From The Shooting Star, June 15, 2008. Copyright 2008, Ellen Rowse Spero. All rights reserved.
The Proposed Covenant And How We Got Here
You may remember back in March that we had an all-congregational retreat on drafting a congregational covenant. At that retreat, a group of people volunteered to work with me to draft a proposed covenant based on all our congregational conversations. This is the proposed congregational covenant drafted by Emma Buckley, Carla Corey, John Fisher, Don Hayden, Sarah Manning, Carlene Merrill, Mickey O’Connor, Tim O’Hara, John Schneider, Sally Seekings, Rev. Ellen Spero, Larry Willette, and Wendla Windt:
We, the members of First Parish of Chelmsford, covenant together to sustain and strengthen our beloved community by:
How We Got to this Covenant
Covenant is at the heart of Unitarian Universalism. Our Principles and Purposes are the covenant that binds all of our individual Unitarian Universalist congregations together. In our tradition, we do not gather around a creed, or a set of stated right beliefs that one must adhere to in order to be accepted into membership of the congregation or church. Rather, we gather around covenant or the promises we make, after discussion, about how we wish to walk together in religious and spiritual community. Individuals make the choice to freely enter into covenant with one another and the congregation as a whole, to make and receive the commitments offered therein.
While our congregation has had several covenants over our 350+ years, we have not had an explicit covenant for a long time. After a couple of years of learning about covenant through my sermons, education offered to the congregation’s leadership, and two adult religious education courses led by me, the congregation began to engage seriously in discussions about our commitments to each other, to First Parish, and to our larger world.
Our first all-congregational discussion was held during the first weekend of April 2006 at a retreat led by the Rev. Dr. Larry Peers, a consultant on congregational life from the Alban Institute. At this retreat, we reviewed the history of our congregation, we talked about the ideas, values, and issues that meant the most to us as individuals and as a congregation. At the end of the retreat, we came up with a list of agreed commitments:
We are a congregation that is committed to:
- Care of the earth
- Willingness to serve within the church
- Honoring, caring, empowering, and mentoring every person comes through our doors
- Nurturing our youth and young adults
- The belief that our local and global community matter, we want to make a positive difference in the larger world
- Carrying and communicating our faith message into the world
- Generous stewardship, including financial responsibility
- Actively expressing our commitment to social justice.
These commitments were read during the Welcome and Announcements of our worship services for 2006-2007 and have been printed on our orders of service since 2006.
In March 2008, Larry Peers returned and we reconvened for another all congregational retreat on creating a covenant. During that retreat, we reviewed our commitments in small groups and completed a series of small group activities about covenant. We combined lists from all the groups to complete the phrase: "At First Parish Chelmsford, we promise to…" All these lists were collected and typed up by John Fisher. I asked for volunteers to help draft a covenant, based upon our commitments and these lists.
On May 10th, the group of us met (listed above) to draft a covenant. First, we read through covenants written by other UU congregations and individuals over the long history of our tradition. We listened for what we liked and did not like. We brainstormed themes and verbs that we heard again and again. We made a couple of decisions: 1) we liked short and simple; 2) we liked ones that were poetic and spiritual in nature, that tried to capture the spirit of the congregation and that would work well in worship, rather than a long laundry list of things we feel we have to do (this felt more like a creed); 3) we didn’t see any reason to repeat our UU Principles and Purposes but agreed they should be mentioned; 4) we want the children and youth to be able to understand it; and 5) that membership matters and that being and becoming a member is intentionally being in covenant with the congregation, so that the covenant should read "We, the members…".
We then reviewed the commitments and the lists from the all-congregational retreats and again picked out repeated ideas and themes. These themes fell into several categories: 1) living out our UU principles and speaking about our commitment to social justice in the world; 2) listening, caring, and walking with one another in times of joys and sorrows; 3) care for the earth; 4) support one another in our spiritual journeys; 5) being good stewards of the church and the larger community; and 5) to listen, share, nurture, accept, support one another across generations in a spiritual community. We decided to work from a draft covenant that John Schneider had written based on our commitments from 2006. We expanded it and worked in the themes and ideas from the 2008 retreat. We then agreed to offer feedback to the draft we created via email and to meet again for final go-over and discussion of next steps on May 31st. John Fisher once again tracked and organized all the feedback and redrafting over email. We brought it all together in the version presented above. Below is a kind of line-by-line annotation of how we came to it:
We, the members of First Parish of Chelmsford, covenant together to sustain and strengthen our beloved community by:
Honoring and celebrating the Spirit of Life (a recognition that worship is the central defining act we do as a community, and that we are here for something larger than ourselves, even if we have different names understandings of it. Spirit of Life is a way to describe the sacred in a way that is well-known and well-used across UUism, and is in the song we sing every Sunday, that our children and youth sing in the chapel services.)
Nurturing all souls in our search for truth and the sacred (all souls means everyone and from every generation, recognizing our differences and our different individuals paths)
Caring and being present to one another in our joys and sorrows (this is the nurture and care for piece)
Bearing witness through service to justice and peace (living out UU principles, bringing our UU voice into the world)
And being good stewards of our congregation, our heritage, our Unitarian Universalist Principles, and our earth. (making the commitments of time, talent, and/or treasure to sustain and strengthen all of the above!)
Going forward:
We brought the proposed covenant to the Standing Committee and they agreed that we will ask for a vote of affirmation by the congregation at the State of the Society meeting next September 2008. Before this September meeting, we are publishing this covenant and this article in the last June newsletter to help the congregation understand how we came to this covenant and to give you an opportunity to read it and consider it over the summer. We will publish it again in the August newsletter. We will hold a worship service on the Sunday before the State of the Society meeting to present it again, this time in the context of worship. Our hope is that this covenant will be seen as an attempt to give poetic language to the shared spirit and life our religious community and who we are and who we hope to become, as best we are able to express it now, based on all the input and ideas we have discussed over the last couple of years. As Rebecca Parker wrote, the words are the icing on the cake. The true covenant is the one we live, the one we practice. Part of the covenantal process is to keep having the conversation. This covenant is not meant to stand for all time. It takes the central practice of our tradition—covenant or promise making—and puts it into our own words. Our hope is that we revisit our covenant every five years or so, to ensure that it is indeed part of an on-going conversation and expression of who we are in the future.
~Rev. Ellen