## Summary Discipleship Ministries is an official agency of the United Methodist Church, charged with supporting local congregations in formation, worship, and discipleship. It publishes *Congregational Song* and other worship resources, and maintains a sustained project evaluating contemporary worship music against pastoral-formation criteria. ## Tradition Mainline. Methodist. Institutional voice of the UMC in worship and discipleship matters. ## Core activities relevant to this wiki - Publishing *Congregational Song* — a journal evaluating contemporary worship music with published reasoning and criteria. - Training worship leaders through connectional networks and resources. - Publishing liturgical resources keyed to the Revised Common Lectionary. - Maintaining the UMC's worship and discipleship commitments across annual conferences. ## Why it matters for this wiki Discipleship Ministries shows that a connectional mainline denomination *can* run a sustained, institutionally backed worship-music vetting project. The UMC's work is useful to St. John's UCC as a reference for: - Criteria and rubrics for evaluating specific songs. - Pastoral/formational framing (rather than regulative-principle gatekeeping). - A model the UCC could adapt despite polity differences. See [[Worship Music Vetting Projects]] for the broader comparison. ## Tension > [!contradiction] Polity gap > UMC connectional polity supports sustained denominational vetting work. The UCC's congregationalist polity does not. The same theological instincts thus produce different institutional outputs. This wiki tries to bridge that gap for a UCC congregation. ## Open questions - Which *Congregational Song* articles directly address CCLI Top 100 songs relevant to St. John's repertoire? - Is there an analogous office or project inside the UCC that this wiki has missed? ## Further reading - [[Worship Music Vetting Projects]] - [[United Church of Christ]]