Contract Covenant Community

Recently, in the context of discussions about our own gathering, I have been thinking about commitment in the context of the community that is the church.

It seems to me there needs to be some degree of commitment by individuals who form the community - commitment to the community, commitment to one another, commitment to God. In our gathering, on the one hand there is some felt need for expressing some commitment, on the other hand no basis available or recognised on which to build it. Other house churches in our area seem to operate without explicit commitments - who ever turns up is welcome, and there is no expectation that any specific collection of people will turn up. I have the feeling that this is too amorphous and laissez faire to function effectively as church, the Body of Christ. But I am not at all sure how the commitment I am missing should be formulated and expressed. As soon as you start to write it down a whole ecclesiology and legal system springs into existence.

With these thoughts in mind I read with interest two essays on Pneumanaut Studio that try to make a distinction between 'covenant' and 'contract' - "Kontract Kills Kommunity" and "Covenant Creates Community". I feel for this distinction - 'contract' requires a legal system as its basis, wheres 'covenant' seems somehow softer, relationship oriented, based on honour and mutual understanding, healed by grace if one party fails.

However, so far, I have not found that the semantics clearly support this distinction. The explanation of 'covenant' in the dictionary on BibleGateway.com starts off "a contract or agreement between two parties".

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Technorati tags contract community covenant church ecclesiology

Comments

[Derek]

I have always understood that covenant was the expression of just one party toward another, which did not depend on the other party's performance. So God made a covenant with Abraham that did not depend on Abraham. Similarly we receive faith by grace. Christ's work on the cross is sufficient. Our receiving it is itself a charis -- a further gift of grace.

Contracts are different. They require an exchange -- both parties must give some valuable consideration to effect the agreement. If only one party is giving value, there is no contract.

Regarding your comment about the basis of contract in a legal system and covenant being more relational: what matters is the attitude of heart. A covenant can easily become legalistic; and a contract can be lived in a relational way -- it all depends on what's in the heart. "Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks." Martin Buber, in I and Thou makes the point that every move of God starts with individuals in a vibrant relation with God, but because that moment of meeting is fleeting -- sometimes present and other times absent -- that man creates belief systems to comfort himself and joins with other beleivers to extend that sense of meeting into a broader set of relationships. He creates an image of the rim of a wheel with God at its center. Over time, the individuals on the rim, turn to each other and God lifts himself out of the middle. Thus we have the history of denominations.

[Andrew B]

Hello Derek,

Thanks so much for your thoughts on this.

I like your suggestion that covenants do not depend on the performance of the other party. However, I think the covenants made by God are a special case. We cannot hold God to any commitment to perform. We can, as an act of faith, depend Him keeping is promises, but we have no means of redress if, in our perception, He fails to keep them.

I was thinking about covenants as an expression of the commitment of the members of a church community or congregation to one another and to God. In such a case there is a two way commitment among the members. The covenant provides a statement of the expectations we may have of one another's performance and commitment in the community.

I absolutely agree with your statement that it all depends on the attitude of the heart. Any contract, covenant or agreement is worthless if in his heart one of the parties is not committed, even though he has signed or made some expression of commitment.

So my conclusion is that, in the community which is church, contracts and covenants are not needed among the members. We depend on one another having an attitude of the heart committed to the Lord and therefore to the fellow members of community. That is also an act of faith - in our fellows.