Pray Capital Region Covenant Form

Please mail to: Pray Capital Region, c/o Brian L. Fast, P.O Box 313, Delmar, NY 12054

Preamble

God has one Church, comprised of many congregations throughout the Capital Region. This Church is comprised of those who have repented of their sins and who have by faith followed Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Jesus has called the Church into a living relationship of faith and obedience to Him. Jesus has made the church holy through His sacrificial death and resurrection and calls the church into fellowship with Him through the Bible, God's Holy Word.

We believe that God's Word, the Bible, calls us to make every effort to maintain the unity of the Body of Christ, the Church. This unity comes from the presence of the Holy Spirit and is marked by a bond of peace. Jesus directly commands His followers to "love one another," and this love for other disciples of Jesus is a testimony to the world.

Central to our association with one another is our conviction that Christian men and women are called to pray together for our communities, our leaders, and for each other. Our commitment is to pray with each other, to pray for each other, to pray for our government and our country, to pray for the Church and for the lost world.

We confess that the experience of true Christian unity and the bonds of peace have been missing in our relationships with one another at various times and to various degrees in the past. We confess that there has not always been prevailing prayer for the work of Christ. We confess that man-made distinctions and issues have kept us from expressing the unity Jesus has created. We desire to see these changed out of our reverence for Jesus as our Lord and King.


Covenant

We the undersigned, leaders of the Church of the Greater Capital Region of the State of New York, do hereby covenant together and state our purpose as follows:

  • To be one Church with many congregations and various expressions.
  • To be agents of Godly change in our society by leading in unity, prayer, evangelism and Kingdom expansion.1
  • To build relationships and minister reconciliation among Christians across gender, racial and denominational lines so that we function together as the Body of Christ in the Greater Capital Region. We will demonstrate God's love toward one another so that the world may know and recognize Jesus Christ and His love for them. We will, to the best of our abilities:
    • prevail in prayer, waiting upon the Lord, by regularly and consistently praying in faith with each other for the Church in our region and for our conununity, seeking God's will to be accomplished (I Thessalonians 5:17)
    • pray in public and in private for other pastors and Christian leaders and for other congregations (Ephesians 6:19)
    • pray for those in authority, the civil governments that lead our country, executive, legislative and judicial leaders
    • meet with our government leaders to pray with and for them about our region and its needs (I Timothy 2:1-3)
    • build and maintain healthy, godly and loving relationships among a diversity of colleagues in the ministry of the gospel, speaking well of other Christian leaders (Ephesians 4:3, Psalm 133)
    • provide opportunities for other Christian ministers to share our pulpits
    • encourage members of our congregations to seek and build healthy, godly and loving relationships with a diversity of Christian people from other congregations, seeking to promote true biblical unity among Christians (John 17)
    • actively seek to resolve all of our differences and disputes according to Biblical principles (Ephesians 5:2 1, I Timothy 5:19)
    • advance the Kingdom of God by supporting efforts to evangelize the Capital Region (Matthew 6:33)
    • seek out personal and professional relationships with pastors who dffer racially or ethnically from us, seeking to experience the unity that comes from diversity in the Body of Christ (I Corinthians 12:21)
    • communicate with the pastor of a congregation when a person from that local congregation seeks to join our congregation, so as to help people first seek reconciliation before leaving a congregation and encourage a standard of reconciliation between the pastors and their people (Romans 1 5: 5-7, Matthew 5:23, 24)
    • foster, maintain and honor biblical marriages, setting high expectations for premarital preparation in our congregation, seeking to restore fallen and broken marriages and discouraging divorce as a solution for difficult marriages (Hebrews 13:4)
    • recognize our personal needs as Christian leaders for mutual accountability with our peers in ministry and have the highest standards for our lives and ministries, so that in all things Jesus might be honored (Ephesians 5:2 1).



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1 When our Lord prayed "Thy Kingdom come," He was referring to the eternal Kingship of God or the realm in which God's will is fullfilled. The word "expansion" has to do with increase. So, what we are saying is that our purpose reaches far beyond filling our churches. We are looking for a Godly transformation of our entire community - that His will be done and increased everywhere (Matthew 6: 10; Matthew 28:18-20; Luke 13: 20-2 1; Revelation 11: 1 5). We want our whole community to be reached with the whole gospel. This is inclusive of God's rule in every heart and organization, beyond man-made racial, generational, gender, and denominational boundaries and encouraging biblical standards of social and civil justice, equality, compassion, righteousness, and morality as mandated by the Word of God (James 1:21-27; Isaiah 58:6-9).