We're Overlooking Our Most Compelling Covenant

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The word “covenant” has been bandied about freely in the past few months, as various groups around The United Methodist Church have announced they will “non-conform” to the denomination’s policies rejecting same-sex affections, while others seek to counter this view by creating an ultra-restrictive parachurch organization with “covenant” in its name. However, for some years now I’ve mused upon a covenant that both precedes and supersedes all the sound and fury of current United Methodist travails. I refer to the covenant that all Christians make, or that others make on our behalf until we can confirm it as our own: the vows of our baptism.

Recently my musings were confirmed in some ways and challenged at many other points during a day-and-a-half seminar, “Living the Covenant,” conducted by staff and consultants from Nashville-based Discipleship Ministries, formerly known as the General Board of Discipleship. I can’t possibly describe here many-faceted spiritual richness that “Living the Covenant” conveyed to some 20 participants – including five people from my own congregation, St. Stephen UMC in Mesquite, Tex. – who attended the Sept. 9-10 session at Perkins School of Theology in Dallas. After all, the entire seminar takes close to 15 hours, and it’s copyrighted by Discipleship Ministries as well!

However, “Living the Covenant” confirms what I’ve suspected for many years now: we take our baptismal vows far too lightly, assume them without sufficient thought, and deprive ourselves of mutual encouragement to live up to them daily.

Before going further, I want to state unequivocally: Discipleship Ministries’ “Living the Covenant” seminar in no way pertains to the political furor that currently convulses The United Methodist Church. Its leaders make no arguments for or against any theological or ideological stance on any United Methodist issue. Instead, “Living the Covenant” instructs United Methodists in the profound commitment that we make in our baptismal vows – a commitment that has not been taught with clarity or consistency for at least 150 years. What follows here are entirely my own interpretations.

“Living the Covenant” recaptured what the Rev.  Taylor Watson Burton-Edwards describes as the “two-handed” approach to of the early church to “making disciples” of Jesus Christ. The earliest Christians participated in both a congregation formed for public worship, and a “discipling” community for faith formation and spiritual practice. The early Church didn’t embrace the easily assumed, requires-no-effort church membership that we practice today. “Living the Covenant” teaches the rigorous heritage of the Christian “catechumenate,” an organic method of showing and teaching how to follow the lifestyle to which Jesus called his followers.

But wait, you say, isn’t the local congregation supposed to be where the United Methodist mission, “making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world,” happens? Yes, that’s where denominational leaders have wanted such disciple-making to happen, but in the minds of many that concept exists more for institutional preservation than spiritual formation. In other words, the UMC seeks to gather members to fill its empty pews and shore up its flagging finances, not to conduct genuine spiritual formation. 

What’s more, in reality the local congregation isn’t set up to make disciples. Local congregations are constituted basically as reliable organizations for public worship and community service. Anyone who’s been through the typical morning rush of Sunday school/worship/church meetings knows there’s little time set aside for true disciple-making. Thankfully, the 2016 General Conference accomplished one positive action by rephrasing our mission definition to cite “local congregations and extension ministries” as the places where disciple-making occurs. Those congregations now most successful in fostering faith formation have partnered with extension ministries such as Covenant Discipleship, Walk to Emmaus, Wesley Foundations and campus ministries, and others, thus reclaiming the early Church's "two-handed" approach.

Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, understood this reality, because he studied the early Church and compared it to the 18th-century Church of England. The Anglican Church was poorly attended; less than 10 percent of the English population went to church in Wesley’s time, and most of them were wealthy elites. (By comparison, The United Methodist Church in America today closely resembles the Anglican Church of Wesley’s time; 91 percent of its American members are mostly middle-to-upper-middle class whites).  John Wesley and his brother Charles organized Methodist classes, bands and societies to provide nearby communities of Christians who could encourage one another regularly to live out their baptismal vows. This is why there can be no solitary Christians, and why Wesley defined “social holiness” as growing in holiness of heart and life through mutual accountability.

Which brings me back to the question of “covenant” in United Methodist life today. Here are the baptismal vows from The United Methodist Hymnal* (page 34):

  • Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world, and repent of your sin?
  • Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?
  • Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Savior, put your whole trust in his grace, and promise to serve him as your Lord, in union with the Church which Christ has opened to people of all ages, nations, and races?
  • According to the grace given to you, will you remain faithful members of Christ's holy Church and serve as Christ's representatives in the world?

Read these vows several times, and try to imagine how our world would change if we Christians actually lived by what we profess. Would we see more kindness and common decency on a daily basis? Would any child go hungry, or any woman fear for her safety? Would so many young black men die from gun violence? Would we have so many homeless people on our streets? Would our political systems be so corrupted by money? Would we pollute God’s creation, Earth, as we do now?

Would The United Methodist Church be so fractured and fractious if we based our life together on our baptismal covenant?

To my mind, our baptismal vows make it clear that we commit ourselves to a pattern of life requiring daily attention to how we actively love God and love our neighbors. “Making disciples” demands that we demonstrate godly behaviors, teach them to others, and help each other – not condemn or demonize one another – when we stumble or fall.

As we debate who has broken or kept “the covenant” in United Methodism, I subscribe to the view that we have all broken the only covenant that matters, because our constant wasteful, hurtful bickering shows that none of us lives out the promises we've made. Baptism encompasses the only covenant that binds humans to God through Jesus Christ and to one another through any denomination of Christ’s Church, including The United Methodist Church. All else is secondary and disposable.

Whether our compacts be wise or foolish, flexible or rigid, nothing else carries the authority of our baptismal covenant. That includes everything from the church’s constitution through the Restrictive Rules, “Our Theological Task,” the Book of Discipline and the Book of Resolutions, clergy vows, conference membership, and any other humanly crafted theologies, doctrines, rules or regulations. No ideological association, no special interest group, no detailed theology, no political power bloc, should carry any greater weight among United Methodists than our bond of baptism. Everything else can be tossed into the wind as chaff from wheat.

As we await the formation of the Bishops’ Commission on a Way Forward, I humbly recommend that this new body start its deliberations with a thorough study of our baptismal covenant and how United Methodists can live our vows more authentically. Our future depends upon it.

For more information on “Living the Covenant,” contact the Rev. Taylor Watson Burton-Edwards at Discipleship Ministries.

* The United Methodist Hymnal, copyright 1989 by the United Methodist Publishing House, Nashville, Tenn. Quoted under the “fair use” doctrine of U. S. copyright law.

A veteran journalist for more than four decades and a certified spiritual director, Cynthia B. Astle serves as Founder and Editor of United Methodist Insight.