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Harvest Hills Home Page
Report of 2001 Seminar on Zion
Oak Hill Congregation
of the Community of Christ
Tristake Mission
Community of Christ
World Church Web Page
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THE HARVEST HILLS COMMUNITY COVENANT
We, the members of Harvest Hills Association
in order to develop a society in which people may
live and work joyfully together, make this
covenant with God and with each other that we
shall seek to establish a community in which His
will may be done upon the earth; that His laws
might become our laws, His ways our ways, His
love our love, and His peace our peace.
The bow in the cloud is the symbol of our quest:
We seek Zion. With the ancients, we make this
covenant: to search for truth that we might
embrace it, and to look upward that we might
find it. We would bring heaven to earth as
laborers in the Lord's harvest.
In this covenant we acknowledge God as the
creator and owner of the earth and ourselves as
stewards over his creation. We seek ways to
manage and distribute the earth's resources so
that all persons may be granted the opportunity to
serve in dignity as a steward over their own share
of God's bounties.
We affirm that our proper business is service to
all people and that this service may take many
forms, call us into many situations, direct us into
many places within the world community. We
seek to mobilize and pool our resources to provide
the necessary instruments by which we may be
sent to places of need equipped with tools which
will meet those needs.
We seek to organize ourselves so that we may do
together that which we cannot do alone. In all our
relationships we seek to promote the welfare of all
people, loving our neighbors as ourselves, with
God, as seen in His eternal Son, the exemplar of
our virtue, the prototype of our behavior.
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We covenant to follow Him.
We affirm that God is the designer of the
universe and that it is His will that all things shall
conform to His design. We seek that design.
We recognize that the quest for truth may
demand rigorous self-discipline with sacrificial
devotion to divine law and the common good. We
affirm that righteousness is the application of
truth in all of human affairs. We seek all truth.
Our acceptance of membership in this
community association is our declaration of our
willingness to relinquish unrighteous forms of
pride, impatience, anger, hatred, and the
predisposition to misjudge another. Virtue shall
displace in us these and all other frailties alien to
the Kingdom of God.
Our acceptance of citizenship in Harvest Hills is
our declaration of our intention to renounce
selfishness, and our proclamation of the
sovereignty of God and the kinship of all.
In this, our covenant, we affirm our resolve to
establish a society of unity and love as the Godly
alternative to war; to develop the economic
instruments necessary for the abolishment of
poverty; to endow all labor with new dignity as
each person learns to produce for the benefit of
all; to provide a way of life which contributes to
the divine and lasting union of husband and wife;
the development of harmonious family
relationships, and the rearing of righteous
children; to fashion systems and institutions of
education in which learning becomes an exciting,
life-long experience for all; to re-examine
solutions thought to belong to another age with a
view toward their possible application to the
needs of our time, and to dare to experiment with
solutions which have never been tried.
Finally, we covenant to make ours a
community which shall not be set apart from all
others for the private pursuit of personal gain.
Rather, we shall establish a community set in the
midst of all other communities dedicated to the
discovery with them, for them, and for ourselves,
of the intelligence by which all communities
everywhere may attain for themselves the
abundant life.
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