{"content":[{"text":"GB-2105","bbox":{"left":0.460196,"top":0.091435,"width":0.07972799999999997,"height":0.016926999999999998}},{"text":"Council on Christian Unity, Inc. \n dba \n Christian Unity and Interfaith Ministry \n (Office: 1099 N Meridian St., Ste. 700, 46204-1075) \n P.O. Box 1986, Indianapolis, IN 46206-1986 \n (317) 713-2585 \n E-mail: cuim@disciples.org \n Website: www.disciplescuim.org","bbox":{"left":0.275882,"top":0.126284,"width":0.4482939999999999,"height":0.13889600000000002}},{"text":"Paul S. Tché, President","bbox":{"left":0.396863,"top":0.283102,"width":0.206038,"height":0.016927000000000025}},{"text":"General Board Report on 2020","bbox":{"left":0.358824,"top":0.335375,"width":0.28247700000000003,"height":0.016927000000000025}},{"text":"The Christian Unity and Interfaith Ministry (CUIM) has been accompanying a faith \n community called the Disciples of Christ for over 110 years now on the journey toward \n unity among Christians. Since the inception of this church as a movement, the Disciples \n of Christ have envisioned Christian unity beyond the struggles and divisions within the \n Church. While the word “unity” is commonly understood to mean uniformity in a \n monotonous orthodox faith and practice, the Disciples boldly proclaim that unity is not \n merely a matter of theological agreements between institutions: rather, it is relational, \n and it is all about our life and reality. For the Disciples, the question of unity has always \n been about whether we can embrace one another as we are; whether we can worship \n together, serve together, and engage in mission together; and whether we speak to the \n world as one body of Christ for justice and peace. Our quest for unity has never been \n about putting a clear boundary around the Christian faith, but rather about our \n willingness to dissolve the existing artificial boundaries that we, not God, have set \n between ourselves. We therefore believe that unity will be lived out with a great deal of \n diversity so that we can have a broader, richer, and older church, one that Thomas \n Campbell envisioned as “essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one” (Campbell, \n Declaration and Address, 1809).","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.370223,"width":0.7600020000000001,"height":0.295715}},{"text":"To the Disciples of Christ, pursuing unity has never meant that we should let the past, \n often speaking in the name of tradition, anchor us at a certain point of our journey; it \n means that the present is defined by the road ahead of us, not behind us. It has been \n risky, and sometimes perilous, for such a small group of Christians to avow this \n revolutionized understanding of the Church and Christian unity, but nothing has \n deterred the courageous journey of the Disciples of Christ.","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.683859,"width":0.7415260000000001,"height":0.10404800000000003}},{"text":"In the course of denominational history, however, some started to suspect that the \n Disciples of Christ have developed a tendency to stay close to the shore. The fact is \n that we are now too large a denomination to function as a “movement” in terms of our \n structure, which means that we cannot be as responsive as we have been previously. \n Someone would say that we should not be “reckless,” as if we were on the US frontier in","bbox":{"left":0.117647,"top":0.805829,"width":0.7640419999999999,"height":0.08662400000000003}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}