The Covenant (good God y'all) what is it good for? Absolutely something ...

Up until a week ago, I was of the view that the Anglican Covenant was a complete waste of time and effort. What had started as a promised way of bringing some kind of doctrinal order and discipline to a fracturing Communion had been delayed past its sell-by date and watered down to homeopathic dilutions.

Well, it seems I was wrong.

There is now an international coalition against the covenant, led by bloggers, no less! And we have a ‘No to the Covenant’ logo turning up all over the place.

Why? Because apparently the Covenant would destroy everything it means to be an Anglican and propel us back into a theological ‘dark age’. (If you think I’m exaggerating, have a look at comments on the topic on the Thinking Anglicans website.)

What this tells me personally, however, is that the Covenant is clearly better than I thought. Of course it will not bring about what the ‘No to the Covenant’ coalition suggests. Their alarmism is, I suspect, just that, and deliberately so. And neither will it achieve what was hoped when it was first put forward, back in the days when there was still some hope of heading off the present crisis.

But it is not the ‘paper tiger’ I’d begun to assume. After all, anything that the typical ‘Thinking Anglican’ thinks must be stopped cannot be all bad.

So let’s bring on the Covenant — not in the expectation that all our problems will thereby disappear, but certainly because it must be good for something.

John Richardson
11 November 2010

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Fulcrum: their challenge to Canterbury and the challenge they must face

Those of us who have watched (and experienced) the opposition of the open evangelical group Fulcrum to many of the conservative attempts to address the problems within the Anglican Communion over the past several years must greet with charity and relief the announcement from the Fulcrum leadership published yesterday in the Church of England Newspaper.

We may feel it has taken them a long time to wake up to what some of us regarded as the obvious. However, their statement not only finally recognizes the intractable problems within TEC but forcefully challenges the Archbishop of Canterbury in a manner entirely similar to conservative pronouncements from which they have distanced themselves in the past.

In response to the consent of the bishops and Standing Committees of TEC to the election of Mary Glasspool as bishop suffragan in the diocese of Los Angeles, the statement is clear that any claims of an adherence to the ‘letter’ of past agreements is now impossible:

We are now indisputably in a radically new situation. TEC as a body has determinedly, perhaps irrevocably, chosen autonomy over “communion with autonomy and accountability”.

There are three other important recognitions. The first is that

... this is not simply a matter of disagreement about biblical interpretation and sexual ethics although these are central and important. It is now very clearly also a fundamental matter of truth-telling and trust.

Their understanding, in other words, is that TEC’s version of truth-telling is not the same as that understood in the rest of the communion, and that therefore TEC as a body cannot be trusted. This is a major and significant conclusion.

Secondly, they recognize a problem within TEC with “their understanding of how the Spirit leads them.” This has been evident for a long time to those with ‘ears to hear’. But acknowledging the problem must demand from Fulcrum a clear identification as to where authority does lie. We have here a ‘clash of spiritualities’, and yet the open evangelical movement as a whole is undoubtedly vulnerable to just the approach that TEC has adopted. How the Spirit leads the Church is, and always has been, a critical question for Christians, and it is one on which Fulcrum could now usefully speak with clarity to its own constituency.

The third recognition is that members of TEC must now act against the overall polity of TEC and be supported in this by Anglicanism worldwide:

The only hope now is for TEC dioceses to reject TEC’s path by committing to the covenant and for such commitment to be recognised by the Communion.

But this raises the question of recognizing ACNA — something which Fulcrum and it’s associates have seemingly been hitherto reluctant to do. (Canon Simon Butler, who has posted articles and comments on the Fulcrum website, vigorously opposed the original motion in General Synod to support ACNA, although he voted for the final motion.) Will Fulcrum, then, follow the logic of its own conclusion and now respond more positively to those who have already stepped away from TEC? If, as the statement asserts, the Communion “must now proceed in its common life without TEC”, will it be encouraged to do so with ACNA?

Most importantly, however, the statement calls for action from the Archbishop of Canterbury. It is not assumed that TEC will take itself into the wilderness. Instead,

The nature of the Communion’s structures at present is such that effecting this distancing will require clear and decisive action by the Archbishop of Canterbury. At the very least he needs to make clear that bishops participating in the May consecration in Los Angeles will thereby exclude themselves from being invited by him to participate in the Instruments or to represent the Communion in any form.

And the statement is absolutely clear about the implications of any failure to act:

 Unless he does this all that the Instruments have repeatedly said in relation to TEC’s conduct will be undermined. The sickness of TEC’s inability to say what it means and mean what it says to the rest of the Communion will then have infected the Instruments and will surely destroy the Communion.

Understandably, the statement is at pains to recognize Rowan Williams’s past efforts. Yet it is remarkably frank in the call it now makes upon him:

Many ... both within the Church of England and the wider Communion (particularly in the Global South which meets next month) have been patient and sought to work with him by supporting the Windsor and covenant processes. They need now to make clear that unless he gives a clear lead then all that he and others have worked for since the Windsor Report and all that is promised by the covenant is at risk because of the new situation in which TEC has placed us.

When news of consents to the election of Mary Glasspool first broke, Fulcrum issued the briefest of responses which ended with the words, “Actions have consequences.”

That same phrase is used in their new statement, one of the consequences they identify being that “TEC as a body has revealed it is incapable of signing the Anglican covenant.” We must be truly grateful that the strong smell of coffee has finally wafted its way to the nostrils of the Fulcrum Leadership Team. We must now ask whether — and indeed how — they will reposition themselves in relation to the leadership of GAFCON, FCA, etc, who have for years been saying the same things, for entirely similar reasons, if not always in a manner of which Fulcrum would approve.

We must also observe that inaction has consequences. If what the Fulcrum Leadership Team has demanded now fails to materialize, will they take things further, and if so, how?

John P Richardson
26 March 2010

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A possible joint statement from the CofE?

OK, could the various bodies and personalities in the Traditionalist wing of the Church of England sign up to something like this?

1. We affirm our unity in the tradition of the Church of England expressed in Article XX, that Scripture is “God’s Word written”, that it is “not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written”, that it may not “so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another”, that “the Church be a witness and keeper of holy Writ” and that the Church “ought not to decree any thing against the same”.

2. We regret that the developing attitudes, decisions and actions of The Episcopal Church make it impossible for us to accept that it shares the same commitment to this tradition. On the contrary, they have stretched the fabric of the Anglican Communion to breaking point.

3. We believe it is time for decisive and united action to signal to The Episcopal Church that it can no longer depend on continuing fellowship with those within the Communion who continue in this tradition.

4. We therefore recognize the Anglican Church in North America as an inheritor of the Anglican tradition in the geographical area it shares with The Episcopal Church.

5. We call for a speedy conclusion to the Covenant process, but we believe that The Episcopal Church is already outside the framework of the Covenant and desire that the final form of the Covenant take account of this.

6. We commit ourselves to working together to ensure that the Church of England in the British Isles does not follow in the footsteps of The Episcopal Church in the United States and elsewhere.

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Love's Labours Lost - the end of the Covenant?

Anglican Down Under has a very interesting comment, under the title 'Much Ado about Nothing', on the attitudes being taken in (and towards) TEC over the issue of diocesan autonomy, raised by a number of bishops there recently. The 'Schori-supporters' line is that dioceses cannot go against the line of their 'church' or 'province'. The bishops' line is that, certainly as regards TEC, it is a conglomeration of independent dioceses with no Metropolitan or hierarchy over the dioceses. So, says ADU,

It would ... be extremely odd, would it not, for the following scenario to occur: the Communion as a whole proposes and circulates a covenant; Anglican church X rejects the covenant, but Diocese Y within X accepts the covenant; X then seeks to discipline Y. Presumably X's grounds for discipline of Y would be some kind of illegality with respect to Y's constitution. But Y's grounds for signing to the covenant would be commitment to Anglicanism. At this point the true bearer of Anglicanism would by Y and not X. Morally, at least, X would cease to be Anglican in the substance of its faith!

In my view, the sheer possibility of such chaos reinforces my own point that the 'game' (keeping TEC and similar variants of Anglicanism within a global Communion) is well and truly over, not least because there is de facto division in their own backyard. The whole thing has become totally incoherent, and it is impossible for a 'covenant' to draw it back together.

In further support of this, I would refer to the complete lack of response on the Fulcrum forum to a thread about the bishops' statement started two days ago. Healthy discussion continues there in a thread started by my own post here on the cross and the resurrection (not, though, vs. the resurrection) and there is a thread on the Covenant itself, but that is going round in circles and off at tangents (if such a thing is possible).

The silence surely speaks volumes. Who, any longer, can unravel anything of this? And what difference will it make? And finally, and most importantly, who really cares?

Certainly not TEC, which carries on regardless.

John Richardson
24 April 2009

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GAFCON - Game Over or New Game?

One of the most interesting people I ever listened to was an advertising executive, talking to a class studying Fashion and Design with Marketing, back in the 1980s. This man had a better grasp of human motivation than anyone I’ve ever met, before or since.

The reason, however, was self-evident: his livelihood depended on understanding what made people tick. Hence he knew (for example) that because 80% of men’s underwear was bought by women, the advertising and packaging needed to be aimed at them.

Another social group with an excellent grasp of human nature is journalists, and for much the same reason: they need a nose for a story, without which they cannot sell the papers that pay their wages. And it is this light that we might interpret the absence of journalists at the recent GAFCON primates press conference.

Some have read this as indicating that GAFCON is washed up. Personally, I believe it is rather because the national press now recognize there is no story in the division of the Anglican Communion — not because the Communion has survived the pressures of recent years but because it quite evidently has not. As a headline, ‘Anglican Communion Faces Split’ is now entirely on a par with ‘Dog Bites Man’.

In fact, the lack of press interest was already evident at the Alexandria Primates’ Meeting in February this year where, according to the Changing Attitude Blog, there were only seven people in the press briefings (including the blogger himself).

This lack of interest from those whose job it is to sniff out what is interesting is as profound as the silence of a canary in a coalmine. It is a sure sign that something has already happened, even though many people may not have noticed.

In case there is any doubt about this, let us remind ourselves that following that meeting the Archbishop of Canterbury appointed a group of Pastoral Visitors “commissioned by him to conduct personal and face to face conversations in order to assist in the clearest discernment of the ways forward in any given situation of tension”.

One of those situations of tension is, presumably, North America. What, then, have the Pastoral Visitors achieved so far in that area? Does anyone know? Or care? The question is not entirely rhetorical, but the answer for most of us is undoubtedly ‘No’ to both.And the point is, this applies to Communion Conservatives as much as to anyone. I doubt very much that, for example, Bishop Tom Wright has any confidence in the scheme, even if he knows much about its workings. And certainly no-one in the hierarchy of TEC gives a hoot.Which brings us to the Windsor Process. If ever there were an argument for mercy-killing, the prospect of putting a bullet in this sad saga must be the best. Chinese Communism used to refer to the West as a paper tiger. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence must see that the Anglican Covenant is not merely paper, but soggy paper. It is to church discipline what Eeyore’s balloon was to birthday celebrations: “You did say balloon? One of those big coloured things you blow up? Gaiety, song-and-dance, here we are and there we are?” Or in the case of the Covenant, one of those things that is going to set boundaries, and define the faith and the faithful?

Those who believe the Windsor ‘Process’ is going to deliver what the Primates’ were demanding four years ago are fooling no one but themselves. Indeed, it cannot deliver, since the Anglican Communion as it was in 1998 is no more. In a few years time, that will be recognized as the date of the last true Lambeth Conference of the old, Empire based, gathering of global Anglican bodies. 2008 was not the year of the breakup, but it was the year in which the breakup could no longer be denied.

The old game is over, and that is sad (in my view). But the new game is beginning. We must look to the future. And it is not ‘Windsor shaped’. The journalists who stayed away from the GAFCON meeting knew this. They will not, I suspect, be there in droves when the Covenant is finally launched either.

The reality is that Anglicanism is now a mixed economy: Canterbury, GAFCON, the FCA, TEC, the ACNA will all vie for position, and it will be the economics of church growth, not reports and formal processes, which will decide the outcome. Our Lord Jesus Christ said that he would build his church. Time will now tell which that is.

Revd John P Richardson
21 April 2009

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