Covenant Lost

While the concept of covenant goes back to the ancient Israelites, its relevance to Unitarian Universalist churches is rooted in two events. The first was the founding of Unitarianism in 16th century Transylvania when Francis David said, “We do not need to think alike, to love alike,” which recalled the words of Jesus and his call for a radical and transforming love as the basis for the kingdom of God. With those simple, but profound words, David said we will gather as religious communities based on love, not intellectual propositions; on covenant, not creed; on orthopraxy or right practice, not orthodoxy or right belief. The second event was the arrival of the Puritans in America in the 1630s, who organized their free churches around covenant, which we inherited.

The idea of covenant as the organizing principle for a church was and continues to be radical. Unfortunately, it was slowly lost by a series of circumstances as Alice Blair Wesley explains in her 2000-2001 Minns’ Lectures, entitled Our Covenant.

First, as the religious fervor of the Puritans, complete with ecstatic experiences, was not experienced by their children and grandchildren, the radical idea of covenant was replaced with the notion of a Half-way Covenant that did not require an ecstatic experience in order to make their descendants members of the church.

Second, as the idea of covenant got tangled up in New England with the notion of a divine contract, with some predicting the Second Coming of Christ, the idea of covenant began to disappear from liberal religious discourse.

Third, as the significance of what it meant to sign a covenant lost power and clarity over time and in practice, membership in a church became a matter of family connection and not a deliberate and free religious choice.

Fourth, the whole idea of conversion became controversial for liberals.

Fifth, young people no longer accepted the idea that they were of a low spiritual state because they had not experienced the religious hierarchy and persecution to which their parents or grandparents had been subjected to in Europe. The primacy of the need for salvation shifted along with their relationship to the liberal church.

Sixth, the liberal clergy who would become Unitarian ministers stopped forming new churches for some 40 years because they expected settlers to do it. This hiatus of church formation and growth of liberal churches caused the idea of covenant to be further marginalized.

Seventh, Unitarian ministers thought that our faith would grow as conservative churches became more liberal, such that they would embrace Unitarianism.

Eighth, the idea of progress that seized the liberal imagination led, suggests Alice Blair Wesley, lead to a “loss of urgency in the members’ sense of mission” as love itself came “to be taken as just natural, as needing no special communal focus or nurture.”

Ninth, the rise of the non-profit corporations in the early 1800s, in which many Unitarians became very involved, eliminated covenant as an organizing idea and ideal. As Wesley concludes, “Thus it came to be that, over time and with a curious inconsistency, when Unitarians turned their attention from governance of the local church to any good work beyond the walls of the local church, we took for granted the hierarchal structure of a nonprofit corporation, even for gathering new Unitarian churches!”

Tenth, in the 18th century, covenant became linked with “revivalism.” Thus, “19th century liberal churches kept the old, earliest covenants on their books—beautiful, simple promises to walk together in the ways of love, but the covenant was mostly not talked about, until the late 20th century.

We began talking about covenant again in the early to mid-1980s, but it has been a conversation among too few people. As Robert Latham noted in 1985, “We have forgotten that covenant is the keystone of our religious experience. This has resulted in diminishment of meaning in membership, confusion of identity, and distortion in gauging ministry effectiveness.”

Reclaiming covenant is a central task of Unitarian Universalist congregations if we are to be vibrant and powerful religious communities and agents of transformation.