The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Secretary General have now announced the names of the Working Group. They are:
* The Most Revd Dr John Neill, Archbishop of Dublin (Chair);
* The Most Revd Dr John Chew, Primate of South East Asia;
* Dr Eileen Scully, Anglican Church of Canada;
* The Rt Revd Dr Gregory Cameron, Bishop of St Asaph in the Church in Wales and former Deputy Secretary General of the Anglican Communion.
The last Lambeth Conference proceeded without resolutions, and the result was far deeper and richer because of the focus on conversation, dialogue and building relationships. This ACC meeting conducted some of its business in that way, but a great deal of time and energy was devoted to hearing reports and dealing with resolutions.
The members of the ACC arrive and are inundated with long and complex papers on a great variety of subjects ”“ resolutions from the different networks, the recent draft of an Anglican covenant, the Windsor Continuation Group report, a 256-page book on ecumenical relations and many others ”“ and are expected to make decisions after brief opportunities for small-group discussion.
The details of decision-making would surprise most Episcopalians. A small group develops material ahead of time and then offers it to the group with relatively little opportunity for deliberation or alteration. The resolutions presented for deliberation are vetted and edited by a resolutions committee.
The pace of work is leisurely, with 40 hours of formal work spread over 11 working days. The chair exercises a great deal of discretion in referring or declining to entertain resolutions; elections are not straightforward ballots for a single individual; discussion of any proposed amendment requires the support of 10 members; the president (the Archbishop of Canterbury) steps in fairly frequently to “steer”; and the rules are quite evidently not Robert’s!
The contrasts with General Convention are significant….
What was going on? The church is an institution. Institutions are determined by power. Power was often exercised arbitrarily in the debates and decisions in Jamaica. The debates on the covenant were confusing and breached many rules of normal procedure. The press were told that a great deal of weight falls on the chairman to direct the meeting.
On the central issue the chair ruled the motion to delay the covenant out of order because it was bringing back a previously defeated motion. But Archbishop Williams trumped him and interpreted the mind of the meeting as having rejected the first motion because they wanted it again in another form. The Archbishop later suggested that, in future, procedures be outlined at the beginning of the meeting.
Those disadvantaged when all power is in the hands of the chair and the president are the ordinary members of the Council. Many said they were confused. A Ugandan member spoke of a spirit of confusion.
Secondly, the real issue was the property of the North American Churches. Had the motion on moratorium passed, TEC would have been in breach of the will of the Communion in pursueing faithful Anglicans through the courts. Had the motion on the covenant passed, orthodox churches would have the high moral ground in property matters in claiming their status as Anglicans faithful to a covenant to which TEC would not agree.
The Primate, Archbishop Phillip Aspinall, who attended the meeting as a member of the joint standing committee, said while there were reports of much confusion about the process by which the Covenant decision was delayed, “the people he spoke to were aware of what was proposed and what was voted on”.
The ACC is a significant body within the Anglican Communion, composed of representative bishops, clergy and laity from each of the 38 member churches. Australia ’s representatives are Bishop Andrew Curnow ( Bendigo ), Archdeacon Dr Sarah Macneil (Canberra & Goulburn) and Robert Fordham (Melbourne & Gippsland). It is one of the four Anglican “instruments of unity”, the other three being the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference and the Primates’ Meeting.
Dr Aspinall has commented that “if all goes smoothly”, the Anglican Church of Australia should have the final form of the Covenant in readiness for debate at the next meeting of General Synod, to be held in Melbourne in September next year.
“I hope that the Anglican Church of Australia will decide to adopt the Covenant, and that all or nearly all of our Anglican Communion sister and brother churches will do so also,” he said.
Unfortunately, the Episcopal Church in America (TEC) and a few other churches were strongly opposing the idea of the Covenant especially section 4[2]. Their excuse was that this section is new and has not been studied enough by the Provinces as the other sections have been. They have forgotten that this particular section of the Covenant is in fact the outcome of many deliberations and responses that came from dioceses as well as bishops who attended the Lambeth Conference in 2008. In addition to this, section 4 was already present in the commentary of the St. Andrews draft of the Covenant that was sent to the provinces after the Lambeth Conference. I personal believe that we will never have a perfect Covenant that could be accepted by all, even if we spend another 10 years working in it. TEC also described section 4 as “punitive.” In response to this, it was clarified that the Covenant gives guidance to the Provinces which are responsible for making their own decisions. The Covenant also does not require any changes in the constitutions of the Provinces. In addition to this, section 4 allows Provinces to make amendments to the Covenant after it is accepted. In fact, it is because that section 4 is not strong enough many conservatives described the Covenant as very weak and useless.
My own impression is that the fear behind accepting the text of the Covenant, especially section 4, originates from the desire to avoid anything binding which would affirm the interdependence of the Anglican churches. Denying the interdependence of churches is contrary to the very meaning of the word “Communion.” For this reason without this section, the “Covenant” would not be a Covenant and the word “Communion” would lose its meaning.
The Anglican Covenant will not be sent out to the provinces of the Communion for adoption until there has been consultation on the controversial section 4, the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) voted by the narrowest of majorities at its meeting in Jamaica this week. SecÂtion 4 deals with the enforcement of the terms of the Covenant.
The chairman of the Covenant Design Group, the Most Revd Drexel Gomez, the recently-retired ArchÂbishop of the West Indies, had urged delegates not to lose the opportunity to take decisive action on the CovÂenant in what was considered to be its final form, the Ridley Draft (News, 8 May). He had predicted breaks in the Communion if it did not vote to send it out.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has conceded that ACC-14 in Kingston, Jamaica was a “failure” that disappointed many Anglicans across the Communion. However, the meeting of the Anglican Communion’s fourth ”˜instrument of unity’ had been a “glorious failure” that saw the Anglican Communion rise from its “deathbed” to address its own shortcomings, Dr Rowan Williams said in his closing presidential address on May 11.
It was unhelpful to establish criteria for success or failure for Anglican meetings, Dr Williams told delegates to the May 2-12 meeting in Kingston, Jamaica said, as there was “no absolute measure for achievement. In critical times ”“ small things might be large achievements. Our willingness in certain areas to act as one and to discover more deeply how we pray as one is, by God’s grace and gift, for no other reason, an achievement,” he said.
On a matter over which several years were spent in deep discussion, study, and work, around the world, and I know serious engagement at the ACC itself, decisions were apparently made within a confused and chaotic few minutes visible to the world at large that have serious consequences for the Communion, and whose propriety is now debated (and I and the ACI are hardly the initiators of or even strident voice in this debate), and the actual significance of which remains unstated and unknown. The initial work of providing resolutions for the Council regarding the Covenant was put into the hands of a small group that from the start simply did not appear representative of the views of the whole, and the sequence of events in the debate and resolution-voting, amending, and re-voting maintained a skewed dynamic of direction.
I am not persuaded by the explanations given by the ACO representatives at their press conference that somehow the process and the final outcome represents some otherwise undefined “sense” of the meeting, ascertained in the heat of debate by the Chair and President, especially when members of that meeting, including bishops from Nigeria and Egypt, are on record as strongly disagreeing with that “sense” and indicating that at least in some significant ways it did not jibe with the “mood” of many delegates. The point here, however, is not to accuse individuals of malicious intent, nor even to argue that these perceptions of mine and others are in fact accurate. There may indeed be good explanations for why things happened the way they did. But the concrete explanations have not been forthcoming, and on a matter of such importance, fraught with enormous tensions from the start, this lack of clear illumination cannot but be perceived as substantively obfuscating. The Communion deserved better, and at the least some admission of this fact would go some way to mitigating a lingering sense on the part of many ”“ I personally have no opinion on this matter ”” that this particular outcome was more important to some than the integrity of the means by which it was reached. It has left a bitter taste.
As to the outcome itself, I am deeply disappointed. My hope had been that the hard work of the Covenant Design Group, a work that even the Covenant’s detractors admitted had carefully assessed and appropriated the suggestions and critiques from around the Communion, would be allowed by the ACC to move forward to the Provinces for their decision-making.
The Covenant
We had come to Jamaica ready to move forward on the Covenant. The deliberations and decisions of the Council make clear that the ACC wants a covenant. Our disappointment was that we could not get it now. The decision to modify the timetable was by a very slender margin of only three votes. And many people took the middle road position in order to give time to improve the Covenant.
Interventions
Cross-provincial interventions are a serious matter. The Archbishop of Canterbury has given his assurance that the role of the Pastoral Visitors would take care of the need for a listening process for faithful Anglicans alienated from their churches and in a significant number of cases deposed from their orders in North America. Some of us who had previously had significant doubts about the wisdom of these interventions have become aware from those whose provinces have taken this bold step that these interventions were both necessary and justified, and others that they were understandable, as an answer to a distress call. We therefore urge the Archbishop to dispatch Pastoral Visitors immediately who will incorporate into their work a listening process because of the urgency of the situation.
While it “hasn’t necessarily dealt with the problems of the Anglican Communion once and for all,” the 14th Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) meeting has enabled members to “build solid relationships with the local church and with one another,” Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said on May 12, the final day of the 12-day council meeting.
“It has deepened our sense of obligation to, and involvement with, each other,” he said. His assessment of a meeting where delegates emerged “more hopeful” about prospects for the Anglican Communion was echoed by ACC delegates in a plenary, where they discussed key messages that they would bring back to their churches.
In a press conference on the last day of the ACC meeting, Archbishop Williams cautioned The Episcopal Church (TEC), whose General Convention is scheduled to be held this summer, against possible action ignoring the call for “gracious restraint” on the ordination of persons living in same-gender unions to the episcopate and on same-sex blessings. Those moratoria, including cross-provincial interventions, were recommended by the Windsor Continuation Group (WCG) and endorsed by this ACC meeting.
“I think actions on that resolution would instantly suggest to many people that The Episcopal Church would prefer not to go down the route of closer (relationships). That’s how it will be perceived,” he said in response to a question as to whether such action could push what he had warned as a possibility of the Anglican Communion splitting into a federation.
One can only reflect, that when there is no clear procedure, the door is open for the arbitrary use of power. That does not empower people, since they have no access to appeal to what all have agreed on. In this case, when the chairman sought to follow the normal rules of procedure he was trumped by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The question remains: what confidence can the Anglican Communion have in a body where those who come to make decisions have no given ground rules for how those debates and decisions are going to be conducted ahead of time, but rather are dependent entirely on the will of the chairman and above him of the president to interpret their mind?
The Chicago Consultation released this statement today from its co-convener Ruth Meyers in response to the Anglican Consultative Council’s affirmation of the recommendations made by the Windsor Continuation Group and its decision to postpone the release of the Anglican Covenant for consideration by provinces:
The Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), meeting now in Kingston, Jamaica, has committed itself to the hard work of debating recommendations and documents that seek to define the Anglican Communion. We are grateful for the efforts of its representatives, and we especially commend the decision to delay sending a draft of the proposed Anglican Covenant to the provinces until more work has been done that might strengthen, rather than tear down, our common life.
However, we believe that the ACC and the Windsor Continuation Group have made a grievous error by concluding that God is calling us to exclude baptized Christians who are gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender for the sake of communion. These moratoria, which were requested in the Windsor Report and by the primates, have not been formally agreed to by the democratic structures of the Episcopal Church and are inconsistent with both the Anglican tradition of seeking unity through diversity and with scripture’s mandate to do justice.
Delegates from the Church of Nigeria stated they were perplexed by Dr Williams’ actions. “All of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s contributions were positive” up until the last moment of the meeting, Bishop Ikechi Nwosu of Nigeria said.
Nigerian Archdeacon Abraham Okorie said there was a “satanic” spirit of confusion in the air. He noted it was hypocritical of the ACC to make a great noise of using African ways of decision making in addressing the covenant, but then resorting to slippery parliamentary tricks to thwart the will of the meeting.
Dr Williams was a “very weak leader,” Bishop Ikechi Nwosu of Nigeria observed. “Of course we pray for him, but couldn’t he be courageous for once?”
Things went only downhill from there. In the first place, there was no clear plan on how to present and to vote on the differing resolutions dealing with the Covenant that had been prepared by the Resolutions Committee. Three of its members, as I mentioned, favored putting off adoption of the entire Covenant at this meeting. Because of ECUSA’s strong opposition to it, expressed in one of the small indaba groups, they wanted the ACC to send Part IV of the Covenant back for a rewrite before it would be presented to the churches of the Communion. They accordingly drafted a Resolution to accomplish this, and it was presented as “Resolution A”:
The ACC:
a) resolves that section 4 of the Ridley Cambridge Draft be detached from the Ridley Cambridge Draft for further consideration and work;
b) asks the Archbishop of Canterbury, in consultation with the Secretary General, to appoint a small working group to consider and consult with the Provinces on Section 4 and its possible revision, and to report to the next meeting of the Joint Standing Committee;
c) resolves that the reconsidered Section 4 may, at the request of the JSC, be offered for adoption as an addendum to the Covenant text.
Simultaneously, in order to reflect the position favored by the great majority of the discussion groups, they presented a second Resolution, which they called “Resolution B”:
The ACC:
a) thanks the Covenant Design Group for their faithfulness and responsiveness in producing the drafts for an Anglican Communion Covenant and, in particular for the Ridley Cambridge Draft submitted to this meeting;
b) recognises that an Anglican Communion Covenant may provide an effective means to strengthen and promote our common life as a Communion;
c) asks the Secretary General to send the Ridley Cambridge draft, at this time, only to the member Churches of the Anglican Consultative Council for consideration and decision on acceptance or adoption by them;
d) asks those member Churches to report to ACC-15 on the progress made in the processes of response to, and acceptance or adoption of, the Covenant.
It should have been obvious that these resolutions were mutually incompatible, and could not both have passed. Therefore, proper parliamentary awareness should have required the Resolutions Committee to (a) decide upon the order in which the various parts of the Resolutions should have been taken up, and (b) in the process present a coherent choice between possible outcomes. For example, paragraphs (a) and (b) of Resolution B could have stood on their own, and been presented for approval at the very outset. Then the choice would have been between detaching section 4 or not, and a clear vote could have been taken which would decide which approach the group as a whole preferred to follow.
Instead, what the ACC representatives got was a parliamentary mishmash, by the end of which no one could follow what was happening.
I would go further than saying “procedural confusion.” It is, as reports from Professor Stephen Noll and others are calling it: PERFIDY. It is a betrayal of every Anglican who has looked to the Covenant process to bring desperately needed order to our life as a Communion. …
It is painfully obvious to observers in many quarters that the continuation of the Communion depends on your actions in this matter.
The covenant decision came after a day of polite debate that, at times, included accusation, exasperation, impatience, and intense and confusing parliamentary maneuvering, both on the floor and behind the scenes.
On one end of the debate spectrum, Dato Stanley Isaacs of the Church of South East Asia, voiced the opinion of many when he said that the council faced “a defining moment for the communion, a moment that we either grab it or we don’t.”
He called the covenant “a hope in Christ that this will be a way of finding a just solution to the realization of a communion that is once again united in the bond of Christ ”¦ we long for that unity again.”
Isaacs said it would give “a ray of hope to us finding a resolution to the problem that has not only divided the communion, but has embarrassed the churches in many, many parts of the world outside of the United States.”
On the other hand, Sarah Tomlinson, ACC youth representative from Scotland, urged the council to allow the communion the time it needs to formulate a covenant whose terms are clearly defined.
“Whatever we decide now, my generation is going to have to deal with it. We’re going to have to bear the burden of dealing with this long after — no offense — you guys aren’t running the church,” she said. “So I know we’re all keen to get this finished and get it to come to an end, but let’s take the time to consult just a bit more ”¦ otherwise, I am going to have to be sorting out this mess and the rest of the youth are going to be sorting out this situation a lot longer.”
There are those on the right side of the aisle, however, who believe that …[Archbishop Rowan Williams] simply made a human error of judgement in allowing the delaying amendments to be voted on. The problem with this charitable view is that he himself stated that it was section 4 ”“ the very section with disciplinary implications ”“ that needed to be revised because it was causing dissension in the Communion. As if there had not been dissension heretofore leading up to this meeting!
Fine, I am willing to concede that Rowan Williams may have slipped up, or been snookered, in slowing down the approval of the Covenant. If, however, he himself recognizes this to be the case, then I would expect him to appoint a select review group that will uphold the Ridley Cambridge Draft and report out to the JSC an unaltered text or at least one where the key provisions of section 4 (including section 4.1.5) are still in place. I shall then expect him to face down Katherine Jefferts Schori and other objectors on the JSC and see the Covenant through to approval so that it may go out to the Provinces.
If the above paragraphs sound skeptical, it is because many of us conservatives see so little evidence that we can count on Rowan Williams for anything. For instance, even though he signed the unanimous Dar Communiqué and pleaded with Bishop John Howard to refrain from forcing clergy and congregation out of their church home in Jacksonville (I almost slipped and said St. Augustine (!) because one of my former students, a Jamaican, was forced from his parish in that city by the same Bishop Howard), did he speak up in favor of the fourth moratorium? Did he vote for it? I don’t know, but if he did, it didn’t make the headlines.
So what should orthodox folk do, now that the Covenant hope has been extinguished or at best put on hold? First of all, do what we are called to do: worship God and love your neighbor. Beyond that, I hope that the GAFCON and Global South bishops at the international level and the ACNA and Communion Partners in North America can find ways of working together for the up-building and mission of the Church. With or without the Covenant, we need each other. Each of our movements has its assets and deficits and we can share them as the Apostle commends to his churches (2 Corinthians 8:13-15).
Whither the Covenant? I believe that we should pursue dual tracks. Ok, the Ridley Cambridge Draft is not dead; it is on life support. It is my hope that Rowan Williams will repent of his mistake in Jamaica. I hope that “communion conservatives,” like the Anglican Communion Institute, will make a strong case for keeping the Draft exactly as is. I hope that Henry Orombi will attend the JSC meeting at the end of this year and insist on keeping the Covenant strong.
At the same time, I hope that the Global South movement ”“ those identified with the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans and those not so identified ”“ will resume its leadership on the Covenant. On the one hand, it can be patient and pressure Lambeth Palace not to change the text. On other hand, it can consider making the text stronger: by adding some elements from the Jerusalem Declaration and making the enforcement clauses even stronger. If the Covenant is not resuscitated by the end of the year, the Global South can ready a new Covenant ”“ a resurrection, as it were ”“ that will serve the mission of the Anglican Communion in the “Global Anglican Future.”
After a break and amid much confusion, the Chairman then announced that the entire resolution had passed even though there is no evidence it had even been voted on, the previous votes having been to amend the resolution, not pass it. If the position is that the individual clauses were enacted separately, is there any evidence that this was understood by the members prior to the vote?
These events unfolded live on Anglican TV to people watching around the world. It is beyond question that these procedures were improper, confusing and manipulative. The credibility of the ACC, already questioned by the Communion’s own advisory groups, has suffered lasting damage.
Two actions are required as a matter of urgency:
1. This issue must be re-visited immediately by the ACC and voted upon in a lawful and proper manner during this meeting. The alternative is moving forward with lasting questions as to the legitimacy of the entire process. Is this in doubt?
2. An explanation must be offered by those in charge of these proceedings, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chairman of the ACC, as to how such manifestly improper procedures were permitted to unfold from the outset of Friday’s session and, indeed, of ACC-14 itself. It appears to us that things descended into chaos and no one stopped and sought to bring things to order.
If lawful and proper action on the covenant is not forthcoming from this meeting of the Council, the only appropriate response is for the Churches of the Communion to begin themselves the process of adopting the Ridley Cambridge Text.
So was this a conspiracy or was it a cock-up? Whichever it was it is a case study of how to win if you are a minority in a meeting. If matters are going against you, get a team to work, introduce endless amendments to the resolution you do not like to spin out the debate, introduce a competing proposal, have a chair who is known to be on your side who has a vote and allows discussion of the proposal out of order, a person to present the material as a formal amendment, the president of the meeting to point out to people what is being intended, and also to interpret to the meeting its own decisions in a way that would allow this intention to come to fruition, and a chair who proceeds swiftly to a vote on this amendment having allowed extensive debate on the first resolution that was thought would be cleared out of the way quickly.
And what is the de facto result? Those facing litigation in the courts over property cannot appeal to an Anglican Communion Covenant which would give them the moral high ground in their cases by showing their continuity with historic Anglicanism; and General Convention can proceed with numerous resolutions which overturn the effective teaching of the Anglican Church with no opportunity for people to argue that this would be against the Covenant that ACC has accepted.
On the one hand is the property and keeping TEC, a major funder of the Anglican Communion Office and its projects, onside; on the other is affirming and embracing the historic faith as Anglicans have received and understood it. The ACC is split down the middle on the matter. Yet again an instrument of Communion has proved unable to deal with the crisis in the Communion.
“We want the rest of the church to know that our bishop has our support,” said the Very Rev. Peter J.A. Cook, president of the Western Louisiana standing committee and rector of St. Michael and All Angels’ Church, Lake Charles. He added that the standing committee and the bishop have no plans to leave, but are committed to working for reform from within the church.
Fr. Cook said the statement also was intended to prepare the diocese for the possibility that it will need to approve the proposed Anglican Covenant on its own if General Convention fails to do so when it meets in Anaheim later this summer.
“If General Convention does not approve the Covenant or fails to consider it, I’d be most surprised if our diocese did not take up a resolution to approve it for ourselves with the encouragement of our bishop,” he said.
One of the most important issues to come before the Anglican Consultative Council is the draft text of the Anglican Covenant. The idea for an Anglican Covenant has been before the Communion for the past few years and it was in 2006 the Archbishop of Canterbury established the Covenant Design Group. The process has been one of evolving texts as ideas suggestions hopes and fears from Primates, Provinces and the Lambeth Conference were shared with the Design group. Just before the Anglican Consultative Council began The Covenant Design Group produced The Third (Ridley Cambridge) Draft .
The Chair of the Covenant Design Group Archbishop Drexel Gomez presented a history of the process and the current text at ACC-14 on Monday May 4th. His address may be found here
On Tuesday May 5 Archbishop Gomez and Bishop Gregory Cameron held a press briefing reviewing the document and Bishop Gregory explained the process that ACC will follow in considering the text and discussed the kind of resolution that would be needed to forward the Covenant to the provinces for their consideration.
Finally, for those who are alienated within the Episcopal Church, the aim of the “professionally mediated discussion” has already been determined: “WCG believes that the advent of schemes such as the Communion Partners Fellowship and the Episcopal Visitors scheme instituted by the Presiding Bishop in the United States should be sufficient to provide for the care of those alienated within the Episcopal Church from recent developments.”[4] (emphasis added)
According to this recommendation of the WCG, those within TEC will have two alternatives to choose from: a Communion Partners Fellowship scheme that has no details as yet beyond DEPO and mere fellowship, or an Episcopal Visitors scheme imposed by the Presiding Bishop. What is the point of gathering those alienated by TEC for a “professionally mediated conversation” when the results have already been pre-determined? Is it an opportunity for further indoctrination in the false gospel of TEC? Or institutional loyalty? Or simply an exercise designed to wear down their resistance to false teaching?
This report from the WCG is the culmination of five years of conversation, dialogue, schemes, reports, and committees that have all failed to adequately address the crisis before us. These efforts have failed in part because they have not adequately talked with or heard from those most hurt by this crisis, those persecuted orthodox Anglicans in North America. Skeptics will be forgiven for recognizing in these WCG recommendations the same processes that have failed to hold the Communion together, and the same processes of delay that TEC will take advantage of while imposing a false gospel at home and throughout the rest of the Communion.
Reacting to Bishop Cameron’s statement, the lay delegate of the Anglican Church of Canada, Suzanne Lawson said, “Interesting.” She added, “I think that would be difficult for the Canadian church. I actually spend a good deal of time thinking about how change comes about and time is an important element in that. If we are to be looking in Canada at something that will take seriously the Covenant and reframe our thinking, we need some time to talk about it at General Synod in Nova Scotia and we may need more time three years from then.” General Synod, the Canadian Anglican church’s governing body, which gathers every triennium, is scheduled to meet in Halifax in 2010.
Ms. Lawson said, “We need to respect the provinces where that is a required amount of time.”
The Anglican Communion is a family of autonomous Churches. It finds its identity in the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. The Churches of the Communion, which are self-governing, share something of a common history, and have traditionally set their faces against centralised government in favour of regional autonomy1. The Anglican tradition was fashioned in the turmoil of reformation in Western Europe in the sixteenth century. Its historic formularies acknowledge the circumstances in which its emerged as a distinctive church polity. The non-negotiable elements in any understanding of Anglicanism – the scriptures, the creeds, the gospel sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist, and the historic episcopate – are to be found in the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral2; and the Instruments of Communion – the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates Meeting – provide an evolving framework within which discussion and discernment might take place. It remains to be seen if the circumstances in which the Communion finds itself today – externally and internally – might require over the years a shift of emphasis from “autonomy with communion” to “communion with autonomy and accountability”.
The principle of autonomy-in-communion described in the Windsor Report makes clear that the principle of subsidiarity has always to be borne in mind. If the concern is with communion in a diocese, only diocesan authority is involved; if communion at a provincial level then only provincial decision. But if the matter concerns recognising one another as sharing one communion of faith and life, then some joint organs of discernment and decision, which are recognised by all, are required. It is this necessity which led the WCG to articulate the move to “communion with autonomy and accountability” as being a better articulation of the ecclesiology which is necessary to sustain Communion.
So the task for the CDG was to write something which preserved the autonomy of the Churches, but which provided for a strong glue that held us together. It had to reflect the fact that as Anglicans we do not believe in one authority structure, but in dispersed authority – the whole people of God bearing witness to the Truth found in Jesus Christ, and each church rooting its witness in its own mission context.
Two leaders in the development of the proposed Anglican covenant said here May 5 that the process which might be used for Anglican entities to adopt the document is “evolving,” even as that evolution has made for some seemingly contradictory statements in the past days.
Anglican Communion Deputy Secretary General Gregory Cameron told reporters “we’re feeling our way” in terms of the implications for those provinces that decide not to sign onto the covenant, whether entities other than the provinces which are now members of the Anglican Consultative Council (as listed in the council’s constitution) would be allowed to adopt the covenant and whether there would be a time limit for provinces to decide.
On May 4, Cameron had told reporters that “at the moment there is no linkage to signing the covenant” and participation in the life of the communion. But, he added, “if a number of provinces were to adopt the covenant, then I think naturally the question would be asked whether some sort of assessment or change would have to take place.”
One cannot help gain the impression of an unfair lack of even handedness while making up the rules as they go along.
The unseating of Rev Ashey is linked with the decision to be made about who can adhere to the Covenant. Those who have consistently defied the Communion for the last five years are in a position to lobby and vote to exclude provisions in the Ridley Draft Covenant whereby other entities ( dioceses in TEC or ACNA) can sign up to the Covenant while TEC itself wants to spend 5 years considering the question. They are also allowed to retake their seats in order to engage in such lobbying while in defiance of requests of the communion about abandoning lawsuits, while those who have defied the request on cross border jurisdiction (soon to become a dead letter when ACNA is formed in six weeks time), are denied the right to exercise their own choice of who their delegate at the meeting is.
We see here what appears to be a lack of fairness, evenhandedness and consistency applied to the advantage of those who have caused the current problems by departing from the teaching and practice of the Communion in faith and morals and to the disadvantage of those who have adhered to the teaching and practice of the Communion in faith and morals. And the former will this week try to prevent the latter from even being able to adhere to the Covenant process.
Archbishop Drexel Gomez, chair of the Covenant Design Group (CDG), Monday urged delegates of the 14th Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) to send out “for consideration and adoption” the third and final draft of the proposed Anglican Covenant to the member churches of the Anglican Communion, saying “what is decided here is likely to make or break the communion.”
Archbishop Gomez, who recently retired as primate of the Church of the Province of the West Indies, warned that while at least three provinces have questioned whether there was a need for a common covenant among Anglican churches worldwide, “I have to say to you in all seriousness, the communion is close to the point of breaking up.” He did not identify which provinces are cold to the idea of a covenant, which was recommended by the Lambeth Commission on Communion as a way to address deep fissures among Anglican churches worldwide triggered by the issue of homosexuality.
Archbishop Gomez added: “If we are not able to commit ourselves to this sort of being a communion, the break up of its life is staring us in the face. Either we are a family, which means that each member of the family has care for and respect for the other members of the family, or we will have to learn to go our separate ways. The question is, do we wish to remain a communion?”