From the diocese of Central Florida:
Two paths suggested themselves. A minority of the LCC “took a juridical view, using canon law to steer the Church.” However the “majority felt the need to go deeper” and believed a covenant was needed. The Windsor Report offered a “first draft” of an Anglican Covenant “as a way of giving flesh to the Communion.”
The Primates asked the Communion to offer its responses to the Windsor Report and Archbishop Williams created a Design Group to review the responses and prepare a draft. Two Americans had been appointed to the Design Group, Archbishop Gomez noted, the Rev. Ephraim Radner, rector of Church of the Ascension in Pueblo, Colorado and the Rev. Katherine Grieb of the Virginia Theological Seminary.
The principle influences came from submissions from the Anglican Church of Australia, the Global South Coalition’s paper “The Road to Lambeth,” the Windsor Report, and the Ordinal of the Church of England, he said.
The impetus towards the creation of a Covenant came from the “total breakdown of trust within the Anglican Communion,” he noted. The Design Group “sought to recognize this and to repair the breach.”
However “trust cannot be legislated. It requires a commitment to travel with one another and be with one another,” he said. That “trust does not now exist.”
The first draft was written by Dr. Radner, Archbishop Gomez said, and at its January meeting in Nassau the Design Group “worked on it and released the draft” presenting it to the Primates at their February Meeting in Tanzania.
“The Primates spent very little time dealing with the Covenant”, Archbishop Gomez noted, but “expressed their pleasure of what the group was doing.”