September 2009

Covenantal—Not Creedal

BY THOM BELOTE, MINISTER, SHAWNEE MISSION UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH, OVERLAND PARK, KANSAS

I once attended a protest on the Plaza, a busy pedestrian mall in Kansas City. The governor of Missouri had recently signed legislation that called for abstinence-only sex education in all Missouri schools. The legislation also restricted outside instructors in health classes to those with no connection in any way whatsoever to any health care system that offers abortion services. Meaning, of course, that someone who is trained and has expertise in teen health counseling but who works for Planned Parenthood would be barred from speaking to a health class at a public high school.

So, there I was holding signs and talking with passersby and advocating for an approach to health education for young people that says that information and education, rather than ignorance, is good health policy.

But that is not really the point. You see, at the protest there were these two young women hanging out. They were amateurish reporters for a fundamentalist Christian magazine. Soon, word got out that a minister was at the protest—that minister happened to be me—and the next thing you know these two were making a bee-line to me…to interview this minister who supports sex ed. “How,” they wondered, “is that possible?”

I introduced myself as a Unitarian Universalist minister. They asked me how to spell that, and then they asked me to explain what UUs believe.

I explained that we are a covenantal faith, not a creedal faith. We share a covenant of how we try to be together, not a creed of what we all must believe together.
Then the questions really began: “Well, does your church believe in the Bible?”

My response: That is a creedal question. We are a covenantal church. We share a covenant of how we try to be together, not what we are expected to believe together.

“Does your church believe in God?” they asked. That is a creedal question. We are a covenantal church. We share a covenant of how we try to be together, not what we are expected to believe together.

This went on for a while. It took them a while to get this. They were being challenged to think in a new way.

I think that sometimes in our churches we stress the fact that we are not a creedal church a lot more than we stress that we are a covenantal church. We emphasize the creeds we are not asked to recite more than the covenants we are asked to share. We over-emphasize the fact that we are not necessarily required to believe in God or believe a certain doctrine about the Bible or the afterlife. And we under-emphasize the covenantal dimensions of our shared faith, preferring not to articulate the covenants of behavior we do share.

I’m really passionate about the idea of covenant. I believe it strikes at the core of our identities as Unitarian Universalists: that covenant can shape our lives and our living— can be a central motivating force in our lives. But let’s face it: covenant isn’t a sexy idea. Covenant is one of those religious lingo words—like creed, or catechism, or charisma, or co-substantial—that comes across as jargon-y and overly intellectual.

It puts me in mind of Indiana Jones movies, where there is always a scene where Indy is a stuffy, nerdy archeologist, giving lectures to bored students who do not share his passion for sixth century Sumerian gravesites. But the other half of the time he is this roughand- tumble adventurer, traveling the globe and risking death.

Conventional church often has this double-life motif. In many conventional churches you show up on Sunday to hear a two-thousand word sermon about a two-thousand year old story, and you learn what this word meant in Greek or that word meant in Aramaic or Hebrew. And then you go off—to lunch, to your real life, and your real life is just about as far removed from the idea of the Hebrews carrying an ark through the desert as can be.

But what is interesting about Indiana Jones, and about Unitarian Universalism, is that we are not living a double life. Indiana Jones is an archeologist in the classroom and an archeologist when he is racing to excavate ancient cities and save the world. Passion and purpose and calling infuse his life at every moment. His is not a double life–he is living his passion. He is living his calling. The same dynamic can be true of Unitarian Universalists. While the concept of covenant can sound abstract and irrelevant, living it can be passionate.

So, what does it mean to say that we are a covenantal faith anyway? A covenant is a set of enduring, but evolving, deeply held promises made between people and with the source of life itself. And while the covenant is taken superseriously, the promises are often so intense that it is impossible to live up to them. So, we will always need to admit a falling short—and, when we inevitably do fall short—our proper response is to re-covenant, to recommit to those promises. What are the covenants we share together?

In our churches, it is obvious that one of the promises we make is to be together in covenant in ways that respect each other’s worth and dignity, ways that are safe. Being non-creedal, we can’t expect to all believe the same things, but in covenant we can respect each other even (and especially) when we don’t agree. “We need not think alike to love alike” is a covenantal statement.

Our Unitarian Universalist covenant is one of inclusion—we are all equally chosen people—so part of our covenant helps to make all feel welcome regardless of age, gender, sexual orientation, or physical ability.

And our covenant, I would submit, is not insular, is not the property of those of us inside these walls. It reaches outward, into the community. When those young women at the protest asked me, “Do you believe the way I believe?” they were really asking if it was possible for us to be in community together. To be in their community required holding the same beliefs. And I replied, “You have asked me a creedal question and posed a creedal test. Covenant is larger than creed.”

Our covenants in this church—made with one another and with the spirit and source of life itself—are powerful. The promises we make have the power to change lives; the promises call upon us to live up to our best selves, to summon forth our true, authentic, vulnerable, and passionate selves.