Freedom Held by Friendship

Transcript

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[0:00] So, our sermon today, just so you know, is I'm going to talk about, this is sort of a three-part series that's been broken up by various other messages that we've had here. The first time we talked about the cults, what they believe, and how they're different from us. The second time we talked about all the different denominations that could fit on one piece of paper, which is not all of them by any stretch. And what they believe, which is slightly different from us. And then today we're going to actually talk about six of the things that our particular denomination believes and has shared. And this should not be constituted or thought of as a creed or a confessional document. However, it lays out in general terms what the covenant denomination has been thinking and believing for over 100 years, more than 100 years. And so I'm going to ask George again to come out. I have another one of those tables. This one's a little longer. So, George, would you pass this out? And I think there's enough for everybody. If you want to share one for family, that's fine, too. And it'll also be up on the screen eventually. And you're going to need your binoculars to read some of the fine print when it comes up here finally.

[1:03] So I want to just talk about our denomination in case you didn't know. If you walked in today, you came into what's called the Covenant Church. Our denomination is called the Evangelical Covenant Church of America, I guess you could say, or the ECC. And one of the questions we had from last time when we talked about the denominations was, are all the different denominations okay? Is it okay that there's different denominations? And that's a mixed question because on the negative side, that points to real division within the body of Christ. Like there's just differences. And actually, in centuries past, there was actual violence over this between the denominations. And that was tragic. That is not happening today as much as that I'm aware of, at least. But so the downside is it looks like... A lack of unity within the church. Oh, George, I'm going to need one of those when you're done. I gave them to all of you.

[2:02] But on the pro side, on the positive side, each denomination has its own special gifts, its own special emphasis. It probably has its own mission field. It probably has something like, you know, just its own uniqueness. And our denomination has its own uniqueness. And it's able to do things that other denominations can't do or won't do. And so it's positive. It's possible that multiple denominations are a positive thing as well. Okay. Did anyone not get one? Oh, send... George, send on... I'll take that. And then you head on back there. Okay. There we go. Way in the corner there. Just go around the backside or go on through. Okay.

[2:42] So... And our denomination has this very unique history that shapes it. I don't have time to go into the whole history of the denomination. It was probably started... I mean, it was started... George, can you go... Go all the way over there? Oh, you got it. Okay, you got it. Okay, good, good. Got it. Okay.

[3:00] In 1885, and I preached about this once, all these different churches got together in Minneapolis. And they decided to form a denomination. And they were known back then as the Mission Friends. They kind of had different names for themselves. But the founding verse for it is what we see in our call to worship today. It's also... Our benediction today is Psalm 119.63. This is what they opened the meeting with. And it says this. I am a friend to anyone who fears you. Anyone who obeys your commandment. So the friendship has always sort of been central to this. Or the companionship. The other translations of the Bible say I'm a companion to anyone who fears you or respects you. And so very early on, the DNA of the church was very connectional and relational. There was about friendships. These were people who knew each other. They loved each other. They cared about each other. They said, Let's be in a denomination together. Let's start a seminary. Let's start a college. Let's start a hospital. Let's do things together. Let's ordain our pastors together.

[4:05] That type of thing. And so they gave up a lot of individuality. They gave up a lot of independence for the sake of being together. But that has some trade-offs. And we're going to get into that. Okay. So there's two things I want you to think about for us that are really defining our denomination even yet today. And that's this tension between... Friendship, which is super important, and freedom. And these things are both complementary and in tension with each other. And you'll see what I'm going to mean by that a little bit later. But friendship is the idea that we're in community together, that we consider things together, that relationships should be part of the mix when we're discussing theological and spiritual matters. And this grew out of one of the reactions of the pietistic movement, and partly the movement of our denomination, against things like doctrine, doctrines, creeds, and confessional statements, which were very intellectual, very theologically weighted, and sometimes very acrimonious. So like these theologians would send poison letters to each other about how the other one was wrong. And some of the pietists looked at that and said, how can God be working in this way? How can any good theology come out of this?

[5:13] These guys aren't even loving each other. They're being mean to each other. They're being hyper intellectual about this. The people in the pews don't understand a word of what they're saying. And so they said, if we're going to develop theology, we have to develop theology in relationship with each other. We have to develop it in ways that people understand. And thus they discarded a lot of high theological language, and they settled for language that they found in the scriptures, because this is the scripture was central. And we're going to get to that too. So the friendship was this idea is that we work together with the language that we have. And that's part of the mix when we're discussing. Theological and spiritual matters. That's the friendship side. The freedom side is that you have the freedom outside of really the basics of the theological thinking of the whole church to have some latitude about what you believe. And so one example is that covenanters, people who are in the covenant church, can disagree on baptism. Some say, well, we can baptize our infants, and that's a baptism. And other people say, no, I don't think so. I think you really only baptize when you can assent to it as some kind of adult,

[6:25] or somebody who's achieved an age where you can choose it yourself. In some churches, like the Baptist church, they won't accept your baptism as an infant. They say, if you really want to be a member of our church, you have to get baptized as an adult. And then there's other churches that, so you can't be a Baptist unless you believe like the Baptists about baptism. Other churches, actually being how you think about baptism, is central to their doctrines and their confessional documents. And if you explicitly disagree with them, they'll say, well, you can't be a member of the Lutheran church. So if you went into a Lutheran church and said, I disagree with you about what the doctrine of baptism is, the Lutheran doctrine of baptism, they'd say, well, you're free to visit us, you're free to attend, and you can come to the potluck, and all that stuff, but you can't be a member of the church. Because to be a member of a Lutheran church, you have to agree with the Augsburg Confession and other Lutheran doctrinal beliefs. And those doctrinal beliefs are the doctrinal works, and those define what baptism means. You get what I'm saying? So other churches are kind of, have drawn the line at baptism, and say, you have to agree with us on baptism

[7:29] to be a member of that particular church and that denomination. The Covenant Church has said, we're not going to fight over that stuff. You have freedom. You have latitude. You can believe what you want about baptism. It does, and you, the other thing you can't do is you can't yell at people and the other thing is for pastors, and both Victoria and I have had to sign an actual document about this, and it's a simple document. It's just about baptism. As pastors of the Covenant Church, that says we should have our own views about the proper understanding of, our own proper understanding of baptism, but we will baptize anyone. So if a young family comes to us with a baby and they want us to baptize it, but we don't believe in infant baptism, we will still baptize that child. And vice versa. So I cannot discriminate as a pastor against anyone who has a different view of baptism than I do. And some pastors won't join the Covenant denomination because they can't sign that document. And everybody's like, that's fine. You don't have to join. You can join some, if you care about it that much, go be a Lutheran, go be a Baptist, do what you want, you know? So we've decided not to fight about that, and we've decided not to let people in the church fight about it.

[8:44] We've decided not to let the clergy fight about that. You can have different views about what you want, but you can't have different views about what communion means. Do you remember when I said this, and I mentioned this once before, when it says, do not come up here to express your opinion? Because people had different opinions about communion. That's your freedom. But the friendship is, when you come up to take communion, you set those differences aside and you receive it together, however you understand it, but you receive it together. And that's not the place to talk about the finer details of the theology of what communion means. You don't do that when you come to the table. You receive from the table, right? So you don't come up here to express an opinion, but to receive God's mercy and grace from the table, however you understand it. And we have freedom on many other things. The center of it is always going to come back to the Nicene Creed. We've talked about the Nicene Creed in the last two Sundays. That lays out the understanding, two super important understandings, and a few others. One is the triune nature of God or the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The other is the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

[9:49] Super important how that works. And then the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the new life that comes from that and the sending of the Holy Spirit into the world. That's the Nicene Creed. The Apostles' Creed touches on that in a lot less detail, but the Nicene Creed really fleshes it out. So if you want to put the Covenant Church in that family tree, we're in that center of that branch. We grow out of the center. That was the Nicene Creed. Then when we come up to the Holy Spirit, we're still in that branch. Then the Roman Catholic Church put in that little phrase, and the Son, filioque, to differentiate themselves from the Eastern Church. We were on the Roman Catholic side, or the Western side versus the Eastern side. Then when we got to the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, 1517, the 95 theses were nailed to the church door at Wittenberg. We're still in that branch. And then we broke off from Lutheranism in Sweden in the 19th century. But even the earliest Covenanters really thought of themselves as kind of like Lutherans, but just more pietistic Lutherans, people who weren't so hung up on doctrinal conflicts with each other. Also, a few other things they thought that you should have a personal renewal.

[10:59] We're going to talk about that. So you don't just become a believer or a Christian by being baptized as an infant, because you can't even remember that. The pietists said at some point in life, you need to have a conversion experience. Even if you've already been baptized as an infant, you have to have a conversion where you go, okay, I accept God's grace. I believe this. This is really for me. You don't just drift into it as they thought the Lutherans did, and they were probably partly right. The other things about pietism was care for the poor, not a lot of dislike of overly intellectual theological debates, so we'll get to all that.

[11:41] So, we have, again, I'm going to put these two things in tension, we have freedom to kind of believe a lot of things that are outside of the scope of the Nicene Creed and sort of the core of Christian faith and disagree on them, but that's constrained by friendship. You don't go so far afield that you outrun all your friends and then you come and say, well, I believe all this sort of crazy stuff out here, but your friends would say, well, wait a second, slow down. Let's look at the Scriptures together. You might have gone too far. Let's work on this together. So this is the, I'm a friend to all those who fear you, right? And so one of the most famous questions you can ask as a Covenanter is, where is it written? So somebody will say to somebody else, oh, I think the Bible says this, or I believe this, I believe this and this and this, and then your friend, who's really your friend and cares about you, is not trying to make you look bad, your friend will say, , is how they would say it in Swedish. Yes, but where is that written? Can you open your Bible up? Show me the chapter and verse where that's written. Let's work on this together. So that's that friendship keeps the freedom in check. But the freedom is there because we're not like cookie cutters, right?

[12:58] We're not just, we're not cookies made from one cookie cutter. We have, you know, the Spirit, and the Spirit does blow. So, I'm free to believe what I want, but I'm constrained by the core of the Spirit. I'm free to believe the faith and, okay.

[13:13] So, and ultimately, we're going to come to this, is we're constrained and free at the same time when the Spirit guides us. So, the third thing that brings it all together is, if the Spirit, we have this conscious dependence on the Holy Spirit, that's also a healthy and good restraint, but also something that pushes us out into the world. Because if the Spirit tells us a thing, we better listen to it. We better do it. You know what I mean? And the Spirit will provide the proof to our friends if it's really there, right? So, we're going to look at the affirmation. Before that, we're going to go to our reading from Galatians 5, 16 through 26. And then we'll get to that table. And this table will be up on the slide today, so the people at home, you don't have to open a PDF file while you're looking at this. You can try to look at your screen and get your glasses on, come right up to your TV at home. Come right up to the TV because some, it's not perfect, okay? It's not great. All right, let's pray. Not pray. Let's read from Galatians 5, 16. The Apostle Paul writes this. So I say, let the Holy Spirit guide your lives. Then you won't be doing what your sinful nature craves. The sinful nature wants to do evil, which is just the opposite of what the Spirit wants.

[14:25] And the Spirit gives us desires that are the opposite of what the sinful nature desires. These two forces are constantly fighting each other. So you are not free to carry out your good intentions. But when you are directed by the Spirit, you are not under obligation to the law of Moses.

[14:46] When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear. Sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, should I keep going? This is really depressing. Envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Let me tell you again, as I have before, that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the kingdom of God.

[15:26] But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have nailed the passions and desires of their sinful nature to His cross and crucified them there. Since we are living by the Spirit, let us follow the Spirit's leading in every part of our lives. Let us not become conceited or provoke one another, or be jealous of one another. Let's pray.

[16:10] Father, thank you for this word, and I ask that you would add your blessing to it. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, let's go to that chart there. I've got that table, and I'll ask Nathan to put up the very first one, and I kind of organized it. There are six affirmations. These are six kind of main points that our denomination pretty much believes in, and some we're going to spend a little more time on than others. But you see in the first column is the affirmation, some of the scripture that it depends on, and some comments from other documents that we have. And this is a little heady, but you know what? Again, I trust this group to kind of get all this. This is important stuff. So you are learning now about the thinking and the doctrines and the theology of the church that you're sitting in right now. So I mean, every now and then, like every five years or so, is it okay to do this? Because it's like, who are we? Why are we here? I mean, this is the Admiral Stockdale moment right now. Who am I? Why am I here? Well, this is why. This is who you are, and this is why you're here, okay? He was a great guy, by the way, and he was made fun of for that, but he meant it in more of a rhetorical way. But anyways, so the first affirmation,

[17:24] and as this makes total sense, the first affirmation of our denomination is the centrality of the Word of God. We are people of the Book. We have to be. That was just where it was back in the 1800s. They're like, where is it written? The only thing we have is the Scriptures, remember? And I told you the story a few weeks ago about, you know, a Lutheran came up to a covenant and said, well, we have the Augsburg Confession, and we have, you know, the Heidelberg Disputation, and we have Luther's Small Catechism, we have this great book. Where's your book? And the covenant pastor took out his Bible and said, here's our book, you know. Our book is the Scripture. It's the source. It's everything. We don't need it. We don't need these other documents. Now, there's a document back there on the table called Covenant Affirmations. That's what I'm preaching on. So we kind of have it, but it's not a book. It's like a leaflet, okay? It's smaller.

[18:16] But that's the freedom, is that we're not defining it down to every last detail. This is the broad stroke so that people who walk into a church know what they're doing. By the way, it's because of that document that I'm here today. Because I went into a covenant church. I was just finishing Lutheran Seminary. I was going to go off to Florida. I was going to be a Lutheran pastor in Florida. All my friends were like, how did you pull that off? I was like, I have no idea. Some of them were being sent to like North Dakota, farmland, freezing. How did you get assigned to? They assigned you in a Lutheran church. How did you get assigned to Florida? I said, I don't know. I must be somebody's favorite. But before I went on a candidating trip to Florida, I got invited to a covenant church.

[19:01] And I found, I was like, what is this place? I've never even heard of covenant. Sounds like, sounds a little sketchy. I didn't know what that was. Covenant? What are they up to? So I found that document and I started reading it. And the church service was great. Really good. Nice. Not too terribly different from Lutheran, but just good. And I started reading that document. I was like, this is the church I've always wanted to be in. These are the real Lutherans. These are the real pietistic Lutherans. These are my people. And I didn't even know. I didn't even know until that moment, right when I had finished seminary. It's crazy. And as I told you a few weeks back, I called the, I sent an email to the president of the denomination, Glenn Paulberg, and the president of the seminary, Jay Phelan. That Sunday afternoon, I sent them each an email going, how do I become a covenant pastor?

[19:49] And, because I had already sold. It was that document. It was right there in the back. That's our pamphlet. And they both replied to me the same day. What is this? The president of the denomination answers personal emails from randos like me. You know? And that was all, the Lord was in it. The Lord was in it. And I met the conference superintendent, Paul Erickson. He bought me breakfast. And he said, we're going to put you in a church. You know? And I told you all this, but I'll tell it again for those who didn't hear it. I said, how can you possibly put me in a church? You don't even know me. Like the Lutherans, you have to go get all these psychological evaluations, the MMPI, the Minnesota Multiphysic Personality Inventory, to make sure that you're not insane. You know? I said, how do you know I'm not insane? I was expecting this long process. He's like, I could tell if you were insane. You're not insane. If you were insane, you'd be out of here right now. Okay. So they found me a church and the rest is history. And if I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have met Christa. I wouldn't have had my children. I wouldn't be here. So I was like, the Lord is good. So that document, which I'm kind of teasing that document a little,

[20:50] because that is kind of our confessional document, but it's short. It's the reason I'm here today. Okay? So praise God. But going back to it. The centrality of the Word of God. And so you can take it from basically the preamble of our church and even our confirmation curriculum. And it says this. We believe that the Holy Scriptures, and they're trying to be a little specific here, Old and New Testaments, just in case you think there's a different set. All right? This is just those two. So we're not Mormons. We don't have extra books. Right? We believe that the Holy Scriptures, Old and New Testaments, are the Word of God. Good. So far so good. But then, and the only perfect rule for faith, doctrine, and conduct. And those are important sort of phrases there. That this is how we know what to believe. This is how we kind of formulate all our thinking. It has to be based in Scripture. We have to keep asking that question. Where is it written? When new things come up in the world, and we have to kind of make decisions about it, we have to put it to the test of Scripture. And of conduct. Okay? So that our personal lives have to reflect what, our personal lives and our corporate life has to reflect what Scripture says. And the Scripture that backs this up is 2 Timothy 3.16.

[22:09] It's well known to us. All Scripture is inspired by God, and is useful to teach us what is true, and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong, and teaches us to do what is right. God uses it to prepare and equip His people to do every good work. And I'm sorry about how the staple was, but that's just how it was. The stapler, I don't know how to use the stapler. So it's on the right side. But here, let's go to the next one. And I don't want to say too much more about that, because it kind of speaks for itself. The next one is, the first one was the centrality of the Word of God. The second one is the necessity of the new birth. So you see how things are going in order here. The foundation of this is that we have one source of information about God and the world, and it's the Scripture. Not the world, but we have one source of information about God, and His work in the world, and that's this Holy Scriptures. And that invites a response of faith. And so we have this necessity of new birth. You can't drift into salvation just because you're baptized as a baby, like I was. I could have just, you know, I could have just drifted into it, but at a certain point in my life, I had to go,

[23:15] no, wait, do I really believe this? Now that's how confirmation functions in places like Lutheran and Methodist churches, is that yes, you're baptized as an infant, but since we don't really know what you're thinking then, and neither do you, unless you're like some amazing infant, when you're 12, 13, 14, you learn all the doctrines in the church, and you stand up in front of the church, as we had happen just a few months ago, a month and a half ago, and you say, yeah, I believe this. You know, that's your opportunity to say, yeah, I believe it. But, you know, in our traditions, more evangelical tradition, you would get, somebody would get baptized, and in their baptism, they would assent to the basic teachings of the Christian faith. But this is what happens when kids go to camp, you know, they have that moment at the campfire, and they say, I believe it! I finally believe it! I get it now. There's just, the spirit works, and there's a breakthrough. And so, we believe in the necessity of the new birth. We're pietists in that particular sense, right? And I just read one, a little bit from our confirmation, or from our affirmations. You can read it yourself later. There's only one copy back there. If you want more, you let me know.

[24:25] As an evangelical church, we believe that conversion results in eternal life. Conversion can be defined as the act by which a person turns with repentance and faith from sin to God. Conversion involves a conscious rejection of the life of sin, and involves a commitment of faith. It's not necessarily a decision, but it's this, this overwhelming desire and need to turn away from one thing and turn towards the other end of the earth. And so, we believe that something else really is in control. Whether you want to call that a decision, or something that happens to you, nonetheless, there's a change that happens, right? A conscious rejection of the life of sin involves a commitment of faith. Eternal life is not given through assent to creeds alone, oh, I kind of believe that, or I think that's intellectually true, but through a personal commitment to Jesus Christ. So, that's an important thing to know about our church, is that we talk about personal conversion, and personal faith, and personal conviction, but we call that the necessity of new birth. And that's who we've been from the very beginning. Okay. So, the third is a commitment to the whole mission of the church. Believe it or not, we're going to get through this by 1150.

[25:36] I guarantee it. We'll see. A commitment to the whole mission of the church. And, this is the idea, this is a bit nebulous. Actually, I wish they were a little more specific with what they call this, but this is the idea that having a conversion, coming to faith, because of the power of the Holy, of the Scriptures, it changes you so that you reach out into the world. You don't just keep this to yourself. And so, it means that you make disciples of all nations, absolutely, but you care about the world. And so, the very early Pietists, they were like, it's not enough that we just believe this. We have to help people. So, they opened orphanages, they opened hospitals, they opened schools. You get what I'm saying here? They're like, we have to help those in need. We can't just sit on this good news, right? So, there's this commitment to the whole mission of the church. The whole mission of the church is not just to spread the gospel. That's one of the missions of the church, but it's to love the world as God loves it, and to spread the love of God into the world by helping those in need. And so, our denomination does a lot of development work. A couple of months ago, we took up a donation for Covenant World Relief. They do development work in the world.

[26:49] They help people who are poor. So, one of the most important people that, in our denomination, in fact, if he hadn't come along, I don't think you would be here today. I wouldn't be here today, because the denomination might not have survived. His name was David Nyvall. You don't have to necessarily remember his name, but it's a good name to remember. David Nyvall. Now, the reason he became a Christian, the reason he became sort of a pastor in the Covenant Church in Sweden, and then eventually he moved to America, is that his adoptive mother, and I don't know her name, but she's called Mud Eval. Mud is a Swedish word for mother. And she lived in this area called Val in Sweden. So, she was the mother in Val. And she and another woman saw how many, basically, illegitimate or parentless children there were. Often illegitimate children were given up for adoption back then. It's very sad. All these children with no home, sort of not being taken care of. And she and this other woman, said, we've got to do something about this. This is the, you know, the inner part saying, we've got to care for the least. So, they put all their money together. They collected money from whoever they can get. They created an orphanage. And they brought David into this.

[28:05] And that's where he gets his name, Nyvall from Val. And he grew up to become a pastor in Sweden. He moved to America. He became the president of the college and seminary. He became the president of the denomination. He was an excellent theologian. But maybe not our top theologian. But he was a great pastor and administrator. And just an all-around good guy. Like, you would love this guy if you met him. And he piloted the church through some really tumultuous time. And so, one of our historians says, if he hadn't come along, the church might have folded. Just because the church was almost bankrupt at one point. You know? And there was, even though there was friendship, there was dissension in the church. And there was an encroachment by fundamentalism into the church. And David Nyvall was able to kind of help the denomination just get through all that in times when he was in leadership. And so, it's really interesting that this desire to care for the whole mission of the church, which is central, and take care of orphans, led to the survival of the actual church. This is kind of neat. In the person of this man named David Nyvall. So, that's just a little vignette for you. That you get the idea that this actually mattered.

[29:23] And so, to this day, if you go to Chicago, which is where the church is headquartered, there's a hospital. Right? There is a college. There's a seminary. There are retirement homes all throughout America that are owned by our denomination. And then, if you go into the rest of the world, there are schools, hospitals, development agencies, all sorts of things helping people who are poor. And so, when we send missionaries to other lands, they don't just go with the gospel. They go with a hand, you know, of help and fellowship. Okay? So, that's... I'm excited. Can you tell I'm excited? That's one of the ones I'm most excited about. But I'm very excited about that one. Okay. So, then, the next is the church as a fellowship of believers. Get your glasses on if you're at home and try to read that. I don't know. It's really long.

[30:15] But this is the idea is that... I'll read from the affirmations. In some cases, this is such a well-written document, I'm just going to read it because it does a much better job than I could do. But here's what it says from the affirmations. The church is a communion or fellowship of believers. You have to be a believer to be a member of the church. You cannot become a member of the church unless you actually believe. And it sounds exclusive, but it kind of makes sense. Okay. So, the church is a commun... Somebody once came and wanted to be a member of a different church that I was at, but not really believe it. And that was a head scratcher. Okay.

[30:55] Characterized by mutual participation in and sharing of the new life in Christ, which we talked about, Paul calls the Christian community the body of Christ, a community composed of many members, each different and mutually interdependent. Not independent, but interdependent. So, if you look at 1 Corinthians, you get this sort of metaphor of the church is like a body, and every person in the church is like one part of the body, and one can't say to the other, I don't need you, but they all work together to make the body work. So, it is when we are in community with one another, when all of God's people are interacting with one another in worship and service, there's that service, you see it all kind of links together, that God's will is most clearly revealed and discerned. The New Testament says, The New Testament also teaches that within Christian community, there is to be neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, but all are one in Christ Jesus. Now, this is not an erasing of ethnic identity. That's not what this is. This is about privileges in the church. No privilege is given to one body more than the other. Male, female, Jew, Greek, slave, free, etc. They're all one in Christ Jesus. These three areas, race, class, and gender,

[32:09] are to be of no advantage or disadvantage. Did I? Does it go on? Within the body of Christ. This is a multi-ethnic, classless, gender equal vision. We recognize our need for ethnic diversity, for fellowship and mutual ministry across artificially constructed socioeconomic boundaries, and for the gifts and leadership of women and men. It is the desire of the Covenant Church to pursue this biblical vision. And indeed, ethnically speaking, our denomination is a lot further along than many denominations. You just have to look at it to see that this is the case. This has happened. And our denomination has been ordaining women into ministry for decades. Not the first, but one of the earlier of the larger denominations to ordain women into the ministry. Now here, the freedom, the freedom and the community, are again at play because a woman may go to our seminary and get a degree, a Master's of Divinity, but not every single Covenant Church will hire her to be their pastor because they have the freedom, each church has the freedom to hire their own pastor. And in all honesty, there are some Covenant individual congregations that don't believe in, personally amongst themselves, don't believe in women in ministry, so they just simply won't hire one of those women

[33:34] to be their senior pastor, sometimes to be a pastor at all. But that number keeps shrinking, that subset keeps shrinking. But it's like this freedom. They have the freedom to believe that because scripturally they can kind of back it up, and they're not punished for it. But at the same time, the denomination keeps elevating and saying, well, we believe the women have the same gifting as men in this area. So there's that freedom and community in interplay. All the time, all the time, there's tension. Just because we have freedom and fellowship doesn't mean everything's perfect. Can you imagine that?

[34:14] There's conflict still? Of course there's conflict. But this gives us the framework for working through conflict, you see? So conflict isn't fatal. That's the distinction. There are some denominations for which conflict is fatal. We don't know how to handle this, so we're just going to implode, or we're going to split into different groups. And we're trying to resist that.

[34:36] So there we have... And then fifth is the conscious dependence on the Holy Spirit. This is where a lot of our readings came from today. And this is the idea that, you know, part of the believer's life is that the Holy Spirit indwells you, guides you, leads you. Even before that, we believe the Holy Spirit brings you to faith in some way or another by encouraging other people to share the gospel with you, by preparing your own heart to receive it. Like, the Spirit is really powerful in doing all these things. After you're a believer, the Spirit gives you gifts. The Spirit gives you fruit. The Spirit allows you to do great things in this world. The Spirit allows you to move the ministry of the church forward. And so basically they're just saying, we don't want to be short on the Holy Spirit. Because a lot of Protestant denominations are short when they talk about the Holy Spirit. And I think it's partly a reaction to the Pentecostal movement, because they think they talk about it too much. And so since they talk about it too much, we have to talk about it less. I think that's a mistake.

[35:45] And in fact, there are a few covenant churches, this is the freedom, that really are probably Pentecostal, or at least charismatic in their own understanding. Like, you can go to those churches, you might hear some speaking in tongues. You might hear a lot of talk about the Holy Spirit. We try to do a good job here at our little church here of talking about the Holy Spirit a fair amount. If we talked about it every week, yes, it would be out of balance. If we never talked about it at all, it would be really out of balance. But the Spirit is there, and so I think there's this conscious move here not to get dragged into that too much or too little about it, but to say, the Holy Spirit was sent by Jesus as our companion, friend, guide, paraclete. He's in the world. He's moving. We have to listen. We have to be attentive to the Spirit. And if the Spirit says something, go. And if the Spirit reveals something to us, tested by the Scriptures, absolutely tested in community, but, you know, the Spirit may speak to us, okay?

[36:47] So, I'm not going to read all of this, but I want to read just the first half of this one paragraph. The covenant church believes that the Spirit of God is active and bold. It blows where it chooses. If you want a definition of freedom, it's the Spirit. The Spirit does what it wants. It just does what it wants. It blows where it chooses. John 3, 8, The Spirit is the prevenient, in other words, before even you sin, the prevenient actor in the drama of salvation, the creator of hunger for Christ's life, and the fulfiller of that hunger. The Spirit is our companion all through our journey of faith. We are often surprised at the unfolding of God's purpose outside the church. Oh, the Spirit could be at work outside the church. Yeah, absolutely, right? We're surprised at the unfolding of God's purpose, suggesting that our ways and thoughts are not always the ways and thoughts of God. And this is what, I think this is one of the best paragraphs in the whole document. For this reason, covenanters, people who are part of this denomination, desire to cultivate a healthy humility before God, open to the leading of the Holy Spirit. Isn't that something? I mean, what churches talk about humility? I think this is great. The Holy Spirit brings us to this place of humility

[38:02] because it might show us something that we didn't know already. I mean, really, this is so great, you know? We have not figured it all out. The Spirit may show us something, so let's bring some humility. When God is about to do a new thing, we wish to perceive God at work rather than being found dull to the divine purpose. We wish to see with the eyes of the Spirit and not merely with our own. I'll just keep reading, it's so good. The covenant church believes with Paul that the Holy Spirit endows believers with spiritual gifts, the purpose of which is to serve the Christian community that is the very body of Christ. Okay, I lied, it's 1151, but this is the last one. So the final one is the reality of freedom in Christ. I talked about this a lot.

[38:44] And so there is freedom. If you read Galatians, it's like the epistle of freedom. As a Christian, you have freedom. The Spirit sets you free, Jesus sets you free, the truth sets you free, all sorts of freedom in the Christian community. And especially in the covenant church, you have freedom to believe what you want about communion, baptism, women in ministry, lots of things. You have a lot of freedom, okay, within the bounds of, say, the Nicene Creed perhaps, right?

[39:13] But here's that tension, right? Friendship, freedom. Friendship holds us together. Freedom allows us to move out in new ways and be open to the Spirit, but it's always checked by the community. The community says, where is it written? Yeah, you can believe that, but you have to tell us why you think it's true.

[39:34] And so the way this looks in practice, and I've alluded to this, is that each covenant church is independent. So, for example, in the Episcopal church, the bishop could show up one day and fire your pastor. It could happen. The bishop could just go, your pastor's gone, we're going to install somebody else next week, and we get to choose who it is. So that's what we call high church, high church ecclesiology, basically, or high church polity.

[40:07] High meaning that you've got a bunch of bishops at the top directing all these pieces on a chessboard. We're a low church polity, which means each individual congregation can hire a pastor. So you could hire, if I quit, I'm not going to quit, but if I quit, you could hire a pastor who's not a member of a covenant church. Now they would be asked to, they'd be asked to, eventually to comply with some things. And they'd be asked to go to the covenant seminary, which I did for the equivalent of a year, learn what it means to actually be a covenant pastor. So they would have to sign that document about baptism that I talked about. So you see the difference? There's some freedom. Now, this church could also start believing crazy things. And then eventually, if you believe too many crazy things, the denomination would go, too much crazy.

[40:53] You know, go do your crazy thing by yourself. You know, you can't do it here. And that's fine. So, you know, each church owns its own property. Not the case in the Episcopal Church, not the case in the Presbyterian Church necessarily. So you see where there's a lot of freedom here. But, and this used to happen, each individual church could ordain, train and ordain their own pastor. And so, you know, there's a lot of freedom here. But, and this used to happen, they said, well, wait a second. Let's, this is where friendship is going to take over from freedom. They said, let's have one seminary. Let's have one annual meeting that meets every year. And it's at that meeting that we will ordain pastors because we can't have some churches with ordaining people who really aren't suitable to be pastors. So there's a, there's an accountability in that friendship. And so there's certain standards for pastors to live up to. And so there's a document that has the ethical guidelines and the theological guidelines for coming to the seminary. And so there's a document that has the ethical guidelines and the covenant pastors, and it's binding on covenant pastors. So you see this interplay between freedom and friendship, and that happens between churches, individual congregations, and the mother church,

[42:01] I guess you could say, the denomination. It happens between churches, but I think it happens between believers. So in this room, we could have a multitude of slightly different views, but think of a Venn diagram with all the circles, and we hope that there's that dark area in the middle where they all overlap, and it's all around the center of faith. It's around the centrality of the Word of God, new life in Christ, right? Commitment to the mission of the world, conscious dependence on the Holy Spirit, being in the body of Christ. You see how that's kind of all, you guys could all be shifted from each other a little bit, but the idea is at the center. And maybe these circles in the Venn diagram being in slightly different places, again, maybe that's a net plus, because we bring different gifts, we bring different emphases to our work together. We're not all cookie cutter from each other, even in this room. So I'm going to stop there because it's 1155. Hey, that's five minutes over. It's good. Isn't this good stuff? Isn't this interesting? So what I really want you to do is just to kind of like be, I mean, I can't make you, but I want you to be happy that you're in this denomination. I really do, because I joined it. I left all sorts of security and established life to join

[43:17] this denomination. I had to start over on some respect. I didn't know how to do it. I had to know anybody. I had to go to their school. I had to pay them money to go to their school. It was a big disruption in my life, but I was like, this is the place. So I want, if you had even 10% of my feeling about it, I'd be really happy. This is a great denomination. But Oregon, if you're listening to all that going, I don't think, I didn't know this is what I signed up for. Well, the door's right there. I don't mean it like that, like I don't want it to hit you on the way out, but I want you to know where you are so that if you don't like it, find something that really is good for you. I really want that. But I just want you to be happy that you're in a covenant church right now, because I think this is, it's not perfect. There is conflict. We can talk about that some other time, but it has, there's a mechanism for dealing with conflict, and there's this deep love for the Holy Spirit, and we think the Spirit's going to keep guiding us as a denomination. So let's pray. Father, thank you for this imperfect vessel that you've given us in the covenant church.

[44:20] Lord, I think of that hymn, God Bless America, where it says, help us mend its every flaw. So, Lord, if we have flaws in our denomination, help us to mend it, help us to be agents of change in it. But also, Lord, thank you for this freedom and fellowship that we have, being guided and depending on your Holy Spirit. Amen.