Christ's Body, the Church

In his annual report to our denomination this year, Covenant President Gary Walter used an image that we all do well to heed. It had specifically to do with how we see ourselves as individuals in relation to our local church, and how we see ourselves as churches in relation to the denomination. Taking us back to root understandings when the Covenant was founded, he laid out before us as individuals and churches a powerful--and I believe biblical--reminder:

"Did you ever stop to think that we chose for ourselves the name The Evangelical Covenant Church, not The Churches of the Evangelical Covenant? We purposefully chose the single, more organic name Church.

"It intentionally invokes Paul’s teaching on the living Body of Christ…made up of many parts, yes, but never standing apart from one another. “Churches” for me has an organizational implication of retaining separateness; “Church” as a living organism has the implication of essential oneness and unity."

What a difference that understanding has made in my life. From childhood it supplied to and in me a security that being essentially on my own could never have supplied. It not only planted my spirit in the rich loam of being "In It Together," as President Walter has now termed it, but set me free from the awful spectre of continually wondering, like so many are these days, "How am I doing?"

The greatest challenge of our time in my view, religiously and politically, is to rediscover our identity--where "home" is for us, the place from which we venture out to work in the Lord's vineyard every day and return at night to renew and rest our spirits.

I once asked an earnest and energetic young man part-way into a local church job interview, "Where is home for you,?" Not lacking in ideas as to his ministry and his gifts, that query somehow struck him to the quick. "That's a great question," he replied, "I'm not sure I know!" What was supposed to be a half-hour interview turned into a two-hour dialogue that moved us both. And on rising after prayer, before leaving, he asked simply, "Could I have a hug?"

The Covenant Church we have inherited as Church--one body of churches conjoined in Christ--is a treasure. What becomes of it now moving forward depends on whether we heed our President's wise reminder that we are "In It Together."

Are you praying for, present with, and supportive of the whole body we are as a Covenant Church, not to mention Christ's larger body of which it is only a part? Is the Covenant just a cardboard house for you to do your own thing, or a home your inhabit and care about with all the others who bear its name with you in the larger body of Christ?