By the mid-1970s American Wicca had grown past any single lineage's ability to represent it, and that created a practical problem: witches and covens had none of the legal standing routinely available to members of other religions. In spring 1975 a coalition of Wiccan elders, drawn deliberately from more than one tradition, drafted a covenant to fix that. Thirteen covens ratified it at the Summer Solstice, and the group incorporated as a nonprofit religious organization in California on Halloween that same year.
The choice to be cross-traditional rather than lineage-specific is the organization's whole reason for existing. A Gardnerian coven, an Alexandrian coven and a solitary eclectic practitioner can all hold Covenant of the Goddess credentials on the same terms, something no single tradition's own governing body could offer. Governance runs by consensus through an elected national board rather than any hierarchy above the coven level, and roughly two-thirds of its ordained clergy are women.
Fifty years on, Covenant of the Goddess remains one of the oldest and most broadly recognized Wiccan legal bodies in the United States, with more than a hundred affiliated covens and a continuing role certifying clergy for legal purposes, marriage officiancy among them, that member covens could not easily secure alone.