Church Covenants in America
An excerpt from “Revisiting Church Covenants,” Kenwood Bulletin (May 2025)
Across the Atlantic, in New England, Congregationalists and Baptists were more nearly universal in their insistence upon the usefulness of church covenants.1 The Cambridge Platform (1648) described the polity of the Congregational church in New England. It stated, “A Congregational church is by the institution of Christ a part of the militant, visible church, consisting of a company of saints by calling, united into one body, by a holy covenant.”2
In early New England, new churches were organized when the inhabitants of a specific territory accepted one another’s conversion, upon the evidence of their testimony, and covenanted together.3 The covenant, explained Williston Walker (1860–1922), describes how church members “give up themselves unto the Lord, to the observing of the ordinances of Christ together in the same society.” This covenant is best when it is “express & plain.”4
In general, these fundamental covenants were…a simple promise to walk in fidelity to the divine commandments and in Christian faithfulness one to another. …Such covenants were renewed, made more explicit against definite forms of prevalent sin, or otherwise amended, with much freedom, to meet the exigencies of ecclesiastical life. …The essential matter was the agreement, not its verbal expression.5
Church covenants became so important to New England congregationalism that three leading Puritan pastors, Richard Mather (1596–1669), Hugh Peters (1598–1660), and John Davenport (1597–1670) joined to defend the practice. They were at pains to argue that covenants were not merely for “Brownists” (i.e. separatists).6
Thomas Lechford (c. 1590–1644) recounted how this was lived-out in New England. A new church would enter into a “Covenant with God, and one another (which is called their Church Covenant, and held by them to constitute a Church),” paraphrasing the covenant thus:
To forsake the Devill, and all his workes, and the vanities of the sinfull world, and all their former lusts, and corruptions, they have lived and walked in, and to cleave unto, and obey the Lord Jesus Christ, as their onely King and Law-giver, their onely Priest and Prophet, and to walke together with that Church, in the unity of the faith, and brotherly love, and to submit themselves one unto another, in all the ordinances of Christ, to mutuall edification, and comfort, to watch over, and support one another.”7
The Congregational practice of organizing churches with covenants was retained by Baptists, through the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. John Hammett notes that church covenants were “constitutive for Baptist churches in North America.”8 Cyril Eastwood wrote, for Baptists “the church covenant brings the individual church into being just as believers’ baptism is the sign of a person’s covenant which brings the individual Christian into being.”9 Deweese noted that original Baptists “viewed covenants, along with believers’ baptism and church discipline, as means of nurturing and safeguarding the New Testament emphasis on a regenerate church membership.”10 Mark Dever explained, “When persons joined a Baptist church, they subscribed to its covenant.”11
William Screven (c. 1629–1713) planted his Baptist church in Kittery, Maine, with a covenant.12 When he and at least ten members transplanted to Charlestown, South Carolina, becoming the first Baptist church in the South, they took that covenant with them. The church, under Pastor Richard Furman (1755–1825), adopted a new covenant in 1791, revised in 1852, and remains their covenant today.13 Meanwhile, the Charlestown Baptist Association’s Summary of Church Discipline (1774) called for new church members to subscribe to their church’s covenant.14 In 1853, John Newton Brown (1803–1868) published a covenant in his Baptist Church Manual that became standard, still often found pasted into hymnals or displayed prominently on church walls. It won such wide acceptance with Southern Baptists that it was included in the 1956 Baptist Hymnal.15
Covenants Signed & Enforced
Signing a confession of faith has roots back to the early church, with Basil (330–379) noting that an apostate is “fighting against his own handwriting, which he put on record when he professed the faith.”16 Hammett notes a Biblical precedent in Nehemiah 9:38 where, after a time of renewal, the leaders of Israel “make a firm covenant in writing; on the sealed document are the names of our princes, our Levites, and our priests.”17 Signing covenants was common and expected apparently from their origins in Congregationalism until the 19th century, but declined in the 20th century.18
As Nuttall noted of covenanting generally, examples of having members sign their covenant could be multiplied. In England’s Bury St. Edmunds “some few professors” led “the way out of Babylon – the corrupt worship, and to separate from them.” They formed a church. Five men and three women on August 16th, 1646, signed a covenant.19 At Bourton-on-the-Water, Gloucestershire, in 1720 after division over the selection of a new pastor, the members of the Baptist church recommitted themselves to one another with a covenant they signed.20 In 1770, in Caerleon, Wales, a Baptist church drafted a covenant and had members “set” their names on it. In Wern Panteg (current Trosnant), in 1776, the church adopted a covenant and the members “annexed their names” to it.21
Signing church covenants appeared to be the norm in America too, with Screven, noted above, leading his church, originally in Maine, to sign their covenant.22 Later (1749) in America, sixteen founding members of a Baptist church in Titicut, Massachusetts signed a covenant drafted by Isaac Backus (1724–1806).23 The Middleborough Baptist Church, in 1756, also signed their covenant. Backus noted that they “solemnly and renewedly sign covenant together; I trust with some real freedom and sense on divine things.”24
The First Baptist Church of Warren, Rhode Island did it in 1764. In 1798 the Philadelphia Baptist Association stated that signing the covenant was a part of forming a new church.25 As late as the mid-nineteenth century, William Crowell wrote, “It has been customary in most churches to have written or printed articles of covenant expressive of the obligations thus assumed, which every candidate for membership is expected to sign, in token of cordial assent to the same.”26 Eleazer Savage (1800–1886) noted that “every member upon joining the church” signs the “instrument,” the church covenant which he hails as “a rich and beautiful summary of Christian duties.”27
The church covenant provided the “concrete form by which the membership of the church could be disciplined.”
The church covenant provided the “concrete form by which the membership of the church could be disciplined.”28 “A church derived its authority to discipline members on the grounds that a covenant had been made and broken.”29 For example, in their covenant, members of First Baptist Church of Charlestown pledge, “We promise individually, to pay a respectful regard to the advice and admonitions of the church, and to be subject to its discipline.”30 From 1720–1732, members were excluded from the Welsch Tract Church for being “a covenant breaker in regard to the church covenant.”31 Discipline was undertaken for “infractions of one’s pledges.”32 Congregational and Baptist churches normally had church covenant meetings during the week preceding service of the Lord’s Supper to ensure that the members were abiding by the covenant. Some churches employed their covenants as part of preparation for the Lord’s Supper, recited by all the members standing.33
In America, Deweese notes, “For most of the nineteenth century, covenanting was a basic and significant feature of Baptist life.”34 The question then is obvious: how did a feature of congregationalism, which was so prominent and was considered vital to the polity, fade away while churches, ostensibly with that polity, came to dominate the American ecclesiastical scene?
For the complete article:
John B. Carpenter (Ph.D, ThM, MDiv) is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church and author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church.
W. T. Whitley, “Church Covenants,” The Baptist Quarterly VII (1934–35), 227. ↩︎
The Cambridge Platform of Church Discipline, Adopted in 1648 and The Confession of Faith, Adopted in 1680 (Boston: Perkins & Whipple, 1850), Chapter II, 6, 51. ↩︎
Williston Walker, A History of the Congregational Churches in the United States (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1894), 218. ↩︎
Walker, 217. ↩︎
Walker, 218. ↩︎
Richard Mather, Hugh Peters, John Davenport, An Apologie of The Churches in New-England for Church-Covenant (London: Printed by T.P. and M.S. for Benjamin Allen, 1643), 41. ↩︎
Thomas Lechford, Plaine Dealing: Or, Newes from Newe England (London, Printed by W. E. and I. G. for Nath, 1642), 2. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A49890.0001.001/1:4.1?rgn=div2;view=fulltext. ↩︎
Baptist Foundations, 178. Ian Birch claims that by William Kiffin’s time “covenanting was rejected as a basis for constituting a church” among Particular Baptists though I do not see him documenting that; cf. Birch, The Ecclesial Polity of The English Calvinistic Baptists, 1640–1660 (Ph.D. Thesis, University of St. Andrews, 2014), 27. ↩︎
Cyril Eastwood, The Priesthood of All Believers: An Examination of the Doctrine from the Reformation to the Present Day (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1962), 157. ↩︎
Deweese, Baptist Church Covenants, v. ↩︎
Dever, “A Noble Task,” Polity, 23. ↩︎
Deweese, 41. ↩︎
Lori Putnam, First Baptist Church of Charlestown, email correspondence, March 10, 2023. ↩︎
Greg Wills, “The Church: Baptists and Their Churches in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Polity, 37. ↩︎
Capitol Hill Baptist Church, “History of our Church Covenant,” https://www.capitolhillbaptist.org/history-of-our-church-covenant/, accessed March 31, 2022. ↩︎
Basil, De Spiritu Sancto, 10.26. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3203.htm ↩︎
John S. Hammett, Biblical Foundations for Baptist Churches: A Contemporary Ecclesiology (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 2005), 118–119. ↩︎
Deweese, 82. “Frequently, Baptist churches asked new members to sign the church covenant as a public pledge of their commitment to live according to the standards and expectations of the congregation,” in George, ed., 14. ↩︎
John Browne, History of Congregationalism…in Norfolk and Suffolk, 394; according to Nuttall, Visible Saints, 49. ↩︎
Haykin, “Some Historical Roots of Congregationalism,” 43. ↩︎
Deweese, 37. ↩︎
Deweese, 41. ↩︎
S. Hopkins Emery, The History of the Church of North Middleborough, Massachusetts (Middleborough: Harlow & Thatcher Printers, 1876), 90. ↩︎
Deweese, 44. ↩︎
Deweese, 50. ↩︎
William Crowell, The Church Member’s Manual (Boston: Gould, Kendall, & Lincoln, 1847), 230. ↩︎
Eleazer Savage, Manual of Church Discipline (Rochester, NY: Sheldon and Company, 1863); Polity, 510. ↩︎
Renihan, Edification and Beauty, 48. ↩︎
Deweese, 36. ↩︎
The Church Covenant of First Baptist Church of Charlestown, South Carolina, https://www.fbcharleston.org/_files/ugd/d87e21_eea9569deaef46d7a67ab2e7fa5166fc.pdf. ↩︎
Deweese, 36. ↩︎
Deweese, 53. ↩︎
Davies, Worship of the American Puritans, 275. ↩︎
Deweese, 97. ↩︎