Matt Kennedy reports for Stand Firm:
Friday, August 1, 2008 • 4:23 am
I’m sitting in the press room waiting for the morning briefing to begin. We are watching a video presentation on the concept of Covenant. These are brief, five minute videos, intended to provide a thematic context for the briefing and for the day.
Today’s theme, in keeping with the video, is “The Bishop, the Anglican Covenant and the Windsor Process.”
Canon Paul: Thank you for coming. It’s great to see you and have you do all the reporting you are doing. I come from the Anglican Church in Canada and am part of the communications team at Lambeth
The theme for today is “Fostering our Common Life: The Bishop, the Anglican Covenant and the Windsor Process.”
The spouses are running a parallel process.
Spouse briefing…they are thinking today about empowering themselves and others in their dioceses and provinces for services. The entire program today will be in French and they will be hearing stories from Burundi, about children with HIV there, and Latin America and from Madagascar who will be at the press conference later. They are moving toward how they can go home and take the things they have gained home with them after the conference.
Canon Paul: The program today is al little altered. There is another Reflection at 2:00pm and then they will go back into their indaba groups for a second session. This is not their usual pattern.
The 1:30pm conference will feature ++Drexel Gomez and ++Trevor Mwamba from Botswana to speak about the Covenant process.
As far as I know any outstanding questions have been answered. If you have more please let me know afterwards
As a guest this morning we have Gregory Cameron, the Deputy Secretary of the Anglican Communion Office
Cameron: Very good to see you all and to see a side of the Conference I have yet to see. I would like to say 4 things about covenant.
1. Why are we using the word “covenant”? Covenant is a strong biblical term and it is used in the bible to describe the committed relationship between God and his people. Christians talk about two biblical covenants, the first covenant between God and Israel and the second between God and Christ. So the word is about committed relationships. So the idea of the covenant is to talk about committed relationships that hold the AC together. What is the glue that makes the Anglican Communion hold together? And the idea of the covenant is to express that explicitly and in one document the glue that holds the churches of the communion together. The design group under Archbishop Gomez said there are three strands that hold the AC together and they will be my next three points.
2. The first strand is our common inheritance in faith, the Christian faith as Anglicans have received it. You will find in section 1.1 of the Covenant draft a brief explanation of the faith based on the Creeds and the sacraments and the scriptures.
3. The second theme is the Anglican mission. What is it the Anglican churches are called to do together? What is it that binds them into the future? The second section talks about the Anglican mission, it talks at bout the history of Anglican mission and the 5 marks of mission that were developed and these five are found in section 2.1
4. The third part talks about our interdependence. What are the things that hold us together? Recently the 4 Instruments of Unity, the Lambeth Conference, the ACC, the ABC, and the Primates meeting have been recognized. And so in section 3 there is a description of these mechanisms.
Across those three sections there are 2 parts:
1. The Covenant begins by affirming what Anglicans have received. The faith, the mission, the instruments of communion.
2. The second section articulates the commitments that need to be made to keep these things alive and fresh. Each of these sections asks churches to make a commitment to the above affirmations.
The Saint Andrews draft added an appendix because the question arose: if there is a dispute about whether the covenant has been violated, how do you resolve the dispute? The appendix was the first draft of an attempt to resolve that question. That attempt was advised by certain canon lawyers so we should not be surprise that it looks legalistic. They said that the laws need to follow the principles of natural justice. There is a great deal of anxiety about a juridical form of covenant because a covenant should not be about laws but about relationships.
So the present draft is with the provinces and it is being discussed here at the Lambeth Conference. The bishops here are not being asked to vote on a covenant but to add their own reflections, what they like and what they have reservations about.
That will be fed into the next meeting of the Covenant design group in September in Singapore
Questions
Q: What impact does the absence of the other bishops have?
A: People are very concerned that they should be drawn into the process of discernment, the Secretary General will be writing to them with an account of these discussions here and asking them to contribute their response. There is a strong feeling that if it is to work it must be owned by the whole of the Communion.
Q: Can you clarify what can change in the Covenant?
A: The bishops are not being asked to change or alter the draft. It is for the provinces to respond and they have to respond by next March and then a third text will be produced that could be radically different. It is the provinces that drive the process of decision. We are asking the bishops to advise the provinces and allow the provinces to take their commentary onto account in their considerations.
Q: can you say what will happen to any province that does not sign on to the Covenant?
A: That question has been asked theoretically in two papers. One, the earlier paper, was entitled “Toward an Anglican Covenant” and it asked that question in a preliminary way and that paper was developed by the Archbishop of Canterbury in a second paper, “Challenge and hope for the Anglican Communion” and both papers say if a given church does not sign on to the Covenant it does not cease to be Anglican but it will live in different relationship to the churches that do. \
No further reflection at the moment has been done on that. Right now, we want to test out whether all can sign up to a covenant in principle. The first question in the consultation with the provinces is: is your province willing to give into the “principle” of the covenant without necessarily giving in yet to a particular text. We want to know if the idea in principle is acceptable.
Conger: If a diocese or province is not willing to sign in principle, is the covenant process able to acknowledge that division? And, second question, since the process of decision making is so different in each of the provinces, why are you taking this at the provincial level rather than the diocesan level?
A: The group decided the covenant ought to be envisaged as existing between the churches of the communion, the provinces. The question was asked early on, what if a province signs on but a diocese does not? The answer was that at the moment we are playing specifically for provincial support. The covenant is a relational document and therefore I do not see why a diocese cannot declare itself in sympathy with the covenant if its province signs on but the aim, at this point, is to seek provincial approval
Q: Can you clarify the timeline in terms of when a final decision will be taken and which body will take that decision and whether that body makes final decisions
A: The St. Andrew’s draft is currently in two places: here at Lambeth with the bishops and in the provinces. What the Lambeth Conference will do today is compile a commentary which will be given to the meeting of the Design Group in Singapore and this will provide an authentic account from the bishops. The provinces will give their answers at the end of March next year and then there will be a third draft of the Covenant by May of next year. The ACC will then be given the answers to the tree questions being asked of the provinces:
1. Is the province willing in principle to sign on to a covenant?
2. What will a given province have to do internally in order to sign on to a covenant
3. What changes will they need to see in order to get a realistic prospect for signing up.
If 34 provinces come back and say we do not want a covenant then, most likely, we will not push ahead. But if a substantial number want to proceed, then ACC14 will decide whether to put the question to the provinces.
The process of acceptance would be different in each province. TEC, for example, may need to put it up to a General Convention or two General Conventions. The Canadian church would put it before their Synod or maybe two Synods. The provinces make the final decisions. There is no legal body forcing this on the provinces, they are the decision makers.
Sugden: Is it true that the substance of the discussion is the nature of the culture of Anglicanism? In the video someone says ‘we don’t want a legal structure for relationships’. I have a list of hundreds of depositions here from TEC. Is it the case that some provinces operate strictly legally and others operate in a more relational way?
A: I would be cautious about commenting about the internal process of a given church. In a time of tension people slip into ways of relating that do not represent its best. As Anglican Christian we prefer a model of relationship. The covenant is about the holistic nature of Anglicanism and the relationships that one Christian has with another and about the way one church relates to another.
Q: If we start from an optimistic point that all subscribe to the covenant, who will be responsible for managing the thing if one part of the communion violates the covenant? Who will have the judicial responsibility?
A: It would be true to say, to get the right mechanism to deal with that problem, is the most difficult process of Covenant design. The section that deals with this is called, “The devil is in the details”. I think we need to go back to classic Anglican ecclesiology. The classic Anglican understanding of the church; and that understanding is that the church is embodied in national provinces.
And therefore the life if the communion is about these bodies living in relationship. The only people who can decide that relationships are broken are the 38 provinces themselves. All must have a way to speak with a clear voice, not with a judge over them, but a method where they can speak effectively and not be judged.
Q: The Anglican Communion is “messy” according to Steven Sykes. What would you say to the thought that the Covenant runs against the grain of that?
A: I do not see it as changing the nature of Anglicanism. It is only making explicit what was previously implicit in our lives. We have tended to cooperate on a relational level. There is no common understanding or answer to the question of how we come to a community discussion.
At the last General Convention in the TEC, they were asked to consider the WR requests and to express regret for breaking the “bonds of affection”. Speaker after speaker said “We do not know what the bonds are so how could we break them?” The Covenant is trying to articulate the answer to that question, to articulate the way the Anglican Communion operates, not create a new kind of church.
Q: Yesterday ++Orombi said that the Instruments of Communion have utterly failed. Since you represent one of those Instruments, what hope do you have when more than half of the Communion already says it will not sign on?
A: we must take very seriously the point of view of any primate or House of Bishops and I am saddened and disappointed that this is his understating at the moment. In the end it will only work if it is owned by the churches themselves. The question they must ask is, do they like what is being offered?
If the answer is no, that is the acid test, we cannot force this on anyone. It is a voluntary association.
Q: If Nigeria and Uganda will not sit down with you until TEC is disciplined what hope is there? (I missed this question but I believe that was the gist)
A: If the AC declines into legalism, calling each other into account through discipline we will have lost something vital. It is about striking a balance, giving enough substance to our structures that they exist but not so much that they bind us into a narrow straightjacket.
end
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