Make it simpler. Don't consider it at all.

With her earned doctorate, it's a given that the PB is intelligent.

But more importantly, ++Katharine is *wise*. God bless her!

I think I agree with Pluralist. The covenant movement is a sidebar to the ill-spirited realignment campaign.

Alas. Unless Rowan and the ACC take a big tent stand, and finesse the self-serving clamor for a special conservative province (or two or three crossing all geographies in order to divide and conquer by de facto undoing the big tent fellowship that reaches across believer differences) - the campaign to destroy common prayer, big tent fellowship, and big tent witness - not to mention big tent service? - will indeed succeed.

On Rowan's watch, imagine that.

I do not think before this that I had quite fully grasped the extent and the animosity of Rowan's disgust for and distance from progressive believers. He claims he does not aspire to redefine global Anglicans by adopting unintelligent readings of the scriptures, nor by prematurely foreclosing how we face and work through difficult surprise questions - but his actions seem to more or less constantly buy into faked conservative either/or choices which in fact tilt right in those two directions. In this preference he is far less wise and far less theologically true to Anglicanism than, say, Elizabeth I was. In the famous ringing words of Akinola: He will do what we tell him to do. (or else)

Thanks to all that, being an Anglican believer is fast becoming a mean, tawdry business where taking sides trumps reaching out across believer differences while taking some reasonable care not to misrepresent those differences, plus the ill-advised weaponizing of new conformed Anglican doctrines to pour mind-numbing presuppositional concrete in all the open spaces left by the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, plus policing plans, plus punishment plans. The new realignment Anglican meanness is apparently all there ever was to being a follower of Jesus of Nazareth, alas, Lord have mercy.

Funny then, how the generous invitation to the kingdom feast yet stands despite all the trash talk and all the efforts to diminish others, believers and unbelievers alike.

It would seem that, with the best will in the world, TEC - and maybe the Anglican Church of Canada, too - will be chary about welcoming a new Anglican Covenant, which seeks to align each of the Churches of the Anglican Cummunion with the 'least common denominator' of the Biblical Literalists and the New Puritans.

Most of the national Churches of the Communion want to operate and live out the implications of the Gospel within their own specific context, and for the more conservative churches to expect the prophetic element to be stifled in the exercise of local ministry in other churches, is to infer that God has created everyone the same - with the same cultural, racial, and ethnic sensibilities.

In this day and age, when Christian missionaries are (generally) taught to recognise and honour the cultural difference that do exist in other parts of the created world; why are the hierarchy of the Anglican Church insisting on ignoring the theological challenges of contextual diversity?

We are no longer militant and agressive deniers of the integrity of other faith communities, so why the need for anything more than the basic tenets of Christianity as taught and practised by Jesus in the Gospels - and referred to in the historic creeds? Jesus never counselled the agressive pursuit of religious ideology. Rather, in the 'be-attitudes', the principles of charity, patience, tolerance, and fasting from a tendency to judge other people, were given preference in mission.

"The Word became flesh and dwelt among us", and gave us the New Commandment: to Love - not to bring our own special brand of cultural or ethnic discrimination to bear on any other branch of the Anglican Communion that thinks differently from us on the priority of mission for our own people in our particular area of God's vineyard.

TEC is already committed by General Convention to considering the Covenant -- the suggestion that they should not rush to judgment in considering a new proposal seems a wise one (IMHO).

Fr. Ron:
"In this day and age, when Christian missionaries are (generally) taught to recognise and honour the cultural difference that do exist in other parts of the created world; why are the hierarchy of the Anglican Church insisting on ignoring the theological challenges of contextual diversity?"

At least the African hierarchy does so because that is what they were taught by the 19th century evangelical C of E missionaries! Homophobia was not indigenous:it was introduced by the missionaries.

"We are no longer militant and agressive deniers of the integrity of other faith communities"

Oh yes we are! It's actually a minority, I feel, who fit your description. Cripes, within the Anglican Church there is a very noisy group that frequently denies the integrity of dissenting members of their own faith community. Also, some of those same conservatives have, on this site, spoken very negatively of those Christians who show respect for other cultures and faith communities. It is seen as betraying the "Great Commission", a reference Evangelicals seem to consider almost automatically recognizable to everyone, but which causes at least some of the rest of us to pause for a minute to figure out what they are talking about. So, I can't hold with you here, militantly and aggressively denying the integrity of other faith communities is alive and well, and, given the way it has been defended here, and the scorn heaped on those who even suggest it might have been wrong, much less apologize for it, it seems to be the only way some people can conceive of for witnessing to those of other faiths.

Good on PB. It is a waste of time considering this fantasy which is neither wanted nor needed. I agree with Pluralist.

"Homophobia was not indigenous:it was introduced by the missionaries."

Given that one of the arguments for persecuting gay people in Africa has been that homosexuality is a white man's vice imported into Africa to weaken and subjugate the Africans, and given the obvious anti-Western slant of much of the anti-gay rhetoric from the Righteous Christians(tm), I think it'd be funny to watch their response to a suggestion that the vice introduced by white people was actually hatred and oppression of gay people like that that they practice!

As a later thread has commented, GAFCON aren't going to accept it anyway. So why bother having it if the parties it was meant to placate are no longer there?

Why repress if the repressors are no longer in the game? Or do souls so need to "prove" themselves as repressors? If they so need to repress, why not just go and join GAFCON?

Ford wrote:"I think it'd be funny to watch their response to a suggestion that the vice introduced by white people was actually hatred and oppression of gay people like that that they practice!"

Only, they will never respond.