On December 4, 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.
Time magazine reported that a meeting in Dallas in May 1966 produced a timetable for merger that called for "creation and ratification of a union plan within 13 years, followed by some 30 years of federation during which a constitution will be prepared." Among delegates from the eight churches then involved were Methodist theologian
Albert Outler, Episcopal bishop Robert Gibson of Virginia, and
United Church of Christ minister
David Colwell. By 1967, ten churches (including two pairs, Presbyterian and Methodist, which later merged) were members of the consultation: •
African Methodist Episcopal Church •
African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church •
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) •
Christian Methodist Episcopal Church •
Episcopal Church •
Evangelical United Brethren Church •
Methodist Church •
Presbyterian Church in the U.S. •
United Church of Christ •
United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Churches of Christ Uniting Churches of Christ Uniting was a proposed name for a body growing out of the Consultation on Church Union which began in 1962 among ten predominantly "
mainline"
U.S. Protestant denominations. The consolidation proposed in the original scheme was overwhelmingly rejected when put to a vote of the constituent denominations in 1969, so the leaders, unwilling to abandon totally this effort, adopted more of a "go slow" approach. Groups within the Consultation began closer contacts, and in some instances full communion, with each other, and the idea to call the group that was hoped to be formed in the long term
Church of Christ United was proposed, with the interim name while the process was ongoing to be
Church of Christ Uniting. (These names had the additional advantage of having the same initials as the initial Consultation on the Church Union.) Opposition within the component denominations, particularly the United Presbyterian Church, caused any plan for a full merger to be put on hold, and a new name, seemingly implying that "uniting" is a presently-ongoing but perhaps long-term goal, was adopted,
Churches Uniting in Christ. (This name also had the advantage of not sounding as much like one of the existing constituent groups, the
United Church of Christ, nor like an entirely unrelated one, the
Church of Christ.) ==The 1970 Plan of Union==