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Covenant, contract and community

Roger C. Sider

Recently I interviewed Tim, a 15-year-old who is bright, handsome and troubled. At one point, I asked him, “Are you religious?” He replied, “Yes, I am.” I asked him to tell me more. He paused a moment, then said, “Well, I haven’t really chosen a religion yet. I’m searching for the one that’s right for me.” Had I asked Tim his thoughts about the church, he probably would have described it as “a sort of religious club where people who have the same beliefs hang out together”.

“I’m searching for the one that’s right for me.” What a profound summary of the deepest assumptions of our postmodern culture. On the one hand, Tim is refreshingly candid about his spiritual need. He knows that something is missing. He acknowledges that if this life and this world are all there is, that is not enough. He yearns for meaning, for purpose, for spiritual connection, for God. Yet Tim’s measure of the faith he is looking for is nothing greater than himself – “the one that’s right for me”. Implicit in Tim’s mind is the belief that choosing his God and his place of worship are not fundamentally different from choosing a car or an apartment.

What do we as Christians have to say to Tim and to the millions of his contemporaries throughout the world? More specifically, how does our understanding of the church as God’s covenant community help us to communicate the message that we believe is the only satisfying answer to Tim’s search?

The Good News for Tim

The first thing we have to share with Tim is that his search for God has been preceded by God’s search for him. From the dawn of creation, God the Creator has been on a quest for us – a quest to be in personal relationship with men and women everywhere. Second, we can tell Tim that Jesus Christ is God’s gift of love to us, our salvation, our hope, our perfect ideal. Third, we can tell Tim that the Bible is God’s revelation to us; in the Scriptures we learn of God’s faithfulness, first in the Old Testament to His chosen people, the Israelites, then in the New Testament to all people everywhere who are willing to receive Him.

So far, we are affirming for Tim the core of Christian orthodoxy, believed by all Christians for 2000 years. But, when we share our understanding of the church, we who are rooted in the Anabaptist tradition have something distinctive to say – our understanding that the church is much richer and deeper than a religious club or a consumer choice. The Scriptures reveal God’s plan for His children to live in community with other believers, which is God’s recipe for His children to flourish here on earth. It is this understanding of the community of believers as the body of Christ that those of us in the Anabaptist tradition have developed more fully than some other Christian traditions have. For us, the gospel is lived with, and among, our brothers and sisters, and thus it is inconceivable that someone could be a Christian on his own. Quite often patients tell me, “I believe in God, but I don’t go to church.” What a curious oxymoron. Since the life God calls us to can only be lived together, how could we claim to “believe” and not be “in community”? As Christians, we are called to relate to one another as brothers and sisters, as family.


Contract or covenant?

We cannot understand this family of Christians unless we first understand the gift of covenant. Tim lives in a culture that is rapidly losing its experience with, and the skills necessary to live in, covenant relationships. Tim lives in a world of contracts, not covenants. Contracts are voluntary agreements between two or more parties to provide specified goods or services in exchange for some payment – usually money. Contracts are excellent vehicles for commerce: buying and selling houses, leasing cars and obtaining loans from the local bank. Everything is negotiated in advance, both parties voluntarily sign the agreement, and when the contract is complete, no further obligation remains on either side. Contracts encourage prior calculation of risk and benefit.

This contractual way of relating to others works quite well in business. Yet it is disastrous in personal relationships. In the end, contractual relationships leave us feeling uncared for and disposable. Nowhere is the corrosive effect of the contractual mentality more obvious than in the current, sad state of the institution of marriage. Nothing so clearly demonstrates the difference between contract and covenant than the difference between the time-honoured promise in the marriage covenant (“For better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live”) and the modern contractual replacement (“As long as we both shall love”).

Covenants begin with a promise – not to a set of conditions – but to a person. A covenant is a promise of love, loyalty and faithfulness. A covenant precedes, and is larger than, the covenanting parties. They do not negotiate the terms of the covenant. Rather, they acknowledge and commit themselves to terms that are already there in the nature of a covenant relationship. When I promise lifelong faithfulness to my wife in marriage, I do so realizing that I am submitting myself to what is fundamental in marriage. If my commitment to her is anything less than “For better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as we both shall live”, then I am not really entering into marriage. Because covenants are promises between people, their obligations cannot be fully specified in advance. In a covenantal relationship, I promise faithfulness whatever may come. Because a covenant commitment to a person is not time-limited, there is no honourable exit. I cannot terminate a covenant. I can either abide by it in lasting faithfulness, or I will be unfaithful.

Just as there can be no marriage without a covenant commitment by each partner, so there can be no true brotherhood in the church without a similar covenantal understanding of the nature of our relationship with our brothers and sisters. This is why studying the Scriptures together is so central to our congregational life. It is as we learn together from the Bible about God’s covenant with us that we realize that it is this covenant which forms the basis and model for our covenant with one another. The teachings of Jesus and the example of the early church teach us what it means to be a covenantal fellowship.

For Tim and his contemporaries, it won’t help much to talk about covenant. He just won’t get it. His whole mindset and life experience make such talk incomprehensible. What will convince Tim is to experience covenant – to feel what it is like to be among those who understand and practise covenantal relatedness with each other. This will not only speak to Tim’s deepest need for acceptance and security, but it will also make believable to him our witness that the gospel is God’s truth.

The church: God’s family and ours

The church as a type of family has a number of important features:

We do not choose family – we are born into one. Just so, by faith in Jesus Christ, we are born into His family. Just as family is for a lifetime, in sickness and health, in good times and bad, in youth and old age, so it is with our relationships in the church. Families are for one another. Families do not calculate in advance how much caring they will do, under what circumstances and for whom. Rather, our caring is without condition and without a termination date. So, too, it must be in the church. Our brothers and sisters in Christ are to be cared for by each of us, especially in times of stress and sorrow. Family requires accountability. As we live our lives, we do so in the presence of our family. We are expected to behave honourably, to be faithful and to fulfill our obligations to one another. Although at first this may appear intrusive and restrictive, in fact it is highly freeing, for it allows us to become better persons, with deeper and more satisfying relationships, than we could ever have achieved outside the family structure. In a family, conflict must not be allowed to destroy relationships. Since there is literally no exit from a covenant, we have no choice but to work it out. This explains why we in the Anabaptist tradition emphasize Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 18 and why peacemaking and ministries of reconciliation are so central. Finally, healthy families do not rest until all their members are reunited. Our hearts go out to those who are separated from the family by accident or by enemies. So it is with the church. We hurt that not all of God’s children have found their way home. We make it our business to find them and to invite them in.

As we enter this millennium, Tim and his contemporaries are wondering, “Where is the faith that’s right for me?” We are bold enough to declare that just as our faith has proved “right for us”, so we believe it promises to “be right for Tim” – not because we have chosen God, but because He has chosen us. We invite Tim to join us as together we commit ourselves to a covenant of lifelong love and loyalty to Jesus Christ and to one another.

Roger C. Sider is a psychiatrist with Philhaven, a Mennonite-sponsored behavioural health system in Pennsylvania. This article is reprinted with permission, from the May/June 1999 issue of The Evangelical Visitor, a Brethren in Christ periodical.

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Last modified May 4, 2000.

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