The contemporary clash between conservatives and liberals puts one of the United Church of Christ’s most cherished principles - unity in diversity - to serve test. Meeting this test is perhaps the chief demand of our time.
Unity in diversity means no one position defines us, save our allegiance to Christ. It means liberals and conservatives can co-exist in one fellowship, hilly honoring each other as kindred in Christ in spite of differences. There can be sibling rivalry under the principle of unity in diversity, and there can be passion around one’s own position. But, if the unity is to be maintained, there can be no feelings of superiority or acts of condescension. One side cannot view itself as the magnanimous one tolerating the other.
To achieve the goals we want, both liberals and conservatives will need to become more critical of their own positions. John Robinson, the minister to the Pilgrims, once wrote that it is sheer arrogance for anyone to suppose they have “sounded the Word of God to the bottom.” In our theology as well as our actions, “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Unity in diversity demands that we — liberals and conservatives alike — be humble enough to admit we do not know the whole truth and have not arrived at perfect expression or appreciation of the truth we do have. For this reason, Harry Emerson Fosdick said, at the height of the fundamentalist/modernist controversy of the 1 920s, “In the present juncture of affairs... few things are more needed than fundamentalists with some honest doubts about fundamentalism and modernists with some searching misgivings about modernism.” How did the Master put it? We need to be willing to see logs in our own eyes.
In addition to their being critical of their own positions, both liberals and conservatives, if we are to achieve the goal we want, will need to see the value in the other. Liberals need to see there are truths worth conserving, and conservatives need to see there are ideas that need liberating. Here we can be helped by turning to one of the primary insights of Elton Trueblood, as published in his book The New Man for Our Time. Trueblood wrote, “It is a mistake... to suppose that we must choose between being liberals and being conservatives, inasmuch as every sound person is something of both. Everyone who is intellectually and spiritually alive is a liberal, in the sense that he (or she) is open to truth from any quarter, welcoming any evidence without the bondage of prejudgment. Similarly, each person who thinks with any care is a conservative, partly because he (or she) is unwilling to waste whatever has proved itself in the long experience of history, and partly because he (or she) knows the most recent emphasis is not automatically the most wise.”
Achievement of any level of appreciation for the other side necessitates a kind of hospitality that is ready to listen, and to listen in a way that does not insist upon having the last and loudest word, The God is Still Speaking emphasis has the potential of being one of the most productive developments in the United Church of Christ in recent history. But it will be only a slogan if we are not listeners. As we listen, we need to hold open the possibility that God is still speaking through those who disagree with us. The conservative needs the liberal’s help in finding what needs expanding; the liberal needs the conservative’s help in seeing what’s gone too far and needs trimming back. Neither, however, will be helped at all if they are not hospitable enough to let the other speak and to listen as they speak.
Perhaps we are helped the most when we realize that Christ is not easily labeled. No side can claim him with an easy conscience. “No one puts new wine in old wineskins” - surely that makes the Master a liberal. “1 did not come to abolish the law” — surely that makes him a conservative. “Therefore every scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” — doesn’t that make him both liberal and conservative? None of us can claim him as our own.
Since Christ cannot be ours, we can only be his. This calls for us to explore more what the well- trained scribe might be like. As we pursue this, we might find there is room for what we might call an evangelical liberalism or a progressive evangelicalism, an ambidextrous discipleship, faithful, not to the ideological left or right, but to Christ who is Lord over both.

I know the controversy between liberals and conservatives has been on all our minds in some sort of way in the past few months. These words from Rev. Mark Yurs pastor at Salem UCC in Verona , get the heart of the matter better than anything I could find. Thanks to Mark for his faith, eloquence and willingness to share these thoughts.