Revisiting Church Covenants

a new academic article in the Kenwood Bulletin

The Importance of the Covenant Idea to Congregationalism and Recent Challenges to It

The twentieth century saw the decline of church covenants in Baptist churches. This peculiar break with what was such a prominent part of congregationalism is the subject of this study. Both Champlin Burrage (1904) and Charles Deweese (1990) document the history and importance of church covenants within congregationalism (which includes Baptists). The church covenant was to congregationalism what apostolic succession was to episcopal churches: their grounds for being and license to practice the sacraments. The covenant idea is necessary for the free church since the only force holding a member to a church is his or her commitment, i.e. covenant. Our Congregational and Baptist forefathers concluded that church covenants were an essential ingredient of church membership and foundational for church discipline. Covenants were definitional to the local church, signed by members, and expected to be honored until the forces of consumerism and individualism, exemplified by Wade Burleson’s (2016) argument that they were abusive, hit the churches. In the generation since Deweese’s book, church covenants have continued waning. Even traditionalist organizations, like 9Marks, rarely mention the role of the church covenant in the church’s life. Nevertheless, faithful Christians today, seeking to recover the full New Testament church, sense there is something awry amid increasingly consumer-driven churches. They yearn for tools to do so. Church covenants are one such tool.

For the complete article:

Revisiting Church Covenants: The Importance of the Covenant Idea to Congregationalism and Recent Challenges to It

The twentieth century was nearly framed by two significant books on church covenants: Champlin Burrage’s in 1904 and Charles Deweese’s in 1990.^[1] Both still hold up well and deserve the attention of students of church history, especially among Baptists. They show how and why the church covenant was a vital organ of congregational — and thus Baptist — church practice. While Burrage lamented the demise of the church covenant among English Congregational churches and tied it to spiritual decline, what he could not see was the waning of the church covenant among Baptist churches in the twentieth century. Deweese could. However, Deweese estimated that by the last decade of that century, the church covenant was returning to prominence. After all, the covenant idea is necessary for the free church since without establishment and parishes, commitment was the only force that held a member to a church. Deweese claimed that interest in church covenants was on the rise “in recent years” (for him, the 1980s) and chronicles a purported renewed interest in church covenants through the 1960s.^[2] That has not come to fruition. In the generation since Deweese’s book, church covenants have continued waning and are now often mere curiosities of a bygone age in older, traditional churches and absent altogether from many – probably the vast majority – of newer churches.^[3] Michael Haykin noted, in 2015, that church covenants “have fallen into disuse in recent days.”^[4] Even traditionalist organizations, like 9Marks and their associated scholars, which major on polity, rarely mention the role of the church covenant in the church’s life. This peculiar break with what was such a prominent part of congregationalism is the subject of this study.

The Church Covenant Idea

The church covenant is an embodiment of what John Fawcett (1740-1817) called the “blest . . . tie that binds.” It is the expression of “the covenantal relationship that is established between Christians.”^[5] It is the practical expression of “the church covenant idea.” That idea was inherent in the Anabaptist conception of the free church. But their expectation of a church covenant was informal. They claimed, “One does not need to take an oath.” However, baptized members were expected to “remain a member, and not desert” even at the cost of losing one’s life because of persecution.^[6] Although there is a hint that some early Christians covenanted in Pliny the Younger’s letter to Emperor Trajan (c. AD 112), when, describing Christian assembles, he mentions that they, as part of worship, “bind themselves by an oath,” there’s no evidence that this practice was successfully passed down through the centuries to the Anabaptists or that the Baptists inherited their practice from the Anabaptists.^[7] The practice of covenanting became formal and written with the English Congregationalists and reached full-flower with them in New England. Baptists inherited it, as they inherited much else, from the Congregationalists.^[8]

The idea of a covenant was in the cultural air Christian Englishmen breathed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.^[9] Since the idea of covenant was foundational to English – perhaps broadly European – society, men’s association in guilds, companies, and in their fidelity to the monarch, was understood in terms of a covenant. They instinctively contracted to give faithful allegiance to the whole in exchange for the protection of their part.^[10] So, it was natural that earnest English believers – Puritans – would seize upon the covenant. Indeed, the “Pilgrims” of Mayflower fame, defined their relationship to each other, in the Mayflower Compact, in covenantal language, declaring, we “solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic.”^[11]

The covenant idea is “nothing more or less than the existence of the local church.” — Jonathan Leeman

That covenant idea is the commitment that holds congregational churches together. More recently, Jonathan Leeman advocates for the church covenant idea. He argues that “church membership is . . . a covenant union between a particular church and a Christian.”^[12] Churches affirm faith and baptism and promise to give oversight; the individual submits to a “particular body and its leaders. This entire exchange can be summarized with the word covenant.”^[13] Indeed, for Leeman, the covenant idea is “nothing more or less than the existence of the local church – the visible church on earth. . . The local church exists when Christians commit to giving one another authority over themselves, and they do so expressly….”^[14] Early Congregationalists and Baptists would easily recognize and heartily affirm Leeman’s definition.

Early English Baptists inherited and carried on the Congregational idea “of a church covenant as a solemn agreement voluntarily entered into by a particular congregation of believers.”^[15] The First London Baptist Confession (1644) defined a church, in part, as believers “joined to . . . each other by mutual agreement.”^[16] The influential New Hampshire Baptist Confession of 1833 came with a covenant which served as a first draft to the John Newton Brown covenant (1853) which became normative among Baptists in America. Both the 1963 and 2000 Baptist Faith and Messages agree that “A New Testament church of the Lord Jesus Christ” consists of “baptized believers who are associated by covenant in the faith and fellowship of the gospel…”.

William Crowell (1806-1871), in his mid-nineteenth century church manual, noted “That any number of disciples may, for good cause and in an orderly way, form themselves into a church by mutual covenant. . .”.^[17] Covenanting is what makes the group of believers into a church. “It is this covenant which unites the baptized believer in church fellowship to the members of that church. . .”.^[18] Not long after, Edward T. Hiscox (1814-1901), noted that a new church is formed “by uniting in mutual covenant.”^[19] Such a covenant, Crowell clarifies, may be “expressed or implied.”^[20] For the original Congregational and Baptist churches, covenants were expressed. The idea of the covenant bond of church members to each other became incarnate in written covenants. So, Charles Deweese defines a church covenant as “a series of written pledges based on the Bible which members voluntarily make to God and to one another regarding their basic moral and spiritual commitments and the practice of their faith.”^[21]

A church covenant was not primarily concerned with beliefs but with conduct.^[22] Burrage says it defines how church members are to give themselves over to faith and service, promising “to work for the Lord’s profit, to avoid evil, and to do good.”^[23] Deweese explains, “A covenant deals mainly with conduct (although it contains some doctrinal elements).”^[24] Leeman explains, “If a statement of faith articulates what a church believes, a church covenant articulates how it agrees to live together.”^[25]

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[1] Champlin Burrage, The Church Covenant Idea: Its Origin and Its Development (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1904), 14. All further references to Burrage are to this book. Charles W. Deweese, Baptist Church Covenants (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1990). All further references to Deweese are to this book.

[2] Deweese, 88, 91.

[3] John Hammett notes that to counter nominalism “some churches” are returning to church covenanting. He does not say whether these churches are a net increase in church covenanting. (“The Why and Who of Church Membership,” Baptist Foundations, Mark Dever and Jonathan Leeman, editors [Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2015], 178. Gregg Allison notes, “there appears to be a resurgence of interest in such covenants among some churches today.” He cites the church covenant of Capitol Hill Baptist Church (Washington, DC), which is not new, and that of Mars Hill Church (Seattle, WA) which is defunct. (Sojourners and Strangers: The Doctrine of the Church (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 127, n. 17. The decline of church covenants is shown in Allison’s book of 471 pages, only four of which address church covenants. Further, I inquired directly of Jonathan Leeman about whether church covenants were increasing. His answer, “I just don’t know” (Email, July 10, 2023.) Given his circles, if there were an increase in covenanting, he would likely be one of the first to know.

[4] Michael A. G. Haykin, “Some Historical Roots of Congregationalism,” Baptist Foundations, Mark Dever and Jonathan Leeman, editors (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2015), 41.

[5] Allison, Sojourners and Strangers, 124.

[6] Burrage, 23.

[7] For the excerpt from Pliny the Younger’s letter, see Allison, Sojourners and Strangers, 125, n. 6.

[8] On terms: “Puritan” is the umbrella term for “hot Protestants” in England, after the Elizabethan settlement who sought to reform the church according to some type of Reformed interpretation of the Bible. They include those who were willing to stay in the Church of England, Presbyterians who settled on the Westminster Confession (1647), and Congregationalists, often also called “Independents.” Baptists began as a subset of Congregationalists. When Congregational, or its forms, is capitalized, it refers to the denomination. When it is not, it refers to the polity, which Baptists share.

[9] Geoffrey Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way, 1640-1660 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), 75.

[10] Darrett Rutman, American Puritanism: Faith and Practice (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1970), 25.

[11] Thomas Armitage, A History of the Baptists (NY: Bryan Taylor & Co., 1976), 602.

[12] Jonathan Leeman, The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love: Reintroducing the Doctrines of Church Membership and Discipline (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 217.

[13] Emphasis original, Leeman, The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love, 217.

[14] Leeman, The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love, 249.

[15] Timothy and Denise George (ed.), Baptist Confessions, Covenants, and Catechisms (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1996), 14.

[16] Paragraph 33. George and George, Baptist Confessions, Covenants, and Catechisms, 45.

[17] William Crowell, The Church Member’s Manual (Boston: Gould, Kendall, & Lincoln, 1847), 84.

[18] Crowell, The Church Member’s Manual, 230.

[19] Edward T. Hiscox, The Baptist Church Directory (New York: Sheldon and Company, 1859), 17.

[20] Crowell, The Church Member’s Manual, 230.

[21] Deweese, 81.

[22] W. T. Whitley, “Church Covenants,” The Baptist Quarterly VII (1934-35), 227.

[23] Burrage, 14.

[24] Deweese, viii.

[25] Leeman, The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love, 299. Mark Dever notes that members often pledged in church covenants to uphold scriptural truth (“The Noble Task: The Pastor as Preacher and Practitioner of the Marks of the Church,” Polity: Biblical Arguments on How to Conduct Church Life [Washington, DC: Center for Church Reform, 2001], 20. All further references to the book Polity refer to this.