page_title: United Church of Christ
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: United Church of Christ / History
caption_attribution_description: First Church of Christ, Farmington, Connecticut, USA
context_page_description: The United Church of Christ is a mainline Protestant Christian denomination based in the United States, with historical confessional roots in the Congregational, Reformed, and Lutheran traditions, and with approximately 4,882 churches and 824,866 members. The United Church of Christ is a historical continuation of the General Council of Congregational Christian churches founded under the influence of New England Pilgrims and Puritans. Moreover, it also subsumed the third largest Reformed group in the country, the German Reformed. The Evangelical and Reformed Church and the General Council of the Congregational Christian Churches united in 1957 to form the UCC. These two denominations, which were themselves the result of earlier unions, had their roots in Congregational, Lutheran, Evangelical, and Reformed denominations. At the end of 2014, the UCC's 5,116 congregations claimed 979,239 members, primarily in the U.S. In 2015, Pew Research estimated that 0.4 percent, or 1 million adult adherents, of the U.S. population self-identify with the United Church of Christ.
  The UCC maintains full communion with other mainline Protestant denominations.
context_section_description: The United Church of Christ was formed when two Protestant churches, the Evangelical and Reformed Church and the General Council of the Congregational Christian Churches united in 1957. This union adopted an earlier general statement of unity between the two denominations, the 1943 "Basis of Union". At this time, the UCC claimed about two million members. In 1959, in its General Synod, the UCC adopted a broad "Statement of Faith". The UCC adopted its constitution and by-laws in 1961.
caption: Congregational Church in Connecticut.
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