NYT: Yale Ending Affiliation With a Church (once led by Wm. Sloane Coffin)

[DeepModem Mom]

Yale Ending Its Affiliation With a Church
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN

Published: April 12, 2005


NEW HAVEN, April 10 - After asking God to help two boys with cancer and a family that had just lost an uncle, the congregants of Battell Chapel at Yale University bowed their heads on Sunday and improvised a prayer for another group in need: themselves.

Yale and the 248-year-old congregation are at a crossroads. The university has announced that as of July its chapel will no longer be affiliated with United Church of Christ, the successor to what was once referred to as the Congregational church.

Though the decision is one of several aimed at making the Yale campus more welcoming to all faiths, the church's congregants have criticized the university for turning its back on its Congregational past and leaving them feeling unappreciated and adrift.

Congregational ministers founded Yale College in 1701 to train men to serve church and state, and many of its early presidents also led chapel services. In 1757, Yale formed the current congregation, now known as Church of Christ in Yale....The affiliation with the United Church of Christ, a liberal Protestant branch, came in 1961, when the congregation was led by the Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr. and other Congregational churches were making the switch....

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Yale said that the recommendation that it disassociate itself from the United Church of Christ was one of several contained in a confidential report prepared in December by a university committee that was asked to look at "ways to strengthen the growing expressions of religious and spiritual life" at Yale....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/nyregion/12yale.html