Consultation on Church Union
COCU Logo
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| Founded | 1960 |
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| Type | Religious |
| Focus | Ecumenism, Mainline Christianity |
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| Origins | Sermon by Eugene Carson Blake in 1960 |
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Area served
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North America |
The Consultation on Church Union (COCU) was an effort towards church unity in the United States, that began in 1962 and in 2002 became the Churches Uniting in Christ. It was a significant part of the Christian movement towards Ecumenism. This effort can be seen in the context of the worldwide ecumenical attitude that was manifested in the 1948 formation of the World Council of Churches, the 1950 formation of the National Council of Churches, the 1957 formation of the United Church of Christ, and the formation of the Roman Catholic Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity during the Second Vatican Council (which occurred from 1962 to 1965). The original task of COCU was to negotiate a consensus between its member denominations (originally the Protestant Episcopal Church, the Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, and the UPCUSA).
On December 4th, 1960, Eugene Carson Blake, the stated clerk of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., on the invitation of Episcopal Bishop James Pike, delivered a sermon at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, in which he proposed the creation of a Protestant "superchurch." In response, the UPCUSA's General Assembly, approved an overture at its General Assembly meeting to work together with the Protestant Episcopal Church in order to invite the Methodist Church and the United Church of Christ to explore the concept of union. The Episcopal church accepted the invitation. Representatives from the four churches met in Washington, D.C. in 1961 and proposed a first official meeting of the churches for the following year at the College of Preachers and Wesley Theological Seminary. It was at that 1962 meeting that the group, which had come to include the Presbyterian Church in the United States, the mainline "Southern Presbyterians", first called itself the "Consultation on Church Union." The first churches to be invited to join COCU beyond the first four were the International Convention of Christian Churches (Disciples), the Polish National Catholic Church, and the Evangelical United Brethren Church, which later merged with the Methodist Church to form the United Methodist Church. All North American churches were invited to send observers. At the next meeting, in 1963, the Disciples of Christ joined, and it was decided to stop sending individual invitations and instead simply accept applications. 16 other churches attended the 1963 meeting as observers.
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