Covenant Presbyterian Church, where the Covenant School was founded and located, is a prominent church affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in America, a theologically conservative denomination.
The Presbyterian Church in America, a mission group founded in the 1970s, split from a larger Presbyterian body on issues including the ordination of women, which the PCA opposed.
In 2019, the sect asserted the so-called The Nashville Declarationa conservative statement about sexuality and gender identity, as a “biblical statement of allegiance”.
The sect’s separate report on gender and sexuality, prepared in 2020, addresses “the sin of homosexuality and transsexual behavior and lust.”
At one point, the Covenant Presbyterian Church had as many as 2,200 members, according to the online biography of a former pastor, Jim Bachmann. It built a $15.5 million hilltop sanctuary in the affluent Green Hills neighborhood of Nashville in the late 2000s, including a pipe organ, an unusual feature in a church newly built.
It opened its affiliated school in 2001. Bachmann said he decided to open the school in part because church parents lamented the difficulty of getting their children into other private schools in the already packed area.
Mr Bachmann said the shooting was “painful” for everyone in the community.
As for the church and its teachings, Mr. Bachmann said, “we are known for being conservative and biblical.”
“You try to love everyone,” he said, “but the view of the Presbyterian Church in America is that homosexuality is a sin. But Mr Bachmann said he rarely mentioned the issue in his lectures, stressing that “it is a sin, and there are many: Pride is a sin, envy is a sin sin, greed is a sin.”
The church has experienced a turbulent times after a leadership struggle in the mid-2010s, but maintained his stature within the broader sect.
The current pastor is Chad Scruggs, whose 9-year-old daughter, Hallie, was killed in the shooting.
Scruggs grew up Catholic in Hendersonville, Tenn., according to a biography published online by his former church in Dallas, but became active in a ministry on the college’s Presbyterian campus.
Ligon Duncan, rector and executive director of the Reformed Theological Seminary, which trains many Presbyterian pastors, knows Mr. Scruggs through Presbyterian circles.
“The kids loved him, he loved his wife,” Duncan said in an interview on Monday. “They look great in a picture, but they really are.”
Kevin DeYoung, pastor of another prominent PCA congregation, Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, NC, said Covenant is “a very popular church” within the denomination. “Everybody knows that church and many people know Chad.”
For now, he says, he’s doing the only thing he can. “Everybody will be praying for Covenant Presbyterian, for Chad and for that school,” he said. “We pray this is an opportunity to show that the gospel gives us hope that the world cannot understand.”
Mr. DeYoung’s church also has a school attached to it. That school is more and more concerned about safety. It recently added a second full-time security officer and locks all doors during the day. On Monday afternoon, he was preparing for a previously planned annual meeting about the school, which he predicts will now be drawn up by questions about security, due to the impact negative of the shooting in the cult.
In a statement to the national organization, spokesman Bryan Chapell said: “We regret the loss and trauma associated with this terrible tragedy. May God comfort all who mourn.”
