Consultation on Church Union.

The 1970s opened with high hopes for closer relationships between various religious groups. The most obvious evidence was the developing plans for a merger of nine of the leading Main-line Protestant denominations in the Consultation on Church Union (COCU). Here representatives from the African Methodist Episcopal, the African Methodist Zion, and the Central Methodist Episcopal churches; the Christian church, or Disciples of Christ; the Episcopal church; the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.; the United Church of Christ; the United Methodist church; and the United Presbyterian church worked on a structure that would permit the creation of a denomination with about twenty-three million members. Observers found it interesting that the COCU denominations had lost nearly two million members since the project began a decade earlier.

Plan of Union.

In 1971 COCU sent its Plan of Union, a document on how to create...