Covenant and the Local Church
Monday, October 17, 2022
5:26 PM
Covenant Making and the Local Church 
To speak of covenant making in a local church is to suggest that the local church is recognized as an entity by God and that by virtue of that recognition by God the members interact in specific ways toward one another and to the world.   
The Local Church as an entity recognized by God.  An extended analogy to marriage—toward the end of a wedding ceremony one of the most important statements made is a quotation from Jesus, “Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate” (Matthew 19:6).   
The covenant of marriage is understood as  
God created—Genesis 1; before the entrance of sin 
God ordered—governed in someway by norms we hope are compatible with the truest expression of God’s love.  
And God blessed—God does not see marriage, as Paul might have, as a necessary evil but in contrast as a very real good.  
Can the same be said of the local church?  Certainly we wouldn’t say that God has joined the local church together and therefore we should treat the movement of church membership as synonymous with divorce.  However: 
Acts 2 suggests that God created the community of the church.  We probably use different language—that the church formed around the act of God in Christ.  Gene Boring writes, “In this biblical understanding of the drama of God’s mighty acts in history, the church does not live in some sort of parenthesis in God’s plan, or pause in God’s activity.  The same God who created the world, called Israel into being, acted deinitiely in Jesus, continues to act in the deeds of witness, mercy, and justice as the church carries out its mission.  The church is a mutual ministry to its own members, providing fulfillment of life’s meaning, celebration of life’s goodness, and consolation and support for life’s problems.  Yet the church does not exist for itself but as the expression of God’s mission to the world, the continuation of Jesus’ own ministry of love and justice.”   
God orders the church—like marriage the norms that should operate within the church should somehow be drawn from the character and nature of God.  
When we speak of norms drawn from our understanding of the character of God, the conversation typically gets bogged down.  For obvious reasons we must distance ourselves from norms of marriage suggested in the deutero-Pauline and general epistles—wives be submissive.  This norm has tortured marriages for many generations.  So, to speak of these norms is to begin first the critiques that name them as unacceptable by today’s standards and then converts them into a joke.  
We fail in the process to get back around to what the church was trying to do—specifically in Ephesians (5:21-33).  Here the writer seeks to understand the covenant of Christ and the church in light of marriage (5:32) and then reciprocally to derive norms for marriage from the model love Christ gives to the church (5:33). 
So too, the New Testament bears witness to a church seeking to model its norms of governance on the character of Christ as seen in his life, ministry, passion, death, burial and resurrection.   
With all due respect to our Church of Christ sisters and brothers, I believe it is a mistake to replicate the exact norms they derived.  While the character of Christ remains eternal, the needs of context change.  But, we cannot be too glib in dismissing the norms of scripture for the self-reflective question we must ask is: how then are the norms of this local church derived from, formed by, and directed toward the character of God as revealed in Christ? 
God blesses the covenant of local church?  Christ is indeed present  
In one of the rare instance where the word “Church” comes from the lips of Jesus (surely redactional) the norms for conflict resolution and correcting a member who sins is explained.  It is in this context that Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matthew 18:15-20)  
It is appropriate to speak of the presence of the Risen Christ at the Lord’s table is—I believe—what defines a church as church. 
To sum up, I believe that like marriage, God recognizes the covenant of membership within a local church as something God calls into being.  The church—not just the church universal but also the local church—is joined together by God.  We are those whom God has joined together.  Within that creation and on-going blessing, we seek to order our lives together on the model Christ gave us.  The specific ways that was lived out in the First Century does not work for us either in terms of marriage or church.  However, their quest to structure relationship as best they could so as to imitate God revealed in Christ (Ephesians 5:1-2) should be our quest.  Though we need to abandon their specific norms, we cannot abandon their quest. 
The members of a local church have a distinct relationship to one another 
The grounding for a unique relationship 
The “one another” passages in the New Testament speak of relationship within the church 
Most of these come in the instructional sections of the letters and they convey a sense of obligations to those addressed (a) as mutual believers and (b) living and functioning within a proximity of intimacy.  The instructions related to “one another” make the most sense when understood as a operating within local churches 
Dangers in treating local church relationship as something unique.		 
The Danger of exclusivity—to speak of church members having a special relationship to “one another” implies that outsiders are not beneficiaries of this relationship.  Indeed, that’s precisely how we have practiced it.  
The New Testament clearly indicates that Christians bear responsibility for those outside their own faith community (Matthew 25:31-46; Luke 10; Acts 10 and so on).  But the love we extend to others is of a different kind.  Specifically, those who are not disciples or do not belong to one’s own faith community receive charity and compassion without judgment.   
Within the local church, we have responsibility for one another’s discipleship (aka accountability.)  
The danger of abuse—in the name of “accountability” or “church discipline,” the church makes itself vulnerable to abuse. 
Abuse by individual persons 
Because accountability requires the use of power, power gets invested into the hands of certain persons (pastors, elders, bishops) 
Because power can be abused, it has been abused to satisfy the sinful desires of the individuals entrusted with power, it has been abused. 
Local churches have within themselves a certain culture (norms, practices, roles, status, rituals, etc).   
The culture of a local church is always a mixture of religiously derived norms and norms derived from the larger culture.  
Churches can abuse others when they acquiesce to the norms within culture that are abusive—racism and sexism.   
Similarly, churches often use guilt, shame, various forms of coercion and manipulation to reinforce norms.   
In light of these abuses, many choose to withdraw from church altogether.  (NOTE:  A recent slam poetry winner whose poem was “I’m a Christians, Sorry.” and also the confession booth described in Blue Like Jazz).  Others become nostalgic about church, defensive about church or simply apathetic about church.  Both responses, it seems miss the point.  It is my hope and prayer that I serve within a church willing to wrestle with the unconquerable call of God and knows that we walk out of that wrestling experience both blessed and acutely aware of our frailty—we limp away from the river with new identity and a pain in the butt.  The abuses attendant to the particular relationship within local church should not cause us to abandon the experiment of local church but make us vigilant in our efforts to be agents of life rather than agents of destruction. 
The local church has a unique response to the world.  
It has been my observation that when people start talking about church we often talk past one another.   
We have specialists with regard to the ministries we have for one another (pastoral care, Christian education and worship). 
Yet, we recognize that we are called beyond the “walls of the church.”  Those most acutely aware of this call are often dismissive of the ministry we offer to one another.   
The goal is to recognize that the internal ministry ought to be designed in such a way so as to propel the ministry to the world—mission.  
It has been my further observation that First Christian Church has typically seen this local church membership/outside the membership connection in the following way:  We want to make the benefits of membership as accessible to those who are not members as they are to members.   
Emphasis on an open table 
No-pressure to join 
A obsessive concern to make ourselves available. 
This approach to ministry—mission through making the internal aspects of the local church accessible to outsiders has been a good model for ministry but, I think it’s no longer a model that works. 
It assumed that people understood the nature of the gospel and simply needed a context in which to live it out.  Similarly, Billy Graham style evangelism essentially called people to commit their hearts and lives to truths their minds already understood.  Today, we cannot assume that level of understanding.  
It assumes that the people within the church have the same needs as the people who are not members of the church.  Local churches, particularly in changing neighborhoods like ours, have to become better adept at exegeting their communities.    