On Monday the General Synod is due to hear a presentation on the Anglican Consultative Council meeting held recently in New Zealand. A great many documents from that meeting are now available online here.
Of particular interest for the other agenda item tomorrow, concerning the Anglican Covenant, is this report on Provincial Reception of the Anglican Covenant (PDF).
This paper contains three kinds of information.
The first (Category A) is from member churches which have taken action in their governing body with respect to the Covenant, and which have communicated their decision to the Anglican Communion Office. The second (Category B) is from member churches which have taken action along the way to a decision, but which have not yet made a formal decision. The third (Category C) is from member churches whose actions have not been communicated to the ACO, but about which there is information through the media or on their own websites.
Wherever possible the exact wording of resolutions as adopted or defeated is given…
At the time this document was discussed at the ACC, Mary Frances Schjonberg of ENS filed this report: Council considers status of Anglican Covenant in small groups.
The Anglican Consultative Council spent an hour in private conversation on Oct. 31 (local time) considering the status of the Anglican Covenant but took no action.
Those reflection group conversations, preceded by a short plenary session open to the public, has been the pattern of this 15th meeting of the ACC.
Before the Oct. 31 reflection conversations began, New Zealand Diocese of Christchurch Bishop Victoria Matthews asked the members to consider “why [the covenant] is a cause of fear and why is it a sign of hope for others?”
The results of the reflection conversations were to be given to the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order (IASCUFO) and the Anglican Communion Standing Committee “as they discern the ways to take the matter forward,” according to a handout on the process…
And the previous day, in this digest report (scroll down for item) she had reported that Members get covenant status update.
While the ACC is not due to discuss the current status of the Anglican Covenant until Oct. 31, a document handed out today shows that nine provinces have made a final decision on the covenant with one rejecting the covenant, six accepting it as is and two making modifications as part of their acceptance.
Those in the so-called Category A that have approved the convent are Ireland, Mexico, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, Southern Cone of America, and the West Indies. In addition, according to the document, South East Asia adopted the covenant with an added preamble of its own and the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia has subscribed to the covenant’s first three sections but said it cannot adopt section 4, which outlines a process for resolving disputes.
And, also in Category A, is the Scottish Episcopal Church, which has refused to adopt the covenant.
The U.S.-based Episcopal Church is one of eight provinces sorted into Category B, which is described as including provinces that have made “partial decisions” about the covenant…
The Church of Ireland Gazette also reported on all this, and interviewed Malcolm French of the No Anglican Covenant Coalition. The full text of the Gazette report is available below the fold.
Church of Ireland Gazette report, 9 November
A tale of two Anglican Covenants – one in the mind, another on paper, Bishop Victoria Matthews tells ACC-15
The Bishop of Christchurch, New Zealand, the Rt Revd Victoria Matthews, last week told delegates at the 15th Anglican Consultative Council meeting (ACC -15), being held in Auckland, that she thought there were two Anglican Communion Covenants: “One is the document that people have in their mind and the other is the Anglican Communion Covenant on paper.”
For that reason, she said, she wanted people “to read the Covenant and be focused on that” because often, when people start talking about the Covenant “ what they describe in their mind as the Covenant is unrecognisable”.
Bishop Matthews, as a member of the Inter-Anglican Standing Committee on Unity, Faith and Order (IASCU FO), was introducing an ACC -15 session on the history and progress of the Covenant.
She observed that the questions behind the Covenant were: ‘What is the best way?’, ‘Is there a way that will keep us together safely?’, ‘What is our deepest fear when we consider decision-making processes?’.
“I believe that in the original idea of the Anglican Covenant, there was a desire to allow the Anglican Communion to be a safe place for conversation and the sharing of new ideas,” she said. “The actual document of the Anglican Covenant does not achieve that for all the Churches of the Anglican Communion, and that is why some Churches have declined to adopt it.”
Bishop Matthews added: “There are those who say [the Covenant] is punitive, and those who say it has no teeth. Both [these comments] tell me that it is not yet perceived, let alone received, as a truly safe way in which to encounter one another.”
While stressing that it was not the work of IASCU FO to promote the Covenant, but rather to monitor its reception, she asked delegates – in advance of a video shown to them on the history and detail of the Covenant – to reflect on “what there is in the Covenant that offers a possible way for us to talk to each other”.
“Remember most of the Covenant reminds us who we are in Christ,” she added.
NO ANGLICAN COVENANT COALITION RESPONSE
The Moderator of the No Anglican Covenant Coalition, the Revd Malcolm French, of the Anglican Church of Canada, has told the Gazette that he agrees with Bishop Matthews that there is a ‘disconnect’ between the Anglican Covenant that is on paper and the Anglican Covenant that some people are discussing.
However, he added that, when the body of literature on the Covenant, on both sides of the debate about it, is examined, “it is far more often the Covenant’s critics who examine the text of the document itself”.
Mr French added that “most of the material written in support of the Anglican Covenant avoids any serious engagement with the text, reducing the Covenant to a notional construct, an empty vessel into which its advocates may pour whatever pretty rhetoric they believe will appeal to whichever audience is being addressed”.
The NACC Moderator told us that he also agreed with Bishop Matthews that IASCUFO’s mandate is not to promote the Covenant, but rather to monitor the process of its reception, but asked why a body mandated to monitor reception of the Covenant felt it was appropriate “to produce a series of videos clearly designed to promote its adoption”.
Mr French concluded: “Whatever the intent of its authors, it is clear the Anglican Covenant has become a cause of division rather than a means of unity. Scotland has said no. New Zealand has said no. The Philippines has said no. Despite the spin, England has said no.
“Despite the growing chorus of noes, the Communion continues to muddle along, showing once and for all that we are bound together by grace, not by law.”
The covenant is meant to be a process for unity but has clearly failed to attract unity of support – indeed it is so divisive that its proposed existence defeats its own reason for existing. In the debates surrounding the attemptive and abortive ‘launch’ of the covenant, too much alienation of the Episcopal Church has taken place, in a climate that seemed to recognise Christ too little, in that province’s sincere pursuit of faith. This climate has arguably failed to honour clause 2.1.3 of the draft covenant: “in humility… exercising patience and charity and in recognizing Christ in one another.”… Read more »
(continued…) Where profound cultural differences exist between disparate provinces – over men having sex with men, for example – the danger (and it was what precipitated the idea of the covenant in the first place) is that a uniformity might have been imposed (by threat of sanctions epitomising the assertion of a central authority). However, many Anglicans recognise that this ‘imperial model’ of a central, top-down attempt to impose uniformity, was entirely foreign to the genius and tolerant acceptance of diversity, which makes Anglicanism what it is: a community of varied human beings and cultures, who found their unity not… Read more »
(continued…) You can’t run Anglicanism with that kind of authoritarianism, imposing requirements of uniformity. Put simply, it’s not Anglicanism: it’s more like evangelical Protestantism. Which is probably why it has been the evangelical protestants within the communion who have been most belligerent, most demanding of ‘repentance’ by those they hold different views from, and most vocal in driving forward the project of the covenant, so as to impose one set of views of human sexuality upon another set of views, even though the Communion is clearly divided on the issue. Yet faith in Christ, and unity in Christ, just carries… Read more »
(concluding…) The covenant does not represent the essential spirit of Anglicanism. It merely accentuates difference, and we’ve seen this in the response to it. Ironically a document that was seen as a means to unity, by threatening diversity with sanction, has accentuated the differences between Anglicans, whereas the Anglican way is to say, yes, we may have different views, but the Lord be with you, and let us keep journeying and worshipping together. The fact that happens in different ways in different societies, makes it wholly understandable that different provincial churches may have different emphases and even different views on… Read more »
The proposed Anglican Covenant is neither. It is not a covenant. And it is not Anglican. For these reasons, it has failed. So Communion officials ought to stop promoting it. To say they are not promoting it, and yet to put out lists and videos that do promote it, falls well short of honesty. Are you listening, Bishop Matthews? Canon Kearon? You cannot claim disinterest and at the same time engage in advocacy. Especially when the advocacy is of a cause that would aggrandize your own power. By all means, allow Dr. Williams a dignified departure. But do not nail… Read more »
For all intents and purposes, the status of the Anglican Covenant is dead. Please stop beating the dead horse. Thank you.
I support whole heartedly what both Susannah and Jeremy have said. The sooner Matthews and Kearon forget the Covenant the better. There is a much better ways of moving forward in a loose , affectionate partnership. It is called the Anglican Commnunion!
Synod might be advised to consider whether, in hindsight, the attempted imposition of a dispute resolution mechanism to resolve insular institutional disputes was ever the wisest investment of time, energy and resources, which could be more usefully applied to situations in the real world, namely the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
“Provincial Reception of the Anglican Covenant” – the Covenant is so dead in the water in England that putting the loss down as a partial decision because of some following motions is grossly misleading. Provincial Reception in this case just made me think of prosecco, sausage rolls and curled up sandwiches served at some municipal twinning association in the English Midlands. The sort of Reception one would go a long way to avoid.
Wales had some expectation of guidance when they delayed any decision and deferred to this meeting following the English rejection. The reflection beloved of commentators here that the Covenant is dead did get a mention from the group discussing the Primates and in those reports on the Instruments and the rethink they portray we find the best reason to expect that the vision of the Communion that pervades that document no longer exists. But the Covenant cannot be consigned to history quite yet. Churches have adopted it etc – the process is in play and it has to play out.… Read more »
It will no doubt interest many of you looking in on this thread to know that, we in the ACANZP Diocese of Christchurch, New Zealand, debated the Anglican Covenant – very thoroughly – and it was rejected. All this happened under the chair-personship of our esteemed Diocesan Bishop, +Victoria Matthews, who is a member of the Faith and Order Commission.