The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA (usually identified as National Council of Churches or NCC) is an ecumenical partnership of 37 Christian faith groups in the United States. Its member denominations, churches, conventions, and archdioceses include Mainline Protestant, Orthodox, African American, Evangelical, and historic peace churches. Together, they encompass 100,000 local congregations and 45 million adherents.[1]
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The NCC holds the copyright on the Revised Standard Version and the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.
The NCC sponsors the research program on which the Uniform Sunday School Lesson Series is based. The series began in 1872 under the auspices of the National Sunday School Convention.[2]
The NCC Faith and Order Commission is an ongoing, scholarly, ecumenical dialogue among North American Christian theologians and church historians, including Evangelical, Pentecostal, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, mainline Protestant, and African-American scholars. In 2007, the Commission celebrated its fiftieth anniversary.[3]
The NCC is an insitutional member of the Interfaith Broadcasting Commission, a partnership established in 1980 with the stated goal of providing religious programming for ABC, NBC and CBS.[4] The current IBC members include the NCC, the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the New York Board of Rabbis, the Union for Reform Judaism, and the Islamic Society of North America.[4]
The member churches have engaged on issues of public policy and moral values, including by adopting the "Social Creed of the Churches" in 1908, a document which was updated by the NCC General Assembly in 2007.[5]
The Council has supported minimum wage laws,[6] environmentalist policies, and affirmative action,[7] and played a significant role in the civil rights movement in the 1960s.[8]
NCC partners with other faith-based groups, such as Bread for the World, Habitat for Humanity, and Children's Defense Fund, to press for broad policy initiatives that address poverty issues.[9] The Council helped launch the Let Justice Roll grassroots anti-poverty campaign that has been successful in raising the minimum wage in more than 20 states since 2005.[10]
In July 2005, the Antiochian Orthodox Church suspended its participation in the NCC because, according to an assistant to the denomination's senior cleric, "the NCC...seems to have taken a turn toward political positioning." [11]
NCC member organizations subscribe to the NCC's statement of faith.[12]
The Council's headquarters are located in The Interchurch Center in New York City. The NCC also operates a public-policy office in Washington DC.[13]