But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the riches of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you (Romans 11:17,18).
The olive tree is Israel, planted and watered and tended by God. The wild olive tree constitutes the rest of the world, seemingly abandoned and left in darkness. Branches broken from the cultured olive tree are the masses among the Jews who have rejected Christ. Gentile Christians could glory in their exaltation of being grafted “to share the riches of the olive tree.” Paul warns against this.
Normally a wild branch is not grafted into a cultured tree; rather the opposite is true. Symbolism here suggests a superceding of natural laws. This process of grafting the wild olive branch makes Gentiles partakers of the grace first given to Israel. The possibility was present that Gentiles might become conceited and despise the Jews in their unbelief. Paul boldly takes up the cudgel against this sin. “Do not boast over the branches,” he says.
When one is inclined to boast, let it be remembered that “it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you.” The trunk of the tree is not comprised of Gentile Christians. But the Jews are the trunk. Gospel blessings come from the Jews to the Gentiles. It is the Chosen People, the Jews, to whom God first entrusted his revelation. It is from them that God's Word has been received. Our Lord Jesus Christ was born of Jewish ancestry. The first Christians were Jews, as were the majority of the apostles. Let our negative feelings toward the Jews, if any, be displaced by love--in gratitude for our sacred heritage received through them.
C. O. Rosenius (1816-1868), Romans: A Devotional Commentary, J. Elmer Dahlgren and Royal F. Peterson, translators (1978), p. 153.
…Dearly beloved and longed for, my joy and crown (Philippians 4:1). Moffatt has it, those for whom I cherish love and longing.
Who were these people for whom the apostle cherished so tender a regard? They were people who did not belong to his race or nation. He was a Jew and they were Gentiles. Until they were changed by the power of the gospel that God preached to them, they had been pagans. So intense and self-sacrificing was Paul’s love for them that he had suffered to within an inch of his life to bring Christ to them. It was in Philippi, you remember, that Paul and Silas were cruelly beaten and brutally jailed. Yet the love of Christ in them conquered all: a Christian church was established in that corrupt city.
The victory of love in Paul can become the victory of love in you and me. With the love of unfailing and creative good will, we can express love even when it totally contradicts the traditional emotional patterns that have governed us in the past and will govern those who are resisting its penetration and are unchanged by its power.
…When I have learned the Christian way of saying “I can”—I can heal. I can be used by the Spirit of God to bring harmony where there is discord, understanding where there is blindness, reconciliation where there is strife.
I can … I can…. Yes, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
Paul S. Rees (1900-1991), “The Race Question: Is There a Solving Word?” From The Covenant Quarterly (November, 1964) pp. 29,30.
God Shaking the Earth
What is it, in the mystery of God, that uproots and brings people together in community, into a mutual relationship with one another? What explains the confluence of events and people that is the reality of the Covenant Church, be it on the congregational, regional, national, or international levels? Here, the uprooting precedes everything else. In so short a time have our lives become tangled together by massive forces over which we and our ancestors have had virtually no control, so that we might with equal truth say with the followers of Moses, “We were led by the hand of God into this wilderness.” The British actor Peter Ustinov, son of an anti-Bolshevic father and a German mother, offered thanks in his autobiography to Europe for causing World War I and the Bolshevic Revolution because these great events on the world's stage brought his parents together such that he could even be born. Therefore, we are obliged to ask in reference to our own birthing as a church and people, why? How did this mystery happen? How did it work? And I want to respond that it worked because God did not merely shake the theology, intellectual categories, and the aesthetic perceptions of ordinary people in Europe. He shook the earth itself; he shook the earth on which they lived. The hammer blows of God, which sent fifty million people careening out of Europe between 1815 and 1930, have no parallel in human history, at least in the cycle for which we have any memory at all. Fifty million people! Forty million of these came to North America. The population of the United States of America in 1815 was about 8.5 million. With all the frontiers closed, where could such a massive migration of dislocated people go today?
Zenos E. Hawkinson (1925-1997), “Uprooting” (1978). From Anatomy of the Pilgrim Experience: Reflections on Being a Covenanter, edited by Philip J. Anderson and David E. Hawkinson (2000), pp. 6,7.
Everyone Has a Root
Like all immigrant churches, the Covenant’s original ethnicity—its Swedishness—has passed with each generation. It is a growing church, eager to extend the right hand of fellowship to all who come to its doors confessing Christ and seeking the warmth of a church home. The backgrounds and religious orientation of its new members are many, and the challenge is great to grow and change while still maintaining the biblical and historic essentials that form the basis of its identity. The Covenant Church is more diverse today than it ever has been, and with that come crucial and unforeseen responsibilities in its life together.
Our name says much about the nature of the Evangelical Covenant Church. The word “evangelical” indicates its commitment to the good news of God’s forgiveness offered to all persons in Jesus Christ, not a fixed list of doctrines. The word “covenant” indicates its principle of voluntary association for the purpose of engaging in the work of the kingdom of God. The Covenant has no formulated creed but holds to the Protestant principle of the authority of the Scriptures, and to the primacy of the fellowship of believers rooted in the living voice of the Spirit in the Church through the ages—a voice that it must continue to hear and allow to speak through it to future generations. We need to know not only our place in the long history of the Christian Church, but also that we are part of its ongoing history. What started with the apostles does not conclude with us. The Covenant is not the end result of what began with the primitive fellowship in Jerusalem. Rather, the Church—and our Covenant—is a place where we all began.
Philip J. Anderson (1949- ), One Body, Many Members (1983, 1994), pp. 30,31.
[David] Nyvall...did not accept the “melting pot” terminology. Ethnic consciousness was not a melt-down of immigrants into the American society. Rather, employing the language of Werner Sollars, the “hyphen became a plus sign” for ethnics: not Swedish-Americans, divided by the hyphen, but rather Swedish+American, joined by the plus sign. This plus sign would signify the connecting “tissues” between Sweden and America.... This relationship was “essentially reciprocal and dialectical, with the immigrants, far from being passive victims, playing an active role in shaping and weaving identities, values, and modes of relatedness.”
“For my part [he wrote in 1918] I must admit that emotionally I am still 100 percent Swedish, despite my having been an America citizen during the past thirty years and loyal to my adopted country to the best of my abilities. In this regard, I am able to cite as evidence thirty years of work in the interest of culture, all of which has had its roots here and borne fruit here. Politically, I am 100 percent American and not Swedish. This conflict contains a great sorrow, a terrible friction, but I cannot be accused of any crime because of this. Personally, it is a clear and obvious obligation to be an American citizen. This is like my feeling of an unavoidable compulsion–a natural compulsion–to be Swedish. What can I do about this? I cannot make a great rush into American patriotism like an infatuated young lad rages in his love. Perhaps I could do so if I were a Swedish citizen. I am more quick to question than to make a declaration. Perhaps even then my nature would not allow me to declare such a patriotism. But my conscience tells me that it would be a great deal easier for me to relate to a Swedish patriotism, just as I feel that it is easier to relate to one’s first love rather than the second or third.... No one can convince me that I sin against my adopted country by maintaining and allowing in my heart these warm feelings for Sweden: feelings which I could not obliterate without committing suicide.”
Scott E. Erickson (1967- ), David Nyvall and the Shape of an Immigrant Church (Acta Universitatis Upsallensis, Uppsala, 1996), pp. 97,98,115,116.
When the Covenant founders gathered in the Tabernacle in that blizzard-whipped Chicago of February, 1885, they saw nothing obvious except the chaos around them. In less than twenty years they had created dozens of churches, two warring synods, a college, several newspapers, and an angry sea of controversy. One of the synods was about to dissolve in constitutional confusion, the college was barely treading water, and a number of churches had seceded from the synods to take an independent position. Engaging demagogues with a thoroughly American eye for opportunity came roaring through the churches producing excitement, theological confusion, and a splintered fellowship. And still the immigrants poured in, flooding the land with problems--and opportunity. No wonder Fred Johnson took as his text for the keynote sermon at this meeting: "I am a companion of all who fear you, of those who keep your precepts" (Psalm 119:63). It was a hope, at the moment nothing more.
But it was a sufficient hope. The companionship of which Johnson spoke came to flower in hundreds of fields from New England to California, from Alaska and China to Africa and Latin America, in places unknown to the founders, in ways wholly unpredictable by anyone in 1885. The companionship lives today, enlarged and enlivened by peoples of diverse ethnic backgrounds and traditions, and shared in congregations, educational institutions, mission fields, and annual meetings.
If we are to recover our ancestral experiences, we must unsheathe our imaginations, enter into the past as participants, and measure its meaning in a realistic but inward way. Are we alive in vast and confusing currents of cultural change? So were they! Do our resources seem limited and poor by the measurement of all that needs to be done? They had almost nothing at all! Do we seem few, pitted against the vast armies of darkness? They were a handful! Are we inadequate? They, too, were ordinary people! Are we confused about the future? So were they! It is by God's mercy that we do not know the future, so that we may live and act in faith. And faith can be fed by memory, above all the memory of the mighty acts of God. For as surely as the Lord God brought Israel out of Egypt, so he swarmed the millions of the world into this new Promised Land. To paraphrase Amos (9:7): “Did I not bring up the Swedes out of the land of Småland, and the Germans from Hesse, and the Irish from Dublin?”
What did God have in mind, bringing all of us here? “God,” as Einstein observed, “is often mysterious, never tricky.” If we cannot know the ultimate purpose of these vast migrations, continuing as they do today over the whole globe, we may in the very mystery of it sense their importance, and make ourselves alive to the dignity of our own small part in the adventure.
Zenos E. Hawkinson (1925-1997), “What Did God have in Mind?” (1983)
From Anatomy of the Pilgrim Experience: Reflections on Being a Covenanter, Edited by Philip J. Anderson and David E. Hawkinson (2000), pp. 106,107.
Perhaps the Covenant’s greatest contribution to North American religion is its inclusion of all who confess Christ in the context of biblical and theological freedom tested and nurtured by the life and wisdom of the covenanted body of Christ. This offers a true via media, as it did in Sweden and America in the nineteenth century. The Covenant’s history is crucial, not constraining, to the realization of the cardinal fact of identity. I disagree that the Covenant “shorn of its ethnicity and traditional culture, plunges into its second century.” I prefer to believe that a healthy living organism such as the church moves confidently and deliberately into the future, affected and challenged by change but secure in its identity because it grows out of a living tradition whose head is Christ.
Philip J. Anderson (1949- ), The Covenant and the American Challenge,” from Amicus Dei: Essays on Faith and Friendship, ed by Philip J. Anderson (1988), p. 138.
No Superiority
We have given, but we have not trusted the recipient. And when we have lost confidence in anyone, we have immediately put ourselves on a higher level than they. And it would always be true that friendship could not be possible for people who were living on different levels.
We could still live in a better house, like the houses in which we had lived at home. We could still eat the same kind of food that we had become accustomed to eating. We could still have some of our customs. These things did not need to raise barriers.
Or we could live in native houses, if we wanted to, and we could eat native food, if we could take it, or adopt native customs and dress, if we felt more comfortable that way. But the doing of those things would not necessarily erase the barriers of superiority.
Superiority was something that could disappear only when we discovered that the other person was as good as, if not better than, we considered ourselves to be. Paul, the apostle, had found the secret in one little word, love.
Edward G. Nelson (1914-1988), Assignment in Japan (1952), p. 23.
The empowerment of Latinos in the United States, and the full participation of the Hispanic church within the Covenant will require significant numbers to be fluent in the English language and cultures. However, retention of Hispanic cultures and values and ministry among the first generation also requires fluent Spanish. There can be no "either/or" in a heterogeneous church.
Only an isolated church ministering to those just like themselves can remain monocultural. The real issue is broader than that of language. Even if second- and third-generation Latinos retain flu¬ent Spanish, their culture will still not be identical to that of the first generation. There must be some kind of contextualization of the gospel to their quest for identity, their struggles for justice, their proclamation of the gospel to friends, their reconciliation with the races and cultures with which they have contact. Effective mission requires reconciliation and unity; mission con¬textualizes the gospel for multifaceted communities and for youth; youth need unity and empowerment for their carrying on the church's mission. These contextualization issues differ in kind and degree for every community. But they are issues for every Hispanic church, as well as for every Anglo church....
To proclaim the good news in each community's sub-cultures and languages presents a great challenge. But it is a challenge wor¬thy of the God who contextualized his ministry in first-century Palestine [in] Jesus Christ, the friend of all immigrants, margin¬alized, and oppressed, who speaks the language of each one of us.
Susan Carlson Wood (1963- ), "Do Latino Covenant Churches Need to Be
Bilingual?" from The Covenant Quarterly (August 2000), p. 56.
People from many cultures and nationalities now make up the Covenant Church, expanding our spiritual heritage. Where 1'00 years ago one would have heard Swedish spoken in Covenant congregations in the U.S. and Canada, today one might hear Spanish, Korean, or Nuer in addition to English. Covenanters today trace their roots to Africa, Asia, Europe, North and South America. We are united in one body by our faith in Christ. A sen¬tence from Luther's explanation of the third article of the Apostle's Creed helps us understand that it is the Holy Spirit who unites the whole Church: "The Holy Spirit calls, gathers, and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth, and keeps it unit¬ed with Jesus Christ in the one true faith."
The Journey: New Testament and Beyond, confirmation curriculum (2001), p. 187.
Opportunity and Challenge
At this very point, however, we are faced with the temptation to concentrate in our evangelistic outreach on those who are most like us socially and economically. When this happens our entire program tends to become geared to the interests and values of this group. We become specialists to our own class and increasingly it seems right to leave to others the responsibility of reaching other classes. Eventually we conclude that we cannot afford to minister in certain areas because we do not understand or know how to work with the people who live there. Thus we lose the freedom to proclaim the grace of God to all people without distinction, as the New Testament presents it.
The very desire to maintain our concept of Christian freedom may tempt us to limit our outreach. We may hesitate to assimilate people from such a wide variety of backgrounds because of the fear that they will eventually lead us to an interpretation of freedom which will not be consistent with biblical authority. On the other hand, we may hesitate to assimilate people from backgrounds in which the Christian faith means submission to detailed doctrinal statements because of the fear that they may lead us to an interpretation of Biblical authority which eliminates freedom.
If, however, we concentrate in our outreach on one segment of society because of either of these fears or simply because of our attraction to those who are like us, we deny the principle of freedom in Christ because we do not permit persons in our fellowship the freedom to be different from us. The effect of such concentration is to make it even more difficult to communicate with the world around us. We need the voice of a wide variety of peoples on the floor of our conferences and in our policy-making bodies. We need the corrective discipline of their differing backgrounds to keep our message and our work relevant to our generation. Were we to seek to protect the principle of freedom within the authority of the Bible by limiting our outreach to those who can appreciate our heritage we would destroy the very principle of freedom which we were seeking to protect.
It will help us to remember that the principle of freedom within the authority of the Bible, which is so much a part of our heritage, came into existence among us in a time of revival. It must be looked upon as a spiritual discipline which is closely related to the life and vitality of our denomination. To seek to maintain it by limiting our outreach to those who we think will most easily embrace it is merely to admit that we do not believe that the Gospel has the power to do for people today what it did for us in a previous generation.
We maintain this principle of Christian freedom only as we maintain our spiritual vitality, which we have by the grace of God. The problem of maintaining it, therefore, must be approached in a contrite and penitent spirit in which we seek the mercy of of God in permitting us to return to him. Out of such an attitude, we pray, will come a renewed experience of the vital life in which we become free sons and daughters of God under the Lordship of Christ as the Truth is revealed to us in the Bible.
Covenant Committee on Freedom and Theology, Biblical Authority and Christian Freedom, (1963), pp. 15,16.
I am grateful for our diversity [in the Covenant]. I'm glad we are not, in the eyes of the political right, a “solid” church. I'm glad, to quote our third president, that we “have room for all true believers no matter what their viewpoints are on controversial doctrines.” I'm glad that our doors have been open to a wide variety of pastors and youth ministers and educators and others who have found a home in the Covenant. In so doing, God has blessed us. The danger comes from those who do not understand it. The risk comes from the people who are welcomed through our doors but want to close the doors behind themselves, those who want to limit the participation or place of others because of a different theological perspective, worship style, or gender.
...Some may say Covenant freedom is really a lesser characteristic. If we lose it, it is not serious. Our affirmations are what really count. I believe our freedom is the context for our affirmations. I believe there are people whose best chance of ever coming to faith in Christ is through a church like the Covenant. Some people need a church that is evangelical but not exclusive, biblical but not doctrinaire, traditional but not rigid.
Glenn R. Palmberg (1945- ), from “Yesterday’s Seed Is Tomorrow’s Harvest,” The Covenant Companion, March, 1977, p. 29.
Miles to Go Before We Sleep
One of our greatest failures as churches around the world lies in failing to allow for cultural diversity. As a result, we don't speak as clearly and forcefully as we might. God's Word must be born into every culture much as Jesus himself was born into the world of the Jew and grew up a Jew. The Word must be allowed to “possess” the various cultural forms and expressions which exist. Only as it does so will it truly speak to the vast variety of cultures and subcultures
which make up the human race.
James W. Gustafson (1944- ), “To Serve the World.” From Bound to Be Free: essays on being a Christian and a Covenanter, James R. Hawkinson, editor (1975), pp. 119,120.
I must confess that... one of my frustrations as an inner-city pastor [is that] I have not successfully trained my congregation to do the work of the people of God in the world. Largely, it seems to me, I violate the criteria for the pastor of the activated people of God. All too much I represent the church in the community; I counsel the troubled, visit the stranger, engage in social action, recruit new members. I am the professional witness. I do it all!
I do not say this as a boast. Actually, it violates my concept of the ministry of the whole church. I do not say it as a complaint against my congregation—at least not overmuch, for the people are kind and loyal and cooperative. But I do say it with some sense of failure and confusion.
My failure has been the failure to help my people catch the vision of being the people of God in the world, looking to me for guidance to do their ministry. So far I have largely failed to equip my people with a new understanding of the Gospel for our new age. I take it that this requires chipping away tirelessly. I do not think that my vision is perfect, but I think it is right. I will go on.
G. Dewey Sands (1924-1989), "Setting the Gospel in the Full Human Context:'
from The Covenant Quarterly (May 1969), p. 33
You [speaking to seminarians] are being consecrated to give the invitation, to speak Christ's invitation. Jesus does not give his children scraps from the table, but a place at the table. He gives a place to all who will come. What we have to offer the boomers and the yuppies and everyone else is a place at the Lord's table, but they will have to sit between Edna and Irene. If they want a place to be comfortable with their own kind, they can find that at the country club. The church is to be something the world is not and never can be. It is a place where those who come can sit next to the poor and get closer to God.
Glenn R. Palmberg (1945- ), “Giving the Invitation,” The Covenant Quarterly, November, 1993, p. 40.
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