We are in a series on covenant right now, leading up to our ‘Covenant Sunday’ on March 16th. The short version is that we, as a church, are opting to move away from some of the ‘membership’ language that many of us have become familiar with in churches. We don’t think that membership is evil or anything like that, but we do feel like it’s lost some of it’s meaning in our society today. Afterall, you can be a member of the YMCA, the country club, and the book club, along with aproximately 1,573,593 other things. And almost without fail, being a member signifies that you pay your dues, and you therefore expect certain rights, privileges, or items in return. We don’t want to think of church as somewhere that we somehow pay our dues and therefore expect to recieve something, spiritual or otherwise, in return.
So with that in mind, we are adopting the language of covenant. Covenant is a major theme throughout Scripture. Some of the more well known examples are God’s covenant with Noah never to flood the whole earth again, God’s covenant with Abraham to bless him and bless all peoples through him, and most importantly the new covenant in Christ’s blood which offers us salvation by grace, through faith. As we’ve studied the Scriptural ideas of covenant, we’ve noticed that covenants (Scripturally speaking) are almost always relational in nature. This is different from a contract that says you do ABC and you get XYZ. A covenant involves two or more parties in mutual trust working towards a common goal. A covenant always directly involves the people, and always changes the people involved.
With that in mind, we have drafted a covenant that revolves around the four main points of our mission statement: Begin, Belong, Believe, and Be Whole. As a church we will covenant together, with God and each other, to strive to exhibit certain characteristics based upon those four main points. We have purposely chosen language that is relational in nature, emphasizing ways that we interact with each other. We have also been deliberate in using language that speaks to the faith journey we are on. In other words, the covenant is not a just a document of things that we can check off of our list, and therefore be in covenant. Rather, it emphasizes that our faith is not a point of arrival, but a journey; with ups and downs, twists and turns.
To highlight why and how we, as a church, can and should covenant together, our friend Nate created a mosaic during our gathering a week or so ago. The mosaic is a bunch of different, broken, individual pieces that have been cemented together to create a new and beautiful image. It really is quite amazing to see how all of the pieces came together to create this work of art representing Christ’s love on the cross. And that is why we will covenant together. Because we believe that God can and will take each of us, in all of our brokenness, and cement us together with Christ in His all encompassing love.
Hopefully we’ll be able to get a link to the covenant on the site in the next week or two. In the meantime, I will try to update each week now as we study together those four main points of our covenant and what they mean.