Prof. [Ephraim] Radner, one of 10 members of the group drafting the proposed Anglican Covenant, made no bones about division as an endearing reality in the church’s life. He called unity a thing not to “cleaned of division,” but rather emanating from “the blood of the cross, from which there is no escape. We are called to be one,” he said, “but our soul depends on the sharp sword of division.”

Bishop [James] Stanton, billing his talk “a report from the front lines in the struggle for a Communion Covenant,” took issue with too-easy attempts to define the Greek word koinonia as mere “fellowship,” when the “koinonia” of God through Christ ”“ his entering into flesh and blood” in fact brings unity through restoration of “fallen, broken humanity.”

“It belongs to koinonia,” he said, “to endure sacrifice and suffering until the battle is through.” Among the obstacles to achievement of koinonia, in Bishop Stanton’s recounting: inadequate education concerning the whole question; the lack of “corporation memory” concerning the church’s own promises to rein in divisive, free-lance activity by advanced spirits; and, last, inability “to articulate in a compelling way why the office and person of the Archbishop [of Canterbury] is critical to our continuing Communion.”

Read it all.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams told the annual meeting of the Compass Rose Society (CRS) in November that the tensions within the Anglican Communion are not going to be resolved any time soon. “Deep wounds heal slowly,” Williams told members of the CRS, which supports the ministries of the Archbishop of Canterbury by providing annual financial support and enhancing communication within the communion.

The Archbishop spoke at length about last summer’s Lambeth Conference of bishops and viewed a “photo cinema” presentation of Lambeth images from the Anglican Communion Office’s communications department. The Most Rev. Clive Handford, former primate of Jerusalem and the Middle East, and Bishop Victoria Matthews of Christchurch in the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, offered an update of the work of the Windsor Continuation Group and matters relating to the Anglican covenant.

Read it all.

Archbishop Gomez said there was “a very high approval rating” for the ministry of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lambeth Conference, but he noted that the bishops raised questions “about the place of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), and there were a lot of questions about the role of the primates’ meeting in Anglican polity.”

The Covenant Design Group will meet in March 2009 to develop a new draft and prepare a report to the ACC for its May 1 to 12, 2009 meeting in Jamaica.

Archbishop Gomez said he anticipates it would take three to five years for the provinces to sign up once a final draft was ratified by the ACC. “There is a strong feeling in some parts of the communion that the covenant, setting out our mutual responsibilities as a family of churches, needs to be in place as quickly as possible ”” although there are other voices which still believe we have a way to go before we arrive at a mature text,” he said.

Read it all.

Before I do so, however, there are other objections to my analysis that deserve a response. Bishop Whalon and others often argue that Dioceses are “created” by General Convention. This claim, however, is an example of wishful thinking that ignores the legal precision of Article V of TEC’s Constitution. This article is entitled “Admission of New Dioceses,” and not “Creation of New Dioceses.” The first sentence specifies General Convention’s role in the process. It is to “consent.” The wording indicates at the outset that the role of General Convention is secondary, not primary. It consents to actions initiated elsewhere.

The following sentences in Article V elaborate this process. The proceedings “originate” with a convention of “the unorganized area,” not with General Convention. It is the unorganized area that “duly adopts” its own constitution. Article V then describes the legal entity created by the duly adopted constitution not, as before, as an “unorganized area,” but as a “Diocese.” Then the “new Diocese” submits its constitution to the General Convention for consent; and upon receipt of this consent, it enters into “union with the General Convention.”

In this articulation of the steps involved in the creation of a new Diocese, Article V reflects the civil law. When an unorganized area adopts its own constitution, by definition it is no longer “unorganized.” It is a legal entity. In the terminology of Article V, this entity is called a “new Diocese.” This step, furthermore, occurs before the constitutional involvement of General Convention. What happens when the new Diocese obtains the consent of General Convention to its application is that it is “admitted” into union with the other dioceses in General Convention. The transformation from “unorganized area” to “new Diocese” occurs when the diocesan constitution is duly adopted. When General Convention gives its consent, another transformation occurs, but it is not the creation of a new Diocese. It is the transformation of unaffiliated “new Diocese” to member diocese of General Convention.

Read it all.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori was among those attending the JSC meeting, which was held behind closed doors at the Anglican Communion Office and Lambeth Palace in London. She noted that a November 26 report in The Times of London newspaper, that suggested the JSC had discussed plans to discipline the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone for its recent incursions into other provinces, was untrue. “The subject has not come up,” she told Episcopal News Service.

The committee heard a report about the 2008 Lambeth Conference budget “and the deficit is much lower than was originally anticipated,” said Jefferts Schori, who was elected to the Primates Standing Committee in February 2007.

Read it all.

The group says that Anglicans are well versed in the idea of voluntarily pledging themselves to others ”” a concept that underlies the notion of a generous covenant ”” even if they have had little use for the word “covenant” in the past.

Replying to other concerns of the bishops, the group says that the document could be a unifying force ”” even, one day, a central text for the Communion. The Covenant could “change, amend and grow”: it is not designed to “constrain the languages, the cultures and the forms in which this Gospel is expressed”.

None of the “basic formal bonds” that frame the Communion’s common life, such as the baptismal covenant or eucharistic fellowship, or even the Lambeth Quadrilateral, contain the necessary element of “mutual responsibility” that the Covenant has, the group says.

Nevertheless, the Covenant would not override the autonomy of the provinces in ordering their life according to the demands of local mission. The group admits that there needs to be “more work” on the way the various instruments of unity relate to each other.

Read it all.

ACNS spoke to the Chairman of the Design Group, Archbishop Drexel Gomez about the Covenant Process.The full transcript is available below:

The Lambeth Commentary to the Saint Andrew’s Draft – what is it exactly?

At the Lambeth Conference, the bishops spent a great deal of time and attention looking at the Saint Andrew’s Draft for the Anglican Covenant – discussing the principle and the text, its merits and demerits. It is very important that their views are made available to the Communion as the Provinces assess the Saint Andrew’s Draft, and so they have now been published in a Lambeth Commentary which has been drawn together by the Covenant Design Group from the materials produced at the Conference.

And what was the reaction of the bishops at Lambeth?

Happily, it has been positive – and I say that as one who is a firm supporter of the current draft. A number of concerns were expressed about how the idea of a covenant might impact on the life of the Communion, but when the bishops looked at the detail, then there was a surprisingly high degree of satisfaction with many parts of the text.

Read it all and follow the links.

(ENS) If a proposed Anglican covenant is released in mid-May for adoption by the Anglican Communion’s provinces, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori will “strongly discourage” any effort to bring that request to the 76th General Convention in July….

Anglican Communion provinces have until the end of March 2009 to respond to the current version of the proposed covenant, known as the St. Andrew’s Draft. The Covenant Design Group meets in London in April 2009 and may issue another draft of a covenant. That draft is expected to be reviewed by the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) during its May 1-12, 2009 meeting. The ACC could decide to release that version to the provinces for their adoption.

If the ACC decides to do that, “my sense is that the time is far too short before our General Convention for us to have a thorough discussion of it as a church and I’m therefore going to strongly discourage any move to bring it to General Convention,” Jefferts Schori told the Executive Council. “I just think it’s inappropriate to make a decision that weighty” that quickly, she added.

Read it all.

Adoption of the proposed Anglican Covenant could be completed much sooner than the 10-year time frame mentioned frequently during the Lambeth Conference, according to one of the two Covenant Design Group members from The Episcopal Church.

Basing on submissions received from bishops attending the Lambeth Conference, the Rev. Ephraim Radner predicted that only a small minority of provinces would fail to approve the Covenant. Prof. Radner, who teaches historical theology at Wycliffe College in Toronto, said the Covenant Design Group is scheduled to disband after holding a second meeting sometime after the first of the year. From there, the Covenant is scheduled to be considered by the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), which meets next May in Jamaica.

Prof. Radner told The Living Church it is not clear whether the ACC would be asked to hold an up-or-down vote on the final language drafted by the Covenant Design Group or whether they would be encouraged to propose amendments before a vote.

Read the whole article.

The process of finalizing an Anglican covenant needs to move forward more quickly if the Anglican Communion is to be preserved.

That was the message delivered Saturday (September 13) by West Indies Archbishop Drexel Gomez, the chairman of the group charged with formulating the pact intended to help ensure unity in basic beliefs, settle disputes, and administer discipline among historically autonomous Anglican provinces.

“I believe Anglicanism has much to offer the world and has made a tremendous contribution to Christianity. But we are at a dangerous point in our history,” Gomez told more than 100 people attending the Festival of Faith at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Bladensburg, Maryland.

“There is nothing on the immediate horizon that offers any kind of hope to holding the Communion together other than the covenant,” Gomez contended. “Nothing else is on the table. If that fails, we will see only further fragmentation and disintegration. That is not theory but reality,” he said.

Read it all.

Two leading Anglo-Catholic bishops presented differing visions for regaining Anglican unity at “The Hope and Future of Orthodoxy in the Anglican Communion: A Festival of Faith Conference,” held Sept. 13 at St. Luke’s Church, Bladensburg, Md.

The Most Rev. Drexel Gomez, Archbishop of the West Indies, and the Rt. Rev. Keith Ackerman, Bishop of Quincy, were the featured speakers at St. Luke’s, an Anglo-Catholic parish in the Diocese of Washington.

The bishops agreed that Anglican unity remains torn, just as the primates said it would be, by the consecration of the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson as the Bishop of New Hampshire””and by the deeper theological divisions evident in The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada.

Archbishop Gomez stressed the importance of a Communion-wide covenant being drafted by an international panel that he leads. “There is nothing on the horizon that offers reasonable hope of holding the Communion together, other than the covenant,” he said.

Read it all.

Please note that this is an introduction to the following post written by Mark McCall–KSH.

Sad to say, it seems virtually certain that TEC will reject any covenant proposal that limits its autonomy. Its leadership has consistently argued for a view of communion that resides in mutual hospitality and practice (as seen from the leadership’s perspective). They have also made clear their resistance to any meaningful form of restraint on a Province that decides to act against the views of the Communion as a whole.

Should the General Convention reject the proposed covenant, the paper we are posting clearly implies that individual dioceses within TEC have a constitutional right to vote for adoption on their own. The Instruments of Communion would then have to decide whether or not to allow individual dioceses that dissent from the negative actions of their Province to be covenant partners with the other Provinces of the Communion. Circumstances such as these present other polity issues, but the Archbishop of Canterbury has already indicated the theological appropriateness of this course of action. It would, nonetheless, still have to receive some form of Communion approval. It is difficult to imagine that such approval would not be forthcoming.

It is painful to think of TEC rejecting the covenant, though this is the course of action intimated. This eventuality will result in individual dioceses being put in the position of adopting a covenant on their own. There is a promise of renewal and reform attached to these possibilities. By adopting the covenant, dissenting dioceses within TEC would place themselves within a communion of provinces and dioceses wherein effective hierarchies are extant. In so doing they would place the hierarchy that orders their own dioceses within a more Catholic (with big C) and less congregationally ordered form of polity.

Read it all.

TWR’s solution was to give extant pan-Anglican instruments of union legislative and juridical authority. Member churches were to commit themselves to submit innovations in doctrine or practice (especially those concerning whom the Church is prepared to ordain and bless) to the instruments of union for approval, and to refrain from giving such changes institutional expression until such approval was secured. In other words, pan-Anglican instruments were to be given a veto power over any changes of ”˜essentials’ by national churches. TWR suggested the mechanism of a pan-Anglican covenant, whose provisions would be given legal force through member churches changing their canons.

Rhetorically, TWR is remarkable for presuming its own legitimacy. It speaks throughout as if TWR polity were already in force and as if TEC and New Westminster had violated covenant commitments. Rhetorically, TWR encouraged the instruments of union to act on this presumption. Rhetorically, TWR was persuasive.

So when TWR went on to suggest ways of disciplining TEC and New Westminster (putting them on probation by asking them to withdraw from participation in pan-Anglican instruments until matters were settled, until TEC and New Westminster had repented and enforced moratoria on ordaining non-celibate homosexuals and blessing homosexual partnerships) and of protecting the faithful in (what came to be known as) non-Windsor-compliant dioceses or provinces, the ABC and the primates at Dromantine took authority and proceeded to do just that.

Read the whole argument

Australia’s most senior Anglican said a once-a-decade conference has given him hope the church can avoid splitting over the issue of homosexuality.

Australian primate Archbishop Phillip Aspinall said while there is no quick fix to the damaging row, the Lambeth Conference in south-eastern England has pointed the way forward.

“There is enormously strong commitment among the bishops present at Lambeth to stay together and that is a very positive outcome,” Dr Aspinall told ABC radio.

The meeting, which ended yesterday, has been overshadowed by a dispute about the consecration five years ago of the first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson, in the United States.

Read it all.

The idea of a covenant itself was mainly accepted by Episcopal Church bishops, said Bishop Charles Jenkins of Louisiana. “I did not find any American bishop who was unable to accept the idea of covenant,” he said. “I think that there is a strand amongst us that ”¦ is not necessarily going to be happy about it.”

Jenkins added that “part of the sacrifice most American bishops are willing to make is that we will accept a covenant and accept the moratoria.” Aspinall said that one American bishop told him that he came into the conference opposed to a covenant, but his support is growing day by day.

However, Bishop Marc Andrus of Diocese of California — where the Supreme Court recently ruled that marriage is open to gays — said that a moratorium “is a non-starter for me.” He also noted that in relation to the other part of the moratoria — ending incursions into other churches — “the main perpetuators of the incursions are not present so [it’s difficult] for me to make an agreement on moratoria on that basis.

“The [main] reason I am committed to continuing blessings is because it’s a justice issue,” he said. “While we defer and wait, there are many gays and lesbians, transgendered and bisexual people all over the world who continue to be denied their civil and human rights.”

Although Jenkins said he believed “it is possible to make a sacrifice without selling out,” he said that it is “a moral dilemma for me” if gay and lesbian Anglicans have a sacrifice imposed on them. He added that the covenant proposals represent “a commitment to minimize the impact of something I do upon another person.”

Read it all.

After a day of discussion on Aug. 1 concerning the proposed Anglican Covenant, there is widespread support in principle for such an agreement among the bishops attending the Lambeth Conference. It is unlikely that anything would be in place for at least 10 years, however.

During a Lambeth Conference media briefing Friday morning, the Rev. Canon Gregory Cameron, deputy secretary general and director of ecumenical affairs for the Anglican Consultative Council, explained that there is currently no provision to welcome into the covenant a diocese whose province rejects it.

“At the moment we are playing a ball game to win provincial support,” he said, “but provided it is within the constitution and canons of the province, there is no harm in having a diocese declare itself in sympathy with a covenant.”

Read it all.

The Archbishop of Adelaide, Dr Philip Aspinall, said that he expected to see reluctance to sign up to the Covenant in every province.

“It will be difficult, I believe, in every province of the Anglican Communion for that province to make a decision to enter into the Covenant; because, at the heart of Anglicanism is the notion of autonomy, self-rule. And so province will guard that very jealously.

“It will only be as a result of deep and careful reflection that they agree to self-limit in order to protect something which is equally valuable, and that is our Communion.”

The chairman of the covenant drafting group, the Most Revd Drexel Gomez, dismissed the suggestion that few provinces had so far endorsed the Covenant. Many in the Global South, for example, had expressed their support verbally.

Read it all.

What is the timetable for this document? This is a very important question. Bishops will make comments here through their own notes and the Indaba groups. They will suggest ways that the document needs to be expanded or wording reworked. But, they are not free to change the document.

Also included in the notes for this meeting is a response paper sent to each of the bishops who are not here. The paper gives each bishop the chance to read the document and comment on it. This was stated as crucial because it must reflect the voice of the whole Communion. All of these notes will go to the Covenant writing group, meeting again in Singapore in September, 08.

It is anticipated that a tweaked draft will be produced in Singapore. This draft will be sent to every province; each province will state 1) what they will require to sign onto the covenant and 2) make suggestions for the document and 3) give an answer to the question: is your province willing to give in principle, agreement to this draft of the Covenant? These answers are required by the end of March 2009.

In May 2009, the Covenant will go to the next scheduled meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council, which has representatives from each of the 44 churches and 38 provinces in attendance. They meet every three years and will debate the Covenant, giving it a thumbs-up or thumbs down vote. If enough (read overwhelmingly good number of) provinces agree that the covenant should be moved forward, it will be. Likewise, it can be killed at this meeting. It is unknown what will happen should it go down.

If it is moved forward, it will require special handling to reach the floor of the General Convention in Anaheim, July 8-17, 2009.

Read it all.

From Matt Kennedy the superscribe–read it all.

Dr. [Ephraim] Radner, who accepted the premise that the covenant itself was not intended to resolve the current difficulties with TEC, nonetheless considered that a resolution of those difficulties needed to be reached before a covenant could usefully be entered into. (I don’t think he meant a resolution by inaction and putting the matter aside. See his letter of July 13.) It seems possible at least to envision a solution involving a combination of a covenant involving substantial improvements to the St. Andrew’s draft (without scrapping it altogether) and a contemporaneous disciplining of TEC that would be illustrative as to future application. Without at least that, it is hard to see the value of proceeding with a covenant.

—Mike Watson on the very important thread on this blog below, all of which deserves careful perusal

An Anglican version of the Roman Catholic church’s “inquisition” is proposed today in a document seen by The Times.

Bishops are urging the setting up of an Anglican Faith and Order Commission to give “guidance” on controversial issues such as same-sex blessings and gay ordinations.

The commission was put forward as a proposal this week to the 650 bishops attending the Lambeth Conference as a way of preserving the future unity of the Anglican Communion. Insiders compared it with the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body formerly headed by the present Pope as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and previously known as the Holy Office or Inquisition.

This morning’s “observations” document is the second in a series of three. The third will be published next week. The document says: “Anglicans are currently failing to recognise Church in one another.”

Read it all.

1. A failure to address the issue

Any covenant document has to recognise fully the mischief it seeks to address. This document makes no mention of the crisis which has generated the call for such a remedy, which is a crisis of obedience to Scripture. Further, it fails to recognise that in the eyes of many the ”˜instruments of Communion’ (3.1.4) are themselves part of the problem. This means that trying to use such failed instruments as arbiters of a future solution is problematic in the extreme. Put bluntly, this covenant will not allow the real issues to be addressed.

2. An illegitimate notion of autonomy

The understanding of the individual Churches of the Communion throughout this document is fatally ambiguous. The language of autonomy in communion is introduced in 3.1.2., but there has been no justification produced for this concept in the preceding sections. More seriously this language is unqualified and so fails to distinguish between matters on which Scripture is silent (and where there may be legitimate liberty and indeed diversity) and matters on which Scripture has spoken definitively (and where autonomy is therefore a euphemism for sin). Our obedience to Scripture and our responsibility to each other must significantly qualify all talk of ”˜autonomy’ with reference to any congregation, diocese, province or, indeed, the Communion itself.

3. No biblical theology

The entire document, and particularly the statement concerning ”˜the inheritance of faith’ in paragraph 1, is detached from the Scriptural narrative of salvation and redemption from sin, which Churches in the Communion have seen realised. The principal concerns of Scripture are ignored as the document concentrates on matters which are dependent and consequential upon those concerns. The unity of Christians flows out of the redeeming work of Christ and the incorporative ministry of the Spirit. Any attempt to generate or sustain such unity on our own terms and by our own institutional efforts without reference to this prior and determinative reality must be judged sub-biblical.

Read it all.

Via Email:

The Global Anglican Future Conference Theological Resource Group (TRG) has published a response to the St Andrew’s Covenant. www.gafcon.org/index.php This has the authority of that group and is the substantive response from GAFCON.

There are two major concerns about the proposed covenant. First, what will it contain? Will it have sufficient commitment to the doctrinal and ethical commitments of the traditional Anglican formularies? Will it have sufficient material on the process of maintaining unity on essentials?

Secondly, the current St Andrew’s draft focuses the action away from the Primates to the Anglican Consultative Council. In every case except the Church of England, the Primates are the elected heads of their churches. The Lambeth Conferences of 1988 and 1998 asked for enhanced responsibility to be given to the Primates on matters of contention. The St Andrew’s draft reverses this direction and gives responsibility to the ACC for approval of the final text of the covenant and as arbiter of inclusion in the Communion.

Thirdly, it should be noted that even though the Lambeth Conference is an instrument of communion, it has no decision-making role in finalizing the covenant. Rather it is the ACC that will be the final arbiter of what the covenant will contain.

Further, no bishop here has the authority to accept the covenant on behalf of anyone else: such decisions belong to the provinces, their synods and house of bishops.

The briefing paper that was posted on the GAFCON website, on which Dr Andrew Goddard focuses his major critique www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/page.cfm, has now been removed. It was purely a resource paper provided for the TRG comparing the St Andrews Draft with earlier theological reflection. This reflection was incorrectly identified for which apologies are made for the confusion caused.

The response of the GAFCON Theological Resource Group is to the St Andrew’s Draft and the GAFCON Theological Resource group welcomes comments on the substance of their response to office [at] gafcon [dot] org.

The first and irrefutable conclusion that must be drawn from these two documents is the shocking inadequacy of GAFCON’s theological resource group and wider leadership. To have produced a briefing paper claiming to summarise the changes between the Nassau and St Andrew’s draft covenants but actually comparing the St Andrew’s draft to a quite different document unrelated to the covenant (and which many of the GAFCON team were involved in writing) is an astonishing error. That nobody in the group (or among the GAFCON leadership which released it) realised that the claimed removals from the Nassau draft were therefore all fraudulent suggests an inexcusable level of ignorance about the covenant process on the part of all those involved in writing and then disseminating this briefing paper to the wider Communion. The authorship is unclear but either we have a very small number of people writing what claims to be a representative document commended by seven Primates or we have a large group which failed to spot this basic and serious flaw. I am not sure which of these options is I would prefer to be reality. Unfortunately this all gives the strong impression that the conclusion ”“ “the new document is severely flawed and should be repudiated” ”“ was already decided upon on other grounds.

The second conclusion is that the other response of the same team is therefore seriously discredited, especially if it was put together on the basis of the briefing paper or by people who had seen the briefing paper and not realised its basic error.

Read it carefully and read it all. It is very disappointing that there was a basic documentation mistake of this magnitude–KSH.

Many attempts have been made to address the breach of relationships caused by the setting aside of biblical teaching by some provinces, dioceses, and individual bishops, beginning at Kuala Lumpur in 1997, at the Lambeth Conference in 1998, and culminating recently, after consistent efforts in the intervening years, in the Primates’ Meeting in Dar es Salaam in 2007.

Sadly this new draft of An Anglican Covenant is both seriously limited and severely flawed. Whether or not the tool of covenant is the right way to approach the crisis within the Communion, this document is defective and its defects cannot be corrected by piecemeal amendment because they are fundamental. The St. Andrews Draft is theologically incoherent and its proposals unworkable. It has no prospect of success since it fails to address the problems which have created the crisis and the new realities which have ensued.

This document falls in effect into two parts. Sections 1 and 2 mention some matters of faith, but section 3 is in fact the critical section of the document, because this introduces the thought of Churches as being ”˜autonomous-in-communion’. It is on this concept that the proposed resolution of Communion disputes rests.

Read it all.

Having written glibly about the “controversial” covenant of beliefs that Rowan Williams wants the bishops to take back to their provinces, I’ve now read a draft of the thing, and can summarise it as follows:

1. If an Anglican province signs up to the covenant, it agrees to not do anything contrary to the policies of the Anglican Communion.

2. If it goes ahead and does it anyway, then it will have ignored the covenant.

3. Which means … um, we’ll get back to you on that.

Or maybe I’ve misread the draft. This whole covenant thing is elusive, shall we say.

Read it all.

(1) Nowhere in the lecture did he refer to the Windsor Report and to conciliar authorities. No reference was made to the instruments of unity or to Canterbury as the focus of unity. Missing was also the quadrant-demarcation of churches and power blocs in Communion’s “Cold War” (to borrow Cameron’s allusion to NATO). His approach in mapping the Communion future is strikingly different from that undertaken by Fulcrum and ACI, which by and large offer a structural and conciliar solution to the present Communion crisis.

(2) The above is underlined by the astonishing way Cameron reinterpreted and defended the Anglican Covenant. The idea of Covenant was first proposed in the Windsor Report under the heading “Canon Law and Covenant” (Windsor Report, 113-120). The sequence and relation between the two are important: “Canon Law” first, then “Covenant”. The Windsor Report has in mind that the Covenant would be a “Communion law” that “would make explicit and forceful the loyalty and bonds of affection which govern the relationships between the churches of the Communion. The Covenant could deal with: the acknowledgement of common identity; the relationships of communion; the commitments of communion; the exercise of autonomy in communion; and the management of communion affairs (including disputes). (Windsor Report, 118)”

In sharp contrast, Cameron (intentionally?) dismissed the juridical and administrative language…

Read it all.

Why do we need a Covenant at all?

A covenant has been proposed, not to change the nature of Anglicanism or the nature of the Anglican Communion, but in order faithfully to respond to developments that have already taken place within our common life as Anglicans. These developments have to do with the enormous blessing God has given to the missionary receipt of the Gospel within different parts of the globe over the past 150 years through the Anglican church. Many of these blessings, though taking form over a long period, did not become apparent in their scope until just the past few decades, as Anglican churches in Africa and Asia especially, as well as in other parts of the world, have emerged as vital and Spirit-filled Christian communities, themselves engaged in a broad range of missionary endeavors. The Covenant seeks to address how Anglicans around the world, although no longer bound by the past habits and culture of a more restricted British and Anglo-American fraternity, will maintain their unity and energy as they witness to the Gospel.

At the same time, the Anglican Communion has always understood itself to be “bound together not by a central legislative and executive authority, but by mutual loyalty sustained through the common counsel of the bishops in conference” (Lambeth Conference 1930, Resolution 49). This eschewal of a “central legislative and executive authority” has always been understood as embodying the Anglican charism of “mutual responsibility and interdependence” (to use the phrase from the 1963 Anglican Congress), exercised under the “ultimate” authority of the Scriptures themselves. Given this tradition, “procedure” in terms of common council and behavioral norms of common decision-making with regard to the meaning and application of Scripture’s rule must take a higher profile for Anglican churches than perhaps for some other Christian ecclesial communities. The Covenant is designed to address this traditional need for procedural faithfulness.

Read it all.

Many, particularly within the Episcopal Church, have already argued that the very idea of an Anglican Covenant, and all the more the St Andrew’s Draft, is inherently alien to the Anglican tradition and ethos. We do not share this perception. We have tried to note several points in the documents of Anglican history which reveal a developmental arc that would lead us to this place even absent the present crisis. The formal embrace of an Anglican Covenant is an organic and natural next step in the growth to maturity of a Christian tradition that we believe God yet wills to use as a vehicle of great blessing on behalf of “all who profess and call themselves Christians.”

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.