Report from ACC-14: Day Three

From The American Anglican Council:

May 4, 2009


Two important issues engaged the minds of the delegates at the ACC Meeting today: the Anglican Communion Covenant and to a lesser extent, the seating ( or rather unseating) of the clerical delegate appointed by the Church of Uganda.


The Anglican Communion Covenant

The first was the discussion of the Anglican Communion Covenant. Archbishop Drexel Gomez, the chair of the Covenant Working Group, made a forthright appeal today that the ACC accept the covenant because he was concerned that "the Communion is close to the point of breaking up. If we cannot state clearly and simply what holds us together, and speak clearly at this meeting, then I fear there will be clear breaks in the Communion in the period following this meeting. Many of our Churches are asking to know where they stand - what can be relied on as central to the Anglican Communion; and how can disputes be settled without the wrangle and confusion that we have seen for the last seven years or more."

Particular discussion is focusing on two issues. The first relates to the section which describes how to join the Communion under the Covenant, what joining means and how to deal with tensions in a new section four. It is this section that The Episcopal Church is lobbying hard, especially among the Global South, to have removed. Archbishop Gomez stressed the value of section 4 in his presentation (read here):

1. It gives explicit reassurance that the Covenant is not intended to interfere with the Constitutions and Canons of the Provinces. In this regard, we have paid due respect to the importance of Anglican polity in any Anglican Covenant.

2. It gives clarity over the processes of joining and leaving the Covenant.

3. It provides a method of dispute resolution. This is not coercive but advisory. Without any such provision, there are no processes by which dispute resolution can take place, and mutual responsibility and accountability is weakened. In addition, a failure to address dispute resolution would negate the Covenant process entirely.

4. It opens out the Covenant, making it open-ended and open to others joining. At the discussion of the Covenant proposal at the Lambeth Conference the desirability of making the Covenant an open-ended process received very favourable consideration by several of the bishops.

5. It provides for the amendment and development of the Covenant.

6. The provision of Section 4 represents a fulfilment of a promise made by the CDG in the Lambeth Commentary to the St Andrew's Draft. It provides the answers to some very important issues that arose in the discussion of the St Andrew's text.

Paragraph 4 in the above is deliberate in opening the door to others joining the Communion under the Covenant. This particularly refers both to dioceses, (such as orthodox dioceses in TEC) and also to other entities such as the Anglican Church in North America. We could have the situation that the ACNA accepts the Covenant in timely manner, and TEC delays or denies acceptance.

So, far from the position of ACNA not being on the agenda of ACC 14, its possible status as a church that would be able to accept the Communion Covenant and therefore be acceptable is at the heart of the opposition of TEC to section of 4 of the covenant being included.

Canon Kenneth Kearon confirmed at the opening press conference that one of the decisions that ACC 14 would have to take would be whether it would be dioceses or provinces that accepted the covenant. The above shows why this question is such a hot potato.

The second issue in regard to the Covenant is the date by which provinces are asked to respond. The current draft resolution reads, after preliminaries that the ACC 4. requests the Secretary General to send the Ridley Cambridge Draft to the member Churches of the Anglican Consultative Council for consideration and adoption as the Anglican Communion Covenant, and 5. requests its member Churches to respond to Secretary General by December 2014 on the progress made in the processes of adoption and response to the Communion text.

Bishop Mouneer Anis of Egypt asked why the response could not be by 2012. It was explained that the reason for the 2014 date was that 3-4 provinces had indicated that their constitutional processes would not allow a decision before 2015. (These are thought to be the USA, Canada and Aotearoa/ New Zealand). Datuk Stanley Isaacs asked why for such important business provinces who wanted to respond earlier could do so and others process the matter as extraordinary business. So some would favour wording that in effect requests member churches to respond as a matter of urgency and at the latest by 2012.

The clerical delegate for the Church of Uganda

The second issue, not unrelated, is the issue of the seating of the clerical delegate for the Church of Uganda. The Church of Uganda has oversight of a number of clergy and parishes in the United States. The Archbishop of Uganda selected one of these clergy to be part of the Ugandan delegation to ACC, as an expression of its sovereign right to choose who represented it, and partly to give a voice to those orthodox in the USA whose voice would otherwise not be heard in the councils of AAC 14. Canon Kenneth Kearon informed the delegates on Saturday night and the press on Monday lunchtime that during the roll call of the delegates the status of the Ugandan clerical delegate, Rev Philip Ashey, a priest of the Church of Uganda since 2005 living in Atlanta, had been challenged and Mr Ashey was not allowed to take his seat.

The Church of Uganda has issued a press statement on this matter ( see here ). At the press conference Canon Kenneth Kearon was pressed about the legitimacy whereby the sovereignty of the Church of Uganda in choosing its own delegate was denied. It was drawn to his attention that in 1999, at the ACC-11 in Dundee, the Episcopal Church in the USA was represented by a Bishop Mark Dyer who had retired in 1995. Canon George Conger writes: "The ACC's constitution at section 4.d says: ‘Bishops and other clerical members shall cease to be members on retirement from ecclesiastical office.' I asked John L Peterson, in my capacity as a reporter for the Church of England Newspaper, why Bishop Dyer was being seated at the meeting, when the constitution said he was not eligible to be seated. Canon Peterson said that the ACC left it to the member churches to determine who would be their representatives and placed the onus on the sending church to conform with the rules. My commentary would be, in 1999 the ACC (in the person of John L Peterson) said the member churches could pick whom they wanted to send, even if they weren't eligible. In 2009 the ACC is now saying the member churches are not free to pick their members, even if the delegate is eligible under the rules laid down by the ACC."

When asked about a perceived change of policy, Canon Kearon stated that he had not been present in 1999. The situation now was that the Ugandan church had sent a delegate who was not qualified. There is no definition for what "qualified" would be in the ACC constitution, nor is there any definition of who would adjudicate who was qualified. In the light of such a gap, the Joint Standing Committee had determined that it was the body to make such decisions.

Canon Kearon stated that Rev Ashey was not qualified as his membership of the Church of Uganda was as a result of a cross-border intervention by the Church of Uganda in the United States, a practice which had been consistently disapproved of by the instruments of communion since 2004.

So far so clear. However, it was also drawn to Canon Kearon's attention that another infringement of the requirements of the instruments of communion had been the continuance of the lawsuits against orthodox churches in North America by TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada. The cessation of these lawsuits was a requirement of the Dar-es-Salaam Primates Meeting in 2007 as part of the compliance required of TEC and the ACoC with the Windsor Report and thus a condition for the re-entry of TEC and ACoC delegates to the Councils of the Communion ( they had been asked to withdraw from ACC 13 at Nottingham, but attended as visitors). How was it that TEC and ACoC had not complied with a requirement of the instruments of communion, yet had been readmitted, and that Uganda was not complying with the embargo on cross-border jurisdiction and yet its selected delegate was barred? The answer given that Uganda as a province had not been barred, only its delegate who was a product of cross-border intervention.

What comes across in all this is the lack of fairness and even handedness. TEC and ACoC are in constant breach of Lambeth 1.10, and by the secretary general's own admission at the Saturday press conference, had in some cases continued to authorize same-sex blessings in defiance of the moratorium. They have not complied with the Primates' call from Dar-es-Salaam to desist from lawsuits, but instead have increased them. Yet they are readmitted to full membership.

The Church of Uganda exercises its sovereign right to appoint a priest under its oversight from among orthodox clergy in the USA who wish to abide by the Communion's teaching and practice, but is denied that right on the grounds of the priest being unqualified according to criteria that are not specified in the ACC constitution, (as a product of a breach of the communion's requests), according to the decision of a body which is not given the authority to determine membership of provincial delegations either in the constitution of the ACC or in the tradition of the ACC ( according to the practice of Canon Petersen in the case of Mark Dyer).

One cannot help gain the impression of an unfair lack of even handedness while making up the rules as they go along.

The unseating of Rev Ashey is linked with the decision to be made about who can adhere to the Covenant. Those who have consistently defied the Communion for the last five years are in a position to lobby and vote to exclude provisions in the Ridley Draft Covenant whereby other entities ( dioceses in TEC or ACNA) can sign up to the Covenant while TEC itself wants to spend 5 years considering the question. They are also allowed to retake their seats in order to engage in such lobbying while in defiance of requests of the communion about abandoning lawsuits, while those who have defied the request on cross border jurisdiction (soon to become a dead letter when ACNA is formed in six weeks time), are denied the right to exercise their own choice of who their delegate at the meeting is.

We see here what appears to be a lack of fairness, evenhandedness and consistency applied to the advantage of those who have caused the current problems by departing from the teaching and practice of the Communion in faith and morals and to the disadvantage of those who have adhered to the teaching and practice of the Communion in faith and morals. And the former will this week try to prevent the latter from even being able to adhere to the Covenant process.


By Canon Dr Chris Sugden