This record group is comprised primarily of records of the associations and conferences that make up the United Church of Christ Michigan Conference. The records document the mergers between smaller conferences to make the larger ones of today. These records are largely made up of correspondence, minutes, agendas, conference materials, and programming information.
Besides records of the individual associations and conferences, the collection also contains an extensive amount of records from individual churches, which can be found in the "Records from individual churches" and the "Church files" series. Because their relationship to each other is unknown, these series were not combined. The "Church files" series are records that may have been stored by the Michigan Conference rather than the individual churches. The "Records from individual churches" concerns materials that belonged to the individual churches. Whether these churches belonged to the smaller associations that make up the Michigan Conference is unknown. Therefore, they were kept separate. More information on these series can be found in the individual series' description below.
The record group has been arranged into the following series: Michigan Conference; Associations and conferences; Woman's Home Missionary Union and related; Records from individual churches; Annual Meetings of Michigan Congregational Conference and of the United Church of Christ; Evangelical and Reformed Church; Church files; Photographs; Ministerial files; and Student ministry.
The United Church of Christ was formed from the merger in 1957 of the Congregational Christian Church and the Evangelical and Reformed Church. Subsequently, on April 17, 1963, the Michigan Congregational Conference and the Michigan-Indiana Synod of the Evangelical and Reformed Church merged to form the Michigan Conference of the United Church of Christ.
The Congregational churches of Michigan were organized into a State Association on October 11, 1842. Previously, in May 1840, the Eastern Association and Conference had been organized for the southeastern portion of the state; in 1841, the Marshall Conference (later Olivet Conference) was established, followed by the Jackson Conference in May 1842. Church leaders at the time believed that if the church was ever to become strong and efficient in the state it would need a state-wide association. The formal name of the new organization was the General Association of the Congregational Ministers and Churches of Michigan.
As of 2014, the United Church of Christ Michigan Conference consisted of the following six associations: Covenant, Detroit Metropolitan, Eastern, GrandWest, Southwest, and United Northern. The collection contains records from each of these associations.
Each of these individual associations are the product of mergers between smaller associations of churches. The Covenant Association consists of mergers between several associations. The Jackson Association (organized in 1842) merged with the Ann Arbor Region, Evangelical and Reformed Churches in 1964 to become the Ann Arbor-Jackson Association. In 1978, the Ann Arbor-Jackson Association merged with the Central Association (organized in 1845) to become the Covenant Association.
In 1993, the Grand Rapids Association and the West Michigan Association merged to form the GrandWest Association.
