The Anglican-Methodist Covenant in England will be signed at a national celebration on Saturday 1 November 2003 in the presence of Her Majesty the Queen. Earlier this year the Covenant was strongly endorsed by the Methodist Conference of Great Britain and the General Synod of the Church of England.
The event will begin at Methodist Central Hall, Westminster, at 11.00 am when the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and the President, Vice-President and Secretary of the Methodist Conference will sign the Covenant on behalf of their churches before an invited assembly. The ceremony will continue at Westminster Abbey with a short service of thanksgiving and dedication.
The order of service is not yet available online, but material from it, adapted for local use, is available here as a Word document and here as a pdf file.
Thirty years ago a unity scheme between the Church of England and the Methodist Church failed at the last stage. Formal conversations between the two churches began in 1999 and produced a Common Statement which proposed a Covenant between the two churches as the first stage on the road to unity.
Unfortunately the Common Statement is not available online. It contains much important information, particularly on those matters where there is general agreement between the two churches and those where there is not. It must however be said that there is often as much disagreement within each church as there is between the two.
The full text of the Covenant, and its accompanying Affirmations and Commitments, can be found here and here. The second of these links also lists all the resources that are available for purchase. One of these, a theological workbook, can be downloaded from here as a Word document.