On Church Covenants (Pastors Talk, Ep. 249)
What is a church covenant? In this episode of Pastors Talk, Mark Dever and Jonathan Leeman discuss the purpose and importance of church covenants for the local church. They flesh out what should be included in a church covenant, most importantly noting that all of the requirements in a church covenant should be biblically based and end their conversation with how church covenants relate to church discipline.
- What is a Chuch Covenant?
- Church Covenants Should be Based in God’s Word
- What Should Be in a Church Covenant?
- Church Covenants and Discipline
Related Resources:
Books: How to Build A Healthy Church, Baptist Foundations, Baptist Confessions, Covenants, and Catechisms, Baptist Life and Thought: A Source Book
Journal: Confessions, Covenants, and Constitutions: How to Organize Your Church
Articles: Membership Matters – What is Our Church Covenant?, How Our Church Covenant Helps Us Care for One Another During the Pandemic, Which Church Documents? And Why?, What Does Your Church Covenant Sound Like?
Interview: How Do Membership and the Ordinances Fit Together?
Transcript
The following is a lightly edited transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Jonathan Leeman:
Hi, this is Jonathan Leeman.
Mark Dever:
And this is Mark Dever.
Jonathan Leeman:
And welcome to this fairly sober, august occasion of Pastors Talk.
Mark Dever:
Because we’re thinking about covenants.
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s right. It’s a bit embarrassing, Mark. We’ve had like 250 of these conversations and yet never talked about church covenants.
Mark Dever:
I’m pretty sure church covenants have come up.
Jonathan Leeman:
I’m sure it’s come up. We’ve never actually concentrated on that topic. And that’s like one of your things. You’re like the church covenant guy, right?
Mark Dever:
I think church covenants arose in the 16th century as congregations have something other than birth inside parochial boundaries that define them.
Jonathan Leeman:
Parochial means geographic, where I live.
Mark Dever:
That’s right. So, the covenant becomes a way for these people to say we are together for these purposes.
What is a Chuch Covenant?
Jonathan Leeman:
What is a church covenant?
Mark Dever:
It’s an agenda. So if the credenda is what we believe, the agenda is what we are trying to do. So it’s a summary of statements of what we understand the duties of the Christian life to be. It’s kind of like the 10 commandments.
Jonathan Leeman:
Is there a biblical basis for it? I mean, it’s not in the Bible, is it?
Mark Dever:
You have imperative verbs in the New Testament. Lots of them. And there are sometimes summaries of duties. There are household duties. There are duties at the end of Paul’s letters.
So I don’t know if I think of… No, there’s not… With the confession, you have… First Corinthians 15:3, 4, 5. I don’t know if I think of anything quite like that with the covenants.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. You know the distinction between elements and forms, biblical elements, we gotta have them, but it might take different forms. Let me try this textual basis for church covenants and you tell me if you think it’s legitimate or if I’m stretching here.
I’m thinking about Matthew 18, I’m thinking about verse 18 where he talks about binding and loosing on earth what’s bound and loosed in heaven, okay? So there’s this judge-like action that the church takes when it binds or loses somebody.
So it’s not just speaking; it’s actually binding in the way a judge speaks. Okay, that’s verse 18. In verse 19 he says, again I say to you, in other words, let me say this in a different way. Again I say to you, if two of you agree, underline, highlight that word agree, agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven and then what’s the kind of ground of all of this?
Verse 20, where two or three are gathered in my name, there among them. So they’re speaking for him. But back to that verse 19. Again, I say to you, if two of you on earth agree about anything, actually, maybe we go all the way back to verse 16.
If you just do not listen, take one or two other lungs that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses, of course, invoking Deuteronomy 19. You’re in a courtroom setting. What does it take to establish a charge in an official sense, establish a charge? We’ve got to have two witnesses.
Those are the rules for establishing a charge. And then we see that whole process play out in verses 16 and 17 and verse 18. Truly I say to you, kind of the foundation for all of this, whatever you bind on earth, be bound in heaven.
Again, I say to you, if two of you agree on earth, in other words, a church, and it’s not just church disciplines, anything they ask, a church’s action possesses a formal-like agreement, a bindingness when they come together, and do this in the name of Christ, could we say, now this doesn’t mean we have to, I’m not arguing we have to write out these church covenants like Capitol Hill Baptist and Cheverly Baptist does and call them a church covenant of sets, but one form that this might take in the constituting of ourselves is a kind of covenanting together. One last historical comment.
The First London Confession, 1644, defines a church as folks doing these things by mutual agreement, it says. I love that phrase, by mutual agreement. And I would want to read that in this text.
Two of you agree about anything they ask. And is our church covenant, not one form that can take? We are agreeing to oversee one another and affirm one another in these ways. What do you think?
Mark Dever:
Good. I mean, you’re looking for the form. I was thinking of the substance of what’s in there. However, the substance list of imperatives could take many different forms. And because the question is the covenant, you’ve well-tried to think, okay, where do we see that mutual accountability before the Lord and with each other?:
Yeah. I mean, I’m thinking of in the Great Commission, when we’re told, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. So that observe all that I’ve commanded you. What we’re having here is a bit of a summary list of that, but you’re trying to go more particularly to the form. I appreciate that. Yeah, I think that’s an interesting and, maybe unnecessary, but interesting justification.
Mutuality in Church Covenant
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. But doesn’t the existence of a church depend upon agreement between believers?
Mark Dever:
Yeah. But that mutuality is necessarily there, say, in Galatians 1 when Paul talks about the gospel and they’re acting on that. So any place you see the church acting as the church, it assumes a mutuality.
Jonathan Leeman:
A mutuality (mutual agreement).
Mark Dever:
That’s right.
Jonathan Leeman:
To use the London Confessions.
Mark Dever:
So 2 Corinthians 2:6 when he refers to what a majority had done.
Jonathan Leeman:
Right. There’s an agreement.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, there’s a group and the visitors that we know went to the Corinthian church are not part of that mutuality. So there is a self-conscious owning of each other. All the one-another languages in the New Testament assume that there is an awareness of who is and is not a part of one another.
Jonathan Leeman:
No, that’s right.
Mark Dever:
So the whole New Testament has behind it this mutuality that I think you will bring out in Jesus’ teaching there in Matthew.
Jonathan Leeman:
Here’s an illustration sometimes I use in seminary classes. Suppose you and I are on a cruise ship with a bunch of other people. It sinks right off a desert island. We all kind of crawl up onto the desert island, right?
And I come along and I see you reading your Bible, and it’s kind of washed up on the shore of this strange desert island that we are with all the other cruise ship survivors. And I say, hey, are you a Christian? You’re reading your Bible.
And you say, yes, I am. And I’m like, oh, that’s awesome. Who do you say Christ is? Confess the truth. You confess the truth to me. And then I say, hey, that’s what I believe. And you ask me, well, what do you say the gospel is, Jonathan?
I said, well, God, man, Christ, response, right? And you’re like, oh, that’s fantastic. Hey, Mark, how about we meet together over here by that coconut tree weekly? We read from this book. We encourage one another.
I found some coconut milk with food dye from the ship’s galley, purple food dye. We can put that on our coconut. We can take this. We can share the gospel with others. What do we have at that moment?
I think we have a church, right? There on this desert island. And what’s sort of the white-hot center of constituting us as a church? It’s you and my agreement.
Mutuality in the Gospel
Mark Dever:
The mutuality in the gospel.
Jonathan Leeman:
In the gospel. In Christ, yeah. Or two or three gathered in my name. We’re agreeing in his name. So I would say that agreement, that covenant in some sense is the very heart of constituting the church as a church.
And then we flesh it out with the list of commands and so forth. These are some of the commands that together constitute us as a church. So, looking at your own church’s confession, having as we…
Mark Dever:
Do you mean church covenant?
Jonathan Leeman:
Sorry, covenant.
Mark Dever:
Yup.
Jonathan Leeman:
Been brought by divine grace to repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and give ourselves up to Him. And having been baptized upon our profession of faith in the name of the Father, Son, and the Spirit, we do now rely on His gracious aid solemnly and joyfully…
Mark Dever:
And joyfully.
Jonathan Leeman:
…renew our covenant with each other. So there it is. There’s the constituting of the church. We’re believers together. We’ve been baptized. We’re gathering. We’re renewing this covenant, this agreement.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. There seems to be something voluntary that you pick up at the end of Acts 2. “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship”. So they devoted themselves to the teaching, the statement of faith. That they all agree on. And the fellowship.
Jonathan Leeman:
Uh, Cheverly Baptist, when we, our first paragraph, we adapted it from yours. It reads, by God’s grace, we are gathered as those who have repented and believed in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Okay. We’re affirming one another as those who have repented and believed. We have given ourselves to him and affirmed one another as citizens of his kingdom through baptism and the Lord’s Supper, relying on his gracious aid.
We do now solemnly and joyfully renew our covenant with each other. So again, slightly different way, but very similar, trying to affirm that. This is us. We are a church.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. And we simply, our church has existed since 1878. We’ve had four church covenants. This is the most recent one. This is 1996. So I led in reshaping ours. I grabbed stuff from the first and second church covenants from 1878 and 1890 or 98. And then we replaced the 1940s one, which was really one that was put out with the New Hampshire…
Jonathan Leeman:
Did you not like it?
Mark Dever:
It had something in there about refraining from the use of alcohol as a beverage. And while I myself refrain from the use of alcohol as a beverage, I don’t feel that should be a requirement because that seems like an extra-biblical requirement.
Jonathan Leeman:
Let me chase that rabbit just for a second.
Mark Dever:
So we have a very similar church covenant to the one we had. We just, don’t have that phrase in there.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay. So the 1941…
Mark Dever:
Had it.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay. I see.
Mark Dever:
But neither of the previous ones did. The ones from 1878 or the 1890s, neither of those had that in there.
Jonathan Leeman:
Was the church using the church covenant when you showed up?
Mark Dever:
No. They had forgotten about it. Yeah. Nor the statement of faith.
Jonathan Leeman:
So you pulled it out of the chest in the attic.
Mark Dever:
Almost literally. Yeah. It was downstairs, but yes.
Jonathan Leeman:
Did people remember like, Oh yeah, I remember that?
Mark Dever:
The fun story about that is I suggested it once, once we amended it which passed unanimously through the deacons and then unanimously.
Jonathan Leeman:
Including removing alcohol.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. I got a group of three of us together over, I think it was Thanksgiving in 95 and we pulled this together and then put it to the deacons, they all thought it was great. And then we put it to the church, it was unanimous. It was no trouble. That’s when we were able to start using it.
And what I suggested, I said, let’s do our re-covenanting every time we have the Lord’s Supper. And I said, I think if you’re from rural churches, sometimes you will have the church covenant written and you’ll see it on the wall of the church hanging there, often a nicely calligraphed version of it.
And a lot of older folks remembered that. And in fact, Jesse Traynham, put up her hand and she said, Dr. Dever, I remember doing this when I was a little girl in my church in Mississippi.
Jonathan Leeman:
And she’s in her 90s?
Mark Dever:
No, she was probably late 80s then, maybe early 90s. This was in the 90s, so she probably remembered this from the 1910s, and 1920s at her church in Mississippi. Yeah, and that would have been a common thing to do in churches.
That’s why in Southern Baptist churches, I don’t know what the hymnal is like these days, but certainly the hymnal from the 1950s, there was the church covenant in the back of the hymnal. And that was regularly used at the Lord’s Supper by Baptist churches.
Jonathan Leeman:
Now, when you brought it forward, I’m surprised you said it was passed unanimously because I’m thinking about older saints in the 80s and 90s, 1990s, older saints who at that point are in their 80s and 90s. The idea of removing a prohibition against alcohol strikes me as something that they would have concerns about, no?
Church Covenants Should be Based on God’s Word
Mark Dever:
You know, I think the fact that I didn’t drink and I was clearly not trying to gain liberty for myself, but I was just pointing to scripture, just going like scripture doesn’t forbid this. So while a lot of us may decide it’s not useful to drink, I think we can’t say that it’s required by God’s word. So I think we want to stick pretty close to God’s word for what we would require of each other in this covenant. And they seem to all be persuaded by that.
Jonathan Leeman:
Other amendments?
Mark Dever:
That was really the only one in the church covenant. I mean, we changed the language, so it was not exactly the same. We had a slightly shorter, more elegant one than the slightly longer one with more phrases tacked on, which was the 1940s one. So we just took what we thought were the best parts of the two earlier ones, and put them together.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. Okay. So you said you use it before you read the Lord’s Supper.
Mark Dever:
Before we have…
Jonathan Leeman:
I’m sorry, you read it before you take the Lord’s Supper.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, that’s…
Jonathan Leeman:
And that’s a once-a-month thing.
Mark Dever:
We have the members of the church, not the visitors. Stand up. Members stand. It’s printed there on the song sheet. They have the music for the hymns, and then we just read it together.
Jonathan Leeman:
Did you ever have people contest the idea of members-only standing? Cause a bit, that’s a bit awkward socially. No?
Mark Dever:
Yeah. It’s deliberately meant to be exclusive to show people that if you’ve been coming to church and enjoying it, that’s awesome, but there’s something more. So we’re trying to show them there’s something more than just that coming and enjoying it.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. We want you in the room, but you have to go through the doorway to get into the room.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. Well, physically you’ve gone through our physical doorway, but we want you to know conceptually there’s yet another level than merely attending the meeting.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. I always appreciated that about Capitol Hill Services is when they all stand, it’s like, hey world, here they are.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
You can see them. They’re visible, literally, church and reading of the covenant. Because you don’t quite see that in the supper in the same way, at least the way it’s done here and passing it out and so forth. Other ways you use it. How else do you use it?
Should Members Sign a Church Covenant?
Mark Dever:
I think we use it at our members meetings. We have new members sign it, Saying they agree that this is how they intend to live.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay, so before members…
Mark Dever:
We teach it in a new member’s class as a summary of Christian duties.
Jonathan Leeman:
You guys have six classes. It’s one of the classes you teach.
Mark Dever:
That’s right.
Jonathan Leeman:
Purely on that. You just read through it and talk.
Mark Dever:
Comment on it. Yeah, illustrate it. See what those questions are. And then members meeting, you read it before members meeting.
Jonathan Leeman:
Again, everybody stands up and reads it out loud.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
And before the supper. So that’s six times a year plus 12.
Mark Dever:
Plus 12 or 13. Good Friday service.
Jonathan Leeman:
So that’s 18 times a year.
Mark Dever:
19.
Jonathan Leeman:
They’re rehearsing this.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. Plus if they’re new that year, they’ve had a whole class on it, they’ve sat through.
Jonathan Leeman:
Do you ever use it for sermon preparation? Like your application?
Mark Dever:
No, but I do use it in personal prayer time and for confession and so yeah, it’s such a familiar set of words. It’s sort of back there in my, not just my pastoral mind, but my Christian mind.
Jonathan Leeman:
Having been a member at Capitol Hill for, I don’t know, almost two decades, those phrases are so locked into my mind.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
That was when, at Cheverly Baptist, we used a slightly different version, which was lightly edited. My mind still wants to go back to the original.
Mark Dever:
It’s like memorizing King James, you’re using the ESV.
What Should Be in a Church Covenant?
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. That’s exactly what it’s like. Okay, what should be in a church covenant? You call it a list of promises or something like that. Is it just promises?
Mark Dever:
I said imperatives.
Jonathan Leeman:
Imperatives, okay. Oh, commands, right?
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, there’s also promises.
Mark Dever:
Well, we are making promises to obey those commands.
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s right.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
I think that’s more what I meant.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
You obviously don’t cover everything in scripture.
Mark Dever:
No.
How to Decide What Goes in a Church Covenant
Jonathan Leeman:
How do you decide what goes in and what goes out?
Mark Dever:
I’ve never had to make that decision. I’m pretty conservative when it comes to taking what I’ve been handed by the generation before me and only changing it if I need to. Like, you know, it comes to weddings, when it comes to new elders, when it comes to funerals.
I’m with Cranmer. I mean, he had the gospel in English, that’s where it comes into our language. So I’m gonna often keep Cranmer’s language unless I’ve found the need to change it. So I’m gonna tend to just give what’s handed me unless I have a particular need because I assume that gives us a unity with previous generations that I maybe as a historically minded person appreciate.
Jonathan Leeman:
Now Cranmer wrote it for the first time, certain things.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, but even Cranmer was taking from existing documents and Englishing them. But he did, certainly make the gospel clear, he did.
Jonathan Leeman:
I appreciate the fact that it starts with…
Mark Dever:
But I mean, one of the things I did, vacation just earlier last month for Connie’s birthday, I took the 1548-49, the first edition of the prayer book and just read through it and just appreciated the freshness and vigor of Cranmer’s English. And still, I recognize paragraphs that we use in the Lord’s Supper, you know, in that 1548-49 composition.
Start with Unity and Prayer
Jonathan Leeman:
You start with unity. And prayer. We will work and pray for the unity of the spirit.
Mark Dever:
The spirit in the bond of peace.
Jonathan Leeman:
In the bond of peace.
Mark Dever:
As the members of the Christian Church.
Jonathan Leeman:
What a wonderful…
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, well, and we will walk together in brotherly love. So it’s pretty central stuff.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, and it’s stated fairly merely. I mean, one of the things we did in this edition of it, we did cut down on the verdant foliage verbally that had grown up. And I felt, you know when you have five or six phrases that you didn’t really need. I did give you some more specifics, but it’s just we tried to pare it back a good bit to just…
Jonathan Leeman:
At the same time, it retains a certain elegance “as becomes members of a Christian church exercise…”
Mark Dever:
An affectionate care
Jonathan Leeman:
Not care. Affectionate care.
Mark Dever:
and watch over each other
Jonathan Leeman:
and faithfully admonish and retreat when others occasion.
Mark Dever:
As occasion may require.
Jonathan Leeman:
So it’s not too mere, but it’s relatively mere yet still I think elegant. It’s a moment in peace.
Mark Dever:
It trades in things that are particularly relevant for us in our relationships.
Jonathan Leeman:
Not forsake the assembling of ourselves, nor neglect the prey, endeavor to bring up such as may be under our care and the nurture and admonition of the Lord. But then there’s an outward turn and by a pure and loving example to seek the salvation of our family.
Mark Dever:
That’s right.
Jonathan Leeman:
And friends.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
So I’m just tempted to read the whole thing. It’s so beautiful and heartening.
Mark Dever:
Now, does its beauty give you any second thoughts about the way you NIV’d it for the Cheverly?
Jonathan Leeman:
No, yeah, I felt that. But I did seek to retain, or we sought to retain, you know, so we said we will work in private, the unity of spirit and the bond of peace, pretty similar. We will walk together in love as Christ commands, caring for each other, watching over each other, encouraging and admonishing one another as occasion requires.
Mark Dever:
That’s fine.
Jonathan Leeman:
It’s fine. It’s a little more work than like.
Mark Dever:
It is. The affection’s gone.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah. I’m just noticing that. We’ll regularly attend the church’s gathering.
Mark Dever:
Plain.
Jonathan Leeman:
As opposed to…
Mark Dever:
Not forsake the assembly of…
Jonathan Leeman:
Not forsake the assembly of ourselves. Well, nobody talks that way.
Mark Dever:
But it’s Hebrews 10, 24, 25 language. It’s picking up the language of scripture.
Jonathan Leeman:
And we saw it more every day. We will regularly attend the church’s gatherings and faithfully pray for one another. So just bam, there it is. Clear, concise. But that’s the…
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Church Covenants and Discipline
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s the thing, the balance you’re trying to strike. What’s the nature of the individual’s relationship to the promises and commands inside of a covenant? I mean, is it binding? Can you discipline me if I don’t keep them?
Mark Dever:
Yes. Because we understand all of them are not only accepted by you, the person coming in, as an agreement with us, the existing church, but it’s also with God. And we feel that God has spoken in his Word about each one of these things. So none of these things are implications simply that we have come up with, but we all think they are clearly taught in God’s word.
Jonathan Leeman:
But again, let me come back to the fact that it’s a partial list of biblical commands, not an exhaustive list.
Mark Dever:
So, therefore, we can require of you much more than is in the church covenant.
Jonathan Leeman:
That is in the church covenant.
Mark Dever:
Yes, we require of you the entire Bible. And we can excommunicate you out of our love for you in any evidence you give consistently that you’re not a child of God by your hearing and rejecting anything that’s incumbent upon us in Scripture, even if it’s not repeated in our church covenant.
Jonathan Leeman:
So to the point to the person who says, well, you got kind of sort of an arbitrary list here that you have, it’s not everything, it doesn’t seem real…
Mark Dever:
It’s pedagogical, and it’s a summary for purposes of displaying, symbolizing, and assisting us in teaching and remembering.
Jonathan Leeman:
And by pedagogical, let me just say, heightening the awareness, so insofar as a matter will be disciplined or corrected for somebody failing to fulfill it. It’s just like, look, we’ve been utterly clear about this. It’s all of Scripture, but look, this stuff is really clear.
Mark Dever:
Very, very clear. As has this whole conversation been.
Jonathan Leeman:
Have you ever raised it? Are you trying to close this down?
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
Have you ever raised the church covenant when you’ve moved into correcting? I said, listen, brother, do you recall that phrase? Do you remember how you are?
Mark Dever:
Rarely. I probably have some rarely because that’s just standing in the place of Scripture. Now, if somebody were maintaining, oh, I never thought that then I might, but I can’t remember that ever happening.
What to do When People Object to Signing a Church Covenant
Jonathan Leeman:
Have you ever had people object to signing it in them?
Mark Dever:
Yes, rarely, but yes.
Jonathan Leeman:
How do you handle that?
Mark Dever:
It depends on the situation.
Jonathan Leeman:
Give me the possibilities.
Mark Dever:
I might say, is there anything in here you disagree with? No. And you don’t want to sign it just because scripture doesn’t tell me I need to. Okay. Would you mind just writing a little note to me telling me that you agree with everything in it and then let me have that note? And that’s fine. So yeah, I’ve done that before.
Jonathan Leeman:
And then you just kind of staple it to it or something?
Mark Dever:
Yeah, I just keep that. It’s just, yeah. That’s the point.
Jonathan Leeman:
Some critics of 9Marks say that church covenants are perhaps inherently abusive. That’s common, I don’t know what I say, it’s common. It’s a theme I’ve seen.
Mark Dever:
Well, again, church covenants arise in the 1580s or earlier. So it’s congregational documents trying to give words to their agreement together. So insofar as congregations of people who agree together can wrongly treat each other when someone who’s a member of that begins to dissent from that, that’s certainly true. But I don’t think I would want to say that is by nature wrong or abusive anymore than I want to say like a contract or any mutual agreement that we would come to is inherently abusive.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, that’s just the thing. They would say, the argument would be A, these aren’t in the Bible. B, the church is a voluntary organization.
Mark Dever:
Wedding vows are in the Bible.
Jonathan Leeman:
C, the pastor says, hey, if you would be part of this. That so fits the moment. But now you’re gonna use this to sort of lord it over me.
Mark Dever:
Well, that can certainly be done. But to say that that’s the essence of the thing, I think is a sand throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Jonathan Leeman:
So they can be abused.
Mark Dever:
Of course. Scripture can be abused. Look at Satan and the temptation with Jesus. You don’t throw out Scripture.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay, well then how would you tell pastors listening, don’t use your church covenant this way?
Church Covenant Can Not Replace Scripture
Mark Dever:
If you have something to talk to someone about, in their life, go to Scripture, take them to scripture, not to the covenant.
Jonathan Leeman:
So you really are using it more as a means of teaching, instructing, reminding, reaffirming, then you are as a…
Mark Dever:
Displaying.
Jonathan Leeman:
Displaying.
Mark Dever:
To outsiders and each other.
Jonathan Leeman:
Last question. A church doesn’t presently… A church doesn’t presently have a church covenant. They’re like, you know, there’s something to this. A, where should they read to learn more? B, how do they get there?
Mark Dever:
There have been a number of books over the years on church covenants. If we were in my study, I could grab them. I remember what their covers looked like. Yeah, Timothy and Denise George edited one, Baptist Creeds and Confessions [Baptist Confessions, Covenants, and Catechisms], and I think there are some covenants in there.
There’s an early 19th-century one and a mid-20th-century one that I can see the covers of and I can’t recall the names. But anyway, there are books out there. You can just type in church covenant.
Jonathan Leeman:
Do you talk about it in 9Marks or Building Healthy Churches?
Mark Dever:
Maybe in a footnote, not much.
Jonathan Leeman:
I’m sure if you Google the 9Marks website or not Google you do the search for church covenants. You’ll find articles that test on that. We certainly addressed it.
Any final, Oh, I’m sorry. What do you do briefly? Walk for me. I got nothing. Walk me through the process of bringing those into a congregation from the past.
Mark Dever:
Grab one that you like, that you think is biblical, get the leaders of your church to agree on it, take it to the congregation, and get them to agree on it.
Jonathan Leeman:
And that process is gonna take me two weeks.
Mark Dever:
Depends on how mature your church is, how good the statement is you’ve got, and how non-controversial. You might find one that has some weird phrases in it or language people don’t use or things that are false or something that you just happen to have a member of your church who strongly disagrees with this one aspect of it, I don’t know. But it need not be that long a process.
Jonathan Leeman:
Alberto, who does exist, just reminded me, we devoted an entire old journal, 9Marks Journal
Mark Dever:
To the existence of Alberto.
Jonathan Leeman:
Confessions, Covenants and Constitutions. So look at that and we’ll discuss that. Maybe read that with fellow leaders and then go from there. Brother, any other comments?
Mark Dever:
It’s a simple and important pastoral tool that you ignore to the detriment of your church.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well said. Thanks for your time.
Mark Dever:
Thank you.
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