Understanding the Church Covenant (Part 1)

Imagine you are attending a wedding. The initial ceremonies are exactly what you expect, until the very end. To your shock, the minister says something like this: "Normally this is when the couple would recite their vows. But today only the groom will offer vows. The bride has chosen to simply commit to being a wife, as she is uncomfortable with the restrictive nature of specific vows, and we believe that's good enough."

Let me ask you, what would you think of such a minister? And more to the point, what would you think of such a bride? Not much, no doubt. And no one could blame you if you sincerely questioned how much time would elapse between the honeymoon and the inevitable divorce filings. Of course there is nothing particularly scandalous about promising to be a wife, that is what one half of the marriage vows are about. No, what would be so suspicious in this scenario would be the refusal to spell out what a commitment to being a wife entails. To desire partnership in marriage while trying to avoid a strict definition of one's commitments and any real accountability is revealing in the worse sense - such a person doesn't really want to be part of a marriage.

My aim in this short article is to demonstrate to you that if you would find such a wedding preposterous, then you already believe in what we call church covenants, even if you don't know that yet. I want to follow through with this aim by raising and answering three questions.

(1). What is a church covenant?

Membership to a church has been a commitment from the very beginning (see Acts 2:41-42). A church covenant is a local church's spelled-out definition and demands for their members. They put on paper what the congregation expects of each other, and what they are promising each other to work toward. Every church that has a member role has a covenant - that is, they have specific expectations for their members and a definition for what constitutes a member. Of course some churches don't publicly talk about a covenant, but even if they are silent about it, the covenant exists at some level. For instance, if a typical, supposedly non-covenant-havng church found out one of their members joined ISIS he probably would no longer be asked to lead in prayer when he visited home for Christmas. What about liberal, progressive churches that make much of their supposed tolerance - churches that affirm homosexuality, people living together outside of marriage and the barbaric praticeof abortion? Even there, if a member were to speak up about what the Bible teaches he would no longer be welcome. What's my point? Everyone has a covenant - a standard for what it takes to be a real part of a church - and the only difference is whether churches are honest about what those covenants are.

(2). Do church covenants compete with the Bible?

Well-meaning Christians have this question, and it is quite understandable. Why sign a covenant when God's Word is our ultimate authority? It is a good question but a poor objection to covenants, at least good covenants. As you will see in upcoming articles, our church covenant is a summation of what the New Testament teaches about Jesus' church. To sign the covenant is to agree with a carefully worded distillation of what the Bible says. So, to any detractors who may be tempted to think the covenant is at odds with the Word of God, I want to give a full-throated no: our church covenant is not in competition with the Bible - it upholds the Bible. Liberals in the 20th century often claimed the catchy nothing burger "no creed but the Bible," a truly awful  statement that would be repeated for decades even by well-intentioned people. This sentiment sounds conservative and Bible-exalting - but it is the opposite. Those liberals who promoted this slogan actually despised the difficult and supernatural teachings of the Bible and did not want to be tied to them, and they sought to evade theological clarity as a result. When someone just wants to be a church member without ever articulating what that means, they may be unintentionally committing the same error. But in both cases, as in the hypothetical wedding that led this article, vagueness is not commitment to what God demands but a subtle way of working around it.

(3). So why exactly do we have a church covenant?

We have a church covenant to ensure being the church means something. To baptize and affirm someone as a member is to affirm them as a Christian - this is one of the jobs of the local church, to mark out Jesus' followers by affirming their conversion. Being a church would be emptied of meaning if being a church member had no requirements. So those requirements and our mutual accountability to them is spelled out in our church covenant. Those that have no interest in the covenant have no interest in following Jesus - and it would be wrong to label them as followers. We must evangelize them. Members who routinely and unashamedly live against the covenant - by sleeping with someone they are not married to, by refusing to attend church worship, etc. - must be lovingly called to repentance and removed from the membership if, sadly, that repentance never comes. Some would say it is cruel to not let people join if they don't like the covenant. Others would say it is just as cruel to dismiss a church member for refusing to live like a Christian. But let me ask you, would you like to live in a town where everyone was given a driver's license, and no one had theirs revoked? A DMV that indiscriminately called everyone a driver would be incredibly cruel. God have mercy on churches who pretend everyone is a Christian. Jesus Christ is the Lord of the universe, and he is head of the church - and each church has an infinitely greater responsibility than any DMV - to mark out Christians, to teach them how to live in Jesus' Church, and to keep them accountable for how they live there.

Thank God we have a church covenant that helps us do this.