{"id":23044,"date":"2014-12-29T23:57:28","date_gmt":"2014-12-30T04:57:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/resource\/college_of_mission_presentation_to_the_united\/"},"modified":"2021-01-28T13:44:38","modified_gmt":"2021-01-28T18:44:38","slug":"college_of_mission_presentation_to_the_united","status":"publish","type":"resource","link":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/resource\/college_of_mission_presentation_to_the_united\/","title":{"rendered":"Presentation to the United Christian Missionary Society Board of Trustees"},"content":{"rendered":"

T. J. Liggett,\u00a0November 2006<\/em><\/p>\n

I think I need to express real appreciation for this invitation to be here because periodically I just have a longing to get back into this. And, that longing has been cured.<\/p>\n

When the ecumenical movement began to flourish in the early 1940’s in South India, they brought into being the united church; but, in North India they didn’t.\u00a0 After the war, they began to talk about a united church for North India.\u00a0 Our secretary was Telfer Mook, who was a UCC Executive.\u00a0 This was the first time we had a joint venture with the UCC and he was very much in support of the united church in North India.\u00a0 But, the Disciples in North India didn’t trust him.\u00a0 They said, “You’re not a Disciple.\u00a0 How do you know the Disciples really feel this way:\u00a0 that this is a good thing?”\u00a0 So, Telfer called me up and I agreed to meet him in Calcutta and go out and visit with the leadership of the Disciples church and assure them we were solidly behind them and we would not withdraw support from the work because of the creation of the church of North India.\u00a0 They wouldn’t take his word for it; so, the ecumenical administration and mission had its handicap.<\/p>\n

Seriously, I appreciate very much the invitation to come to this meeting today and the visiting with people before and after this meeting.<\/p>\n

I’m assuming, having read Arnold’s summary of history at your previous meeting, that you’re familiar with the background.\u00a0 I would like to talk about The UCMS in its context both for the church itself in the 20th century and as a denomination.\u00a0 I think it helps to see what happened when the specifics take on meaning in the context in which they are seen.\u00a0 It’s difficult for us to imagine the degree of optimism which existed at the beginning of the 20th century among church leaders; not just in the United States, but worldwide.\u00a0 There was the feeling they were standing on the threshold of a new era in the history of Christianity.<\/p>\n

When they met in 1912 for the World Conference on World Mission, they divided the world into categories:\u00a0 the category of Christendom, which was Europe, Western Asia, North and South America, New Zealand and Australia; and the Mission Fields were Africa and Asia.\u00a0 The former had already been evangelized and the latter was yet to be evangelized.\u00a0 They said the general mission was to send missionaries from Christendom to non-Christendom; it wasn’t valid to send missionaries from one part of Christendom to another part of Christendom (i.e. to send German Lutherans to the Catholics of South America or send North American protestant missionaries to Latin America).\u00a0 They believed this new century would be the century of Christianization of the world. The magazine, The Christian Century, reflects that optimism. The dreaming of The United Society started in the early 20th Century…1902, 1903, 1904…and built up but was interrupted by the first World War.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As soon as World War I was over in 1920, they created The United Christian Missionary Society.\u00a0 I think it’s very difficult for Christians today in the 21st Century to vaguely imagine the optimism and confidence which permeated the church, because here is what happened:\u00a0 Roman Catholic Italy turned Fascist; Protestant Germany turned Nazi; Orthodox Russia turned Communist.\u00a0 In our country, with the vanguard of technology and everything, it invented and used the atomic bomb in ways beyond anybody’s imagination.\u00a0 So, when the leaders of the church met in 1952, they said:\u00a0 throw away the maps!\u00a0 There is no such thing as Christendom; it doesn’t exist!\u00a0 Every country is a mission field; every Christian is a missionary.\u00a0 He or she lives daily in contact with non believers and the church has to re conceive its mission and its work in the light of this reality.\u00a0 And, I’ve struggled trying to imagine what it was like in the beginning of the Century; to imagine they were on the threshold of the Christianization of the world, very optimistic and The UCMS was dreamed of in that context.\u00a0 I just think that if we want to understand what The UCMS was, that was the world in which it existed.\u00a0 We haven’t yet imbedded in consciousness that every Christian is a missionary in the contemporary culture. I don’t know if foreign missions and home missions would have any meaning in the modern world in which we live except for practical and administrative.\u00a0 That’s the first thing.<\/p>\n

The second thing, context again, is that religions, according to the specialists and authorities in history, move through stages.\u00a0 Stage one in a religion is what they call the movement stage, in which the religion is innovative, creative, flexible, usually unorganized, and primarily centered in personalities…charismatic personalities.\u00a0 So that to this day we still talk about religion in India and Asia as Buddhism because of the impact of Buddha and we have Christianity because of the personality of Jesus and in detail, we have Lutheranism and Calvinism, etc. In that movement stage, it’s a stage of ferment and excitement and novelty and the center of the movement is the charismatic leader and everything sort of rotates around that person.\u00a0 And, then, in the process of evolution, as these charismatic leaders disappear, the religion slowly goes through what I call an institutional stage, where it begins to organize and a few things appear which in the movement stage didn’t exist.\u00a0 In our church, the conservative independent churches say that this is a restoration New Testament church.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Well, the New Testament church was only the beginning of an organization.\u00a0 They say there was no mission board in the New Testament church; of course there wasn’t.\u00a0 But in the second half of the 19th century, it began to move into the institutional stage and it changed the character of the church.\u00a0 These institutional stages emerged, as far as I’ve been able to know, from writings (I’m almost old enough to be a witness to it!). When the religious movement identified a need to do a certain task, they often discovered they didn’t have the handle to get hold of it.\u00a0 They needed someway to organize, to do it.\u00a0 That organizational, or institutional, phase usually reflects the culture where it takes place.\u00a0 So, the Italian Christian movement became hierarchical, which was typical of that society. \u00a0Our church became democratical, because that was the atmosphere where it happened. Usually, these organizations were created by the people who believed that particular enterprise.\u00a0 So, the people who believed in foreign missions got together and organized their activity.\u00a0 They didn’t believe it was the whole church or anything; but, that’s what people who believed in foreign missions did.\u00a0 We had it in our church and you can see it in all the denominations in America, the appearance of Boards or Societies to do a specific task.\u00a0 The American Bible Society was to bring and distribute Bibles and people who believed in praying and distributing Bibles became members of that Society so that the Society or Board usually belonged to the advocates of that particular activity.\u00a0 Nobody planned it that way; that’s just the way it happened.<\/p>\n

One of the most fascinating things in Protestantism in the 19th century in America, (taking education as an example) for most of history, education was something that happened to a very small entity of people at the height of society.\u00a0 The vast majority of people were illiterate, wouldn’t have the foggiest idea of how to write or read; but, once the invention of the press came in and the envision of movable type and they could print books instead of having somebody painstakingly copy the manuscript by hand, which had gone on for centuries, suddenly the idea broke, particularly in America, that everybody ought to be educated.\u00a0 There was great enthusiasm in the 19th century for public schools.\u00a0 They said it was the duty of society to educate the children.\u00a0 Once the educational system got going, then church leaders began to say, boy, what does that mean to us? Instead of an illiterate congregation, we’re going to have people who are educated; not scholars, but educated.<\/p>\n

For the first time, they began to think that education in the church ought to be more than just a catechism which is learned from memory, which had been going on for centuries.\u00a0 But, if you have people who know how to read, then you have to have the Sunday school after day school five days a week.\u00a0 Then, if you have Sunday school, you have to have teachers.\u00a0 They didn’t have anybody in the church who knew how to teach.\u00a0 Pedagogy was a new invention.\u00a0 They had to have persons and they had to have a Sunday school lesson and they had to have a plan and curriculum developed.\u00a0 All these things in the general society were happening.\u00a0 Suddenly, the church had to take on a whole new set of activities…not nationally, but locally.\u00a0 It had to do things it had never done before, and there were no tools.<\/p>\n

I could go on all afternoon; but, what does a church do with an old preacher who can’t work any more? Usually what happens in American churches is that the congregation where he was last serving gets stuck with the old pastor.\u00a0 They don’t know what to do with him.\u00a0 There were cases where the church gave the parsonage to the pastor and his wife.\u00a0 They didn’t know what else to do with him.\u00a0 They were having trouble helping him with his monthly bill\/food thing.\u00a0 They looked to see where he served before and wrote to that church and asked for support.\u00a0 They looked at other churches and said everybody has a certain responsibility.\u00a0 So, they created the Ministerial Relief Fund, which was the formal name and a way to get some money together to help take care of these old preachers they couldn’t take care of.\u00a0 There was no one pattern that emerged.\u00a0 But, there was recognized foreign missions, home missions, and what we call a pension system now.\u00a0 Homes for widows and orphans.\u00a0 Most of the men died young so we didn’t have to worry about widowers.\u00a0 These things began to appear, and all during the 19th century there was what I call the institutional phase in the church.\u00a0 Various parts of the country did it different ways.\u00a0 But, by the end of the century, they had these institutions which required support from the church; and, they set into this business of having special offerings in the local churches for every one of these worthy causes.<\/p>\n

In Kentucky, they had a fifth Sunday offering for the widows and orphans.\u00a0 That began to produce the kind of attention in the church of how you do you do this adequately and in order and in appropriate ways to meet the needs of persons.\u00a0 The local congregation had no way of knowing if activity A is more needful than activity B or activity C.\u00a0 So, they decided, slowly, at the beginning of the 20th century, that we need to bring all the institutions together in one organization which would be the work of the whole church and would seek support regularly for all these activities.\u00a0 And, then, what brought The UCMS into being, not part of phase one of institutionalism; it was stage two of institutionalism…bringing institutions together so that there was efficient management.\u00a0 It acted on behalf of the whole church. \u00a0There would be a sense of ownership of the whole church for the whole program.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As I said earlier, most of these institutions individually were sparked by enthusiasts for this particular thing.\u00a0 The women had CWBM; others were interested in Sunday school education.\u00a0 They said this must involve everybody.\u00a0 So, they created The UCMS, brought all these organizations under one umbrella, and provided that membership in The UCMS would involve everybody in the church.\u00a0 So that everybody who registered and went to an international convention in 1920 was a member of The United Christian Missionary Society.\u00a0 They didn’t have delegates like we have today.\u00a0 At a certain time in the convention, they would adjourn the convention and call into existence a meeting of The United Christian Missionary Society.\u00a0 Everybody there was a member!\u00a0 I think it’s very difficult for us today to imagine the degree of ownership which existed in the church for The United Christian Missionary Society.\u00a0 This is ours.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I had to preside over a meeting in the 1960s of The United Christian Missionary Society.\u00a0 Everybody in the convention was a part of it.\u00a0 They didn’t feel like the women owned the foreign mission board and somebody else owned another thing.\u00a0 It was everything.\u00a0 There were no multiple competing appeals.\u00a0 The appeal was for the total support of the total program of the church.\u00a0 The United Society shouldn’t be seen as one of a number of individual organizations with specific tasks; it was the instrument created for the whole church to do the whole work of the church.\u00a0 That mentality was fomented enthusiastically in its creation as a whole new chapter in the history of the Disciples church.<\/p>\n

The President of The UCMS was the central figure in the denomination.\u00a0 Within a few years, they began to sense problems with that kind of a total organization.\u00a0 One was how the knowledgeable constituencies could have a voice on the board.\u00a0 The United Society had a board of managers of 120.\u00a0 You think you have trouble getting a majority for this size of Board!\u00a0 The board of managers selected a smaller board of about 23 or 24; half of which had to be women and half men.\u00a0 The CWBM said they wouldn’t go into anything that didn’t protect the place of women.\u00a0 So they picked a board of 12 men and 12 women who were knowledgeable about some aspect or other of the total church.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The dream had complications which the dreamers didn’t know until actually they got started.\u00a0 Furthermore, the distinct character of the operation of these divisions within The United Society posed problems.\u00a0 Having one board to determine all those things was very difficult.\u00a0 Simultaneously with what was happening in our church, American society was moving to a pension system; so, beginning at the beginning, a minister and the church would contribute to a pension fund which would take care of him when he retired.<\/p>\n

That required a whole different kind of investment and money management.\u00a0 Here was a group talking about getting money they wouldn’t spend for 39 years, and the state and federal government were saying that accumulation of money is very serious business and you have to meet certain standards about how you invest it, etc.<\/p>\n

By 1927, what now is the Pension Fund moved away from The UCMS (the old Minister’s Relief Fund) in order to function appropriately as a pension system.\u00a0 Into the 1930s it matured.\u00a0 This kind of specialized management was not dreamed of in the 1900s when they dreamed of this umbrella organization.\u00a0 There was no ill will about the moving and creation of this pension system out of The UCMS.<\/p>\n

Other kinds of differences appeared, too.\u00a0 One is, how can one person be a chief executive of an organization that has all these different kinds of activities?\u00a0 What does the president of The UCMS have to know and do to take care of all these things we think of today as the organization of the church?\u00a0 This created personnel problems.\u00a0 The president very often found he was calling shots of a team of people…one playing football and the other playing basketball…there were different characters of activities.\u00a0 Those first presidents of The UCMS really had a difficult job, plus that all these special interests would fight with each other to get people on that board of 23 or 24 people.\u00a0 You wanted someone who knows about women, someone who knows about orphanages, somebody else who knows about publishing, etc.\u00a0 The cup of complexity grew slowly over the years.\u00a0 It wasn’t animosity; it was recognition that managing everything with one set of criteria and one type of administration is not a very good thing to do.<\/p>\n

It was complicated further by the depression.\u00a0 In the 1930s, the shortage of money impacted everybody and everything.\u00a0 The offerings went way down.\u00a0 Decisions had to be made of terminating staff people.\u00a0 There were no jobs available for them in other places.\u00a0 It happened overseas.\u00a0 I had the privilege of knowing and having the funeral of one of those people.\u00a0 Her name was Zona Smith.\u00a0 Her legal name was Arizona Smith.\u00a0 She didn’t like that Arizona business.\u00a0 She was from Iowa.\u00a0 She went to Drake University, graduated summa cum laude, went to the CWBM, applied for missionary work, and went overseas in 1910.\u00a0 In 1932, letters went all over the world saying we had to cut back on missionaries.\u00a0 She resigned as a missionary.\u00a0 She said God had called her to be a missionary to Argentina, so she got herself a little apartment.\u00a0 She had a little savings.\u00a0 You talk about a woman pioneering!\u00a0 She helped found a thing called the Institute for Women Christian Workers.\u00a0 Since women weren’t admitted to seminaries, they started training women Methodists and Disciples.\u00a0 They didn’t ordain them; they commissioned them.\u00a0 Even in my life, they got into arguments in Argentina about what an ordained woman could do that a commissioned woman could not do.\u00a0 They finally decided that the commissioned woman couldn’t pronounce the benediction!\u00a0 In 1917 she founded a magazine for women.\u00a0 As far as I know, there was no other magazine, secular or religious, not in Argentina or in all of South America.\u00a0 This magazine, called Guia de Hogar, circulated widely all over the continent.\u00a0 She resigned and stayed on her own, continuing to publish the magazine.\u00a0 She finally died in 1952.\u00a0 I had to settle up her estate.\u00a0 She had four large trunks full of envelopes from people she had corresponded with in Peru and Panama with things about the women’s magazine.\u00a0 It took me forever to go through envelope by envelope.\u00a0 Sometimes she would get a check from somebody in foreign currency.\u00a0 She would convert it into pesos and it produced two more pesos than the subscription was, so she would put the pesos back in the envelope with the intent of returning the money some day, but never did.\u00a0 I found hundreds of bills of money which I carefully assembled and threw the envelopes away.\u00a0 The problem is, the money had decreased in value but the stamps on the envelopes were a real asset!\u00a0 So, I burned all the envelopes and kept the pesos.\u00a0 This is an illustration of the vision work of the church and the place of women in the church.\u00a0 I don’t think many women in the USA understand what this woman did as a pioneer.\u00a0 She started another thing called the Argentine League of Protestant Women… kind of like Church Women United.\u00a0 At her funeral, there were scads of people I had never seen before.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That is not the organizational history of The United Society, but it’s an element of which I am sure there are dozens and dozens of types of work that were brought together under The United Society and spun off indirectly by circumstances.\u00a0 This internal tension between administrative methods and validity, over the years counseled a different approach.\u00a0 Even before restructure, the program of The UCMS was not just DHM and DOM; it had all kinds of ramifications all over the country.\u00a0 The educational program of the church had regional directors of Christian education, working out of what is now DHM.\u00a0 The summer conference program was run by those directors; not by the regions.\u00a0 And, that was a sophisticated thing done by Christian educators.\u00a0 They directed a formal curriculum, printed materials, a four-year course in the summer time, and a commencement program that handed out a diploma.\u00a0 It was designed to train the leaders of the local church.\u00a0 That was done not by the regions all over the country, but by the Department of Christian Education.\u00a0 The educational promotional work of the mission work followed the lines of the old CWBM.\u00a0 There were area executives all over the nation, working out of the Indianapolis office.\u00a0 The United Society had a director of education in Kentucky on their staff when I went to college during the depression years.\u00a0 The women’s department had a full time executive in Kentucky.\u00a0 By circumstance, this educational process began to be merged with the states and gave the regions a kind of mission it never had before.<\/p>\n

In 1936, I was assigned to the State Office in Kentucky, as a servership from college.\u00a0 The executive there was Ben Bobbitt.\u00a0 Maybe you’ve heard that name.\u00a0 He was called the Secretary Director.\u00a0 As the Secretary, he worked with the churches in Kentucky.\u00a0 As the Director, he worked for The UCMS.\u00a0 About four blocks away, there was a full time woman working.\u00a0 She worked for the mission board, not for the state office.\u00a0 Over the years, by economic pressures in some cases and sometimes by program, there was a shift of national personnel to regional personnel.<\/p>\n

If I could say just a word more about the impact of restructure.\u00a0 The process of restructure started with a panel of scholars to make a theological study of the nature and mission of the church. Out of that grew the commission to restructure.\u00a0 The denomination was not structured in keeping with this mission of the church.\u00a0 The big question in restructure was what would The UCMS do because it received 40 per cent of unified promotion money and still had deployed staff all over the nation and the executive of The United Society was still the principal operating officer of the denomination.\u00a0 It was further complicated by the fact that A. Dale Fiers, who had been the president of The UCMS, became the Executive Secretary of the International Convention and the Chief Overseer of the restructure process.\u00a0 They didn’t know what to do for a president.\u00a0 So, they asked Virgil Sly to take it because they weren’t sure what the future of The UCMS would be.\u00a0 Virgil served until 1968, when he reached retirement age.\u00a0 They had to pick a new person.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Committee invited Virginia and me to dinner at the Columbia Club on the Circle.\u00a0 They said right off the bat:\u00a0 We need a new president of The United Society, but we don’t know what that means anymore.\u00a0 They were six months away from the adoption of the restructure of the church.\u00a0 They said, we can’t go out and ask somebody.\u00a0 They can’t go to a president of a college and ask of they want to be president for less than six months; so, they had to look internally.\u00a0 They asked me to take this job.\u00a0 But, it wasn’t because they thought I was capable of the foreseeable future.\u00a0 There was no foreseeable future.\u00a0 Nobody knew what would happen after restructure.\u00a0 We were fortunate to have as heads of DHM and DOM, Kenneth Kuntz and Robert Thomas, who were really convinced that the restructure process was the right structure.\u00a0 So, after the restructure design was adopted, it was my responsibility to help The UCMS move into the new structure.<\/p>\n

In a sense, it was chapter two of The UCMS.\u00a0 Chapter one was in 1920, when The UCMS was the restructured programmatic life of the church.\u00a0 It included everything.\u00a0 But, by the time restructure took place in the 1960s, very strong separate institutions such as NBA, Pension Fund, etc., used the language of a division of the church.\u00a0 We concluded that the DOM and DHM should become divisions of the church, which meant drafting a charter, developing a corporate description, and moving into the new structure.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But, there were problems which didn’t get solved by that simple division.\u00a0 There were investments that were not clearly designated for one or the other.\u00a0 We made three investments:\u00a0 DOM, DHM and The UCMS.\u00a0 We put money there that couldn’t be finely defined.\u00a0 There were properties, like the one you spent most of the afternoon on here (not only in the United States but abroad), that were in the name of UCMS.\u00a0 Furthermore, there were estates that were in the process of being settled.\u00a0 Where The UCMS was a beneficiary, we didn’t want to wipe out The UCMS under those circumstances.\u00a0 There were certain functions of The UCMS that didn’t fit DOM and DHM.\u00a0 We tend to think today that The UCMS is the mother of these two units; but, that’s not totally true.\u00a0 I saw in your budget here that you have medical obligations for retirees, who were employees of The UCMS that shouldn’t be transferred to DOM or DHM.\u00a0 There’s real estate and contractual relationships that had corporate responsibility.\u00a0 So, we said, for at least the foreseeable future…not for eternity… we ought to keep the corporate life of The UCMS, take care of those items that cannot be separated or transferred to DOM and DHM or to some other entity of the church.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We had an extensive, for example, health program in The United Society that functioned for years.\u00a0 But, it didn’t benefit local churches.\u00a0 The Pension Fund launched the health plan.\u00a0 As soon as it got organized, we transferred all this package of participants.\u00a0 There were aspects of communication that The UCMS had that were transferred to the General Minister and President’s office.\u00a0 The definition of what the role of The UCMS president would be changed often.\u00a0 Dale said to me that he wanted me to become an Associate General Minister and President.\u00a0 Over four or five years, until I finished my term, I spent a lot of time working on the nuts and bolts…not the most exciting thing…trying to get some regions to merge, like Iowa and Minnesota to put together the Upper Midwest; South Carolina and Georgia we tried and failed.\u00a0 To see that the role of The United Society was not only made for administration work but also to commit itself to the unity of the denomination.\u00a0 There was a time, for example, when Dallas\/Fort Worth wanted to be a separate region from Texas.\u00a0 I spent my time for four years getting together the nuts and bolts to take care of the needs of these things and to help facilitate the downsizing of The UCMS to this holding corporation of things that couldn’t be easily transferred.<\/p>\n

I can’t tell you whether we thought this would be necessary for two years or six years or for a hundred years.\u00a0 We said to ourselves that The UCMS should exist as long as there is a problem, legal or financial or otherwise.\u00a0 But, there will be a day when it won’t exist anymore, when these things are taken care of.\u00a0 And, you’re still taking care of some of them.\u00a0 I saw that this afternoon.<\/p>\n

I think the bad news that The UCMS incorporated in 1920 and expressed in its participation in restructure were still the basic two:\u00a0 one, it’s a unit of the church and it should do what it can do to unite the church in every feasible way; and, second, faithful administration or effective administration of the work that it does.\u00a0 The scope of that thing over the years has changed.\u00a0 Some changes were made from outside pressure; some changes were made from inside pressure.\u00a0 One illustration: \u00a0the regional programs of the church developed substantially during these later years of The UCMS.\u00a0 But, the women’s staff remained a staff of the Central office.\u00a0 There was growing conversation about transferring those deployed staff members to the regions and transferring to the regions the allocation of the commission on finance for their salaries and benefits.\u00a0 That was done, but it was not enthusiastically celebrated by everybody.\u00a0 There were women leaders nationally who felt that their voice was weakened.\u00a0 There were regional staff that were reluctant to accept a compromise agreement that meant appointing new women staff that would consult with the national office.\u00a0 See how that threatened the autonomy of the regions?\u00a0 But, we finally got a formal kind of a covenant between all the regions and The United Society that in staff selection they would make their decisions, but after consultation with the Department of Women of DHM.<\/p>\n

Throughout, the policy of The United Society was to strengthen the administrative piece of the work and at the same time be a part of the unity of the church.\u00a0 The individual decisions over a period of years were complicated, sometimes debated; but, in retrospect, I think most people felt that process and creating DHM and DOM and transferring the regions was the right way to go.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That’s the background for what you’re doing, and it will be in your hands to decide what responsibilities The UCMS has will still remain, what can be transferred appropriately, and whether The UCMS can continue its endeavor.\u00a0 And, it’s complicated by one other complication.\u00a0 In some real estate, it is difficult to change the title.\u00a0 The church I served in Buenos Aires, the title to this day I think is still in CWBM.\u00a0 I don’t know whether it has been changed or not.\u00a0 But, when I was there, we tried to change the title to the Argentine church and the federal government said, even though they don’t pay for it, we would have to have an appraisal of the value of the real estate and taxes would have to be paid on the capital gains, etc.\u00a0 It was so horrendous a number of pesos (thousands of dollars).\u00a0 It isn’t easy to do these things, but I want to finalize by saying that I appreciate the fact you folk are willing to serve on this UCMS Board that is in the final stage of what is a very fascinating history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","topic":[20180],"region":[20049],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPresentation to the United Christian Missionary Society Board of Trustees - Global Ministries<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/resource\/college_of_mission_presentation_to_the_united\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Presentation to the United Christian Missionary Society Board of Trustees - Global Ministries\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"T. J. Liggett,\u00a0November 2006 I think I need to express real appreciation for this invitation to be here because periodically I just have a longing to get back into this. And, that longing has been cured. When the ecumenical movement … Read more\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/resource\/college_of_mission_presentation_to_the_united\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Global Ministries\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2021-01-28T18:44:38+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"25 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/resource\/college_of_mission_presentation_to_the_united\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/resource\/college_of_mission_presentation_to_the_united\/\",\"name\":\"Presentation to the United Christian Missionary Society Board of Trustees - Global Ministries\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2014-12-30T04:57:28+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2021-01-28T18:44:38+00:00\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/resource\/college_of_mission_presentation_to_the_united\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/resource\/college_of_mission_presentation_to_the_united\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/resource\/college_of_mission_presentation_to_the_united\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Resources\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/resources\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":3,\"name\":\"Presentation to the United Christian Missionary Society Board of Trustees\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/\",\"name\":\"Global Ministries\",\"description\":\"Global Ministries is a common missional witness of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the United Church of Christ. Global Ministries works with approximately 290 faith-based international partners in close to 90 countries. Our Vision: That all of God\u2019s people and creation share in God\u2019s abundant life. Our Mission: To receive and share the Good News of Jesus Christ by joining with global and local partners to work for justice, reconciliation, and peace.\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Presentation to the United Christian Missionary Society Board of Trustees - Global Ministries","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/resource\/college_of_mission_presentation_to_the_united\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Presentation to the United Christian Missionary Society Board of Trustees - Global Ministries","og_description":"T. J. Liggett,\u00a0November 2006 I think I need to express real appreciation for this invitation to be here because periodically I just have a longing to get back into this. And, that longing has been cured. When the ecumenical movement … Read more","og_url":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/resource\/college_of_mission_presentation_to_the_united\/","og_site_name":"Global Ministries","article_modified_time":"2021-01-28T18:44:38+00:00","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Est. reading time":"25 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/resource\/college_of_mission_presentation_to_the_united\/","url":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/resource\/college_of_mission_presentation_to_the_united\/","name":"Presentation to the United Christian Missionary Society Board of Trustees - Global Ministries","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/#website"},"datePublished":"2014-12-30T04:57:28+00:00","dateModified":"2021-01-28T18:44:38+00:00","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/resource\/college_of_mission_presentation_to_the_united\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/resource\/college_of_mission_presentation_to_the_united\/"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/resource\/college_of_mission_presentation_to_the_united\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Resources","item":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/resources\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Presentation to the United Christian Missionary Society Board of Trustees"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/","name":"Global Ministries","description":"Global Ministries is a common missional witness of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the United Church of Christ. Global Ministries works with approximately 290 faith-based international partners in close to 90 countries. Our Vision: That all of God\u2019s people and creation share in God\u2019s abundant life. Our Mission: To receive and share the Good News of Jesus Christ by joining with global and local partners to work for justice, reconciliation, and peace.","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-US"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/resource\/23044"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/resource"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/resource"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=23044"},{"taxonomy":"region","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.globalministries.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/region?post=23044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}