Covenant Life Church

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Covenant Life Church is an evangelical megachurch in Gaithersburg, Maryland. It began in 1977 and later helped start other churches. It was the flagship church of Sovereign Grace Ministries until it left the group in December 2012.

The church has roots in a citywide prayer movement called Take and Give (TAG), which ran from 1970 to 1979. TAG grew to include thousands of young people. In 1977 a small group of TAG attendees started meeting in a Maryland home and formed Gathering of Believers, which eventually became Covenant Life Church. The church moved to different schools and facilities around Montgomery County before uniting in the mid-1980s as Covenant Life Church at Magruder High School. A new 45-acre campus opened in 1993 at 7501 Muncaster Mill Road, and the church expanded its worship space in 2002.

Leadership was initially collaborative, with many small groups in member homes. As the church grew, C. J. Mahaney became lead pastor and Larry Tomczak helped lead a growing network of Covenant Life churches and affiliates. The church helped start a group of related churches that later became Sovereign Grace Ministries, then Sovereign Grace Churches (2014). In the 1990s and 2000s, leadership shifted to Joshua Harris, who became senior pastor in 2004 while Mahaney continued to mentor Sovereign Grace.

In 2011-2012, internal disagreements over church leadership and polity led Covenant Life to leave Sovereign Grace Ministries. Harris and Mahaney later resigned from The Gospel Coalition in 2014. Also in 2014, a former member was convicted of abusing boys in homes during the 1980s and 1990s (not at Covenant Life). A civil lawsuit against Covenant Life and Sovereign Grace Ministries was dismissed in Maryland in 2014 because the statute of limitations had passed.

In 2015 Joshua Harris announced he would step down as lead pastor to study theology, and in 2017 P. J. Smyth was installed as the new lead pastor after immigration clearance. In 2018, disagreements within the Board of Elders led to tensions and Smyth leaving the church; the board continued to lead Covenant Life, and Smyth planned to plant a new church in the area.

Covenant Life School is a K-12 accredited day school on the church campus, with over 300 students. It is accredited by the Association of Christian Schools International and the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools, and its mascot is the cougar. The church also runs a Family Schools Program to support homeschooling families.

Over the years, Covenant Life has sent out more than a dozen church plants in the U.S. and abroad, including Covenant Fellowship Church in Pennsylvania, Sovereign Grace Church of Frederick in Maryland, and Iglesia Gracia Soberana de Gaithersburg, the second Spanish-speaking Sovereign Grace church in the U.S. Its pastor José Mercado leads that Spanish-speaking church.