The “Half-Way Covenant,” or Unconverted Church Members

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 16, 1879

The “Half-Way Covenant,” or Unconverted Church Members.

The curse of the church in all ages has been unconverted members. The “mixed” multitude among the Israelites soon began to murmur and then to rebel. These half-hearted and worldly members have been a hindrance and a weight to the church’s power and progress. In our anxiety for numbers we have not been sufficiently guarded as to quality, and the church is full of unregenerated persons, who have more affinity for worldliness than for Christ, and whose religious duties are a bondage. Every revival of religion reveals this fact. When the church is alive and holy, then souls are saved. And the great work of reform must always begin in the church. Such members are hard to manage. They demand Sunday entertainments, lose a relish for Bible truths, absent themselves from the house of God, oppose spiritual Christianity, and, like dead branches on a tree, hinder the vitality and growth of the whole body.

Joseph Cook, in one of his Monday lectures, ascribed the origin and wide prevalence of loose religious opinions in New England to this fact of the admission of unconverted persons to membership in the churches. He gives the following description of the trials of Jonathan Edwards in his endeavor to establish the rule that evidence of conversion should be an indispensable pre-requisite to church membership:—

“I know where, in Massachusetts, I can put my hand on little, irregular scraps of brown paper, stitched together as notebooks, and closely covered all over with Jonathan Edwards’ handwriting. Why did he use such coarse material in his studies? Why was he within sight of starvation? Because he had opposed the half-way covenant. Why did that man need to accept from Scotland funds with which to maintain his family? Because he opposed the half-way covenant. Why did his wife and daughters make fans and sell them to buy bread? Because he opposed the half-way covenant. Because he defended with vigor, as Whitefield did, the idea that a man should not be a minister unless converted, or a church member unless converted, and so set himself against the whole trend of this huge, turbid, hungry, haughty wave of secularization that had been rising since 1631. Of course, he was abandoned by the fashionable. Of course, his life was in some sense a martyrdom. His note-books were made from the refuse of brown paper left from the fans. There is nothing Massachusetts so little likes to be fanned with as those fans Jonathan Edwards’ wife and daughters made and sold for bread. Yes, you starved him; but Scotland fed him, thank God. When Edwards was dismissed, it was proposed that there be a council of ten pastors, and he, of course, claimed the right of choosing five; but he was obliged to go beyond the broad bounds of old Hampshire county in order to find five who agreed with him in opposing the half-way covenant.”—Selected.