Bishop Pierre Whalon, who is Bishop of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe, has written an article which is published at Anglicans Online.
You can read it at Covet a covenant?
…The Covenant Design Group tried their best to satisfy the demands of those who wanted to restrain local provinces from actions that would disturb, as well as those who insisted on maintaining complete independence. In that sense, the document is interesting, and I maintain that the process of discussing its proposals throughout the Communion is healthy for us all.
However one frames it, the Covenant does provide a mechanism for eventually determining who is “in” and who is “out.” Do I want, say, the Diocese of Sydney “in” or “out”? Based on what? Their peculiar ecclesiology, which lies well outside the usual range of Anglican options? Their desire to have lay people presiding at the Eucharist under certain conditions? That it often seems to be too much of a family affair? What benefit would there be to them and the rest of us in ostracizing them? Or any Anglican church you think has placed itself outside the pale?
Also, the weekly front page essay at Anglicans Online is about the Covenant. You can also read that over here (permalink).
3 CommentsWe decided it was a two-letter night. Like to read about the Covenant, to be voted on this week by the Church of England? See the left side.
If you’ve had quite enough of the Covenant, have a look at the right side.
The Church of England General Synod will be debating the “Big Society” on Tuesday afternoon this week. As background material to this debate the Mission and Public Affairs Division has produced a report: GS1804 “The Big Society” and the Church of England. There is also a summary of this report: GS1804A. The debate will undoubtedly extend to the government’s cuts in public expenditure.
Jonathan Wynne-Jones writes in today’s Telegraph: Bishops warn David Cameron’s Big Society will be undermined by welfare cuts
Today’s Diary of a civil servant column in The Observer is Welcome to the ever-diminishing world of the ‘big society’.
The Common Wealth (Christians for Economic and Social Justice) network has been launched with Christians say cuts-based Big Society is ‘a Big Lie’. The network has issued a statement with this abstract.
In the face of sweeping public spending cuts and a UK government economic strategy which targets the poor to pay for a crisis produced by the wealthy, a group of Christians in public life (activists, ministers and theologians) have issued this statement calling for Christian unity with others in the movement to resist the cuts in public and welfare provision. It urges the churches to be wary about being co-opted into the Big Society initiative – which it calls ‘a big lie’ in economic terms. The document articulates a radical theological critique of government policies and the social and economic order they seek to maintain. It is rooted in an alternative vision based on strong Christian roots and wide solidarities, arguing for a Common Wealth that expresses the central dynamics of the Gospel message. The statement is also a call to form a network of discernment, resistance and creativity in the generation of fresh approaches to the shared life of people and planet.
Savi Hensman has written for Ekklesia about Cuts that divide and devalue
The Church in Wales has issued this press release: Count the human cost of the cuts – Bishop responds to Draft Budget.
And there is this from The Church of Scotland: Kirk challenges Chancellor to meet the poor.
Church Action On Poverty has published Churches challenge Government over poverty and welfare.
6 CommentsRuth Gledhill has interviewed Gene Robinson, the bishop of New Hampshire. The full interview is behind the Times paywall but there are two extracts on YouTube.
Gene Robinson Part One: the Anglican crisis
This week I [Ruth Gledhill] went to New York to interview Gene Robinson. “I have clergy friends in England who literally studied at Archbishop Williams’s feet when he was teaching and who have said to me it is almost as if aliens have come and taken Rowan away from us and they have left something here that looks like him but we don’t recognise him any more,” Bishop Robinson said. Giving his first interview since announcing that he will retire in two years, Bishop Robinson said that Dr Williams was a wonderful human being and a faithful Christian.
But he added: “I’m not at all sure that his attempts to hold us together as a communion at all costs is the kind of leadership that this time calls for. I pray for him every day.
Gene Robinson Part Two: A Boy Named Vicki Gene
Gene Robinson talks to Ruth Gledhill in New York: His parents, poor tenant farmers, were told he would certainly die. Before his birth, they had come up with a girl’s name, Vicky Jean, after his father, Victor and his mother, Imogene. “In his distress he just changed the spelling and thought it wouldn’t matter on a tombstone. So that’s the name on my birth certificate.”
Jonathan Clatworthy has written a response to this recent article by Andrew Goddard.
Read it in full at Reply to Andrew Goddard.
Andrew Goddard has now provided a lengthy defence of the Anglican Covenant against the arguments in PDF our advertisement of 29 October. At over 15,000 words it bears witness to Dr Goddard’s commitment. It is not light bedtime reading, and a point by point reply would not be either. In any case our views are already available. Although he does not refer to it, at the bottom of the advertisement we printed a website address (www.modernchurch.org.uk/anglicancovenant) for further details, where we had already provided much of the further information he asks for. Since then a huge amount of additional material has been placed on websites. There is a list in the resources section at www.noanglicancovenant.org, of which notthesamestream.blogspot.com is particularly worthy of note.
Nevertheless it may be helpful to respond to the substance of his points…
Note: the reply is only 3,700 words long.
5 CommentsUpdated
Andrew Goddard has now turned his attention to this article.
Read his Conservatives’ covenant concerns: A critique.
On reading Truth or Conviction: questions over the Anglican Communion Covenant by Vinay Samuel and Chris Sugden I did not know whether to laugh or to cry. Part of me wanted to laugh, having just spent some time responding to IC & MCU. In part, that response sought to show that the covenant was not the punitive brainchild of neo-Puritans which ruled out dialogue and which if accepted automatically entailed the expulsion of North American church from the Communion. Here were two leading spokesmen often portrayed as those supporting the covenant because it is punitive and exclusionary making clear that they were far from happy with it because it did not do what IC & MCU claimed it did. But most of me wanted to cry. Here are two distinguished fellow evangelicals and friends not just taking a view with which I disagree but doing so in a manner which had so many of the hallmarks of those they are fighting – no reference to the text of the covenant, making unsubstantiated claims and even some clear falsehoods to raise doubts and fears in their constituency, and approaching the covenant seemingly driven by a wider agenda in pursuit of which the covenant could be distorted and dismissed but with no serious alternative on offer…
Update
Chris Sugden and Vinay Samuel have responded to Andrew Goddard.
4 CommentsLord Blair of Boughton, the former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and a practising Anglican, delivered the 2010 Theos Annual Lecture this week: The image of religion must change. Andrew Brown had this comment at The Guardian: Faith and policing.
A writer in the Irish Times says that the Simple message of Jesus has been complicated and twisted.
Giles Fraser writes in the Church Times that Misery is not a spectacle.
The Archbishop of Canterbury delivered the Annual Isaiah Berlin Lecture this week, with the title Faith and Enlightenment: Friends or Foes?
Bishop Paul Butler writes about Sanitising the Bible for Children; he’s not in favour.
Christopher Howse writes in the Telegraph about The tomb of Jesus in central London.
9 CommentsThe Church of Ireland Gazette gave this topic some space, see:
Former Anglican Deputy Secretary-General’s comments add to Covenant controversy
and this editorial comment.
Alan Perry wrote Does the Anglican Covenant really mean what it says?
And Paul Bagshaw has a separate reason for voting against the Covenant for each day of the week:
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
and Friday.
There has been a flurry of interest around the references to what Archbishop Drexel Gomez (now retired) said in 2008. Here is the original report of those remarks.
Christian Challenge ARCHBISHOP GOMEZ: Need For Covenant Grows More Urgent by Robert England.
Leader Sees Good Chance That Final Covenant Will Go To Provinces Next Year; Expresses Openness To Possibility Of New North American Province
The process of finalizing an Anglican covenant needs to move forward more quickly if the Anglican Communion is to be preserved.
That was the message delivered Saturday (September 13) by West Indies Archbishop Drexel Gomez, the chairman of the group charged with formulating the pact intended to help ensure unity in basic beliefs, settle disputes, and administer discipline among historically autonomous Anglican provinces…
Another copy is over here.
8 CommentsChris Sugden and Vinay Samuel have written an article for this week’s Church of England Newspaper entitled Truth or Conviction: questions over the Anglican Communion Covenant. Here’s how it starts:
Many primates have indicated that they cannot support the Covenant in its present form. The African Primates said in Entebbe in August : “We realise the need for further improvement of the Covenant in order to be an effective tool for unity and mutual accountability.”
In April the Global South meeting said: “We are currently reviewing the proposed Covenant to find ways to strengthen it in order for it to fulfill its purpose. For example, we believe that all those who adopt the Covenant must be in compliance with Lambeth 1.10. Meanwhile we recognize that the Primates Meeting, being responsible for Faith and Order, should be the body to oversee the Covenant in its implementation, not the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion.”
Why the reticence?
And the article concludes:
20 CommentsThe current Covenant process interminably delays judgement and leaves little hope of discipline and thus of consistency. We are left in a permanent state of dialogue and conversation. This has practical implications at parish level when churches have to decide how to relate to same-sex couples requesting blessing and bringing surrogate children for baptism. If the covenant process in the Communion becomes the state of affairs in the Church of England, its practices could be so contradictory that chaos would result. Endless appeal could be made to conviction, openness, listening and time while practices and actions continue which go against the teaching of the church whether in a parish or whole diocese.
The above argument could therefore suggest abstention in the vote in General Synod next week for the following reasons:
The Communion needs recognition of orthodox teaching and for proper and appropriate boundaries. The Covenant does not achieve that purpose but substitutes conviction for truth. Some wish to travel further in the direction in which the Covenant is supposed to point, but do not wish to support the very weak approach of the current Covenant. Where the current Anglican Communion process is going today could be used to allow for English Dioceses to move in TEC’s direction tomorrow on the grounds that this is accepted Anglican practice.
This press statement has been issued following a meeting of the RC Bishops of England and Wales.
Implementation of the Apostolic Constitution Anglicanorum Coetibus
The Establishment of a Personal Ordinariate in England and WalesFull text appears below the fold.
Update
The Church Times has a report from today’s press conference on its website, see Ed Thornton We have no designs on your churches, says Archbishop Nichols
Last week, I linked to a news article by George Conger that appeared in the Church of England Newspaper.
This week, both the Church of England Newspaper and the Church Times have further reports on the matter.
In the former, George Conger’s story is headlined No plans to cancel Dublin Primates’ Meeting, ACC says.
There are no plans to cancel the Dublin primates meeting, ACC secretary general Canon Kenneth Kearon has declared.
In a statement released via Twitter on Nov 11 in response to a story last week in the Church of England Newspaper about the Jan 25-31 meeting, ACC spokesman Jan Butter wrote: “Am afraid this story is not accurate. Communion Sec. Gen. Canon Kearon adamant: never any plans to cancel Primates’ Mtg.”
…The report in the CEN, however, did not claim the archbishop’s Oct 7 letter called for the cancellation of the primates meeting.
In response to a request for clarification, the spokesman for the ACC stated there had been a “slip of the pen”’ in the Twitter message in saying there were never any plans to “cancel” the meeting. “The point I was trying to get across was that there have never been any plans to suspend the upcoming Primates’ Meeting in Dublin next January,” Mr. Butter wrote.
However, behind the scenes conversations between Dr. Williams and the primates remain on-going, CEN has been told. While reservations and supplies have been laid on by the ACC staff for the 38 primates and the Archbishop of York to meet at the Emmaus Conference Centre outside of Dublin, it is not clear how many primates will attend the gathering…
The Church Times news report on this is only available to paid subscribers until next week, but the story does quote Canon Kearon as saying there is:
7 Comments“a suggestion that this be a different kind of Primates’ Meeting, driven by the need for discernment and dialogue around issues affecting the life of the Communion”.
“The proposal is that it begins with a number of different conversations taking place simultaneously at first. This is to provide a safe space where dialogue can begin and progress together in a spirit of discernment.”
Cif belief has published an article, written by me, on the Covenant.
The covenant is a waste of time and money
9 CommentsEveryone agrees the Anglican Communion is in a mess, but increasing the power of a central committee won’t fix it.
Gregory Cameron, Andrew Goddard, and Graham Kings have all criticised attacks on the covenant as misinformation and scaremongering. But strikingly none of them has explained what benefit to the Church of England comes from endorsing the covenant. There’s a very simple reason for this: none exists…
The Archbishop of Canterbury is on a pre-arranged visit to the Vatican to address a public conference to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the (then) Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. During his visit, the Archbishop granted an interview to Vatican Radio, the transcript of which can be read on his website.
Vatican Radio reports on the interview: Archbishop of Canterbury on ecumenism, the ordinariate and Pope’s UK visit. This report has links to audio of the interview in Real and mp3 formats.
Tim Ross at the Telegraph reports on part of the interview: Churches lose their vicars as Anglicans “jump ship” for Rome, warns Rowan Williams.
9 CommentsAndrew Goddard has written more about the Anglican Covenant at Fulcrum.
How and Why IC & MCU Mislead Us on the Anglican Covenant
In the church press on Friday 29th October, two Church of England groups, Inclusive Church (IC) and Modern Church (formerly, Modern Churchpeople’s Union, MCU), published a whole page advert headed ‘Who runs the Church?’. This explains why they believe the Anglican Covenant would be a change for the worse. Having offered an initial short critique of it, this offers a more detailed analysis of its claims. In the week leading to the Synod debate on the covenant and subsequent diocesan discussion, their seriously flawed case risks being given greater circulation and credibility through the wider international (though predominantly Western liberal) No Anglican Covenant Coalition and other publicity such as the recent similar leaflet sent to General Synod members.
The key questions that need to be answered in relation to the covenant are as follows and each section is hyperlinked here so it can be read on its own
(1) Where does the Anglican Covenant come from, who wants it and why?
(2) What does the Anglican Covenant actually do?
(3) What will happen if the Church of England signs the Anglican Covenant?
(4) But isn’t the covenant disciplinary?
(5) What if…?: Hypothetical futures and pasts
(6) Conclusion: What vision and future for Anglicanism should we embrace?
Read the original to get the links.
20 CommentsBishop Graham Kings has written at Cif belief The Anglican covenant is the only way forward. (Another copy here.)
21 CommentsIts detractors say it will stifle diversity, but unless the church votes for the covenant, deeper divisions will be unavoidable.
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” is a celebrated line in WB Yeats’s 1920 poem The Second Coming. How that relates to the Church of England and the tensions in the wider Anglican communion, 90 years later, we shall witness next week. On Wednesday 24 November, General Synod will be debating the Anglican covenant.
This covenant of unity seeks to hold the Anglican communion together organically in the face of increasing fragmentation. The choice in this debate is to opt into intensifying our world-wide relationships in affection and commitment or to allow splits to develop further and irrevocably. Do we consider each other and decide we belong together, or do we do our own thing and hang apart?
Updated again Wednesday morning
Canon Alyson Barnett-Cowan, Director for Unity Faith and Order, The Anglican Communion Office has written a press release:
Many things have already been said in the public arena about the proposed Anglican Communion Covenant. As Provinces around the world continue to discuss this important document I think it worth clarifying some points about it. I am not arguing here for or against the Covenant, merely pointing out that it should be debated fairly, with an accurate reading of the text…
Updates
This article has been swiftly rebutted point by point, on the blog of the No Covenant group. See Pleading Guilty over the Covenant at Comprehensive Unity.
Bishop Alan WIlson has also commented at Only us, redeemed.
45 CommentsFrom her rather improbably titled office, Canon Alyson Barnett-Cowan, “UFO Director at the Anglican Communion Office,” reminds us that the Anglican Covenant hovering over us poses no threat to Churches whose antics may be referred to the First Fifteen, but they must accept that if processes of mediation have broken down their actions have (Euphemism alert) “relational consequences.”
Frankly, this phrase needs very careful handing before can possibly be applied to Christians…
Paul Bagshaw has written What is the Covenant supposed to solve?
7 Comments…But what problems is the Covenant supposed to solve (now, as opposed to when it was first conceived)?
First, the unity of the Communion. Sadly, I think it’s too late – and perhaps was always too late. In fact it increasingly seems that pushing people to sign will be the last step in the de facto schism. By going for a Covenant that was acceptable to a sufficient majority of the players in Global Anglicanism the Covenant Design Group has failed to bring enough of the Communion on board.
Second, to provide the framework for future disputes. Sadly the Covenant procedures will almost certainly only work for little disputes or issues exclusively between two parties. And they could probably be resolved in any framework.
Or they will work to exclude TEC and Canada – and then everyone will take fright because they could be next. They will move quickly to dismantle the Covenant – it will prove to have been a disastrous one-shell cannon.
The Covenant framework will not be adequate to any significant dispute. It’s back-to-front: what happens is that administrative structures & agreements work because people agree to make them work. In normal times conflicts flow through, and are contained by, the channels of the pre-existing system: people and systems are in continual dialogue. In abnormal (though not uncommon) times disputes overflow the system and leave it in pieces. Then people coming together, pick up the pieces and rebuild. The cycle starts over again: systems cannot be imposed without assent.
Third: as one more step in a long-term programme to reform the Communion by centralising and reducing the differences between provinces. This goal might well be met, in part at least, by the process to arrive at a Covenant as much as by the document itself. In the course of debate, it seems to me, the previously normative idea that the Communion was a federal structure with central consultative bodies seems to have been replaced by the normative idea that the Communion is a single entity whose centre needs to be strengthened because its component parts are too fissiparous.
Bishop Alan Wilson has written at Cif belief about the Anglican Covenant. The article is titled
Sugar and spice, or strychnine …
2 CommentsNiceness may carry the measure, but it won’t make the covenant the turbine of a more mutually engaged global denomination.
In the Hebrew scriptures, people cut covenants by chopping a bird in half and walking between the halves to indicate sincere meeting of hearts and minds.
The Anglican Communion is proposing a fractionally less messy covenant between member churches – part of the fallout from the Windsor report, which attempted to resolve its gay bishops row in 2003. Perceptions have progressed faster these last seven years in the world, perhaps, than in the higher echelons of the Anglican Communion…
George Pitcher wrote in the Telegraph Are Church of England liberals really Nazis?
…Leave aside whether there’s something slightly contradictory about Little Englanders being Nazis and consequently whether you can both be a Nazi at the same time as feeling like you’re facing them in 1939. The real point here is whether there is some sort of concerted effort to paint theological liberals as totalitarian extremists.
If there is, then the language of next week’s General Synod is not likely to be conducive to making any constructive advances on vital issues concerning women bishops or the covenant. And that would be a shame for both sides of the Church’s political spectrum, neither of which are remotely fascist.
Cif belief has as its Question of the Week: Will the covenant kill or cure?
Next week the Church of England’s General Synod will be asked to take an apparently momentous decision. Should it sign up to a formal, international, disciplinary process which would allow other churches a voice on whether it is truly Anglican or not? The proposed Anglican covenant is presented as a means to deepen unity within the Anglican Communion, but it will do so by strengthening discipline.
It has grown out of the schism of the last decade, and the desire of the conservatives to exclude, and have declared un-Anglican, and in fact un-Christian, the inclusion of of gay people on equal or comparable terms to straight ones. The question really does divide the church. Globally, there is a clear majority against it. In this country, there is probably a vague majority of Christians in favour, and certainly no strong sentiment for a purge of gay clergy. So why should the Church of England sign up to a document which can only be either another piece of toothless waffle, or something that one day will turn round and bite it, painfully?
We will link to each of the contributions in separate articles.
1 CommentUpdated Tuesday
ACNS reports that Uruguay votes to transfer to another Province.
One week after a proposal to allow dioceses to individually permit women’s ordination to the priesthood was turned down by the Tenth Synod of the Province of the Southern Cone, the Diocese of Uruguay has voted to seek another jurisdiction with which to share its ministry.
The vote in the Province had been by a specific request of the Diocese of Uruguay and sought to allow a diocesan option in the matter, rather than Provincial wide adoption, so that the diocese could proceed to minister within a very difficult agnostic milieu. Uruguay felt that after a nine year hiatus since the last vote for approval, a patient wait would be rewarded. That was not the result and so the Uruguayan Synod took this measure to move away from the Province…
There is a further report from ENS URUGUAY: Diocese votes to leave Southern Cone
15 Comments…Clergy members of the Southern Cone’s 10th triennial synod Nov. 4 refused to approve the canonical changes required to allow for the ordination of women to the priesthood. The changes, which required a two-thirds majority in all three houses, were approved by the bishops and laity. Uruguay ordains women to the diaconate.
The Diocese of Uruguay synod met Nov. 12 in the capital city of Montevideo and decided by a simple majority vote in orders to quit the province, according to Lyons.
The diocese wants to transfer from the Southern Cone within the year, he said, adding that if permission is not given, an appeal would be made to the Anglican Consultative Council to arrange for oversight, following provincial canons…