The Anglican Covenant is all but dead in the water as far as this church is concerned. This follows a crucial vote by Tikanga Maori at its biennial runanganui in Ohinemutu today.
The Covenant will still come before General Synod in July, but a decision to accept it requires a majority vote in all three houses ”“ lay, clergy and bishops ”“ and by all three tikanga.
Today’s runanganui decision effectively binds all Maori representatives on General Synod to say no.
They seem to have clubbed it on the head fairly effectively.
Is anyone surprised by this? Frankly, I always thought New Zealand might quash the Covenat before TEC nixed it. And now it looks like they are going to beat TEC and the ACoC to it.
In and of itself, that doesn’t kill the Covenant, of course, since it was designed all along to isolate and quarantine the provinces that were simply determined to “walk apart.” What will really kill the Covenant is the refusal of the big Global South provinces to sign on. The Sinapore South-to-South Encounter made it abundantly clear that most of the Global South now sees through ++RW’s hypocritical game and won’t play along anymore. And rightly so, for section 4 is indeed, as they said, “fatally flawed.”
Not of course, for the reason that the Philippine Episcopal Church gave for declining to sign the Covenant, i.e., that it supposedly created a new centralized authority that unwisely or impermissibly limited provincial autonomy. The fact is, that it doesn’t clip the wings of wayward provinces enough. The grim reality is that, in today’s Anglican world, every province does what seems right in its own eyes, and no one, even Christ himself, can them what to do.
David Handy+
The Tikanga Maori is a tiny organization with hardly a score of clergy – a Potemkin church.