Resolutions
For our Christian faith to be vibrant, it has to speak to our culture. That’s true even—or especially—on complex and difficult issues of contemporary life: abortion, war, assisted suicide, sexuality, poverty, and religious persecution, to name a few.
The Christian Action Commission prepares resolutions on ethical and political issues and recommends particular actions informed by biblical perspective.
These proposed resolutions are then reviewed by the denomination’s Executive Board for recommendation to the Covenant Annual Meeting and a vote by delegates. In the tradition of the Covenant, these resolutions are not binding. With the Covenant’s long-standing emphasis on freedom in Christ as one of our core affirmations, individual churches and church members are free not to abide by resolutions. But they still carry significant weight.
The purpose of these resolutions is that our people will engage with them. What is more important is that the opinions expressed in the resolutions are not only opinions, but that they cause us to grapple with challenging issues about how we live our faith in the world.
– Donn Engebretson
2021 RESOLUTION PROPOSAL
The Christian Action Commission has taken up the topic Repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery for draft submission at the 2021 Annual Meeting.
This resolution briefly explains the Doctrine of Discovery and outlines its-long impact in the U.S., as well as the damage and trauma it has inflicted on indigenous peoples. We turn to Scripture to remember that God has created all humans in God’s own image and imbued each individual with God’s image (imago Dei). We confess with our Indigenous brothers and sisters that the whole of creation is the work of God, and we acknowledge the damage done to the Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas through the taking of rights, property, and land. We acknowledge the cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples through sustained and systemic acts of injustice. We acknowledge the complicity of the Christian church (including the Covenant Church) in that dispossession, subjugation, and relegation. We the Evangelical Covenant Church hereby repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery as fundamentally opposed to the gospel of Jesus Christ. We will seek to support Indigenous people as they identify ways to affirm their inherent human rights and resolve wrongs.
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