Moving from Values to Covenant

I’m reading Alan Hirsch’s The Forgotten Ways and I’ll admit it’s prompting lots of thoughts.  On p. 47 he discusses the values of a church.  He mentions that values aren’t that valuable.  Rather it’s the actions of the church that are more important.  In other words, if your values are no more than words on a piece of paper, then they are worthless.

For church planters, this presents an interesting dilemma.  In the early stages of the church, the values truly are just dreams on paper.  The values are aspirational at best.  Hirsch suggests that rather than create values, which are cerebral, the church planter should create a covenant.  The covenant are behaviors that communicate action to be taken.  Will Mancini in his book, Church Unique, has a similar thesis.  He encourages the pastor to work through each value and the phrase “as demonstrated by” to the end.  So if you value relationships, what are the two or three ways that is demonstrated behaviorally in the church.  These as demonstrated by statements form the covenant language for the church.  The planters should use these statements to form the membership covenant of the church.

You may think that this is all just semantics.  Covenant or values: it all the same thing.  But how many churches have you seen where the stated values don’t align with the actions of the church.  It’s great to have some aspirational values or things that as a community you are striving for.  But if they are all aspirational, they probably aren’t values but rather meaningless words on paper.  James said faith without works is dead.  The applicable analogy might be values without covenant are meaningless.