The Standing Committee of the Diocese of Virginia has released a “response” regarding the proposed Anglican Covenant – and it’s a doozy. Indeed, it is illuminating. BabyBlue posts her commentary interspersed with the text. Read it all.

The concept of agreeing to disagree fails to do justice to the nature of the commitments and convictions that command our loyalty and obedience and bind us together. What we disagree about is not what has brought us together. We have not come together because we have diverse views on things. Diversity of opinions is not what people have committed themselves to. This is a via negativa ”“ we do not agree on this, we do not agree on that.

The focus of the paper by Colin Slee and his colleagues is on agreement and disagreement. “The Covenant is an attempt to impose agreement where this did not exist before”. “A true family cannot exist without disagreements”. “The Anglican tradition of living with difference”. This is typical of the current approach to religion in a secularist context. It is argued that since there are disagreements on some matters, it follows that there is no standard of truth, no body of authoritative teaching at: all that is left is the expression of various views, agreements and disagreements.

But this is surely too sweeping. Because some matters are contested it does not imply that all are. And if some are, and some are not, a method is needed to establish where the mere existence of dissenting views means there is no body of authoritative. Take, for example, the incarnation of the Son of God, or the Trinity: there may be people, very distinguished people, in the Anglican Communion who at one time or another have expressed deep reservations about some fundamental matters of those doctrines. But those doctrines remain authentic Anglican doctrine, even though some have dissented from them.

Read it all.

The Communion has grown and developed through the missionary vision and labours of, among others, Evangelical Anglicans in the Church of England. Evangelicals have never understood the Church of England as simply the national church of the English people but part of the worldwide church of Christ sharing in his mission. We should have a vision for a global communion committed to mission and to partnership together in mission with other provinces. The covenant process provides a means of developing structures for such a missional vision. It also offers the hope of being able (in a theologically rich and biblically based form of a covenant) to express biblical and creedal faith and to develop the structures of a distinctive global Anglicanism which is both Catholic and Reformed and which will help us work for the unity among all his disciples for which Christ prayed.

There are no solid reasons – either in principle or pragmatically in the current political context – for evangelicals or anyone else to object to Synod making a commitment to positive participation in the covenant process. There are many reasons – theological and political – why evangelicals and others who share our commitments to world mission, to learning from Anglicans around the globe, to safeguarding biblical faith and to facilitating harmony among Anglicans should wish the Church of England wholeheartedly to support the covenant process. Indeed, in terms of our life together as a Communion, the covenant process is – like the Windsor Report in which it originated – now ‘the only poker game in town’. If the Communion is to have a future together then the form of this will be discerned in and through this covenant process. For the Church of England to abandon that process through non-participation, or destructive participation, would therefore be for the eye to say to the hand ‘I don’t need you’ and for us as a province to embrace a vision of Anglicanism in which every one does what is right in their own eyes.

Read it all.

Funny how the people complaining about the media are those whose interests are at risk because of revelations in the media that did not come out in the typical top-down-the institution-controls-the-flow-and content-of-information manner.

Do bloggers sometime reveal too much information? Yes. Is some of it untimely? Yes. But are all institutions better for the greater transparency from, particularly the newer forms of, media? Yes.

I would say that given the responses of Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda to the Lambeth invitations, the multiplicity of lawsuits and depositions and departures in the United States, not to mention Canada, that the alleged crisis in the Anglican Communion is far from overblown. Rather, these scholars and bishops ought to get out more, read the blogs, subscribe to a newspaper. They will discover that their first premise is definitely out of touch with reality.

If their first premise is out of touch with reality, then what of their other conclusions?

This seems to me to be reminiscent of Winnie the Pooh commenting, “Tut, tut, it looks like rain.”

—Canon Neal Michell of Dallas in a comment on Ruth Gledhill’s blog

From here:

There are a number of points that need to be made…

Firstly, a distinction needs to be made between a ”˜confessing’ church and a ”˜confessional’ church. A ”˜confessing’ church is any church that confesses Christ and the gospel before the world as all Christians are called to do. A ”˜confessional’ church, on the other hand, is a church that adheres to certain specific statements of belief.

Secondly, it is clear that Anglicanism is not only a ”˜confessing’ tradition but also a ”˜confessional’ tradition in the sense that there are specific statements of belief to which the churches of the Communion individually and collectively subscribe. For example, the Catholic Creeds and the three ”˜historic formularies’ (The Thirty Nine Articles, the Book of Common Prayer and the 1662 Ordinal) are accepted as doctrinal authorities by the Church of England26 and for the Communion as a whole the Lambeth Quadrilateral sets out the Anglican understanding of what the visible unity of the Christian Church involves.

In his essay ”˜Where shall doctrine be found?’ in the 1981 Doctrine Commission report Believing in the Church, NT Wright suggests that a ”˜confession’ is a document: ”˜”¦in which the Church says to God, to the world, to itself and to the next generation, ”˜This is where we stand, and what we stand for.’’27 If the term ”˜confession’ is defined in this way it is clear that there is a strong confessional element to the Anglican tradition in the sense that are some documents that are seen by the Church of England and the other churches of the Communion as declaring where they stand and what they stand for.28

The issue of whether Anglicanism is confessional in nature has been confused by a long standing debate about (a) whether the Thirty Nine Articles should be seen as a confession of faith in the same sense as the confessions of faith produced by the Lutheran and Reformed churches during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and (b) whether the Articles have the same status within Anglicanism as, for example, the Augsburg Confession has within the Lutheran tradition or the Westminster Confession has had in parts of the Reformed tradition.

The answer to (a) is that from a historical point of view the Articles should be viewed as one of the confessions of the Reformation period. Much of the material in the Articles came from the Lutheran Augsburg and Wurtemberg confessions, the Articles had the same function as other Reformation confessions (namely to make clear what the Church of England stood for both in terms of its fundamental theology and in relation to specific issues of controversy) and the Articles were regarded as the Church of England’s confessional statement at the time when they were produced.29

The answer to (b) is that the Articles have had a rather different status to that enjoyed by the Augsburg or Westminster Confessions in the Lutheran and Reformed traditions because within Anglicanism the role of the Articles as a doctrinal authority has been balanced by the doctrinal importance that has been given to the liturgy and, in many parts of Anglicanism, to the witness of the Fathers of the first five centuries.

However, acceptance of this latter point does not negate the confessional nature of Anglicanism. It remains the case that there are documents that are seen as declaring, either explicitly or implicitly, what Anglicanism stands for. This in turn means that an Anglican covenant that re-stated where the churches of the Anglican Communion stand and what they stand for would not be alien to the Anglican tradition.

Thirdly, the fact that Anglicans have been willing to say either explicitly through statements of belief or implicitly through the liturgy ”˜This is where we stand and what we stand for’ means that Anglicanism already excludes those who are not able to accept in terms of either belief or practice what Anglicanism currently stands for. Thus someone who cannot make the Declaration of Assent contained in Canon C1530 cannot serve as either an ordained minister or a Reader in the Church of England. Similarly, a church that could not accept one or more of the elements of the Lambeth Quadrilateral could not be a member of the Anglican Communion.

This means that the development of a covenant will not mean a move from a non-confessional to a confessional Anglicanism or from a situation where everyone is accepted to a position where some begin to be excluded. The Anglican Communion is already, in the way just described, a confessional body of churches and, as such, one that upholds certain specific beliefs and practices to which not everyone is able to sign up.

What it might mean, and this is what people are afraid of, is that as the result of the covenant process the confessional basis of Anglicanism will become more detailed, with the forms of acceptable expression of Anglican theology being more precisely defined and the number of things that have to be accepted in order to be Anglican being increased, and that this will mean that some people who are currently part of the Anglican Communion will be forced out.

However, and this is the fourth point in this connection, there is nothing inevitable about a process whereby the development of a covenant leads to a narrower definition of Anglican belief and practice than that which currently exists. The churches of the Communion will decide collectively what the covenant contains in and it is entirely possible (and indeed likely) that what they will decide to do is simply ratify existing statements of Anglican belief and practice without adding to them in any way.

In any event, nothing will be able to be imposed on the Communion without the consent of the churches of the Communion and this means that any attempt to narrow down the confessional parameters of Anglicanism could only succeed if the Communion as whole decided to go in this direction and after a process in which opponents of such a move would have plenty of opportunity to argue their case.

It should also be noted that there is also a concern about exclusion among many conservative Anglicans. They fear that unless what they see as a drift towards unacceptable theological liberalism within Anglicanism is halted by clear theological boundary markers being laid down in an Anglican covenant, such liberalism will become the norm and they will end up being excluded either because of intolerance of traditional Anglicanism by liberal church authorities or because they will be conscientiously unable to remain in churches that deny the basic tents of Christian belief and behaviour.

“Anglicanism is not a confessional church” is one of the many false mantras one hears as almost a liturgical chorus these days from numerous leaders of The Episcopal Church. It is not only false in that it is not accord with our history, as Dr. Davie shows, but it is also contradicted every week in TEC nationwide in the liturgy when those participating in eucharist confess their faith in the Nicene Creed. The question rather is: Anglicanism is a confessing church in what sense? Read it all-KSH.

From the diocese of Central Florida:

Two paths suggested themselves. A minority of the LCC “took a juridical view, using canon law to steer the Church.” However the “majority felt the need to go deeper” and believed a covenant was needed. The Windsor Report offered a “first draft” of an Anglican Covenant “as a way of giving flesh to the Communion.”

The Primates asked the Communion to offer its responses to the Windsor Report and Archbishop Williams created a Design Group to review the responses and prepare a draft. Two Americans had been appointed to the Design Group, Archbishop Gomez noted, the Rev. Ephraim Radner, rector of Church of the Ascension in Pueblo, Colorado and the Rev. Katherine Grieb of the Virginia Theological Seminary.

The principle influences came from submissions from the Anglican Church of Australia, the Global South Coalition’s paper “The Road to Lambeth,” the Windsor Report, and the Ordinal of the Church of England, he said.

The impetus towards the creation of a Covenant came from the “total breakdown of trust within the Anglican Communion,” he noted. The Design Group “sought to recognize this and to repair the breach.”

However “trust cannot be legislated. It requires a commitment to travel with one another and be with one another,” he said. That “trust does not now exist.”

The first draft was written by Dr. Radner, Archbishop Gomez said, and at its January meeting in Nassau the Design Group “worked on it and released the draft” presenting it to the Primates at their February Meeting in Tanzania.

“The Primates spent very little time dealing with the Covenant”, Archbishop Gomez noted, but “expressed their pleasure of what the group was doing.”

Read it all.

A task group of the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council will propose June 14 that Council tell the Anglican Communion that no governing body other than General Convention can interpret Convention resolutions or agree to deny “future decisions by dioceses or General Convention.”

A draft of the statement, titled “The Episcopal Church’s Commitment to Common Life in Anglican Communion,” says it “strongly affirm[s] this Church’s desire to be in the fullest possible relationship with our Anglican sisters and brothers.”

The draft would have the Council decline to participate in a so-called Pastoral Scheme proposed by the Primates of the Anglican Communion for dealing with some disaffected Episcopal Church dioceses. In March the House of Bishops said the plan “would be injurious to The Episcopal Church” and urged the Council to decline to participate.

The draft of the statement was released to Council members and staff the afternoon of June 13 at the Council’s meeting in Parsippany, New Jersey. The draft, and three proposed accompanying resolutions, will be discussed by the entire Council June 14.

Read it all.

The Rev. Dr. Ian Douglas, a member of the subcommittee, added that only a small minority of responses were completely for the covenant as proposed or against any form of covenant. Most responses were nuanced””stating conditions under which a covenant might be acceptable or unacceptable.

The Rev. Dr. Lee Alison Crawford, another member of the subcommittee, said that many respondents offered thanks for the opportunity to comment on the covenant.

The Rev. Canon Mark Harris concluded that the subcommittee had reached consensus on three recommendations to the entire Executive Council”¦

1. That a hard copy of all responses be forwarded to the Anglican Communion Office and the Covenant Design Group.
2. That Executive Council appoint a writing group to draft a collective response to the proposed covenant for approval by Executive Council during its October 2007 meeting.
3. That the writing group communicate with the House of Bishop Theology Committee.

Read it all.

The genius of Anglicanism is its gracious comprehensiveness in allowing for pluriform, contextually responsive theologies and hermeneutics throughout the global Church. Our heritage and our Christian witness are enriched by the presence of evangelicals, conservatives, moderates, and progressives in our midst, engaging in spirited dialogue that respects the culture and insights of each believer and each local church. The Baptismal Covenant, the Creeds, and the Eucharistic liturgies we use have all been developed with extraordinary care over the centuries and are sufficient as the “fundamentals” that bind us together officially. To suggest that we need another covenantal authority beyond those is not only to innovate in an undesirable way regarding the central characteristic of Anglicanism. It is also to dishonor, however unwittingly, those ancient and great instruments of unity.

Historical precedents in adiaphora””such as the Church’s positions on various social questions and liturgical options over the centuries””should be mulled with respect, but they should never be bowed to as if they were idols. The truth of this claim should be transparently obvious just on the face of it, but I would add a particular reason in light of our current debates: the voices of women, the poor, and openly gay persons have been suppressed in the councils and other judicatory bodies of the Church since its inception. I am astonished whenever anyone, progressive or conservative, suggests that the fact that the Church has “always” done something or “always” said something means that the Church has necessarily been correct on the matter. It is abundantly clear that the Church has made disastrous missteps in its history””the Crusades, colonialism, and chattel slavery are only three examples out of many that could be cited. Creating a covenant that enshrines any historical status quo as such would be a dangerous and harmful move in our polity.

It is politically naïve and theologically suspect to suggest, as some have, that having an Anglican Covenant will keep us in conversation on divisive issues. Our commitment to our Lord Jesus Christ should already keep us in loving and patient conversation on every issue of importance to the Church and the world. Those for whom our unity in Christ is not sufficient reason to remain in dialogue will not be one iota more inclined to listen to Christians with whom they disagree if we establish a new and weak political instrument.

It has also been suggested that a Covenant could serve a spiritual-formation purpose as a rule of discipline that fosters virtue in the life of the Church. To propose that a juridical instrument could serve that purpose effectively is to gravely misunderstand what polity is for and how spiritual formation in community may be nurtured. In my view, that suggestion also subtly denigrates the rich traditions of spiritual formation on which Anglicans already draw.

The concern of some that global mission and relief work will be fatally compromised if we do not have a Covenant is understandable, but in that case, the terms of the issue are being illogically framed. Service delivery systems are already in place within the Anglican Communion and outside of it. Those who are committed to relief of the poor and to mission work will continue to minister in those arenas, and where collaborative relationships have (already) broken down, new relationships with other partners can be forged. The problem should be understood for what it is: the unconscionable refusal of some Global South primates to accept resources from provinces that do not hew to their own particular patriarchal, misogynistic, and homophobic views. If relief work suffers in the short term””which will be a tragedy””it will be because of the intransigence of those primates, not because of the absence of an Anglican Covenant or the failure of the Episcopal Church to yield to pressure on one or another matter of our local polity.

There can be no question that the proposed Covenant will be used in pragmatic terms to derail local autonomy, threatening discipline or exclusion of those whose Christian witness does not conform to androcentric and heteronormative values (which are by no means as obviously “scriptural” as their adherents claim). The causes of our current divisions are many and complex. As all agree, a fundamental disjuncture has to do with divergent ways of conceiving Scriptural authority in different cultural contexts. The uneven deployment of economic resources globally and reactions against Christian and secular Western colonialism are also in play here. I see little reason to expect that the innovation of a potentially punitive instrument of extra-provincial polity will help us to address these challenges more effectively. To the contrary, such a Covenant would likely only exacerbate the bitter struggles for power that we are currently experiencing.

Read it all.

Amidst rising tensions in the Anglican Communion over the issue of homosexuality, the Windsor Report strongly advised its member churches to adopt a worldwide Anglican Covenant in order to restore the bonds of trust and affection within the Communion. The Report also presented a detailed draft covenant for discussion. That covenant proposed a sweeping transfer of authority from individual provinces to the four central structures of the Communion, the ”˜Instruments of Unity’, two of which are composed wholly of primates and three exclusively of bishops.

Despite these ominous first steps on the way to an Anglican Covenant, subsequent documents and public statements from the Instruments of Unity gave reason to hope that the Covenant process would be an inclusive exercise resulting in an inclusive agreement. These hopes were shattered, however, by the Report of the Covenant Design Group (CDG) and by the communiqué of the Primates’ Meeting at Dar es Salaam. The draft Covenant of the CDG report gives the Instruments of Unity veto power over change within the provinces on ”˜essential matters of common concern’, as well as exclusive authority to declare a member church in breach of the Covenant and therefore no longer in covenant relationship with other churches. Furthermore, instead of envisaging an unhurried, comprehensive process of consultation in provincial synods, the CDG report urges the immediate acceptance of this Anglican curia across the Communion, offering a patently question-begging argument for doing so. The primates’ communiqué from Dar es Salaam exceeded the presumptuousness even of the CDG, not only crediting the primates with the authority to issue ultimatums to member churches and impose sanctions for non-compliance, but also demanding that a member church violate its own canons and constitution. Far from restoring trust throughout the Communion, the Covenant process has thoroughly undermined it.

It might be replied that, while of course the process of agreeing a Covenant must be a collaborative dialogue with neither content nor purpose of the Covenant fixed at the outset, the only way forward is a more centralised Anglican Communion, with a central tribunal for vetting change in the Communion on controversial matters. But such a tribunal would only be reasonable if it could be more reliable at ”˜tracking the truth’ than the traditional polity of the Anglican Communion””and that is not the case. Moreover, at present and in the foreseeable future, no international Anglican tribunal could begin to approach the standard of reliability required, for it would be unduly vulnerable to pressure from hardliners on the issue of homosexuality. Hence the CDG draft Covenant’s proposals for concentrating power in the Instruments of Unity violate the Covenant’s own commitment to the open, communal pursuit of truth.

Read it all.

We oppose the Draft Anglican Covenant on the grounds that

Ӣ it would transform the Windsor process from admonition and counsel into an
unprecedented and unjustifiable ecclesiastical coup d’état;

Ӣ its central proposal is to transfer power from the presently autonomous Provinces to a
Meeting of the 38 Primates. The ambiguity of the text leaves open the possibility that
this power would be unlimited, unaccountable, and irreversible;

Ӣ the consequences of this development for Anglican theology and polity, and for
ecumenical agreements, would be extensive and have scarcely been explored;

”¢ the proposed innovation in granting juridical power to the Primates’ Meeting would be
a distortion and not a legitimate development in Anglican ecclesiology;

Ӣ the consultative processes and timetable are wholly inadequate and in particular they
completely marginalise the voice of the laity;

Ӣ the proposals have not been adequately justified in their own terms (the creation of
trust) nor in the wider terms of better ordering and facilitating the mission of the
Church;

Ӣ and yet Anglicanism has a rich storehouse of dispersed authority, of hospitality,
mutual respect and trusting co-operation, of valuing difference and openness to new
developments, of the honest and open search for truth, all of which can provide an
alternative to the Draft Anglican Covenant as grounds for hope for the future.

Read it all.

(1) Do you think an Anglican Covenant is necessary and/or will help to strengthen the interdependent life of the Anglican Communion?

I don’t feel that a Covenant is necessary, but I am aware that there are many who do, and I am fully prepared to commit to one, provided it does in fact “help to strengthen the interdependent life of the Anglican Communion.” It is hard to answer this question in the abstract, however; the details of any such Covenant””and much more detail than this Draft provides””must first be considered.

(2) How closely does this view of communion accord with your understanding of the development and vocation of the Anglican Communion?

It is close enough, though I think we do well to remember that the Anglican Communion is an historical accident: the spread of Anglicanism globally and the emergence of the Anglican Communion as we know it was not the result of a comprehensive strategy or clear intention. To acknowledge this in no way contradicts the assertion that this Communion is a gift given to us through the grace of God; it simply recognizes the newness, unevenness, and elements of surprise present in our becoming who we are; it should also incline us to an abiding openness to change, flexibility, and a willingness to experiment. It may be that this Communion is still on its way to become something yet unimagined.
I appreciate this section’s reference to mission.

Read it all.

When the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church convenes June 11-14 in Parsippany, New Jersey, its members will spend time reflecting on the past, present and future shape of the Church and of the Anglican Communion, as well as considering issues of ministry and governance.

The Church’s governing body between General Conventions will, as part of its agenda, look to the past to hear a report about the effort to gather information about how the Episcopal Church may have benefited from slavery.

The Council will look to the present and the future as it discusses how the Church might reach out to Episcopalians in a small number of dioceses and parishes where the leadership is disaffected with the wider Church.

Council will consider a report and resolutions in response to portions of the communiqué issued by the Anglican Primates at the end of their February meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; get a summary of responses to its invitation for Episcopalians to discuss the proposed Anglican Covenant; and will hear about the experience of one gay Anglican in Nigeria.

“I am sure that a number of international concerns will be the subject of our conversation and deliberation,” said Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori. “Among them, Anglican Communion issues, of mission including the Towards Effective Anglican Mission meeting and matters of peace and justice such as our Millennium Development Goal efforts. We’ll talk about how we can grow our partnerships around the Communion; as well as relationships with our covenant partners such as Brazil, Mexico and Philippines.

“The current conflict around the draft Anglican Covenant and the process for its consideration, as well as the Lambeth Conference and the House of Bishops’ response to the Primates’ Communiqué, will be discussed. We will also include in that discussion the conflict caused by incursion into the Episcopal Church from other members of the Anglican Communion.”

“We will consider domestic issues including the federal Farm Bill and our concern about domestic poverty, as well as matters of internal governance,” she continued.

Read it all.

Given this situation, we would make the following points and raise the following questions:

1. ACI has defended not only a collaborative understanding of the Instruments of Unity, but their integrity as well. The failure of the ABC publicly to state that the Dar es Salaam Communiqué is alive and well has been injurious to our common life. It has also been intimated in certain quarters that the adjudication of the Communiqué will be undertaken by a Joint Steering Committee of the Primates and the ACC. We trust that this rumor is mistaken. The Primates have worked hard and declared their intention, and their recommendations and requests are fully within their remit as an Instrument with enhanced responsibility, whose present character was requested by other Instruments of Communion. Lacking any clear understanding of the precise fate of the Communiqué has left the field open for manipulation and the multiplication of other initiatives, borne of fear, concern, power balancing and so on.

2. ACI has sought to work with the Windsor Report, the Covenant, and within the US, the Windsor Bishops. One can watch with curiosity and concern the proliferating of various groups within the conservative ranks, most recently, a Common Cause College of Bishops (as proposed), CANA, and others. The Anglican Communion Network would appear to have split into those bishops now headed toward the Common Cause College, and those who wish to continue on the Windsor path. But to the degree that the Windsor Bishops have no clarity about the future of the Primates’ Tanzanian Communiqué, and hence a comprehensive, ordered response to their Communion life in troubled times, they will collapse altogether. Indeed, one wonders what role they might be expected to exercise in the light of such unclarity.

3. It is our understanding that the recent issuing of Lambeth invitations was done in the light of organizational concerns and the timing of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s leave. The ways in which the Archbishop has reserved to himself all manner of options, discernment, and counsel regarding the ultimate character of invitations–which is his right to do–means that speculation about the character of the conference is bound to be only that. Still, it is speculation capable of generating unease and reaction that is not always constructive.

Read it all.

Church of England bishops have drawn up plans for a “rule book” of beliefs that would expel liberals who refuse to abide by it.

The proposals to introduce Papal-style laws come despite warnings that they could lead to a split in the Church.

The confidential document from the House of Bishops, seen by The Sunday Telegraph, claims that a “narrower definition of Anglican belief” is crucial to prevent the Anglican Communion from becoming embroiled in future disputes over issues such as homosexual clergy.

The paper reveals the determination at the highest levels of the Church to impose powers to quash dissenters, backing a covenant – or set of rules – that would block Anglican clergy from pursuing liberal and potentially divisive policies.

There is no official policy that governs the clergy’s behaviour, but instead each of the world’s 38 Anglican provinces is autonomous.

Read it alll.

The Covenant process is, in practice, by-passing these questions, acting on the implicit assumption that we already have the answers ”“ that they are known and must be obeyed; so all we need to do is to set up the slow inexorable process of exclusion of those who question the traditional understanding of the answers. The Primates are demanding that ECUSA give assurances that they will cease giving any sanction to practices which go against Resolution 1.10 (Lambeth 1998) (Note 3), and the Archbishop of Canterbury in his letter to the Primates (5thMar 07) refers again to this requirement.

What has happened to the vital consideration of issues raised in the Windsor Report concerning ”˜essentials and non-essentials’ (”˜adiaphora’) ”“ core doctrines as opposed to other teaching? (Windsor paras 36f, 49, 87f). All this is in practice being put to one side. Why are we not, as a Communion seeking to find common ground regarding methods and principles of biblical interpretation, which are common to those involved in biblical scholarship across denominational boundaries? Or at very least clarify where we differ in regard to our hermeneutical criteria? Instead we are avoiding these crucial matters.

4) Covenant Design sets up procedures for exclusion
This is no exaggeration, because it must be known that ECUSA and the Canadian Province cannot be expected to ”˜back down’ from the convictions that they have come to over decades, in their understanding, in good faith, of how the Holy Spirit has led them in seeking answers to the above two fundamental questions. Yet Section 6 of the Draft Covenant makes clear provision for their exclusion if they fail to ”˜fall in line’: note the injunction “to heedthe counsel of the Instruments of Communion (para 4) and the reference to the Primates as giving direction (para 5.3). But far more specific is para 6, of this section: “where member churches choose not to fulfil the substance of the covenant as understood by the Councils of the Instruments of Communion, we will consider that such churches will have relinquished for themselves the force and meaning of the covenant’s purpose, and a process of restoration and renewal will be required to re-establish their covenant relationship with other member churches.” To what else can this possibly refer, but to excluding Provinces which believe they are called to affirm committed same-sex partnerships? And yet this is being proposed while avoiding any further rigorous theological and hermeneutical debate on the matter, let alone a serious listening to our gay brothers and sisters in the Communion who long to be affirmed in their committed partnerships.

5) The Communion needs to acknowledge the reality of a re-assessment of certain teachings
Concerning the two crucial questions which connect us all in this wrestling debate, there are two realities: there is the reality of the traditional teaching which the majority still hold to, and there is the reality of a reassessment of the traditional teaching which many believe to be prompted by the Holy Spirit. It is these realities which need to be respected. It is the challenge of the above two questions which need to be addressed. How can the Communion set in motion what is in practice a ”˜process of exclusion’ when the theological and hermeneutical questions are at best being shelved, if not being deliberately avoided.

Read it all.

1. Do you think an Anglican Covenant is necessary and/or will help to strengthen the interdependent life of the Anglican Communion? Why or why not?

It would be helpful at this point in time for the Anglican Communion to make up its mind whether the needs of the world and the mission of the church in response to those needs will be better served by a more strictly and centrally regulated structure, or by a more open model deployed for ministry. We favor the latter as more in keeping with Christ’s commission to the church, which is focused not on itself and its structures but on the proclamation of the saving message to a wounded world. It appears that the more we attempt to secure our inner agreements the more we focus on the things that divide us. The Anglican Communion has been known until recently as a body governed not by statute but by bonds of affection, and a Covenant, if needed, should, unlike the present proposal, focus on the affection rather than the bondage. Such a Covenant would be tolerant of diversity and encourage bilateral cooperation in meeting local and global needs through partnerships rather than promoting more complex and rigid structures, as the present proposal seems to advise.

Read it all.

1) Do you think an Anglican Covenant is necessary and/or will help to strengthen the interdependent life of the Anglican Communion? Why or why not?

v No ? I am not persuaded that we need a Covenant, nor is it clear how such a Covenant will be interpreted and employed. Is it to be a gesture of renewal of our interdependence, or is it to be a binding contract that will be cited as law? It gives the appearance of attempting to centralize and control the Communion, of policing the process of discernment and implementing conformity in the name of clarity. It seems to depart from the unique witness of the Anglican style, by which we have inherited a spirituality, polity and theological methodology that resists uniformity for the sake of unity, and is grounded instead on gracious invitation.

Read it all.