the Committee for the Continuation of Congregational Christian Churches, formed by the pastor of Los Angeles' Congregational Church of the Messiah, Harry R. Butman; and the League to Uphold Congregational Principles, led by a Hartford, Connecticut pastor, Henry Gray. These two groups conducted an extensive pamphlet and church-meeting campaign to forestall the merger process, despite the General Council's and the E&R General Synod's revision of the Basis in favor of explicit congregational autonomy. Their counterpart on the pro-UCC side of the denominational merger debate was the then-current CC general minister and president, Douglas Horton. When these efforts only produced a small minority of sympathizers, some "continuing" clergy and laypeople in a Brooklyn congregation decided to take legal action, suing CC moderator Helen Kenyon in 1949, in order to place a legal restraint on the process. Some years later, after appellate courts reversed the lower court's finding in favor of the merger opponents, the activists turned instead to forming a new fellowship, with no legal claims to any portion of the assets of the majority. Representatives from 102 U.S. Congregational Christian churches met at a Detroit hotel in 1955 to organize the NACCC as an alternative to joining the UCC. Because the existing denominational organization was being transferred to the UCC, the NACCC started out without any funds, staff, or organizational structure. Dr. Harry Johnson of Idaho, who previously been superintendent of the Intermountain Conference of the Congregational Christian Churches, became its first Executive Secretary in 1956. He was succeeded in 1959 by the Rev. Neil Swanson, minister of a church in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. Under Swanson's leadership, the first denominational office was established in Milwaukee. The NACCC moved into its own newly-built headquarters building in Oak Creek in 1973. All Congregational-heritage colleges except for Piedmont College in Georgia approved the UCC merger, which finally took place in 1957. Piedmont joined the UCC in the early 2000s while keeping its NACCC affiliation. Current ethos and practices During the 1960s through the 1990s, the NACCC slowly built a network of, or formed alliances with, voluntarily-supported missions and agencies to replace those lost in the UCC merger. One distinction between the NACCC and UCC is the former body's refusal to engage in political activity on behalf of its constituent churches. By its governing ethos, the NACCC refrains from taking political positions of any kind. The NACCC's commitment to local church autonomy is so pronounced,