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After Dar es Salaam, a representative of the progressive position on sexuality encouraged the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church to ”˜fast’ for a season from involvement in Communion affairs. That was sage counsel. The alternatives are simply keeping people close to the presenting issue without giving them any genuine way forward.

Our plea is then for the adherents of a new teaching in sexuality, and a principled view of Anglicanism as a worldwide federal reality, to take courage and move forward, and detach from an understanding of both of these issues, theological and ecclesiological, with which they disagree. There is no reason for this action to be the cause of any negative judgment whatsoever, and every reason for it to be applauded as principled, courageous, and a sign of consistent belief and consistent commitment. It is unclear why this view of the way forward is not enthusiastically embraced, as a principled commitment to a specific understanding of the Gospel and its demands.

It has become clear that mutual subjection in Christ, within a worldwide catholic Communion, is not a priority for certain American Episcopalians; it may also not be so for some Anglicans with opposing views, though their opposition emerged in the context of provocation. We see no reason whatever to contest this view or argue for its deficiency. Its logic is clear and time has allowed that to emerge with clarity. Can we not then allow for a different view to go its own way, and so find a resolution that belongs to the logic of ”˜ecumenical relationships’? The Anglican Communion is not some kind of ultimate good, necessary for salvation, and indeed it is seen to be a hindrance for many within The Episcopal Church.

Let that reality sound forth, and let those within this same church exhibit the kind of keen commitments to Communion, commitments they believe are consistent with what it genuinely means to be an Anglican in the United States, express them and move forward on that understanding.

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However, although acknowledging that commendable effort, we believe that our Communion does not need new instruments of consensus beyond those that historically have been our benchmarks in terms of identity.

We have diligently studied the second draft of the Covenant, known as the St Andrew’s Draft, and despite some new insights shown from the first reactions to the proposal coming from various parts of the Communion, according to our view, the proposition is still problematic.

Sections 05 and 06 in the new proposal focus on elements that we believe are unnecessary and inapplicable to our Communion. In the manner in which they are presented, they constitute a serious setback in the understanding of what is Communion, prioritising the juridical dimension more and less so the ecclesiological and affective dimensions that have been the historical mark of our mutual interdependence.

The Covenant continues to be a mistaken proposal for the resolution of conflicts through the creation of curial instances absolutely alien to our ethos.

We are fully convinced that the time in which we live is marked by symptoms that value highly the building up of networks and other manifestations of communion in a spontaneous way in the various aspects of human life. Insisting on a formal and juridical Covenant, with the logic of discipline and exercise of power, means to move in the opposite direction, thus returning to the days of Modernity, with its Confessions, Covenants, Diets and other rational instruments of theological consensus.

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A final comment about the significance of the covenant and the process of its adoption is in order. For many, if not most, the covenant will be viewed simply as a means of dispute settlement. It certainly is that, and for this reason the Appendix containing procedures for dispute settlement is an essential part of the document. Failure to include such a procedure renders the covenant ineffective from the outset. However, to focus primary attention on the settlement of disputes is to miss the significance of the process and its outcome. The basic issue before the Communion as it struggles to adopt a covenant is that of the identity of the Anglican Communion as an expression of catholic Christianity. How is it that Anglicans propose to negotiate the passage of time in a way that both remains faithful to the apostolic witness and bears witness to the Christian Gospel in ways suitably adapted to time and place? The St Andrew’s Draft makes clear that the Anglican way is not that of the Roman Catholic Church with its focus on papal authority and a uniform juridical system. As articulated in the draft, the Anglican way is also not the way of the Orthodox Churches with their focus not on pervasive synodality but upon ecumenical councils (which now seem impossible to assemble). I have indicated as well that it ought not to be the way adopted by the confessional churches of the Reformation.

The way proposed by the St. Andrew’s Draft and WR is that of common belief and practice expressed in common worship, common ministry, mutual support, and open hospitality, all sustained by the practice of mutual subjection expressed by forbearance and restraint over time within a conciliar polity. This way is the way that indeed pervades the witness of the New Testament, but it is a way that cannot prevail through time unless commonly understood and commonly supported.

I have written this response in large measure to make this final point. I can only hope and pray that in the midst of the push and pull of politics and ideological difference it will not be forgotten that Anglicans are in this debate giving identity to themselves. In its “Introduction” (#4), the St Andrew’s Draft mentions a special Anglican “charism among the followers and servants of Jesus”, but does not actually say what that is. Taken as a whole, however, the draft in fact puts that charism on display and in so doing asks that we take notice of it, cherish it, and offer it to the Christian churches for testing.

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(ENS) Episcopal Church House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson has asked diocesan General Convention deputations to find ways to comment to their bishops about the second draft of the proposed Anglican covenant.

Anderson made her request in an April 21 letter emailed to all deputies and first alternate deputies. The full text of the letter is below.

“We are told that the bishops at the Lambeth Conference will not be making a decision on the Anglican covenant, nor will they be ratifying any draft of the covenant,” Anderson wrote, reminding deputies that “the only body with authority to commit the Episcopal Church to an Anglican covenant is the General Convention in which bishops, priests and deacons and lay persons share authority.”

Thus, she wrote, “the input of the clergy and laity of the Episcopal Church is especially important as the Anglican Communion considers the development of a covenant.”

“In the Episcopal Church the belief that God speaks uniquely through bishops, laity, priests and deacons, enables our participatory structure and allows a fullness of revelation and insight that must not be lost in this important time of discernment,” Anderson wrote. “The joint work of the House of Deputies and the House of Bishops is the highest institutional expression of this belief. It is thus crucially important that our bishops go to Lambeth with a sense of where their General Convention deputations (and their diocese) are with respect to the current state of the Anglican covenant.”

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A Member of the Lambeth Commission that first proposed an Anglican Covenant has changed her mind.

Speaking at a conference in New York last week, the Dean of St John’s College, in Auckland, New Zealand, Dr Jenny Plane Te Paa, said that events since the launch of the commission’s report had “caused me to reconsider my initial support for the development of covenant”.

Among the events she cited was the behaviour at the Primates’ Meetings, which had gone from being a gathering for “leisurely thought [and] prayer” to being a “quasi-governance body universally perceived as inappropriate, unbidden, and unhelpful”.

Covenant drafts served to “protect and enhance . . . dominant male leadership, privilege, and power”, she said. In her view, the “fussing with and about one another” needed to stop, in order to reaffirm the bonds that already exist within the Communion.

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Speaking at a conference on the proposed Anglican Covenant, the Rev. Canon Gregory Cameron, deputy secretary general of the Anglican Consultative Council, did not offer hope to those eager for other Anglican provinces to follow the North American churches’ perceived leadership in social justice ministries.

Canon Cameron was the final keynote speaker at “An Anglican Covenant: Divisive or Reconciling?”, a conference held April 10-12 at The General Theological Seminary’s Desmond Tutu Center. He explained that the Archbishop of Canterbury has no juridical authority, and noted that while individual bishops have differing levels of sympathy for full inclusion of homosexual persons, neither intervention nor affirmation can be expected at this summer’s Lambeth Conference.

“We must get our ecclesiology right,” he stressed. “Lambeth bishops cannot command and require. They can only commend. Therefore when any of the instruments speak, they don’t speak as law but as advisors. Like the [British] monarchy, they do not rule or govern, but they can be consulted.”

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Referencing Anglican polity and the Windsor Report, [Archbishop Drexel] Gomez said that in the three years since the release of the Windsor Report, positions across the Communion have “polarized” and there is “less trust” between parties and provinces than there has been for a long time.

“Everyone claims to be the defender of the true spirit of Anglicanism, and to describe that spirit as orthodox, mainstream, comprehensive or inclusive,” he said. “The language has become more strident, and, quite frankly, scaremongering is commonplace.”

He said in a situation which is becoming “increasingly overheated” we need to hear “a voice of calm.” We need to identify the fundamentals that we share in common, and to “state the common basis on which our mutual trust can be rebuilt.”

Stating that as “essentially all that the covenant proposal is — no more and no less,” Gomez clarified that it is not intended to define some sort of “new Anglicanism,” or invent a new model of authority, or “peddle a narrow or exclusive view of what Anglicanism is.”

“It is intended to state concisely and clearly the faith that we have all inherited together, so that there can be a new confidence that we are about the same mission,” he said.

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The proposed Anglican Covenant could be applied in a variety of circumstances, including lay presidency of Holy Eucharist, according to the Most Rev. Drexel Gomez, Archbishop of the West Indies. Archbishop Gomez delivered the opening address at “An Anglican Covenant: Divisive or Reconciling?”, a conference and panel discussion April 10-12 at The General Theological Seminary (GTS) in New York City.

Archbishop Gomez is chairman of the Covenant Design Group, a task force appointed by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams to prepare a draft covenant for the Anglican Communion. Given his position, Archbishop Gomez said it should not be surprising that he speaks with a bias in favor of adopting an Anglican Covenant.

He outlined his role and offered a host of reasons why a covenant is not a foreign concept to the Anglican way of life, but rather is a laudable way to foster trust when the bonds of affection are strained within the Communion are strained. Most of his presentation was spent answering questions from conference attendees.

Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, assistant professor of church history at Church Divinity School of the Pacific, posed the question that if the presenting issue is human sexuality, what other issues could an Anglican Covenant address? Archbishop Gomez said that “if we took a second draft, lay presidency had been mentioned” as one possibility.

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The British publication International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church commissioned a volume on Covenant and Communion in 2007. This essay was prepared by invitation for that volume several months ago, and it will appear in published form in May 2008. It was posted on the ACI site so that it could be referred to in the context of a General Seminary event in New York last week. The remarks prepared for that context are much briefer, and aimed at a more general audience. They should be posted as well on the ACI site shortly. This was an event attended by Archbishop Gomez and Gregory Cameron, as well as others. Archbishop Gomez is on the ACI Board. I was present as representative of Wycliffe College, University of Toronto.

In order both to set limits and for clarity’s sake-themes to which I shall return- the present essay will undertake theological reflection on covenant and the appropriateness of using this term for work presently before us in the Anglican Communion. This requires some threshold consideration. By ”˜theological reflection’ I mean, giving a comprehensive account of Scripture with concern for its total, mutually-informing witness. I take this to be the concern of one of the Articles, with a long prior history, that scripture be read in such a way that its portions be not repugnant, one with another. The same concern also animates what in our present period is called ”˜canonical reading.’

It will be a basic contention of the present essay that this hermeneutical caution is traceable to the rule (kanon; regula) of faith (regula fidei) in the early church. Indeed, in the period of the formation and consolidation of New Testament writings and especially relevant because of the character of that ”˜work-in-progress,’ the rule grounds Christian convictions about the nature of God in Christ in the witness of the stable, inherited scriptures of Israel. The rule of faith is an appeal to the total witness of scripture, especially the Old Testament, as constituting the speech and work of the selfsame Living God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in Israel and in the Apostolic witness to Jesus Christ.

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It seems that most of my speaking engagements in recent years have focussed on three topics. Each of these is a subset of that traditionally unmentionable trio – politics, sex and religion. A standard conversation at home is “What are you speaking about this time? War? Homosexuality? The Anglican Communion?”. Of course I’ve often found myself speaking about two of the three on the same occasion – I’m sure you can guess which two! Today I think is a first in that I’m going to speak about all three in the same presentation!

My decision to include war is obviously triggered by the title’s use of ‘conflict’ but also by two memorable quotations. One comes from Herbert Butterfield, the distinguished 20th century Christian historian. He apparently once suggested that one could adequately explain all the wars fought in human history simply by taking the animosity present within the average church choir at any moment and giving it a history extended overtime. The roots of war, in other words, are found within the conflictual life of the church at every level. The other comes from the memorable response in 2000 of the then Primate of Canada to the consecration by the Primate of Rwanda and the then Primate of South East Asia of two American priests to serve as bishops in the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA). “Bishops”, Michael Peers, said, “are not intercontinental ballistic missiles, manufactured on one continent and fired into another as an act of aggression”. The means of war, in other words, have their parallels within the life of the church at every level.

Of course, we are, thankfully, no longer likely to kill each other and that is not an insignificant development and difference from literal ‘war’. However, having said that, the events of recent weeks announced by Changing Attitude are a sad and shocking reminder that physical assault and threats to kill are still real dangers for some who openly identify as gay or lesbian and something all of us need to oppose and make sure we don’t in any way encourage. We must also confess that at a spiritual level Stephen Bates was sadly not too far wrong in calling his book “A Church at War”. We risk as an international body the sort of self-destruction brought by war. We need to recall Paul writing to one of the many New Testament churches wracked by conflict – “You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another in love. The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other” (Gal 5.13-15).

So, how are we to think about conflict and making good moral decisions? What I am going to say falls into two parts – broadly a longer one on conflict and one on covenant….

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In this context, and looking to the future, it has been proposed and fairly generally accepted throughout the Anglican Communion that there should be a Covenant produced which would express what was essential to being “in communion” with one another in terms of our shared faith and calling, and of our responsibility towards one another. In 2007, a first draft was produced in Nassau which, following miniscule amendment at the Primates’ meeting in Dar es Salaam, was circulated for comment throughout the Communion. The Church of Ireland through the Standing Committee of General Synod established a Covenant Response Group which offered a response and proposed a much shorter redrafting.

Responses were received from many of the Anglican Churches, as well as from individual scholars and conferences and various groupings. These were all carefully examined in January 2008, when the Covenant Design Group, on which I serve, held its second meeting at St Andrew’s House (The Anglican Communion Office) in London. This group is representative of Churches in Africa, Asia, North America and Oceania, and also of the various strands within Anglicanism.

In working with the Covenant Design Group, I learnt a great deal, but I would mention one or two insights that I gained, or gained afresh.

The first was that, in spite of the hyping of differences within our Communion, there is a deep determination to stay together, and that we really experienced a deep unity around prayer, the Bible and sharing in the Eucharist.

The second was that the role of Synods comprising bishops, clergy and laity varies greatly around the Communion. In some parts of the world, what the Primate says on almost any question is regarded as the voice of the Church, even though there has been no work done on the question at synodical level, whereas, in America and Europe, the voice of the Church requires a great deal of consultation before it is articulated.

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Drawn up by a 12-member international team meeting in England, the covenant is the second draft to be proposed; the first draft was released last year and roundly criticized. This draft will be discussed and amended at the Lambeth Conference, a meeting of nearly 600 Anglican bishops, in July. Implementation is likely years away.

While asserting the autonomy of each province, the covenant nonetheless lays out a process through which threats to the “unity of the Communion and the effectiveness or credibility of its mission” may be challenged.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, who heads the Church of England and is recognized by Anglicans as the “first among equals,” would be given the power to make “requests” of national churches based on those challenges. The Most Rev. Rowan Williams is the current Archbishop of Canterbury.

The Anglican Consultative Council, an international body appointed by the 38 provinces, would be the last court of appeals on all disputes. It would have the power to determine if a province has “relinquished the force and meaning” of the covenant, the consequences of which are not specified.

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(ACNS)

The Covenant Design Group (CDG) held its second meeting at the Anglican Communion Offices, St. Andrew’s House, London, UK, between Monday, 28th January, and Saturday, 2nd February, 2008, under the chairmanship of the Most Revd Drexel Gomez, Archbishop of the West Indies.

The main task of the group was to develop a second draft for the Anglican Covenant, as originally proposed in the Windsor Report 2004; an idea adopted by the Primates’ Meeting and the Joint Standing Committee of the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates in their following meetings. At their meeting in January 2007, the CDG produced a first draft ”“ the Nassau Draft – for such a covenant, which was received at the meeting of the Primates and the Joint Standing Committee in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in February of that year. This draft was subsequently sent to the Provinces, Churches and Commissions of the Anglican Communion for consultation, reflection and response.

At this meeting, the CDG reviewed the comments and submissions received and developed the new draft, which is now published. In addition to thirteen provincial responses, a large number of responses were received from commissions, organisations, dioceses and individuals from across the Communion. It is intended that these responses will be published in the near future on the Anglican Communion website. The CDG is grateful to all those who contributed their reflections for this meeting, and trust that they will find their contributions honoured in the revised text prepared.

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We have three principle areas of concern regarding the Draft Covenant:

–The discussion of the foundations which are traditionally held to undergird Anglicanism omits to mention reason, which has long been thought to stand alongside scripture and tradition.
–The wording of section 6 of the Draft Covenant is potentially open to a wide variety of interpretations. For example, to take paragraph 6.3 alone, we feel that the expressions such as ”˜common mind’, ”˜matters of essential concern’, and ”˜common standards of faith’, all require significant further definition before they can bear the weight being placed upon them in the context of this Covenant. We are led to wonder whether the wording of section 6 of the Draft Covenant is fit for purpose in any practical circumstance in which it is likely to be called upon.
–We note that the Draft Covenant invests the Primates’ meeting with considerable and wide-ranging powers. We question whether the Primates’ meeting is the Instrument of Unity best suited to the task being entrusted to it (rather than the ACC, which contains a more wide-ranging representation of Church members).

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The responses show that our Church has at least three different attitudes to the Covenant as a solution to the Communion’s difficulties:

1. The Anglican Communion does not have machinery that allows us to discern the validity or otherwise of differing points of view and the Covenant may be a way of creating such a mechanism. We should be able to trust the international process to resolve any detailed difficulties we may have.

2. The nature of this Draft Covenant, and the underlying assumptions make it an unsatisfactory solution to our difficulties as a Communion, and runs the danger of exacerbating them. We therefore need to keep searching for a different way forward.

3. For Tikanga Maori tino rangatiratanga (self determination), Christian and ethnic identity are of foundational importance. Tangata whenua (the indigenous people) have a rootedness that precedes the Anglican Communion, and would not lightly cede their autonomy.

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THE Church of England response to the draft Anglican Covenant was published on Wednesday, in advance of a meeting of the international Design Group later this month.

There is a new draft text, overseen by the House of Bishops’ theological group, and building on earlier work done by the Faith and Order Advisory Group. A key addition is a clause prohibiting interfering in other dioceses or provinces without official sanction.

The text identifies a need for greater theological justification and context, wants a “minimalist” approach to doctrinal argument, and suggests significant revisions in key areas such as Section 6, “The Unity of the Communion”, especially on the part played by the Primates’ Meeting.

Read the whole thing.

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An interesting read.

There are proposals, of course, to make us either a federation or a confederation, or God forbid, a unitary governmental structure such as the Roman Catholic Church has. The draft Anglican Covenant is a serious concern in this regard, particularly because it abrogates the constitutional principles that make us Anglicans. It abrogates the principle of lay participation in the governance of the Church by placing disproportionate emphasis on the views of the highest ranking bishops. It abrogates the principle of toleration by imposing a standard, and more frighteningly a mechanism, for judging orthodoxy other than the idea of common worship. Most dangerously of all, it appears merely to compromise the principle of autonomy when, if fact, it virtually destroys it by vesting the right to determine what is a matter of common concern, what the common mind of the Communion is, and what punishment is appropriate for violations of the common mind in the Primates Meeting. It is as if the English Reformation, to say nothing either of the Elizabethan Settlement or the constitutional development over time of independent churches voluntarily cooperating on the basis of a shared heritage, never happened.

I do not believe it is impossible to create an Anglican covenant that is constitutionally consistent with existing Anglican polity. The Inter-Anglican Commission on Mission and Evangelism has proposed one.(24) I do believe the current draft being considered, rather than being an expression of our constitutional identity, would be a complete replacement of it with something far less significant as an experiment in being the Church than is the Elizabethan Settlement.

In truth, the Anglican Communion does not exist with a governmental structure at all. It is, rather, a voluntary association of autonomous churches bound together by a shared heritage from the Church of England and enjoying cooperative relationships for the purpose of mission, nothing more. It is not at all unlike the autocephalous Eastern Orthodox churches in that regard, and they somehow manage to function reasonably well without a central government.
The term Anglican Communion arose, after all, not from an international constitutional convention but from the usage of Horatio Southgate, the American missionary bishop to Turkey in 1847.(25) Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as the Anglican Communion at all in an institutional sense. There are, instead, ways in which Anglican Christians affirm their heritage and further their missional ends by mutual respect for the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury and participation in the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates Meeting, as well as, probably more importantly, countless informal relationships that bring them together across racial, cultural, and geographic barriers for a common purpose in the service of the Gospel of Christ. What the Anglican Communion already is, I would suggest, is quite enough.

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The Church of Ireland has responded to the Anglican Draft Covenant by producing its own draft covenant. The document was prepared by a small group former and present Irish members of ACC and other church members experienced in ecumenical affairs, who hold “a wide variety of views in relation to both churchmanship and issues of human sexuality.” It has been presented to both the House of Bishops and the Standing Committee of the Church of Ireland, with suggestions from both bodies incorporated into the document.

In redrafting a proposed Anglican Covenant the working group wanted to express very clearly the themes of Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence within the Body of Christ, to be inclusive, insofar as possible and produce an agreement which might prevent similar crises in the future. To achieve this, the working group sought to remove elements of legislative structure from any proposed Anglican covenant and emphasised provincial autonomy within the Communion.

IrishAngle reproduces the text of the draft covenant below:

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Section 3: “Our Commitment to Confession of the Faith”
Reactions to this section are highly mixed, leading us to ask if this section is particularly necessary to the Covenant. Section 3: “Our Commitment to Confession of the Faith,” as it stands, incorporates a wide range of commitments many of which are broadly accepted but some of which imply agreement to as yet undetermined Communion-wide understandings. There seems to be little in this section that cannot be understood as growing from the positive affirmations of our Anglican Christian identity developed in Section 2: “The Life We Share,” or in Section 4: “The Life We Share With Others.” If Section 3 is to be retained, many believe that it needs considerable reworking.

While the commitments contained in Section 3 are commendable, the language used for some of them is subject to various interpretations and misinterpretations. It seems to many of us unwise to place language of this sort within the Covenant without having a clear and agreed-upon definition of what these terms mean.

For example, what does the phrase “biblically derived moral values” mean and how are such values determined? In the American context, the phrase, “biblically-derived moral values,” is fraught with baggage. On the individual level this phrase can convey a facile and judgmental approach to Christian moral ethics and decision-making not in keeping with the best of Anglicanism. Historically, some of the greatest national sins of conquest and subjugation have been defended by appeal to “biblically-derived moral values.”

Similarly, we might ask what understanding of human nature is operative in the phrase “the vision of humanity”? Clearly, Holy Scripture contains a very complex and, at times, paradoxical vision of humanity. Using a phrase like this in the context of the covenant seems to ignore these complexities and the difficulties that Christians have had through the centuries in understanding and applying this biblical vision of humanity to their lives and societies.

We would suggest that it is disputes over concepts like these that have led to some of the current challenges before the Anglican Communion. We doubt that using such terms in the body of the covenant without further definition would advance the interest of unity or a common understanding of what the terms mean and how they should be applied.

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Jefferts Schori also reported briefly on the September meeting of the House of Bishops in New Orleans. Noting the presence of members of the Joint Standing Committee (JSC) of the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates of the Anglican Communion at the New Orleans meeting, she said “the bishops heard some very challenging words from the visitors.”

She said that she was pleased with the statement the bishops issued to the Anglican Communion at the end of the meeting. “Not everyone was comfortable where we stood, but we stood together,” she said.

The JSC also recognized that the Episcopal Church has a “vocation in this season to keep the issues of human sexuality before the communion,” Jefferts Schori said, adding that not all of the JSC members like that situation, but she said they do recognize the Episcopal Church’s vocation.

The communion is involved in a “signal shift” these days, Jefferts Schori said, back to mission questions and “basic living issues.” She cited the recent communiqué from the Council of the Anglican Provinces of Africa as an example.

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But this does not mean “anything goes.” By no means!

We are all permanently under the three-fold testing and purifying scrutiny of the refining fire of God’s holiness (Zech 13:9), of the two-edged sword of Scripture (Heb 4:12), of minds transformed by the renewing Spirit (Rom 12:2).

It is on this basis we dare to engage with the complexities of contemporary life around us.

God is God of everything, and we need to have the spiritual maturity, and the depth and breadth of faith, to know how to listen to what he has to say about everything from global security and biotechnology to poverty and development.

We need to be able to engage profoundly, and often critically, with every aspect of human behaviour.

Sometimes we speak of the need to “baptize culture.”

This is no cursory wipe with a damp cloth to produce a superficial religious veneer.

Baptism is the radical transformation that comes through burial with Christ and being raised with him to new life. Every culture must die to the priorities, the loyalties, the idols, of this world; and find new, authentic, life-giving, contemporary expression — transfigured under the Lordship of Jesus, Saviour and Redeemer, who calls us to walk in holiness of life.

This is God’s call to all of us, and to every area of our lives ”“ it is not just about sexuality and the morality of our sexual behaviour.

It is the life of obedience and self-discipline, and often costly self-denial, for, as Paul reminds the Corinthian church, even where “all things are lawful,” it may well be that “not all things are beneficial” (1 Cor 10:23).

All of us would do well to remember this, as we grapple with our diversity — believing it to be a gift of God’s creative abundance.

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Will the Anglican Communion be joined together or rent asunder? That was the question that the Rev. Dr. Richard Leggett offered to a group gathered at St. Faiths.

The reason for these discussions is that the current solution to global Anglicanisms difficulties is to craft a covenant document which would make room for what many call a two-tiered membership, with some who are full members and some in association but not fully entitled because of differences in their practice of worship or discipleship.

In this model, the Anglican Church of Canada, the Episcopal Church USA, the Anglican Church of New Zealand, the Anglican Church of South Africa, and possibly the Church of England, would be second-tier Anglicans primarily, but not only, because of the blessing of same-sex couples.

Leggett, a professor at Vancouver School of Theology, said that in 1886 questions in the Episcopal Church (USA) led to an agreement on essential elements of Anglican communion, and these were slightly revised (with broader, less restrictive, wording) at the Lambeth Conference (1888), and known afterwards as the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral.

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The contentious relationship between the Episcopal Church based in the United States and the worldwide Anglican Communion is appropriately called a “civil war over homosexuality” by The New York Times. I, also, think it is an event of civil stress about love and justice. In 1966, Joseph Fletcher, an Episcopal priest on the faculty of the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, wrote a book titled Situation Ethics in which he declared that “love is the boss principle of life” and “justice is love distributed.”

“God is love” is a fact of life some of us learned in Sunday school. We also learned that covenants, creeds, doctrines and traditions may pass away, but love endures. How, then, can a church with a responsibility of promoting love and justice adopt a policy of discrimination that prohibits homosexual people from being elected and consecrated as bishops? There is no evidence that such people cannot “love and be loved in return.” If love is the boss principle of life, arbitrary and capricious acts of discrimination against all sorts and conditions of people, including male and female people, heterosexual and homosexual people, is unjust and should cease and desist.

While other institutional systems in society — like government, the economy and education — identify principles other than love that are central to their mission, certainly love is the foundational principle of religion — all religions. It is our religious responsibility in society to remind other institutions to do what they are called to do in loving and just ways.

It is a shocking experience to see a religious institution like the Anglican Communion refuse to support gay couples and lesbian couples who wish to marry and homosexual people who wish to make a sacrificial offering of their leadership skills to serve the church as priests and bishops. It is regrettable that the church rejects such people, as if they were engaged in a demonized activity.

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In my opinion, the old way is clearly inadequate. Even apart from the issues that have created the crisis, to try to maintain the old way of doing things is backward thinking ”” basically merely saying “But we’ve never done it that way before.” It is doing business this way that has brought the Anglican Communion to its current crisis. It doesn’t work any more. It hasn’t worked for more than 30 years. I find it more than curious that most of those who claim to be “pushing the envelope forward” in the Anglican world are the “backward thinkers” in the matter of Anglican decision-making.

The first view, proposed by the majority of Anglican leaders, is indeed a way new to Anglicanism. This does not make it automatically wrong. On the contrary, in my opinion it is wise, realistic, and essential. The realignment is moving in the direction of this view ”” creating a worldwide Anglican identity with mutual accountability and effectively recognizing that Anglicanism has become a world family and is no longer a loose confederation.

There are currently four instruments of unity in Anglicanism that define us as a world family: the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is the symbol of unity and has authority to decide who is an Anglican; the Lambeth Conference of all Anglican bishops, which began in 1867 and meets every 10 years to take counsel; the Anglican Consultative Council, a deliberative body that includes clergy and lay people from around the world [TLC, Sept. 16]; and the meeting of primates, or bishops who are leaders of the 38 Anglican provinces. The latter two instruments came into being as recently as the 1970s.

Currently an Anglican Covenant is being devised by which it appears that the provinces will be asked to agree to be a worldwide family with mutual accountability and, when necessary, make binding decisions together on matters that affect everyone. It is a situation similar to the time after the original 13 American colonies had become independent from England and then had to decide whether to form a federal government. It is a rare situation in world history, and people do not easily or gladly cede authority to a larger body.

From where I sit, it looks as though a lot of Anglican provinces see this trend as the answer to a crying need. Whatever lies ahead, Anglicanism is in the throes of change and cannot go back.

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There is much talk at present in the Anglican communion of a new covenant to bind us together. This is seen as a solution to our problems, to our disagreements about homosexuality. Some argue that we just need to agree to certain new “essentials”. But many of us hesitate to embrace such a covenant because we already have a covenant: our baptismal covenant. That is how we are joined together and it is based on the long-established “essentials”: the historic creeds. From the very earliest days of Christianity, baptism marked that moment when men and women assented to the Christian essentials – one God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit – and came into relationship with those who shared this belief in the creator God, the risen Christ and the Spirit who sustains us daily. Baptism is therefore the foundation of our identity as Christians. With Paul’s words to the Galatians in our memories, we hesitate to assent to a covenant in which there will be a new distinction between lay and ordained by handing over decision-making power to the Anglican primates. Having made our assent to the historic creeds, we hesitate to create new “essentials” about an issue – homosexuality – that may be purely of this moment.

Let me suggest another response to the Anglican crisis. All we really have to do in the midst of this crazy church dispute is be awake to our relationship with a loving God.

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Clearly, the debated vision of “communion” present in our Anglican turmoil is tied to this, not only historically, but conceptually and theologically. We are in the midst of a grand movement towards and through democratization: its gifts are potentially and really (in many cases) great, especially in terms of the kinds of democratic charisms that we rightly cherish here and wish to support elsewhere: individual freedoms, protection of rights, the coherent rule of law and appeal, and accountability. The Church’s place in this movement is not peripheral, however, since – at least as we believe, and indeed even as students of democratization recognize with or without a religious lens – the persuasive moral frameworks by which the violence of autonomy is checked and transformed are not only the special charism of the Church, but is also a divine imperative for human history’s ordering.

The current Covenant process can be seen in terms of those elements bound to the choices we earlier claimed face all democratizing movements: we can choose to move towards a retrenchment of confrontative blame, whereby the boundaries of a pure confessionalism deny the possibility of open discussion and engagement across local units; we can choose a path that leads to the dissolution of accountability altogether, through a kind of the federalist model of autonomous units that merely talk to one another across local divides, but that cannot hold each other accountable to some broader formative molding of the self and its assertions; or we can choose some kind of structure that can uphold dispersed accountability, where truth is bound to a way of life and to the persuasive moral framework of accountable actions. I would obviously argue for the last option as our calling as well. One can see that the Covenant proposal that was presented to the Primates in Dar es Salaam, and through them to the Communion at large, takes this last road. (And the Primates’ Communiqué from Dar falls squarely within this perspective.) One need only look at the current debate over human rights in Nigeria, and the Church’s proper duties within this debate, to realize that unless Christian Communion is able to bring its formative weight to bear upon these matters, the process of democratization will indeed become a weapon in the hand of forces whose destiny will simply be the re-expression of Cain and Abel’s long-standing conflict, where power means simply giving each brother a chance to have his say and do his thing, with whatever results.

In sum, I invite us to see the relationship of Communion to democratization in a special way: as the embodied work of transfiguring the violence inherent in the dispersal of power. We are aware of what this means Scripturally, if nothing else: it is, in the terms of Ephesians 2, the breaking down of a “wall” of separation, and of making what were once “two” hostile and estranged bodies, “one” body in the “one new man” who is Christ. But this reality, as Paul emphasized, is achieved through the Cross and the shedding of blood, Jesus’ own. Not surprisingly, Paul is here speaking of an act by which violence itself is exposed before the world to be seen for what it is, and then comprehended within the being and heart of God. If power is dispersed in this context, it is also given over to God, who bears its chaotic assertion. Only here is the seeming contradiction of Galatians 6, where each is accountable only for his or her own actions yet is also called to bear the burdens of others, resolved. If we are to think of Communion, it is from this base, and in the context of those seeking to see such a foundation exposed before the world. The buzz-words of “mutual accountability” and “interdependence”, so important to the Windsor Report, yet based on a long tradition of discussion dating to the 1960’s at least, are not mere jargon in this light. They go to the center of the Gospel’s particular summons to this age. And so I have no hesitation in commending this vision of Anglicanism. There are few gifts more filled with promise that God has given his people in this regard for the service of the nations, at this point in history most especially.

As a gift to the American church in particular, it poses an enormous challenge. We are loath to admit that pure autonomy embodies the violence of death. And few of us, in any context, are ready to admit that the death of self leads to the resurrection of the self’s life as a common life. Yet in such an admission lies the promise of God’s peace.

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What is wrong with the proposed Covenant

Its origins are shallow, being primarily the Windsor Report, and the “recent life of the Instruments of Communion;” that is, rather than drawing upon our scriptural and larger tradition sources, the Covenant is based on a recently prepared report that has immediately gained authoritative status usually only granted documents tested by time, and upon recent experience of a body of leaders of the Communion.

Related to this last point, the Covenant was drafted in response to urgency, a sense of ”˜severe strain.” While at times we must recognize genuine emergencies and respond with rapidity, in crafting guidelines intended to direct the inter-life of the vast, sprawling Anglican Communion over time, we should hope for a creative climate of peace, of dynamic shalom, rather than stress and anxiety.

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