New Abolitionist Covenant

In the name of God, let us abolish nuclear weapons... now.

The Christian faith must be demonstrated anew in each historical moment. Christians must find ways to relate timeless but timely faith to their own situation, showing what they will embrace and what they will refuse because of Jesus Christ. In the fall of 1981, a group of Christians gathered to discern an appropriate response to the nuclear arms race.

The result was a "New Abolitionist Covenant" that made clear that the only appropriate response by people of faith was an unequivocal rejection of the nuclear arms race…. The existence and spread of nuclear weapons is not just a political issue... it is a question that challenges our worship of God and our commitment to Jesus Christ...

Now, a decade after the end of the Cold War, we find ourselves faced with another moment of truth. But this moment is now more an historic moment of opportunity and hope, rather than a reaction to crisis based upon fear... The geopolitical rivalry between two superpowers is over. Yet many of the weapons amassed... have survived... and are today in search of new justifications and new missions...

The continued development, testing, and reliance on nuclear weapons in the name of national security is an evil we do not accept. At stake is whether we trust in God or the bomb. We can no longer confess Jesus as Lord and depend on nuclear weapons to save us.

Conversion in our day must include turning away from nuclear weapons as we turn to Jesus Christ. The maintenance and development of nuclear arsenals is a sin against God, God's creatures, and God's creation. There is no theology or doctrine in the traditions of the Church that could ever justify the use or the threat of use of nuclear weapons...

The God of the Bible loves the poor and demands justice for the oppressed. To continue to spend tens of billions of dollars on nuclear weapons every year while millions go hungry is a grievous failure of compassion and an affront to God. But by God's grace our hearts can be softened in order to heed the biblical vision of converting "swords into plowshares." It is time for the Church to bear witness to the absolute character of the Word of God, which is finally our only hope...

No longer trusting in nuclear weapons, we refuse to cooperate with preparations for their use or threatened use. Trusting anew in God, we will begin cooperating with one another in preparations for peace. We covenant to work together for peace and join with one another to make these vital commitments:

Prayer

We covenant together to pray. Prayer is at the heart of Christian peacemaking. Prayer can change us and our relationships. Prayer begins in confession of our own sins and extends into intercession for our enemies, bringing them closer to us. Through prayer the reality of Christ's victory over nuclear darkness can be established in our lives and can free us to participate in Christ's reconciling work in the world.

Education

We covenant together to learn. Our ignorance and passivity must be transformed into awareness and responsibility. We must act together to dispel our blindness and hardness of heart. We will ground ourselves in the biblical and theological basis for peacemaking. We will become thoroughly and deeply informed about the dangers and costs---human, financial, and ecological---of nuclear weapons and the steps to be taken toward their abolition. We will become aware of the Church's teaching on these matters.

Spiritual Examination

We covenant together to examine ourselves and to shed the light of the Gospel on the nuclear situation. We will examine the basic decisions of our personal lives in regard to our jobs, lifestyles, taxes, and relationships, to see where and how we are supporting reliance on a security system based on weapons of mass destruction. The Church should be concerned with the spiritual well-being of its members whose livelihoods are now dependent on the production and maintenance of nuclear weapons. We will undertake a thorough pastoral evaluation of the life of our congregations in all these matters.

Evangelism

We covenant together to spread the gospel of peace. We will speak out and reach out to our friends, families, and Christian brothers and sisters about the dangers of nuclear arms and the urgency of this moment of opportunity. We will take the message to other churches in our neighborhoods, to our denominations, and to the decision-making bodies of our churches at every level. The cause of peace will be preached from our pulpits, lifted up in our prayers and made part of our worship. We will offer faith in God as an alternative to trust in the bomb.

Public Witness

We covenant together to bear public witness. Our opposition to nuclear weapons and the imperative of peace will be taken into the public arena: to our workplaces, to our community and civic organizations, to people of other faith traditions, to the media, to our government bodies, to the streets, and to the nuclear weapons facilities themselves. A prayerful presence for peace needs to be established at all those places where nuclear weapons are researched, produced, stored, tested, deployed and where decisions are made on these issues. The gatherings, events, and institutions of the churches will also become important places for our public witness. We will make our convictions known at all these places, especially on significant dates in the church calendar and on August 6 and 9, the anniversaries of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nuclear Abolition

We covenant together to work to abolish nuclear weapons. We will publicly advocate abolition and will act in our local communities to place the call for that goal on the public agenda. We will press our government and other nuclear powers to halt all further testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons and take immediate steps to move steadily and rapidly to eliminate them completely.