There's one thing that I agree with from the GAFCONite camp.

The reasons and motives vary widely.

Mind you, if they had thought the covenant had a hope of pinning down liberals and ending reforms, they would have been all for it.

However, once it became clear it was going to fail as a tool of repression, they were at least honest in declaring that they wanted no part in further reforms. As far as they are concerned Jesus is the complete and perfect fulfillment of the scriptures and there was no need to go back and re-read the texts and contemplate what had not yet been fulfilled, forgotten, or outright broken (e.g. the covenant of peace).

There is an article at Fulcrum by Andrew Goddard at which he is edging towards the GAFCON view, if he doesn't fall between two stools first. I've written on this at my blog ('Commentary' from my website) to the effect that he is going in that direction because Fulcrum is being left without a position. Like those 'good socialists' who went along with Militant in the 1980s, but disposed as soon as they crossed swords, Andrew Goddard was one to get the CE treatment at Wycliffe only to become something of a fellow traveller with this group afterwards.

My charge here is because Andrew Goddard wants to legitimise the breakaway North America Province of GAFCON via it accepting the Anglican Covenant along with other existing provinces accepting the Anglican Covenant. Yet his magnetic Conservatives have no interest in the Covenant as it is being designed, nor would many provinces if it were used this way.

I have revised the article to include a link to the Fulcrum newsletter mentioned above.

The article by Pluralist can be found at
http://pluralistspeaks.blogspot.com/2008/11/fellow-traveller.html

Andrew Goddard would presumably then want the Church of England in South Africa admitted? A far more stable and larger denomination than the proposed North American province.

Hmmm, maybe AG wants to eat his conservativ Anglican Realignment cake and have it too, in other regards.

Maybe AG wants credit for allegedly being a big tent Anglican while repeating story lines, presuppositional, that diminish the real global big tent by making progressive believers, queer folks (and maybe certain women?) nothing but fools and outsiders?

Maybe AG wants credit for being a modern, informed, thoughtful thinking believer while deftly avoiding any detailed engagement with the hot button queer folks controversies or dilemmas? He especially sidesteps any hint of our shared global Anglican knowledge that many traditionalistic negatives about queer folks have been empirically disproved, period?

So in these two added ways, AG is occupying quite a seriously vexed place?

AG still tells a story in which nothing has really happened to the negative story line which is our big tent Anglican heritage? Nothing has happened, and nothing new or changeful has affected any Anglican believer. Nobody who is a Real Anglican in AGs curiously presuppositional conservative Fulcrum vision has any questions, any empirical disproofs of the criminal, psychiatric, basically impaired status that traditional beliefs say queer folks innately embody?

Say, unless AG still wishes us to keep queer citizens in prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and culturally invisible, underground, disenfranchised, marginal spaces – so traditionally dark, invisible, dank, and vulnerable to every detriment in the modern social problem dictionary? - he is tossing out a narrative fast ball as a spin doctor not a truth teller who is speaking in great compassion to unjust Anglican power.

Even less can AG repeat a story in which special traditional believers still have special high power to say and do especially negative or mean things to queer folks above all other possible targets. Nor can AG simply presume the up/down, inside/outside social and church life arrangements which are, loosely and simply put, our brute negative global Anglican heritage.

Even less can AG persuade by simply presuming, that familiar traditional cover story in which decent good straight believers are safely bubbled off from those dangerous indecent queer folks.

Fulcrum cannot destroy the big tent by shoving progressive believers or queer folks or anybody else generously blessed to be Anglican, and keep an exclusive conservative grip on the power and witness of the global Anglican big tent, all at the same time.

"The proposed Anglican Covenant is an 'exercise in futility' theologians affiliated with the Gafcon movement tell The Church of England Newspaper," - George Conger -

This statement issued by the 'theologians' (including among them - Moore College, Sydney, Dean Thompson) must sorely disappoint at least one GAFCON friend - the Chairperson of the Covenant, Arcbishop Drexel Gomez.

However, it should not surprise anyone that the Covenant document is rejected by GAFCON, because most of it's members will never adhere to the proposed moratorium on their 'missionary' activities in other Provinces of the Communion. They have said so, loudly and definitively.

So why does Drexel Gomez think that non-GAFCON Anglican Provinces will meekly accept a Covenant that the re-Asserters will not be a part of?

P.S. Has anyone noticed that one of the foremost 'theologians' in the GAFCON movement is none other than the Dean of Moore College, Sydney?

Sometimes souls purport to be "moderate" to get jobs elsewhere, so that the real liberals don't get apponted. It's merely a deceptive form of cronyism.