God calls us to be followers of Jesus Christ and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to grow as communities of grace, joy and peace, so that God's healing and hope flow through us to the world.
Our God, left abandoned at the cross
gives us to each other,
to carry and be carried,
to comfort and be comforted.
God has given us good and satisfying work to do.
As neighbors and as family,
we commit ourselves to our God,
to the wider community of the Mennonite Church,
to one another,
and to this work.
We commit to worship together in song and prayer and meditation. With Jesus Christ as our model, we will baptize those new to God’s covenant, wash one another’s feet, and share bread and wine. We will press to the limits of our energy and imagination in honoring our God.
We commit to befriend one another as God befriended us, loving and serving each other in humility, welcoming children and strangers into this community.
We commit to cultivate each other as we grow toward God’s holy light. Teaching our children and learning from them, we will discover and rediscover the God who transforms us. We will pray for one another as Christ prays for us. And we will strive for the boldness and sensitivity of Christ, our model, as we tell our stories and nourish one another’s growth.
We commit to serve those outside this room, giving our time, our strength, our skill, our imagination and our money to God’s children in need.
Finally, we commit to work for reconciliation with those in this room, within and among our wider communities, and with the land and everything that lives from it. We will seek justice for the oppressed, especially for those who cannot plead their own cause.
Clinging to God—our Parent, our Friend, our Breath—we enter this covenant. We commit to all this, knowing that we still live in the time of not quite, knowing that we will fall short of the good we promise, but relying on the promises of our God, who never abandons us, and who will help us, ever and again, to start new.