Living and Leading Together in Covenant

It’s happened again. That staff member you don’t get along with, that minister you don’t like, that fellow elder who just gets on your nerves—they did it AGAIN. That thing that bugs you. And you just know that they did it on purpose, trying to get under your skin.

How in the world do you keep your head on straight, avoiding retaliation, aggression, gossip, or just bailing out of the relationship entirely?

Obviously, we hope that this situation doesn’t happen much, in church life or otherwise. We are called to live in community with one another, to build each other up, and to love each other. Hopefully, if we have been under the leadership of Jesus for a while, our restless hearts have quieted down a bit. Hopefully, we have become more like weaned children on our mothers’ knees, not demanding our own rights or that we have our way immediately and all the time (see Psalm 131 for the source of this image).

But, of course, we are still human. As much as we may try to follow Christian teachings, whether it is Jesus’s encouragement to curb anger in our hearts (Matthew 5:21-26), his instruction to pray for our enemies (Matthew 5:43-48), or Paul’s reminder to leave vengeance to God (Romans 12:19), sometimes our flesh rises up in self-righteousness and calls us to action. Maybe we even feel like we have a good reason! I assume Peter felt at the time like he was doing the right thing when he defended Jesus by cutting off the man’s ear in Gethsemane… until Jesus told him that those who draw a sword will die by a sword (Matthew 26:47-56).

How, though, can we live in Christian community when this is a real threat? When we know that another person might rise up in this way against us, or that we might rise up against another? How can we serve together in ministries, on church staffs, on deacon boards, on elderships? Let me propose an answer:

That we resolve to live in covenant with one another.

You’ll likely remember that the idea of “covenant” is a big one in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. There are a number of depictions of God making covenants with his people there: with Noah (Genesis 9), with Abram/Abraham (Genesis 12, 15, and 17), and with David (2 Samuel 7), just to name a few. And, of course, this becomes a key way that the New Testament offers us to understand God’s action in Jesus Christ, as we see in Jesus’s words at the Last Supper and in later texts like Hebrews 8.

Why does covenant matter for us? Well, as I once heard a preacher say, it’s because covenants are fundamentally different from contracts, and we have a lot more contracts than covenants in our lives. Contracts are what we make with used-car salesmen and landlords—they are instruments of protection, designed because we don’t trust that the other party will hold up their end of the bargain. But covenants are based on trust, not mistrust; they assume the possibility of forgiveness, not the need for vengeance. 

Have you ever noticed that, when we make our marriage vows, we don’t say things like, “If you burn dinner five times in the first month, I’m out”? We don’t say, “I get to divorce you, no questions asked, if you come home late from work without telling me three times in a week.” Just like we assume fortune and misfortune—“for richer, for poorer,” “in sickness and in health”—we also assume that the other person will fail us sometimes. We assume that we will be wronged. But we make our promises nonetheless.

What if we could think this way about our partners in life and leadership? What if, rather than holding them to an impossible ideal of relationship or partnership, in the hopes that we would never be wronged, we treat them with love and respect and care even though we know they will hurt us, wrong us, annoy us? I don’t claim that I regularly think in this way, but when I think about the healthy relationships in my life, this is a common thread. In these relationships, we may not have made a formal covenant with each other, as I did with my wife 22 years ago, but we live as though we are in covenant with each other. If we could do this in our leadership relationships, I think we would be fulfilling a number of the “one another verses” in the New Testament:

• We would live in harmony with one another (Romans 12:16).

• We would bear with one another, maintaining the unity of the Spirit (Ephesians 4:2-3)

• We would show hospitality to one another without grumbling (1 Peter 4:9).

• We would most certainly love one another (LOTS of verses).

So, how can we start? Well, a simple first step is to review these “one another” verses and to work on implementing them in our lives, regardless of how we feel toward those folks that irritate us. (Notice I said it was “simple”—I didn’t say it was “easy”!) But if you are working together in ministry with others, a second step is to actually initiate a formal covenant in your group. These are not uncommon among elder groups; in fact, on the Siburt Institute website, we have some sample elder covenant documents. If you’re not in an elder group but in another kind of team environment, could you adapt one of these for your group? Could your church staff have a staff covenant with one another? What about your ministry team? I think so.

One last encouragement: talk together about what happens when (not if) someone breaks the covenant. If the goal of the covenant is to promote positive, Christ-like behavior and to minimize destructive, relationship-sabotaging actions, then you need to talk about what happens when someone goes against the agreement. We need to have a plan in place, one that includes restoring one another with gentleness (Galatians 6:1) and keeping no record of wrongs (1 Corinthians 13:5). An approach like the one Jesus teaches in Matthew 18 is good advice: go to the person privately, then if needed with another group member. Hopefully, the person in the wrong sees their error and can confess to the group, and the group can enact accountability seasoned with love. 

You can figure these things out for yourselves, but you know the principles: the goal is to live, lead, and work together in harmony, showing the love of Christ to others in how you treat each other.

Blessings be on your ministry!
David