I recently told someone that my Bible professor in college
saved my faith. He took my Sunday School faith and enlarged it, making it wider
and deeper. Wide enough and deep enough to accept the harder questions of the
adult world that continually challenges our faith and make us doubt and wonder.
I still remember Old Testament I, 1st semester, Monday, Wednesday,
and Friday at 8am. It was a right of passage for all religion majors at Lambuth
University. I learned many new things there, one of which is what truly
constitutes a covenant. A covenant is an agreement made between two or more
parties, but Dr. Davenport added that in a true covenant the terms are set
solely by God…non-negotiable. I see his point in reading Genesis 17 and seeing
phrases like “I will make” and “you must keep my covenant.” For a time
after learning this I walked about asking, “Is this a covenant?” I felt kind of
like the little duck in the children’s story asking, “Are you my mother?” I was
constantly asking because we label many, many things in the church covenants,
we love this term, sincerely I think because of the sacredness that it lends to
our relationships.
This key point stuck with me though, and as I have been
talking to churches about church-to-church partnerships that come with a…you
guessed it, covenant, I have again started to think about what Dr. Davenport
taught me in my 8 am class, my first semester, freshman year of college. As I
look at covenant partnerships between churches, especially between the global
south and global north there is something about this revelation that struck
me…and hard. When the church from the global north (AKA the western church, AKA
the wealthy people) set terms in a covenant what we are really doing is taking
the place of God. It is His job, not ours to set the terms of any covenant in
the church. So if it is not our place to set the terms, which also conversely
means it is not the global south’s job either, who does it, how can we enter
into sacred agreements?
First, if God is setting the terms of the covenant then both
the Global North and the Global South are on the receiving end. Which puts us
not on opposite ends of an agreement, but on the same side, helping each other
fulfill our calling to be the body of Christ. This places all of us where we
belong, as sinners, straining to fulfill a new covenant with God, and both of
us failing to do so outside of the grace and mercy that God has for all of us.
This also means that we need to be looking to God for the
terms of any covenant we set in the church. We should start looking at places
like 1 Corinthians where God reminds us that we are all part of the body of
Christ, that we all receive the same gifts from the same spirit, and that all
parts of the body are needed and important. We should start looking at places
like Luke 4 where we learn that our purpose here is not to provide money and
receive money, not to be the patron or the patronized, but to be forgiven, to
be healed, to be set free as Jesus comes among us and to bear witness to others
being forgiven, healed, and set free as Jesus comes among them. We should stop
throwing the global south a bone by saying that they can “pray for us” and
start seeing what they have to teach us. I was fortunate today to be part of several
conversations that did talk about that exact thing as I visited with pastors in
the Alabama-West Florida Conference of the UMC and professors at Huntingdon
College in Montgomery, AL.
As I looked deeper at the meaning of covenant, something I
have not done in years, I realized it places all of us, regardless of our
status, education, wealth, or any other markers of supposed privilege, exactly
where we need to be, together, in the same posture of worshiping God, receiving
forgiveness from God, and being blessed to be doing Kingdom work in the world.