Covenanted Nazarene Church of Benacia

The Covenanted Nazarene Church of Benacia, a Nazarene church subordinated to the United Ecclesiastical Corporation of Benacia.

Doctrine

Nazarenes worship the Highest Divinity in His trifold form, of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. At once the three are distinct, and the three are one. The Covenanted Nazarene believer must accept this absolutely or perish in the hereafter, destroyed in unending hellfire. It is the duty of the presbytery to detect and lead to destruction all in their congregations who do not accept this article of faith without question.

The Highest Divinity is the creator of the heavens and all the realms of creation, including Micras. He chose the Yehudim as the vehicles of His Will, guiding them tens of millennia ago across the wastelands of Benacia. The Will of the Celestial Temple was communicated to the Slaves of the Lord through Celestial Messengers who spoke unto the Prophets blessed with the Sight. By these teachings was the Law established for the Rightly Guided, whereby a Harmonious Society might be established. However, the Slaves of the Lord grew wicked and disobedient. They searched the Law and sought to find exemptions from Service to that which was Mandated as Holy. For their Correction, the Lord Commanded that the Yehudim would ever after be placed under the discipline of priests and judges so that they might be scourged and returned to the Light of Perfect Obedience.

Yet still, the Highest Divinity understood that for the Harmonious Society to become manifested upon His Creation it would be necessary for Him to come down unto every realm of existence. To this end He incarnated as a child with the name Yeshua. His mother was known as Miryam. Yeshua preached the Way of Perfect Obedience to Yehudim but was reviled by them, Nonetheless, he gained a small fellowship of believers. The followers very quite good and spreading the message of God Father and Yeshua to the gentiles, especially the people that would be known as the Tellians, Cisamarrese, and later, also to the Alexandrians, Martinos, Matbaics, and Atterans. In the end, the Yehudim, now ruled by the Machiavellians, had Yeshua executed for public disorder.

Nazarenes believe in the eternity of the soul, but for the soul to have a good existence after death, the soul must acclaim Yeshua as the Son of God, confess all sins to God and seek God's forgiveness for them. All other souls will be separated from God upon death.

They commune with their God through a ritual known as communion. They share wine and bread during a service. Other sacraments are baptism, marriage, and the anointing of the ill.

As subjects of the Union-State, Covenanted Nazarenes are bound by the Union Covenant which they must also accept as an article of faith and deny the existence of any contradiction between the covenant and the tenets of their practiced religion.

Liturgial year

• Day of the Birth of the Lord occurs on the second day of the Lord following the solstice of month II.
  • 18.II (336-day year)
  • 24.II (348-day year)
  • 6.III (360-day year)
  • 12.III (372-day year)
• Fastentide begins forty days before the Day of Resurrection, and ends with that same day:
  • 14.IV (336-day year)
  • 20.IV (348-day year)
  • 2.V (372-day year)
• Day of Resurrection occurs on the first day of the Lord following the equinox of month VI:
  • 6.VI (336-day year)
  • 12.VI (348-day year)
  • 18.VI (372-day year)

History

Founded on 23.XII.1690 AN, the Covenanted Nazarene Church of Benacia began as an organisation established by the Religious Affairs Bureau of the Unified Governorates of Benacia (UGB) to supervise those practitioners of the Nazarene faith who signed the Covenant and performed the requisite yearly rites of loyalty to the state. As a subordinate entity of the Civil Executive of the UGB, the Church was ultimately subject to the control of the Political Directorate of Benacia Command. Accordingly, in line with policy concerning other senior administrative appointments, the designated head of the church, the Metropolitan Presbyter, held a nominal tribunal rank in the General Inspectorate of the Black Legions. The Metropolitan Presbyter had been chosen from the Bureau of Coordination and Harmonisation and received formal training in the form of one to one tuition from a Cisamarraese priest in the Nazarene Church of Our Lady of Monsanto. The same priest subsequently conducted the ordination of the Metropolitan-designate. Upon re-signing the Covenant and performing the rites of adoration before the Imperial Icons, the Metropolitan Presbyter was recognised as the Warden of All Covenanted Souls and as the Vicar of Merensk in a ceremony which took place in the Panopticon Citadel of that city on 23.XII.1690 AN with the Szodan of Benacia himself leading the acclamation of one Gerald Nussbaum as the man to whom all Nazarene in the Unified Governorates would now owe obedience in matters spiritual. After the second session of the Congress of Chryse the Church was subordinated to the United Ecclesiastical Corporation of Benacia, the body with responsibility for regulatory supervision of all covenanted religions within the Benacian Union.

In 1708 AN, during the first month of the year, the congregations of the Benacian Union were subjected to a reading by the presbyters instructing them to offer worship to Yeshu ben Pantera as "the Word made Flesh". The manufactories of the artisans and artificers were duly set to work preparing bejewelled icons bearing proclamations of the new revelation in time for Easter.