We sent out some notices to people about the website this afternoon. We got a response from a "Rev. Molly". I will let her introduce herself:
"I received your email and the link to your website. As Conference Minister for the Central Pacific Conference of the United Church of Christ, I appreciate and acknowledge all concerns that are brought to me about our member churches.
I am closely aware and supportive of Rev. Kukuk's ministry. She and I have met at length. I have also spoken with many other members of the Ashland UCC family.
I regret that you have felt unsupported, however, it is inappropriate to forward your complaints to such a wide audience. Your behavior, as it has been reported to me, continues to be abusive and constitutes harrassment. As Christians that live in covenant with one another, there are expectations of kindness, compassion and grace. I see no indication that Ashland UCC or Rev. Kukuk have acted in any way outside of this covenant. I have, however, received many reports of damaging and hurtful behavior from yourself and your partner. I ask that you please stop."
I sent her this response:
Dear Rev. Molly,
There are so many, many things you got quite wrong in your response to L, and this reinforces the thesis of our website, that folks in the UCC church lack respect for finding the truth, preferring to cloak themselves in piety and shame people who are presenting different ideas than their own.
L’s email to you was not a complaint. We are not complaining. We put the whole story of what happened to us at the church on a public website so that sensible, clear-minded people can make a determination for themselves about it, and we want it to have as wide an audience as possible. We thought it a favor to you to know about the website.
We have already seen that higher ups in the United Church are cloaked in hypocrisy, always ready with the recommendations about how to be “Christian”, while not observing even the most basic principles of fairness, just as in your response! We would not have expected you to somehow “help us” with our “complaint”. We had no expectation of that. It is in no way “inappropriate” to seek the widest possible audience for the site. It is what, fortunately, we are privileged to do in 2017 in the United States - to offer our ideas out into the public commons of ideas and seek to tell the truth.
The rest of your message is just ridiculous, Rev. Molly. You are basically saying that you know who we are and you know all about us on the basis of gossip. You don’t know us. You don’t have “dominion” over us. There isn’t anything uniquely holy about you or your church. So we don’t need your lecture about what being a good Christian is all about. Your position right now is much closer to that of the scribes and pharisees in the Bible, if you want to think about it. Probably you don’t. It is a hysterical assertion, though. Our lodging of a petition to the Conference about ethics specifically addressed the dishonesty of Rev. Kukuk. And your investigation of that amounts to nothing. It is laughable.
One more thing. I have no idea where you got this idea about the “covenant” of kindness. Kindness, compassion and grace are all good qualities. So are honesty, accountability and self-responsibility. And morality is not about being harmless. That is a phony morality. Morality is about doing the right thing.
No one at the church did the right thing. That is not a mortal sin. All anyone had to do was to acknowledge the mistakes that were being made and take responsibility for fixing them. Rev. Kukuk managed to take a very ordinary and stupid incident of bullying on the part of an elder in the church against a volunteer and create an existential crisis for the congregation. Dozens of people have left. That is horrible pastoring, and if you were doing your job, you’d actually try to make an honest assessment of it, instead of taking counsel from the perpetrator.
I am posting your response and my response to you on our blog. Feel free to continue the conversation if you like, but try to see if you can make an argument based on actual facts, rather than hearsay. And spare us the pontificating. It doesn’t serve your cause very well. If you want to actually be kind, you could start by assuming you know much less than you do.
Daniel Sperry