Covenant

Life involves relationships. Persons enter fully into their humanity only in relationship with others. A truly isolated person cannot survive.

Covenant serves as the model of relationship in the Bible. The driving principle of community in Scripture is always covenant-making and covenant-keeping.

A great biblical teacher of the early part of the 20th century put it this way:

"True community does not come into being because people have feelings for each other (though that is required too), but rather on two accounts: all of them have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to a single living center, and they have to stand in a living reciprocal relationship to one another." (Buber, I and Thou, p.94)

This “living center” reference is of course to God. What does it mean to live in a "reciprocal relationship" with other people? What does it mean to be in relationship with God? And how does one really experience what that means?

The only way to know what living in a "true community" means, (we are using the term "covenant community"), is to actually live it.

The Ten Commandments point the way so that a group of people may enter into that higher quality of life. They provide the first principles of covenant-keeping. They create a social architecture, a way of being together, that results in a community of a certain excellence.

The Ten Commandments inform personal and communal values that give rise to norms and behaviors that result in blessing. Think of them as creating an environment that allows God’s blessing to flow freely in the midst of the people. They transform an anonymous crowd into something of a loving family.