Douglas Horton

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Douglas Horton (July 27, 1891,

Due to his acumen and the keen ecumenical leanings of the CC Churches, Horton became the denomination's minister and general secretary in 1938, which gave him the leadership of the main national decision-making entity within the group. In that position, Horton would make his greatest contribution: overseeing the process of his church entering into a full organizational merger with a denomination governed by presbyterian polity, the Evangelical and Reformed Church.

Merger

Talks which began between leaders of the two churches in the 1930s blossomed into full-fledged preparations throughout the 1940s that brought about an actual plan by the end of that decade.

Horton and advocates of the merger, however, encountered a vociferous minority of CC pastors and laity who argued that the merger would threaten the autonomy of the local congregations by the introduction of presbyterian governance practices from the E&R Church, and that, legally, the General Council, the national legislative body, had no authority to enter its congregations into such a union in the first place. A Brooklyn church successfully sued in 1949 to restrain the merger from proceeding; in arguments before the appellate court, Horton and another CC leader, Truman Douglass, articulated that the General Council understood itself to be legally separate from the constituent congregations and not immediately subject to its directives, although admitting that it, likewise, had no power to compel participation in a merger. The court viewed these perspectives favorably, and the restraint was overturned in 1953. This enabled the final stages of the merger process to proceed, to the point of the actual union on June 25, 1957; the merged body took the name United Church of Christ.

Before the merger was consummated, however, Horton had resigned his position as CC executive to assume the position of dean of the

Horton retired from Harvard in 1960 and died eight years later in retirement. Horton was married to Mildred H. McAfee.

Sources

• The Shaping of American Congregationalism: 1620-1957, John von Rohr. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1992.
• The Shaping of the United Church of Christ: An Essay in the History of American Christianity, Louis H. Gunnemann; Charles Shelby Rooks, ed. Cleveland: United Church Press, 1999.
• The Living Theological Heritage of the United Church of Christ, volume 6, Growing Toward Unity, Elsabeth Slaughter Hilke, ed.; Thomas E. Dipko, postscript; Barbara Brown Zikmund, series ed. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2001.
• 1969 Year Book of the United Church of Christ, New York.
• Review of book Douglas Horton and the Ecumenical Impulse in American Religion

External links

• The papers of Douglas Horton are in the Harvard Divinity School Library at Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.