Evangelical Covenant Church says White People are Guests in America

The Evangelical Covenant Church of America, the denomination I grew up in, certainly has changed since my time there. It has endorsed a position that white people are guests of native people in the U.S.A. and should conduct themselves accordingly. 

The original name of this denomination was the Swedish Evangelical Church. Some form of it started in Sweden in the 1800's as a revolt against the Lutheran state church. The Lutheran state church of the time was considered by conservative Swedes to be corrupt.

The trademark of the denomination in my time there, at least in my tiny community, was piety. There were so many rules and so many kinds of sin. It was movies, ballroom dancing, alcohol and driving a tractor on Sunday.

A few years ago I attended the final service in my home church. A small part of the service was a video from the President of the denomination. He tried to lament the closing of  a church that had existed for over 100 years but the demeanor was more like, "It's been nice. But, goodbye." Small rural churches are dying like flies and the Covenant Church of America has its eyes on bigger things. 

Today, the Covenant Church business model is entirely different. It is to market itself in multiracial urban areas. According to its own statistics it is the fastest growing denomination in the U.S. Methodist columnist Mark Tooley says. The Covenant Church should reexamine its past when it sent many white missionaries into other countries to convert natives to the white man's religion. My relatives were missionaries in Alaska and China.

The Covenant Church has only one university, North Park University. I noticed on its web page there is an officially sanctioned student organization called "Queers and Allies." It's mission statement is to help gay people thrive in Christian environments. It did not say "hostile environments" but that was implied. The denomination dumped a church near my home town for conducting a gay wedding. Life is complicated.

And complicated it is to make blanket declarations about who is a "guest" in any geographical area. Native societies in the U.S. fought each other. Certainly white people took advantage of people of color, black and brown, and must own up to it. How exactly to do this is still unresolved. Using the vague word "guest" does not seem to me to add anything to the resolution.

The Covenant Church seems to desire a clear conscience. It could start by not preaching about invisible gods and heavenly and hellish places that do not exist. Start with that and you will feel better.