Covenant groups have been around for hundreds of years in other religious traditions. After the Reformation in Europe, some people found that religious gatherings in small groups in private homes offered a more meaningful religious experience than formal worship services. Protestant denominations such as the Methodist Church have successfully integrated small groups into the fabric of everyday church life for generations. More recently, non-denominational megachurches have flourished in part by setting up an expectation that all church members are part of a small group, and then encouraging each small group to add more people until it can divide into two groups, and so on.

Unitarian Universalists have adapted the covenant group model to fit our own distinctive congregational culture. For example, Unitarian Universalists have generally tended to resist splitting their existing covenant groups into two new groups, preferring to develop more enduring relationships. On the other hand, Unitarian Universalist covenant groups typically use exactly the same meeting format as covenant groups in other religious traditions.

Here at First Unitarian Church, we started with three covenant groups in the year 2000. Over time, I wrote out a series of covenant group discussion guides for these groups to use. We also used covenant group discussion guides from the Unitarian Universalist Church of Augusta, Maine. We encouraged the formation of additional covenant groups. Two of the original three covenant groups were still meeting after thirteen years. Other groups met for a year or for several years and then disbanded. The net result is that as of the fall of 2012, we had twenty-one covenant groups that included one hundred and seventy-one adults in a congregation of four hundred and forty adult members.

In some ways, our covenant groups are similar to the covenant groups in other Unitarian Universalist congregations. First, we use a standard format for covenant group meetings, which includes a centering reading, a check-in, a guided discussion, a closing reading, and an opportunity for evaluation. Second, we encourage groups to include no fewer than eight people and no more than twelve people. These upper and lower bounds are quite common. Third, we encourage all of our covenant groups to engage in a service project at least once each year for the church or for the larger community. Fourth, we ask each covenant group to develop a covenant among themselves to guide their behavior during their meetings.

In other ways, our covenant groups may be different from the covenant groups in other Unitarian Universalist congregations. First, some of our covenant groups have included both parents and children. We have encouraged these so-called family covenant groups to begin their gatherings by having dinner together as an extended family. Then, while a child care provider supervises the children, the adults have their discussion. At the end of the gathering, the parents and children may spend a few moments talking together or listening to a story. Second, we have encouraged our groups to stay together indefinitely rather than automatically disbanding after a year, which is the practice in some congregations. Third, we have relied on staff members (or, more recently, Covenant Group Advisory Committee members) to assign church members and friends to covenant groups based on such things as compatible personalities or shared stage of life. Fourth, we have encouraged the members of our covenant groups to share leadership responsibilities among themselves rather than build the groups around the leadership of a trained facilitator.

In the fall of 2009, First Unitarian Church adopted a four-year cycle of monthly spiritual themes that help structure our worship services. This collection of covenant group discussion guides matches those monthly spiritual themes and provides an opportunity for members of our covenant groups to explore our monthly spiritual themes more deeply. The four-year cycle of monthly spiritual themes loosely matches the four-year cycle of annual themes for our children and youth ministry program, thus providing some additional coherence within the church as a whole.

Each discussion guide includes several ways to approach the topic or theme. Usually there are one or more open-ended questions at the beginning of the discussion section. Next are a series of quotations or poems, each of which is followed by one or more questions. There are more options than any group could cover in a single gathering. Which options the group uses for its discussion is the decision of whoever is providing leadership or the group as a whole. The options are numbered for convenience, but the numbers are not necessarily a ranking or a recommended sequence.