When you introduce new members to the Covenant of Christian Conduct, the conversation will go one of two ways depending on where you start. If you start with the list of what Nazarenes do and do not do, you will spend most of your time defending positions. If you start with the why behind those positions, people lean in.
This lecture is built around the why. For each major area the covenants address, we are going to ask the same question: what is the conviction driving this? What does this say about who God is, who we are, and what kind of community we are trying to become together? If you can answer those questions, you will be able to teach these covenants with pastoral warmth rather than reading people a list of rules.
Before walking through what the covenants say, you need to be able to answer a prior question: why does the Church of the Nazarene have covenants like these at all? Most churches have statements of belief. Fewer ask members to make commitments about how they will live. When new members or longtime attendees ask why we do this, you need a ready answer.
The covenants are not a fence. They are a path. The conviction underneath everything in these documents is that God designed human beings for flourishing, and that the shape of a holy life is not a restriction imposed from the outside but a description of the kind of life that makes human beings whole.
Think about it this way. A doctor does not tell a patient to stop smoking to make their life less. They do it because they understand how bodies work and know this habit is harming the patient’s health. The Covenant of Christian Conduct operates from a similar conviction. We are not trying to make people’s lives more restricted. We are saying that these commitments, rooted in Scripture and refined over a century of communal discernment, are the pathway toward the kind of life God intended for human beings.
This is worth saying clearly to new members: every position in this covenant exists because the church believes it leads toward human flourishing, not away from it. You can disagree with specific applications. But if you understand the motive, you will stop hearing the covenant as a list of prohibitions and start hearing it as an expression of care.
The Church of the Nazarene takes both orthodoxy and orthopraxy seriously. Orthodoxy is right belief. Orthopraxy is right practice. The Articles of Faith address what we believe. The covenants address how we live. Both matter, and neither is complete without the other.
There is a version of Christianity that reduces faith to intellectual agreement with a set of propositions. The Wesleyan tradition has always pushed back against that reduction. Transformation is visible. Grace changes the whole person. A faith that leaves your daily life untouched has not yet become what it was meant to be. The covenants are the church’s way of saying: we take seriously that our beliefs should shape how we live. We are going to talk about it, commit to it together, and hold one another accountable. That is not legalism. That is discipleship.
The Church of the Nazarene does not offer these covenants as though every position is beyond question or further discernment. The covenant is offered in humble confidence. The church has searched the Scriptures, studied the tradition, listened to the experiences of people across many cultures, and said: “It seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us to live this way.”
That language comes directly from Acts 15, the Jerusalem Council, where early church leaders wrestled with some of the most contested questions of their day. They did not claim prophetic infallibility. They said: we have prayed, we have discerned, we have looked at Scripture and experience together, and this is where we have landed. That is the spirit in which the Covenant of Christian Conduct is written and amended at each General Assembly.
Acts 15:28 “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us not to burden you with anything beyond the following requirements…”
For your congregation, this means you can teach these positions while remaining humble about the process that produced them. You are not defending God. You are explaining the church’s best discernment. That posture is more honest and more persuasive than pretending there are no hard questions.
The Covenant of Christian Character is part of the church’s Constitution, which means it sits at the foundation of who we are as a denomination. It describes three commitments that every Nazarene makes, speaking in the language of vision rather than regulation.
The covenant begins with the Great Commandment, and that order is not accidental. Everything else in the Covenant of Christian Character, and everything in the Covenant of Christian Conduct, flows from this one commitment: love God with your whole self, and love your neighbor as yourself.
Why does this come first? Because it establishes the motive behind everything else. Nazarenes are not trying to avoid alcohol because of a rule. They are trying to love their neighbors who suffer from addiction. They are not trying to be sexually faithful because a list says so. They are trying to reflect the faithful covenant love of God in their most intimate relationships. When love is the foundation, every commitment makes sense in a way it cannot if the foundation is mere compliance.
If you help your congregation understand that the Covenant of Christian Conduct is an extended answer to the question “what does it look like to love God and neighbor in these areas of life,” the whole document becomes more than a collection of denominational preferences.
The covenant calls members to holiness of heart and life, not simply to avoid doing bad things. That distinction matters enormously. A person whose entire spiritual life is organized around what they will not do has missed the Wesleyan vision. Holiness is not primarily about subtraction. It is about becoming. It is the positive pursuit of Christlikeness, which includes but is far larger than the avoidance of specific sins.
Help people see that the holy life is expansive, joyful, and growing. The person who is wholeheartedly given to God is not living a shrunken, restricted existence. They are living more freely, more fully, more humanly than they were before, because they are no longer in bondage to the things that once controlled them.
The third commitment, participating in the unity and mission of the church, includes a dimension that surprises some new members: accountability to one another. Nazarenes do not believe holiness is a private achievement. We believe it is nurtured, shaped, and sustained in community. The reason we ask people to make these commitments in the context of church membership is that we intend to help one another live them out.
Theologically, the New Testament does not know a solo Christianity. The body metaphor in 1 Corinthians 12 presupposes interdependence. Practically, almost every person who has maintained spiritual integrity over decades of ministry will tell you that they could not have done it alone. Community accountability is not surveillance. It is care.
The Covenant of Christian Conduct calls Nazarenes to wisdom in the use of time, money, and bodies. It names entertainment and media as areas requiring discernment. For many new members, especially younger adults, this is the section that feels most dated or most invasive. Understanding the why helps.
The reason the church addresses entertainment and media is not a suspicion of culture or a desire to keep people away from the world. It is a conviction about how human formation works. We are shaped by what we repeatedly give our attention to. This is not a religious claim. It is a psychological and neurological reality. The stories we inhabit, the images we absorb, the values that get reinforced hour after hour in what we watch and listen to, these things form us. They shape what we find normal, what we desire, what we fear, and what we take for granted.
The covenant is not saying that all popular culture is evil or that Christians should live in a cultural bunker. It is saying that disciples should be intentional rather than passive. The question to ask about any entertainment is not simply “is this permissible?” but “is this building me toward the person God is making me, or pulling me away from it?”
Susanna Wesley gave her son John a standard for discernment that the covenant names: whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off the relish of spiritual things, that thing for you is sin. That is a remarkable standard because it is not a checklist. It is an invitation to self-examination. It asks: what is this doing to the person I am becoming?
Philippians 4:8 “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.”
Paul is not telling the Philippians to avoid thinking. He is telling them to be deliberate about what they give their minds to. The covenant applies that same instruction to a media landscape Paul could not have imagined but would immediately recognize as relevant.
When you teach this, do not start with what people should stop watching. Start with this question: what are you trying to become? What kind of person do you want to be in ten years? Then ask: are the things you are regularly giving your attention to building that person, or slowly eroding them? The covenant is not asking people to give up culture. It is asking them to consume it deliberately.
The Nazarene position on alcohol is the one most often questioned by people coming from other Christian traditions, where moderate drinking is considered acceptable. Many thoughtful Christians drink occasionally with no apparent spiritual harm. So why does the Church of the Nazarene call its people to abstinence?
The covenant is clear about this: Nazarenes abstain from alcohol as an expression of self-giving love and solidarity with individuals, families, and communities who suffer pain and trauma because of alcohol abuse and addiction. The position is not primarily about what alcohol does to the person drinking it. It is about what it does to the people around them.
This is not a purity code where drinking a single glass of wine makes you spiritually compromised. It is a communal witness rooted in love. In a world where alcohol destroys families, enables abuse, and takes lives, the Nazarene tradition has said: we choose to abstain not because wine is evil but because our neighbor’s suffering matters more to us than our personal freedom to drink.
The covenant acknowledges that other Christian traditions reach a different conclusion and does not condemn them for it. But it asks Nazarenes to make this sacrifice of freedom out of love. That is a different and more compelling argument than “the Bible says not to.”
Romans 14:21 “It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother or sister to fall.”
Paul’s argument in Romans 14 is the most honest biblical foundation for the Nazarene position. He is not saying wine is inherently sinful. He is saying that love for your brother or sister who is vulnerable to it is more important than your right to it. The covenant applies that logic to a contemporary context where addiction and alcohol-related suffering are widespread.
The covenant calls Nazarenes to abstain from tobacco and other substances used outside proper medical care. The human body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Practices that are destructive to the body, mind, and the social structures around us are inconsistent with that conviction. This is not about legalism. It is about the theological claim that our bodies belong to God, and how we treat them is a matter of stewardship, not personal preference.
Paragraphs 29.5 through 29.8 of the covenant are among the most important and least discussed. They address greed, racism, corruption, and competing loyalties. Understanding why the church includes these alongside alcohol and entertainment reveals an essential part of the Nazarene vision of holiness.
One temptation in holiness traditions is to reduce holiness to personal purity. Keep your own life clean, stay away from the bad list, and you are living a holy life. The Covenant of Christian Conduct will not let us do that. It names systemic and social sins alongside personal ones, because holiness that ignores injustice is not the holiness of the New Testament.
The covenant names racism, ethnic preference, tribalism, sexism, religious bigotry, classism, and exclusionary nationalism as contrary to God’s love and the mission of Christ. It calls Nazarenes to resist greed in all forms, oppose predatory financial schemes that exploit the poor and elderly, and resist all forms of corruption that use power to take advantage of others.
Why? Because Jesus said the second great commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself, and your neighbor includes the person being exploited by the system you are comfortable with. A person who abstains from alcohol but participates in or tolerates racism has not grasped the holiness that the covenant is describing. The holy life is not just a clean personal life. It is a life that reflects God’s justice and love in every dimension.
Micah 6:8 “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
The prophetic and holiness traditions are not in tension. They are two expressions of the same conviction: that God cares about the whole of human life, and that the people who bear his image are responsible to reflect his character in how they treat one another.
The covenant places racism, sexism, and classism in the same document as alcohol and entertainment. In many Nazarene churches, the conversation about alcohol is routine. The conversation about racism and economic justice is rare. What does that selective engagement say about which parts of the covenant we have internalized?
The covenant’s position on human life, covering abortion, euthanasia, and related questions, rests on a single conviction: every human being is created in the image of God, and that dignity is not conditional on age, ability, circumstance, or utility. Once you understand that, every position in this section follows from it.
The Church of the Nazarene opposes abortion because it believes that human life created in God’s image begins at conception. This is not a political calculation. It is a theological claim. If every human being is an image-bearer of God, then that dignity must be protected at its most vulnerable, before the child can advocate for itself, before society can decide whether this life is convenient.
The covenant does not stop at opposition. It requires commitment. Responsible opposition to abortion means commitment to programs that care for mothers and children. It means that the congregation is a community of love, prayer, and practical support for women in crisis pregnancies. A church that opposes abortion but offers no help to pregnant women in difficult circumstances has only done half of what the covenant asks.
The covenant also makes clear that the church must be a place of redemption and hope for those who have experienced abortion. The response to someone who has terminated a pregnancy is not condemnation. It is the message of God’s forgiveness and grace. Your congregation almost certainly contains people carrying grief and shame about this. The covenant gives you language and authority to meet them with grace, not judgment.
The opposition to euthanasia flows from the same root. If human life has dignity given by God, then the decision to end it is not ours to make based on quality-of-life calculations or the desire to relieve suffering. The covenant does not require prolonging life at all costs through extraordinary means. It is saying that intentionally ending a human life, even mercifully, crosses a line that belongs to God alone.
This is a conversation your congregation will have. Families face impossible medical decisions. The covenant does not offer simple answers to every clinical situation. It offers a framework: human life has infinite worth, suffering calls for compassion and presence rather than elimination, and the church’s role is to be with people in their hardest moments rather than advising them toward death.
The 2023 Manual’s approach to human sexuality begins not with a list of what is forbidden but with a theological affirmation of sexuality as God’s good gift. This order is not accidental. It is the key to teaching this with integrity. You cannot adequately explain what the covenant prohibits without first understanding what it is trying to protect.
The covenant begins with a theological claim: our capacity for connection, intimacy, and desire reflects the image of a God who is himself a community of love. The Trinity is a unity of love among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are made in that image, which means our yearning for connection with another is not a concession to weakness. It reflects God’s own character.
This means sexuality is not primarily dangerous or suspect. It is significant. It is the area of human life where we most deeply reflect the relational nature of God, and therefore the area where distortion of God’s design causes the most harm. The covenant is protective of sexuality precisely because it takes it so seriously, not because it regards it as dirty or shameful.
The covenant describes marriage as a covenant between one woman and one man, intended to reflect the covenant between God and his people. The why is both theological and symbolic. Marriage, when it functions as God designed, is a witness. It demonstrates in human relationships what God’s faithful, exclusive, self-giving love for his people looks like. Two people publicly binding themselves to one another in faithful covenant is an enacted parable of God’s love.
This is why the integrity of marriage matters so much to the church. When that covenant is broken by adultery, abandoned by divorce, or distorted by arrangements that undermine its exclusive and permanent nature, it weakens the witness the church is called to bear. The covenant is not trying to regulate private relationships; it is protecting a sign that points to God.
The covenant names unmarried sexual intercourse, same-sex sexual activity, adultery, pornography, and sexual violence as contrary to God’s intention. Each of these is rooted in the same positive vision: sexuality is meant to be lived out in the covenant of marriage between one man and one woman, and anything that falls short of that distorts the design and harms the person.
For same-sex attraction, the covenant acknowledges directly that the origins of this attraction are complex, that the call to sexual purity in this area is costly, and that God’s grace is sufficient for it. The church’s responsibility is not to condemn people for their experience of attraction. It is to be a welcoming, forgiving, and loving community where people are not alone in their struggle.
What the covenant will not do is pretend that the distinction between attraction and behavior is unimportant. Both the standard and the grace must be held together. The standard without grace produces shame and exile. The grace without the standard produces confusion about what the church believes.
After naming what the church asks people to refrain from, the covenant closes with three affirmations. First, where sin abounds, grace abounds even more. Second, the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and our sexuality must be shaped by God’s will. Third, the people of God are marked above all by holy love, and the church must be a welcoming, forgiving community for the broken.
1 Corinthians 6:19–20 “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies.”
Your congregation already contains people living in the complexity of every topic this section addresses. They are sitting in the pew. Before you teach on sexual ethics, ask yourself: can the person who is secretly struggling with same-sex attraction, the person who had an abortion at nineteen, the person whose marriage is fracturing, the person who cannot stop using pornography, can each of them hear in what you are about to say both the truth about God’s design and the availability of God’s grace? If only one of those comes through, you have not taught the covenant fully.
The final major section of the covenant addresses stewardship, and as with every other section, the why comes first: God is the owner of everything. We are caretakers, not owners. That single conviction, when believed, transforms the relationship to money, possessions, time, and the natural world more than any specific rule about tithing ever could.
The covenant calls Nazarenes to tithe, returning ten percent of their income to God through the local church. The why is not financial sustainability, though congregations that tithe can do ministry in ways that congregations that do not cannot. The why is theological: the tithe is an act of acknowledgment. It is how you say with your money what you believe in your theology, that this is God’s, and I am a steward of it.
Hoarding money, accumulating beyond need, and organizing your financial life entirely around personal security are not morally neutral choices for a Nazarene. They are in tension with the conviction that God owns everything and we hold it in trust. The tithe is the practice that keeps that conviction from becoming a belief we hold only in our heads.
The covenant names greed as something to resist in all forms, and it is specific about what that means: rejecting the prosperity gospel, opposing gambling and predatory financial schemes, and refusing to participate in economic practices that oppress or exploit others. Every person we encounter has infinite worth. Any economic system or personal habit that treats people as means to our financial ends violates that worth.
This is the prophetic edge of the covenant again. The person who tithes faithfully but supports systems that exploit the poor has not yet arrived at the stewardship described by the covenant.
The covenant calls Nazarenes to care for creation. The why is embedded in the creation story: God pronounced the creation good and appointed humanity to steward it for God’s greater purposes. Creation care is not a political position. It is a theological one. The earth belongs to God, we have been entrusted with it, and how we treat it is a matter of faithfulness, not preference.
When people understand why the church holds its positions, the conversation changes. They may still disagree with specific applications. But they are no longer reacting to arbitrary rules. They are engaging with a vision of human flourishing rooted in the character of God, the teaching of Scripture, and the accumulated wisdom of a global community of people trying to follow Jesus together.
Your job as a pastor is to know the why well enough that you can explain it, hold it with humble confidence rather than defensive certainty, and embody it with enough grace that people want to understand it more. The covenants are not a wall. They are a door into a particular kind of life together.
Start with the why. The what will make sense from there.