January 13, 2023
Covenant Considerations in a New Year
As we begin a new calendar year, I would like to look back on the past year, specifically in terms of our denomination, our Covenant Church. In two weeks, I will be in Jacksonville, Florida for our Ministerial Midwinter Conference. One of the topics of discussion among my ministerial colleagues will be the decision announced by the Covenant’s Executive Board in October to involuntarily remove two churches from our denomination. Those churches are Awaken Church in St. Paul, Minnesota and Quest Church in our hometown, Seattle. This will come before our Annual Meeting in Garden Grove, California in late June.
Since that announcement, an open letter has been circulated as a petition offering rationale for voting “No” on this proposal, by inviting people instead to consider our tradition of “agreeing to disagree.” Many, if not most, of you may be aware of this letter, as some of you added your name in affirmation. As you can imagine, issues of human sexuality which are behind this back and forth, can be divisive. We need only to look at sister denominations which have splintered over this issue. One can only wonder if we are next. Can our center possibly hold?
In anticipation of our upcoming Midwinter, our Conference Superintendent, Greg Yee, has arranged for a meeting of our conference ministerium to discuss this situation. In attendance will be our newly elected president Tammy Swanson-Draheim. I am writing this the day before that meeting. I am anxious to hear what my colleagues think and feel about this difficult situation.
I thought it would be helpful for you to know what I am thinking as I approach this meeting. I believe a resolution of this issue must happen. There are obviously people on both sides of this question who believe that they know what is best for our denomination, and feel strongly about their beliefs. This will be a hard, but necessary, process for our denomination.
However, I do not believe it is best for our denomination to have this conversation this year. President Tammy Swanson-Draheim has only been in office since September 1. We affirmed at last year’s annual meeting that we believed God has called her to lead us in this season. I can imagine that having such a decision made in the first two months of her presidency is not what she planned on, or hoped for. It would seem that having this issue to manage before she has her administration and agenda in place, handicaps her ability to lead our denomination through the many challenging issues we face, let alone this one. My thought is that we table this decision for a year, allowing President Swanson-Draheim to settle in and to place this issue within the matrix of other issues that she must lead us through. A thoughtful and systematic approach to our denomination’s life would hopefully make us a stronger, more unified Covenant Church. I look forward to hearing her response to my thoughts.
Twenty-four hours later…
I am now reflecting on the time spent with my ministry colleagues and President Swanson-Draheim. It was a closed meeting so I cannot disclose what was discussed, only to say that conversations were honest and candid, including comments that some people did not feel entirely comfortable being candid. A variety of opinions were expressed and the tone was always cordial and never confrontational.
I was able to speak to our new president and discovered that any agenda item, if tabled, must still be dealt with in that year’s meeting. Postponing this vote is not an option. I also was given permission to provide an outline of her presentation. She began by identifying 5 documents (the first three are found here that are helpful for this conversation: 1) Our Position Paper written in 1994 and revised in 2004; 2) Guidelines for Pastors and Congregations; 3) “Human Sexuality” a paper written by the faculty of North Park Seminary; 4) Freedom and Responsibility; and 5) Our Constitution and By-Laws, especially on removal of churches and pastors.
President Swanson-Draheim then identified four areas of our life as a denomination that intersect with questions of human sexuality: our Position (as in the Position Paper above), our Posture(in my words: how we embody our values), our Policies (developed in 2010 and revised in 2015), and our Process (which is underway right now for these two churches). Her hope is to lead with our Posture: to approach this issue in terms of human relationships within our denomination and its churches, as the other three are less personal, more institutional, and appear to be less helpful in this matter than we hope they would be, to the life of our denomination.
As I write this, I remain the eternal optimist that God made me to be—nothing is beyond God’s redemption because Christ is Lord of everything, even this situation. I wish I could say that redemption will not cost us the loss of churches, members, and clergy, but no one can say that with certainty.
When I expressed my hope that the center would hold for the Covenant, our President responded, “No, we want the center to grow.” We called this the “radical middle” while at Fuller Seminary, with extremes on either side. And there were only a few seminaries that occupied that contested middle ground. One was North Park Seminary. Might the majority of our denomination, its people, and their churches follow the example of our seminary to grow that middle.
Please pray for our church, our conference, and our denomination in the year ahead.
With audacious hope,
~ Pastor Todd