Please go here and read all 3 comments/transcripts.

While the statement was released on the same day as General Synod debated the Covenant, the timing of the release was not intended to sway discussion in England, a spokesman told CEN.

The “Oxford Statement” required weeks of refining and was passed from archbishop to archbishop before it was ready for release, a Gafcon secretariat spokesman said.

Sources within the Gafcon movement tell CEN the Oxford Statement should not be read as an outright rejection of the Covenant, but as a vote of no confidence in the current draft that vests authority in the Anglican Communion “Standing Committee”.

On November 1, Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali encapsulated the thinking of many of the Gafcon leaders, telling CEN the new Section IV of the Covenant was “quite different” from what had been prepared by the Covenant design team, and “produces a new kind of ecclesial animal” in the Standing Committee. “We have had a spate of resignations” from the Standing Committee “that calls into question its on-going credibility,” he noted. Yet the Standing Committee will “make recommendations” about discipline.

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Many of the reports of the vote therefore conclude that the Covenant is dead in the water — even before it is sent to the rest of the Communion.

That is a misreading. Although +Rowan Williams wants as many Anglican provinces as possible to sign up to it, he always knew that introducing a more Catholic ecclesiology — defining boundaries of doctrinal orthodoxy — would alienate both the conservative evangelicals and the liberal Anglicans. The loss of GAFCON and the Episcopal Church of North America are foreseen, if not intended, consequences of the Covenant process.

But the gain lies in a stronger, more unified, and more coherent Anglican Church, even if it will be considerably smaller than now. For Catholics that is good news, because Rome can again have a dialogue partner it can do business with.

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You may find the programme [at present hosted by William Crawley] link here.

The BBC blurb reads in part:

Earlier this week the General Synod voted to press ahead with the Anglican Covenant, a worldwide deal designed to keep Anglicans around the world united. But the traditionalist lobby group, the Global Anglican Future Conference, rejected the Covenant saying it was ‘no longer appropriate’. We’ll be hearing Bishop Martyn Minns, a member of the Secretariat of the Global Anglican Future Conference Primates’ Council and Dr Graham Kings, Bishop of Sherborne in the Diocese of Salisbury.

There are two segments of particular interest to blog readers. The first starts about 6 minutes in and features comments Guardian report Stephen Bates (it last about four minutes).

The second starts approximately 33 1/2 minutes in. It features those mentioned in the above blurb as well as former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord (George) Carey (the total length of this part is some ten minutes or so).

Listen to it all and note, alas, that this audio is only available for a limited time.

The Bishop of Bath and Wells, the Rt. Rev. Peter Price, insisted that the Covenant process was underway well before the election of Gene Robinson in New Hampshire. He referred to an Anglican Consultative Council document, Belonging Together (1992), which had a direct influence on The Virginia Report, much of which formed the basis of Covenant drafts.

Traditional Catholics, in the persons of the Bishop of Blackburn and the Rev. Simon Killwick (leader of the Catholic Group), signalled support for the Covenant as a means to provide greater coherence and integrity in Anglicanism.

A succession of speakers aired doubts. Would the Covenant undermine the autonomy of the Church of England or its prophetic spirit? Some thought that Covenant language like “relational consequences” spells a legalistic threat. Foremost among the doubters was the soon-to-retire Bishop of Lincoln, John Saxbee, who thought a Covenant is unnecessary since “Anglicanism is a covenant.”

Canon Elizabeth Paver, a member of the Anglican Communion’s Standing Committee, introduced a note of realism: in practice the Covenant will advise, never dictate; and it is vital that the Church of England “give some leadership” on the matter.

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After a debate in which concerns about the content and implementa­tion of the Covenant were raised, all three Houses of the Synod voted overwhelmingly for the motion: “That the draft Act of Synod adopting the Anglican Communion Covenant be considered.”

In the House of Bishops, 39 voted in favour, none against, with one abstention; in the House of Clergy, 145 voted in favour, and 32 against, and 11 abstained; in the House of Laity, 147 voted in favour, and 25 against, and eight abstained.

Introducing a debate on the Big Society on Tuesday, the Bishop of Lei­cester, the Rt Revd Timothy Stevens, said that the programme had begun to unleash a new wave of energy in the Churches for practical social action. The Synod enthusiastically welcomed the con­cept of the Big Society as an opportunity for the Church and a way of emphasising work that is already being done.

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One should be clear that objections to the Covenant that have been articulated in the past weeks represent entrenched strategic interests, not without principled motivation, but nonetheless driven by worries over maintaining particular stakes in the church’s decision-making process. The fact that objectors openly admit that the text of the Covenant itself is irrelevant to their concerns ”“ they rarely cite its actual words or argue on their basis ”“ disclose the nature of their anxieties as lying elsewhere. The Covenant has become a symbol. But if so, a symbol of what? Onto its screen has been projected the ideologies of one after another group.

But the Synod needs to do its own projecting. What can it see? If it cannot see an image of the Church of England’s own life and calling in the Covenant’s discussion of Christian communion, common commitments, and mutual deference and accountabilities ”“ a discussion derived from several hundred years of shared ministry and a rich ecumenical service and desire ”“ then the Church of England will indeed have chosen to stand still, as other Anglicans move forward with a life that promises to go far deeper and more vibrantly into Christ’s purposes than what is left behind.

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The turmoil in the Anglican church deepened today as conservative leaders said they could no longer sign a framework designed to restore unity, even as the Church of England rallied around the archbishop of Canterbury to back the plan.

Members of the General Synod agreed to support the Anglican covenant after listening to a morning of emotional debate.

But while the Church of England took one step closer to signing the covenant, other churches are retreating from it. In a statement, senior Anglican conservatives from countries including Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Nigeria, said they now would not support the covenant, which they believe has been watered down and become too soft on more liberal attitudes.

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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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As Andrew recognises and as their own statements make clear the Primates who wanted a covenant are unhappy with the current version. He may not be aware that before formal covenant proposals were committed to writing in the Windsor Process, there was discussion and some drafting by primates of the Global South. Our article is trying to explain why the people who promoted and supported the covenant now have misgivings about it.

In promoting, and indeed initiating the call for a covenant, the Primates were calling for unity, accountability and a basis for discipline where churches were acting contrary to Communion agreements. Why are these same people now uncertain about this draft of the covenant? Because they perceive that prematurely endorsing something inadequate may be worse than the original problem and create more problems.

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If Christians are alienated from each other, culturally, sociologically and psychologically, how high a formal fence should they erect between themselves? Enough, surely to give reflective space to both and a chance to relate their partial interests in the whole gospel picture whilst they live in tension and await, in joyful hope, a new heaven and a new earth. But temporary fencing, as low and light as possible, has to offer the best way forward if it’s relationships that count.

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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.

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If GAFCON and its supporters are genuinely seeking to be not an alternative Communion hoping for the breakup of the existing Communion but a reform movement within the Communion then rather than majoring on the covenant’s minor weaknesses and disparaging and distorting its content they should be embracing and working with the covenant as a reform which moves us in the right direction. Although not without its problems, by God’s grace and through our patience and perseverance the covenant holds out the prospect of gradually bringing greater faithfulness and order to global Anglicanism and so strengthening us to share in the mission of God.

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Asked if he thought the covenant would become a reality, the former bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, recently said: “I think so, because I don’t think really there’s any alternative.” Without it, he argued, “the loudest voices tend to win, or at least drown out the other ones, and I have seen that happen and it’s not a pretty sight”.

But responding to the loudest voices was exactly what the Windsor report did ”“ capitulating to Nigeria, Uganda, Sydney and the others ”“ to propose a covenant that establishes a formal procedure to block other Anglicans doing what they judge necessary for the Gospel.

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The Covenant sets some of the credal statements of the Christian faith in a specific framework. The premise of this framework is that the doctrinal and theological disagreements which have surfaced within the Communion are not about fundamentals but have arisen through problems in communication and understanding, as people have differing convictions.

Are the doctrinal and theological matters in current dispute matters of right and wrong, truth and error, or matters of personal conviction over which better communication will produce unity and harmony? The Covenant process is only capable of dealing with disagreements of the latter kind. Better communication in such a framework requires an attitude of openness, a process of listening and adequate time. So the Covenant puts in place such a decision-making process in the Communion….

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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’.

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Niceness may be enough to carry a measure through an inexperienced and supine General Synod, but it can hardly make the covenant a transformative consciousness raiser, let alone the turbine of a more mutually engaged global denomination. However the General Synod votes, the big issue for the covenant process thereafter will be securing buy-in, confronted by zealots’ disappointment and majority indifference.

It is often observed that individual Anglicans around the world recognise, like and enjoy each other’s company. They generally get on like a house on fire at local level. Their institutional quadrille is where the problems lie. Covenant afficionados may hope beefing up the formal denomination will improve informal relationships. Others fear beefier formalities will sour them.

One Conservative blogger announced this week, tongue slightly in cheek perhaps, that he had believed the covenant useless, until it had been drawn to his attention how much it annoyed Liberals. Et voilà. Even as a kicking foetus, the covenant is already annoying people. This doesn’t imply that once born it will only be used only to promote understanding and harmony. Nice people will use it nicely ”“ others won’t. Real copper-bottomed zealots will almost certainly carry on regardless. The god of unintended consequences will stand in the background, smiling.

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The covenant has been portrayed, and betrayed, by its detractors as a dangerous, monolithic innovation of regulatory control, which will stifle freedom and diversity. But forced assimilation is not on the table, and it is false witness to dress it up as such. Gregory Cameron (secretary to the group who produced the covenant) and Andrew Goddard (Anglican ethicist) have demonstrated that its detractors have seriously misconstrued the text and its intention.

The model of the covenant is drawn from family ties and kinship and bounded by mutually agreed norms of behaviour which benefit everyone. It is not a document of doctrinal specifications, like the conservative Jerusalem Declaration, drawn up mostly by those who boycotted the Lambeth conference. Nor is it a contract, as feared by its liberal critics. It is truly a covenant.

In his address to the Lambeth conference 2008, the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, was pithily penetrative and perceptive in drawing out contrasts: “A contract is a transaction. A covenant is a relationship. Or to put it slightly differently: a contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘us’. That is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.”

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Many things have already been said in the public arena about the proposed Anglican Communion Covenant. As Provinces around the world continue to discuss this important document I think it worth clarifying some points about it. I am not arguing here for or against the Covenant, merely pointing out that it should be debated fairly, with an accurate reading of the text….

The point of the processes outlined in the Covenant is precisely to encourage one part of the Communion, when seeking to respond responsibly in its own context in mission, to consider how that will affect other parts of the Communion It is not that one Province would exercise a veto over another, but that there would be collaborative discernment. In a globalised world, it is no longer possible (if it ever was) for one church to act entirely for itself; decisions have ramifications, and the intention is for these to be explored together.

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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).

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In November, the Church of England’s General Synod will be asked to approve the covenant.

“Many synod members do not realize it, but it could be the biggest change to the church since the Reformation,” said an Oct. 28 press release from Inclusive Church and Modern Church, ahead of a campaign launch Oct. 29 when full-page ads will appear in both the Church of England Newspaper and the Church Times.

The campaign “will continue during the weeks leading up to the General Synod debate,” scheduled for Nov. 24, “and if the [covenant] is not rejected, but referred to the dioceses, it will continue throughout 2011,” the release said.

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The Diocese of Western Louisiana endorsed the Anglican Covenant at its 31st annual convention Oct. 15-16 in Alexandria, La.

Delegates passed by an overwhelming majority a resolution offered by St. Mark’s Cathedral of Shreveport that endorsed the Covenant. The resolution added that the diocese “remains committed to the Constitution and Canons of General Convention of the Episcopal Church while seeking to pursue our identity as constituent members of the Anglican Communion in communion with the See of Canterbury.”

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Obviously, the most problemmatic portion of the proposed Anglican Covenant is Section Four which deals with processes and procedures should one Province or “instrument” of the Communion feel that another Province has failed to live into the implications of the Covenant and caused serious stress and strain for sisters and brothers elsewhere, stretching or even breaking the bond of Communion the Covenant is supposed to enhance.

This is obviously a new development for the Anglican Communion. We have always seen ourselves as interdependent but autonomous Provinces bound together primarily by our approaches to the Bible and the Liturgy and by our historic ties to the See of Canterbury and the Church of England. This relationship has served us well in the past but, with globalization and worldwide communication and our now-decades-old developing self-understanding as a global Communion (“the third largest communion of Christians after the Roman Catholics and the Orthodox”) do we not need something more now as a kind of skeletal structure to bind us together.

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The Anglican Church of Rwanda has also been at the forefront of the reform movement within the Anglican Communion. While it supports in principle the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Anglican Covenant process, it has been less than enthusiastic about how such a structure might work, given the anarchy now prevalent across the Communion.

At the All African Bishops Meeting in Entebbe in August, discussion of the Anglican Covenant among the gathered bishops took a decided second place to the conciliar programme for a renewed Anglican ecclesiology propounded by Rwanda and the Global South group of churches.

An August 2008 paper prepared by Dr. Kevin Donlon, an American priest of the AMiA, and a member of the Global South Anglican Theological Formation and Education Task Force, argued the Covenant was yesterday’s solution to today’s problems.

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Update: You can now find the full article on George Conger’s blog here.

In his Pentecost letter to the Anglican Communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, speaks of us as having ”˜not fully received the Pentecostal gift of mutual understanding for common mission’.

The differences that focus around questions of human sexuality continue to be very real, very difficult.

ACSA must contribute what we can to the painful debate, not least from our own experiences of dealing with vast diversity.

I am therefore glad that ACSA was effectively represented at the Global South 4th Encounter earlier this year, and that 10 Bishops attended the All African Anglican Bishops Conference in Uganda last month.

For us, what has mattered most is:

· being centred on Christ;

· agreeing on the central matters of who Jesus is and the salvation he brings;

· and therefore recognising one another as being united in him, and, in consequence, with each other.

In consequence, as we have found within the Synod of Bishops, when differences arise, none of us feels called to say to another ”˜I no longer consider you a Christian, a brother in Christ, a member of the body of Christ ”“ I am no longer in communion with you.’

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Australian Anglicans have committed themselves to three years of debate before a decision is taken on whether to embrace an international covenant designed to preserve the unity of their church.

The General Synod, meeting at Melbourne Grammar School, adopted a resolution asking the synods of all 23 Australian dioceses to consider whether the Anglican Church of Australia should adopt the Anglican Communion Covenant and to report to the Standing Committee of the General Synod by December 2012. The resolution asked the Standing Committee to report to the next meeting of the Church’s national parliament in 2013.

The Covenant proposal, which is endorsed by Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury, arose out of divisions in the Church over human sexuality. The Episcopal Church in the United States has consecrated two openly gay bishops in the past seven years, while many Anglicans in the developing world hold to traditional Christian teaching against homosexuality.

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The Anglican Communion: As many of you know, there is this thing running around the Anglican Communion called the “Anglican Covenant.” It was a product (at least its concept) from the Windsor Group convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury, several years ago. At Lambeth Conference it was discussed, and while I have to admit that we were told that no decisions were going to be made at Lambeth, it does appear that a decision was made that a Covenant would be presented to be adopted by all of the Provinces of the Anglican Communion.

We have people from the Episcopal Church who have been working on this group (among others) to help write a Covenant. Quite honestly, they seem to be rather supportive of such a document. As I stated last year and previously, I support the concept of a Covenant. It is what it is ”“ a Covenant, not a legal Contract. It is a way of living together, and in the larger scheme of God’s Salvific Creation, the Anglican Communion is still relatively young and is suffering from growing pains. Something that helps us is probably not a bad thing. Those who worked on it have suggested that it is broad enough, with enough “mays,” “ifs,” “possiblies” and the like, that there is much latitude for the Episcopal Church, and other Provinces to continue to move forward where the Holy Spirit appears to be leading, but at the same time, an opportunity to remind everyone that we are in relationship.

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Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson and Executive Council member Rosalie Simmonds Ballentine have issued a letter to the church calling for study on the Anglican Covenant.

“We strongly urge every congregation in this Church to engage in discussion of the proposed Covenant at some time in the coming two years,” the letter states.

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