Who We Are

Rooted in the grace of God, the mission of the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ is to nurture local church vitality and the covenant among our churches to make God’s love and justice real.

We are a gathering of 386 churches with over 73,000 members, making us the largest Protestant denomination in Massachusetts. Our roots go back to the Puritans and Pilgrims who founded this country, making us the Commonwealth’s oldest denomination.

Here is an irony. We begin with a brag here of the Puritan and Pilgrim roots of the Church, yet the call for "restorative justice" to replace "retributive justice" utterly rejects the views about justice of the same Puritans and Pilgrims. And it rejects the Anglo-Saxon traditions of jurisprudence as well. Seems to me like over-kill.  You can do much for the prisoners and downtrodden without going so far as to put the burden on the victim.