Covenant Life Church is a 3000+ member "reformed charismatic" church in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The church was established in 1977 by a group of Christians including Larry Tomczak and C.J. Mahaney. It is currently led by Joshua Harris, the best-selling author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye and Boy Meets Girl. It is the flagship church of Sovereign Grace Ministries.
Covenant Life Church has its roots in the city-wide charismatic prayer meeting Take and Give (TAG) which ran from 1970 to 1979. It was founded by ten people who met in a house. TAG's instigator was Washington resident Lydia Little, who had experienced the Jesus People revival in California and wanted to see similar renewal brought to local young people. The most spectacular growth of TAG occurred after Larry Tomczak moved to the area and attendance steadily skyrocketed to over 2,000. Nearly of all the original members of CLC were at one point members of TAG. The church itself was established in 1980 with around 350 former TAG members.
Covenant Life was initially led by Larry Tomczak and CJ Mahaney. Mahaney later assumed sole leadership. In September 2004, after several years of preparation, Mahaney stepped down in favor of Harris, the former Executive Pastor of CLC and founder of the New Attitude singles conference, recentlyrenamed Next .
Tomczak eventually left the group and has subsequently suggested that the increasingly Calvinistic theology was a major factor in this parting of the ways.
Covenant Life's other pastors include Kenneth Maresco, Mark Mitchell, Don DeVries, Grant Layman, Braden Greer and Robin Boisvert.
The church currently meets on Muncaster Mill Road in Gaithersburg. They hold two Sunday morning services, one at 9:00am and the other at 11:30am.
Covenant Life also runs a K-12 day school and a home school program. Almost 300 students currently attend the day school, which is accredited by the Association of Christian Schools International and the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools. Over 500 students are enrolled in the home school program.
Read more about Covenant Life Church: Church Plants
Famous quotes containing the words covenant, life and/or church:
“Happy is the house that shelters a friend! It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that relation, and honor its law! He offers himself a candidate for that covenant comes up, like an Olympian, to the great games, where the first- born of the world are the competitors.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Silent waters rocking on the morning of our birth,
like an empty cradle waiting to be filled.
And from the heart of God the Spirit moved upon the earth,
like a mother breathing life into her child.”
—Gordon Light (20th century)
“I condemn Christianity. I raise against the Christian church the most terrible accusation that any accuser has ever uttered. It is to me the ultimate conceivable corruption. It has possessed the will to the final corruption that is even possible. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity: it has turned every value into a disvalue, every truth into a falsehood, every integrity into a vileness of the soul.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)