My piece at Episcopal Café will appear on Monday, Jim Naughton tells me, so I'm holding back otherwise, except to do a run up, and in the run up it is worth seeing what some of the intentions were and then, for my own part, on and after Monday, I'll rabbit on about whether this achieves any purposes.

http://www.pluralistspeaks.blogspot.com/

If you see the entry I made while busy, you can see some of the chopped down passages that struck me of concern or issues, and then I developed an argument around most of those but in a different order.

I did initially support this draft, but after I read Ephraim Radner's comments on TitusOneNine, I have the same questions as everyone else.

It looks as though -- perhaps this is an uncharitable reading -- this version of the Covenant was deliberately crafted to allow ACNA to 1) achieve provincial status then 2) replace TEC in the Anglican Communion.

The crafting of a "replacement province" for TEC, installed through a Canterbury-facilitated coup, has been the strategy of the English consevos and the American IRD/AAC right-wing since the late 1980s. Early on, the Covenant process was seized upon by a part of this faction as the means to achieve their goal. Evidently this faction continues to dominate the Covenant process, as certain provisions of this draft of the Covenant seem designed to serve no other purpose than the installation of ACNA as a replacement province to TEC.

Evidently, this group is hoping to achieve their goal by flying under the radar screen with vague language about "churches" in the Covenant. Alas, Fr. Radner spilled the beans in an inelegant way on T19, so now the whole RCD Covenant must come under suspicion of having been crafted as just one more device by which this extremist faction can achieve its goal.

What Charlotte said.

The proposed Covenant seems designed to increase the divisions that purportedly is intended to heal.

When people refuse to talk to one another, it is not possible to establish mutual understanding & concord (IMHO).

" Evidently this faction continues to dominate the Covenant process, as certain provisions of this draft of the Covenant seem designed to serve no other purpose than the installation of ACNA as a replacement province to TEC." - Charlotte -

If Charlotte is indeed correct, and Ephraim Rader's interpretation of the covenant process really does have an expectation of replacing TEC with the ACNA sodality, then all would be lost - as not many provinces in the Anglican Communion would want to see any replacement of TEC or the Anglican Church of Canada by a groups of dissidents.

The true test will come at the meeting of the ACC this month, when I should thing most of the cards will be on the table. Personally, I think that Radner's idea could prove to be the Joker in the Pack - not to be dealt with lightly, and a possible deterrent to acceptance of the Covenant by anyone considering themselves to be a truly *Thinking Anglican*.

For the record, I hope I am wrong. And I would be very willing to accept a Covenant -- though not one with the sort of ulterior motive I suspect here (I hope wrongly).

This redraft of the pending proposed covenant does little or nothing, just as the others do or did.

What has changed is context - the virtualized emergence of consevo claims about ACNA, and that is pretty much all that has effectively changed from the past draft to the present one.

Meanwhile, the gaps, lacks, and outright spin of previous drafts also gets embodied in this latest one. It offers little or nothing that we do not already have available, and much better said in most cases, via our library of scriptures plus existing treasure house of believer documents plus empirical data and critical scholarship.

Given the Great Conversation at such a high level that already exists and obtains among all those authorities - why in the world do we need some newly drafted secondary covenant authority? Well, to make ACNA able to apply for recognition from the supposedly established-authoritative Instruments of Communion (!) which in themselves have never been much formally scrutinized, debated, and/or adopted in formal procedures according to each provinces ways of being church.

One is tempted to huff, House of Cards, Imaginary.

I see nothing that this new covenant draft could possibly do for real, if Jesus New Covenant with us and the Lambeth Chicago Quad are failing among us - except possibly facilitate ACNA as an alternative conservative-replacment entity for TEC plus Canada plus whomever else could be replaced by its highly self-regarding ACNA status and aims. That is really about all there is to it, so far.

Meanwhile, who pronounced the Instruments of Communion the sole, unique, new, centralised, globally institutionalized authorities among us global Anglican believers?

Finally, this new draft is as fine an example of a sort of Anglican DADT as I can imagine. It fairly screams or screeches all about queer folks precisely by refusing to name them. Can we have any clearer example?

One might forgive Radner or Gomez for not being an accurate Anglican authority on the Queers-Are-Awful Traditional Anglican Closet - since so far as we know, neither man has ever lived for any length of time in this very Closet. Both men are rooted in any number of traditional flat earth belief systems about those hot button queer folks.

How could either man then be nothing but our best available authority and guide for how we should deal with queer folks in our biological or social family networks?

why is TEC bothering???? And at what cost to its people????

"why is TEC bothering???? And at what cost to its people????" - Cybil

Respectfully, Cybil, I think TEC is concerned about the outcome of any sort of Covenantal relationship because it believes it is already a constituent part of the Anglican Communion, whose basic theology is not religiously fundamentalist, and therefore incompatible with other Anglican Churches who see the Gospel as the outworking of a theology of Love having replaced the aridity of judgement by The Law.

Most TEC members, I would venture to suggest do actually value their close relationship with the other members of the Anglican Family who allow the Holy Spirit to continually inspire the sort of prophetic action about, for instance, the inclusion of women and gays in the ministry and witness of the Church in and to the world.

It is not TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada
who want to strike off on their own, but the dissidents, who cannot live with the reality of diversity in the Body of Christ.

"why is TEC bothering????"

The principle of the thing? Not only that, but these conservatives like to promote themselves as the True Christians in all this, they even have the unmitigated gall to call themselves "orthodox". Well, they are pretty good at showing how big a lie that is, but it's nice to make it even more obvious from time to time, I think.

Besides, bullies can't be allowed to just get away with whatever they want.

What does the Ridley covenant provide that is not already available through our existing structures and constitutions?
GAFCON and its affiliates will continue their refusal to officially accept homosexuality and some will contue to refuse communion with those who do accept gay people.
The Covenant does not supercede existing authority structures.
It makes much of 'the authority of Scripture' but does not define it and all of us have our own insigts as to what it means but some of these are not acceptable to those with a more fundamentalist outlook.

A huge amount of work for very little result

John Marcon

Had the Ridley Covenant been in force some fifty years ago it is unlikely today that there would be any ordained women and the 1928 prayer book would probably still be the only acceptable revision of the 1662 one.
The problem of a papal-style committee acting as the arbitor of acceptable or non-acceptable 'inovations' is that the committee itself is the greatest inovation for nearly half a millennia and totally abrogates two key principle of the Anglican Communion - one is the free association of provinces based on our common bond in Christ and our shared history, the other our liberty of doctrinal variation within our churches, dioceses and provinces within our synodical governance structure.

John Marcon, Milford , Auckland NZ
j_marcon@clear.net.nz