Covenant Discipleship: A Guide to Covenant Groups

Covenant discipleship is the practice of a small group making a shared promise, a covenant, about how they will follow Christ, and then regularly giving one another an honest account of how they are keeping it. It is mutual accountability with a gentle spirit: the point is not to catch each other out, but to help each other keep faith.

Where covenant discipleship comes from

The practice is old, but its best-known form comes from the eighteenth-century Methodist movement in England. John Wesley organised the people who responded to his preaching into small class meetings of around a dozen people, who met weekly with a leader. The heart of each meeting was a simple question put to every member, in some form: how is it with your soul?

Wesley believed that people grew in faith when they watched over one another in love. The class meeting gave ordinary people a place to speak honestly about their lives, to confess, to encourage and to be prayed for.

In the late twentieth century, the United Methodist writer David Lowes Watson drew on that tradition to shape what are now called Covenant Discipleship groups: small groups that write a covenant together and meet each week to give an account of it. The idea has since spread well beyond Methodism.

How a covenant works

A covenant is a short, written statement of what each member intends to do. It usually balances two kinds of practice:

• Inward practices: prayer, reading scripture, worship, reflection.
• Outward practices: acts of kindness, justice and service toward others.

The group writes the covenant together, each member agrees to it freely, and it is reviewed from time to time. It is close kin to a rule of life, written for a community rather than one person.

A good covenant is:

• Specific: “read the day’s passage and write a few lines about it,” not “read the Bible more.”
• Keepable: written for ordinary weeks, not ideal ones.
• Shared: the same commitments for everyone, with room for one or two personal ones.
• Reviewed: revisited regularly, so it grows with the group.

Mutual accountability, rightly understood

“Accountability” can sound like supervision. In a covenant group it means something warmer: each person gives an account, and the others receive it with grace. Nobody is the inspector. Everybody is both giving and receiving.

Three things make it work:

Honesty

The account is only useful if it is true. Groups do best when it is normal to say “I didn’t manage it this week, and here is why.”

Confidentiality

What is said in the group stays in the group. Without that trust, honesty does not last.

Grace

Falling short is expected. The response is encouragement and a fresh start. The guide to running an accountability group goes into the quieter ways this can go wrong.

The problem of performance

Any group that shares its inner life faces a temptation: to perform. When one person shares something polished, others feel pressure to match it. When you can see what others have written before you write, it is easy to shape your words to fit.

Over time that slowly hollows out a group. People say what sounds faithful rather than what is true.

How Ordo helps

Ordo is an iPhone app built for covenant-style groups. Each group writes a shared rule (its covenant) in six parts, including personal accountability areas for each member. Each day asks three small things: a written reflection, a response to the day’s scripture and a short check-in on your commitments.

Then comes what Ordo calls the reveal. Reflections are held until every member has written, and then released to everyone at once. No one can read ahead, and no one can shape their words to match someone else’s. That small design choice makes room for honesty.

There are no streaks or badges, and no notifications telling you you have been away too long. Ordo follows the church year, so groups can review their covenant season by season. It is in beta on iPhone; join the waitlist to try it with your group.