When a resolution to add this fourth moratorium was moved today, the Presiding Bishop of TEC rose to complain, among other things, that such a moratorium would enable congregations leaving TEC to “alienate their property.”

As usual, nothing could be further from the truth. The key principles set out in the appendix to the Dar es Salaam Statement required both parties “to give assurances that no steps will be taken to alienate property from the Episcopal Church without its consent or to deny use of that property to those congregations.” (WCG Report to the Archbishop of Canterbury at paragraph 34, footnote 11, page 7). It is exactly the kind of “standstill” begged for by +Rowan Williams in his presentation of the WCG Recommendations, where he called all parties to take a step back from what they are doing – that we owe it to the Lord of our Church to do so.

Dr Williams has read the report. He presented its recommendations to the ACC-14. He was present at DES and read that Statement too. Yet he allowed the misrepresentation of the Presiding Bishop to stand, without comment.

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The document, which was advocated by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams earlier this week as the only way to save the fractured Communion, has divided opinion across the Church. In addition, legal questions have been raised as to whether the Church of England itself will be allowed to adopt it.

Now, the representatives of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) decided yesterday (May 8) that the Ridley Cambridge Draft of an Anglican covenant needs more work before it can be presented to the communion’s provinces for adoption. And in a narrow vote, the ACC voted against calling for a moratorium on legal battles over property.

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The 14th Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) by a tight vote on May 8 rejected a move to add a fourth moratorium on issues related to divisions over human sexuality that would have asked for a “cessation of litigation” among member churches of the Anglican Communion involved in disputes over property.

The ACC, however, said it “affirms” the recommendations of the Windsor Continuation Group (WCG), which included not just moratoria on the blessing of same-sex unions, the ordination of persons living in same-sex unions, and cross-provincial interventions, but also “relational consequences” for those who breach them. The original text of the resolution had used the word “notes,” instead of “affirms.”

The word “notes” had been used to reflect the “range of views” expressed by delegates in discernment groups, said Anthony Fitchett, chair of the resolutions committee and a lay delegate. Opponents said, however, that using a “more neutral” word was not useful, since the ACC “needs to give an indication of how it feels” about the WCG recommendations.

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At the ACC-14 meeting in Kingston Jamaica the concept of An Anglican Covenant was a central theme on this, the 6th day of the meetings. Over the past few days the delegates had a number of sessions in Discernment Groups discussing the Covenant and the resolution that would be presented.

Much of the debate today centered on the fourth section ”˜Our Covenanted Life Together’ which, unlike the other three sections, some delegates felt had not had the time for comments and feedback from the provinces. After some strong and a vigorous debate the following resolutions were passed by the Consultative council

The Anglican Communion Covenant

Resolved:08.05.09

The ACC:

1. thanks the Covenant Design Group for their faithfulness and responsiveness in producing the drafts for an Anglican Communion Covenant and, in particular, for the Ridley Cambridge Draft submitted to this meeting;
2. recognises that an Anglican Communion Covenant may provide an effective means to strengthen and promote our common life as a Communion;
3. asks the Archbishop of Canterbury, in consultation with the Secretary General, to appoint a small working group to consider and consult with the Provinces on Section 4 and its possible revision, and to report to the next meeting of the Joint Standing Committee;
4. asks the JSC, at that meeting, to approve a final form of Section 4
5. asks the Secretary General to send the revised Ridley Cambridge Text, at that time, only to the member Churches of the Anglican Consultative Council for consideration and decision on acceptance or adoption by them as The Anglican Communion Covenant;
6. asks those member Churches to report to ACC-15 on the progress made in the processes of response to, and acceptance or adoption of, the Covenant.

After the Council had passed the resolutions the Secretary General Canon Kenneth Kearon explained to the media how the covenant process would be moving forward over the next year and responded to questions.

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After a long, drawn-out debate, and what some delegates referred to as a “confusing” process, the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) on May 8 asked that a “small working group” be appointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury to “consider and consult with the provinces” on Section 4 of the Ridley-Cambridge draft, “and its possible revision.” That group was asked to report to the next meeting of the Joint Standing Committee of primates (senior bishops of each Anglican province) and the ACC, which will meet before the end of the year.

The ACC had, by a vote of 47 against, 17 in favour, and one abstention, defeated a section of the resolution that sought to detach the draft’s controversial Section 4, Our Covenanted Life Together, “for further consideration and work.”

Prior to the vote, however, Archbishop Philip Aspinall, primate of the Anglican Church of Australia, noting that the process had bogged down so that session had to be extended, introduced an alternative resolution that addressed the concerns of both proponents and opponents of the issue. Some delegates spoke against the resolution while one, Rev. Janet Trisk of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, introduced an amendment to include two sections from Archbishop Aspinall’s resolution. Those sections were those that called for the appointment of a small working group and for the JSC to “approve a final form of Section 4.” The amendment was carried by a vote of 33 for, 30 against, and 2 abstentions.

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Kondo, sudan: I want to add my voice and thank the cdg…it seems to me section 4 is the most important…to accept this resolution is to mean we will debate this issue again and again…

Anis: without section 4..we can not call the covenant a covenant..it is section 4 that makes the whole covenant a covenant…the crisis we are going through now is because of the absolute autonomy that this covenant with 123 and 4 affirms the interdependence…we are a communion with autonomy…i would appeal that you would vote against this b/c 1. if we accept this we will lose a great chance to be united…i assure you that there are churches that affirm the whole covenant…and the communion will be divided…if we don’t approve 1234 together…if we wait 10 years we will never get a perfect covenant…the cdg has worked for 3 years very hard..they have broght us a good covenant…we can not undermine the work of the cdg…section 4 is from lambeth and the responses of the diocese/provinces…all that has been done is the commentary has been brought in..its not truet that it hasn’t received any study…it is the outcome of a lot of study…

SE Asia, Stanley Isaac. I want to say that this resolution a should be rejected because it would be disastrous to send to the provinces the text of the covenant without 4 because it would mean nothing for all the rest of us who have been waiting for this document to find a ray of hope for a problem that has divided the communion and embarrassed the churches. This is a defining moment for the communion, We grab it or we dont. It would be a way of united the communion once again in the bond of Christ and truly regard ourselves as one body. That will be a unity only in the past if we do not pass section 4…We have not been taken by surpruse by section 4. I want to express the appreciation of my province we feel disappointed that the concerns to tighten up the appendix, was watered down. We think it is a weak provision of measure for achieving a soluton to the problem. Allow this full text to go forward..

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Diocese of Peru Bishop Bill Godfrey, representing the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone, unsuccessfully called for a “listening process for those involved in litigation,” so that they “feel that justice is being done” and that “the ACC hears them.”

Episcopal Church episcopal representative Diocese of New York Bishop Catherine Roskam suggested that, a listening process should include the voice of “joyful Episcopalians — both liberal and conservative — in the re-constituted dioceses of the Episcopal Church.”

“There’s much good there,” she continued. “They’re faithful Episcopalians and their voices need to be heard as well.”

Earlier in the debate, Episcopal Church lay representative Josephine Hicks spoke against having the resolution’s second resolve to “affirm” the continuation group’s recommendations. She argued that while the Episcopal Church had “complied with all the moratoria — at a significant cost,” others have not honored the ban on cross-boundary interventions. These interventions occur when bishops and priests from other communion provinces enter the territory of the Episcopal Church to minister to disaffected members of the church, without the traditionally required permission of the local bishop.

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THE Anglican Communion may not survive its current crisis over authority and dif­fering theological perspectives, the Archbishop of Canterbury acknowledged on Tuesday.

But he insisted: “Even if we are separated by a number of canonical, theological determinations; even if we blew apart as a communion in chaos and disruption, which God forbid, sooner or later we would have to hear the voice of Christ say: ”˜There’s your brother, there’s your sister, there’s a long journey for you together in the path towards reconciliation.’”

Dr Williams was giving the Anglican Con­sul­tative Council (ACC) a 40-minute presenta­tion on the recommendations of the final report of the Windsor Continuation Group (WCG), the body created, as he put it, to “con­tain the chaos and division” that threatened the Communion over the issue of human sexuality.

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Q: How did the idea to have “discernment groups” come about?

A: One of the things that the (2008) Lambeth Conference was trying to achieve was to create a process within the conference itself to enable every voice to be heard and we felt that there were two or three things that needed to happen. First of all, there needed to be trust. Secondly, there needed to be groups that were small enough for people not to feel that they had too large a group of people they were talking to. And thirdly, a process where they didn’t have to have everything very clearly worked out in their minds before they could speak and talk.
The way we did it at the Lambeth Conference was, first of all, we put people into Bible study groups, and those were groups of eight or nine people that met every day. And so, there was a sense of trust growing out between those Bible study groups. Then, we put five Bible study groups together to make an indaba group. So we were building on units that were already getting to know one another.
We took that same principle here. We created Bible study groups of eight or nine people with a cross section of people across the Communion, trying to make sure that all the groups had bishops, clergy and laity within them. And then we combined three Bible study groups into the four discernment groups.

Q: Why not just call them indaba?
A: There was quite a lot of confusion about why the Lambeth Conference chose the word indaba. My reading of the way it came about was that when indaba was introduced as a way of describing what was going on at Lambeth, it was actually describing the whole process at the Conference, not just what happened in those two-hour groups, the second half of each morning.

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The Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Ecumenical Relations (IASCER) on May 7 asked the 14th ACC meeting here to endorse a set of resolutions, including one that urges the resumption of the Anglican Communion’s dialogue with the Oriental Orthodox Churches of the Middle East.

The resolutions and documents, compiled in a book, The Vision Before Us, also asked the ACC to commend to member provinces for adoption, “key sections” which include matters ranging from the administration of baptism and eucharist, to guidelines for ecumenical participation in ordinations to the Four Principles of Anglican Engagement in Ecumenism.

Gregory Cameron, who is bishop of the Welsh diocese of St. Asaph and former IASCER director, likened the book to “a box of chocolates” that offers many delights and surprises.

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At the ACC-13 meeting in Nottingham a resolution was passed that asked the Secretary General to do a number of things in connection with the Listening Process. They included:

* To collate relevant research studies, statements, resolutions and other material on these matters from the various Provinces and other interested bodies within those Provinces
* To make such material available for study, discussion and reflection within each member Church of the Communion
* To identify and allocate adequate resources for this work, and to report progress on it to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to the next Lambeth Conference and the next meeting of this Council, and to copy such reports to the Provinces.

As a result of this motion The Revd Canon Philip Groves was hired as the facilitator of the Listening process to work within the Anglican Communion Office. Philip is a canon of All Saints’ Mpwapwa, Tanzania and continues his parish ministry in England. Following his presentation at ACC-14 and the announcement of The Continuing Indaba and Mutual Listening Project. In the podcast that follows he talks about the challenges and opportunities of the listening process and the role the new project will play in assisting people to hear and listen to God and to one another on the subject of human sexuality.

This one is over 35 minutes; listen to it all.

At Church gatherings such as ACC-14 the delegates experience different styles of worship, theology and conversations that fosters growth and development in each person. There are also moments when decisions need to be made-the election of a new chairperson, resolutions on very important matters and constitutional questions to name a few. In those moments there is often needed a clear legal mind to help with the process and settle matters when disputes arise. The Anglican Consultative Council has been blessed with the presence of Canon John Rees as its legal Advisor since 1995.

John is a practicing solicitor and Provincial Registrar to the Archbishop of Canterbury. He has advised successive Archbishops for over 20 years. He was also the Convener of the Anglican Communion Legal Advisers Network since its inception in 2001. He served as the Legal Consultant to the Lambeth Commission in 2003-04.

John is an Honourary Canon of Canterbury Cathedral and in the following podcast responded to a variety of constitutional and legal questions that affect the Anglican Communion.

Watch it all.

The Compass Rose Society, an international body which seeks to support the ministry of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican Communion is seeking “a more formal relationship” with the Anglican Consultative Council, its president told the council on May 6.

Currently, the Compass Rose Society is “a free-floating body with no group to which it connects and no accountability,” said its president, Canadian Bishop Philip Poole, in an address at the ACC meeting here. “I would like to ask whether we can have a more formal relationship so that the Compass Rose Society can continue for generations to come.”

There have been misconceptions that the Compass Rose Society is merely “an administrative bureaucracy” that doles out money to Anglican bodies, said Bishop Poole, who is also a suffragan (assistant) bishop in the diocese of Toronto (York-Credit Valley). “We’re much more than a source of money for meetings,” he said, adding that the Compass Rose Society was “taking responsibility” for the image that it projects and was doing something to change it.

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From here (posted earlier, but this section was not excerpted):

However, it was also drawn to Canon Kearon’s attention that another infringement of the requirements of the instruments of communion had been the continuance of the lawsuits against orthodox churches in North America by TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada. The cessation of these lawsuits was a requirement of the Dar-es-Salaam Primates Meeting in 2007 as part of the compliance required of TEC and the ACoC with the Windsor Report and thus a condition for the re-entry of TEC and ACoC delegates to the Councils of the Communion ( they had been asked to withdraw from ACC 13 at Nottingham, but attended as visitors). How was it that TEC and ACoC had not complied with a requirement of the instruments of communion, yet had been readmitted, and that Uganda was not complying with the embargo on cross-border jurisdiction and yet its selected delegate was barred? The answer given that Uganda as a province had not been barred, only its delegate who was a product of cross-border intervention.

In the colonial era the Anglican Church and British Imperial Power were not just continuous but identical. Orthodoxy and imperialism were inseparable in the British colonial project. British imperialism used religious orthodoxy ”“ the true faith, and political orthodoxy, parliamentary government as opposed to despotic rule. This helps to explain the resistance among liberals to orthodoxy. It was unthinkable for them to espouse orthodoxy without being associated with imperialism.

This now presents a problem for those from the non-western former colonial world who espouse orthodoxy. They are thought themselves to be relics of a colonial past. The challenge for them is demonstrate that religious orthodoxy is liberating and transformative. Liberals see them only as representing an alliance of orthodoxy with oppression.

In creating uncolonial space where they demonstrate that the gospel brings liberation and transformation, the Global South leaders are not only creating space for themselves, but also for the orthodox of western societies who are marginalized because they will not go along with the cultural pressure for diversity, inclusion and pluralism and are therefore seen as rigid and repressive. Evangelicals since John Stott have been regarded as marginal from the centres of power both of English society and the English church. Thus uncolonial space is global.

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The Windsor Continuation Report to the Archbishop of Canterbury and ACC-14 sets out nine recommendations that its authors felt would best deal with the present crisis in the Anglican Communion. Of the nine recommendations set forward, none of them pertain to the cessation of litigation by TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada. This omission would not be as ironic if it were not for the fact that the text of the WCG’s report does directly refer to the litigation going on in North America. Paragraph 34 says, “”¦a fourth moratorium requested by the unanimous voice of the Primates at Dar es Salaam in 2007 – to see the end of litigation – has also been ignored.” However, when the report’s authors decided to make recommendations as to the “four moratoria,” they dealt with moratoria one, two, and three (on consecrations of bishops living in a same gender union, permission for rites of blessing for same sex unions, and interventions in provinces) but omitted moratorium number four. Why would they do that?

When asked why this “fourth moratorium” was addressed in the report’s content, paragraph 34, but not in its recommendations, the highest level answer I could get was, “I can’t tell you the answer to that question.”

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During the past few years the Anglican Communion has been developing a ”˜Listening Process’. The root of the process was in response to the request of the bishops attending the Lambeth Conference in 1998 in Resolution 1.10 to establish “a means of monitoring the work done on the subject of human sexuality in the Communion” and to honour the process of mutual listening, including “listening to the experience of homosexual persons” and the experience of local churches around the world in reflecting on these matters in the light of Scripture, Tradition and Reason. The Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Nottingham (ACC 13) encouraged such listening in each Province and requested the Secretary General to collect and make available these resources for use in the Communion.

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The 14th Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) will consider requesting member provinces to increase their financial contributions to the Anglican Communion by 10 per cent over a three-year period to cover the cost of inflation.

Briefing ACC delegates on the state of Communion finances, Canon Kenneth Kearon, secretary general of the Anglican Communion, expressed concern that “we’re now operating on low reserves” of £104,000 ($183,000 Cdn).

Mr. Kearon distributed a list of contributions made by each province and urged delegates to look at them. He said “an exceptional increase of 10 per cent” had similarly been requested at the last ACC meeting in 2005, but “frankly, very few gave; money wasn’t forthcoming.”

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The Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) asked May 6 for a renewal of the Anglican Communion’s process of listening to homosexual persons and those who struggle with the full inclusion of such persons in the life of the church.

A resolution passed by the ACC on the fifth day of its May 2-12 meeting here says the council “recognizes that listening is a long-term process” and is linked to the Windsor Continuation Group’s call (in paragraph 26 of its final report) for “gracious restraint” from blessing same-gender relationships and the ordination and consecration as bishops of people living in such relationships.

The resolution also notes its request echoes the continuation group’s call for the renewal of the Listening Process and “a real seeking of a common mind upon the issues which threaten to divide us.”

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One of the most important issues to come before the Anglican Consultative Council is the draft text of the Anglican Covenant. The idea for an Anglican Covenant has been before the Communion for the past few years and it was in 2006 the Archbishop of Canterbury established the Covenant Design Group. The process has been one of evolving texts as ideas suggestions hopes and fears from Primates, Provinces and the Lambeth Conference were shared with the Design group. Just before the Anglican Consultative Council began The Covenant Design Group produced The Third (Ridley Cambridge) Draft .

The Chair of the Covenant Design Group Archbishop Drexel Gomez presented a history of the process and the current text at ACC-14 on Monday May 4th. His address may be found here

On Tuesday May 5 Archbishop Gomez and Bishop Gregory Cameron held a press briefing reviewing the document and Bishop Gregory explained the process that ACC will follow in considering the text and discussed the kind of resolution that would be needed to forward the Covenant to the provinces for their consideration.

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Finally, for those who are alienated within the Episcopal Church, the aim of the “professionally mediated discussion” has already been determined: “WCG believes that the advent of schemes such as the Communion Partners Fellowship and the Episcopal Visitors scheme instituted by the Presiding Bishop in the United States should be sufficient to provide for the care of those alienated within the Episcopal Church from recent developments.”[4] (emphasis added)

According to this recommendation of the WCG, those within TEC will have two alternatives to choose from: a Communion Partners Fellowship scheme that has no details as yet beyond DEPO and mere fellowship, or an Episcopal Visitors scheme imposed by the Presiding Bishop. What is the point of gathering those alienated by TEC for a “professionally mediated conversation” when the results have already been pre-determined? Is it an opportunity for further indoctrination in the false gospel of TEC? Or institutional loyalty? Or simply an exercise designed to wear down their resistance to false teaching?

This report from the WCG is the culmination of five years of conversation, dialogue, schemes, reports, and committees that have all failed to adequately address the crisis before us. These efforts have failed in part because they have not adequately talked with or heard from those most hurt by this crisis, those persecuted orthodox Anglicans in North America. Skeptics will be forgiven for recognizing in these WCG recommendations the same processes that have failed to hold the Communion together, and the same processes of delay that TEC will take advantage of while imposing a false gospel at home and throughout the rest of the Communion.

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Reacting to Bishop Cameron’s statement, the lay delegate of the Anglican Church of Canada, Suzanne Lawson said, “Interesting.” She added, “I think that would be difficult for the Canadian church. I actually spend a good deal of time thinking about how change comes about and time is an important element in that. If we are to be looking in Canada at something that will take seriously the Covenant and reframe our thinking, we need some time to talk about it at General Synod in Nova Scotia and we may need more time three years from then.” General Synod, the Canadian Anglican church’s governing body, which gathers every triennium, is scheduled to meet in Halifax in 2010.

Ms. Lawson said, “We need to respect the provinces where that is a required amount of time.”

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The Anglican Communion is a family of autonomous Churches. It finds its identity in the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. The Churches of the Communion, which are self-governing, share something of a common history, and have traditionally set their faces against centralised government in favour of regional autonomy1. The Anglican tradition was fashioned in the turmoil of reformation in Western Europe in the sixteenth century. Its historic formularies acknowledge the circumstances in which its emerged as a distinctive church polity. The non-negotiable elements in any understanding of Anglicanism – the scriptures, the creeds, the gospel sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist, and the historic episcopate – are to be found in the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral2; and the Instruments of Communion – the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates Meeting – provide an evolving framework within which discussion and discernment might take place. It remains to be seen if the circumstances in which the Communion finds itself today – externally and internally – might require over the years a shift of emphasis from “autonomy with communion” to “communion with autonomy and accountability”.

The principle of autonomy-in-communion described in the Windsor Report makes clear that the principle of subsidiarity has always to be borne in mind. If the concern is with communion in a diocese, only diocesan authority is involved; if communion at a provincial level then only provincial decision. But if the matter concerns recognising one another as sharing one communion of faith and life, then some joint organs of discernment and decision, which are recognised by all, are required. It is this necessity which led the WCG to articulate the move to “communion with autonomy and accountability” as being a better articulation of the ecclesiology which is necessary to sustain Communion.
So the task for the CDG was to write something which preserved the autonomy of the Churches, but which provided for a strong glue that held us together. It had to reflect the fact that as Anglicans we do not believe in one authority structure, but in dispersed authority – the whole people of God bearing witness to the Truth found in Jesus Christ, and each church rooting its witness in its own mission context.

Please take the time to read through it all (7 page pdf).

Take the time to watch it all (almost 30 minutes).

Two leaders in the development of the proposed Anglican covenant said here May 5 that the process which might be used for Anglican entities to adopt the document is “evolving,” even as that evolution has made for some seemingly contradictory statements in the past days.

Anglican Communion Deputy Secretary General Gregory Cameron told reporters “we’re feeling our way” in terms of the implications for those provinces that decide not to sign onto the covenant, whether entities other than the provinces which are now members of the Anglican Consultative Council (as listed in the council’s constitution) would be allowed to adopt the covenant and whether there would be a time limit for provinces to decide.

On May 4, Cameron had told reporters that “at the moment there is no linkage to signing the covenant” and participation in the life of the communion. But, he added, “if a number of provinces were to adopt the covenant, then I think naturally the question would be asked whether some sort of assessment or change would have to take place.”

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Its first two recommendations are about the listening process and the moratoria. The first recommendation invites the instruments of communion to commit themselves to a further stage of the listening process.

In this process we are at the stage to allow honest discussion and gain a picture of where the communion as a whole is in its response to Lambeth 1.10 which strongly discouraged ordination of persons in same-sex relations and blessing of same-sex unions but also encouraged listening to the experience of homosexual people. This process should continue, be reinforced and deepened.

I want to make it clear that without that kind of attention to the underlying issue, the appeal for restraint and moratoria is likely to sound rather hollow. You cannot say to large tracts of the communion you cannot pretend that this issue is not there or real. We need to exchange our convictions and thoughts hopes and fears more fully.

In that light, the second recommendation needs to be read about the moratoria. Windsor and Dromantine were consistent in urging that provinces hold back from deeper divisions that make common conversations harder. The moratoria called for restraint from electing a person in a same-sex union to the episcopate, from approving rites for blessing of same sex unions, and from intervention in other provinces to offer pastoral care. The Dar es Salaam communiqué made a heart felt plea about litigation.

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