I posted Lionel's emblem on my blog. Thank you, Lionel.

June Butler

I posted Lionel's emblem on my blog. Thank you, Lionel.¨ Grandmère Mimi

Make that a double! THANK YOU, Lionel and Mimi!

"The upshot is that the bishop is going to vote for a covenant in which he does not himself believe because he thinks other Christians and secular foreign politicians value the Communion for exactly those qualities which the covenant is designed to stamp out." - Andrew Brown's Blog -

Andrew Brown is surely right is this supposition, that the Bishop of Croydon is doing what the Covenant is trying to suppress - he is believing in one strategy (No-Covenasnt), and signing up for another (Yes-Covenant). Surely, if the Covenant means anything at all that is new and effectively binding on all parties, it is enjoining on each of the partners the necessity of towing the Party Line, which is essentially conservative and dismissive of women and gays who already exist in the Church.

To vote for the Covenant in it's present form is to give way to the recalcitrant conservatives who are threatening schism if the rest of the Communion doesn't agree with it's moratoria on same-sex blessing and the ordination of women and gays.

Important to realise, is that those intent on breaking up the Church on these issues are not worried about the moratorium on cross-border interference between the Provinces which is still happening at this time. The newly-formed ACNA sodality in the USA is largely the product of these cross-border acts of piracy, but will the Communion and the C. of E. stop to consider this fact before voting for a repressive Covenant?

Will Scripture and Tradition outlaw the third leg of the Anglican stool which represents REASON? And will the Anglican Communion lose all respect as a direct result? We have just to wait and see what the Church of England does before the rest of us decide on our own response. God help us all

"To Fr. Harris’ credit, he has another, and to my mind nobler, reason for defending this position. He does not want the dioceses of TEC to be able to act independently of the General Convention, the Executive Council, and the Office of the Presiding Bishop. Thus, Fr Harris has a position that is, as it were, a knife that cuts in two directions. Internationally, he seeks to establish the unfettered autonomy of the several provinces of the communion and so preclude any form of “global governance,” and domestically he wishes to establish a form of hierarchy, like that of the Methodists and Presbyterians, that locates final authority in a national form of governance that has supreme authority over its constituent units." ACI - Communion & Hierarchy -

What the ACI article here seems not to understand is that Fr. Mark Harris is quite logical in his argument of differentiation between the prospect of hierarchical jurisdiction in Provincial and Communion-wide entities in the Anglican Communion.

The Communion simply is not 'One Church'. It is a communion of Provincial Churches, which seek to uphold the Anglican ethos of Scripture, Tradition and Reason. There is no legal connection between the Provinces which could bind any of them to the observation of any rule which proved not to be acceptable to any or all of the Provinces.

Can ACI and others not understand Fr. Mark's position? - That each provincial Church is ultimately responsible, under it's own canons, to govern the dioceses, parishes and ministries of its own constituency according to its own rules?
No outside authority - real or imaginary - can undermine the ecclesial jurisdiction of the individual Province. Ties with the Communion are of Love and not Law. Whereas ties within the Province are of both Love and Law.

This is the basic reason why individual dioceses of the Communion should not be able to bind themselves to a Covenant relationship within the Communion - outside of their constitutional and legal relationship to their home Province.

...or to put it another way, Fr Ron, what diocesan bishop would tolerate parishes in his/her diocese making a "covenant" with the bishop of another diocese (that could give the slightest pause of to whom said parishes ultimately were responsible)?

This isn't really so complicated---

National churches: autonomous. (*)

Dioceses, parishes: NOT.

(*) Except in extremely *limited* ways, e.g., can't decide to send more than their canonically allotted share of (voting) representatives to the Anglican Consultative Council.

One reason why the pro-covenant side don't take seriously the provisions against cross-border raids: after the covenant is signed, the provinces outside it will become officially partes infideli -- so planting churches there is just evangelism., Of course, that's what they think already, but the covenant will regularise their case.

re Andrew Brown's comment - I find it distinctly odd that the dissidents, who have already distanced themselves from the polity of the Communion (by their withdrawal of official support for the Communion - e.g. as in Nigeria and Uganda) should be siding with those looking for a Covenantal relationship - especially when it is precisely they who have departed from the policies of the ACC. No-one in their right mind would want to separate out from TEC and the A.C.of C. - unless it helped in their quest for puritanical and institutional uniformity. Would the Covenant guarantee that there would be no further strife within the Communion on any grounds whatsoever? I think not.

It's local politics, folks - only local.

ACI spin doctors are pretty consistent in what they write and preach, insofar as they follow the rule:
..., We presume this way when it favors us, and we presume that way when it undermines everybody else.

ACI and conservative realignment Anglicans want the covenant they want, no less, no more.

ACI wants, above all, power to police and punish everybody who does not follow their ways. They do not quite have that yet, effectively, so in the meanwhile running up to new police powers, ACI simply presumes that right now, top Anglican structures-processes innately trump and define all provincial realities, often bypassing province as a convenience in order to connect directly with each and every global Anglican diocese. This writes Lambeth large and heavy, as a sort of Anglican state apparatus, and spin doctored away is any history of Lambeth as a worldwide consultation, study, and worship opportunity for rest and nurturing of bishops.

While ACI figures push divisive issues about queer folks, they say they are generous to a fault when it comes to other hot button Anglican differences. Suddenly police-punish principles do not apply to those differences. Why? Because the spin doctor says so, that's why.

Three visions sum up the current conservative Anglican realignment. One vision is all about strict doctrinal conformity and power, often top down.

It gets a bit hinky if we try to see what ACI really thinks, so as to anticipate what ACI might really do. How would top down power play out, across various church life differences and circumstances?

At times, conservatives would rebel and protest at some limitations on parish-diocese-province actions, drummed up from a distance. At other times, conservatives are the loudest drummers across our distances. Even after covenant signings, one can easily imagine continuing the culture wars inside the new Anglicanism?

Waiting in our covenant stage wings are key fights in religious culture wars. Obvious are: (1) ordaining or not ordaining women; (2) reading scriptures plainly-literally enough that we must embrace, say, Creationism instead of evolutionary biology, demon possession and church exorcisms instead of germ theory or developmental biology, theocracy as superior to democracy.

Does any ACI spin doctor grasp, how far down, how far backwards these conservative culture wars can devolve?

On the Covenant/ecumenical issue,

We (= liberal Anglicans) are doing what is right. Sooner or later, everyone else will catch up. Many are, of course, unofficially. That 'unofficial' is the key. The C of E, in its beauty and wisdom, and TEC (ditto), extends the Eucharist to all who receive communion in their own churches. Thre is much traffic in all directions under these, or similar, rubrics, or tacit 'disobedience' of spurious official prohibitions. Who cares what the (present) Pope thinks, or Tom Wright, or whoever? Who cares that there is not - and never can be - unanimity about detail?

By the way, one person who most emphatically does value Anglican 'diversity' is Jonathan Sacks, educated in a C of E school and never conscious - there - of any anti-Semitism.

I reiterate my point that the purpose of the Covenant is schism but that refusal to take communion together means that the schism has already occurred by the GAFCONites "walking away" (TEC bishops did not boycott Lambeth -- TEC has never threatened to leave the WWAC -- they have repeatedly been threatened with expulsion -- let's get some facts straight)

Another conservative Anglican vision wears the face of safety. Seeking high safety. Via un-Anglican means.

Distance, barriers, condemnation, police, punishments, Us vs Them? - these are the tools - indeed the weapons? - of alarm, fear mongering, and prescient pre-existing judgements. Anglican

Conservatives know all about people as condemned categories - way before any real, live people walk on any real world stage connected with being Anglican.

A strong and bitter field it all is - spikey and overgrown with weeds. Not the sort of verdant, breezy park lands where one goes with one's beloved and the kids to enjoy a casual stroll on a warm day. Not the sort of place where, as Matthew's gospel writer remind us, God is generous enough to let rain fall on the just and the unjust?

ACI is busy tending a mean realignment, loyalist gardeners, for a time being.

Many busy spin doctors of our current Anglican conservative realignment practically depend upon the very secular, democratic, fair, or generous conditions whose roominess they take as opportunity to condemn, all that very same stuff.

Conservative believers are sustained by modern progressivisms of all sorts. Indebted to modern best practice tool kits and modern leeway, especially in western democracies.

Yet. Cannot. Bring. Themselves. To. Be. Thankful.

Instead, conservative religion demeans and attacks the modern or democratic life which actually makes life possible for all of us, together on this planet, across our touchy culture and religion differences.

ACI figures say God wants us to? Obtain a conformed, intellectually narrow, antimodernist, policed, Status Quo covenant space as Anglican believers. Contrary is one glaring fact: The very oxygen ACI people are breathing intellectually is pumped out by any number of progressive-democratic modern engines.

What's up with that?

ACI figures surely depend on their own local or global neighbors being able to live and let live across differences; while they preach exactly the opposite as essential Anglicanism. Live and let live is alleged, ungodly. Not orthodox. Except when or if ACI and other conservative spin doctors need leeway and fair-neutral arenas to advertise?

What's up with that?

ACI figures constantly play Eric Berne's old interpersonal action game, called, Let's You And Him Fight. Yet they patently depend on other people not to mistreat them in this very same manipulative manner while they keep doctoring up the conservative spin that justifies these fight clubs.

What's up with that?

"I reiterate my point that the purpose of the Covenant is schism but that refusal to take communion together means that the schism has already occurred by the GAFCONites "walking away""

Indeed, if being Anglican means being in communion with Canterbury, the act of refusing to receive Holy Communion from the ABC because of the presence of others at the rail would seem to be an important act. But it seems to have been overlooked.

Can anyone get Rowan Williams to read Letter from a Birmingham Jail? Please? It says all that needs to be said about why this Covenant is wrong.