Model covenants

Sunday morning in the bilingual Sunday school class we shared some covenants between North American congregations and presbyteries and Guatemalan evangelical Presbyterian groups. The covenant above is the one-page, English-language version of the covenant between Middle Tennessee Presbytery and the Kek'chi-predominant Guatemalan Presbytery of Peten. We're looking for the Spanish version and a covenant between two congregations within those two presbyteries. Below is the four-page, English-language version of a covenant between Pines Presbyterian Church in Houston and a consortium of Kek'chi groups.

Those are both sample covenants that participants in the summer 2008 Amigos de Kek'chi gathering in Nashville had submitted before the gathering, to share among participants. Below are the English- and Spanish-language versions of a one-page covenant between Western North Carolina Presbytery and Guatemalan congregations. Ellen, formerly a pastor in the North Carolina presbytery, brought this in to class. She noted that this covenant was unusually concise in part because it was developed within the context of a presbytery-to-presbytery partnership, with its own apparently longer and more detailed covenant. Readers might note that the Pines Presbyterian covenant implicitly imagines resources transfers from Pines to the Guatemalan congregations (built into the "constitution," so to speak). Might the expectations for Crescent Hill Presbyterian Church and the Estoreno Izabal Presbytery be similar? Ellen and I also talked about how any draft covenant would need to be translated into Kek'chi and English (before any parent groups considered it). But its basic building blocks would probably start out in Spanish (a language that some of us North Americans and Guatemalans in El Estor next month will not understand well). Click on each page of the covenants to magnify the text so you can read it. Hopefully: more covenants later.

-- Perry