Against this background, what is most remarkable about the Dublin meeting is that its working document on the Primates’ Meeting cites only the preliminary remarks of Archbishop [Donald] Coggan, but makes no mention whatsoever of the subsequent work done to implement those remarks by the Lambeth Conferences and the Covenant in specifying the role of the Primates’ Meeting, work that by now has been accepted by all the Instruments of Communion. As far as one can discern, this established understanding played no role at all in the deliberations at Dublin. While one might try to parse the provisions of the Dublin document to align it to greater or lesser extent with the accepted precedents, the simple fact is that those other sources were not acknowledged, were not quoted and were not even the subject of obvious paraphrase. Those meeting in Dublin staked no claim to continuity with the past, ignoring the will of the most authoritative of the Instruments of Communion””the Lambeth Conference of Bishops.

For all these reasons, the group of Primates who met in Dublin cannot be recognized as acting in accord with the accepted Communion understanding of the Primates’ Meeting as an Instrument of Communion. This Instrument thus joins the others as now being dysfunctional and lacking in communion credibility. The role of the Lambeth Conference as an Instrument of Communion is to “express episcopal collegiality worldwide.” But in 2008, when the bishops of most Anglicans “worldwide” were not present, it could not perform this function. It accomplished little of substance and is now regarded throughout much of the Communion as a symbol of futility. Similarly, the Anglican Consultative Council has been re-structured legally so that it is no longer recognizable as the Instrument defined in the Covenant or in past Anglican documents. The role of the Archbishop of Canterbury as an Instrument of Communion is to function as “a primacy of honor and respect among the college of bishops,” as “a focus and means of unity,” and the one who “gathers” the Lambeth Conference and Primates’ Meetings. Whatever may be said about the cause of the disintegration, it is incontrovertible empirically that Canterbury has been unable to perform this function over the last three years. The Communion thus finds itself with no working Instrument that has been able to perform its necessary function, follow its rules, and garner credible acceptance from the majority of the Communion.

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Today, less than 8 years after the 2003 emergency Primates Meeting, 15 of the Primates are no-shows. There is loss of trust and a sense that words and efforts are meaningless – that the Episcopal Church in particular will act unilaterally against the mind of the Provincial leaders and global Anglican witness.

The Episcopal Church continues to decline, with its membership the oldest among U.S. denominations and its internal reports showing no reliable sources or patterns of growth. In an Anglican Communion of some 80 million members, only about 700,000 Episcopalians attend services on an average Sunday. The [partnered] gay bishop consecrated in 2003 downsized his diocese, spent most of his time at gay movement and media events, and recently announced his retirement after less than a decade in office.
A [partnered] lesbian bishop was consecrated, and some gay and lesbian couples have had high profile ceremonies, including a recent lesbian union worded contentiously as a variation on the Prayer Book marriage rite.

So, a small, affluent, socially homogeneous inner circle of a very small denomination indulges its fancies at the cost of a diverse, global Christian fellowship – a fellowship whose leaders hung in with misrepresentations and broken commitments while trying to maintain bonds of affection. That is, until this 2011 Anglican Primates Meeting in Dublin.

Read it all and make sure to take special note of the numbers of Primates attending.

Evident Preoccupation with Issues of Anglican Crisis: The four current emphases of IASCUFO indicate that issues arising from the Anglican crisis are dominating the group’s attention. The definition of church and the related question whether the communion is a church or a communion of churches constitute an issue that is, yes, fundamental but also a bit elementary for a group purporting to be advancing the theology of the communion as a whole. The reason is probably a pervasive of sense of crisis and disintegration. The second topic of the Anglican Covenant is obviously crisis-related, as is the third on the Instruments of Communion and their inter-relations. The first half of the fourth topic, the reception of the work of the instruments and of the ecumenical dialogues, is also crisis-related, with only the second half indicating a nod to the complex and diverse ecumenical dialogues. Ecumenism is likely to get short shrift, most unfortunate in light of Anglicans’ historic role in catalyzing ecumenical relationship and work. Theology and doctrine are likely to be marginalized altogether as managing and responding to the crisis take center stage. The Anglican crisis is full-blown, I have criticized efforts to minimize it, and it deserves the kind of attention it has been receiving. It is simply unfortunate that this conflation of commissions appears to suck all other theological and ecumenical air out of the room. The health of the communion depends partly on other kinds of work moving forward and receiving support ”“ and it may well be that this unfortunate conflation has occurred mainly for financial reasons.

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“Sumptuous” Is the word the Rev. Dr. Peter Moore used to describe this years’ Mere Anglicanism Conference held January 20-22 at St. Philip’s Church in Charleston. Over 200 participated in the sixth annual Conference held, this year, in honor of the 12th Bishop of South Carolina, the Rt. Rev. C. FitzSimons Allison.

“Over half a century ago Dr. ”˜Fitz’ Allison began preaching, teaching, and writing about the Word of God’s Grace in ways that are still bearing fruit in Anglicanism today,” said Conference organizer and retired Dean of South Carolina, the Very Rev. William McKeachie. “This year’s Mere Anglicanism Conference, the biggest and best ever, was the church’s way of saying, ”˜Thank you,’ to this amazing bearer and sharer of God’s Grace.”

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(By Cheri Wetzel).

The main day of presentations has concluded. This afternoon, we heard a brilliant piece by the Rev. Dr. Ashley Null on Recent findings in Cranmer Research. For the first time ever, the development of the Doctrine of Anglicanism made sense to me, from the early days of the beginning of the Church, through Cranmer’s time as Archbishop of Canterbury. The early Church Fathers, the writing, analysis and evaluation of competing texts in Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, plus the Reformation writers, especially Luther, became a completed picture ”“ no longer a jig saw puzzle with lots of missing pieces. Rationale for Cranmer’s development of the Book of Common Prayer I and II finally make sense. Because major portions of this paper will be published this calendar year, this commentary ends here. Dr. Null has promised that when the publishing cycle is complete, we will do an in-depth interview. Trust me, it will be worth the wait for this excellent material.

This lecture was followed by the Rev. Dr. Steven Paulson, escapee from the frozen tundra of central Minnesota. His topic was “Preaching the Gospel of Grace.” A clerical member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), Dr. Paulson spoke with clarity about the difference between the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of the Sadducees, both of which are warned against in Paul’s letters. “Cheap Grace” and the problems between works and grace that have inhabited the Church since the early days, received great discussion. How do you actually preach the Gospels when these differences in understanding still exist? Get to the core. Who is the person of the Christ? What was he sent to us to accomplish? How did he do that? Is this healing balm still vital and active and functioning today? Yes. Preach it!

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(By Cheri Wetzel).

The Rev. Jeffrey Miller of St. Helena’s, Beaufort South Carolina delivered the homily. Here are my notes from this homily, which was excellent.

Tertullian, a Roman theologian, said, “We are but of yesterday, yet we have felled every spot you occupied. We have left nothing to you but empty broken tokens of your gods.”In the short span of 200 years, a formerly persecuted sect filled the whole earth and even invaded Caesar’s palace.
How? Edward Gibbon wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that Christians felt it was the sacred duty of each person to share their faith. Why is Christianity struggling and shrinking across the West and Islam growing? Because you and I have failed. We have become convinced that it is impolite, impolitic and rude to discuss in public our faith. We believe that our faith is a private matter and is best kept to the self. This is decidedly not how the disciples or the early Church felt.
Remember that first Palm Sunday in Jerusalem? Jesus was walking down the street and the people were ripping palm branches off the trees and shouting. It was pandemonium. The disciples ran to Jesus and begged him to make the people stop. He replied, “If they are silent, even the rocks will cry out.”
His last words to his disciples before his ascension into heaven were, “Go ye into all the world and make disciples”¦”
So let me ask you. Is it impolite, impolitic and rude to warn someone about a speed truck that is heading their way? Is it impolite, impolitic and rude to tell someone about a cure for cancer?

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From its birth in 1559, the Church of England trumpeted latitudinarianism in the early church as the basis for its existence, and now for the more catholic minded among them they all wonder why ”˜Anglicanism’ has become, like mystery Babylon the great, the “hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.”

There are many good, loyal, God loving people within Anglicanism, both those still looking to Canterbury, and those who have abandoned those in communion with ++Rowan Cantaur for putatively more pure forms. Ultimately, however, the anti-Catholic notions of 1559 will catch up to them. Why? Because allowing or accepting anything means holding to nothing. Kinsman can have the final word: “In the Episcopal Church, some of the most conspicuous examples of applied individualism in ministerial free-lances are to be found in ”˜Catholic parishes.’ This is inevitable. Those who believe they possess the Catholic priesthood and the Catholic episcopate are bound, by conditions of the Episcopalian system, to act as priests-at-random and bishops-at-large . . . . Congregational methods seemed ”¦ a travesty on the true work of Bishops and Priests in the Church of God, to illustrate the effort to ”˜raise an altar on one’s own centre of gravity’ and to be ”˜a little Holy Catholic Church, all by one’s self.’ I could never view every minority of one as an Athanasius, or feel that the one criterion of Catholic truth was that it should be held by only one person! I was never on of those Anglo-Catholics who can think of themselves each as Athanasius contra ”“ Ecclesiam. Ego contra: ergo Athanasius!”

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Here is a nice color brochure to remind ou of this upcoming gathering.

…the issue goes beyond an interchange of views. What has happened is that TEC has demonstrated repeatedly an incapacity or unwillingness to deal with the views of the rest of the Communion with actual Christian responsibility. Such responsibility is assumed in council and by respecting the decisions of council.

TEC will do this on several bases: Communion councils have no legislative authority, she says, and therefore do not require adherence; majority votes by global South patriarchs are intrinsically undemocratic, and so should not be granted power; the Kingdom of God favors diverse viewpoints, and so uniform actions in the Communion are actually unfaithful. But the main reason TEC gives for not deferring to the decisions of the Communion’s representative bodies is that she is being “prophetic”, and therefore is being called by God quite precisely to oppose and subvert these decisions.
The self-given prophetic mantle is a claim that is difficult to argue against, by definition. But it is worth noting that the convenience of this difficulty is itself a major part of the problem in the Communion: TEC has adopted a self-identity that cannot be questioned and overturned, and thereby she has become impervious to all reason. This is not just a matter of style, as though the point is “let’s all tone down our rhetoric” ”“ a suggestion one hears a good bit, as if talking more quietly would solve our problems. No: at issue here is that TEC has laid out a way of approaching disagreement that brooks no compromise, and therefore makes impossible constructive engagement altogether. On this matter, I commend a fine essay by Cathleen Kaveny in the recent volume Intractable Disputes about the Natural Law: Alisdair MacIntyre and his Critics (Notre Dame, 2009). Kaveny, hardly a right-wing shill, ably points out how reasoned moral discourse in America especially has been utterly eviscerated of common avenues of engagement largely because of “prophetic” commitments to ideological fixities that finally amount to self-blinding.

But there is more to this prophetic self-designation: its effect of moral intransigence is simply contrary to the specifically Christian vocation of deferring to the Body, a vocation that asks that we “not insist on our own way” (1 Cor. 13:5), and “count others as better than ourselves” (Philippians 2;3)….

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This is the third in a series of essays on the proposed Anglican Covenant.” The first, entitled “Communion, Order and Dissent,” attempted to present what might be called the inner logic of the covenant”“a logic that rests upon a commitment by all the provinces to “mutual subjection within the body of Christ.” The second had the subtitle “On How To Dissent within a Communion of Churches.” Its purpose was to show that communion, as understood by Anglicans, must have as a part of its ideation an understanding of how to dissent from common belief and practice. Apart from such an understanding communion cannot survive the inevitable disagreements that arise within and between its member churches. This third essay explores ways to address dissent that serve to sustain communion even in the face of actions that plainly are at odds with Christian belief and practice as “recognized” within the Anglican Communion. If an agreed upon understanding of the nature of dissent is necessary to sustain and strengthen communion, so also is an agreed upon understanding of appropriate ways to address dissent. No matter how deep their divisions may be these are questions the Primates dare not ignore if the communion of Anglicans is to be sustained.
In the near term, however, it is a virtual certainty that they will address neither the question of dissent nor that of response to dissent. The Archbishop of Canterbury has invited the Primates to meet in Dublin, but he has done so in a way that guarantees that no significant business will be done. By inviting the Primate of a Church that has acted against the request of all the Instruments of Communion he has called for a meeting a significant number of Primates feel they in good conscience cannot attend. In view of these circumstances, there seems no good reason to call such a meeting. What of any possible value can be achieved?

A primary Instrument of Communion appears to have reached an impasse. The Communion’s mechanisms for sustaining communion have become dysfunctional. A part of the reason for this sad state of affairs is what the Bible calls “hardness of heart.” A part, however, stems from a lack of understanding of how to dissent and how to respond to dissent within a communion of churches.

This essay addresses the question of response to dissent….

Read it all.

In short when communion is not sustained by a central juridical authority but by mutual recognition and submission within the body of Christ, there must be a means of dissent that coheres with these formative commitments. There must also be a means of addressing dissent that retains communion between a dissenting province and the Communion as a whole. Ecclesial disobedience as set forth above provides both an instrument of dissent and a response that prevents communion from lapsing into constantly dividing segments.

How are mutually recognized forms of belief, practice and worship to be sustained within a communion that does not have and does not want a centralized juridical structure? Given Anglicanism’s commitment to locally adapted expression of Christian belief and practice, in a world of competing nationalisms a covenant based upon mutual recognition and mutual subjection within the body of Christ is the only way I see to achieve this goal. Nevertheless, a shared understanding of dissent within a covenant relation must be part of the way in which the Communion sustains its common life. Apart from such an understanding, those who dissent will have no wisdom about the proper way to express their dissent, the Instruments and provinces of the Communion will have no wisdom about how to respond, and the Communion as a whole will inevitably devolve into a federation or (worse) a host of fragments that once formed a remarkable example of catholic Christianity.

To return to the beginning of this essay, the Archbishop of Canterbury, TEC’s Presiding Bishop, the ACO and the Primates will all be involved in the upcoming meeting in Ireland. Whether they admit to it or not, the question of dissent within a communion of churches will rest just under the surface of all their conversations. One can only hope and pray that the issue raised in this essay, the nature of ecclesiastical dissent, will rise to the surface of their conversations and receive the sort of attention that will allow the Anglican Communion to retain its identity, its unity and its integrity.

More concretely, the issue is this. What steps can the Primates take when they meet to bring the question of dissent out in the open where it belongs? There is an answer to this question, and it involves all the players that will come to Dublin. First, because it is the Archbishop of Canterbury who “gathers” the Primates and because his office is the primary locus of moral authority within the communion, the answer begins with him. He has authority to set the agenda for the Primates Meeting, and he should announce publically that the issue of TEC’s dissent from the moral authority of the Instruments is on the agenda. Further, if as is rumored, the Presiding Bishop has refused a request voluntarily to withdraw, the Archbishop should employ his authority to gather and withdraw her invitation….

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The danger in the current situation is that arguments over the details of the covenant text or how the covenant might be used are distracting us from central theological and ecclesiological questions which lie at the heart of the vision of our life together articulated in the covenant. Those rejecting the covenant have not, in their critiques, set out any credible theological and practical alternative either of a vision of our life as a fellowship of churches or of what we should do now given the reality of our fractured but still much treasured communion. Indeed, Jonathan Clatworthy claims ”˜Those who oppose a change do not normally feel obliged to propose a different change’ while Chris Sugden and Vinay Samuel simply claim we need ”˜to recognise the role that the Jerusalem Declaration could play’. More seriously, although never clearly articulated or justified, behind their critiques are understandings on some key theological areas addressed by the covenant which are seriously flawed.
Jonathan Clatworthy ends his response by claiming that recent controversies and ethical and theological disagreement ”˜should be resolved by patient, informed ethical and theological dialogue, not by ecclesiastical power politics and threats of exclusion’. That will require scrutiny not only of the covenant but of the arguments and alternatives of those rejecting it from polar opposite and incompatible perspectives. We need to hear and weigh not just the criticisms of the proposed covenant but the alternative proposals of those who are currently challenging the covenant’s way forward.

The only way to allow the Church of England ”“ and perhaps the wider Communion – to engage in ”˜patient, informed ethical and theological dialogue’ about this crucial issue is to vote for the motion in Synod. This makes no binding commitment but allows diocesan synods and ongoing debate in other arenas to inform Synod’s final decision in 2012. To vote against or to abstain suddenly puts into reverse the general support given to the Windsor and covenant processes by the Church of England and its General Synod and makes the Archbishop of Canterbury’s already difficult calling well-nigh impossible. Anything but a ”˜yes’ vote is, in short, to engage in ”˜ecclesiastical power politics’ and, far from being inclusive, excludes much of the church from further informed discussion and discernment about how we should live together in future.

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One can see the same dynamic at work in the advertisement “Who runs the Church?” composed by members of Inclusive Church and Modern Church. The implicit (and occasionally explicit) vision of the authors is of a church in which “Anglicans have traditionally valued the role of reason and thus expect to learn from other people.” It is a vision of a non-dogmatic church that is forward-looking, devoted to debating matters at a local level, and eager to learn from others. Their cry, if you will, is that “Anglicanism is not dogmatic” and that “Anglicans have never accepted the primacy of Scripture in a Puritanical manner.”

This delightfully gentle vision of Anglicanism suffers from only one flaw: it has very little basis in reality. While liberal Anglicanism has long sought a utopian church that is non-dogmatic about everything but the dogmas of tolerance, non-dogmatism, and social justice, this has never been a position that has laid claim to more than a minority among Anglicans. To the contrary, even the most cursory reading of Anglican history will show that we have a long and notable history of being dogmatic, intolerant, occasionally authoritarian, and gleefully happy to impose a particular interpretation of Scripture on others. I suspect that the Roman Catholics burned at the stake, the Puritans whose ears were lopped off, the Non-Conformists who were fined for not attending their parish church, the evangelicals who were attacked for their “enthusiasm,” the Ritualists who were put on trial or (worse) tarred-and-feathered, or the so-called conservatives and liberals of today who feel threatened by their church would question just how tolerant and non-dogmatic Anglicanism actually is. In reality, Anglicanism is a bit like those late medieval knights who imagined themselves to be noble and chivalric even as they raided and pillaged defenseless towns and villages. At times we’re a little too willing to believe our own smug press.

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The most obvious disagreement is whether provinces will be subordinated to the international authorities and threatened with punishment if they do not obey. We wrote that the Covenant

was first proposed by the Windsor Report in 2004 to put pressure on the North American churches, after a diocese in the USA had elected an openly gay bishop and a diocese in Canada had approved a same-sex blessing service. Opponents had no legal way to expel the North Americans, so the Covenant is designed to achieve the same result by redefining the Anglican Communion to exclude them.

Goddard considers this a ‘highly implausible spin’. He does not explain why, but he does reply:

In fact, the Windsor Report’s stated aim was that a covenant ‘would make explicit and forceful the loyalty and bonds of affection which govern the relationships between the churches of the Communion’ (para 118).

Our point exactly! How one can force people to be loyal and affectionate has been one of the great puzzles of the project; clearly any talk of force is obviously meaningless without some kind of punishment.

Later, repeating the denial of any subordination or punishment, Goddard describes how the current text was established:

In fact, the Windsor Report’s stated aim was that a covenant ‘would make explicit and forceful the loyalty and bonds of affection which govern the relationships between the churches of the Communion’ (para 118).

Our point exactly! How one can force people to be loyal and affectionate has been one of the great puzzles of the project; clearly any talk of force is obviously meaningless without some kind of punishment.

Later, repeating the denial of any subordination or punishment, Goddard describes how the current text was established:

There was substantial resistance to the idea that there should be any development of a body which could be seen to be exercising universal jurisdiction in Anglican polity. Anglicans wished to keep the autonomy of their Churches. Secondly, it became clear that the processes of adoption of the Covenant would be immensely complicated if the Covenant were seen to interfere with or to necessitate a change to the Constitution and Canons of any Province… Section Four of the RCD is therefore constructed on the fundamental principle of the constitutional autonomy of each Church.

This too accords with our argument: the reason why the Covenant restricts its punitive proposals to the relationships between provinces is that legally it cannot do more.

Read it all.

The GAFCON statement notes a third sad fact about the Anglican Communion today:

The third fact is the manifest failure of the Communion Instruments to exercise discipline in the face of overt heterodoxy. The Episcopal Church USA and the Anglican Church of Canada, in proclaiming this false gospel, have consistently defied the 1998 Lambeth statement of biblical moral principle (Resolution 1.10). Despite numerous meetings and reports to and from the ”˜Instruments of Unity,’ no effective action has been taken, and the bishops of these unrepentant churches are welcomed to Lambeth 2008. To make matters worse, there has been a failure to honour promises of discipline, the authority of the Primates’ Meeting has been undermined and the Lambeth Conference has been structured so as to avoid any hard decisions. We can only come to the devastating conclusion that ”˜we are a global Communion with a colonial structure’.

This third fact is also in line with the observation of Metropolitan Hilarion that the source of false teaching and lax discipline in the Communion has its origins in the “North and the West,” that is to say, in Canterbury’s own jurisdiction. I have noted elsewhere that the “Instruments of Unity” as currently constituted are under the sway of the “Lambeth bureaucracy,” and hence the ecumenical failure of Anglicanism can only be laid at the door of Canterbury himself. This tough fact is exactly what Hilarion has brought to the banquet table at Lambeth Palace.

So GAFCON and the Orthodox share the sober critique of contemporary Anglicanism. It would be facile to say that today’s Anglican confessors are of one mind with the Orthodox. Surely there are issues of substance and ongoing discussion between the two.

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A proper reading of the covenant shows it is, on this account, indisputably Anglican and inclusive of all these components of our Anglican heritage accepting that ”˜each of these has a place in the church’s life’.

The critique of IC and MCU distorts this by unfairly and unreasonably painting the covenant as simply a mixture of two concerns pushed to their extremes: ”˜strict evangelical Protestantism’ (the neo-Puritan method) and ”˜Roman Catholicism’ (more centralised and clerical, subordination to an international body). In doing so, they show no awareness of the many elements of the covenant reflecting their own emphases and its overall nuance and balance. Even more worrying is their apparent blindness to the dangers in their own tendency of ”˜de-emphasising revelation and history’. In fact, in the substance and tone of their campaign, they demonstrate that they have become ”˜enthusiasts’ for an isolated ”˜religious liberalism’ who have little regard for ”“ or even fundamentally reject ”“ any ”˜limits on the degree of adjustment to the culture and its habits’.

In summary, their response to the covenant reveals that they are far from being the authentic voice of Anglicanism or the Church of England. Instead, they are at risk of seeking to remake the Communion in their own particular Western liberal image and thus make it captive to what Oliver O’Donovan described as The failure of the liberal paradigm in his first Fulcrum sermon on subjects of the day (now published by SCM as A Conversation Waiting to Begin). At root, their ill-informed polemic suggests that ultimately they cannot accept that their own tradition in Anglicanism must ”“ like evangelical and catholic perspectives ”“ also learn ”˜to live with certain tensions or even sacrifices’ if it is to be truly Anglican. As a result, they rail against a covenant one of whose main strengths is precisely that it prevents any one part of Anglicanism from heading where they sadly risk heading – ”˜in a direction ultimately outside historic Anglicanism’.

Read it all.

This is the topic for the 2011 Mere Anglicanism Conference in Charleston, South Carolina in January.

Consider coming and make plans now.

So, who wants an Anglican covenant? For some reason it is never acknowledged that the only province to sign up so far is Mexico, whose primate is a Patron of Inclusive Church (the other province close to signing is that well-known neo-Puritan African province, South Africa). He perhaps wants it for the same reasons many others have welcomed it.

The covenant will, for example, force the Church of England to stop thinking of itself simply as, in the words of the advertisement, ”˜the mother church of the Communion’ whose actions are so important that on its own it can prevent developments such as the covenant. It will create a more egalitarian and post-colonial international fellowship of churches affirming not simply an English ‘mother church’ but a common inheritance of faith and shared vision of life together “in communion with autonomy and accountability” (3.1.2). That will then shape their commitments, including mutual accountability, to one another and to a pattern of life marked by such virtues as spending time “with openness and patience in matters of theological debate and reflection, to listen, pray and study with one another in order to discern the will of God” (3.2.3).

Above all, the covenant will hopefully help refocus the Church of England and all covenanting churches on mission. That mission is not, as in the advert, defined by whether or not some outside the church are ”˜put off by the Church’s apparent reluctance to change’. It is rather ”˜God’s call to undertake evangelisation’ and ”˜share in the healing and reconciling mission’ of God in Christ ”˜”for our blessed but broken, hurting and fallen world”’ (2.2.1).

Read it all.

Read it all–and please consider attending.

When asked by the American Anglican Council for the minutes of this December meeting, Anglican Communion Office officials told us that they were not yet available as they needed to be approved at next week’s meeting. For now, we are left to guess why Janet Trisk, a white priest and lawyer, was chosen to replace a black laywoman on the SCAC if their intent was to promote diversity. Are we to understand that there was really no other qualified lay representative from Africa who could replace Ms.Walaza? And was there not even another qualified clergy representative from Africa who could take her place until such a lay representative could be found? (See the ACC roster here) Is it merely a coincidence that Janet Trisk played a major role at ACC-14 in delaying and bottling up Section 4 of the Anglican Covenant, as documented on video by Anglican TV and live-blogged on Stand Firm in Faith by AAC Communications Officer Robert Lundy, and that her participation on the SCAC will almost certainly further the agenda of those who would weaken an already-weakened Anglican Covenant?

And what about those new “proposed bylaws” of the SCAC – can we have a look at them? Again, in the words of Mr. Butter from the Anglican Communion Office (ACO):

Asked if copies of the proposed new bylaws were available for review, the ACO responded that “discussions about the Articles are still ongoing between the legal advisor and the Charity Commission, so they are not yet available.”

Is it any wonder that the majority of the Anglicans in the Global South, and the GAFCON Primates, have concluded that the ACC, the SCAC and its unpublished bylaws are simply a tool for the West to continue to exercise colonial hegemony over the rest of the Anglican Communion?

Read it all.

….the whole question of diversity and communion more broadly has been a consistent Anglican concern, at least since the late 18th-century English bishops required of the nascent Episcopal Church that she reorder her Prayer Book (e.g. replacing those parts stricken from the Americans’ proposed version of the Apostles’ Creed), if she wished to have her ministers and bishops “recognized” through a process of continuous succession with the English Church. It was still a question when the first Lambeth Conference met and resolved that “it is necessary that [newer Anglican churches] receive and maintain without alteration the standards of faith and doctrine as now in use in [the Church of England]”, echoing in this instance TEC’s initial commitments from 1786. The bishops then explained that, nevertheless, “each province should have the right to make such adaptations and additions to the services of the Church as its peculiar circumstances may require”. Immediately, however, the bishops noted a proviso, “that no change or addition be made inconsistent with the spirit and principles of the Book of Common Prayer”, a standard that, if rather loose, at least pointed to a text. Further, the bishops insisted more concretely, “that all such changes be liable to revision by any synod of the Anglican Communion in which the said province shall be represented”. And here, obviously, “representation” is not viewed as a veto power for one’s own interests, but rather as a participatory role bounded by unitive action.

One can argue whether this Lambeth resolution was consistently followed through in a strict sense. And so, with respect to the broader diversity-unity question, the Communion has tended to address difficult issues on this score as they have arisen, rather than through a strict censorial mechanism, whether constitutional or confessional. But does this lack of a defined template that can measure when diversity becomes “too much”, or when the “recognizable becomes unrecognizable” indicate that in fact there is no means of discernment at all? Certainly not, since the dynamic of recognition ”“ unity and separation ”” has performed this task quite adequately: when one church is no longer recognized as representing other Anglicans before the world, diversity has exceeded the measure of unity.

And, indeed, if the Archbishop of Canterbury himself, based on whatever means by which he has made this determination (in this case, years of consultation) no longer recognizes TEC as representative of the Communion that ”“ for TEC and many other Anglican churches ”“ is substantively defined by their bonds with him, then it is a simple descriptive fact that TEC’s particular convictions have undercut common Communion commitments. There is not some other mechanism that awaits application to reveal this fact. Indeed, the claim made by the Presiding Bishop that a Covenant is needed first before this can be done, ”” and therefore it cannot be done now ”” only underscores TEC’s choice to move to the side of previously acknowledged means of discernment regarding appropriate Christian diversity with the Communion, and to claim a kind of Communion chaos on this matter that even more desperately seeks some kind of covenantal resolution.

Finally, what are we to make of the fact that the Presiding Bishop and other leaders of TEC have long sought to undercut the strength of local diversity within the American Church ”“ there are vast swaths of no-go zones in TEC for traditional and conservative Episcopal clergy and scholars, imposed quite consciously by bishops and the committees they lead? Or that they have now put in place disciplinary canons (the revised Title IV rules) that would give the Presiding Bishop the arguably unconstitutional power to inhibit fellow bishops without prior consultative permission? None of this suggests a stable understanding of the relationship between diversity and Christian unity, despite claims to the contrary in her Pastoral Letter. While the diversity-unity question deserves (and has received) significant Scriptural and theological scrutiny, its practical import is nonetheless contained within these kinds of “actions”, as Lund put it: one judges the character of a tree of unity by its fruit, if always somewhat retrospectively.

Read it all.

A year ago, after analyzing carefully the chaotic vote on the Trisk amendment in Jamaica, we expressed the “hope that this will further demonstrate to the Communion the corrosive effect the current conflict and the efforts of those who seek to defeat or disable the Covenant are having in the Communion.” We have to conclude, however, that in the past year this hope has not been realized and the corrosion has only spread. Many of the primary players at Jamaica are now on the Standing Committee itself and they freely denounce and try to subvert the very Covenant they are to administer. TEC’s Presiding Bishop, like Dr. Fitchett calls the Covenant “un-Anglican,” challenges the Archbishop of Canterbury’s understanding of Pentecost and dismisses canonical requirements of the Church of England as “nonsense.” In reply, a Lambeth Palace official noted pointedly that one of the statements made by the Presiding Bishop was not true. The Secretary General notes that TEC does not “share the faith and order of the vast majority of the Anglican Communion” and that some Communion discussions are “at the point of collapse.” The Secretary General interrupted his vacation to meet with TEC’s Executive Council at its request only to be treated rudely while he was there and ridiculed after he left. Five resignations have been reported by the ACC Standing Committee in the last six months, and the Secretary General described its last meeting as the “worst meeting” of his life.

The Communion can hardly tolerate another year like the last one. It is essential that the Communion have structures that work in the midst of ongoing crises in several churches of the Communion. The corrosive effect we spoke of a year ago must now be addressed as a matter of urgency. Five things are needed….

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From David Ignatius in the Washington Post:

Investors keep pounding Europe in part because they don’t yet see the mechanisms that will enforce discipline. The European Union just established a trillion-dollar bailout fund, but what happens when it runs out? There’s a pledge to impose strict conditions on Greece, Portugal and the rest in exchange for loans, but it still isn’t clear how Brussels will make this austerity regime work.

The problem is the one Napolitano describes: Europe remains a union of convenience, which can be discarded by national governments when it suits their purpose. Northern European nations such as Germany like to chide their spendthrift southern counterparts for lack of discipline. But it was Germany and France that demonstrated the toothlessness of the eurozone’s enforcement mechanisms in 2005 by refusing to pay fines when their budget deficits exceeded the limits of the E.U. Stability and Growth Pact.

There are very useful parallels here for Anglicans for those who have eyes to see–KSH.

Notes to editors:

Q. Practically, what does this letter mean for Provinces, national or regional churches who have broken any of the moratoria?

A. Representatives of those Provinces, national or regional churches whose decision-making bodies have gone against the agreed moratoria a) will be asked to step down from formal ecumenical dialogues such as those with Orthodox Churches or the Roman Catholic Church, and b) will no longer have any decision-making powers in the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order that handles questions of church doctrine and authority.

Q. What are the agreements that have been broken?

A. As far back as 2004, the Anglican Communion leadership agreed to three moratoria: 1) No authorisation of blessings services for same-sex unions; 2) No consecrations of bishops living in same-sex relationships; 3) No cross-border interventions (no bishop authorising any ministry within the diocese of another bishop without explicit permission). These have been affirmed repeatedly in subsequent years at the highest levels of the Communion.
Q. Is anyone being asked to leave the Communion?

A. No. By proposing these actions the Archbishop is working to safeguard the common life of the Communion. His proposals come after several churches broke the Communion’s agreed moratoria (their promises to the Communion). Nevertheless the churches concerned remain full members of the Anglican Communion.

Q. Why did the Archbishop decide to issue this letter now?

A. His comments are made at the season of Pentecost when Christians pray for a renewing of the Holy Spirit which is the Spirit of communion and of fellowship. The letter also comes shortly after the Episcopal Church broke one of the moratoria by appointing a bishop in a same-sex relationship.

Read it all also.

The Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) Primates Council has bracketed the UK with Kenya and Uganda as nations “where Christian views are marginalised and ignored”.

England is also defined as an “Associate Par­ticipant”, along with Australia, New Zealand, the Anglican Church in North America, and the Communion Partners of the Episcopal Church in the United States, in the “Fourth Global South to South Encounter” to be held in Singapore later this month.

The Council, which constitutes the Primates of Nigeria, West Africa, Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and the Southern Cone, to­gether with the Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Peter Jensen, and the leader of the Anglican Church in North America, Archbishop Robert Duncan, was meeting in Bermuda as guests of the American businessman Emmanuel Kam­pouris.

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… this leads to our final point. It is the preservation of this catholicity, the relationship of bishop to the college of bishops, and these finally understood to include some kind of universal college, that is most important. In the past, TEC has exercised its autonomy with accountability in communion with the other Anglican churches. Anyone familiar with the formation of TEC will know that this accountability, although voluntary, was expressed in very concrete ways, including in the formulation of our Book of Common Prayer and the consecration of our first bishops. And within TEC, its autonomous dioceses were able to exercise their autonomy with accountability both to the other dioceses of TEC and to the Anglican college of bishops. But TEC has now repudiated any accountability to the larger communion. This presents TEC’s dioceses with an awful choice. How will they exercise their autonomy? To whom will they be accountable? To no one but themselves? To an isolated and declining body that itself rejects accountability to the church catholic? Or, through the Anglican Covenant, to the wider Communion?

Autonomy without accountability leads to denominationalism and isolation. Accountability without autonomy leads to authoritarian structures. Communion with both autonomy and accountability is the Anglican hope manifested in the Covenant. For us the choice is obvious, but we recognize that it is not without cost.

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The paper aims to draw out the historic significance of the Anglican Covenant for the Anglican Communion. It begins by examining the nature and reasons of the “ecclesial deficit” of the Anglican Communion. It points out that the ecclesial status of the Anglican Communion has never been clarified. The Anglican Communion arises historically as an accident. It has never been constituted as an ecclesial body. The paper traces the transformations in the Anglican ecclesiastical map amid powerful global undercurrents in the second half of the twentieth century. It reflects on the emergence of the status of the See of Canterbury as “focus of unity” of the Anglican Communion. It proceeds to point out how uncritical adoption of the term “instruments of unity” from Protestant ecumenical dialogues led to confusion and mistrust among Anglican Churches. The paper then explores the potentials of communion-ecclesiology for the Anglican Covenant. It goes on to argue that the Anglican Covenant, grounded in the New Covenant, provides the canonical structure of the Anglican Communion. It constitutes the particular Churches to be a confident Communion of Churches. The inter-Anglican structures of the Anglican Communion should in fact be the ecclesiastical embodiment of the Anglican Covenant.

Read it carefully and read it all.

The full document is here (51 page pdf)

Noll raises some important questions that must be addressed:

* Why and how has the biblical, apostolic and historic role of the Primates been diminished and marginalized by the Anglican Communion bureaucracy? What role has the Archbishop of Canterbury himself played in marginalizing the Primates, and to what end?
* Why were the recommendations of the Windsor Report ignored-recommendations that the Primates take a leading role in drafting the Anglican Covenant?
* Likewise, why has the role of the Primates in overseeing the Covenant been replaced by that of “The Standing Committee”?
* By what authority did the Archbishop of Canterbury and the ACC Joint Standing Committee establish itself as “The Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion (SCAC),” with responsibility to oversee the Covenant? And what is to prevent the new SCAC from becoming a “Fifth Instrument” of disunity?
* What “relational consequences” can the SCAC impose on those who breach the Covenant?
* Why have the Archbishop of Canterbury and the ACC consistently ignored the consequences recommended for those who breach Communion discipline and order-such as reduction to observer status, the establishment of a parallel jurisdiction, and provision for a new jurisdiction and communion suspension of the intransigent body- outlined by retired Archbishops Drexel Gomez and Maurice Sinclair in their essay “To Mend the Net”?

And the most important question of all: Why not do the Anglican Communion Covenant right by replacing the role of the ACC and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s “ersatz Standing Committee” with that of the Covenanting Primates and the Lambeth Conference in overseeing the Covenant? Authority should be placed in the hands of Covenant-affirming churches. TEC and its proxies should be excluded from the governing bodies of the Communion-for the sake of Communion order and our ecumenical relationships.

Read the rest of Philip Ashey’s introduction of Stephen Noll’s analysis here

The talks manage to avoid the sin of navel-gazing: rather than focusing on Anglican peculiarities, the purpose of each is to see and to show how the Anglican tradition opens up onto a world much larger than itself, making them not just a good primer on Anglicanism but on Catholic Christianity as such.

The series begins with N.T. Wright, who with characteristic clarity and depth of learning gives not only an overview of the New Testament but also of how Anglicans have classically read and been formed by the Bible in their common life. Scripture, as reformers such as Wycliffe, Tyndale, and Cranmer held, is to be placed in the hands of the people and read in common, so as to knit together a people through deep immersion in the Scriptural story. This, Bishop Wright holds, is in fact at the heart of Anglican worship and life: the simple, daily, communal reading of the Bible, through which the Spirit forms us as a church and equips us for mission in the world.

Read it all.