network without Conference Staff knowing about it, and without going through the standard criminal and ecclesial background checks that assure those same committees that the candidate has been cleared to serve a church. In a radio interview that aired on June 21, 2004 on KFUO in St. Louis on a program called "Issues, Etc.," David Runnion-Bareford was asked about the shortage of clergy in the UCC. He gave some statistics and some analysis, and then talked about the Pastoral Referral Network, and how he and others recruit from Evangelical seminaries those who are not affiliated with the United Church of Christ. (The entire interview can be heard at http://www.kfuo.org/ie_archive_juno4.html)

Even though he has lost his standing and has been deemed unfit for ministry in and on behalf of the United Church of Christ, George Dohm is now being proposed as the likely successor to the outgoing pastor at our United Church of Christ in Marthasville, MO. As a tried and true aggressor, no one would doubt that this is an overt signal to the members that someone has targeted this church as a likely candidate for a takeover.

This matches my experience, and I'm sure rmj will agree. It's not always the case that the pastor of a departing congregation has a track record of ministerial misconduct, nor that they've lead a previous congregation out of the denomination. But it happens often enough for those things to be red flags for the sharp-eyed judicatory minister. Moreover, pulling a congregation from the denomination is itself a boundary violation: the covenant between the UCC and its member churches is something like that between spouses, and good pastors do not bust up healthy-if-difficult marriages. So it's not surprising to find that those who would behave in such a way have other ethical issues.

It also true that trouble has a way of inviting trouble. Most of the cases that I am personally familiar with were churches who had simply grown apart from the denomination, though I suspect Dorhauer will have more to say about that dynamic next week. But several times, I've seen a congregation weakened by internal conflict or the misconduct of a previous pastor, then vote to leave after the arrival of a charismatic but uncommitted pastor. That is in fact part of the Biblical Witness Fellowship strategy, as John says above. My own church survived such an attack not once but twice, and has come back to be a strong and loyal part of the UCC. But it's not incidental that before it could get to that point, it had to overcome one episode of pastoral misconduct, another of the pastor's untreated mental illness, and a generation of abusive members whose clutches needed to pried off the church. All told, it's been almost 15 years, and they've managed to put almost all of that history behind them.

The other thing that needs to be said here is that the UCC is uniquely vulnerable to such attacks. Unlike many denominations, UCC churches are primarily responsible for calling their own pastor - and pastors for finding a call. Although pastors need to be approved by a local committee to be considered in good standing with the UCC, there's no rule that says that they must be in good standing. That leads to the baffling situation of a pastor from outside the denomination - or a pastor with no credentials whatsoever - serving a UCC church. Without that leverage, there's little the denomination can do, directly. We could tighten up those rules, and perhaps we will someday. But at the moment, our independence is fiercely guarded, so we'll just have to work with what we have.

The bottom line is that John is doing a good job of detailing how these attacks take place. And it shouldn't be surprising, given the connection between the Biblical Witness types and secular Republican operatives, that there is an element of sleaze at work.