The Covenant Stories: Introduction

In the Fall of 1989, Jeanene and I arrived in San Antonio, Texas with our 6-month-old daughter, having both just graduated from seminary. Jeanene had been hired as a chaplain in the Baptist hospital system in San Antonio. I planned to stay home and care for our daughter while looking for some kind of ministry employment.

We were looking for a progressive-thinking Baptist church that would be supportive of women in the ministry. It’s hard to believe, but in the mid-1980s, that kind of Baptist church was hard to find. A friend told us about Covenant Baptist Church, a “different kind of church” that was currently the only Baptist church in the world meeting in a bar. We were intrigued enough to visit our first Sunday in town. We walked into the Duckblind Lounge, and the pastor, Kenny Wood, spotted us at the door and rushed over to say hello. There were only about 50 people there, so it was obvious when visitors showed up. Pamphlets on a small table by the door gave information about the community. Once pamphlet titled, “Open House: Women in the church” described Covenant’s commitment to allow men and women equal leadership roles. I handed one to Jeanene and we nodded at each other. So far, so good.

There were wooden chairs arranged in a U shape in front of the bar, where beer was available on tap except on Sunday mornings when the church met. There was a sign that said, “Be prepared to show ID. No drinks on dance floor.” The back row of the church was made from couches dragged over from in front of the big-screen television set. Scattered around the room were high tables with stools. One of these was serving as the pulpit. People were dressed casually and the service had a casual feel to it, which isn’t surprising given the setting. Children took up the offering, which I had never seen before and thought was charming. The children also came up front to sit on a blanket and talk to the pastor during the service. I noticed that Kenny did not deliver the classic children’s sermon, but instead talked to the kids for a few minutes and prayed with them.

Kenny’s sermon was unlike any I had ever heard. I had been in Baptist churches all of my life and studied preaching at a Baptist seminary. Kenny seemed to break all of the rules. He read the text, then talked about it and our lives in a conversational way. At the time I thought of sermons as carefully crafted orations delivered from a stage to a waiting audience. That’s ecclesiologically ridiculous but a good description of my subconscious attitude toward preaching at the time. In contrast, Kenny was having a relaxed conversation with his friends. In spite of his conversational style, Kenny had obviously put a lot of study and work into the sermon. His scholarship was understated but deep and obvious to anyone with training.

It was one of the most compelling sermons I had ever heard, and for the first time in years my attention never wavered from start to finish. Jeanene and I fell in love with the entire Covenant Baptist Church experience. But later that afternoon, we became a little suspicious. Was this too good to be true? Having been programmed to think of church in more traditional ways, we wondered if it was “okay” to do church like this. Jeanene suggested that we visit a number of other churches in town and think it over. I agreed. But the next Sunday morning we both wanted to go back to Covenant so badly that chucked that plan and returned. By the end of our second visit we knew we had found our church home. We joined the following Sunday.

We had no way of knowing, of course, that we were beginning a 20 year odyssey with this congregation and that our lives and our ideas about the Church would be changed forever. Kenny left Covenant three years later, and I ended up as the pastor of the fledgling church. After Kenny left we met in the bar, in a school, and in another church on Saturday nights before building a small, stone church in the woods outside of San Antonio. We’ve journeyed along the Christian path with many pilgrims over the years, some of whom are dead and others living all over the world. Our church has struggled financially and emotionally at times. Back in the mid-90s we weren’t even sure if we would survive. We’ve gone through hard times and intense grief together. We’ve also experienced moments of wondrous joy and discovery.

Covenant Baptist Church has been something of an experiment, because we didn’t have any role models. From the beginning we decided that we would do things that seem right to us and waste no energy doing things that didn’t seem important. As it turned out, most of the things that standard churches do didn’t seem important to us.

I was 27 when we arrived. I’m 47 now and still the pastor of Covenant Baptist Church. The little girl we carried into the Duckblind Lounge is now 20, and she has two sisters. Now that Jeanene and I are celebrating our 20th anniversary with this church, I feel compelled to tell the stories of this community. The larger story of any church is a collection of all the small stories. All of the stories cannot be told, but I’m going to write as many of them as I can in the coming year. One ever week for 52 weeks.

The Covenant Stories collection will be housed here at the High Calling Blogs website. I hope you’ll stop back by and learn why I love our little church so dearly.

Gordon Atkinson
Real Live Preacher

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