Part Three:
Community and Commitment
The first part of this prayer impresses upon us the importance of surrendering and suffering. Part two presents us with the themes of honor and humility. Finally, in this third part of the prayer, we are offered two more captivating themes—community and commitment.
Community and commitment are essential ideas to the Wesley Covenant Prayer as they each take on more than mere words. Community and commitment take deeply committed disciples on a pilgrimage toward a new kind of covenant. This new kind of covenant is one in which we turn over our own interests and causes and choose to take on God’s mission, which is to restore the world toward its intended wholeness.
Community, in a very broad view, is the sense we have of fellowship and friendship. Fellowship and friendship are the result of sharing common mindsets, interests, purposes, and ambitions. The product of aligning ourselves with those with whom we share important matters in common is a group of interdependent people who choose to share life together.
Authentically sharing life together narrows the understanding of community toward its finer attributes and qualities. Sharing life together is an intimate undertaking in which, among other fundamentals, love, trust, respect, honesty, attention, and ongoing two-way communication are required. These traits and qualities help us feel at home. Feeling at home means that we have found a person or a group of people to whom we can belong. A place where we belong is a place of forbearance and forgiveness, in which God is shaping us into who God desires us to be.
The third part of the Wesley Covenant Prayer turns our attention to community. It also turns our attention to commitment. Commitment is dedication, loyalty, and faithfulness. Like community, commitment isn’t merely an idea; it is actually a state of being, a reality. All of us like the idea of commitment, but living in such a dynamic state can be difficult for us to maintain. The Wesley Covenant Prayer challenges our commitment to commitment, so to speak; it challenges our sustained faithfulness to God’s mission.
Our commitment, in the end, is a direct result of how we understand community. For those we love, we choose devotion and loyalty. For those with whom we share a common purpose, we choose faithfulness. It can be said that the degree of our commitment is directly proportional to the depth of the community we experience. We commit to who matters, and we commit to what matters. The final third of this prayer is meant to help us establish who matters and what matters in our lives.