Restoring Covenant
Life and Relationships:
The Lord’s Response
.
by Bob Tedesco
Background
Each of our communities, as well as the whole of
the Sword of the Spirit, could be described by a
long list: we are a Christian community; a lay
Christian community; an ecumenical
Christian community; a covenant community;
or perhaps a Pentecostal community. From
the beginning, these types of communities were
called covenant communities. In describing and
identifying what we are, covenant is the
best word to pull out of that long list. It is
distinct from other types of communities such as a
prayer community or a religious community. Covenant
is the best descriptor.
There are many things that we as Christians hold
to that are only mentioned a couple or a few times
throughout all of Scripture. Covenant, however, is
mentioned 298 times in the Scriptures. Clearly,
God is a covenant-making God. It is part of his
nature, and in covenant community one of our
intentions is to reflect that part of his nature.
Societal Unraveling
The sexual revolution was one part of a larger
cultural revolution that began in the 1960s. Major
mores as defined by ways of acting or cultural
norms were shed. Modesty of dress, modesty of
speech and common sense seemed to disappear.
People began to think that they could go
bar-hopping at two o’clock in the morning and not
get into any trouble! There were many signs
during that time to indicate that society was
beginning to unravel: eliminating prayer in the
schools, the acceptance and promoting of abortion,
the rise in divorce and promiscuity to name a few.
Also, during this period, legal agreements began
to lose credence. We might say that a person’s
word carried much less credibility and became much
less reliable than in times past. People would say
things or make statements that had little
substance or of which they had little intention of
holding to. Some of the Christian denominations
had religious orders that had been in place for
centuries. Even many of these also began to
unravel as promises were taken less seriously.
Many of them began to decline before the 60s, and
religious orders did have promises as a part of
their intended way of life.
Restoring Covenant Life and
Relationships
One element of the Lord’s responses to
these declines was to begin to restore covenant
life and relationships especially among lay
people. We see the Lord divinely responding to the
situation by initiating and restoring covenant
life. Today, everything is voluntary and you can
walk out of just about everything. If your word is
good, the promises that you make are serious and
they can bring cohesion to intentional
relationships.
A covenant is a tool to support any significant
relationship. Marriage is one example. A religious
order is another. If you get hired for a new job
there is usually a written description of what
that job entails; how the company will relate to
the employee; how the company expects the company
to relate to them. If you researched the
applications of agreements, promises, and
contracts you would discover that these are all
tools which become relevant and weigh heavily in
decisions handed down in a court of law. Contracts
give evidence that a person or persons have
adhered to or reneged on their given word or
promise. There are many, many legal cases that are
based on covenants, promises and agreements that
were broken by one of the parties involved.
It is easy to look back at the last 50 years or so
and see how people’s words just don’t mean as much
as they used to. Part of our decline as a society
is because we can no longer count on people to do
what they said or to adhere to a given promise.
We, in the Sword of the Spirit are part of a
worldwide network of communities that the Lord has
raised up to give a divine response to this
societal unraveling. We are, to be sure, one
network among many that God has called forth.
Covenants are not that unusual. Some ministers,
for example, may have a particular goal they wish
to accomplish and will establish a “covenant of
understanding” with their associates. Some of the
more well-known ministers have written covenants
dealing with how they want to work together; how
they want to protect one another from the
onslaughts of the enemy in our culture as well as
working together to protect Christianity.
Our Recent History
Although it might seem to our younger members that
we’ve been around for a very long time, by all
accounts, if we consider history in its totality,
covenant community, and more specifically, the
People of God community, is a very recent
development.
Our history with the Sword of the Spirit began
when we intentionally aligned with the Word of God
community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in1974. We
recognized the value in receiving teaching and
wisdom from those who have gone before and to
learn from them.
From 1973 to mid-1974 the People of God worked on
writing our covenant. That was preceded by some
covenant work done with the Pittsburgh Charismatic
Renewal, particularly the Catholic Charismatic
Renewal and a priest named Fr. Mike Salvagna. Fr.
Mike was instrumental in gathering leaders from
the Pittsburgh area together to study the idea of
covenant that was coming to us from other places.
We were sensing a call to covenant, but we really
didn’t know much about what that meant. Several of
our early leaders were part of that group.
While the wheels of covenant were turning in
Pittsburgh, my wife Bobbie and I made a trip to
the Alleluia Community in Augusta, Georgia. We
visited them in order to study community but also
to study covenant because our own covenant was
still a work in progress. I was given a copy of
their covenant during that visit and consequently,
our covenant in the People of God is structurally
very similar to theirs.
There are different types of communities, one of
which is referred to as common sharing,
residential community. Alleluia Community was that
type of community. Their neighborhood was called
Faith Village. There are common sharing
communities with folks who live in clusters. There
are also communities where some folks live in
clusters, while others do not, but all have
separate incomes. Some communities are a mix of
various types of community living experience. Both
the Word of God and the Alleluia community were
ecumenical. The Alleluia Community remains so to
this day.
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The People of God
Covenant Structure
[Covenant
Statement printed in italics]
Opening
Scripture
“This is the covenant I will make
with the house of Israel after those
days, says the Lord. I will put my
Laws into their minds and I will write
them on their ears, and I will be
their God and they shall be my
people.” Hebrews 8:10
Opening
Prayer
Father, we recognize and accept the
covenant to which you have called us.
Jesus, we accept your lordship in our
lives. We accept your call to be
disciples, your commission to teach
and make disciples of all people. Holy
Spirit, we dedicate ourselves to
allowing you to sanctify us, to work
the Father’s will in us, to form us as
individuals into what we were meant to
be and to form us into a people of
God. You have destroyed our isolation
and joined us together.
There is much to consider in that
paragraph and it’s worth reading over
and meditating upon from time to
time. It begins by saying, “We
recognize and accept the covenant to
which you have called us…” We were
sensing a call from the Lord to be
more serious and more stable about our
relationships. We were sensing that
our isolation was being destroyed or
eliminated and that God was joining us
together to become his people.
How We
Want to Live the New Way of Life
Faithful to our churches and to our
primary vows such as marriage, we
commit ourselves as brothers and
sisters in the Lord, entrusting our
lives to him and to each other in him.
This statement acknowledges that we do
indeed have other covenants, other
serious relationships such as marriage
or the relationship we have with our
denominations. In light of those,
however, we are entrusting our lives to
one another together in this covenant
agreement. Some specific ways we agree
to do that are the following:
We promise to build up, exhort,
admonish and to listen to one another…
We could do a little better at building
each other up or encouraging one
another, but also exhorting and
admonishing each other. Someone once
said, “You have two ears and only one
mouth!” We should listen to one another
a little more; to be slow to speak and
quick to listen as it says in James
1:19.
…to communicate, or call for help
when we have a need…
Now, that specifically put the onus on
the individual to be speaking up
and asking for help when there is a
need. If you have a need and you just
wait to see who might meet your need,
that’s not what we agree to in our
covenant. The responsibility is on each
of us to call for help when it is
needed.
…to be quick to forgive, and to ask
forgiveness…
This is essential! At the risk of being
too simplistic, you could almost say
that the entire Bible, the entire work
of God is the work of forgiveness. That
little piece of a sentence really taps
into the greatness of Christian
revelation. For all time, God has been
planning to build a family from flawed
people and correspondingly needed a plan
to help us fulfill his vision. We need
to see that to be quick to forgive and
to ask forgiveness is a fundamental,
Christian bedrock foundation stone that
we cannot get around, step over or
ignore!
If you remember, the chosen people
wandered around in the desert for 40
years. There is a saying about taking
another trip around the mountain. In
other words, if you’ve not formed this
principle of forgiveness in your life
well enough, it may require another trip
around the mountain, perhaps another
year in the desert in order for you to
get it! We need to be quick to integrate
this point into our lives, and we need
to be determined to live this way!
…to be a mutual support to one
another…
Here, it says ‘mutual’. Here the onus is
not all on me, but we want to be a
support to one another.
…We commit ourselves to loving one
another…
If you want to understand how corporate
our life in Christ really is, search the
Bible for how many times the phrase ‘one
another’ shows up in scripture. It’s
quite amazing!
… as brothers and sisters in Christ,
to faithfulness to our commitments…
One way of describing commitment is
this: Commitment is doing what you said
you would do after the feeling in which
you said it has passed. For example,
after a year of marriage one of the
partners might discover they have a
serious illness. Circumstances and
perhaps your feelings about that other
person may have changed. Will you still
keep your commitment? You should,
because that’s what it means to make a
commitment; faithfulness to your
decision even after the feelings have
passed or the circumstances have
changed. We are called to be faithful to
our commitments.
…to regular community prayer, daily
prayers…
It’s corporate, personal and family,
small groups, etc.
...fellowship, teaching, and to our
financial responsibilities to the
community…
The area of financial responsibility is
one that we should review every so often
because it’s not natural to give away
your money. Just as your children are
not yours but God's, neither is it your
money! The agreement we have made to
tithe can easily be compromised if we
begin to use it to pay the babysitter,
or tuition for school, or to put gas in
our car so we can get to work. We need
to protect the Lord’s money and
use it for his work.
…We agree to recognize the authority
of the coordinators and to support, to
pray for and to submit to them…
Anytime you have a significant
relationship or a significant network of
relationships there will be a need for
someone to be responsible for oversight.
In a family the buck stops at the desk
of the father. Working together in a
covenant of serious relationships
necessitates an authority to govern the
covenant and those relationships. It
will work much more smoothly when the
authority is recognized, supported and
covered in prayer.
…We will foster the growth of the
community by supporting the programs
of Christian initiation and formation
in community life…
This is something we want to support
from the very beginning, from the
earliest stages of our members lives;
from children’s ministry all the way
across the youth bridge into adulthood.
As community members who have agreed to
live our covenant, should we really be
saying we’d prefer not to serve in
children’s ministry? It is stated in our
covenant that we agree to foster and
support every stage of growth in our
members’ lives, including children’s
ministry!
Sword of
the Spirit ties
…We recognize by virtue of our
membership in the People of God we are
also members of the Sword of the
Spirit, an international community of
communities. We commit ourselves to
love and support our brothers and
sisters in the Sword of the Spirit
throughout the world and to serve them
in common mission…
There are many ways we serve together in
common mission with our brothers and
sisters in the Sword of the Spirit,
among them are Summer Camp, University
Christian Outreach, our men’s and
women’s retreats, serving our mission
communities as outside coordinators and
Senior Women Leaders, visitation teams,
hosting regional groups and events, and
perhaps most importantly, by praying for
one another. We are, in fact, by intent
a living bulwark!
…We agree to be held to this covenant
and to hold one another to it. We
regard this as a serious commitment
which we enter prayerfully. Once we
were no people, but now we are God’s
people.
Amen!
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Bob
Tedesco is the founder of the People
of God, a
Sword of the Spirit community in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA where he
served as Senior Coordinator for 26
years. He has been involved in lay
ministry for over forty-five years,
serving in the Sword of the Spirit as
the North American Regional President
and Chairman of the Board of Directors
of the North American Executive
Committee.
Bob is also the author of two
books, Essays on Christian
Community and Choosing
Discipleship. and forty-one
Christian life articles published in
the Sword of the Spirit international
online magazine, Living Bulwark.
He has a BS in Aerospace Engineering
from the University of Pittsburgh and
worked as a consulting engineer for
twenty years. He and his wife, Bobbie,
have been married for nearly sixty
years. They currently have ten
children, thirty-seven grandchildren,
and eleven great-grandchildren. They
reside in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania,
USA.
Choosing Discipleship
Embracing
the Call in a Modern Culture
by
Bob Tedesco
163 pages
Published in 2019 by Credo
House Publishers,Grand Rapids, Michigan,
USA
The
book is available in print at Amazon and Credo
House Publishers.
Choosing Discipleship
is an excellent book and very
helpful for keeping some key issues before
us in a compact way. It is very useful, easy
to ponder, and easy to teach from. It is a
great resource... personally; I liked the
style you used... it relates to the busyness
of our culture.
Bill Durrant, Founder, People of
God’s Love Community, Columbus, Ohio
Excellent pastoral material and also well
written. It’s a tremendous contribution to
the Sword of the Spirit worldwide and the
wider church as well... Seasoned leaders,
parents, pastoral workers, and community
members need to be refreshed and learn again
(and again) the vision and sound principles
and wisdom you have taught over the past few
decades... It will continue to be circulated
to many communities and individuals for
generations to come.
Don Schwager, Editor, The Living
Bulwark, international online magazine of
the Sword of the Spirit
Typing the manuscript for Choosing
Discipleship over the course of a
summer felt like being on an
extended retreat! My own life of
discipleship and my understanding of what
God is doing in the world today has been
significantly influenced by Bob’s clear
vision, insight, and wisdom... The impact he
has had both as a community builder and
author has stretched across continents, and
I suspect his influence will be felt for
many years to come.
Joanie Nath, Senior Women’s Leader,
People of God Community,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Top
illustration: Christians worshipping
together (c) Paul Shuang at bigstock.com
Stock
Photo ID: 251603902
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