Statement of Faith of the United Church of Christ
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The Statement of Faith of the United Church of Christ is a Christian confession of faith written in 1959 to express the common faith of the newly founded United Church of Christ, formed in 1957 by the union of the Evangelical and Reformed Church with the Congregational Christian Churches. The statement was prepared by a 28-member commission elected at the Uniting General Synod in 1957 and was formally ratified by the Second General Synod in 1959. The commission, chaired by Elmer J. F. Arndt (Evangelical and Reformed) and vice-chaired by Douglas Horton (Congregational Christian), had equal representation from the two predecessor bodies, and included six women.[1]
Since the original version was adopted in 1959, two further revisions of the statement have been written in order to make the statement's language more gender-inclusive (that is, to remove references to God and to humanity that are exclusively masculine). The 1976 version drafted by then-UCC president Robert Moss retains the original statement's confession-of-faith language form, while the 1981 version transformed the language of the statement into a doxological prayer form. The statement has also been translated into Spanish.