Conference Explores Multiple Facets of Communion

The website that the article mentions is covenant-communion.com. ed.

From The Living Church:

Posted on: December 9, 2008

Episcopal scholars and clergy sought at a Dallas conference on Dec. 6 to kindle support for the proposed Anglican Covenant that is expected to take final shape early next year.

With the Rt. Rev. James M. Stanton, Bishop of Dallas, and the Rev. Prof. Ephraim Radner, author and professor of historical theology at Wycliffe University in Toronto, as featured speakers, the conference brought scholarship and wit to bear on the question of how 21st century Anglicans might live with diversity and yet commitment to a common life grounded in “continuity and consequence with scripture and the catholic and apostolic faith, order and tradition.” The group also created a website as a resource for interested parishes and clergy.

Organizers of the one-day conference at the Church of the Incarnation in Dallas view the occasion as a “sort of prototype” for use in other dioceses prior to the General convention, said Christopher Wells, a website organizer presently serving as scholar in resident for the Diocese of Dallas.

Prof. Wells said principals in the new website, who are active in various Episcopal dioceses, hope the General Convention next July will not only respond to the covenant draft but also retain support for a 2006 resolution calling for “restraint” in the consecration of bishops “whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church.”

Backers of the proposed Anglican Covenant, whose roots lie in the 2004 Windsor Report, say they are committed to remaining in The Episcopal Church despite recent votes in four dioceses to leave and affiliate with the Anglican Church of the Southern Cone, based in Argentina.

Prof. Radner, one of 10 members of the group drafting the proposed Anglican Covenant, made no bones about division as an endearing reality in the church’s life. He called unity a thing not to “cleaned of division,” but rather emanating from “the blood of the cross, from which there is no escape. We are called to be one,” he said, “but our soul depends on the sharp sword of division.”

Bishop Stanton, billing his talk “a report from the front lines in the struggle for a Communion Covenant,” took issue with too-easy attempts to define the Greek word koinonia as mere “fellowship,” when the “koinonia” of God through Christ – his entering into flesh and blood” in fact brings unity through restoration of “fallen, broken humanity.”

“It belongs to koinonia,” he said, “to endure sacrifice and suffering until the battle is through.” Among the obstacles to achievement of koinonia, in Bishop Stanton’s recounting: inadequate education concerning the whole question; the lack of “corporation memory” concerning the church’s own promises to rein in divisive, free-lance activity by advanced spirits; and, last, inability “to articulate in a compelling way why the office and person of the Archbishop [of Canterbury] is critical to our continuing Communion.”


William Murchison