Reading the covenant aloud and renewing it is one of the few genuinely distinctive Congregational rituals, and it survives in churches whose theology has changed beyond recognition since the seventeenth century. The classic texts are short and behavioural rather than doctrinal — they say how members will treat each other, attend, give, and submit to admonition, not what they believe about the atonement. That is the structural reason Congregational churches were able to move from Calvinism to liberalism to whatever they hold now without a schism over doctrine at every step: the binding document was never a creed. The most famous American church covenant, the Salem covenant of 1629, is one sentence long.