The Right Relations Covenant Team has drafted a covenant for our community and is asking for your input. The congregation will vote on the covenant at the June Annual Meeting—your feedback between now and April 2 will help shape the final document before it goes to the Board.
About a year ago, the Board tasked a dedicated team—the Right Relations Covenant Team—with developing a Right Relations Covenant for our community. This covenant is the first of three Board initiatives designed to help us navigate conflict within our congregation.
The second initiative will establish a set of policies and procedures to follow when harm, disagreement, or conflict arises. The third will create a Right Relations Team to keep the covenant alive, serve as a resource for those who feel we have fallen out of covenant, offer educational opportunities around conflict, and review and update the covenant as our community grows.
This covenant is meant to be living—woven into our culture, not filed away.
Draft MLUC Right Relations Covenant
We, as a beloved community, choose to covenant together, believing that keeping these promises to one another will foster our growth as a congregation and as individuals, and enable us to live out our mission within and outside our walls.
- Together we covenant to create and sustain a physical, spiritual, and emotional sanctuary;
- Together we covenant to realize fully the value inherent in each person in this beloved community, an understanding that powers our collective strength;
- Together we covenant to hold one another in mutual respect, approaching each other with moral courage, curiosity, and radical hospitality;
- Together we covenant to live in a spirit of generosity, service, and support with our friends and those we do not yet know alike;
- Together we covenant to honor one another with grace, compassion, and humility, recognizing that the gifts of our community grow from the world within each of us;
- Together we covenant to be brave enough to acknowledge our disagreements, to speak honestly, to listen deeply, and to commit to return to right relations.
With Love at the center of all we do, this Right Relations Covenant calls us to be accountable to each other and binds our beloved community together. Harm to one is harm to all.
Share Your Feedback
Over the past several months our team has met with groups across the congregation to develop this draft. Now we’re bringing it to the full community. Will this covenant encourage us to remain in right relations? Are these the aspirations we want for our community? We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Responses welcome through April 2.