## Metadata: - Source: Louis H. Gunnemann, *United and Uniting: The Meaning of an Ecclesial Journey* (United Church Press, 1987) - Reference: [[3. Resources/Readwise/Books/United and Uniting|United and Uniting]] — 45 highlights - Prequel: [[3. Resources/Readwise/Books/Shaping of the United Church of Christ|Shaping of the United Church of Christ]] (Gunnemann, 1977) - Reader draft: https://read.readwise.io/read/01kyd5cd8aae81vxt26eeeem9q - Tags: #ecclesiology #governance # The Church That Wrote Its Own License Wrong **A review of Louis H. Gunnemann, [*United and Uniting: The Meaning of an Ecclesial Journey*](https://archive.org/details/unitedunitingmea0000gunn) (United Church Press, 1987). Out of print; scanned in full at the Internet Archive.** In 1987, on the thirtieth anniversary of the United Church of Christ, one of its own seminary deans published a book arguing that the denomination had a constitutional bug it had never fixed. The bug is in Article IV, paragraph 15. It grants each local church the right "to formulate its own covenants and confessions of faith." Gunnemann spends 180 pages asking one question about that sentence: is it a license, or is it a charge of responsibility? He is not being cute. He thinks the answer determines whether the UCC is a church. %% PICK ONE — each is complete prose except the bracketed phrase. Delete the other two and this comment block. **A — governance-first.** I came to Gunnemann sideways. I had spent [the year on FAIR and Linux Foundation governance work / a stretch of months arguing about project governance], and a book about a 1987 Protestant merger turned out to be the most precise thing I had read about the problem I was actually stuck on: what a community owes the layers above it, and what it owes nothing to. **B — church-first.** I picked this up because [reason — a polity class, a discernment process, a congregation asking what it belongs to]. I did not expect to find my open source work in it. The overlap is not a metaphor I am imposing; Gunnemann and Ostrom are describing the same failure with different words. **C — the blunt version.** [How you found it — a citation in the Manual on Ministry, a used-shelf accident, an assignment.] Whatever brought me to it, the reason I finished it is that Gunnemann is asking, in 1987 and about a denomination, the question I keep failing to answer about software projects. %% Thirty-nine years later the numbers are in. [Ryan Burge's data](https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-united-church-of-christ-is-running) puts current UCC membership at 683,936, down roughly 70% from its peak, across 4,485 congregations, down about 46%. Gunnemann did not predict those numbers, and he would have resisted the idea that his book explains them. But he did name a structural condition in 1987 that makes them legible in a way that "mainline decline" does not. ## United as identity, uniting as vocation The book's frame is in the title, and Gunnemann states it cleanly: > "United as identity, and uniting as vocation have meaning that derives from two major sources: first, the imperative and character of Christian unity as interpreted in the New Testament; and, second, the story of modern ecumenism in which the imperative of Christian unity has gained new significance in a fragmented world." The 1957 merger of the Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reformed Church was not supposed to be a merger. It was supposed to be a demonstration. The point was to prove that a church could form across genuine confessional difference — Calvinist, Lutheran, Wesleyan, Zwinglian, and what Gunnemann's sources call "left-wing" strands all sitting in the same pews — and thereby model something for every other divided communion watching. He is explicit that the demonstration mattered more than the institution: > "United churches have contributed invaluable experience to the entire ecumenical movement by demonstrating the possibilities in living toward unity. They exhibit the reality that theological consensus is not an absolute precondition of union but the continuing, and potentially exhilarating, task of the community of faith living under the power of the gift of unity." That claim — consensus is the *work*, not the *entry requirement* — is the most useful idea in the book, and it is the one most often gotten backwards. Every organization that has ever stalled a merger waiting for alignment has assumed the opposite. The cost of that posture is stated with equal clarity. The Basis of Union, Gunnemann writes, "clearly acknowledged that the faith communities known as Congregational Christian and Evangelical and Reformed would have to die in order that Jesus' prayer could be fulfilled." And a few pages on, in the sentence I keep returning to: > "To surrender an identity is not to discard it but to subordinate it in the service of a new and larger identity." Two paragraphs of the merger documents contradict each other on exactly this point. One says the uniting bodies join "without break in their respective continuities and traditions." The other says they die. Gunnemann never resolves the contradiction. Neither did the UCC. ## The ecclesiology nobody wrote Here is the book's sharpest self-criticism, and it applies well beyond churches. Because the merger prioritized unity over doctrine, the new denomination developed a habit of not asking what it was: > "The first consequence of the subordination of doctrinal differences to the goal of Christian unity through church union was an all-pervasive tendency during the first two decades of UCC history to neglect, and perhaps even avoid, ecclesiological questions." He notes that both merging bodies arrived with "more than two hundred years of experience in concentrating on issues of personal and individual faith but relatively little occasion to question the nature of the church." Neither side had the muscle. So the question went unasked. The second consequence lands harder: > "The second consequence of the practice of subordinating doctrinal differences was the increasing dominance of a social activism that often lacked clearly articulated theological grounding and consistent development." This is a Christian ethicist and UCC insider saying, in 1987, that his denomination's justice work had outrun its theology. He is not attacking the work. He is saying that activism unmoored from an account of what the church *is* becomes a set of positions rather than a formation, and positions can be adopted or dropped by a body that never had to agree on anything in the first place. If your organizing principle is "we do not require agreement," you eventually find you cannot require anything. Both consequences trace to the same source: a founding generation that treated the hard question as deferrable. Gunnemann's judgment is that the deferral was never a delay. It became the polity. ## Covenant versus contract Chapter 8 is where the book stops being denominational history and becomes something more portable. Gunnemann puts the two available readings of paragraph 15 side by side: > "On the one hand, the covenant assures mutual care, respect, and trust... On the other hand, the contract assumes an adversarial attitude, engenders distrust and suspicion, and builds defensive lines that divide and alienate. The covenant assumes and affirms the redemption and transformation of human nature... The contract assumes that in any organized form of community the base, unredeemed elements of human nature must be restrained by law." His verdict on which reading won: > "When allowed to stand in its 'social contract garb,' the affirmation of the autonomy of the local church becomes a 'red flag' in ecumenical relationships. Where is the church — as Christ's koinonia — in the so-called United Church of Christ? Because it does not take autonomy seriously in a covenantal mode, the UCC undercuts the creative potential its ecclesial model has in this ecumenical age." And then the definition that reframes the whole argument: autonomy "understood not as independence but as responsibility for self-rule in the awareness that in Jesus Christ all are one body in communion with him and with one another." Gunnemann is not against local autonomy. He calls it "the genius" of the UCC model. He is against autonomy defined by exit rights. The distinction is between a body that governs itself because it is accountable to something, and a body that governs itself because nobody can make it do otherwise. The practical consequence appears in his account of the 1981 full communion agreement with the Evangelical Church of the Union in Germany. General Synod voted it. Local churches were not bound by it. So implementing it meant persuading four thousand congregations one at a time: > "To put it crassly, the concept of full communion and its mandates must be 'marketed' among local churches. Quite apart from the magnitude and complexity of such an effort, the baffling reality is that UCC organizational structure lacks a binding principle of accountable unity." A denomination that has to run an internal marketing campaign to make its own ecumenical commitments real has answered the paragraph 15 question. It read it as a license. ## What Gunnemann was actually describing Here is what I did not expect from a 1987 book about Protestant polity: it is a governance paper about a commons, and it reaches conclusions that the open source world arrived at independently, later, and mostly by getting burned. Elinor Ostrom's design principles for durable commons — which I know through [Nadia Eghbal's *Working in Public*](https://press.stripe.com/working-in-public) and Greg Bloom's ["Principles of Governing Open Source Commons"](https://www.appropedia.org/The_Principles_of_Governing_Open_Source_Commons) — include two that Gunnemann is effectively restating in theological vocabulary. Ostrom's fourth principle: those who monitor the rules are community members or accountable to the community. Her eighth: if the commons is part of a larger system, its governing rules are organized into multiple nested layers of authority. Bloom's gloss on that last one is worth putting next to Gunnemann's: > "We realize that every commons is part of a larger whole. Therefore, different institutions working at different scales are needed to coordinate stewardship and to cooperate with each other." That is subsidiarity. It is also, almost exactly, "autonomy understood not as independence but as responsibility for self-rule in the awareness that... all are one body." Gunnemann's complaint is that the UCC built the local layer and skipped the nesting. General Synod speaks *to* the churches, never *for* them. There is no binding relation between scales — which is Ostrom's eighth principle failing, and Ostrom's prediction is that such a commons does not hold. The parallel gets uncomfortably specific when you put it against WordPress. The 2024–25 conflict turned on the same missing layer. Trade reporting on the WP Engine litigation kept returning to what it called the unusual dual structure of WordPress governance, in which the WordPress Foundation "ostensibly oversees the open-source project" while Automattic "exerts significant influence over the WordPress.org repository and community resources." [404 Media reported](https://www.404media.co/wordpress-login-pineapple-on-pizza/) that contributors' open letter raised "concerns about 'double standards,' including Mullenweg's lack of accountability under the project's Code of Conduct." Different failure direction — WordPress has a concentration problem where the UCC has a dispersion problem — but the same diagnosis: the written rules do not bind the layer that actually decides. And the remedy the WordPress ecosystem reached for is the one Gunnemann wanted. When FAIR [moved under the Linux Foundation](https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-announces-the-fair-package-manager-project-for-open-source-content-management-system-stability), Simon Kraft described the move on the KrautPress podcast as arranging "for proper governance for all of this. We have a TSC, that is a technical steering committee that is chosen from the community." He then added the caveat Gunnemann would have endorsed: "I don't think that's like the holy grail of fixing all governance issues." Structure is not covenant. But structure is what makes covenant enforceable at scale, and neither the UCC nor pre-2024 WordPress had it. The sharpest point of contact is the fork. Mitchell Baker [writes that](https://mitchellbaker.net/2025/04/the-ethos-of-open-source/) "the 'right to fork' allows participants to try to correct wrongs in the system; it provides a mechanism for alternatives to emerge." That is the license reading of paragraph 15, stated approvingly, by someone who has thought hard about open source ethics. A UCC congregation's autonomy *is* a standing right to fork, exercised without cost, requiring no justification. Open source treats that right as a load-bearing safety valve. Gunnemann treats the identical right as the thing that hollowed out his church. Both can be true, and the condition that decides which is Ostrom's: a right to exit stabilizes a commons when the layers above it are legitimate and accountable, and dissolves it when they are not. The UCC granted the exit right and never built the accountable layer. It got the fork dynamics without the foundation. Thirty-nine years of congregational drift is what that looks like when it runs to completion — and it is, I think, the strongest available argument for why open source projects should treat governance work as load-bearing rather than as overhead. %% PICK ONE — or write over the top. The section above argues the parallel holds; this is where you say whether you believe it. **A — it holds.** [Yes/no, and from where you sit.] The reason I think the split survives contact with practice is that I have watched both readings operate in the same room: people invoking the letter of a governing document to explain why they owe nothing, and people treating the same document as a description of what they already owe. Gunnemann's contribution is refusing to call those the same posture. **B — it is too neat.** The distinction is cleaner on the page than in a meeting. [Where it broke down for you.] Real communities run on both at once — covenant among people who know each other, contract at the boundary where they do not — and Gunnemann never concedes that the contract layer is doing necessary work at scale. **C — it holds, but the direction is wrong.** Gunnemann treats contract as the degraded form of covenant. [Your read.] From inside a governance process, the sequence often runs the other way: you write the contract first, honestly, and covenant is what accretes on top once the contract has proved it will be honored. %% ## Where the oneness argument goes wrong Gunnemann's weakest chapter is the one on diversity, and it is weak in a way that matters. He quotes approvingly that "unity in Christ leaves no room for any autonomy of tradition, culture, ethnicity, race, class, sex, politics (or anything else that we call 'Christian pluralism') by which we justify our divisions," then draws the conclusion himself: "The experience of that oneness may be diverse, but the identifying mark is oneness, not diversity." He warns against "absolutized diversity" surrendering to "a dogmatic pluralism." Read charitably, he is arguing against using difference as a permanent excuse not to be reconciled. That argument is sound and it is the one N.T. Wright makes on [the Holy Post](https://www.holypost.com/post/694-why-don-t-we-take-church-unity-seriously-with-n-t-wright): Paul "wouldn't recognize homogeneous communities as genuine churches," and the church growth movement's homogeneous-unit principle produced growth that was "advancing down the wrong road." Wright's version and Gunnemann's version agree that unity across difference is constitutive, not optional. But Wright grounds the claim in the cross and in Ephesians 3:10 — *polypoikilos sophia*, the many-colored wisdom of God, where the diversity is the revelation, not a tolerated feature of it. Gunnemann has no equivalent. His diversity is a solvent to be managed. He lists "race" in the same breath as "tradition" and "politics" as an autonomy to be "challenged and surrendered," which in a book published in 1987 by a white denomination in a country twenty-three years past the Civil Rights Act is a serious misread of what was actually dividing American churches. He is worried that Congregationalists and Evangelical-and-Reformed people are still keeping separate books. He is not worried that 11 a.m. Sunday was still the most segregated hour in America. The thing that makes this a real error rather than a period limitation is that his own framework catches it. A note from [The New Evangelicals' Juneteenth piece](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mitrEZiBH4E) puts the correction precisely: "the church doesn't get to say we're all one in Christ while turning away from the harm that it actually helped create. That's not unity." Unity invoked before repair is the contract reading of reconciliation — a claim of settled status with no accountability attached. Gunnemann's own covenant/contract distinction condemns it. He just does not apply the tool to himself. Burge's data adds the other half. Talking about denominational decline, he observes that the Assemblies of God is the only large American denomination with sustained growth over thirty years, and the mechanism is that its racial composition went from roughly 85% white to matching the country: "Look at all the mainline denominations, for goodness sakes. They're overwhelmingly white. And that's one of the reasons they're failing." Gunnemann diagnosed the UCC's problem as insufficient theological cohesion. The measurable driver of mainline collapse turned out to be substantially demographic. The oneness he wanted more of was not the scarce resource. ## What the book gets wrong or leaves out Three failures beyond the diversity chapter. **It assumes the problem is theological when it is partly organizational, and it never names the money.** Brandon O'Brien and Skye Jethani, on the Holy Post, describe a congregation where "your incentive structure is all built around the institutional needs of this infrastructure that you've built rather than the spiritual mission that you've been given," and note that when the two conflict "you automatically go to the institutional need." That is the mechanism by which a church becomes contractual regardless of what its constitution says. Gunnemann treats the drift toward contract as a failure of imagination shaped by "eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social models." Buildings and payrolls do a lot of that shaping, and he does not account for them. **It has no theory of why people leave.** Diana Butler Bass, writing much later, gives the version Gunnemann needed: people say "church or Christianity has failed them, wounded them, betrayed them, or maybe just bored them." His book is addressed to a church deciding how to be one church. It never asks whether anyone outside the room cares about the answer. The ecumenical project of the mid-century assumed a fixed pool of Christians to be reorganized. Burge's finding that the retention rate of non-religion has risen from about 20% to 60% describes a world where that assumption no longer holds. **Its prescription is unfalsifiable.** Gunnemann wants the UCC to "bend itself" to exploring the covenantal mode "theologically and politically." He does not say what a covenantally-bound local church would be required to do that an autonomous one would not. No mechanism, no threshold, no consequence. Compare Ostrom's fifth principle — rule violations meet graduated sanctions — or the Apache Way, where standing is earned by contribution and the board can actually discipline a member company. Those are covenants with teeth. Gunnemann's is an appeal to a change of heart, offered to a body he has just finished explaining has no way to act on one. To his credit, he says as much: "Learning to be accountable to Christ and Christ's Body requires a radical transformation for which many may not be ready." ## What happened next The book's forecast is worth grading, because the record since 1987 is mixed in an informative way. On the ecumenical side, Gunnemann's program largely happened. The UCC entered the [Ecumenical Partnership with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)](https://www.ucc.org/what-we-do/office-of-the-general-minister-president/eir/ecumenical_ecumenical-partnerships-and/), then the 1997 Formula of Agreement with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the Reformed Church in America. The current UCC Manual on Ministry codifies all of it, along with the 1981 EKU relationship he was writing about, and defines "united and uniting church" as a live category. The vocabulary of the book is now denominational infrastructure. On the polity side, nothing moved. Paragraph 15 stands. Full communion is still implemented congregation by congregation. The Manual on Ministry still has to define these relationships as things ministers must be able to *articulate*, which is a tell: the commitments live at the level of ministerial standing, not congregational obligation. Gunnemann's ecumenical vocation got institutionalized. His ecclesiology did not. Which is, on his own terms, the failure mode he warned about. He wanted the UCC to answer the question of what it is. It answered instead the question of whom it is in relationship with. Those are not the same, and the second is much easier to vote on. The line I would put on the last page: > "In fulfillment of its responsibility to its 'sister' united churches, as well as to itself, the UCC has before it an unfinished task. Making the 'historic faith its own' is a consequence only if each generation is involved in 'unraveling the web of our beliefs.'" Each generation. That is the part governance documents cannot carry. A constitution can define who decides; it cannot make the deciding happen. Gunnemann's covenant is a practice, and practices lapse silently — the way, in his own denomination, an unresolved contradiction in two founding paragraphs quietly became an answer. ## Further reading - [The United Church of Christ Is Running Out of People—and Pastors](https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-united-church-of-christ-is-running) — Ryan Burge's numbers on UCC membership, congregations, and the clergy pipeline. The empirical counterpart to Gunnemann's structural argument. - [The Principles of Governing Open Source Commons](https://www.appropedia.org/The_Principles_of_Governing_Open_Source_Commons) — Greg Bloom's adaptation of Ostrom's eight design principles for software communities. Read the self-governance and nestedness sections against Gunnemann's chapter 8. - [Working in Public](https://press.stripe.com/working-in-public) — Nadia Eghbal on maintainer sustainability and commons governance; the clearest treatment of why exit rights and accountability structures have to be designed together. - [Balancing Makers and Takers to Scale and Sustain Open Source](https://dri.es/balancing-makers-and-takers-to-scale-and-sustain-open-source) — Dries Buytaert's three models (self-governance, privatization, centralization). Gunnemann's UCC is a case study in the first one failing without nested authority. - [The Ethos of Open Source](https://mitchellbaker.net/2025/04/the-ethos-of-open-source/) — Mitchell Baker on the right to fork as a corrective mechanism. The strongest case against Gunnemann's position, from outside his field. - [The Shaping of the United Church of Christ](https://www.ucc.org/what-we-do/justice-local-church-ministries/mesa/ucc-history-and-polity-resources/) — Gunnemann's own 1977 history, which this book is the sequel and self-critique of. ## Links - [[Spiritual Formation and Discipleship MOC]] — places this denominational review within the vault's material on church identity, formation, and shared practice. - [[Commons & Community Governance MOC]] — the central argument: Gunnemann's covenant/contract split is Ostrom's design principles in theological vocabulary - [[Open Source Governance MOC]] — extends: UCC local-church autonomy as a permanent, costless right to fork; what happens to a commons that grants exit without building the accountable layer above it - [[Faith & Theology MOC]] — situates: united-and-uniting ecclesiology, koinonia, and the UCC's unfinished ecclesiological task ## Open threads - Two decision points remain, both marked with `%%` comment blocks: the opening entry point (how I came to the book) and the verdict on covenant/contract from inside the FAIR work. Each has three drafted options — pick one, delete the rest, fill the bracketed phrase. - Worth a permanent note: *a right to exit stabilizes a commons only when the layers above it are legitimate and accountable.* That claim is mine, not Gunnemann's and not Ostrom's — it is the join between them.