“The Heart of Congregationalism”
Rev. Samuel Schaal
January 23, 2005

2 Corinthians 2:14-3:6
Matthew 4:12-23

“Here is the church
   and here is the steeple.
Open the doors
    and here are the people.”

This simple children’s hand game tells us something about the nature of church, at least church according to the Christian understanding.  And perhaps Congregational Christian understanding. That it has something to do with people gathered together.  That a church is at its core, more than a building.

Today we are trying to get at the heart of Congregationalism.  What is the heart of Congregationalism?

Some say, since we don’t use creedal statements as tests of membership, that you can be a Congregationalist and believe anything you want.  You may remember the old joke about people of many different faiths gathered at a religious convention.  The secretary runs into the meeting hall and yells “Fire!”  The people respond to that exclamation according to the qualities of their various faith traditions.  “Fire!”  The Presbyterians respond by forming a committee to study fire.  The Episcopalians recess out in an orderly fashion.  The Lutherans think it is God punishing them with fire.  The Quakers quietly consider the blessings that fire brings.  In that joke, when the Congregationalists are presented with the threat of fire, they yell, “Every man for himself!”

As with many jokes, there is some truth to this, at least in the popular imagination.  We do love our freedom.

Indeed, our beginning was found in the quest for religious liberty.  We are the product of the Pilgrims and Puritans who, in that celebrated voyage of 1620, came to this land for a more purified faith.  They established congregations throughout the Massachusetts Bay Colony and these churches came to be known as Congregational churches.

The most notable contribution of the Puritans was that they saw the locally gathered church as the church complete, needing no hierarchical or ecclesiastical structures beyond the local church to be a worshipping community.  So we might say that the heart of Congregationalism is freedom, or liberty, or perhaps autonomy.

Perhaps.  But while those words apply to us, I don’t think freedom gets at the heart of Congregationalism.  The very word itself, Congregation–alism, suggests that the heart of the idea must rest in a congregation, or in a community.  I think that though freedom is a piece of the puzzle, it doesn’t define the very core of what we are, the very heart of what, perhaps, we should be.

Indeed, this morning’s gospel text about the gathering of the disciples shows the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, and so we might say that it is the very beginning of the gathered church. 

When Jesus commands “Follow me,” and the two, then two more, respond, here begins not just a ministry, but a community.  And Jesus suggests that he will make them fishers of more people. So now we can begin to see that at the heart of the church is something about community.

Now, the way that our Puritan mothers and fathers understood the community that was following Jesus was that the locally gathered church was the church; it was not merely a branch of a larger church (or, from the Greek, ecclesia).  The foundational Biblical text for Congregationalists is several chapters later in Matthew when Jesus says, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”  Nothing more is necessary for Jesus to be present and real, than that believers gather together in his name. 

And the way the Puritans defined that community was through covenant. Covenant in the Biblical sense is something a greater power offers or imposes on a lesser power. 

In the Old Testament, the greater power—God—usually demands loyalty and obligation and so promises protection of the lesser power. Consider the covenant with Moses at Sinai: “Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation” (Exodus 19: 4-6a). Earlier in Genesis, God had established a covenant with Noah. Referring to the rainbow, God tells Noah: “This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth” (Genesis 9:17).  Another was God’s covenant with Abram, an agreement between the deity and the father of a nation (Genesis 15).

In the New Testament, though covenant isn’t as frequent, the covenant concept is raised to new levels.  In the Old Testament covenants, the promise was often based on certain things that humanity had to do.  God says, in essence, I will take care of you, if you do these things.  In the New Testament, covenant is not so much law and obligation as it is of love.

According to New Testament understanding, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ began a new covenant. At the institution of the Lord’s Supper, Jesus says, “This is my blood of the (new) covenant, which is poured out for many” (Mark 14:24, 1 Corinthians 11:25).

Today’s epistle text underscores this (2 Corinthians 3:6): “…our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not in a written code but in the Spirit; for the written code kills, but the Spirit gives life.” The New RSV renders it: “…a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.”

Here Paul is talking about the disunity between the old and new covenants.  In other parts of Paul’s writing, he speaks of the continuity between the old and new covenants, between Moses and Christ, between the Jewish scriptures and the New Testament.  But here in this text Paul emphasizes the discontinuity, on the radically new world inaugurated in the gospel, on the life-giving presence of the Spirit.

Paul is saying we have a new covenant in Christ, a code whose power is not of the letter, but of the spirit. It is this sense of covenant, this sense of the freedom of spirit, a covenant bound in people freely gathered, that I think Paul was talking about and many centuries later the Puritans picked up.

So the Puritans understood and emphasized this Biblical covenant and used local church covenants to define communities.  It became the task of each church as it gathered to develop an agreed-upon covenant.  The covenant of the church at Salem in 1629 is among the earliest of church covenants:

We Covenant with the Lord and one with another, and do bind ourselves in the presence of God, to walk together in all his ways, according as he is pleased to reveal himself unto us in his blessed word of truth.” (Spelling and style modernized for contemporary readers.)

So these covenants were primarily statements that bound the people of the congregation into covenant with God and each other.  They aren’t creedal statements, though some covenants had creedal statements.  As Dr. Peay is always quick to remind us, many Congregational churches, including this one, have used doctrinal covenants in the past.  A doctrine is usually shorthand, a statement of the essentials of a faith.  We have used doctrines and they are still handy, except … and it is a big except … when they are used as tests of membership.

The covenants of our churches tend, instead, to suggest how the community will live together; how they will act out their faith; not what they will believe.  The written covenant is a way of emphasizing this free relationship with each other and with God.

Over the years this congregation has had a number of covenants. You are no doubt familiar with our current covenant.  We open many meetings of the church’s boards, committees and small groups by a reading of the covenant.

It is in many ways a classic covenant.  It is not doctrinal, but it does place us squarely as followers of Jesus.  It is an active covenant; it suggests how we shall live our lives together.

There are five verbs.  So when we own the covenant, when we agree that we will be bound by this covenant, we agree not just to believe something, but we agree to: share (in worship and service), grow (in knowledge and expression), reach out (with compassion), treat (with love and understanding), and return (a portion of our wealth to God).

These are active words.  They suggest an active community. They suggest an active faith.  Moreover, they suggest a relational faith; a faith in relationship with Jesus Christ and in relationship with each other.

Our covenant suggests that our primary relationship as a congregation to Jesus is as follower. If we follow him, then our religion is primarily a religion of relationship to Jesus Christ.  We cannot follow one we do not have a relationship with.

And while this relationship is in part private and personal; certainly many of us have had private experiences with the divine and we each have our individual understandings on what that relationship means for us— the primary way this relationship works out in our Congregational faith is communal.  “As followers of Jesus Christ, we…”

I invite you to reconsider, in the context of all this, the words of our covenant:

As followers of Jesus Christ, we commit ourselves
to share in the worship and service of God,
to grow in the knowledge and expression of our faith,
to reach out with compassion to those in need,
to treat each other with love and understanding,
and to return to God a portion of God’s gifts.

The heart of Congregationalism is covenant.  Moreover, the heart of this congregation is this covenant.

The heart of Congregationalism is covenant. And the heart of covenant is relationship—our relationship with each other and with God, who offers the covenant.

And a healthy relationship is a free relationship.  So we are back to freedom again.  But this is a freedom within the life of God, not mere license.  So freedom is the motive force of this relationship, but freedom, in and of itself, is not the heart of Congregationalism.  Our freedom is derived from God.  We are, in an old Puritan phrase, the Lord’s free people.

Another way of understanding this is to say that we are not merely a voluntary society.  You don’t join a church like you join the country club or the museum guild.  You have the freedom to join the Congregational church or the Lutheran Church or the Methodists or to not join any church.  Certainly God has given you that freedom.

But when you join a church – this church – you are not merely making a free-will decision.  You are responding to the divine call in your own life, in some measure.  For God is always reaching out to us.  God is always loving us.  Jesus is always inviting (commanding) “Follow me.”

In my own understanding of the event of creation, when God created everything out of nothing, God was a God of relationship and sometimes I think that perhaps God was lonely.  It was in God’s very nature to be self-giving and loving and so God created creation. (God needed us to be in relationship.)  And yet God made us free so that when we love God back, it is a genuine love, a love of our own volition, of love of our own choice, for this is really the only kind of love there is.  A conscripted love is not love.

So God always offers himself to us and waits for our reply.  Some respond and some don’t. We have responded by joining this church.  We have responded by living in community, guided by our covenant, and by answering that old command of Jesus:  “Follow me.”

So a relationship in freedom, in covenant, is at the heart of Congregationalism.  It is anything but “every man for himself.”  It is at once something very simple and very demanding.  And very promising.

Here is the church
	and here is the steeple.
And in the heart of it all,
	here are the people.

Amen.

Benediction

Beloveds, we haven’t just been to church. 
We are the church. 
 	And when the church is the church
	it is nothing more, nothing less and nothing other 
	than the Body of Christ in the wider world.
We go now from this place to be the Christ
	for this hurting world.