"Common Roots", part VI : Freedom

This newly-born church community that we call “The Commons”, here in Rochester, NH is blessed to be the adopted child of a global family of faith known as the Evangelical Covenant Church. For the reason that, for most of our launch team partners this journey of church planting has constituted a running introduction to the mere existence of the ECC - never mind vision, values and so on - my hope is to offer this short series of articles as a primer on the essential history and distinctives of the Covenant as our denominational and spiritual “home”. These articles will be framed around the six central “Covenant Affirmations” of the ECC, with a focus upon the historical forces that led to their articulation. May God bless and establish this new work, that as we grow in our awareness of where and how the Spirit of God has moved in and through our past, we might also grow in clarity and conviction regarding our future!

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Part VI: “We affirm the reality of freedom in Christ.” 

“The Apostle Paul wrote, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free” (Galatians 5:1). This freedom is a gift of God in Christ, and it manifests itself in a right relationship with God and others… We in the Covenant Church seek to focus on what unites us as followers of Christ, rather than on what divides us.” 

As a reformation movement birthed out of historic dissent, having faced strong legal and institutional forces of resistance at the hands of state Lutheranism - of pietistic heritage and birthed upon the soil of the newly-launched “American experiment” in democratic freedom -  it ought not surprise that the Evangelical Covenant Church has from the very beginning held freedom of reasonable dissent as a central value. While it is never helpful to be simply defined by what we are not, the struggles of our past indelibly shape the values of our present.

I have deeply appreciated the historic ability of the ECC to keep the “main thing” the main thing; pressing back against the natural tendency of secondary and tertiary issues to become ultimate and defining issues. Rather than crafting a rigidly and microscopically defined “bounded set” paradigm to govern corporate life and collegiality, “Covenant Freedom” allows us to fix our working convictions upon our shared center in Christ, guided by common affirmations, and then set one another free to navigate the intricacies, nuances and inevitable conflicts of our shared journey in and towards Christ in a spirit of grace and apart from fear.

Of course, the challenge of genuine freedom is that definition will always remain, in some respects, elusive. Elusive because our freedom is always understood contextually and relationally; the boundaries of freedom defined in and by each conflict or tension which emerges along the way. In a very basic sense, the trouble is that we cannot escape the sheer subjectivity of conviction, shared or otherwise. As a people “of the Book”, we want to hold the centrality of Scripture as a key border-marker of our freedom, and rightly so. Any journey towards “freedom” which involves the jettisoning or downplaying of scriptural authority over our corporate life must be rejected out-of-hand. But the objective authority of scripture is an authority delivered to us through the subjective lens of interpretation. And what are we to do when well-meaning interpreters arrive at different convictions in such a manner and to such a degree that the bonds of unity suffer tension to the point of breaking? It is here that we are faced with the reality that we cannot escape the ongoing, prayerful - and at times agonizing - task of defining what we mean by “Covenant Freedom” in light of these new tensions and challenges. May the Lord have mercy upon us, burdened as we are with freedom!