From Covenant to Beloved Community

The problem in our churches is not the inevitable conflicts that emerge over time. The problem is that too many of us too easily forget our covenant and the obligations required if we are to be faithful. In a conflict, it would be far better for us to say to our opponents: “May all of your deepest desires be satisfied.” Such a wish would help remind us of their inherent worth and dignity and the other religious principles that inform our Unitarian Universalist faith.

Living in covenant takes compassion. It takes compassion to look at our own motives and behaviors in a conflict. How can it be that this person, with whom we have worshipped, broken bread, shared joys and sorrows, worked and played, has become the enemy? Objectively, it is beyond comprehension, but some understanding and clarity and reconciliation and forgiveness can emerge if we can look at our own anxiety, our own fear, and our own sense of powerlessness, and understand how we have contributed to the conflict.

Living in covenant takes courage. It takes courage to engage those involved in a conflict and ask or insist that they be accountable to the mutual obligations of our covenant. It takes courage to walk into the middle of a conflict determined to love and minister to all sides for the sake of the individuals involved, and the well-being and integrity of the beloved community. To be in covenant, suggests Tom Owen-Towle, means that we cannot remain spectators on the sidelines during a conflict, believing that we are answerable only for our own personal portion of congregational character.

Living in covenant also takes practice. M. Scott Peck suggests the beloved community emerges among “individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together,’ and to ‘delight in each other, making others’ conditions their own.’ ”

Too often, pseudo-community, as Peck calls it, masquerades as true community. In pseudo-community, people avoid conflicts, minimize the diversity that exists within the group, and communicate superficially because they rightly lack the trust to express their beliefs and feelings. The Beloved Community is not an accidental creation. It is the result of hard work.