Andrew Baldwin is pastor at Petone Baptist Church and in 2025 completed a MAppTheo from Carey Baptist College.
This article is the second in a series entitled Worship in community, exploring the interaction between the worship of the church community and the relationships between the people in that community. In this article we explore the historic Baptist practice of forming church covenants.
Covenanting may seem a strange place to begin a conversation about community worship but, by explicitly bringing together the horizontal and vertical aspects of the church’s relationships, the ancient Baptist practice of covenanting holds significant potential for incorporating interpersonal relationships into the church’s worship.
A brief history of covenanting
Covenants were an important part of both the early Baptist’s practice of church life and their theological reflection on the nature of the church. These early Baptists took very seriously Jesus’ promise that when two or three were gathered he was present in their midst. As Andrew Picard notes, “At the heart of Baptist distinctives is not a unique understanding of the Trinity, the Bible or salvation, but a distinctive understanding of the church as a gathered community living under the rule of Christ.”[i] This understanding of each local congregation being under the direct rule of Christ had implications for congregational authority (which will be explored in a future article). It also led to the development of church covenants as the means by which the congregation would outwork together this conviction regarding the presence of Christ among them.
A Baptist innovation – the church as grace made visible
The early Baptists saw the covenants formed in the local congregation as being in continuity with the different covenants seen throughout both the Old and New Testaments, all of which were themselves expressions of the eternal covenant of grace between God and creation.
The innovative step the Baptist’s took was to fuse together God’s eternal covenant of grace with humanity in Christ, with the local congregation’s commitment to Christ and each other through the forming of covenantal communities. The covenant the local congregation formed amongst themselves was not secondary or incidental to the covenant God formed with God’s people, but rather was the very expression of it. God’s eternal covenant of grace with humanity was now made visible in the gathering of the local believers in a covenant community. The covenant made by the church members was a part of and an expression of God’s covenant with them.
The interaction of the horizontal and vertical elements of these covenants grounded the church’s existence in the action and initiative of God. It is God who initiated the covenant. The church is not a voluntary society, but a community gathered together by God in Christ. Andrew Picard recounts how it was not a desire for community that led to the formation of these covenants but rather a conviction that community was the appropriate outworking of their salvation.[ii] Those who formed the first Baptist churches did not just want community for community’s sake, but rather they went searching for truth and found community. Covenanting was their response to God’s choosing of them to make them God’s people, a response that included a commitment to be faithful to God’s commands.
Covenanting then, is not just a human action to commit to live together for the sake of the gospel, and to be faithful to God and to each other, but rather covenanting is an action of God. God covenants with this group of people to make them God’s people, to make them a church. Covenant is not a voluntary agreement but being summoned into relationship. This understanding of covenant gives new meaning to the status of the church as an intentional community. The church is intentional not in choosing to gather together, but rather in choosing to live in a way that reflects that they have been chosen and gathered by God in Christ.
Reforming membership
An understanding of covenanting as based in the action of God can help to reframe our conceptions of church membership. In historical Baptist practice, the church members were those believers who had entered into covenant agreement with each other in response to God’s covenant with them. These believers committed to walk together in the ways of the Lord and to watch over each other. Membership was linked to discipleship with an expectation that those who were members of the church would be held accountable for their behaviour by the other members of the community.
In current practice, my observation is that the emphasis of church membership has shifted from discipleship to decision-making. While most Baptist churches today no longer have formal covenants, they continue the practice of church membership as a way of defining those who participate in the corporate decision-making processes of the church. It is the members who gather together at the church meeting to make decisions about the life of the church. This has led to a downgrading of the importance of church membership. It reduces church membership to the equivalent of making sure my name is on the electoral role so that I get to have my say in the decisions of the church. Rather than an expression of the importance of community it has become an expression of individual rights.
What would it look like to recover the original intent of membership as an outworking of this theological conviction regarding the necessity of community in salvation? And how do we do this in a way that continues to create a community that is open at the edges – able to welcome and include the stranger, the new-comer, the child? Nigel Wright suggests we make a distinction between community membership and covenant membership. Churches could define and celebrate community membership while reserving covenant membership for those who are the core stakeholder membership.[iii] I’m not sure this is the whole answer but is perhaps a part of it.
Membership and worship
But what has all this got to do with worship? The Baptist practice of covenanting provides a foundation to further explore the interaction between the interpersonal relationships in the church and the church’s worship. By explicitly linking the vertical and horizonal dimensions of the church’s relationships, a covenant understanding becomes the context in which to explore the way these relationships are worked out in all worship practices of the church.
More than this though, the forming of covenants and the practice of church membership is itself an element and expression of worship. Church membership is a tangible and concrete expression of the conviction that my relationship with God necessarily creates a relationship with others. It moves this conviction from the abstract to the concrete; from just a nice idea to something that has practical implications for how I relate to both God and those around me. I wonder how it would change the way we viewed and talked about membership if we considered becoming a church member as an act of worship.
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[i] Andrew Picard, “‘On the Way’ and ‘In the Fray’ in Aotearoa: A Pākehā’s Covenantal Reflections from the Context of a Treaty People,” Pac. J. Baptist Res. 11.1 (2016): 45.
[ii] Andrew Picard, “Be the Community: Baptist Ecclesiology in the Context of Missional Church,” Pac. J. Baptist Res. 5 (2009): 57.
[iii] Nigel Wright, “Spirituality as Discipleship: The Anabaptist Heritage,” in Under the Rule of Christ: Dimensions of Baptist Spirituality, ed. Paul S. Fiddes, Regent’s Study Guides 14 (Regent’s Park College, 2008), 90–93.
Sources
Fiddes, Paul S. “Baptist Concepts of the Church and Their Antecedents.” eBook. Pages 293–316 in The Oxford Handbook of Ecclesiology. Edited by Paul D. L. Avis. First Edition. Oxford Handbooks. Oxford University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199645831.013.2.
———. Tracks and Traces: Baptist Identity in Church and Theology. Paternoster Press, 2003.
Fiddes, Paul S., Brian Haymes, and Richard Kidd. “The Difference the Doctrine Makes.” Pages 157–84 in Baptists and the Communion of Saints: A Theology of Covenanted Disciples. By Paul S. Fiddes, Brian Haymes, and Richard Kidd. Baylor University Press, 2014.
Holmes, Stephen R. Baptist Theology. T&T Clark, 2012.
Picard, Andrew. “Be the Community: Baptist Ecclesiology in the Context of Missional Church.” Pac. J. Baptist Res. 5 (2009): 27–69.
———. “‘On the Way’ and ‘In the Fray’ in Aotearoa: A Pākehā’s Covenantal Reflections from the Context of a Treaty People.” Pac. J. Baptist Res. 11.1 (2016): 44–58.
Wright, Nigel. “Spirituality as Discipleship: The Anabaptist Heritage.” Pages 79–101 in Under the Rule of Christ: Dimensions of Baptist Spirituality. Edited by Paul S. Fiddes. Regent’s Study Guides 14. Regent’s Park College, 2008.
